During the dead season Federigo visited the Pope and Ferdinand, to concert measures for the ensuing campaign, and on its opening was again obliged to proceed against the Duke of Sora, who had evaded a submission extorted from him in the autumn. It was not, however, by such petty achievements that the Neapolitan succession was to be settled. Nominally a republic, Genoa was really an oligarchy, the sport of rival factions; but there had long been a leaning to the Angevine alliance, and no support could have been more useful to that house in its pretensions upon Naples. Without command of the sea, such pretensions were absolutely vain, and that commercial community, situated between Provence and Lower Italy, not only secured to these a mutual intercourse, but formed a most available entrepôt for reinforcements and military stores. The French, originally received within its walls as allies, had become virtually masters of the maritime state; but in the spring of 1461 a popular revolution, occasioned by financial burdens consequent upon the Neapolitan war, and promoted by the Duke of Milan, overthrew the Angevine party, and obliged the French to seek shelter in the fortress. An army chosen from the chivalry of Languedoc and France was embarked at Marseilles to succour the Duke of Calabria, but his father directed the fleet conveying it to stand into the bay of Genoa, in hopes of easily re-establishing there the Angevine interests. He was, however, repulsed thence in July by a defeat so bloody and complete that his army was annihilated and his influence entirely overthrown. The cause of René, hitherto almost uniformly successful, never recovered this check, by which he lost at once a highly important reinforcement and a most serviceable ally. Other discouragements followed in rapid succession: the death of Charles VII. deprived him of a powerful coadjutor, the unlooked for convalescence of Francesco Sforza restored energy to his most active adversary, and a sudden descent upon Apulia by George Scanderbeg, the hero of Greece, with a seasonable reinforcement of Castriot horse, cheered Ferdinand's drooping spirits, and enabled him during the campaign of 1462 to recover his lost advantages.