Black Sea

by Neal Ascherson

  Chapter Three

  The nucleus of this singular people [Cossacks] were deserters... The course of nature, and the constant arrival of fresh fugitives, rapidly increased their numbers. They opened their arms to recruits from every nation, and were joined by all the outcasts whose crimes compelled them to abandon civilised society. In this manner, they ceased to be mere fugitives, and became a people. As may be supposed, their habits revealed the taint which sullied their origin.

  Henry Tyrrell, History of the Russian Empire

  ONE COLD AUTUMN, I went to the Don delta and stayed in a Greek colony. On the ruins of the city of Tanais, there is a small modern village of archaeologists living in wooden shacks. In summer, expeditions arrive from Russian or German universities to excavate, and for a few months the site is crowded with muscular students who sleep in tents and sing to the guitar round camp-fires. But out of season, only half a dozen men and women live at Tanais, their beds squeezed between shelves of broken Greek pottery and carboys of photographic chemicals. At such times, before the Scythian frosts trim the Sea of Azov with ice and snow blocks the road to Rostov, there are empty huts to rent to visitors.

  The director of Tanais, commander of the colony, is Valeriy Fedorovich Chesnok. Like his colleague at Olbia, Mr Chesnok is stranded in an outpost whose subsidies have been cut off, left to survive on his own resources as if on some ice-floe forgotten by the supply ships. Water comes from a well, heating is uncertain, sanitation is a pit latrine. Some food and any amount of vodka can

  be found in the Cossack village of Nedvigovka (meaning roughly 'No-Surrenderville'), a mile away. Vegetables can be bought in abundance from a rich, well-organised Armenian village halfway to Rostov, but only in spring and summer. While I was there, in late September, the scientists were still eating well: breakfast was carp stew and beetroot salad, with gallons of steaming tea made from camomile and steppe herbs.

  'Science' is the word Russian archaeologists use to describe the whole profession of knowledge to which they belong. The word in Russian has none of the limitation to physical sciences or technology which it has acquired in English; a philologist or an art historian is as much a scientist as a molecular biologist, in the sense of the French word savant. Nothing, neither Stalinist terror nor free-market pressures and privations, has been able to rob this Russian term of its majesty. WTien Mr Chesnok and his colonists spoke about themselves as 'scientists', I came to understand that they were talking not only about their research but also about something inward and existential. They meant a sort of marble stele in the mind; incised upon it are the moral commandments to which the life of a scientist is dedicated. These commandments include the commitments to truth, to loyal comradeship, to intellectual and personal self-discipline, to an ascesis indifferent to discomfort or money. This is the Rule of a religious order. At Tanais, 1 heard a love affair between a Russian archaeologist and a foreign scholar condemned as 'unworthy of a scientist', because it had led the woman concerned to re-time an excavation schedule.

  Once I watched Mr Chesnok as he put through a telephone call to Moscow. He stood up at his table, his small, energetic figure erect, shouting concise orders to one operator after another through the humming and frizzling of static. I was watching an artillery officer at the battle of Kursk calling down a barrage, or getting through to a threatened battery commander. 'Moscow? Alloa! This is Chesnok, Tanais -1 repeat: Chesnok, Tanais. Get me Moscow! Alloa!...' In this way, across widening crevasses of chaos and across distances which seem to grow longer as Russia's central coherence yawns apart, the integrity of science is defended.

  Mr Chesnok remains undaunted. He has written a booklet, available to visitors, entitled 'The Principles of Life', which expresses his own iron optimism through citations from the Decalogue and the American Declaration of Independence. One night, at the end of an enormous row with a Cossack about corruption, Cossack nationalism and the fate of the nation, he tried to communicate his faith to me: 'All this is not such a tragedy. Culture is what matters for identity, not ethnicity and not money either. Russia is going through wild years. But we will survive them.'

