The Black Sea

by Charles King

  Within a few decades, the sense of order represented by that cavalry unit spread all across the Black Sea. The commercial route that linked the sea to the plains of central Asia was so well-traveled that medieval Italians could read about it in guidebooks. Francesco Pegolotti, a Florentine banker, set down his advice for businessmen making their way east in a book, The Practice of Commerce, written in the early 1300s. The journey was not for the fainthearted, of course—it could take more than nine months to go from Tana to China, and Pegolotti advised that traders should allow their beards to grow long, in order not to broadcast their foreignness to shysters—but the travails of Brother Julian and his associates were now uncommon. “The route leading from Tana to Cathay is very secure both day and night,” he wrote, and the detachments of armed cavalry that one could expect to meet along the way were a sign of the safe passage guaranteed across the Tatar–Mongol domains.38

  For all their cosmopolitan connections, the Tatar–Mongols were at base a mobile society, composed mainly of shepherds and herders who migrated with their animals down toward the sea in the winter and north in the summer. They glided over the steppe with their yurts set on top of wheeled carts, the driver standing in the door and steering the oxen teams that labored before it.39 Some time after Pegolotti, another merchant, Josafa Barbaro, climbed onto the walls of Tana and recorded his impressions of nomads on the move:

  First, herds of horses by the [hundreds]. After them followed herds of camels and oxen, and after them herds of small beasts, which endured for the space of six days, that as far as we might see with our eyes, the plain every way was full of people and beasts following on their way …. We stood on the walls (for we kept the gates shut), and in the evening we were weary of looking.40

  The sight and, even more, the sound—the squeal of solid wood wheels turning on axletrees, audible even over the horizon—would have been familiar to a traveler a millennium earlier.

  The pax mongolica allowed commerce and contacts to flourish for a time during the Middle Ages. It set the stage for Europe’s commercial take-off and piqued the interest of European explorers in finding a sea route to China. However, the rivalries among the successors of Chingis meant that the pax was often less than entirely pacific. Already by the mid-1300s, the Tatar–Mongol empire was little more than a loose system of often hostile appanages, each seeking to profit by raiding the flocks of the other. The Golden Horde fell victim to internal intrigues. Rival khans from the east, including the ambitious Tamerlane, briefly exerted their control and then left behind even more disorganization than before. A Chinese dynasty, the Ming, sloughed off Mongol control in 1368 and soon invaded Mongolia itself. The route to China was closed.

  The height of long-distance commerce via the Black Sea port cities was thus relatively brief, probably peaking in the first half of the fourteenth century. Political disruptions among the neighboring Tatars and the growth of oceanic routes to the east diminished the importance of Tana and Caffa as international entrepôts. Yet even this limited period produced a free movement of peoples back and forth across the steppe and from one end of the sea to the other that had not been seen since the days of Greek colonization and the Roman imperium. Movement, however, had a price, for it opened the door to an unappealing newcomer, one that any European visitor to the Black Sea ports would have known only too well.

  The Ship from Caffa

  The populations of the Genoese and Venetian colonies were never primarily Italian. Caffa, for example, was perhaps only one-fifth Italian at its height.41 Greeks—a general label that westerners used for all Orthodox Christians, including Greek-speakers from the Aegean and Anatolia, as well as people whom we would now call Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and others—were represented in sizeable numbers, as were other Christians such as Armenians. There were also growing communities of Muslims, another general social category that included Tatars from the north shore, various peoples from the north Caucasus, Turks from Anatolia, and Arabs from the Levant.

  For all the cooperation that must have existed in business transactions and transport, relations among these groups were not always congenial. There is a rough-and-tumble quality to any port city, and those on the Black Sea were no exception. Disputes over a slight, a transaction, or a woman, fueled by sweet Georgian or Crimean wine, sometimes turned violent. So it happened in Tana in the sultry summer of 1343.

