and visit to the island then.
Two inscriptions at Pisa Charterhouse at Calci attribute the change of order to the influence of Catherine on Pope Gregory XI in trying to obtain economic assistance for the Carthusians. The pope made a grant of money and gave the Carthusians Gorgona. The change cast reproach on the Benedictines for their alleged non-monastic way of life. They were asked to leave the island and were banned from it.
Carthusians from Pisa Charterhouse retenanted the monastery under Don Bartholomew Serafini. He promptly invited Catherine to visit. She lodged outside the monastery but was invited to address the monks. She spoke on resisting the temptations of Satan. The mantle she was asked to leave as a token of the visit placed later in the hands of a young monk tempted to suicide by the death or illness of his mother is said to have removed all temptation, a token, in the church, of her sainthood.
Subsequently the Mediterranean became politically unstable. Fearing an attack by Saracen corsairs the monks left the island for the charterhouse at Calci in 1425, taking all the records and works of art with them, and never returned. The records were duly published at Pisa. The island however remained in the ownership of Pisa Charterhouse until the 18th century.
Modern history
Early in 1771 Peter Leopold I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, purchased Gorgona from the Carthusians of Pisa with the intent of making it part of a plan for economic revival. In March of that year he passed a law opening the island to settlement by fishermen with the proviso that they would catch and cure anchovies and sell them in Livorno. The fishing village dates to this time.
With the unification of Italy in 1861, including the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany, ownership of Gorgona passed to the new Kingdom of Italy. Gorgona became a new and experimental agricultural penal colony in 1869
