The Black Sea

by Charles King

  First, Trebizond was, far more than the multilingual and multi-religious population ruled by the emperors in Constantinople, a largely Greek state, that is, a state whose culture was built on the Greek-speaking imperial traditions of the old Byzantium, even though it was a culture which the Comneni knew as “Roman.” (Neither the Comnenus emperors nor their subjects would ever have used the term “Hellenic” to describe themselves or their language and culture.) The heartland of the empire lay not in the city itself but inland, in the lush valleys that run up from the seacoast toward the mountains beyond. This region, known as the Matzouka (Maçka in modern Turkish), was situated directly on the caravan route between Trebizond and Tabriz. Its peasant population was dispersed in an array of small hamlets and farming communities, raising livestock and growing wheat for export to the coast. The great landowning monasteries of the region, such as Soumela, provided not only a stable administrative order, but also helped preserve a sense of cultural identity among the peasant population, an identity rooted in the traditions of the old Hellenistic east but transformed by the introduction of Christianity and sustained contact with the other peoples and cultures of Anatolia. The Matzouka was the only major area around the Black Sea where something approaching a continuous line of Greek-speaking settlement can be traced from antiquity to the twentieth century. In the late Middle Ages, Greek-speaking Christians formed nearly 90 percent of the population in the inland valleys south of Trebizond; by 1920 they were still around three-quarters.53 It was only in the deportations that followed the Greek–Turkish war of the 1920s that this population would be virtually eliminated.

  The other feature—and the one which accounted more than anything else for the political and economic success of the Comneni—was the empire’s close relationship with the Muslim emirs of Anatolia. The land that lay on the other side of the Pontic mountains had been inhabited since the eleventh century by an array of Turkic peoples, some nomadic and some settled in the major cities. It was perhaps ironic, at least from a modern point of view, that the most “Greek” of the Byzantine regional powers was at the same time the closest to the people of the interior, people whom we would today call Turks; but for the Comneni, and indeed for most other political leaders, the gulf between Christian and Muslim was one that could be easily bridged. If there was some advantage, political, military, or economic, to be gained from a dynastic marriage, the Comneni were ready to oblige. That, in fact, was what the strict Catholic Pero Tafur had found so disconcerting when he visited the city on his way to Crimea in the early fifteenth century.

  The interconnections with the Turkomans of Anatolia, and by extension with other Muslims such as the Ilkhanids and the Golden Horde, were so great as to make many of the dynastic lines indistinguishable. For example, under the longest-reigning Comnenus emperor, Alexius III (1349–90), the empire of Trebizond was locked into a system of political marriages that reached all across the Near East. One of the emperor’s sisters was married to Kutlubeg, chief of the Akkoyunlu Turkomans. Another sister was married to a different Turkoman emir, Haci-Omar, and Alexius’s daughter was given to Haci-Omar’s son, Süleyman. Two other daughters were married to the emir of Erzurum and the emir of Limnia; after the latter’s death, that daughter was in turn given to John V Paleologus, emperor of Byzantium. Still further daughters were wed to Kara Yuluk, the son of Kutlubeg (now Alexius’s brother-in-law), and to Bagrat IV, the king of Georgia. Through those marriages, Alexius III became brother-in-law to two Turkoman emirs and father-in-law of four others, plus father-in-law of the emperor of Byzantium and the king of Georgia. Trebizond’s most valuable export was undoubtedly its women.54

  The reign of Alexius III marked the high point of Trebizond’s fortunes. The complex system of dynastic marriages provided peace with the empire’s neighbors and a stable of powerful in-laws on whom the emperor could call in the event of civil strife, such as an attempted coup or an uprising by Italian merchants (both reasonable worries). There was, however, another threat that Alexius had probably not foreseen, else he would no doubt have found another daughter to give away. It was the growing strength of another Muslim power, this one in the west, that would most concern the Trebizond emperors in the half century or so after Alexius’s death.

