The Black Sea

by Charles King

  [spread] devastation from the Propontis [Sea of Marmara] and, overrunning the whole coastland, reached the native city of the Saint [modern Amasra, Turkey]; they pitilessly killed those of both sexes and all ages, giving no mercy to old men nor sparing children; but raising their blood-stained arms against all, they hastened to make ruin as far as they could.23

  The relationship with the Byzantines was not always so conflictual, however, for the empire recognized early on that the princes of the north could be both an important partner as well as a useful ally against other enemies. For two centuries or more, river routes carried furs, amber, wax, and slaves between the Baltic Sea and Constantinople. Kiev, the greatest of the princely cities of Rhosia, or Rus’ to the Slavs, flourished as an entrepôt on the Dnepr route. The relationship between Norsemen and Byzantines became so close that, in the tenth century, a corps of Norse mercenaries joined the Byzantine army, eventually forming the core of the emperor’s household guard. The most famous of their number, one Harald Sigurdsson, would finish his life as King Harald III of Norway, the last Viking invader of Britain, felled by a Saxon arrow at the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066.

  The princes of the Rhos grew powerful from the trade with Byzantium and were so much a presence on the sea route linking the Dnepr estuary to the Bosphorus that some contemporary Arab geographers labeled the Black Sea the bahr al-Rus, as if the Rhos, not the Byzantines, were the real sovereigns of the sea. The Rhos could even at times dictate the terms of the relationship with their trading partner. In the late tenth century, Vladimir, prince of Kiev, demanded a sister of the emperor Basil II in marriage. He was initially promised Basil’s sister Anna, but when the emperor seemed to go back on his word, Vladimir sacked Chersonesus. The emperor finally agreed to the marriage, on the condition that Vladimir convert to Christianity, so in 988 the prince had himself baptized and gained Anna in return. In one go, the Kievans were conjoined with the Byzantine royal house and also brought into the universal church. Christianity had already drifted up the northern rivers before Vladimir’s conversion, but the baptism opened the way to numerous Byzantine influences—of alphabet, music, art, and architecture—that would shape the culture of the Kievan state and eventually of medieval Russia as well. Although now sealed by a dynastic marriage, the direct relationship between Byzantium and Kiev proved to be shortlived. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the coming of yet another nomadic people, the Cumans, cut off links between the northern cities and the coast, and trade diminished. For the Byzantines, the end of the profitable alliance meant that the northern coast slipped forever out of their grasp.

  At the time, however, Basil II’s link with the prince of Kiev was supremely fortunate, for the mercenaries whom the Kievans provided were crucial to a series of spectacular military victories during his reign. Those campaigns would also give the emperor his unusual epithet—bulgaroktonos, the Bulgar-Slayer.

  The Bulgars had once been allies of the Byzantines, another of the many relationships forged on the edge of the empire, and at various times they had been critical in Byzantine domestic politics as well. In fact, when Justinian II returned to Constantinople with his Khazar wife in tow, he owed his resumption of power to the Bulgars. His father-in-law, the Khazar khagan, had been bought off by the reigning Byzantine emperor and had agreed to assassinate Justinian before he could attack Constantinople. Theodora warned Justinian of the plot, and the two escaped across the sea from Phanagoria to the Danube. There, Justinian found a far warmer welcome than he had experienced among his Khazar in-laws in the east. His new hosts, the Bulgars, provided the troops that allowed him to return in triumph to the imperial palace.

  In Justinian II’s day, the early eighth century, the Bulgars were a relatively recent appearance on the edge of the Byzantine empire, but like the Khazars, they were already of critical importance in the empire’s foreign and domestic affairs, as their intervention in favor of Justinian showed. The original Bulgar homeland lay far to the east, up the Volga river, an area that cartographers were still showing as “Great Bulgaria” as late as the eighteenth century. The Khazars and Bulgars were probably closely related; their origin myths had them descended from the same son of Noah, and the Bulgar lands on the Volga were very early absorbed into the Khazar khaganate.