  A Venetian merchant, Andreolo Civrano, is said to have scuffled with a local Muslim, Omar. The subject of their dispute went unrecorded, but Omar ended up dead.42 As news of his murder spread, Tatars within the town lashed out at Venetians, Florentines, Genoese, and Catalans—all the Franks, as Catholic Europeans were called—burning businesses and lodgings and threatening the stores near the port. The local Tatar khan, hearing of the merchant’s death, blocked river traffic at the mouth of the Don and ordered revenge on Italian settlements as far away as Crimea.

  Word of the crisis eventually reached Venice, and the republic moved to repair the damage and reopen the route up the Don. The Senate voted to banish Civrano and to send a diplomatic mission overland to Tana to try to mend fences. The Genoese, however, were less enthusiastic about appeasement. They had dealt with the mercurial Tatars before—the Tatars had razed Caffa at the beginning of the century—and they were convinced that a show of force, not accommodation, would put the matter to rest. The Genoese consul in Caffa bucked up his Venetian counterpart, and in a rare moment of cooperation the two Italian communities pooled their resources, steeled themselves behind the walls of Caffa, and prepared to hold out against the inevitable Tatar assault.

  It came the next year. As usual the Genoese were able to deploy an impressive array of weaponry against the khan’s forces, and their control of the sea meant that the city could be easily provisioned. Shipping went on steadily throughout the summers of 1344 and 1345, despite the Tatar control of the overland routes to the center of the peninsula and along the coast. The Tatars, more accustomed to quick raids than to multi-year sieges, grew weary. A strange disease had also been working its way through the ranks of the khan’s troops, a dispensation from God, the Genoese reckoned. But as his soldiers faltered, the khan decided that they could be of better use to him dead than alive.

  He ordered his commanders to load the bodies of the deceased men onto catapults and to fling them over the walls into the city. The tactic worked for a while. A few residents of Caffa became ill, sprouting the same painful carbuncles that had appeared earlier on the Tatar soldiers, and expired in agonized throes. But the Geneose organized a brigade to toss the bodies into the sea as soon as they plopped from the sky. That seemed to stem the disease’s spread. In time, the khan tired of the siege, just as the Genoese consul had predicted. A peace was hammered out, and the Venetians were able to return to Tana.

  That was not the end, however. The very seaway that brought provisions from Constantinople during the siege now carried a darker cargo on the return voyages. Gabriele de’ Mussi, an Italian notary, claimed to have been on board one of the ships that sailed from Caffa in the summer of 1347. That is doubtful, but his story of the journey from Caffa to the Mediterranean is probably based on the accounts of those who were. He reported that sailors fell mysteriously ill during the journey, and wherever they docked along the way—in Constantinople later in the summer, in Sicily in the early autumn, in Genoa by January 1348—the disease quickly jumped from the port into the heart of the city. The same deadly ailment that had afflicted the Tatar troops was now working its way along sea lanes back to Italy itself. Little more than a skeleton crew struggled ashore when de’ Mussi’s ship reached Genoa. “Confess, O Genoa, what you have done,” he wrote. “We reach our homes; our kindred and our neighbors come from all parts to visit us. Woe to us, for we cast at them the darts of death! While we spoke to them, while they embraced us and kissed us, we scattered the poison from our lips.”43

  By the end of the century, the Black Death claimed as many as twenty-five million people, perhaps a quart
er or more of Europe’s population. The plague had been seen long before, of course. Diseases with similar symptoms—suppurated lesions, swollen glands or buboes (whence “bubonic”), followed by an excruciating and inevitable death in a matter of days—were known to the Romans. But it was the great openness of trade and maritime contacts that eased the disease’s leap from Eurasia to the west, an expansion from the urban centers around the Black Sea to the growing towns and cities of medieval Europe. “The epidemic which then raged in northern Scythia,” lamented the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, “invaded not only Pontus … but almost the entire universe.”44 Globalization, even the kind built on camel caravans and wood-hulled ships, has its victims.

