The Last Harbour Before the Straits

Genoese Chios was not a plantation with a wall round it. It was a hub — and to understand why an island of this size mattered so much more than its acreage justified, you have to see what was moving past it.

The thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are the period sometimes called the Pax Mongolica: the interval, roughly from the 1250s to the 1340s, when the Mongol successor states — the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Golden Horde on the steppe, the Chagatai khanate in Central Asia, the Yuan in China — had subdued everything between the Black Sea and the Pacific and, whatever else they did, made long-distance overland trade across Eurasia unusually practicable. Silk, spices, gems, porcelain, rhubarb, and above all raw silk moved west. And the western ends of those routes were the ports of the Black Sea and of the Syrian and Anatolian coasts.

Genoa, by the Treaty of Nymphaeum, held privileged access to the Black Sea, and it exploited that access with total commitment. Genoese colonies ringed the sea like beads on a string. Caffa in the Crimea, the greatest of them, was a substantial fortified city with a bishop, a mint, a shipyard, and a mixed population of Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Tatars. Soldaia — Sudak — lay along the same coast. Tana, at the mouth of the Don, opened the Volga route into the steppe and beyond. Trebizond, on the southern shore, was the terminus of the caravan road from Tabriz and the Persian interior. There were lesser factories at Sinope, at Samastris, and up and down both coasts.

From these places the Genoese drew grain in enormous quantity, salt, salted fish, wax, hides, furs, timber, and slaves; and from Trebizond and Tabriz they drew the silk and spices brought from further east.

Every one of those cargoes had to come out the same way. South through the Bosphorus, past the Genoese quarter at Galata; through the Sea of Marmara; through the Dardanelles; and out into the northern Aegean. And there, at precisely the point where a master coming out of the Straits must decide whether he is running for the Adriatic, for Sicily and the west, for Alexandria, or for the Anatolian coast, lies Chios.

The island's functions for the Genoese were therefore several, and they compounded one another.

It was a convoy assembly point. Vessels running to and from the Black Sea gathered at Chios, waited for escorts and for company, and went through the more dangerous stretches together. The harbour was good, the garrison was Genoese, and it was the last friendly deep-water anchorage before the Straits.

It was a transhipment and warehousing centre. Cargo was broken and consolidated at Chios. A big round ship out of Genoa could discharge Flemish and Lombard woollens and load, in their place, a mixed cargo assembled from a dozen smaller vessels: alum from Phocaea; silk brought down from Bursa; spices arrived from Alexandria in coasters; grain from Caffa; wax, hides, and gum; slaves; and the island's own mastic.

It was a financial and information centre. Genoese notaries worked on Chios, and the deeds they drew — a substantial surviving body of documents — record partnerships, freight contracts, loans at interest, marine insurance, dowries, wills, and manumissions. Where notaries are, credit is. And credit requires information: a merchant sitting at Chios in the 1370s knew what the Crimean harvest looked like, what the Turkish emirates were doing, what Alexandria was paying for pepper, whether Venice had a fleet at sea, and what freight was fetching. In an economy where the difference between profit and ruin was frequently a matter of knowing something three weeks before a competitor, that was the most valuable commodity on the island.

It was a naval base, from which Genoese squadrons operated across the Levant.

And it was a diplomatic listening post, sitting between Byzantium, the Turkish emirates of the Anatolian shore, the Latin lordships of the Aegean, the Knights of St John at Rhodes, Venice's island empire, and the Mamluk sultanate — negotiating with all of them, sometimes at once and sometimes in contradictory directions, and reporting home.

The Genoese route can be drawn as a single line: Genoa, then Sicily or Sardinia, then the Aegean, then Chios, then Constantinople and Galata, then Caffa or Trebizond or Tana, and then the overland roads to Tabriz, Samarkand, and points east.

It should be said that the "Silk Road," as a single continuous highway across Asia, is a nineteenth-century coinage and a considerable simplification. What existed was a shifting web of overland and maritime routes, along which goods passed through many hands and many middlemen, and along which very few individuals travelled end to end. But the essential point stands: the goods of Asia reached Europe through a small number of chokepoints, and from 1346 to 1566 the Genoese held one of the most important of them and ran it as a corporate asset with an annual dividend.

The Mongol peace broke down in the mid-fourteenth century, and it broke down partly through the same routes that had made it valuable. The Black Death reached Europe in 1347 via Caffa and the Genoese ships that fled it — the classic account has the plague breaking out in a Mongol army besieging the Genoese there, and the Genoese carrying it home. The overland trade contracted thereafter. But the Black Sea grain and the Anatolian trades continued under Ottoman conditions, and Chios's function as the staging post outlasted the empires whose goods it handled, as it had outlasted several before them.