There remained the most serious of all enemies—the Turks. Murad I, who died in 1389, had already levied tribute from Chios[500]; Mohammed I in 1415 fixed this sum at 4000 gold ducats, while the lessee of Foglia Nuova paid 20,000 out of the profits of the alum mines. By this system of Danegeld the maonesi kept on fairly good terms with the Turks till the capture of Constantinople. The active part taken in its defence by one of the Giustiniani, whose name will ever be connected with that of the heroic Constantine XI, exasperated Mohammed II against Chios, whither the chalices and furniture from the Genoese churches of Pera were removed, and many of the survivors fled for safety. An increase of the tribute to 6000 ducats was accepted[501]. But in 1455 the Turks sent two fleets to Chios under the pretext of collecting a debt for alum, alleged to have been supplied to the maona by Francesco Drapperio, former lessee of Foglia Nuova, and then established at Pera[502]. These expeditions cost the company Foglia Nuova, but it gained a further respite by the payment of a lump sum of 30,000 gold pieces and the increase of the annual tribute to 10,000 ducats. In vain it appealed to Genoa and to the Pope; in vain on April 7, 1456, the Republic wrote to our King Henry VI[503], then struggling against the Yorkists, for assistance, reminding him that there had been few wars against the infidels in which the most Christian Kings of England had not borne a great part of the toils and dangers. The extinction of the Lesbian principality of the Gattilusj in 1462, the taking of Caffa in 1475, the capture of the Venetian colony of Negroponte by the Turks in 1479, were signs of what was in store for Chios, now completely isolated. The maonesi in vain wrote to Genoa, threatening to abandon the island, if help were not forthcoming, and offered to cede it to her altogether. “We cannot put our hands,” so ran their letter, “on 100 ducats; we owe 10,000. The Genoese mercenaries sent us were very bad. Send us none from the district between Rapallo and Voltri, for they quarrel daily, steal by day and night, and pay too much attention to the Greek ladies,” whose charms were the theme of every visitor to the island[504]. The only means of maintaining independence was to pay tribute punctually and to propitiate any persons who might be influential at the Porte, notably the French ambassadors, two of whom visited Chios in 1537 and 1550. Finally, in 1558 Genoa disavowed all connexion with the island, and instructed her representative at Constantinople to repudiate her sovereignty over it[505].
Then came the final catastrophe. The company was no longer able to provide the annual tribute, which had risen to 14,000 gold pieces, and to give the usual presents, valued at 2000 ducats, of scarlet cloth to the Turkish viziers, “a race of men full of rapacity and avarice,” as De Thou called them. It was accused of having betrayed the Turkish plans against Malta to the knights and thus helping to stultify the siege of that island in 1565; while the fugitive slaves who found refuge in Chios were a constant source of difficulties. One of them was the property of the grand vizier; the podestà, Vincenzo Giustiniani, called upon either to give him up or pay compensation, confided the latter to an emissary, who absconded with the money. Thereupon Pialì Pasha, a Hungarian renegade in the Turkish service, appeared off Chios with a fleet of from 80 to 300 sail on Easter Monday, April 15, 1566. The pasha told the Chiotes that he would not land, as he did not wish to disturb the Easter ceremonies. Next day he entered the harbour and demanded the tribute. After having landed and studied the strategic position, he invited the podestà and the twelve “governors” on board to confer with him, and clapped them into irons. On April 17, as an inscription[506] in the chief mosque, then a church, still tells us, he took the town, and the flag of St George with the red cross gave way to the crescent almost without resistance.
