Diogo Homem’s 16th-century map of the Black Sea
Pedro Tafur ventures out from Constantinople to visit a sultan, an emperor, and the centre of the Black Sea slave trade.
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Sources:
Pero Tafur: Travels and Adventures (1435-1439), translated and edited with an introduction by Malcolm Letts. Harper & brothers, 1926.
Barker, Hannah. That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Gregory, Timothy E. A History of Byzantium. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.
Script:
Pedro, when last we spoke, was venturing forth from doomed Constantinople. He was not leaving for good, was not saying final farewells to its imperial family, which he seems to have found very agreeable, or to its general population, which he did not appreciate so much. It was closer to a day-trip excursion for him, taking the early morning train out of town with plans made to have seats on the last one back.
Pedro was going to what is now the Turkish city of Edirne, what had been that of Adrianople, and was, when Pedro traveled there, the Ottoman capital, a status it had held since 1369. You can find Edirne in what is now the extreme northwest of Turkey, closing in on the Greek and Bulgarian borders to its west and north, more the former than the latter. It was not situated in Anatolia, or Asia Minor, at all, its location is a reminder that the Ottomans did not simply run up against Constantinople’s oh-so-imposing walls and stop there, stymied in their ambitions and confused as to what was to be done next.
Instead, they engulfed the city, their waves washing around it, one might say, though descriptions of that sort have a bit too much of the ring of the natural world to them. They conjure up unthinking forces, inevitable and environmental in character, rather than an increasingly imposing and very human regional power that would reach Vienna in the late 17th century and was going to stick around until WWI. I do sometimes step outside the edges of the strictly “medieval” on here, but the Ottomans were going to outlive the focus of this podcast by an extremely healthy margin.
Around half a dozen years before Pedro’s arrival in Edirne, Constantinople’s Ottoman conqueror, Mehmed II, would have been born there. He would grow to rule over an empire that stretched well past Edirne, north and west, with vassals in Wallachia and Serbia, and land on Greece’s Ionian coast. Maybe Pedro even saw little Mehmed in the city, though of course he doesn’t mention any particular imperial children in his observations. He would be there and in Trebizond, on the Black Sea. He would be in Kaffa, witnessing and taking part in the unpleasantly healthy business of slavery, and we will be there with him.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast traversing that world in the footsteps of its travellers, and a history podcast with a Patreon. One where you can support this ongoing expedition while enjoying early, extra, and ad-free listening. And thank you, everyone who has already done so. Whether you’re currently on there or have been in the past, I really do appreciate it.
And now, back to the story.
As previously noted, our traveller was taking the opportunity to stretch his legs a little from Constantinople, using it as a kind of home base from which to get out and explore further afield.
He was visiting the Ottoman capital of Edirne, and as was often the case in his travels, Pedro had help. In this case, the Byzantine emperor’s brother—since killed by the time of Pedro’s writing—had set him up with a Genoese merchant’s brother going in the right direction, with instructions to see Pedro safely there and back. The journey was nine days, passing “certain small places which,” he said, “need not be described”—apologies on his behalf if you happen to be in or from one of those places—and when they’d reached the city, he stayed with his Genoese guide who had a house there. There’s no mention of money, rarely is in his writing, but one gets the sense that he was not actually called on to spend for large stretches at a time, that he was in the pleasant situation of being wealthy/noble enough that he often did not need to.
There in Edirne, Pedro wrote of the people’s horses, how there were so very many of them that it seemed no one went anywhere on foot, how they were small enough that he said he would rather go to war on his own country’s donkeys than the Ottoman horses. He wrote of their tents which contained anything they could need, of their cloaks, made of fine wool or silk, and of the many furs on display, the martin, sable, ermine, and fox.
Of the people, Pedro was highly complimentary, remarking that while in regard to the local Greeks, the “Turks [were] ruthless and treat[ed] them with great cruelty,” they were more generally “a noble people, much given to truth. …. They [were] very merry and benevolent, and of good conversation, so much so that in those parts, when one [spoke] of virtue, it [was] sufficient to say that [someone was] like a Turk.” Perhaps a surprising attitude to find in a European of his time.
I don’t know that his friends back in Constantinople would have had quite the same levels of admiration for these people, but then I suppose Pedro had the great advantage of not being born somewhere that brought him into violent conflict with them. He got to meet them from what was a relatively neutral position, with heavy emphasis on that relatively part, and as to their ruler, he was equally positive.
