by Charles King
Genoa and Pisa managed to eke out some concessions from the Byzantines, even during the period of Venetian dominance. In the 1100s they were granted business quarters along the Golden Horn. But the Partitio Romaniae presented a unique opportunity. While Venice enjoyed the fruits of its new acquisitions, Genoa forged an alliance with the exiled Byzantine dynasty that controlled the reduced “empire” of Nicaea in northwest Anatolia. The investment in that relationship soon bore dividends. When the exiles recaptured Constantinople and ousted the Crusaders in 1261, Genoa was given the privileged status that Venice had once enjoyed. The Genoese moved into prime quarters in the Pera section of Constantinople, on the hills across the Golden Horn from the emperor’s palace. All the ports of the empire, including those on the Black Sea, were fully opened to Genoese merchants.
The Venetians and Pisans were loath to accept these new arrangements, however. More than a century of warfare among the three city-states followed, including spectacular naval engagements in the Bosphorus itself. The outcome was the destruction of Pisa as a major maritime power, the ascendancy of the Venetians in the eastern Mediterranean, and an uneasy condominium between Venetian and Genoese merchants in the Black Sea. The old Greek colony of Tanais on the Don river, now called Tana by the Italians, became the Venetian doorway to the east and the terminus of the overland route from China and central Asia. Yet, in the race to profit from the Black Sea trade routes, Genoa was the real successor to the Miletus of antiquity. By the end of the 1200s, the Genoese had created a virtual empire of their own within that of the restored Byzantines. From the heights of Pera, the governor of the Genoese community, the podestà, could look out on a commercial dominion unrivalled in wealth and geographic extent. “The sea,” wrote a Byzantine chronicler, “belongs to them alone.”26
The entry of Italian commerce into the Black Sea revived the cities around the coast. Some had lain dormant throughout the period of the great movement of peoples across the northern steppe, while a few, such as Chersonesus, had weathered the period as a remote outpost of Byzantine influence on a tense frontier. By the late 1200s, however, the Black Sea was ringed with active port cities, many built on top of the former Greek colonies and now taking advantage of their position as entryways to the wealth of the east.
Most ships could go from Constantinople to Trebizond in a few weeks, including stops along the way to trade or take on supplies; with very favorable weather, the trip could be made in under a week if necessary.27 From there, a ship could dart across to Crimea, anchoring at the old Greek port at Theodosia (renamed Caffa by the Italians), then continue into the Sea of Azov and on to Tana, the jumping off point for the overland portage to the Volga and then on to the Caspian Sea. All the way along the Black Sea coastline, the Genoese were dominant, both in commerce as well as in the local administration. Permanent Genoese consuls resided at Sinope and Trebizond, Sevastopolis (modern Sukhumi, Georgia) in the east, and Licostomo and Maurocastro at the mouths of the Danube and Dnestr, as well as in Caffa. The Venetians were present as well, especially at Tana and Soldaia (modern Sudak, Ukraine), but their supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean always meant that the Black Sea was of secondary interest to them.
Any visitor to these emporiums, especially those along the Crimean coast, would have encountered bustling workshops and markets filled with traders from across the known world. A dozen languages could be heard on the paved streets, with hawkers hashing out deals in a patois of Greek and Italian dialects. Bells from Franciscan and Dominican monasteries pealed the hours, competing with the Islamic call to prayer or the chants of Orthodox and Armenian priests. Townspeople and merchants crowded the audience hall of the consul’s palace, seeking redress or hounding the notary to give his imprimatur to a contract. Caravans of camels and packhorses wound through the city gates and down to the harbor. Merchants from southern Europe—Italians, Catalans, and others—met growing numbers of Muslims and Jews, as well as a new rush of Orthodox Christians from the Peloponnese and the Aegean archipelago, some living permanently in the cities, others only wintering there before the return to the Mediterranean.
