The Long Twilight

The Ottoman conquest of Chios took a hundred and thirteen years to arrive, and everybody involved watched it coming.

The pressure began early. From the late fourteenth century the Maona was paying tribute to the Ottoman sultan for the privilege of being left alone, and the sums, which Argenti traced through the documents, climb with a horrible steadiness: a few thousand ducats a year at first; more through the fifteenth century; and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 a sharp escalation, until by the early sixteenth century the annual tribute stood somewhere in the region of ten to fourteen thousand ducats. For an island that had lost its alum revenues in 1461 and whose transit trade was increasingly conducted on Ottoman sufferance, that was close to insupportable.

The Maona managed the situation with the only instruments a small rich island has: money, flexibility, and studied neutrality. Chios paid promptly. It avoided provocation. It declined, as far as it decently could, to participate in Christian leagues against the Ottomans — and was accordingly denounced in the West as unreliable, mercenary, and scandalously accommodating. The Knights of St John at Rhodes complained. Venice complained, at length and repeatedly. The Papacy complained. And the Chians replied, with perfect accuracy, that they were a small island with no army, ten miles from Ottoman Anatolia, whose critics' enthusiasm for holy war was notably easier to sustain from several hundred miles further west.

Structural pressures made the position steadily worse. When Rhodes fell to Suleiman in 1522, the last independent Christian naval power in the eastern Aegean disappeared, and Chios's exposure became absolute. When Barbarossa dominated the Mediterranean in the 1530s and 1540s, the island's survival depended entirely on being useful, being polite, and being punctual. Barbarossa visited more than once. He was received with elaborate honour, given handsome presents, paid what he asked, and went away, and the Chians presumably breathed out and started saving for the next time.

Meanwhile — and this is the part that makes the period so peculiar — the island was in some respects flourishing.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Chios was a genuinely cosmopolitan place: the last Latin Christian port of any consequence in the eastern Aegean, and therefore an extremely convenient neutral clearing house where Ottoman, Venetian, Genoese, French, Ragusan, and Jewish merchants could all do business with one another under a flag that was nobody's enemy. The Ottoman authorities in Anatolia found it useful to have a discreet European trading window a few miles offshore, which is among the reasons the annexation was so long delayed.

Western travellers passed through in a steady stream and wrote it up. They describe the walled city with its Genoese towers; the mastic villages with their extraordinary architecture; the orange groves; the mixed population of Greeks, Latins, Turks, Jews, and Armenians; the Latin churches ringing their bells; and — nearly all of them, at length, and with varying degrees of decorum — the women. Chios in the European imagination of the sixteenth century was a byword for social freedom, elegance, and a certain relaxed quality that visitors found remarkable and that sat very oddly indeed with the island's actual status as a company-owned mastic plantation with capital punishment for resin theft.

The island also became a conduit. Greek manuscripts moved west through it; Western humanists visited; and after 1453 Chios was one of the routes by which Greek learning and Greek scholars reached Italy.

By the 1560s the arithmetic no longer worked. The Maona was in arrears; the tribute had become genuinely unpayable; and the new Sultan, Selim II, who succeeded in 1566, had both a fiscal motive and a strategic one. Chios was the last significant non-Ottoman territory in the eastern Aegean. It sat directly opposite the Anatolian coast. Its neutrality was an anomaly that had been tolerated for a century because it was convenient, and conveniences of that kind do not survive a change of reign forever.