Murad II was about 45 years old, Pedro thought, though the truth was more like 35. He was “of good stature,” Pedro said, “and handsome of feature. He seemed from his bearing to be a discreet person, grave in his looks, and … so handsomely attended” by horsemen that the Castilian traveller had never seen the like.
As a new arrival of interest, Pedro was summoned in to speak with the sultan, and given the chance to see “his person and household and people,” so perhaps he did see young Mehmed there. Pedro was asked and answered questions about the Byzantine emperor and his travel arrangements, “when and how [he] had departed, and in what state, and in whose ships,” something he seems to have had no compunction about doing. I suppose he did not have much of a choice.
He saw Murad entering the city, something Pedro said he did only to visit the baths, saw him accompanied as he went by music, song, and “a great crowd of women,” and only returning very late at night. He also accompanied him on the hunt, something you were basically always going to be doing when dropping in on a ruler of the period, in this case carried out with falcons, leopards, and quote, “all the hunting accoutrements.” He noted the men’s clothes, in particular their linings, which astonished him in their quantity and in their great richness.
Pedro wasn’t actually very long in Edirne. It really was just a tourist-y stop along the way for him, and he would have had an even shorter time in town were it not for his Genoese companion having business still to attend to. After eight days he would be returning to Constantinople but only to pass back through it. He would be leaving the one “empire,” now reduced to just about that city, and journeying to yet another doomed example, that of Trebizond.
In Constantinople, Pedro informed the emperor’s brother that having been to Edirne, he would quite like to journey on into the Black Sea and visit Genoese Kaffa next. The emperor’s brother dutifully had the arrangements made, recruiting a willing aid who might shepherd Pedro to his next destination, just as had been the case in getting him to Edirne. A ship’s captain was found and a Castilian friend who would arrange for the necessary supplies, and Pedro was soon on the move once more, his vessel entering the Black Sea and following its Turkish, or southern, coast.
They reached Sinop, where the land juts northward at very roughly the sea’s east-west midpoint on the map. It was a Genoese holding at this point, and a place where the ship stopped to unload some goods and take on others. Pedro remarked on the very strong crossbows that were made in the area, and how men would bury them along the shore, ready to be dug up and sold in secret, so that no one knew they were trafficking weapons to Christians. Apparently not an airtight secret.
Further along, to the southeast of that sea, they came to modern-day Trabzon, then still the heart of the Empire of Trebizond, stretching along that southern coast. So it had been since Alexios Komnenos, of Byzantine imperial descent, had seized the city in and among the chaos of the Fourth Crusade’s occupation of Constantinople. His successors had clung to that successor state for the 230-something years since, fending off everyone from the Seljuks to the restored Byzantine Empire, once the Latin Empire of Constantinople had fallen. And those successors would manage to hold out a little longer than Constantinople too, a little longer after Pedro had visited, only to be overtaken by the same conqueror, Mehmed, about eight years later.
It was John IV’s Trebizond that Pedro reached, its ruler then in the first decade of a very solid 30-year reign, the city itself well walled and with a population that Pedro put at about 4,000 people. Like his Ottoman counterpart before him, John was full of questions for Pedro as to the doings of the Byzantine emperor and his court. Unlike Murad II, John also wanted to know all about his own brother, Alexander. This brother would eventually return to Trebizond as co-emperor, but at just this moment Alexander was off in Constantinople, marrying the daughter of the lord of Mytilene and causing John some concern that his new Mytilenean uncle might be making plans with the Byzantine emperor and the Genoese to send a fleet against him, a concern which his visitor confirmed was indeed warranted. Pedro, quote, “assured [John] that this was so, whereupon he was much cast down and replied that he had sufficient to resist them all, and many more.” An admirable, if perhaps misguided, show of confidence.
Pedro has John as having killed his father, just as the father had done to his own father before him in order to take power. Other sources on the story have John only ordering that his father be brought to him, but the two men told to do so thinking that John would be even more pleased with them if they simply killed the father and saved him the trouble. As the story goes, John was not more pleased at his employees’ efforts to really exceed expectations and go above and beyond, and he had both men mutilated for their troubles.
