by Charles King
By this stage, Pius II had become suspicious. The “ambassadors” seemed to be having far too good a time at public expense, satisfying their voracious appetites and offering fawning praise to European monarchs, with little real concern for the military cause that they had earlier espoused. When the group finally arrived in Italy in August 1461, Pius II moved to stop the charade. He refused to grant Ludovico his credentials as patriarch of Antioch and arranged to have him and his associates arrested as imposters. Ludovico affirmed his good faith but quickly escaped Rome before Pius II could act. The embassy was dissolved. Ludovico’s name pops up in various texts until the late fifteenth century, when nothing is heard of him again.
“In matters carried on from a distance,” wrote Pius II after his last meeting with Ludovico, “there is abundant opportunity for deception and the truth can seldom be discovered.”60 What was the real purpose of Ludovico’s mission? Probably business. He might have reckoned that helping to remove the Ottomans would lead to trade privileges for the Florentines, with whom he had connections, much as Genoese assistance to the Byzantines in 1261 had allowed them to take over from the Venetians. Ludovico would then have been in a favorable position to profit from the new power relationships in the region. That was perhaps also the reason for his contact with Michele degli Alighieri, probably a Florentine merchant who was seeking to establish trade ties with the Comneni of Trebizond.61 The assortment of “ambassadors” may actually have been Franciscan missionaries in the Christian east, lured into Ludovico’s scheme by the prospect of claiming Constantinople for the Catholics. When he began his journey, Ludovico had every reason to believe that the plan would work; his personal interests seemed to match perfectly with the interests of European powers in allying with Trebizond and the Turkoman emirs against the Ottoman threat. But as his journey across Europe continued, his chances of either making money or sparking a new crusade were quickly diminishing.
In the spring of 1461, Sultan Mehmet II began assembling his fleet, perhaps as many as 300 ships, some newly constructed, some requisitioned Italian vessels, and organizing his army for a new campaign. In March he left his palace in Adrianople and headed east, crossing over into Anatolia and meeting up with the main army column there. The army first marched on Sinope, which it easily took from the Turkoman overlord who controlled it. The fleet then hugged the coast and sailed farther east while the army marched across Anatolia and then turned north toward the sea.
In the late summer, with the fleet sitting off the headland, Mehmet ordered his infantry down out of the mountains and toward Trebizond. In a pouring rain on August 15—two centuries to the day after the Byzantines had removed the Crusaders from Constantinople—the emperor of Trebizond surrendered to the sultan without a shot’s being fired. Although he could not have known it at the time, when Ludovico traipsed into Rome in the late summer of 1461, attempting to rally the pope’s support for an alliance with the Grand Comnenus, the last remnant of Byzantium was already in Ottoman hands.
NOTES
1. Procopius, Wars, 7.29.16.
2. Herodotus, Histories, 4.144.
3. See Hélène Ahrweiler, “Byzantine Concepts of the Foreigner: The Case of the Nomads,” in Hélène Ahrweiler and Angeliki E. Laiou (eds.) Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998), pp. 1–15.
4. Walter Goffart, “Rome, Constantinople, and the Barbarians,” American Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (April 1981):284.
5. Maurice, Treatise on Strategy, 11.2, quoted in Michael Maas (ed.) Readings in Late Antiquity(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 328.
6. Herodotus, Histories, 4.110–117.
7. Josafa Barbaro, Travels of Barbaro, in Josafa Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, Travels to Tana and Persia, trans. William Thomas and S. A. Roy (London: Hakluyt Society, 1873), p. 30.
8. Procopius, Wars, 8.31–33.
9. Procopius, Buildings, 3.7.1–10.
10.Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins, new rev. edn. (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967), pp.6, 53.
11. Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p.17.
12. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 7.
13. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 13.
14. Lionel Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World, rev. edn.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 148–51.
15. J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p.15.
16. Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, Byzance et les Arabes, eds. Henri Grégoire and Marius Canard, Vol.2, Part 2 (Brussels: Editions de l’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves, 1950), p.150.
17. Peter Simon Pallas, Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire, in the Years 1793 and 1794, Vol.2(London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees et al., 1802–3), pp.290, 297.
18. Robert Browning, “The City and the Sea,” in Speros Vryonis, Jr. (ed.) The Greeks and the Sea (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1993), pp.98–9.
19. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, Puteshestvie Akhmeda Ibn-Fadlana na reku Itil’ i priniatie v Bulgarii Islama, ed. Sultan Shamsi (Mocow: Mifi-Servis, 1992).
20. Links between the Khazars and later Turkic-speaking communities of Jewish “Karaites” in Crimea are almost certainly spurious. For a view sympathetic to the Khazar–Karaite kinship theory, see Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (New York: Random House, 1976). For a scholarly refutation, see Zvi Ankori, Karaites in Byzantium: The Formative Years, 970–1100 (New York: AMS Press, 1968).
21. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio, 4.
