The Genoese in Chios, I346-1566
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418 July Downloaded from The Genoese in Chios, i346-1566 F the Latin states which existed in Greek lands between the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the fall of O http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ the Venetian republic in 1797, there were four principal forms. Those states were either independent kingdoms, such as Cyprus ; feudal principalities, of which that of Achaia is the best example ; military outposts, like Rhodes ; or colonies directly governed by the mother-country, of which Crete was the most conspicuous. But the Genoese administration of Chios differed from all the other Latin creations in the Levant. It was what we should call in modern parlance a Chartered Company, which on a smaller at Memorial University of Newfoundland on April 4, 2015 scale anticipated the career of the East India and the British South Africa Companies in our own history. The origins of the Latin colonization of Greece are usually to be found in places and circumstances where we should least expect to find them. The incident which led to this Genoese occupation of the most fertile island of the Aegean is to be sought in the history of the smallest of European principalities—that of Monaco, which in the first half of the fourteenth century already belonged to the noble Genoese family of Grimaldi, which still reigns over it. At that time the rock of Monaco and the picturesque village of Roquebrune (between Monte Carlo and Mentone) sheltered a number of Genoese nobles, fugitives from their native city, where one of those revolutions common in the medieval republics of Italy had placed the popular party in power. The proximity and the preparations of these exiles were a menace to Genoa, but the resources of the republican treasury were too much exhausted to equip a fleet against them at the cost of the state. Accordingly, an appeal was made to the patriot- ism of private citizens, whose expenses were to be ultimately refunded, and in the meanwhile guaranteed by the possession of any conquered territory. In response to this appeal, twenty-six of the people and three nobles of the popular party equipped that number of galleys, which were placed under the command of Simone Vignoso, himself one of the twenty-nine privateers. On 24 April 1346 the fleet set sail; and, at its approach, the outlawed nobles fled to Marseilles, whence many of them entered 1915 THE GENOESE IN CHIOS, 1346-1566 419 the French army and died four months later fighting at Crecy against our King Edward III. The immediate object for which the fleet had been fitted out had been thus accomplished. But it seemed to Vignoso a pity that it should not be employed, and the Near East offered a tempting field for its activities. The condition of south-eastern Europe in 1346 might perhaps be paralleled with its situation in later times. An ancient empire, which Gladstone described as Downloaded from ' more wonderful than anything done by the Romans ', enthroned on the Bosporos with one brief interval for ten centuries, was obviously crumbling away, and its ultimate dissolution was only a question of time. A lad of fourteen, John V. Palaioldgos, sat on the throne of the Caesars, while a woman and a foreigner, http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ the empress-mother Anne of Savoy, governed in his name. Against her and her son the too-powerful Grand Domestic (or, as we should say, prime minister), John Cantacuzene, whom posterity remembers rather as an historian than as an emperor, had raised the standard of revolt. In Asia Minor Byzantium retained nothing but the suburb of Scutari, Phila- delphia, and the two towns of Phdkaia. Independent emirs ruled the south and centre, the Ottomans the north, whence in at Memorial University of Newfoundland on April 4, 2015 seven years they were to cross into Europe, in eight more to transfer their capital to Adrianople. Already the European provinces of Byzantium were cut short by the frontier of the Bulgarian Empire and still more by the rapid advance of Servia, then the most powerful state in the Balkan peninsula. Seventeen days before Vignoso sailed for the East, the great Servian conqueror and lawgiver, Stephen Dushan, one of the most remarkable figures in medieval history, was crowned at Skoplje ' Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks ' and had proposed to Genoa's rival, Venice, an alliance for the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Greece proper, with the exception of the Byzantine province in the Morea, was parcelled out between Latin rulers, while Byzan- tium had no fleet to protect her outlying territories. Under these circumstances a commercial Italian republic might not unnaturally seek to peg out claims