  As part of the great westward steppe migrations, the Bulgars appeared in strength on the Danube in the late 600s. Under their chieftain, or khan, Asparukh, they crossed the river and subjugated the Slavic population to the south. Their arrival so troubled the Byzantines that Constantinople agreed to pay tribute to Asparukh and his successors and recognized their control of the lands between the Danube and the Balkan mountain range. When the Byzantines refused to pay up, war was often the result, usually with the Bulgars coming out on top. After one major victory, the khan Krum converted the skull of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus into a chalice. What the Byzantines were unable to do by force of arms they hoped to achieve by the Gospel. The Bulgars were converted to Christianity in the ninth century and remained on the Byzantine side during the great schism that split eastern and western Christendom in 1054. By this stage, the Bulgars had lost most of the nomadic and Turkic traits of the past; they had gradually been assimilated to the Slavic language of the local population.

  But a common religion failed to ease relations with Constantinople. Until nearly the end of the Byzantine empire, dealing with the Bulgar problem was a mainstay of Constantinople’s foreign policy. In the tenth century, the Bulgar empire under Simeon—who now took the title of “Tsar of All the Bulgars and Greeks”—was perhaps the most powerful state in eastern Europe, and its capital, at Preslav, was said to rival Constantinople in its magnificence. The first empire fell to Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, whose Norse mercenaries helped rout the Bulgar troops. The chronicles recorded that Basil blinded ninety-nine of every hundred prisoners, leaving one sighted captain to lead the rest back to the Bulgar encampment. The Bulgar empire was then annexed by Byzantium, the first time in centuries that Constantinople had controlled most of the Balkan peninsula. But that arrangement, too, eventually broke down. A resurgent Bulgar empire emerged a century and a half later. This second empire, with its new capital at Turnovo, stretched at its height in the thirteenth century from modern Albania to the Black Sea. However, with the expansion of other Balkan kingdoms, such as medieval Serbia, it too would soon disappear.

  Christianity had been a powerful tool of statecraft for Byzantine emperors in their relations with the Rhos and the Bulgars. Conversion did not always prevent conflict, of course, but from the Byzantine perspective it certainly meant that conflict was of a different type—something closer to a civil war within the bounds of Christendom than a battle across the lines between believer and infidel. If a neighboring people or state could not be brought into the empire or into a firm alliance, the next best thing was to bring them within the bounds of the church.

  The situation was rather different in Anatolia, however. Although it formed the backyard of the empire itself, Anatolia had long been a place where languages, peoples, and religions were mixed: speakers of Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Caucasian, and Syriac languages, Christians and Muslims, heterodox and orthodox. But the arrival of a new group—Turkoman nomads—fundamentally altered political and social relations.

  Although their original grazing lands lay on the central Asian steppe, the Turkomans began to press up against the eastern frontiers of the Byzantine empire in the eleventh century. They were nominally under the authority of the Great Seljuk empire centered in Baghdad, but as with all nomadic peoples, they were rarely under anyone’s direct political control. Fearing for the safety of his own empire, the Seljuk sultan encouraged the Turkomans to push toward the west, goading them on with tales of grazing lands in central Anatolia and the prospect of plunder in the Byzantine towns and cities. In 1071 the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines at the battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, a military victory that effectively opened the door to large-scale Turkoman migration all th
e way to the Aegean.

  Over the next two centuries, Anatolia experienced the same slow migration of Turkic peoples that had earlier taken place on the steppeland to the north. Political control gradually passed from the Byzantines to a variety of local emirs drawn from the Turkoman hordes. Some had become settled or semi-nomadic and lived in an uneasy relationship with Byzantine peasants and urban centers. Warfare was frequent, yet it was usually sparked not by religious animosity between the Muslim emirs and the Christian emperor in Constantinople, but rather by local communities vying for grazing rights and by nomadic raiding on outlying farmsteads and larger settlements. Moreover, the two sides in these disputes were rarely the same from year to year. Local Byzantine aristocrats, even rival dynastic factions in Constantinople, frequently called on various emirs to assist them in the numerous civil conflicts that racked the empire.

  The overlordship of the Great Seljuks ended with the coming of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The Mongol invasion disrupted the Seljuk imperial system and sparked a new westward migration by still further groups of Turkoman nomads. The result was a new array of Turkoman emirates and confederations and the extension of their power to the coastal areas of the Black Sea. The Akkoyunlu (“white sheep”) Turkomans held eastern Anatolia and western Persia. The Seljuks of Rum—an emirate that combined the names of two of its neighbors, the Great Seljuks of Baghdad and the “Romans” of Constantinople—claimed much of central and southern Anatolia. The coastal areas, including the major ports such as Sinope and Trebizond, were at various stages under the direct control of these and other groups or paid protective tribute to them.

