The Morning of 15 April 1566

In April 1566 an Ottoman fleet under Piali Pasha, Kapudan Pasha — grand admiral — of the Ottoman navy, appeared off Chios. It was a substantial force; the accounts give something like eighty galleys. It came into the harbour and anchored.

Piali came ashore and was received exactly as Ottoman commanders had been received on Chios for a century: with elaborate courtesy, handsome hospitality, and immediate compliance. He explained that he was bound west and required supplies. The Chian authorities supplied him. His men came ashore in the usual way, in numbers that were large but not unprecedented, and dispersed about the town and its approaches.

Then, on 15 April 1566, having his troops in position and the walls effectively in his hands, Piali summoned the leading men of the Maona — the Giustiniani, whose grandfathers' grandfathers had governed the island since the fourteenth century — and informed them that Chios was annexed to the dominions of the Sultan.

There was no battle. Not a shot was fired. The great Genoese circuit of the Kastro, which had been maintained and improved for two hundred years and had never been seriously tested, was handed over. Two hundred and twenty years of rule by a shareholders' company ended between breakfast and lunch.

For the great mass of the island's population, the annexation was mild, and this was deliberate. The Greek inhabitants kept their religion, their property, their local administration, and their courts. The mastic system was preserved absolutely intact, with the villages continuing to produce under monopoly — for the Sultan now, rather than for shareholders in Genoa, which from the growers' point of view was a change of address rather than a change of condition. Ordinary life on Chios altered remarkably little, and one may reasonably suspect that a mastic villager in Mesta, informed that the Republic of Genoa no longer ruled the island, would have taken a moment to work out what practical difference it made.

For the Giustiniani it was the end. The families of the Maona were arrested. Their property was confiscated. They were deported — principally to Caffa in the Crimea and to Constantinople. The Latin churches were closed or converted, and the Genoese administration was dismantled entirely. Many Giustiniani made their way back to Chios in the following years and their descendants remained on the island for centuries, holding their estates at Kambos and their place in Chian society; but they returned as private persons and Ottoman subjects, not as rulers.

There is one further episode, and it produced Chios's Catholic martyrs.

A group of Giustiniani boys — the sources give the number as twenty-one, or in some accounts eighteen, and their ages as roughly between twelve and twenty — were taken to Constantinople as hostages and placed in the imperial palace, where boys of good family taken from Christian populations were customarily raised as Muslims for the Sultan's service. This was the ordinary machinery of the Ottoman state and it usually worked. In this case it did not. The boys refused to convert, and went on refusing.

Accounts of what followed differ in their particulars. The tradition holds that they were imprisoned, pressed repeatedly over an extended period, offered advancement and threatened with death, and eventually executed — in 1566 or over the following years. They are venerated by the Catholic Church as the Blessed Martyrs of Chios, and for the island's Latin community, which survived under Ottoman rule for another three and a half centuries as a small and rather beleaguered minority, they became the founding sacrifice around which that identity was organised.

Vincenzo Giustiniani, the last podestà, and the officers of the Maona disappear from the record shortly afterwards. The Republic of Genoa protested, negotiated ineffectually, and moved on to other business; its own great age was ending, and its future lay in lending money to the kings of Spain rather than in holding islands in the Levant.

So ended the Maona di Chio: one of the earliest and by a very wide margin the longest-lived of Europe's shareholder-owned territorial companies. It did not fail. It was not wound up, or bankrupted, or dissolved by its members. It ceased to operate because a rival sovereign annexed its principal asset with eighty galleys on a spring morning, and its shareholders' claim on the Republic of Genoa was never redeemed.