Empire of Trebizond

Two hundred miles of coast

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)formation

In April 1204, while a crusading army was in the middle of sacking Constantinople, two brothers took the city of Trebizond on the far side of Anatolia with troops lent by their relative Queen Tamar of Georgia. Alexios Komnenos was twenty-two and was proclaimed emperor that month. His grandfather Andronikos I had been emperor in Constantinople and had been torn apart by a mob in 1185.

Three Byzantine successor states came out of 1204 — Nicaea, Epirus and this one — and all three called themselves the Roman empire. Nicaea won that argument by retaking Constantinople in 1261. What Trebizond had instead was geography.

The state was a strip: two hundred miles of Black Sea coast from about Sinop to the Georgian border, with the Pontic mountains rising immediately behind it. Nothing about that is defensible in the ordinary sense — there was no depth, no manpower reserve and no field army worth the name for most of the empire's existence. What the mountains did was make it expensive to reach from the Anatolian plateau, and what the sea did was make it reachable by anyone with ships, which meant that whoever wanted the trade had an interest in the place continuing to function.

The state that resulted is one of the least likely survivals in medieval history: a strip of shore under a mountain wall, founded by two brothers with borrowed Georgian troops in the week somebody else's capital was being sacked, which then outlasted every other Byzantine successor and the Byzantine empire itself.

What the road brought

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)expansion

That is what it lived on. Trebizond was the Black Sea end of the overland route from Tabriz and Iran, and after the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 a great deal of the east-west traffic that had gone through Iraq moved north through Tabriz to this coast instead. Genoese and Venetian quarters were established in the city. Alum for the cloth industry, silver from the Pontic mines, wine and hazelnuts went out; the empire took the customs.

The Mongols, when they arrived, made it a tributary and left it alone, because a functioning port at the end of their trade route was worth more than a ruined one. That is the arrangement in miniature. For two and a half centuries this state paid whoever was strongest and was allowed to continue.

The city and the road

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)peak

Trebizond's fourteenth century is the period in which a state this small was, briefly, one of the more important places in the world economy.

What that bought is visible in the arrangements. Genoese and Venetian merchants held quarters in the city on treaty terms and quarrelled with each other and with the emperors over them, occasionally violently. Alum from the Anatolian interior, needed in quantity by the European cloth industry, went out through the port. Silver from the Pontic mines went out as coin: the aspron, the Trapezuntine silver piece, which circulated widely enough to be a recognised denomination in Italian merchant handbooks.

Alexios II, who reigned from 1297 to 1330, is where the sources put the height of it — a ruler who kept the Turkmen at bay in the hills, managed the Italians, and left a city with walls, churches and a court that produced astronomical work of real quality, Gregory Chioniades having brought Persian astronomy back from Tabriz.

It did not last, and what ended it was not conquest. A civil war between court factions ran through the 1340s, the plague arrived in 1347, and the Ilkhanate's collapse a decade earlier had already begun to move the trade route.

The city went on. The reason for the city being wealthy went away, and what a state does when it has lost its economy and still has two hundred and fifty miles of coast to hold is the rest of the story.

The baker's son

Drafted from Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy to the Court of Timour at Samarcand (1859)contraction

In the spring of 1404 a Castilian embassy on its way to Timur wintered at Trebizond, and one of the ambassadors kept a journal. Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo had no literary ambitions and wrote down what he was shown and what he was told, which is why his account is worth more than most.

He describes the city first. It is built near the sea, and its wall rises over rocks, and on the highest part there is a very strong castle with a wall of its own. A small river passes the castle and dashes over the rocks, so that on that side the city is very strong; on the other side it stands on open ground. Outside the walls are suburbs, and the most beautiful part of the place is a street near the sea where everything the city needs is sold.

Then, without appearing to notice what he is saying:

On the shore there are two castles, with strong walls and towers, one belonging to the Venetians and the other to the Genoese, and they hold them with the consent of the emperor.

Two fortified positions on the emperor's own waterfront, garrisoned by two foreign republics, held by permission. That is the arrangement this state lived by, stated as a matter of course by a visitor who thought it unremarkable.

What the courtiers told him

On the Sunday afternoon two of the emperor's household came to the embassy's lodging: the Horchi, which Clavijo explains means the page who carries the bow before the emperor, and the Protovestati, the treasurer.

The treasurer, he was told, was very intimate with the emperor, who did nothing in the empire against his advice. And they say, Clavijo adds, that he was of base lineage, the son of a baker.

Then the rest of it. The young emperor, seeing that his father made so much of this man and took no notice of the nobles of the empire, was enraged, and rose against his father, and made war, and besieged the city for three months with the greatest men of the empire behind him. They came to terms in the end, through the bow-bearer, who was a friend of the young emperor and of the others who had risen. And afterwards, Clavijo notes, there came dishonour, trouble and injury to the emperor, on account of his friendship for this man.

Why that is the whole state

Because it is the whole state, told in an afternoon, by people who lived in it.

