From the dim days before the Trojan War, when Pelops, coming from Pisa in Elis, founded the Italian Pisae on the marshy headland between the Arnus and the Ausar, the city's destiny was sealed beyond recall. Of the sea was she born, from the sea she drew her life-blood, and when the sea was lost to her she perished from inanition. This is the keynote of her history so long as she has a history at all that is worth recording; and he who would understand her weakness and her strength, her splendour and her ruin, must never altogether get the sound of the sea out of his ears nor the smell of the sea out of his nostrils.

Originally, no doubt, Pisa stood quite close to the shore; but, owing to the alluvial deposits of her two rivers, the land gradually gained upon the sea, until, in Strabo's time, the city was already two and a half miles from the coast. In the tenth century it was four, and to-day it is six miles inland. Yet the ever-widening strip of plain between Pisa and the sea did nothing to affect her status as a maritime city, since the Arno long continued to be navigable for all except the very largest vessels.