  For a Russian scientist, the wild years which brought the first wave of primitive capitalists after 1991 have often resembled a new inrush of steppe nomads. But when an unfamiliar horde is seen from the walls of a Black Sea city, there has always been a choice of tactics. The first option is to bolt the gates. The second is to invite the nomad chieftains to enter as honoured guests. In return for a few gold rings or an amphora of Trebizond wine, they may be impressed enough to offer their services as the city's protectors. Tanais, whether as a Greek emporium or as a Russian archaeological colony, has generally chosen the second option.

  I discovered this for myself early one morning, as I stumbled over mounds of potsherds to reach the latrine. I had stopped to look at the view. The huts and the Greek ruins stand on the northern shore of the Don delta, above a backwater which was once the main channel of the Don but is now the 'Dead Donets'. In the distance, the Sea of Azov gleamed tin-coloured under low clouds. And then I saw a Bactrian camel. It swayed towards me until it reached the end of its hobble, then bit a piece out of a bush growing on the old rampart. Beyond the camel, I made out an encampment of rusty caravans and towing-tractors, all flagged-out with washing hung up to dry.

  This turned out to be the Rostov State Circus, in its new winter quarters. Mr Chesnok had discovered a sponsor: a speculative builder who had fallen in love with the lady who trained the performing dogs in the circus. The circus was in trouble, however, and the dog-lady was inconsolable, for the Rostov authorities had cut off the rent subsidy for their expensive palace in the city centre. The sponsor, knowing Mr Chesnok's problems, saw a way out. He proposed that if Tanais would allow the circus a few hectares of unexcavated Greek suburb to winter on and graze its animals, then he could see his way to constructing a new brick storage and laboratory block for the scientists.

  So the deal was made. The builder was happy, the dog-lady was consoled, and the Tanais scientists stepped uncertainly into this new world in which culture is dependent upon the pleasure of private entrepreneurs.

  For the urban cultures of the Mediterranean, from the Greeks to the Genoese and Venetians, the Don delta was the north- eastern corner of their world. The delta, at the far end of the Sea of Azov, was a place so distant, so exposed to nomad raiding and so hard to reach across a sea which froze over in many winters, that for long periods the Aegean and Mediterranean traders had no foothold there. But in good times fortunes could be made. When the rulers of the inland steppes were not at war with one another, caravan trails - the 'Silk Routes' - would reach across Eurasia from China to the mouth of the river Don.

  This was not just hinterland trade, like the wheat, dried fish and slaves which made Olbia rich. It was long-range exporting in luxury commodities. From China, Persia and India came silks, spices, porcelain, bronze and gold luxuries, which the European colonists at the Don delta paid for in different ways. The Greeks exported wine, red- and black-figure pottery, jewellery and ornaments made first in Greece and later in the Bosporan Kingdom at the Kerch Straits. Both Greeks and Italians did a certain amount of cash business, and their coinages found their way thousands of miles back up the caravan routes into Asia. Most of the Italian export trade was coarse European woollen cloth woven in Flanders, Lombardy or Venice, much of it produced in the earliest versions of a factory system.

  To serve these long-range routes into Eurasia, two fortified trading cities grew up at the delta. The first was Tanais (which is also the Greek and Latin name for the river Don itself). Founded around 250 BC, it stood on the north side of the delta on what was then the main river channel; ships were able to enter from the Sea of Azov (several miles nearer than it is today), and tie up under its walls. Tanais stood for some five hundred years, until the Goths sacked and burned it in the third century AD. Some squatters returned to the ruins later, but Tanais was finally obliterated when the Huns appeared ou
t of Asia around the year 350.

  Prosperity along the north shore of the Black Sea has always required two conditions: steady peace inland on the steppes, and free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. These conditions revived in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Khazar nomads established dominion over the whole region between the Black Sea and the northern forests. But the Pax Khazarica did not reach far eastwards into Asia. It was not until the conquests of Chingiz Khan and his successors in the thirteenth century, extending a Tatar-Mongol empire over northern Eurasia from the Sea of Japan to the Black Sea, that the overland routes between China and Europe reopened after an interval of nearly a thousand years.