Several registers of Genoese notaries from this period are extant, and they give a remarkable picture of the diversity of trade among the seaports as well as the melange of people engaged in it. In April 1289, Guglielmo Vesano sold one-third interest in a transport ship, the Mugetto, to Vivaldino Laugerio. In May, Manuele Negrone sold to Mazzo di Campo and Obertino d’Albenga a thirty-year-old slave named Venali, originally taken into servitude on the Caucasus coast. In June, the Catholic Giacommo di Ghisulfo, acting as agent for Guglielmo di Saluzzo, received from the Muslim Kemal Takmadji a sum of money in payment for a shipment of cattle hides traded to him by Hassan, a Muslim from Syria then resident in Caffa. In April 1290, the Armenians Perra, Vassili, and Priche, along with the Orthodox Christians Theodore and Costas, acknowledged that Vivaldo Lavaggio, commander of a galley fitted out by Argun, the Mongol khan of Tabriz, recovered and returned to them all the property taken by a pirate named Iurzuchi.28 With such remarkable exchange among many different communities and all over considerable distances, it is no wonder that Marco Polo felt little need to describe the Black Sea in any detail.
Evidence of Europeans’ knowledge of the sea is also easily seen in the colorful sailing charts, or portolans, produced mainly by Italians and Catalans. The charts, now prized by museums and private collectors, were drawn on vellum and rolled up into scrolls to be taken on sea voyages. They showed direction by reference to prevailing winds and gave an outline of the coast, with all the major and minor ports labeled. The geographical detail in these charts, most of which date from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, is extraordinary. Sharp headlands project out into the sea, interspersed with semicircular indentations representing inlets and bays. The shape of the entire sea, the position of the headlands, the outlines of Crimea and the Sea of Azov are all broadly correct—geographical features that maps for centuries after the end of Italian dominance would get imaginatively wrong.
Administration of the seaports and the Genoese communities along the coastline was formally directed by the Officium Gazariae in Genoa—one of the places where the name of the mysterious Khazars survived—but the epicenter was at Caffa in Crimea. Caffa had an elected senate and a civil bureaucracy. The chief consul, appointed directly by Genoa, was even better paid than the podestà in Pera and was charged with collecting taxes, drawing up a communal budget, and provisioning militias and appointing consuls in most other Black Sea ports.29 The consul’s administration oversaw the construction of imposing defenses, a wall of brick and stone interrupted by defensive towers and surrounded by a ditch.30 The city’s sweeping crescent-shaped bay held a herd of fat-bottomed long-distance ships, as well as feluccas and other small coasting craft imported from the Mediterranean. The great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta recorded that it held about 200 “ships of war and trading vessels, small and large.” He saw many seaports in his life, but as far as he was concerned it was “one of the most notable harbors in the world.”31
Another traveler, Pero Tafur of Cordoba, sailed into the harbor at Caffa on a clear day in the late 1430s. He had crossed over from Trebizond, a city that he had been happy to see melt into the haze. Trebizond, the ancient Trapezus, was governed by its own emperor, he said, who was a rival to the Byzantines, and Genoese and Venetian merchants were active there. But what had soured him on the southern port was his discovery that the emperor had married off his daughter to a local Muslim chieftain. What the men of Cordoba had died to keep from the Moor, Tafur must have felt, the men of Trebizond now freely offered to the Turkoman. Caffa, or at least a part of it, seemed closer to civilization. The city’s governor greeted him warmly and personally saw to his needs. The inn where he was housed was satisfactory and the friars in the Franciscan monastery he visited pleasant. “The city is very large, as large as Seville, or larger, with twice as many inhabitants, Christians and Catholics as well as Greeks [Orthodox Christians],
and all the nations of the world.” Ships arrived daily from distant ports, he said, and the passengers’ comings and goings filled the streets with a cacophony of languages. Spices, gold, pearls, precious stones, rich Russian furs, and slaves were bought and sold, and at prices that were often unbelievably low. He even bought several slaves himself, a form of charity, he reckoned, to prevent their falling into the hands of impious Muslims.32