22. Povest’ vremennykh let, quoted in Basil Dmytryshyn (ed.) Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850–1700 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 2000), p.10.
23. Quoted in Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, The Goths in the Crimea (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), pp.111–12.
24. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p.344.
25. Gheorghe Ioan Braătianu, La mer Noire: Des origines à la conquête ottomane (Munich: Romanian Academic Society, 1969), pp.44–5.
26. Quoted in Michel Balard, La Romanie génoise (XIIe–début du XVe siècle), Vol.2(Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1978), p. 501.
27. G. I. Braătianu, Recherches sur le commerce génois dan la Mer Noire au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1978), p.501.
28. See G.I. Braătianu, Actes des notaires génois de Péra et de Caffa de la fin du treizième siècle(1281–1290) (Bucharest: Cultura Naţională, 1927).
29. Balard, La Romanie génoise, Vol.1, pp.142, 373.
30. Pero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435–1439, trans. Malcolm Letts (New York: Harper and Brothers,), p.133.
31. Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1325, trans. H. A. R. Gibb (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1929), p.143.
32. Tafur, Travels and Adventures, pp. 132, 134–5.
33. Tafur, Travels and Adventures, pp. 134, 137.
34. The Journal of Friar William of Rubruck, in Manuel Komroff (ed.) Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York: Dorset Press, 1989), p.18.
35. Anthony Bryer and David Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos, Vol.1(Washington: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1985), p.18.
36. The Journal of Friar William of Rubruck, pp.88, 134–6.
37. Braătianu, La mer Noire, p.230.
38. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura, Allen Evans (ed.)(Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1936), pp.21–2.
39. The Journal of Friar William of Rubruck, p.59
.
40. Josafa Barbaro, Travels of Barbaro, in Travels to Tana and Persia, trans. William Thomas and S. A. Roy (London: Hakluyt Society, 1873), pp.11–12.
41. Gilles Veinstein, “From the Italians to the Ottomans: The Case of the Northern Black Sea Coast in the Sixteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.1, No.2 (December 1986):223.
42. Braătianu, La mer Noire, pp.243–4.
43. Gabriele de’ Mussi, Ystoria de morbo seu mortalitate qui fuit a.1348, quoted in Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, 2nd edn. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1908), p.20.
44. Quoted in Gasquet, The Black Death, p.12.
45. Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev, “The Foundation of the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1222),” Speculum, Vol.11, No.1 (January 1936):7–8.
46. Vasiliev, “The Foundation,” p.19.
47. William Miller, Trebizond: The Last Greek Empire of the Byzantine Era, 1204–1461, new enlarged edn. (Chicago: Argonaut, 1969), p.31.
48. This description is based on the vivid picture painted in Bryer and Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments, Vol.1, pp.178–9.
49. The church was transformed into a mosque in the 1880s and the frescoes plastered over. Although the images were damaged when the walls were hacked to allow the plaster to stick, they nevertheless represent one of the greatest treasures of Byzantineera frescoes anywhere. A full-scale restoration effort began in the late 1950s. See David Talbot Rice (ed.) The Church of Haghia Sophia of Trebizond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).
50. Bryer and Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments, Vol.1, pp.185–9.
51. The monastery has unfortunately long been allowed to decay, but an ambitious restoration program, supported by the Turkish government, began in 2000.
52. Ruy González de Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406, trans. Guy Le Strange (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1928), pp.111–13.
53. Bryer and Winfield, The Byzantine Monuments, Vol.1, p.251.
54. Miller, Trebizond, p.69.
55.. Balard, La Romanie génoise, Vol. 1, p.6.
56. On this point, see Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1983).
57.Anthony Bryer, “Greek Historians on the Turks: The Case of the First Byzantine–Ottoman Marriage,” in his Peoples and Settlement in Anatolia and the Caucasus, 800–1900(London: Variorum Reprints, 1988), p.481.
58. George Makris, “Ships,” in Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.) The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh Through the Fifteenth Century, Vol.1(Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), p.481.
59. This account of Ludovico is based on Anthony Bryer, “Ludovico da Bologna and the Georgian and Anatolian Embassy of 1460–1461,” in his The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980), chapter 10.
60. Quoted in Bryer, “Ludovico da Bologna,” p.195.
61. Bryer, “Ludovico da Bologna,” p. 186.
Faithful friend, if you have understanding,
Know that the mariner’s art is a difficult one.
For these seas resemble an enemy’s muteness;
Their storms remind one of his bitterness.
Pirî Reis, Ottoman admiral and cartographer, 1525
[Istanbul] holds an absolute dominion over the Black Sea. By one door only, namely by the Bosporus, it shuts up its communication with any other part of the world; for no ship can pass this sea, if the port thinks it fit to dispute its passage…. For this reason all foreign nations, if they want to entitle themselves to any prosperity in the immense wealth of the Black Sea, and all seaport and island towns, are obliged to court the friendship of this city.