  The Tatar-Mongols arrived on the Black Sea when the Byzantine Empire was near its end, weakened by the struggle against the Ottoman Turks and by the pressure of the Crusader kingdoms advancing from the west. Pushing behind the land armies of the Crusaders were the maritime city-states of Italy — Genoa and Venice above all — impatient to break through the Narrows into the markets of the Black Sea. Unwilling to share the Sea with outsiders, the later Byzantine emperors at first offered these 'Franks' and 'Latins' only reluctant and occasional passage through the Narrows. But after the Crusaders had stormed Constantinople in 1204, the two maritime empires were able to slip through the Bosporus and reach the Crimean coast, the Sea of Azov and finally the river Don.

  Now the second delta city was built. Tana, as it was named, stood on the opposite, southern side of the delta, looking across ten miles of reeds to the silent ruins which had been Tanais. Founded by Genoese and Venetian colonists in the thirteenth century, Tana began as an open trading-post which only gradually acquired Italian-designed stone walls and towers. In practice, the walls meant little. The survival of Tana remained always a gamble on the tolerance of the Golden Horde, the western division of the Mongol empire which had arrived in the Pontic Steppe only a few decades earlier. Tana's diplomacy, like much of its short-range trade, concentrated on the Horde's 'capital' far away at Saray on the Volga. When the Genoese were finally edged out, Tana became for a time the most profitable of all Venetian colonies. But its dependency on the Mongols, and later on the Crimean Tatars, never lessened. For the most part, the sabre of Mongol power was turned away from the Italians. In the end, it struck them down.

  One rainy autumn day, exploring what remains of Tana, I looked down into a huge, untidy pit. Its sides were made of fire-blackened earth, wood-ash and calcined plaster. Out of them spilled human skulls and thigh-bones, white debris against the black soil.

  Nearby, the archaeologists had piled their finds into open cardboard cartons disintegrating in the rain: fragments of amphoras imported from Trebizond for shipping caviar, broken bottles of fluted Venetian glass, shards of caramel-coloured Byzantine pottery and of exquisite green-glazed bowls made by Tatar craftsmen of the Golden Horde at Saray. Lumps of black rust turned out to be the shoulder-plates of a Venetian cuirass, lying among iron crossbow quarrels.

  This was the wreckage left by Timur (Tamburlaine), whose armies sacked Tana in 1395 during the last of the great nomad invasions from Central Asia. But it was not the final grave of Venetian Tana; Italians remained here until the city was stormed by Tatars and Turks in 1475, as their combined armies mopped up what was left of the Byzantine-Latin presence round the north coast of the Black Sea. The city itself survived as the Ottoman port of Azak, then as the huge Turkish fortress of Azov. Today the town of Azov, with its river port on the Don, covers the whole site of Tana. For some reason, the Soviet authorities decided that Genoese ancestry was less ideologically obnoxious than Venetian; there is a ruined 'Genoa Gate' (it is actually eighteenth-century Russian), and a shabby corner where Genoa Lane runs off Rosa Luxemburg Street. The memory of Venice has been banished.

  This Tana of the Italians had a briefer life than classical Tanais, but it was eventful. The Genoese were more powerful than the Venetians on the Black Sea as a whole; they were already well entrenched along the Crimean coast at Cembalo (Balaklava), Sudak and Kaffa when they became partners of the Venetians on the Don. But at the end of the thirteenth century, after the first of several Black Sea wars between the two maritime empires, Venice won exclusive control of Tana - and this happened at a lucky moment in world history. The Mongol-Yuan dynasty, which ruled China until the late fourteenth century, made it possible for the output of imperial China to flow westwards across the continental land mass of Mongol-dominated Eurasia to this western terminus of one of the Silk Routes, and the Tana merchants could for a time monopolise almost the entire China trade for Venice. But this route, kept open only by precarious agreements among the Mongol khanates along the way to China, was never more than a transient opportunity. It had begun to flow around 1260, but within a few years inter-Mongol feuds were already interrupting it. When the Mongol empire broke up in the fourteenth century, the main transcontinental trade lines were disconnected for good — first the northern route, which ended at Tana, and later the southern branch, which had brought spices and textiles from Asia to the Black Sea at Trebizond.