An empire two hundred miles long, with a fortified capital it could not be starved out of, a waterfront let to two Italian republics, an emperor paying tribute to Timur, a treasurer of no family who ran the government, and a succession war fought over him that put the heir outside his own capital for a season.

Clavijo goes on to describe the Armenians of the city, who have a church and a bishop and do not put water in the chalice, and the Greeks, whose priests carry the consecrated bread out on their heads in a white cloth while the people press their faces to the ground crying that they are not worthy to see it. He is interested in all of it and condescending about most of it.

He was there because Trebizond was where you changed from a ship to a road. The embassy was on its way to Samarkand, and this coast was the door.

Tribute and marriage

Drafted from Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (2005)contraction

Trebizond's method after 1261 was tribute and marriage, in that order of frequency.

The imperial title went first. In 1282, under pressure from the restored Byzantine court, John II stopped styling himself emperor of the Romans and became emperor of all the East, Iberia and Perateia. It is a formal concession of the argument the state had been founded on, made in exchange for being left alone as something smaller, and it worked: the empire lasted another hundred and seventy-nine years after conceding it.

The marriages are the part the sources dwell on and they were policy. Grand Komnenian daughters were married to Turkmen emirs, to Seljuk and later Ottoman princes, to the Byzantine emperors and to Georgian kings, and the practice was systematic enough that the beauty of Trapezuntine princesses became a commonplace in Persian, Turkish and Greek writing alike. What it bought was a web of relatives among the neighbours who might otherwise have taken the city, and it bought about two hundred years.

The arithmetic of it is worth stating plainly, because it looks like weakness and was a policy.

A state with two hundred miles of coast, no depth, no manpower and no field army cannot deter anybody. What it can do is make itself more valuable intact than sacked, and more awkward to attack than to accommodate. Tribute did the first. Marriage did the second: a Turkmen emir contemplating Trebizond had to reckon with the fact that his own household, and several of his neighbours', contained Grand Komnenian women and their sons.

It bought two hundred years, which is a long time. What it could not survive was a neighbour large enough that neither instrument reached — one that did not need the customs revenue and had no interest in a marriage.

Enough to resist them all

Drafted from Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439 (1926)contraction

In 1438 a Castilian gentleman named Pero Tafur, travelling the East for his own curiosity and receiving hospitality from most of the rulers in it, landed at Trebizond and went to see the emperor. He records the town in a line — about four thousand inhabitants, well walled, fruitful ground, a large revenue — and then reports the conversation, which is the most useful three paragraphs written about this state in its last half-century.

The emperor wanted news. He asked about the emperor in Constantinople, how he had departed for Italy and whom he had taken with him; and about the empress, who was his sister; and about his own brother, whom he had exiled. He was working round to one question. Was it true that his brother was betrothed to a daughter of the lord of Mytilene, and that the lord, the Genoese and the emperor in Constantinople had given him a fleet to make war on Trebizond?

Tafur told him it was true. The emperor was much cast down, and then replied that he had enough to resist them all, and many more.

Who these people were

The man asking was John IV, and Tafur's testimony is the reason historians know when he came to the throne: his father Alexios IV was long thought to have lived until 1446, and Tafur's visit shows he was dead by 1437 or early 1438. John had murdered him.

The brother collecting the fleet was Alexander, and Tafur met him too. Sailing home past Mytilene he found the exiled brother on the Genoese island, gathering ships, having married the ruler's daughter to get his help. They asked him how things stood at Trebizond, and he told them the truth as he saw it: that with the Grand Turk against them they could do nothing that would either help themselves or hurt their enemies.

The sister was in Constantinople. When Tafur got back there, the Despot received him and the empress asked at once whether he had seen her brother in the Black Sea — and her other brother was standing in the room. A few days later they all went to hear Mass in Hagia Sophia together: the Despot, the empress, and the man Tafur calls the real emperor of Trebizond.

So in one year one small dynasty had a reigning emperor who had killed his father, a claimant brother fitting out a Genoese fleet against him, and a sister at the Byzantine court hearing Mass beside the claimant, while the thing that actually decided the question was represented in none of those rooms.

The argument Tafur had with him

The Castilian did not leave it there. Pressed to stay, he refused, and gave a reason that was also an insult: that even if his own affairs had allowed it he could not remain with a man married to the daughter of a Turk, and that harm would surely come to him from it. The emperor answered that God would show him grace, because he had married her meaning to make her a Christian. Tafur's reply was blunt.

My Lord, they say, rather, that they gave her to you so that she could turn you into a Moor, by reason of your expectations from her and the little that you have.

The emperor ordered him supplied with whatever food he needed and asked him to come back.

It is a traveller's set piece, polished for readers at home, and the Christian moral is applied with a heavy hand. What survives the polishing is the shape of the predicament: a state whose foreign policy consisted of marriages, whose ruler knew a fleet was being assembled against him and could only say he had enough to resist it, and whose two rival princes both understood that neither of them mattered against the power to the west. Twenty-three years later that power arrived and the question of which brother was emperor stopped being a question.