  Empire of the Comneni

  When the Byzantine empire was torn apart at the hands of the participants in the Fourth Crusade, there were at least four major claimants to the title of successor to the new Rome. There was the Crusader empire itself, which commanded Constantinople but had little in common with the imperial traditions and practices of the Greek emperors whom it had deposed. A new empire was proclaimed in northern Greece, but it was rather quickly snuffed out. In Nicaea rival families of former Byzantine emperors bided their time, awaiting the opportunity to return to the city and reclaim the throne. And far to the east, another deposed dynasty, the Comneni, proclaimed their own empire centered in the ancient port of Trebizond. In 1261 the Nicene emperors returned to Constantinople and ousted the Latins; an alliance with the Genoese provided security for the restored emperor in exchange for trading privileges in the new empire. That dynasty, the Paleologi, would hold the city until the coming of the Ottomans. But even after the triumph of the Paleologi, the Comneni of Trebizond maintained their own separate state in the eastern Black Sea, a state that would keep the heritage of Byzantium alive even after the fall of Constantinople itself to the Ottomans. In fact, for the last two and a half centuries of the existence of the Byzantine empire, it was Trebizond—not Constantinople—that was the real imperial capital of the Black Sea.

  The Comneni had originally reigned as emperors in Constantinople, beginning in 1057, and while on the throne they were one of the wealthiest and most illustrious of Byzantine dynasties. But in the two decades preceding the Fourth Crusade, they had fallen on hard times. A palace coup pushed them from power in 1185 and installed a rival family; many of the leading lights of the Comneni dynasty were brutally murdered. The two infant sons of the last Comnenus emperor, Alexius and David, were spirited away to the Caucasus, where they were taken in by the Georgian queen Tamar. There had long been a close relationship between the Byzantine and Georgian royal houses, with military pacts sealed by marriage, and the Comneni and the Bagrationi, the Georgian dynasty to which Tamar belonged, had enjoyed especially intimate ties. The queen, in fact, was probably the aunt of the two Comneni infants.45

  The relationship with Georgian royalty was fortunate for the Comneni, not only because it almost certainly saved the family from total extinction but also because, at the time, Georgia was perhaps the most powerful state in the region. Some time earlier, King David II (the Restorer, reigned 1089–1125) had united the territories of inland Georgia and the coastal areas of Abkhazia under a single, Christian crown. As one of David’s descendants, Tamar (reigned 1184–1213) built on that success and ruled during a period celebrated as the golden age of the medieval Georgian kingdom. She further extended the boundaries of the state, forged alliances with neighboring princes, and built a kingdom that was arguably the strongest economic and military power from the Balkans to the Caspian—far more significant, in fact, than any of the mini-empires created after the Byzantine partition of 1204. It was under her tutelage that the two exiled Comneni sons grew to maturity, perhaps speaking Georgian as well as Greek, reared in the sumptuous surroundings of Tamar’s palace.

  Little is known about why the two brothers, in their twenties at the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Latins, came to possess the city of Trebizond; but it may well have been that their aunt simply handed it to them. Tamar had been in a feud with the reigning Byzantine emperor, Alexius III Angelus, over his seizure of a sizeable donation she had made to the monks on Mount Athos. In the turmoil of the Latin invasion, she may have found it an opportune time to seize Trebizond, the emperor’s easternmost port, as recompense.46 In any case, in the spring of 1204, an army under the command of Alexius and David marched overland from Georgia and claimed the city as their own. There was probably not much of a fight; the city had long enjoyed a certain autonomy from Constantinople, and even Byzantine holdings across the sea—the port of Chersonesus and other parts of Crimea—were probably by this stage more dependent on Trebizond, particularly as a trading partner, than on the weak imperial administration in Constantinople. When the Comneni marched into the city, they thus laid hold not only to the city itself but to its cross-sea dependencies in Crimea as well.