The fall of Genoese rule was ennobled by the heroism of the bishop, Timoteo Giustiniani, who bade a renegade kill him rather than profane the mass, and by the martyrdom of eighteen boys, who died rather than embrace Islâm—a scene depicted by Carlone in the chapel of the Ducal Palace at Genoa[507]. The other boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, while the leading maonesi were exiled to Caffa, whence some of them, thanks to the intervention of the French ambassador, returned to Chios or Genoa[508]. In vain they demanded from the home government compensation for the loss of their island. As late as 1805 their descendants were still trying to recover a sum of money, deposited with the bank of St George, and in 1815 the bank ceased to exist and with it the last faint hope of repayment. There were, however, some lucky exceptions to these misfortunes. Thus Vincenzo Negri Giustiniani, who was a child of two at the date of the Turkish conquest, came to Rome, was created by Pope Paul V in 1605 first marquess of Bassano, and in 1610 built the Palazzo Giustiniani, now the seat of the Italian Freemasons and of the Prussian Historical Institute. Professor Kehr, the director of that body, informs me, however, that there is no trace there of the Chiote inscription of 1522, which is said to have been removed thither[509]. On the other hand, although the Turks destroyed many churches, Chios still abounds with Latin monuments[510], in which the arms of the Giustiniani—a castle of three towers, surmounted after 1413 by the imperial eagle granted by the Emperor Sigismund[511]—are conspicuous. It may be of interest to mention that when in 1912, an Italian attack upon Chios was contemplated, orders were issued to spare the historical monuments of Chios. That island, however, with the exception of a brief Venetian occupation in 1694-5, remained Turkish till November 24, 1912, when a Greek force landed and on the following day easily captured the capital, which thus, for the first time since 1346, passed from under foreign domination.
We may now ask ourselves whether the rule of the company was successful. Financially, it certainly was. Even in its latter days, when heavy loans had been contracted with the bank of St George and the Turkish tribute was 14,000 gold ducats, a dividend of 2000 ducats was paid on each of the thirteen original shares; while in its best times the small caratto, originally worth some 30 Genoese pounds, was quoted at 4930. Chios during the middle ages was one of the most frequented marts of the Levant, while the alum of Foglia Nuova (which, as long as that factory remained Genoese, covered the annual rent to Genoa) and the mastic of the island (in which a part of the Turkish tribute was paid) were two valuable sources of revenue. The production of mastic was carefully organised. The company leased to each hamlet a certain area of plantation, and the lessees once a year handed in a certain weight of mastic in proportion to the number of the trees. If it were a good year and the yield were greater, they received a fixed price per pound for the excess quantity delivered; but if they failed to deliver the stipulated amount, they had to pay twice that sum[512]. In order to keep up prices in years of over-production, all the mastic over a certain amount was either warehoused or burned. Special officials divided the net profit accruing from its sale among the shareholders; no private person might sell it to foreigners; and thefts or smuggling of the precious gum, if committed on a small scale, cost the delinquent an ear, his nose, or both; if on a large scale, brought him to the gallows. Another curious source of revenue was the tax on widows[513]. The latter must have had ample opportunities of avoiding the penalty, for the courtesy and beauty of the Chiote ladies was the theme of every traveller. Indeed, one impressionable Frenchman[514] proclaimed Chios to be “the most agreeable residence” with which he was acquainted, while another visitor[515] declared their natural charm, the elegance of their attire, and the attraction of their gestures and conversation to be such “that they might rather be judged to be nymphs or goddesses than mortal women or maids.” He then, greatly daring, attempts a detailed description of their costume, upon which I shall not venture. Nor were amusements lacking. The inhabitants were musical; they were wont to dance by the Skaramangkou torrent; the chief religious feasts were kept in state; and Cyriacus of Ancona[516] was a witness of the festivities which accompanied the carnival in what Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti[517], another traveller of the fifteenth century, called the first island of the Archipelago.
There was more intellectual life at Chios than in some of the Latin settlements in the Levant; indeed, the two Genoese colonies of Chios and Lesbos stood higher in that respect than most of the Venetian factories. The list of authors during the period of the maona is considerable. Among them we may specially notice Leonardo Giustiniani, archbishop of Lesbos, but a native of Chios, and author of a curious treatise, De vera nobilitate, intended as a reply to the book De nobilitate of the celebrated scholar, Poggio Bracciolini. But the chief value of the literary divine for us at the present day is the graphic account which he has left us in two letters, addressed respectively to Popes Nicholas V and Pius II, of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and of Lesbos in 1462—accounts of the greatest historical interest, because their author was an eyewitness of what he described. In Gerolamo Garibaldi Giustiniani, born in Chios in 1544, the island found an historian, who wrote in French a work entitled La Description et Histoire de l’Isle de Scios, ou Chios; Vincenzo Banca Giustiniani, another Latin Chiote, edited the works of St Thomas Aquinas; while Alessandro Rocca Giustiniani translated portions of Aristotle and Hippocrates. But the most curious local literary figure of the period was Andriolo Banca Giustiniani (1385-1456), who sang in Italian verse the Venetian siege of Chios[518] of 1431. The poet was a man of taste and had the means to satisfy it; he constructed near the so-called “School of Homer” (who, according to Thucydides, was a native of Chios) an “Homeric villa” in a forest of pines near a crystal well, where he was visited by the well-known antiquary and traveller, Cyriacus of Ancona, his frequent correspondent[519]. This elegant Chiote accumulated a library of 2000 manuscripts, and for him Ambrogio Traversari of Florence translated into Latin the treatise on the Immortality of the Soul by the fifth-century philosopher, Æneas of Gaza. His son, in 1474, entertained at his villa a greater even than the archæologist of Ancona, then, however, only a modest ship’s captain, the future discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus. The culture, however, of the Giustiniani seems to have been mainly Latin—a fact explained by their practice of sending their sons to be educated at Genoa, Pavia, Padua, or Bologna; and it was from Italy that they summoned the architects to build their palaces “of divers kinds of marbles, with great porticoes and magnificent galleries,” and their villas, of which there were more than 100 in the last century of their rule. It was only just before the Turkish conquest that they thought of founding a university[520].