  Turchia

  In the Middle Ages, where sailors went depended on when they went there. When the Italians first began their commerce in the Black Sea, they spoke of voyages to a land called “Romania”—that is, the empire of the new “Romans,” with its seat at Constantinople. In the middle of the 1300s, however, “Romania” disappears from the records of Genoese and Venetian notaries. The Byzantine empire, of course, remained in existence for another century, but when sailors weighed anchor in the Adriatic, they were now heading for a place they knew as “Turchia.”55 Turkic peoples had long been a feature of the Black Sea littoral, from the Pechenegs of the middle Byzantine period to the Turkoman emirs of Anatolia and the Tatar–Mongols of the late empire. But by “Turchi” Italian sailors meant one group in particular, the people of the House of Osman, the Ottomans.

  The traditional interpretation of the origins of the Ottoman empire stresses religion as the chief motivation for the remarkable growth of imperial power: Ottoman warriors were pushed forward by the strength of their Islamic faith, conquering lands not only for the glory of their sultan, but also to enlarge the domain of the faithful. The picture was far more complicated than that, however. The Ottomans were originally an unremarkable frontier dynasty, a combination of Turkoman nomads and Byzantine farmers, some perhaps converted to Islam, others still Christian, along with itinerant traders of various stripes, Muslim scholars and Greek, Armenian, and other townsmen—little different, in fact, from the mixed cultures of the other Turkoman frontier emirates across Anatolia. They spent as much time battling fellow Muslims as they did engaging in war with Christians, and in any case, the brand of Islam practiced by even the most observant was hardly the orthodox sort found in the great centers of medieval Islamic thought such as Damascus or Baghdad. Most importantly, no early Byzantine account ever mentions the Ottomans’ alleged desire to conquer for their faith, even though the Byzantines themselves were the supposed targets of this religious fervor. The idea of warriors for Allah fighting the infidel is, in fact, a product of later Ottoman historians. Once the Ottomans acquired a real empire in the late 1300s and 1400s—with the conquest of the Balkans and finally of Constantinople—they had to manufacture a vision of their past that recast their heterodox nomadic ancestors as pious Muslims.56 Later European historians simply accepted whole cloth the Ottomans’ own propaganda.

  The early Ottomans were different from other Turkoman emirates in one important respect, however, and that was geography. Their lands touched on the edge of the Byzantine empire, whittled down by the 1300s into little more than the area around Constantinople and the Straits. The Ottoman domains were situated just to the east, in the ancient region of Bithynia. That location gave them access to productive farmland and relatively wealthy towns, which could be raided when food and other resources provided by the pastoralists ran low. But it also meant that the Ottomans were, over the course of several generations, in intimate contact with Greek-speaking Christian communities nominally under the suzerainty of the Byzantines. In time, that relationship became one of cooperation. The Ottoman sultans provided some degree of order in a region that had long been plagued by political instability, and even for the emperors in Constantinople, the Ottomans were preferable to the western powers—Crusaders and Balkan kings—who constantly threatened to snuff out completely the remnants of Rome. In the early 1300s, twin processes were thus at work in the eastern borderlands of Byzantium: the slow transformation of the followers of the eponymous founder of the emirate, Osman, from nomadic raiders into settled landlords governing the outlying reaches of the weak Byzantine state; and the absorption of Byzantine peasants and townsmen into the emerging Ottoman cultural and political system—nominally Islamic but tolerant of other faith
s, a mix of settled agriculture and pastoralism, constantly on guard against threats to its power.

  Throughout the fourteenth century, the Ottomans rapidly expanded their realm. They took over the old frontier regions of the Seljuks of Rum and began to launch summer expeditions against the principalities and kingdoms across the Sea of Marmara in Thrace and the southern Balkans, often in alliance with the emperors in Constantinople, who were eager to fend off the troublesome rulers of Serbia and Bulgaria. Where the Ottomans succeeded, they did so not because of their ruthlessness or religious fanaticism—the two traits that would come to define the “Ottoman yoke” in the minds of many Europeans—but because of their consummate political skill. In fact, none of the great battles of the fourteenth century, including the famous encounter at Kosovo field in June 1389, involved only Muslims on one side and only Christians on the other—much less, anachronistic ethnonational categories such as “Turks,” “Greeks,” and “Serbs,” words that simply did not mean the same thing in the Middle Ages that they mean today. Rather, they were contests between rival political alliances that cut across lines of language, ethnicity, religion, and even kinship. The royal houses of virtually every regional power from central Europe to central Asia were, at some level, commingled. In fact, the eventual conqueror of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmet II, actually had a reasonable claim to the Byzantine throne: He was the product of multiple marriages between Byzantine princesses and Ottoman sultans that stretched back more than a century.57

