The Valide Sultan's Mastic

The most surprising thing about Ottoman Chios is how extraordinarily well it did.

The expectation would run the other way. A Christian island annexed by force in 1566, its ruling class deported and its churches confiscated, ought to have declined into the condition of a provincial backwater — poorer, smaller, and less consequential with every generation. Instead, between the conquest and the catastrophe of 1822, Chios became one of the wealthiest, most populous, best-educated, and most privileged places in the entire Ottoman Empire. It was a Christian community governed under an arrangement so favourable that other Aegean islands regarded the Chians with a mixture of envy and outright suspicion, and that other Ottoman Christians found frankly implausible.

The reason was the resin, and the mechanism was a woman.

Mastic went, from the conquest onward, overwhelmingly to the imperial household. It flavoured the palace confectionery, went into the medicines compounded in the imperial pharmacy, scented the perfumes and pastilles of the harem, cleaned the teeth of the imperial family, and was chewed more or less continuously by the women of the court, among whom the habit was universal. Consumption was substantial and constant, and it came from twenty-four villages in southern Chios and from nowhere else on earth.

So the Ottoman state did something it did rarely and never lightly: it created a specially protected fiscal category around them. The mastic villages were assigned as a hass — a revenue grant — to the Valide Sultan: the mother of the reigning Sultan, mistress of the imperial harem, and, in several reigns of the seventeenth century, effectively the most powerful person in the empire. Mastic was her personal revenue. The growers of Mesta and Pyrgi and Olympi worked, in the most literal administrative sense, for the Sultan's mother.

The consequences for the island's governance were remarkable. Territory attached to the Valide Sultan's household was administered under her authority and was protected by her interest, which meant that the local Ottoman governor could not treat it as an ordinary province to be squeezed for whatever it would yield. The mastic villages received a formal charter of privileges, renewed by successive sultans over two and a half centuries, and the terms of it would have been unimaginable almost anywhere else in the empire.

The villages paid a fixed annual quota of mastic in place of most ordinary taxation. They were exempt from the devşirme, the levy of Christian boys for the janissary corps — the single most feared imposition in the Balkans, and the one that shaped Christian folk memory more than any other. They were exempt from various extraordinary levies and from the billeting of troops. They were permitted to ring their church bells, to build and repair their churches, and to display crosses in public: privileges denied to Christian communities almost everywhere else in the Ottoman world, and so conspicuous that visitors remarked on them. They governed themselves in most internal matters. And they had a right of direct appeal to Constantinople against arbitrary action by provincial officials — a right that was, unusually, worth something, because the official who abused a mastic village was interfering with the Valide Sultan's income and could expect to hear about it.

The catch was the quota, and the enforcement was ferocious. Penalties for mastic theft under the Ottomans were, if anything, harsher than under the Genoese, for the excellent reason that the thief was now stealing from the mother of the Sultan. Concealment, private sale, or smuggling carried mutilation, the galleys, or death. Village headmen were collectively liable for their village's quota, which meant that the community policed itself, which was the point. Officials counted the trees. The system the Maona had built was inherited whole and run for another two hundred and fifty years with almost no structural change whatever — a piece of institutional continuity across a conquest, a religion, and an empire that is genuinely rare.

The rest of the island did not enjoy the mastic villages' specific charter, but it benefited from the general climate. Chios as a whole was administered with a light hand. A kadı and a small garrison sat in the Kastro, where a Turkish quarter developed; but the day-to-day governance of the Greek population was handled by elected demogerontes, community elders, who apportioned the tax burden among the villages, ran the courts for internal matters, managed church and school endowments, and dealt with the Ottoman authorities on the community's behalf. The Orthodox metropolitan was a major political figure. The Catholic community persisted with its own bishop and its own quarter. There were small Jewish and Armenian communities.

And the island filled up. Estimates for the early nineteenth century put the population somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 — a startling density for 842 square kilometres of largely barren rock, and a figure that made Chios by a wide margin the most populous island in the Aegean.

The economy diversified far beyond resin. Kambos shipped citrus. The north and west produced wine, figs, olives, and almonds. Sericulture expanded and Chian silk textiles found markets. Chian shipowners and merchants worked the whole eastern Mediterranean. And by the eighteenth century the island had become a banking and commercial centre in its own right, with capital accumulating in the hands of a merchant class operating on an international scale.