Pedro seems to have had some rather frank exchanges with the rulers of the region. Like other rulers who Pedro had visited, John wanted Pedro to stay, or at least Pedro wrote that he did—he was, in his own telling at least, apparently someone who you really wanted to have around. He wrote of a conversation in which he informed John that, among other reasons for not wishing to remain in Trebizond, the emperor’s decision to marry a Turk would surely bring him harm. I married her only to make her Christian, John was to have replied, to which Pedro is to have answered that, quote, “they say, rather, that they gave her to you so that she could turn you into a [Muslim], by reason of your expectations from her and the little that you have."
Harsh words, it would seem, to inform a ruler that he was by far the weaker party in a political marriage, that he was widely viewed as such and not expected to exercise any influence on the other side due to being on the wrong end of that power imbalance, but John appears to have taken all of this in stride. He ordered that Pedro should be given all the food he needed and urged him to return, making one wonder about the authenticity of the exchange, or wonder at the great need which the Emperor of Trebizond had for allies and for military aid. Either way, Pedro seems again to have been very well treated, there, and once more in Kaffa, where the Genoese podesta welcomed him and promised to supply everything that he needed. Before nightfall, Pedro went about the city where he said he admired much that was strange to him, though “admirable” is not necessarily the impression he gives of the city.
Pedro had arrived at the Crimean Peninsula and in a centre of Genoese trade, but one which had recently recognized a khan. He was in what had long been the land of the Golden Horde, otherwise known as the Ulus of Jochi after Genghis’s oldest son, but that was coming apart, and the founder of the Crimean Giray dynasty was already alive and active in the area. That dynasty would rule until the late 18th century when it was swallowed up by the Russian Empire.
The last Giray Khan of Crimea was well-educated and well-traveled, multilingual and full of ideas for achieving reform and change in the khanate. However, the application of those ideas was not always well received by elements among his own people, and then there were the external pressures, from Catherine’s Russian Empire on the one hand and Abdul Hamid’s Ottoman one on the other. The khan would seek a peaceful way out in Edirne, the location of his birth, but he was deemed too much of a threat to be allowed to live. The Ottomans had him arrested and then executed in 1787, some 350 years after Pedro’s visit to Kaffa.
Pedro viewed the city as being only “indifferently walled,” with just a little ditch around that, but also as well-armed with all manner of defensive arms and artillery. It was a place where diverse peoples of varied nations came to trade, where “spices, gold, pearls, and precious stones” were sold, along with furs from all over the world, and all at a very reasonable price. But bread and fruit were expensive and often stolen, and women were traded for a measure of wine. It was also, by Pedro’s characterization, a real hive of scum and villainy, and he actually presents that moral griminess as a kind of defensive asset. It could have been taken or destroyed many times over, he said, but those around it would not allow for such a thing to happen because it was simply too useful.
They said that to destroy Kaffa would mean all of those vile deeds and practices spilling out and being committed in the surrounding lands. The place functioned as a kind of container of transgressions which they used, to quote Pedro, “for their evil doings and thefts, and their great wickedness, such as fathers selling their children, and brother selling brother. These things, and worse, are done there.” It was further said that when people would leave the city, they would turn back and shoot an arrow against the wall, releasing their sins with the shot. It was like a kind of early “what happens in Vegas” sort of thing, only rather more serious than a marketing slogan.
After this short break, we’ll get into the unpleasant business of Kaffa.
…
The city of Kaffa was very important in terms of trade in general, with a great deal of merchandise flowing through it, including—to add to that earlier list of spices and precious stones—honey, wax, wood, and salt, along with the grain which went to feed Constantinople as Egypt’s had in the past. But in regards to one product in particular the city was noteworthy and not for the most ethical of reasons.
Pedro would spend a fair bit of time on the topic of slavery in Kaffa, the origin, or thereabouts, of all those trafficked individuals who we met in his time in Egypt, the place, he said, where more enslaved were sold than anywhere else in the world at that time. Restricting our focus to the Mediterranean world, which is what Pedro was actually speaking of, the Black Sea was hardly the only source of the enslaved for Genoese and Venetian merchants. As Hannah Barker, author of The Most Precious Merchandise, writes, these sources inexhaustively included Iberian wars, Balkan and Aegean piracy, and North African ports, but the Black Sea, more generally than just Kaffa, provided the single largest group. From there, Genoese ships might make stops in Pera or Chios, both Genoese holdings.