  These political changes were accompanied by the slow transformation of social life across the region. Some Christians, especially those disconnected from ecclesiastical authority in urban centers, converted to Islam. Some Greek- or Armenian-speakers came to speak a Turkic language. Some Turkoman nomads became sedentary and Christian. Some, no doubt, came to speak what we would now call Greek or Armenian or Kurdish or Georgian. Other nomads remained pastoralists, moving their herds from pasture to pasture and, when times were difficult, raiding settled villages and towns now occupied by people who, only a few generations before, had probably lived lives not very different from their own.

  The Turkomans would remain in place even after some of their number—the Ottomans of northwest Anatolia—had transformed themselves from frontier emirate into Islamic empire. Although most Turkoman nomads became settled during the centuries of Ottoman power, pastoralists of various sorts survived. They are still to be found across the Near East, from the Turkomans of northern Iraq to the Çepni people of the southeastern Black Sea coast, shepherds who move their flocks of sheep and goats to upland pastures in the summer, much as coastal herders did in the waning days of Byzantine power.

  Emperors had long worried about the princes of the Rhos, the Christian kings of the Balkans and the Caucasus, and the array of nomads who periodically poured out of the northern steppe or from eastern Anatolia. Yet, in the end, it was none of these groups that eventually separated the Byzantines from the Black Sea. Rather, it was the Latin powers of the west, divided from the emperors in Constantinople by both religious affiliation and political allegiance, that proved to be the empire’s real undoing.

  Since the eleventh century, the rise of central European powers had threatened Byzantine interests in the west. Much of Italy was lost to the Normans, the Italian maritime states commanded the Mediterranean, and French, German, and papal forces conspired to weaken the empire’s remaining holdings. The Crusades repeatedly brought all these powers to the gates of Constantinople itself, and it was only deft diplomacy—and strategic marriages—that prevented them from sacking the city every time they made their way to the Holy Land.

  By the time of the Fourth Crusade, diplomacy was not enough. In 1199 an expeditionary force assembled in Italy and persuaded the doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, to assist in an operation against Egypt. He agreed, but the price was a full share of any conquests made along the way. In the years that it took to outfit the Crusaders, the target shifted. It was no longer to be the Muslim infidels, but rather the schismatics in Constantinople. The Venetians had fought periodic wars with the Byzantines, particularly over trading rights in the eastern Mediterranean, and a crusade against the heretical emperor was the opportunity to secure their dominance in the economic affairs of the east. After much discussion of how to divide the future spoils, in the spring of 1204 the Crusaders finally launched an attack on the city. It fell quickly.

  Contemporary chroniclers called it a “cosmic cataclysm.” The destruction was immense. The great church of the Haghia Sophia was desecrated. Icons were thrown into the sea. Nuns were raped and young monks sold into slavery. One of the Crusader generals, Baldwin of Flanders, was elevated to the imperial throne, and a Venetian was made patriarch of the church, now formally in union with Rome. Some Byzantine nobles fled across the Sea of Marmara to Nicaea and set up an empire-in-exile that soon attracted many of the Greek-speaking aristocracy, as well as the displaced church hierarchy. In the great carve up of the empire—the Partitio Romaniae, as it was called—Byzantium was divided among its Latin conquerors. Outposts of Byzantine influence remained among the exiles in Nicaea, among a rival family line at Trebizond (Trapezus), and in a small kingdom in Greece; but the empire as a whole, whittled down over the centuries, was no more.

  The history of the Byzantine empire on the Black Sea came to a close in 1204. The Byzantines managed to retake Constantinople in 1261, ending the brief period of Latin dominance in the east. But the restored Byzantium was no more than an empire of the Straits, a relatively minor power hemmed in by other Christian kingdoms in the Balkans and the Caucasus and the Turkoman emirates in Anatolia. Its economy and foreign trade remained largely in the hands of the Italians. The Black Sea, a short sail up the Bosphorus, was now effectively beyond the horizon of imperial control. Yet the end of the Byzantine era also ushered in a period of unparalleled economic activity around the coastline, a time when the sea was as close as it has ever been to the heart of Europe.

