Preface: Three Thousand Years on the Map

Most places have one good century.

A town rises because of a mine, or a river crossing, or a monastery, or a garrison; it prospers for a while; the mine closes, the road moves, the empire that needed the garrison collapses, and the place subsides into the pleasant, slightly melancholy condition of somewhere that used to matter. This is the ordinary fate of human settlements, and there is no shame in it. Nearly everywhere has been important once.

Chios has been important continuously for three thousand years.

That is a claim worth pausing on, because it is genuinely unusual, and because it is the argument that holds this book together. Consider the sequence. In the seventh century BC, Chios was among the richest states in the Greek world, minting some of the earliest coinage, exporting the most prestigious wine in the Mediterranean, and producing the sculptors and metalworkers whose work stood at Delphi and Delos. In the fifth century BC it was the wealthiest and most privileged ally of the Athenian Empire, and the only one permitted to keep its own navy. Under Rome it was a free and allied city, exempt from taxation, whose wine appeared on the tables of emperors and whose marble was quarried for imperial building. In the eleventh century an emperor of Constantinople spent a fortune building on it one of the three great surviving monuments of Byzantine art. From 1346 to 1566 it was owned and governed — the words are exact — by a shareholder-owned company, an arrangement so profitable that Genoa never willingly relinquished a share of it in two hundred and twenty years. Under the Ottomans it was the personal revenue estate of the Sultan's mother, the most privileged Christian community in the empire, and one of the richest districts in it. In the nineteenth century its exiled merchant families built trading houses that reached from Manchester to Calcutta. And today, families originating from this one island and the specks of rock beside it own and operate a share of the world's merchant fleet that, when you work the arithmetic out, is close to one ship in ten.

There is no gap in that list. From the archaic age to the present, through Persian conquest, Roman annexation, Arab raids, Turkish emirs, Genoese corporations, Ottoman sultans, Venetian occupation, revolution, massacre, earthquake, and world war, Chios has never once dropped off the map. It has been burned to the ground repeatedly and has never become unimportant.

Why? The short answer, which the rest of this book will elaborate, has three parts.

The first is position. Chios lies seven kilometres off the coast of Asia Minor, at the point where a ship coming out of the Dardanelles must decide where in the Mediterranean it is going. Every cargo that has ever moved between the Black Sea and the western world — Scythian grain in the sixth century BC, Crimean wheat and Persian silk in the fourteenth century AD, Russian wheat in the nineteenth, and Russian oil in the twenty-first — has passed within sight of this island. Position is not a resource that can be exhausted or a crop that can burn.

The second is the resin. In the southern third of the island, and nowhere else on earth in commercially meaningful quantity, a shrub called Pistacia lentiscus weeps a resin called mastic when its bark is cut. It has been chewed, burned, varnished, prescribed, and traded continuously for at least twenty-five centuries. Every ruler of the island from the Genoese onward has understood that possession of twenty-four villages in southern Chios confers an unforgeable worldwide monopoly on a luxury commodity, and each of them has governed accordingly — with fixed quotas, sealed warehouses, and the death penalty for theft. Very few places on earth have a natural monopoly of any kind. Almost none have held one for two and a half thousand years.

The third, and the most interesting, is the habit of leaving. Chios is the story of a place whose history has been repeatedly written by people who were somewhere else. Chian wine merchants were operating in the Black Sea colonies in the sixth century BC. Chian mastic was being sold in Alexandria and Bruges by Genoese agents in the fourteenth. Chian merchant families were established in Odessa, Trieste, Livorno, Marseille and London before the nineteenth century began, which is precisely why, when the island was destroyed in 1822 and the greater part of its population killed or enslaved, the Chians did not disappear. They had somewhere to go, relatives to go to, and a business to be absorbed into. The catastrophe converted a Mediterranean trading network into a global one within a generation. And that network, in its turn, is the direct ancestor of the shipping houses of Part VII: the same families, the same marriages, the same instinct for buying cheap at the bottom of a market, the same London offices, four or five generations on.

That third element — the diaspora that never quite lets go — is what makes Chios a genuinely strange place to visit. The island itself is quiet. It has fifty thousand permanent residents. It has never been fashionable; there are no whitewashed villages tumbling down a caldera, no cruise berths, no reputation. And yet its hospital, its schools, its libraries, its museums, its harbour works, and its churches have been built and rebuilt by people whose offices are in Piraeus, London, New York, and Monaco, and who come home in August. There is a small island offshore, called Oinousses, with about eight hundred permanent residents, a merchant marine academy, a first-rate maritime museum, and a cemetery full of tombs of a grandeur that makes no sense at all until you know what the families buried there own.

A word on names before we begin. In Greek the island is Chios (Χίος). In Italian and in almost every Western European source written before about 1900 it is Scio — Delacroix's painting is Scènes des massacres de Scio, and a nineteenth-century English merchant would have said "Sio." In Turkish it is Sakız Adası, which means Mastic Island: the Ottomans named the place after the thing it made. All three names appear in the sources; all three mean the same rock.

And a word on trust. Chian history has an unusually good documentary foundation for a Greek island, and that is very largely the achievement of one man, Philip Argenti (1891–1974), a scion of one of the great Chian merchant families who spent a private fortune and a scholarly lifetime recovering, editing, and publishing the Genoese, Ottoman, and revolutionary archives of his ancestors' island. Much of Parts IV, V and VI stands on Argenti's shoulders. But Chios also attracts a great deal of confident storytelling — about Homer, about the numbers killed in 1822, and about how much of the world's shipping its families own — and the confident version is not always the true one. Where the evidence is thin I will say so rather than smoothing over it. A history that reads well and cannot be trusted is not worth the paper.