Black Sea (18 page)

One rainy autumn day, exploring what remains of Tana, I looked down into a huge, untidy pit. Its sides were made of fire-blackened earth, wood-ash and calcined plaster. Out of them spilled human skulls and thigh-bones, white debris against the black soil.

Nearby, the archaeologists had piled their finds into open cardboard cartons disintegrating in the rain: fragments of amphoras imported from Trebizond for shipping caviar, broken bottles of fluted Venetian glass, shards of caramel-coloured Byzantine pottery and of exquisite green-glazed bowls made by Tatar craftsmen of the Golden Horde at Saray. Lumps of black rust turned out to be the shoulder-plates of a Venetian cuirass, lying among iron crossbow quarrels.

This was the wreckage left by Timur (Tamburlaine), whose armies sacked Tana in 1395 during the last of the great nomad invasions from Central Asia. But it was not the final grave of Venetian Tana; Italians remained here until the city was stormed by Tatars and Turks in 1475, as their combined armies mopped up what was left of the Byzantine-Latin presence round the north coast of the Black Sea. The city itself survived as the Ottoman port of Azak, then as the huge Turkish fortress of Azov. Today the town of Azov, with its river port on the Don, covers the whole site of Tana. For some reason, the Soviet authorities decided that Genoese ancestry was less ideologically obnoxious than Venetian; there is a ruined 'Genoa Gate' (it is actually eighteenth-century Russian), and a shabby corner where Genoa Lane runs off Rosa Luxemburg Street. The memory of Venice has been banished.

This Tana of the Italians had a briefer life than classical Tanais, but it was eventful. The Genoese were more powerful than the Venetians on the Black Sea as a whole; they were already well entrenched along the Crimean coast at Cembalo (Balaklava), Sudak and Kaffa when they became partners of the Venetians on the Don. But at the end of the thirteenth century, after the first of several Black Sea wars between the two maritime empires, Venice won exclusive control of Tana - and this happened at a lucky moment in world history. The Mongol-Yuan dynasty, which ruled China until the late fourteenth century, made it possible for the output of imperial China to flow westwards across the continental land mass of Mongol-dominated Eurasia to this western terminus of one of the Silk Routes, and the Tana merchants could for a time monopolise almost the entire China trade for Venice. But this route, kept open only by precarious agreements among the Mongol khanates along the way to China, was never more than a transient opportunity. It had begun to flow around 1260, but within a few years inter-Mongol feuds were already interrupting it. When the Mongol empire broke up in the fourteenth century, the main transcontinental trade lines were disconnected for good — first the northern route, which ended at Tana, and later the southern branch, which had brought spices and textiles from Asia to the Black Sea at Trebizond.

As far as profit was concerned, the long-range import of Chinese and Persian silks was not the main business at Tana. The Venetians made far greater profits out of other lines of business: furs, caviar, spices and above all slaves. While they were on good terms with the Golden Horde and its successors, the Venetians bought and shipped Russian, Circassian and Tatar slaves who were either sold in Constantinople to local and Levantine buyers or auctioned in Venice itself. Venetian slave-traders travelled from Tana as far as Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, or to Tashkent, in Central Asia, to inspect the stock. Back at Tana, a staff of solicitors was kept busy drawing up purchase contracts, while in Venice the
Signoria
(the governing senate) supervised the trade and laid down the maximum costs which could be incurred for transporting and feeding slaves on the three-month voyage between the Sea of Azov and the Adriatic.

Kaffa, a rival Genoese colony which stood on the site of modern Feodosia in Crimea, was exporting an average of 1,500 slaves a year in the fourteenth century, almost all male and almost all destined for the Mameluke sultans in Egypt. Tana was probably slave-trading on much the same scale. But then something happened at Kaffa which not only transformed the terms of the slave trade but changed the history of the world.