  In the early fifteenth century, the emergence of another powerful but shortlived conqueror, the Mongol khan Tamerlane, reversed the Ottoman conquests in Anatolia and returned the region to the system of small emirates that had existed before the expansion of Ottoman power. But that setback also shifted the sultanate’s center of gravity to the west. The Ottomans moved their capital from Bursa to Adrianople in Thrace (modern Edirne, Turkey), and in the very architecture of the city it is possible to see the rapid transformation of the Ottomans from imitators of the Seljuks to a modern empire in their own right. In the three spectacular mosques in the city center are arrayed three different architectural styles, each one defining different stages in the emergence of Ottoman imperial consciousness. The square proportions and low domes of the Eski Cami, built in 1414, are typical of the styles that the Ottomans inherited from the Seljuks of Rum. Just across the square, the Üçşerefeli Cami (1447), with the three balconies on one of its minarets (from which the mosque takes its name), is evidence of the Ottomans’ having incorporated the building techniques and architectural tastes of the Byzantines. No longer are the multiple domes set low on top of supporting walls; now, a single massive dome reaches skyward, supported by a tall drum, as in the Haghia Sophia in Constantinople. And on the northeast side of the central square stands the magnificent complex of the Selimiye Camii (1575), the finest achievement of the master Ottoman architect Sinan, completed almost a century after Adrianople had yielded the title of imperial capital to Constantinople. Its soaring minarets, symmetrical design, spacious interior, and beautifully placed outbuildings mark the golden age of the Ottomans as empirebuilders.

  It was only a few decades from the time the Ottomans marched into Adrianople to their final assault on Constantinople. It was not that relations between the Byzantines and the Ottomans had necessarily turned sour. Rather, the Byzantines had simply become irrelevant as Ottoman allies. Not only could the Ottomans field an army far larger than that of the Byzantines, an army drawn from all the peoples of the Balkans and Anatolia, but they had begun to develop a significant naval capacity as well. After Tamerlane’s death in 1405, the Ottomans reasserted their control over Anatolia, including the littoral areas of the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. In these areas, the Ottomans took on the seafaring traditions of the coastal communities who now came under their suzerainty, a mixture of people whom we would now label Greeks and Italians, Christians and Muslims, perhaps some former Turkoman nomads who had taken to the sea, or Greek-speakers who had adopted Islam, or any combination of the above.

  By the early 1400s, the Ottomans were able to put their own navy to sea. They set up an arsenal at Gallipoli and made use of the experience of the seaboard communities in the Aegean to construct ships. Soon, the Ottoman navy exerted control over Italian possessions in the Aegean, including strategic islands from which it could launch further assaults. That growing naval capacity turned out to be critical in the conquest of Constantinople, a long-standing goal of Ottoman strategists. From their arsenal at Gallipoli, the Ottomans commanded the Dardanelles, and already in the 1390s they had constructed a fortress up the Bosphorus from Constantinople to restrict access to the Black Sea. A second fortress across the strait, built in 1452, ensured complete control, so that Ottoman ships could sail through both straits unmolested by the weak Byzantines.

