Governing Chios: The Podestà and the Two Churches

How did Genoese Chios actually work, day to day, for two centuries? The answer is a study in careful, profitable, and surprisingly durable colonial management, and it repays attention because it went so much better than the alternatives available at the time.

Formal sovereignty lay with the Republic of Genoa, which appointed a podestà — a governor, usually sent out for a term of one or two years, generally a Genoese notable, responsible for justice among Latins, for defence, and for relations with foreign powers. He had a council. He lived in a palace inside the walled town. And his authority was constrained at every point by the fact that he did not control the money.

The money belonged to the Maona, whose resident officers administered the revenues: the mastic monopoly above all, but also customs, the salt pans, the mint, the alum trade as long as Phocaea lasted, taxes on wine and other produce, and the profits of the port. In any dispute between the governor's authority and the shareholders' interest, the shareholders' interest generally prevailed, because the shareholders were still there when the governor's two years were up.

The Greek community retained everything that had been guaranteed in 1346, and the guarantees were substantially honoured. There was an Orthodox metropolitan of Chios throughout the Genoese period. The great monastery of Nea Moni kept its lands and its privileges. Greeks had their own courts under their own custom for matters among themselves, and the surviving notarial records show Greek and Latin legal practice running side by side, sometimes in the same document. Greek village notables — the class who would be called demogerontes under the Ottomans — handled local administration.

Alongside this a Latin church was established: a Catholic bishop of Chios, Latin parishes, Franciscan and Dominican houses. A Catholic community grew, from Genoese settlers and their descendants and from intermarriage and conversion, and it proved astonishingly durable. There were still several thousand Catholics on Chios in the eighteenth century; the Latin bishopric persisted into modern times; and Chios remains one of the very few places in the Aegean where a Latin Christian population survived the end of Latin rule instead of being absorbed or expelled.

Relations between the two communities were, by the standards of Latin rule in Greek lands, remarkably good. That is not a sentimental judgement but the consistent finding of the documentary record, and since it is genuinely unusual, it deserves explaining.

Part of the answer is that the terms of 1346 were kept. Compare Venetian Crete, where confiscation of Greek land for Venetian feudatories and the suppression of the Orthodox hierarchy were deliberate policy, and where the result was more than a dozen major Greek revolts across three centuries. Chios's capitulation guaranteed Orthodox worship and Greek property, and those guarantees held. There were very few Greek risings against Genoa on Chios, and the ones there were tended to be about specific grievances rather than about Latin rule as such.

Part of the answer is that the Maona's interest was commercial rather than seigneurial. Its shareholders were not knights looking for estates and deference; they were investors looking for dividends. A prosperous, cooperative, productive Greek population was worth considerably more to them than a subjugated one, and the incentives ran, unusually, toward decent treatment.

Part of it is that the alternative was visibly worse. The Turkish emirates across the strait raided constantly, and the Genoese walls, garrison, and galleys were, for a Chian villager, a real and valued security service.

And part of it, over time, is simply that everybody married everybody. Latin and Greek families intermarried so extensively that by the fifteenth century a great many of the island's leading houses were of mixed descent and mixed confession, with Catholic and Orthodox branches attending different churches at Easter and dining together afterwards. The Chian Latin nobility recorded in the Libro d'Oro is a substantially Hellenised body. The Genoese elite spoke Italian, the Greeks spoke Greek, a great deal of business was done in both, and the Chian dialect absorbed a thick stratum of Genoese and Italian vocabulary — much of it maritime and commercial — some of which is still there.

None of which made Genoese Chios a paradise. The Greeks paid the taxes and cut the mastic; the profits went to Genoa; the citadel was closed to Greeks at night, as citadels were everywhere; and enforcement in the mastic villages was savage, as the next chapter will describe. But when the Ottomans finally took the island in 1566, the Greek population does not appear to have regarded it as liberation, and that is the most eloquent evidence there is.

The Genoese also left the island its most visible structure. They rebuilt and massively strengthened the Kastro, the walled town of Chios — a great circuit of walls, towers, and a moat enclosing the administrative and military centre of the island, with the podestà's palace, the Latin cathedral, the arsenal, the loggia, and the merchants' houses inside. Much of that circuit still stands, and people still live inside it.