The Tear of the Tree

Mastic was the point of Chios, and the Genoese ran the monopoly with a thoroughness that reshaped the southern third of the island permanently and visibly.

The legal structure was total. All mastic produced on Chios belonged to the Maona. The growers in the southern villages were not free cultivators selling into a market; they were obliged producers, required to deliver a specified quota to the Maona's officers at a price the Maona set, and forbidden — on pain of death — to retain, sell, transport, or conceal any part of the crop. The Maona then sold it into the international market at whatever the traffic would bear, and the margins recorded in the accounts are very large indeed, frequently several times what the grower received.

Administration of the mastic zone was separate from the rest of the island and considerably more intrusive. Each village had an assigned quota, calculated on the number and age of its trees. Officers of the Maona walked the groves and counted; every productive tree on the island was, in principle, on a list. They supervised the incision season, watched the collection, received the delivery, and weighed it. Movement out of the mastic villages was restricted, because a grower was an asset and an asset that walks away is a loss.

And the penalties were brutal. Argenti published the Genoese regulations, and they make grim reading. Theft or concealment of mastic drew mutilation for a first offence and, for serious or repeated offences, death by hanging. Sheltering a thief, moving undeclared resin, damaging trees, or failing to make quota all carried heavy punishment. These were not decorative statutes intended to frighten; executions for mastic theft are documented. A man could hang on Chios for a handful of resin, and men did.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment, because it is the shape of the whole thing. The pleasant white tears that flavoured a sultan's confectionery and varnished a Flemish painting were produced under a criminal code that killed people for pilfering them, administered by a shareholders' committee in Genoa that most of the growers never saw.

Production figures under the Genoese are hard to compare across time because the units and the grading kept changing, but the scale ran to tens of thousands of okes — an oke being about 1.28 kilograms — in a good year, varying enormously with weather and with the condition of the trees. What is clear is the revenue significance. Mastic was consistently the single largest item of income from the island, and in some years it appears to have provided the majority of the Maona's entire receipts.

Where did it go? In two directions, and the second is the one that usually gets missed.

Westward, through the Genoese commercial network, to Italy, France, Spain, Flanders, and England, where it was sold as a pharmaceutical, a varnish resin, an incense, and a luxury ingredient. Medieval and Renaissance apothecary inventories list masticis as a matter of routine; it appears in pharmacopoeias, in painters' materials, in cookery.

Eastward and southward, to the Islamic world — and this was both the larger market and the more profitable one. Mastic was in constant demand in Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Persia and beyond: for chewing, for medicine, for cookery, for perfumery. The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt was a major buyer. And in time the Ottoman court became the single largest customer on earth.

So Genoese Chios, a Latin Christian possession administered by a Catholic company under a Catholic republic, sold the greater part of its principal product to Muslim powers with whom Genoa was intermittently at war, through licensed intermediaries, with everyone's full knowledge and nobody's embarrassment. This ought to be shocking and was entirely normal. Commerce and crusade coexisted in the medieval Mediterranean with a shamelessness that modern readers consistently underestimate, and the Genoese were the least embarrassed of all.

The Ottoman appetite in particular is worth stating plainly, because it explains everything about the island's later history. Mastic went into the imperial kitchens and the palace confectionery; into medicines compounded for the Sultan's own person; into the perfumes, pastilles, and dentifrices of the harem; and it was chewed constantly by Ottoman women of rank, to the point where the habit and the island became synonymous. The Turkish name for Chios is Sakız Adası, and sakız is the word for mastic and, today, for chewing gum. When the Ottomans took the island in 1566 they did not disturb the system in the slightest. They inherited it entire, including its penal code, and ran it for another two hundred and fifty years.

There is a footnote here with a very long shadow.

In the 1470s a young Genoese seaman is believed to have made at least one voyage to Chios aboard a vessel in the mastic trade. His name was Cristoforo Colombo, and twenty years later, in the journal of his first Atlantic crossing and in the letters that followed, he wrote about mastic repeatedly and with real technical familiarity — the season for cutting, the method of incision, the appearance of the resin, the going price. He believed he had identified mastic-bearing trees on Hispaniola, and he proposed to his sovereigns that the new islands might yield a mastic revenue "as Chios does," and that he could produce a thousand quintals a year.

He was wrong. The Caribbean trees were a different species and yielded nothing comparable, and the mastic scheme joined the long list of things Columbus was confidently mistaken about. But the episode is a small, precise illustration of how the Genoese world actually worked. A Ligurian sailor's practical knowledge of a crop grown in a few villages on one Aegean island was part of the mental furniture he carried across the Atlantic, and it shaped what he expected to find there.