For all the vitality of Caffa and the other cities that he visited, Tafur’s final judgment was not positive. They were livable enough, for Oriental towns anyway, but none quite came up to the standard he had expected after hearing stories about the opulence of the east that circulated in Spain. It was so cold in winter that ships froze fast in the harbors, he said, and the hinterland was as inaccessible as India. The food was generally inedible, and most of the people in the marketplaces were bestial. The Franciscans and a few refined merchants struggled to provide a modicum of order, but it was not an easy project. “Certainly, if it were not for the Genoese who are there, it would not appear that the people have any lot with us”—Catholic Europeans, that is—“since there are so many different nationalities, so many ways of dressing and eating, and such diversity in the usage of women.” A virgin, it was said, could be had for a measure of wine, a shameful exchange that he confirmed by having one himself.33
Tafur theorized that the inhabitants of the Crimean ports were probably civilized enough when they arrived from Italy—scions of the best families could be found residing there—but they had been gradually deformed by their association with the tribes of the interior, especially the Asiatic Tatars. Most of the inland areas in the north were controlled by Tatar chieftains, who had swept into the region as part of the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century. The Italians at first negotiated the right to set up quarters in the coastal cities but then gradually expanded their control over the suburbs as well. Some Tatars lived among the Italians inside the city walls, but that did not prevent others from periodically holding the cities under siege. Whenever one or another khan became dissatisfied with his tribute, a swarm of armed Tatars would appear at the gates. It was only thanks to the superior weapons of the city militias—crossbows, cannon, and muskets—that the ports escaped the Tatars’ depredations. Sometimes even that was not enough. More than once, the Italians had to rebuild their homes and businesses almost from scratch.
Tafur shared the anti-Muslim prejudice common to many Catholic European visitors to the Black Sea ports, at least those whose main concern was exotic travel, not living and conducting business there. He had been scandalized by the close associations between the Christian authorities in Trebizond and the Muslim emirs of Anatolia, and he was equally disconcerted by the way in which the Tatars mingled with Christians in the Crimean cities. But as with so many outsiders who visited the Black Sea coast, Tafur missed a crucial dimension of social relations there: It was to these Tatars—or rather to the vast Mongol empire of which they were originally a part—that the Italians owed much of their commercial success.
Pax Mongolica
The Mongols were the last of the great westward migrations from central Asia.
Their move into the Black Sea region was fueled in part by the desire for conquest, in part by the natural peregrinations of a nomadic population that, like Eurasian pastoralists from centuries before, trailed along behind endless herds of horses, cattle, and sheep. The mass of these nomads were actually Turkic in origin, hence the name usually applied to them by contemporary observers—Tatars or, in an older spelling, “Tartars,” a label that would come to apply to all the Mongol successors north of the sea—but their warrior class was perhaps dominated by men with roots in Mongolia. Like the Scythians of antiquity, however, they shared a single, broad pan-Eurasian culture and style of life common to speakers of a variety of different languages.
Under Chingis Khan, the Tatar–Mongol dominions expanded rapidly, stretching at the great khan’s death in 1227 from the coasts of China to the Black Sea. His successors moved even farther afield, ending the dominance of the Cumans on the Black Sea steppe, striking into Poland and Hungary, and subduing Persia and the Caucasus. The appearance of the Tatar–Mongol horsemen on the plains north of the sea worried the statesmen of Europe. News of the plunder of cities and the murder of their inhabitants swept before their cavalry, who seemed able to overcome even the best-fortified cities far into central Europe. Popes and princes called for new crusades against the infidels who had sacked Kiev, Cracow, and Budapest and now exacted heavy tribute from their new clients.
