Pisa

Its independence did not. In 1406 Florence took Pisa after a long siege, and although the council that tried to end the Great Schism of the papacy met here three years later, the city was losing the sea that had made it: its harbor silted up steadily through the 15th century. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, the Pisans rose and proclaimed a republic again, and for fifteen years they held off the Florentine armies until Florence retook the city in 1509. Livorno replaced Pisa as the chief port of Tuscany, and the city turned to learning instead. Its university, founded in 1343, had its most famous son in Galileo Galilei, born in Pisa in 1564, who studied and later taught there.