The Emir Who Built a Navy
The eleventh century ended badly for the Byzantine Empire. The defeat at Manzikert in 1071 opened the Anatolian plateau to Turkish settlement, and within twenty years Turkish principalities had reached the Aegean coast and were looking at the islands.
The most dangerous of them, from Chios's point of view, belonged to a man the Greek sources call Tzachas and the Turkish ones Çaka Bey, and he is one of the more remarkable figures of the period.
He had been captured by the Byzantines as a young man and taken to Constantinople, where — as was standard practice with promising prisoners — he was not merely kept but cultivated. He learned Greek. He was given rank and honours and a place at court. He understood the Byzantine state from the inside: how its bureaucracy worked, how its armies were paid, what its weaknesses were. And then, when a change of emperor cost him his patrons, he went home to Anatolia and made himself emir of Smyrna, directly across the strait from Chios.
And there he did what no Turkish leader before him had done. He built a fleet.
The Turks who had come into Anatolia were horsemen from the steppe with no maritime tradition whatever. Tzachas simply hired the tradition: he took the Greek shipwrights and Greek sailors of the coastal towns he now ruled and set them to building and manning war galleys. Around 1090 he put to sea and took Chios, and then Lesbos, Samos, and Rhodes, and the Aegean suddenly had a Turkish naval power in it.
His ambitions, according to Anna Comnena — our principal source, and a hostile one, being the daughter of the emperor he was threatening — extended considerably further. She says he assumed the insignia of a Byzantine emperor and styled himself accordingly, and that he was coordinating with the Pechenegs, the steppe people then pressing on Constantinople from the European side. Whether or not she is exaggerating, the strategic picture was genuinely alarming: an enemy fleet in the Aegean, a nomad army in Thrace, and an empire that had just lost Anatolia.
Retaking Chios was hard. Alexios I Comnenus sent commander after commander, and the decisive campaign was eventually run by Constantine Dalassenos, who beat Tzachas's fleet and recovered the island around 1092–93. But Tzachas himself was not disposed of by Byzantine arms. He was disposed of by Byzantine diplomacy, which was always the empire's sharpest weapon. Alexios worked on the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan I — who happened to be Tzachas's son-in-law — and persuaded him that the emir of Smyrna was a threat to Seljuk interests as well as Byzantine ones. Kilij Arslan invited his father-in-law to a banquet, made him welcome, got him drunk, and killed him at the table.
The episode is a footnote in Byzantine history and a turning point in Chian history, because it establishes the island's medieval condition. Chios was now a frontier possession: enormously valuable, permanently exposed, and — this is the operative fact — no longer defensible by the empire that owned it. Byzantine naval strength was in terminal decline, and everyone in the Mediterranean could see it.
The Italians in particular could see it. Venice had extracted sweeping commercial privileges from the empire in 1082, in exchange for naval help, and used Chios as a base during operations in the twelfth century, wintering a fleet there in the 1120s. Genoa and Pisa obtained privileges of their own. By 1204, when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and the Latins divided the empire among themselves, the Aegean was already an Italian commercial lake in everything but name; the crusade merely made the political arrangements match the economic ones.
Chios's fate in the confusion after 1204 was messy. It was assigned on paper to the Latin Empire, contested in practice, and eventually recovered by the Byzantine successor state of Nicaea in the 1230s or 1240s. And when Michael VIII Palaiologos retook Constantinople in 1261 and restored the empire, he did it with Genoese naval assistance — assistance for which he had paid in advance, by the Treaty of Nymphaeum, with a package of commercial privileges so extensive that they effectively handed Genoa the eastern trade: the quarter of Galata across the Golden Horn, exemption from customs, and free access to the Black Sea.
That treaty is the hinge on which the next three hundred years of Chian history turns. Genoese Chios, the Maona, and two centuries of Latin rule over a Greek island all descend from a Byzantine emperor's decision to buy a fleet with concessions he could not afford to give.