Chroniclers and later historians would look back on the period of Tatar–Mongol dominance as a dark night of Oriental despotism; the consonance between “Tatar” and “Tartarus,” the Hell of classical mythology, was not lost on medieval commentators. But for a good part of the Middle Ages, the so-called Tatar yoke was, in fact, as much about enrichment as servitude. The two centuries or so of relative stability that followed the initial westward migration provided the political backdrop against which the commerce of the Near East, including that of the Italians in the Black Sea, flourished. Before, the Black Sea steppe and the cities along the northern littoral had been subject to a shifting set of overlords. Slavic princes competed with one another and with a variety of Turkic chieftains. Stability, when it was achieved, was more often the result of a careful balancing of interests and, as the Byzantine emperors had long understood, that balance could be upset as soon as a new group of nomads from the east arrived on the scene.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the sea lay at the meeting point of two stable powers born of the Tatar–Mongol conquests: in the north the Golden Horde and in the south the Ilkhans, Mongol rulers who controlled Persia from their capital at Tabriz. A Catholic, Orthodox, or Armenian merchant could travel from one great Near Eastern trading city to the next—from Tabriz in northwestern Persia to Trebizond on the Black Sea to Tana on the Don river—and never venture beyond the realm of one of the descendants of Chingis Khan. Friar William of Rubruck, sent on a diplomatic mission to the Tatars by Louis IX of France, looked out across the sea from Soldaia and understood the extent of their power:
Towards the south stands the city of Trebizond, which has its own governor …, who is of the lineage of the emperors of Constantinople, and is subject to the Tartars. Next is Synopolis [Sinope], the city of the Sultan of Turkey, who likewise is in subjection unto them. All the land from the mouth of the Tanais [Don] westward as far as the Danube is under their subjection.34
For a merchant, trying to include the Black Sea as part of any eastward itinerary also made economic sense. A roundabout journey by sea from Constantinople to Trebizond and then by caravan to Persia took a third of the time of a direct overland trip across Anatolia,35 and the possibility of a storm at sea was always preferable to the certainty of impassable roads and highwaymen.
The leaders of the Tatar–Mongol empire were skilled warriors, to be sure, but they welcomed commercial or political relationships that might be to their advantage. Travelers such as Friar William and Marco Polo marveled at the sophistication of the Tatar–Mongol administration. Even subordinate khans, scattered across Eurasia, maintained a staff of interpreters who could translate the letters of friendship that came from western kings. In the Middle Ages, there were few places more cosmopolitan than the mobile tent city of a Tatar lord. When Friar William crossed the Don river and came upon the tents of Sartak, one of the great-grandsons of Chingis, he was surprised to find a Nestorian Christian serving as chief of protocol and a member of the Knights Templar regaling the crowd with his recent adventures in Cyprus. Farther east, at the seat of Sartak’s grandfather, the Great Khan Mangu, he found a Parisian goldsmith; a Christian from Damascus; a French woman from Lorraine who had married a Russian carpenter in the service of the court; ambassadors from Baghdad, India, and the Seljuk Turks; and a hair-shirted Armenian monk intent on converting Mangu to Christianity.36
Before the era of Tatar–Mongol su
premacy, it was rare to find Europeans on the northern steppe. The hinterland was dangerous, and the few intrepid travelers who attempted a journey had to resort to ingenious methods of ensuring their safety. In 1235 an ambitious company of four Dominican friars set out from Budapest to discover the ancient homeland of the Hungarians—thought to lie along the Volga river—and to convert their pagan cousins to Christianity. They floated down the Danube, then across the Black Sea and up the Don. All was well so long as they were on water, but the land journey to the Volga was fraught with peril. Cuman chieftains waged war on one another. Marauders roamed the steppe. Caravans and traveling partners were few.
As their stock of food dwindled and their purses grew light, they hit upon a novel idea. Two would voluntarily sell themselves into slavery so that the remaining two could have enough money to buy provisions, pay off robbers, and continue their proselytizing mission. The plan failed. After a few solicitations, the friars found that none had sufficient skills to attract a buyer; the most they could muster was a facility for carving wooden spoons. In the end, three turned back, leaving one valiant brother, Julian, to continue eastward. He never found his proto-Hungarian brethren, but he did find civilization. Somewhere along the Volga he came across a detachment of cavalry, a scouting party of the Great Khan, and was astounded to find that the party’s interpreter spoke six languages, including German and Hungarian.37