In the Genoese sea-wall at Kaffa, there is a tall gateway. Through it you can see blue water and merchant ships at anchor in the roadstead of Feodosia. Six hundred years ago, columns of slaves in irons would enter this gate, and gangs of men carrying bales of Chinese silk shipped across the Sea of Azov from Tana. But one day in 1347, an invisible immigrant made its way under the arch and began to explore Kaffa.

The Black Death came to Europe through this gate, the pandemic of pneumonic plague which within a few years had reduced the European population by one-third or more. One legend asserts that the plague broke out among a Tatar army commanded by the khan

Djani-Beg, which was besieging Kaffa, and that the khan ordered the heads of the Tatar victims to be catapulted into the town to infect the defenders. More probably, it came with slaves or Tatar stevedores in time of peace. The disease must have taken hold among the nomad inhabitants of the Pontic Steppe before it infected the 'Latin' cities of the Black Sea coast. And it had travelled a long way, clear across Eurasia from Manchuria or Korea, carried down the Silk Routes by traders, porters and soldiers to the fringes of Europe on the Black Sea.

The Silk Routes brought wealth, but then death. Within twenty years of the plague's arrival in Europe, the Mongol Empire founded by Chingiz Khan more than a century before began to break apart. The graveyards which the onslaught of the Mongols had filled in Europe were insignificant compared to this culling by disease which they left behind them.

Between December 1347 and September 1348, the Black Death had killed three-quarters of the European population in Crimea and the other Black Sea colonies. But it also killed half the population of Venice, the slaves and journeymen as well as the grandees, and suddenly there was a labour shortage. All over Europe, where many villages had perished to the last child, there was a famine of manpower on feudal estates, in baronial kitchens and stables, in urban workshops. Employers who had never dreamed of paying cash wages for labour found themselves on the defensive. In due course, the rural poor were to press their advantage and demand money or charters of secure tenure, as the English did during the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

Good businessmen do not miss an opportunity. The impact on the slave market was enormous. Everywhere on the Mediterranean littoral, from Egypt to Crete and Spain, the price of foreign slaves rose steeply. Most of the Venetian slavers at Tana had died horribly in 1348, but the survivors were rewarded by a boom in demand and prices which roared on for half a century. By about 1408, no less than 78 per cent of Tana's export earnings came from slaves. Out of their misery, and out of the profits born of the Black Death, one palace after another was raised along the Rialto.

In the Powder Magazine museum at Azov, there is a human hand cast in iron. The breadth and thickness of the palm, the hogback hump of the fingers, suggest some hominid creature bigger than a man.

This is the iron hand of Peter. The fist of Peter the Great brought Russia to the shores of the Sea of Azov, and drove Dutch and German shipwrights to build the first Russian Navy at Voronezh just three hundred years ago, in the 1690s.

Between Russia and the open ocean, there were three bottlenecks plugged by the Turkish enemy. The first was the fortress of Azov, built by the Turks to command the main channel of the river Don as it reached the sea. The second plug was the stronghold of Yenikale, built by the Ottomans to block the Kerch Straits: Catherine the Great broke through that barrier at the end of the eighteenth century. The third was the Narrows, the double passage of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles which led past Istanbul itself to the Mediterranean. The Narrows have been open to the merchant shipping of the world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1912, but all the armies and navies of Russia have never been able to capture them.

The Russian struggle south to reach the warm waters of the Mediterranean, and the Turkish struggle to hold the Ottoman conquests around the Black Sea and protect the Narrows, raged for nearly three hundred years. They led to one major European war-the Crimean conflict in the 1850s which involved France, Britain and Sardinia as well as Russia and Turkey-and nearly precipitated several others in the course of the nineteenth century. Generations of illiterate, obedient peasant soldiers died on both sides. So did the innocent inhabitants of wasted landscapes and stormed cities all round the Black Sea, from Azov to the outskirts of Istanbul.

Byron devoted a long section of his poem
Don Juan
to one of these famous slaughters, the battle for the Turkish fortress of Ismail on the Danube:

All that defies the worst that pen expresses, All by which hell is peopled, or as sad As hell - mere mortals who their power abuse -Was here (as heretofore and since) let loose.