  As far as profit was concerned, the long-range import of Chinese and Persian silks was not the main business at Tana. The Venetians made far greater profits out of other lines of business: furs, caviar, spices and above all slaves. While they were on good terms with the Golden Horde and its successors, the Venetians bought and shipped Russian, Circassian and Tatar slaves who were either sold in Constantinople to local and Levantine buyers or auctioned in Venice itself. Venetian slave-traders travelled from Tana as far as Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, or to Tashkent, in Central Asia, to inspect the stock. Back at Tana, a staff of solicitors was kept busy drawing up purchase contracts, while in Venice the Signoria (the governing senate) supervised the trade and laid down the maximum costs which could be incurred for transporting and feeding slaves on the three-month voyage between the Sea of Azov and the Adriatic.

  Kaffa, a rival Genoese colony which stood on the site of modern Feodosia in Crimea, was exporting an average of 1,500 slaves a year in the fourteenth century, almost all male and almost all destined for the Mameluke sultans in Egypt. Tana was probably slave-trading on much the same scale. But then something happened at Kaffa which not only transformed the terms of the slave trade but changed the history of the world.

  In the Genoese sea-wall at Kaffa, there is a tall gateway. Through it you can see blue water and merchant ships at anchor in the roadstead of Feodosia. Six hundred years ago, columns of slaves in irons would enter this gate, and gangs of men carrying bales of Chinese silk shipped across the Sea of Azov from Tana. But one day in 1347, an invisible immigrant made its way under the arch and began to explore Kaffa.

  The Black Death came to Europe through this gate, the pandemic of pneumonic plague which within a few years had reduced the European population by one-third or more. One legend asserts that the plague broke out among a Tatar army commanded by the khan

  Djani-Beg, which was besieging Kaffa, and that the khan ordered the heads of the Tatar victims to be catapulted into the town to infect the defenders. More probably, it came with slaves or Tatar stevedores in time of peace. The disease must have taken hold among the nomad inhabitants of the Pontic Steppe before it infected the 'Latin' cities of the Black Sea coast. And it had travelled a long way, clear across Eurasia from Manchuria or Korea, carried down the Silk Routes by traders, porters and soldiers to the fringes of Europe on the Black Sea.

  The Silk Routes brought wealth, but then death. Within twenty years of the plague's arrival in Europe, the Mongol Empire founded by Chingiz Khan more than a century before began to break apart. The graveyards which the onslaught of the Mongols had filled in Europe were insignificant compared to this culling by disease which they left behind them.

  Between December 1347 and September 1348, the Black Death had killed three-quarters of the European population in Crimea and the other Black Sea colonies. But it also killed half the population of Venice, the slaves and journeymen as well as the gran
dees, and suddenly there was a labour shortage. All over Europe, where many villages had perished to the last child, there was a famine of manpower on feudal estates, in baronial kitchens and stables, in urban workshops. Employers who had never dreamed of paying cash wages for labour found themselves on the defensive. In due course, the rural poor were to press their advantage and demand money or charters of secure tenure, as the English did during the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

  Good businessmen do not miss an opportunity. The impact on the slave market was enormous. Everywhere on the Mediterranean littoral, from Egypt to Crete and Spain, the price of foreign slaves rose steeply. Most of the Venetian slavers at Tana had died horribly in 1348, but the survivors were rewarded by a boom in demand and prices which roared on for half a century. By about 1408, no less than 78 per cent of Tana's export earnings came from slaves. Out of their misery, and out of the profits born of the Black Death, one palace after another was raised along the Rialto.

  In the Powder Magazine museum at Azov, there is a human hand cast in iron. The breadth and thickness of the palm, the hogback hump of the fingers, suggest some hominid creature bigger than a man.