  In the spring of 1453, the noose tightened. Sultan Mehmet II ordered his army to march out of Thrace and toward Constantinople. His ships, now sitting in the Bosphorus, made an attempt to occupy the harbor, but the Byzantines relied on the old technique of the floating chain and repelled them. The sultan then ordered the ships lifted onto carts, wheeled up over the highlands north of the city, and slipped into the Golden Horn, well inside the chain. With the harbor filled with Ottoman vessels and enemy soldiers pouring through a breach in the city walls, the Byzantines were soon overcome. Mehmet II entered the city in triumph on May 29. He gave the city over to his soldiers for looting, but a special decree mandated that no shipwrights were to be harmed. They were now to be employed in the service of the sultan’s own navy, one that would soon make its first major foray into the Black Sea.58

  An Ambassador from the East

  Even after the fall of Constantinople, the emperors of Trebizond remained in place, now the last Byzantine dynasty still occupying a throne. For political leaders in Europe, that fact was of some interest. Not only did the Comneni have the legitimacy of a respected imperial dynasty, but their geographical location—behind the backs of the Ottomans—placed them in an important strategic position. Not long after Mehmet II’s conquest, European powers devised plans for a new crusade to retake the city with the help of the Comneni. The fate of that plan and one of its chief proponents, a certain Ludovico da Bologna, are ample testimony of how little the Western world knew of the peoples around the sea—or, more accurately, how much had been forgotten since the apogee of Mediterranean commercial contact a century or so earlier. For a brief moment in the 1460s, Ludovico held European leaders enthralled by a grand scheme for wresting Constantinople from its Muslim conquerors.59

  Little is known about Ludovico’s early career, but he seems to have made a name for himself as an expert on the Christian kingdoms of the east. He may have traveled as far as India and Ethiopia as an ambassador of Florence, and in any case, he seems to have been knowledgeable enough to have been appointed papal legate to all the eastern Christians—Orthodox, Armenians, Maronites, Georgians, and the Comneni of Trebizond—in the 1450s. Whether he actually made a trip to these far-flung regions is uncertain, but he claimed to have done so, for in 1460 he returned to Europe and presented himself as spokesman for Oriental Christendom. He even brought along a collection of eastern ambassadors to plead with the pope and European kings for making a crusade against the Ottomans.

  Ludovico’s troupe met first with the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, whom they convinced to raise a crusader army. They then moved on to Venice, Florence, Rome, and Paris. At each stop, the ambassadors would regale the court with tales of the Christians’ antipathy to the Ottomans and their desire to join forces with the kings of the west to rid Constantinople of the Muslims.

  As the embassy wended its way across Europe, Ludovico’s hosts grew more and more dubious about the strange array of representatives whom he placed before them. Ludovico had a tendency to overplay his hand. In his earliest audiences, he presented six ambassadors from the east, including representatives of the king and princes of Georgia. Contemporary accounts of these
meetings recorded one of the ambassadors variously as Custopa, Costopa, Custoda, Chastodines, and Cossodan—a result perhaps of the chroniclers’ idiosyncratic spellings or of Ludovico’s own imaginative renderings of his real name. By the time they reached Italy, another person had joined the group, one Michele degli Alighieri, who claimed to be not only a descendant of Dante but also the ambassador of the Grand Comnenus himself, David of Trebizond. When the group arrived in Rome, they had added two more envoys: an ambassador of Cilician Armenia, who wore a huge cloak and pointed hat and carried a remarkable assortment of musical instruments, and another ambassador from the Akkoyunlu Turkomans—both of whom looked strangely similar to the people who had previously been introduced as ambassadors of the Georgians.

  Crowds flocked to see this strange assemblage, and at each stop the royal courts were obliged to provide food, lodging, and gifts from public funds. Ludovico himself received praise and endowments from the European rulers. Pope Pius II named him patriarch of Antioch. Encouraged by these successes, Ludovico added still more ambassadors to his retinue, and by the time they arrived in France, the group had become practiced in the art of wowing the crowds. The ambassadors would begin by revealing their unusual haircuts—which bore some resemblance to the distinctive tonsures of Franciscan friars—while the Armenian ambassador played lively tunes on his musical instruments. When they came to Paris in May 1461, the group had even added an ambassador of Prester John, the fanciful Christian monarch whose kingdom was said to lie, in various versions, beyond the Caspian or in central Asia or India or China. After securing commitments of troops and support, Ludovico’s group returned to Rome for a final meeting with the pope.