Pierre Gilles, French ambassador to the Ottoman sultan, 1561
[T]he storm began to buffet us most unmercifully, nothing but thunder and lightning, hail and torrents of rain pouring down on us for three days and nights…. Of the passengers, some were vomiting, some praying, some vowing victims and sacrifices, some alms and pilgrimages…. [T]he ship now touched the highest heavens, and now descended into the deepest of hells…. I swore never to try the navigation of the Black Sea any more.
Evliya Çelebi, Ottoman traveler, 1684
4
Kara Deniz, 1500–1700
In rather short order after the conquest of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Ottomans took control of the major ports and fortresses around the sea: Caffa, the other Crimean ports, and Tana on the Don river in 1475; Anapa on the Caucasus coast in 1479; Maurocastro on the Dnestr and Licostomo on the Danube in 1484. It took longer to subdue the inland powers—the Christian rulers of the south Caucasus and the principality of Moldova, as well as the Muslim khan of Crimea—but by the early sixteenth century, they had all come to recognize the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan. Within less than a century after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans could claim the sea as theirs.
Never before had an imperial power been able to dominate the entire littoral and much of the lands beyond. The navies and commercial vessels of most foreign powers were prevented from entering the Straits, and regional trade, previously dominated by the Italian city-states, now came under the hand of the sultan. Commercial routes were redirected so that merchandise passed through “Constantine’s city” (as the former Byzantine capital was still called, even under Muslim rule) where it could be taxed or used to feed the burgeoning urban population. The sea and its products became the possession of the Ottoman state, a source of revenue that successive sultans guarded jealously. As a French ambassador reported, given a choice between admitting foreign ships and throwing open the doors of his harem, the sultan would probably have chosen the latter.1
Ottoman hegemony on the Black Sea lasted for three hundred years, from the rolling conquests of the late fifteenth century until the opening of the sea to European commerce in the late eighteenth century. Because of the strictures on the entry of foreign vessels, European diplomats in this period, as well as later historians, often termed the sea a “Turkish lake.” The picture was far more complicated than that, however. The Ottoman empire strongly regulated exports from the Black Sea region, particularly grain, a strategic food source; but restrictions on foreign ships were put in place only gradually and enforced haphazardly, and even then only once the Ottomans began to feel threatened by the growing naval might of major European powers.2
Moreover, even though the Ottomans had been able to extend their power much farther around the sea than had their Byzantine predecessors, that power usually rested on striking deals with local potentates. Vassalage, not outright conquest, was the preferred method of dealing with the hinterlands. The Ottomans depended on stable commercial relationships with the northern coast, and force was usually too blunt an instrument of foreign policy if the goal was to encourage business. Of course, the sultans resorted to sword and cannon when necessary. Summer was the season of war, and most years saw Ottoman armies embark on long marches to correct one or another contumacious client or counter a threat from the preeminent powers of central and eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, and later Russia. But until relatively late in the period of Ottoman control, the arts of diplomacy—enticing, tricking, persuading, and cajoling—were far more productive than outright war.
In terms of the political economy of the region, the great shift in the Ottoman centuries was the transformation of trade from primarily the enterprise of individual profit-seeking merchants to an activity taxed and regulated by the Ottoman state. The Byzantines had certainly attempted to control traffic through the Straits; there was no shortage of complaints from foreign shippers about the venality of Byzantine tax officials. But from the beginning of the thirteenth century, they had ceded their foreign commerce, and a good deal of their internal trade as well, to the Italians. The Ottoman innovation was to place the imperial city—Istanbul—at the center of the Black Sea regional economy, an effective spigot that could be turned on and off according to the wishes of the sultan. Give
n the need to provision the Ottoman capital and, later, the desire to prevent rival powers from getting their hands on the riches that the sea provided, the Ottomans well understood the relationships among geography, commerce, and state-building, far better, in fact, than had the Byzantines. “My Sultan, you dwell in a city whose benefactor is the sea,” wrote the sixteenth-century scholar Kemal Paşazade. “If the sea is not safe, no ships will come, and if no ship comes, Istanbul perishes.”3
As with any prized possession, the Black Sea was also the object of an obsessive concern. The Ottomans considered the sea theirs by right, a watery extension of the Balkan and Anatolian lands that constituted the heartland of the empire. But it was also a possession that could be easily pried away. Benefiting from trade with the northern coast meant first squelching the pirate activity that had plagued the Byzantines and then making sure that it did not reappear. Client states around the sea had to be corrected when their loyalty to the sultan waned. The aspirations of rising powers farther afield—Poland in the northwest, Russia in the northeast—had to be curbed before they impinged on Ottoman interests. As time passed, holding the sea became more and more a drain on state coffers, diminished already by the exigencies of maintaining other imperial possessions stretching from central Europe to Arabia. By the middle of the seventeenth century, what had once been a source of wealth and security, the empire’s greatest geopolitical asset, came to look more and more like a strategic burden. The dark, forbidding Black Sea of early antiquity—literally, the kara deniz to the Ottomans—began to reappear.