But we must also look at the picture from another point of view—that of the governed. The judgment of Finlay that the rule of the company was “the least oppressive government in the Levant” seems by the light of later research to need qualification. If we are to take as our standard the happiness of the people as a whole, then of all the Latin establishments in the Levant Lesbos comes first. But for that there were special reasons. The first Gattilusio came to Lesbos not as a foreign conqueror, but as brother-in-law of the Greek Emperor; he soon spoke the language of his subjects; his successors wrote in Greek, and as time went on the family became hellenized. But a company is apt to be deficient on the human side; and this would seem to have been the weak point of the maona. Quite early in its career a conspiracy of the Greeks was discovered, which led to the permanent expulsion of the metropolitan and the substitution in his place of a vicar, called Δίκαιος (or “the Just”), elected by the company and confirmed by the patriarch. Moreover, the dominant church, whose bishops were usually Pallavicini or Giustiniani, was partly supported by tithes, which the members of the other creed had also to pay, and which they paid so reluctantly that in 1480 the bishop was glad to abandon all claims to tithe and all the church property to the company[521] in return for a fixed stipend. Moreover, we are told that certain Latins seized property belonging to Νέα Μονή, “one of the most beautiful churches of the Archipelago,” as it was called[522]. To these ecclesiastical disadvantages was added social inferiority. The native nobles, or archontes, sixty in number, although their privileges had been guaranteed at the conquest and although instructions were subsequently given to see that that pledge was respected, ranked not only below the Giustiniani, who formed the apex of the social scale, but below the Genoese bourgeoisie also, from which they suffered most. They lived apart in the old town (much as the Catholics still do at Syra); and if they sold their property and left the island, they forfeited to the company one-quarter of the proceeds of such sale.
Worse still was the position of the Greek peasantry, who were practically serfs, forbidden to emigrate without permission and passports. Liable to perform military service even out of the island, they had to undertake in time of peace various forced labours, of which the lightest was to act as beaters once a year for their masters during the partridge season. So many of them sought to escape from Chios that a local shibboleth was invented for their identification, and they were obliged to pronounce the word fragela (a sort of white bread), which became frangela in the mouth of a native. Still, the Greeks were consulted at least formally before a new tax was imposed; a Greek noble sat in the commercial court and on the commission of public works, and during the administration of Marshal Boucicault in 1409 and down to 1417 four out of the six councillors who assisted the podestà were Greeks. In later times when there was a Turkish element in the population—for after 1484 the Turks paid no dues—the company provided the salary of the Turkish kâdi. Cases were tried in a palace known as the Δικαιότατο (“Most Just”), and a “column of justice” hard by served for the punishment of the guilty. A great hardship was the cost of appeals to the ducal council in Genoa—the counterpart of our judicial committee of the privy council. Worst treated of all classes were the Jews, forced to wear a yellow bonnet, to live in their ghetto, which was hermetically closed at Easter, to present a white banner with the red cross of St George to the podestà once a year, and to make sport for the Genoese at religious festivals[523]. Such, briefly, was the Genoese administration of Chios—an episode which may serve to remind us how very modern in some ways were the methods of Italian mediæval commonwealths.
3. THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)
Me clara Cæsar donat Lesbo ac Mytilene,
Cæsar, qui Graio præsidet imperio.