1461

Drafted from Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (2005)end

The last attempt at it was John IV's, in the 1450s, and it is the strangest alliance any of them attempted. He married his daughter Theodora to Uzun Hasan, the ruler of the Akkoyunlu — the Turkmen confederation of eastern Anatolia and western Iran — in the hope that the Akkoyunlu army would come west if the Ottomans came east. Then Constantinople fell in 1453, and Trebizond became the last state anywhere still ruled by a Roman emperor.

It lasted eight more years. In the summer of 1461 Mehmed II brought an army overland and a fleet along the coast, the city held out for about a month, and David surrendered on 15 August. He and most of his family were executed in Constantinople two years later. Uzun Hasan did not come.

The Roman empire is conventionally dated to 1453, which is where the institution that mattered stopped, and that is the right date. The literal end is here: on a strip of coast at the other end of Anatolia, eight years later, under a dynasty that had given up calling itself Roman a hundred and eighty years before it stopped existing, in a city that surrendered after a month because nobody came.

Fifteen hundred and eight years after Augustus, the last man anywhere entitled to be addressed as Roman emperor handed over his keys in August, was taken to Constantinople, and was executed there two years afterwards with most of his sons.

What left before the city fell

Drafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)aside?What aside means

Basilios Bessarion was born at Trebizond around 1403, when the empire had about sixty years left. He became a monk, then a bishop, went to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438 as part of the Byzantine delegation seeking union with Rome in exchange for military help against the Ottomans, argued for the union, and stayed in Italy when it collapsed. He was made a cardinal, was twice a serious candidate for pope, and spent thirty years doing one thing.

He collected Greek manuscripts. He bought them, had them copied, and pursued them across Greece and Italy, on the explicit reasoning — which he set out himself — that the Greek-speaking world was being conquered and its books would go with it if somebody did not move them. In 1468, fifteen years after Constantinople fell and seven after Trebizond did, he gave the collection to Venice. About a thousand codices, some six hundred of them Greek, the largest such collection assembled by one person. It is the founding core of the Biblioteca Marciana and it is still there.

Two things are worth drawing out.

The first is that it worked. Medieval libraries mostly end one way: Alamut burned, the Fatimid palace collection was sold off and scattered during the famine, the Ghurid records went at Firuzkuh, the Samanid library that Ibn Sina had used burned. The usual story is of somebody realising afterwards what had been in the building. Bessarion saw it coming and moved the material while there was still time to move it, which is rare enough to be worth saying twice.

The second is where he was from. A man born in a Greek city on the Black Sea, in an empire that had given up calling itself Roman a hundred and twenty years before he was born and would be extinguished eight years after Constantinople, moved the surviving literature of that civilisation to Venice, where it was printed. A substantial part of what Europe learned to call the classics passed through the hands of a Trapezuntine.

Trebizond is usually a curiosity: a strip of coast, an improbably long survival, a footnote to 1453. This is the thing that came out of it, and it is sitting in Venice.

What stayed in the mountains

Drafted from Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (1890)afterlife

The empire ended in a month. The population it had governed took four and a half centuries.

Mehmed II did with Trebizond what he did everywhere: deported a portion of the inhabitants to repopulate Constantinople, took the boys he wanted for the palace service, installed a garrison, and left the rest. The Grand Komnenoi were executed. The city became an Ottoman provincial capital and its trade, already reduced, went on at a smaller scale.

What did not end was the Pontic Greek population of the mountains behind it.

The reason the coast survived and the empire did not

The geography that had made the state indefensible made its people durable.

A strip of coast with no depth cannot be held against an army. A range of steep valleys running back into the Pontic Alps, with villages at the heads of them reachable only on foot, is a different problem — one nobody had any reason to solve, because there was nothing up there worth the cost of taking. So the Greek-speaking communities stayed where they were, farming and mining and speaking a dialect that had separated from the rest of Greek early enough to be barely intelligible to Athenians.

Some of them converted and went on speaking Greek. That is the strangest residue: Muslim villages in the Of and Tonya valleys whose language was the Greek of the empire that had been abolished, a situation that persisted into the twentieth century and in places past it.

Ramsay's habit

Ramsay, walking Anatolia in the 1880s to fix the sites of ancient cities, kept noticing this sort of thing — that at Laranda in the south the Christians were still using the Roman name of the town four hundred years after the Turkish one became official, and that the old names survived in the mouths of whoever had been there longest.

Places remember through the people in them, and the people are removable.

The Greeks of Pontus were removed in 1923, in the population exchange that followed the Turkish war of independence. Something in the order of two hundred thousand of them went to Greece, where their descendants still hold festivals for a place on the Black Sea and dance to a lyre most of them have never heard played there.

And a library in Venice

So the empire's inheritance divides cleanly.

The state left nothing: no successor claimed it, no institution outlived it, and its imperial title had been surrendered a hundred and eighty years before the end. The coast it governed kept its language for four and a half centuries after the surrender and then lost it in a single administrative act.

And a cardinal who had been born there, and who understood in the 1450s what was about to happen to the Greek-speaking world, spent thirty years buying its books and gave them to a republic on the other side of Europe, where they still are.

Of the three, the books were the only part anybody planned.