Among the writers who were his contemporaries stand foremost, Bonfadio, Campanaceo, Sigonio, Capelloni, Foglietta, Mascardi and Casoni. I do not mention foreigners, first among whom are Tuano and the Cardinal de Retz. I omit, too, the modern writers, since they have all followed with the assiduity of copyists the earlier historians, making no effort to study the public archives or even to criticise the text which they copied. Nevertheless, it is important to give the reader some account of the historians of that epoch; since the first duty of one who attempts to describe past events is to employ criticism in its widest sense, and so to separate the true from the false. Nor can this be done without carefully weighing the credibility of authors who have gone this way before us and taking account of the passions which governed them when they wrote. The first historian of Fieschi was Bonfadio who was employed by the senate to write the annals of the Republic. He was a witness of the events which he described and on the very night of the rising, he went to the senate in company with Giovanni Battista Grimaldi. Yet we can yield him little faith; since, writing at the command of the government, he could not do less than speak harshly of the government’s enemies. He confesses that he had not in his hands the records of the conspirators’ trial. He ignores many facts, and never names the accomplices of Fieschi, scarcely suspecting that there were any. Having a mania for classic imitation, and borne away by the current of his times, he depicts Gianluigi as a man thirsting for base deeds and for blood; so, that if his immortal pages served to render the memory of Fieschi odious at a time when men had little concern for the honour of the vanquished, they are certainly too careless and too partial to satisfy the future. The unfortunate author, who was truthful in all other matters and failed in this only, because it treated of a plot against the powerful Doria, reaped bitter fruits for his great bias against Fieschi. Not less unjust was Giuseppe Mario Campanaceo, who added to his history of the conspiracy a comparison between it and that of Catiline. “Both,” he says, “sprung from noble stock. Both were crushed under the ruin they plotted for others. In the one, a fierce look, a sanguinary countenance; in the other, a singular beauty and a virginal candour. The Roman was stained with bloody and licentious deeds; the Genoese bore the fame of goodness of heart and grace of manners. The Roman was verging towards age; the Genoese was in the freshness of his youth, yet he surpassed the conspirator of the Tiber as much in deceitfulness as Catiline excelled him in warlike exploits.”