in the midst of the general confusion in the East, where only two years before Smyrna, formerly a Genoese colony, had been recaptured from the Turks. Vignoso's first intention was to protect the Genoese settlements on the Black Sea against the attacks of the Tartars ; but informa- tion received at Negroponte, where he touched on the way, led him to change his plans. There he found a fleet of Venetian and Rhodian galleys, under the Dauphin of Vienne, preparing to occupy Chios as a naval base for operations against the Turks in Asia Minor. Vignoso and his associates were offered large sums for their co-operation, but their patriotism rejected the Be 2 420 THE GENOESE IN CHIOS, 1346-1566 July idea of handing over to the rival republic an island which had belonged to the Genoese family of Zaccaria from 1304 to 1329, and which as recently as seventeen years earlier had been recovered by the Greeks. They made all sail for Chios, and offered to assist the islanders against a Venetian attack, if they would hoist the Genoese flag and admit a small Genoese garrison. The scornful refusal of the garrison was followed by the landing of the Genoese ; four days sufficed to take the rest of the island ; but the citadel Downloaded from made such a spirited resistance that three months passed before food gave out and on September 12 the capitulation was signed. The governor, Kalojanni Cybo, himself of Genoese extraction, and a member of the well-known Ligurian family which afterwards produced Pope Innocent Vill, made excellent terms for himself http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ and his relatives, while the Greeks were to enjoy their former religious liberties and endowments, their property, and their privileges. A Genoese governor was to be appointed to administer the island according to the laws of the republic, and 200 houses in the citadel were assigned at once for the use of the Genoese garrison. Vignoso proved by his example that he meant to keep these promises. He ordered his own son to be flogged publicly at Memorial University of Newfoundland on April 4, 2015 for stealing grapes from a vineyard belonging to one of the natives, and bequeathed a sum of money for providing poor Chiote girls with dowries as compensation for any damage that he might have inflicted upon the islanders. Vignoso completed the conquest of Chios by the annexation of Old and New Phdkaia, or Foglia Vecchia and Nuova, as the Italians called them, almost the last Byzantine possessions on the coast of Asia Minor, and celebrated for their valuable alum-mines, whence English ships used to obtain materials for dyeing, and of the neighbouring islands of Psara, or Santa Panagia, Samos, Ikaria, and the Oenousai.1 All these places had belonged to the former Genoese lords of Chios, with whose fortunes they were now reunited. The two Foglie, with the exception of a brief Byzantine restoration, remained in Genoese hands till they were conquered by the Turks in 1455 ; Foglia Vecchia, after about 1402, being administered by the Gattilusj of Lesbos, Foglia Nuova being leased to a member of the maona for life or a term of years. Samos and Psara were abandoned in 1475 from fear of corsairs, and their inhabitants removed to Chios, whilst the harbourless Ikaria, where pirates could not land, was in 1362 granted to the Genoese family of Arangio, which held it with the title of Count until 1481. In that year it was ceded for greater security to 1 Jerosme Justinian, La Description et Histoirc de Visit de Sdos, ov. Chios, part i, 19; part ii, 166 ; BoBchini, VArdpelago, pp. 72, 74 ; Piacenza, L'Egeo Rtdivivo, pp. 200, 216; Coronelli, I sola di Rodi, p. 360. To this occupation of Ikaria refers the ballad in Journal of Hellenic Studies, I 293-300. 1915 THE GENOESE IN CHIOS, 1346-1566 421 the knights of Rhodes, and remained united with that island till it too was conquered by the Turks in 1522. Vignoso desired to add the rich island of Lesbos and the strategic island of Tenedos, which, as we have been lately reminded, commands the mouth of the Dardanelles, to his acquisitions. But his crews had had enough of fighting, and were so mutinous that he returned to Genoa.2 The Genoese exchequer was unable to repay to Vignoso and Downloaded from his partners their expenses, amounting to 203,000 Genoese pounds (£79,170 of our money) or 7,000 for each of the twenty-nine galleys, the Genoese pound being then, according to Desimoni, worth 9 lire 75 centesimi. Accordingly, by an arrangement made on 26 February 1347, it was agreed that the republic should http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ liquidate this liability within twenty years and thereupon become the direct owner of the conquered places, which in the meanwhile were to be governed—and the civil and criminal administration conducted—in her name.