In the end, both sides died of their wounds. Russian hatred of Turkey and Turkish fear of Russian expansion were among the most dangerous ingredients in the mixture of unstable diplomatic explosives which blew up in 191
4.
Turkey joined the war behind Germany and Austria-Hungary; Russia invaded Anatolia from the east. The effort broke both regimes. Within a few years, before the First World War was over, both the Russian and Ottoman Empires had collapsed.

The honour of knocking out the first Turkish plug belonged not to Peter, but to the Don Cossacks. The Cossacks were confederations of Russian and Ukrainian outlaws and fugitives -often intermarried with local Tatar or Kipchak nomads — who had settled in the freedom of the steppes during the late Middle Ages. This particular confederation or 'host', the Cossacks who ranged over the plains of the lower Don, had been harassing and resisting the Turks for more than a century before Peter the Great arrived on the Sea of Azov. They had dug a canal across the delta, so that boats could sail or be rowed upriver without passing under the guns of the fortress-town of Azov. Far to the west, on the lower Dnieper, their cousins the Zaporozhe Cossacks had built a form of submarine to evade Turkish guard-posts: covered-in skiffs propelled with oars, supplied with air through wooden pipes and carrying sand-ballast to release when they wished to surface. (Reports that fleets of submarines crossed the Black Sea in the sixteenth century, disgorging Cossack commandos who captured Anatolian cities like Sinop, belong, however, to Russian mythology.)

None of this gave the Turkish sultan serious anxiety. But one day in 1637 a Cossack force prowling in the Don delta approached the walls of Azov and then, on a wild impulse, attacked them. There was a large Ottoman garrison there, behind zig-zag brick and earth ramparts constructed according to the latest designs of European military engineering. But the defenders were taken by surprise. The Cossack regiments burst into the town and then, after three days of fighting, captured the citadel.

They soon lost the place again. The Turks came back to Azov with reinforcements, and many years and sieges passed before Peter finally captured it for Russia. In the end, the job had to be done professionally, with encroaching trenches, regular armies, demolition sappers, mortar batteries and gunboats. When Azov finally fell, the butchery was as sad as Byron's hell, and in the back gardens of the town men digging for potatoes still find collapsed trenches containing Turkish bones and buttons among iron Russian cannon-balls.

Peter did the hard and brutal work here, but the Don Cossacks

rode off with the glory. Taking Azov suited the Cossack myth. It was a blow struck for Russia and Christendom, in lands far beyond the limits of the tsar's dominion. It was done without orders from any superior, on the spur of the moment, without fear of the forbidding military odds against them. It was the victory of plains people, poor horsemen from the fens and steppes, over settled and heavily armed people who lived behind walls.

The first time I saw Don Cossacks was in Rostov. In a narrow street with broken pavements, several dozen men in uniform were milling and shouting at one another. In the Russian manner, other people passing down Suvorov Street took absolutely no notice of them except to make a slight detour round their noise.

The Cossacks had seized a house, one of those squat old merchant's houses apparently built of blue-and-white marzipan and crystallised fruit. Before the Revolution, the house at 20, Suvorov Street had belonged to the Cossack millionaire Paramonov. Now, defying the city council's orders to move out, the occupying force proposed to defend it as reclaimed Cossack property.

They crowded across the street to harangue me. When, after a diet of Russian novels, you cast eyes on a knout, you recognise it: this leather knout was shorter than a whip but longer than a rope's end, and one of the Cossacks was slapping it against the big red stripe down his uniform trousers. He wore a red-and-white tramdriver cap, pushed to the back of his sweaty blond curls, and his face and neck were brick-red from sun and wind.

The oldest man, wearing a St Andrew's Cross medal on his military tunic, roared at me,
⁴
We are not bandits, as they say in the West! No, we are the party of ecology, the party of the environment! All the Don Cossacks ask for is that the factories be torn down and the steppe be given back to us. We will restore this land to nature, and bring all the poor little town children to come and breathe our fresh air.'