  Business in Gazaria

  In the late 1200s, Marco Polo sailed from Trebizond to Constantinople on his return journey from many years at the court of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan. He barely mentions the voyage:

  [W]e have not spoken to you of the Black Sea or the provinces that lie around it, although we ourselves have explored it thoroughly. I refrain from telling you this, because it seems to me that it would be tedious to recount what is neither needful nor useful and what is daily recounted by others. For there are so many who explore these waters and sail upon them every day—Venetians, Genoese, Pisans and many others who are constantly making this voyage—that everybody knows what is to be found there.24

  Travel along that route had become so commonplace that he felt it too boring to be included, a quotidian commute from one cosmopolitan trading center to another.

  By the time Marco Polo arrived, the Black Sea was already at the center of an economic network that extended from the mulberry groves of China to the silk houses of Marseilles, from the fairs of Novgorod and Kiev to the bazaars of Tabriz. It lay at the crossroads of major international highways. “Silk routes” wound from China though central Asia, across the Caspian to the Volga, then overland to the Don river and from there into the Sea of Azov and the ports of Crimea; or along a southern road, across central Asia and Persia, then through Armenia to the port of Trebizond. The rivers of the north carried traffic through Poland and Russia to the Baltic Sea, an ancient route that had once brought amber to the Mediterranean but now bore silk, fur, and animal hides to the growing cities of northern Europe. Manufactured goods, especially textiles, arrived from central Europe and then spread out across the Eurasian steppe. Cereals and spices flowed in the opposite direction, into central Europe or out through the Bosphorus to the Aegean.

  What people called the sea reflected these trading relationships. Some early Arab maps l
abeled it the bahr al-Tarabazunda, the Sea of Trebizond, after the port where caravans unloaded after the trek across Anatolia from Persia. Poles named it the mare Leoninum, the Sea of Lwów, even though that landlocked commercial city lay hundreds of kilometers to the northwest, in Polish Galicia.25 To a new influx of sailors and traders coming from the city-states of medieval Italy, it was simply il mare Maggiore—the Great Sea. A merchant could start his journey in Genoa or Venice, sail half way across the Mediterranean, through the Straits and over the Black Sea, and at the end of it share a glass of wine with another Italian, probably even someone he knew. If a European importer could bring his Chinese silk or Indian spices as far as the Black Sea, they were almost home. If an exporter could deliver his wine or cotton cloth there, it was as good as sold. As the commercial houses of the Middle Ages discovered, get your merchandise to the Black Sea and you could get it anywhere in the world.

  In the centuries when Byzantium grew from a provincial colony into an imperial capital, the Italian coastal cities were also developing as major maritime centers. Venice emerged from a jumble of island villages to become a mercantile empire whose interests extended all across the eastern Mediterranean. The city’s early trade in cured fish with the Italian mainland was gradually transformed, by the early Middle Ages, into near absolute control of the sea routes from Asia Minor and the Levant to the ports of southern Europe. Across the peninsula, Genoa and Pisa lacked the geographical advantages of Venice; they looked out to the poorer western Mediterranean rather than to the richer east. But their powerful navies, built out of necessity during a series of wars with Arab raiders, emerged as rivals to that of the Venetian republic.

  Venice was once part of the Byzantine empire, professing loyalty to Constantinople in exchange for protection against rapacious princes on the mainland, but in time that relationship was inverted. The Venetian navy grew strong, a byproduct of the need to protect shipping lanes against Mediterranean pirates, just as Byzantine seafaring decayed. Soon, the Byzantines came to depend on Venice as a surrogate navy. Already in the ninth century, the Venetians were given privileged commercial rights in the empire in exchange for naval protection, including the defense of Constantinople against its multiple besiegers. That early connection grew into a virtual monopoly on the eastern trade during the Crusades. Popes and princes had plenty of zeal, but the doge of Venice had the money. The Venetians provided financing for weapons and provisions and transported Christian troops to the Holy Land. By then, the Venetians had more interest in plundering the Byzantine empire than in continuing to protect it, and when the Crusaders ravaged Constantinople in 1204, it was Venice that profited most. In the partition of the empire that followed, three-eighths of the Byzantine lands went to the Venetians, including the Aegean archipelago, northern Greece, and the coasts of the Black Sea. Overnight, the republic acquired an empire.