  The younger brother, David, continued along the coast, taking ports as far west as Heraclea Pontica and threatening the territory of the empire of Nicaea, even perhaps dreaming of a march on the Crusaders in Constantinople. David’s adventure to the west, however, led to his own death in battle and the end of the expansion of his dynasty’s domains. Thus, by around 1214 the borders of the new empire of Trebizond, now ruled by Alexius alone, ran from west of Sinope all the way to Georgia. Over this stretch of coastline and the Crimean dependencies—roughly the old Pontic kingdom of Mithridates—Alexius’s successors took the title of “Emperor and Autocrat of All the East, the Iberians [i.e., the southwest Caucasus], and the Overseas Lands [in Crimea].” So central was the dynasty itself to the identity of this new state that the emperor was often called simply Megas Komnenos—the Grand Comnenus.

  As with most imperial titles, that of the Grand Comneni was exaggerated. For a time, Trebizond may have paid tribute to the Georgians, and already by the end of Alexius’s reign, the Crimean lands in the north had begun to slip out of Trebizond’s control; Tatars and Italians would soon dominate there. But within their restricted parameters, both political and geographic, the Grand Comneni created a state that represented to many outsiders the apex of grandeur, an intriguing and almost mythical mixture of the decadent splendor of the Orient and the otherworldly piety of the Christian churches of the east. At its height, from the 1220s to the 1330s, the empire of Trebizond maintained diplomatic relations with all the major powers of the Near East and many in Europe; the emperor even received an embassy from the English king Edward I.47 The city was well-placed to take advantage of the overland trade with Persia, and although the natural harbor was less than ideal, the emperors allowed Italian merchants to construct port facilities in the eastern suburbs.

  As the historian Anthony Bryer has noted, most travelers who visited Trebizond arrived first by sea, and the sight that awaited them would have been magnificent.48 The city would have been obscured by headlands until the ship was almost upon it. First, the bell tower of one of the city’s major churches, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom, could be seen on the western outskirts, sitting on a plateau above the sea. Farther along, the city itself would come into view, a cluster of buildings placed on top of a series of dark gray escarpments, cut by deep ravines running toward the water, with the wall of the Pontic Alps behind. Gardens, vineyards, and orchards covered the city’s slopes. Wooden bridges carried people across the ravines and inside the city walls, where a cluster of wooden houses pushed up against the citadel and the gold-hued imperial palace of the Comneni. The emperors had built a mole for ships where the lower city met the sea, but a commercial traveler would continue on around to the eastern suburbs. There, the Genoese and Venetians had built docks and warehouses around a small bay. In this lively commercial center, the traveler would find workshops and shipping companies, a crowded bazaar, inns for overland caravans, and a collection of churches and shrines kept by Armenians, Catholics, and others.

  For travelers who set out to explore the city and its environs, even more wonders awaited. Ther
e was the church of the Holy Wisdom, the Haghia Sophia, far smaller than its sister in Constantinople but impressive nonetheless, with its separate bell tower and radiant frescoes.49 The palace of the Comneni, situated in the upper part of the city, had floors of white marble and colonnaded halls covered by lofty golden domes painted with stars; the walls were decorated with portraits of former emperors and interpretations of their exploits.50 Farther inland were a series of famous monasteries, enriched by the endowments of land and tax privileges granted by the Comneni. One in particular, the monastery of Soumela, was a favorite site of pilgrimage. A religious aerie carved into the side of a mountain and often shrouded in mist from the dense alpine forest below, it was by tradition founded in the tenth century and housed the famous icon of the Panaghia Atheniotissa, one of only a few icons said to have been painted by St. Luke.51

  The Comneni enjoyed the longest uninterrupted reign of any dynasty of the Byzantine era. The splendor of their court impressed countless envoys from Europe, who came to establish trade links and diplomatic relations with the emperor, or simply to meet this curious potentate ruling at the edge of Christendom. Ruy González de Clavijo, an ambassador of the Spanish king, visited Trebizond in the spring of 1404 and met the Grand Comnenus Manuel III, who received him dressed in beautiful imperial robes, wearing a tall hat trimmed with marten fur and topped with a great plume of crane feathers.52 Both the opulence of the court and the longevity of the dynasty, however, rested on two particular characteristics of the Trapezuntine state that, from a modern perspective, seem strangely at odds.