All of Them Called Giustiniani

The first Maona — the Maona Vecchia, the Old Maona, comprising the original investors — did not run smoothly. Shares fragmented through inheritance until nobody could agree who was owed what. Disputes multiplied. The cost of defending the island against Turkish raiders, of paying tribute, and of maintaining a garrison ate into the returns. By the early 1360s the enterprise needed restructuring.

The restructuring of 1362 produced the Maona Nuova, and with it the detail that everybody who hears it remembers.

The reorganised shareholders all took the same surname.

They became Giustiniani — from the palace of the Giustiniani family in Genoa where the association held its meetings — and they did so in accordance with a peculiar and characteristic Genoese institution called the albergo.

An albergo was an artificial clan. It was a group of families, frequently unrelated by blood and sometimes of quite different social origin, who formally merged themselves into a single named house for political and commercial purposes: adopting a common surname, a common coat of arms, a common palace, and common obligations of mutual support. Genoese politics ran on these constructed lineages. The great names of the Republic — Doria, Spinola, Grimaldi, Fieschi, Adorno — are not simple bloodlines but alberghi, coalitions with a family name attached, and a man could be admitted to one, or born into it, or bought into it.

So from 1362 the shareholders of Chios, whose original surnames had been Recanelli, Campi, Longo, Garibaldo, Banca, de Fornetto, Arangio, Oliverio, Paterio and others, became — in law, in the notarial record, and in daily speech — Giustiniani. Some branches kept the old name as a second element, which is why the Chian Latin nobility for the next five hundred years consists largely of Giustiniani-Longo, Giustiniani-Banca, Giustiniani-Recanelli, Giustiniani-Campi, and their cousins. Argenti's Libro d'Oro untangles them across two volumes, and it is not light reading.

The consequence is a curiosity of European genealogy: an entire island aristocracy sharing one surname, none of them originally related, all of them descended from a shareholders' meeting.

The most famous individual that name produced died on the walls of Constantinople.

Giovanni Giustiniani Longo was a Genoese soldier of the Chian branch, and by 1452 he had a considerable reputation as a specialist in the defence of fortifications. In January 1453, with the Ottoman army massing and the Christian powers of Europe conspicuously failing to intervene, he sailed for Constantinople with two ships and seven hundred men, recruited and equipped substantially at his own expense.

The emperor Constantine XI gave him command of the land walls — the four-mile Theodosian fortification which was the only thing between the city and Mehmed II's army, and against which the Sultan had concentrated the largest artillery train yet assembled. Giustiniani took charge of the critical central sector, at the Mesoteichion, where the walls dip into the valley of the Lycus and the ground favours the attacker. Over the seven weeks of the siege he organised the defence of that sector with a competence that impressed everyone who wrote about it, Greek and Italian alike: repairing by night what the bombards knocked down by day, filling breaches with barrels of earth and timber, and holding the outer wall rather than falling back, which was the aggressive choice and the right one.

On the morning of 29 May 1453, during the final assault, Giustiniani was hit — the sources disagree about whether by a culverin ball, a crossbow bolt, or a handgun, and about whether the wound was in the chest or the leg or the hand — and, bleeding badly, was carried from the wall to be taken to a ship.

The defenders saw him go. Whatever the truth about the wound, and it seems to have been genuinely serious, the effect on the morale of the men holding the breach was immediate and, in the judgement of most contemporaries, decisive. The line wavered; the Ottomans came through; and within hours the city that had stood for eleven hundred years was taken.

Giustiniani was carried aboard a Genoese ship, which sailed for Chios. He died there, of his wound, a few days later, and he is buried on the island.

It is a strange and rather moving thread. The last commander of the walls of Constantinople was a shareholder's kinsman from a joint-stock company's island, and he came home to it to die.