They might do business in the markets and with the merchants and pirates along the way, with Barker additionally listing Constantinople, Candia, Famagusta, Bursa, Mytilene, Modon, and Rhodes as important waypoints. She writes that “A ship bound from Kaffa to Genoa might stop in Chios and sell five slaves to locals, buy eight from pirates, and sell thirty to a Catalan merchant for shipment to Majorca,” creating a complex web of transactions done in human bodies. Others, such as future Mamluk sultans Baybars and Barsbāy, were also taken across the Black Sea but only to its southern coast. They were then taken overland by one of a few different trunk roads by which traffic was funneled by the mountain ranges.
The sultan of Egypt who we met a few episodes ago, had buying agents there in Kaffa, Pedro said, adding that the Christians had their own excuses, that the purchase of enslaved Christians would save them from being sold into conversion, something that Christian observers viewed as weakening their cause and strengthening that of Islam. It was certainly strengthening that of the Mamluks, something that there were efforts to prevent.
There had been pre-Mamluk embargoes, such as that of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 against the sale of arms, iron, and timber to the, quote, “Saracens,” and by the early 14th century, there were attempts to regulate the supply of human bodies. It was to be reinforced in the Genoese case by the consuls in Pera and Kaffa, but the trade was a very profitable one, even with the threat of fines, and soon after bans were placed, Barker writes that Pope John XXII was still, quote, “accus[ing] the Genoese of selling enslaved Christians to Muslims and even capturing free Christians to sell them.” Early 15th-century papal bulls attempted to more directly deal with the trade.
By the time of Pedro’s arrival, Genoa had made another effort at regulating the flow of bodies to Egypt. The earliest reference to it is in 1420, but the fullest description would not come until a 1434 letter to Pope Eugene IV, just a few years before Pedro’s arrival in Kaffa.
The letter expressed concern that, quote, “it had been reported to our dishonour that Christian slaves have been transported by Genoese hands from Kaffa to Egypt and other kingdoms of the infidels, which crime is as foreign from us as can be.” It went on to explain the lengths the Genoese were going to, the treaties with neighbouring lords ensuring that “no one may take slaves beyond the boundaries of the Black Sea except in [their] ships.” All were to be gathered, counted, and taxed in Kaffa first, and they were to be questioned too, with any claiming to be Christian or wishing to become Christian “set down on land and offered for sale to a Christian.” This, the letter claimed, was, quote, “done so that in no way may any Christians be permitted to be taken to the lands of the infidels, but in addition many non-Christians may become faithful.”
The policy would drive slave merchants from the other Black Sea ports to Kaffa while preventing them from going on to Egypt. It would also, not coincidentally, make for a very profitable Genoese hold on the trade in that sea, something that their naval power, won in the mid-14th century, permitted, but of course, the Mamluks themselves would have something to say about all of this.
One such case would come in the late 1420s when a shipment bound for Egypt was detained due the Christians aboard. The Mamluks, who had a Genoese community in Alexandria that they could act on directly, responded by giving them a hefty fine. In turn, the local Genoese consul initially paid the fine, doing so with a tax on all Genoese imports, but the Genoese government soon ordered an end to the tax, thinking it a bad precedent to give in on the matter. They sent a diplomatic mission in 1431 with the goal of negotiating “both the recent fine of the slaves, and the distribution of spices, and other daily annoyances.”
Genoa had a great deal of leverage in these negotiations, effectively possessing the power to open and close the tap for Mamluk access to bodies from the Black Sea, and on that occasion an agreement was reached. But that power, as ever, would be contested. The Mamluks had plenty of reason to attempt to circumvent Genoese involvement, while the Venetians were busily attempting to undermine their Italian rivals' hold on the waters. Through all of this, Barker writes, “Kaffa remained the commercial hub of the Black Sea,” as it was at the time of our traveller’s visit there, finding it, by his estimate, larger in population than Seville, but the Genoese grip would begin to weaken.
In the 1440s, not long after our time there, Muslim merchants, mostly Turks, started to replace Genoese in the business of transporting Black Sea slaves. The fall of Constantinople, despite the swift arrangement of safe passage and trade treaties, would cause a bit of an Italian exodus from the sea. Then, in 1475, a dispute within the Crimean Khanate brought the Ottomans in. They conquered Kaffa, and its Genoese population were forced to surrender their slaves and more than half of their possessions’ value. Thousands were captured and shipped off to the new-ish Ottoman capital. With their conquest, the Ottomans seized control of the Black Sea trade in the enslaved, but that was not for another 30 years or so.
As Barker writes, quote:
“Neither the papal embargo policy nor the urging of crusade strategists prevented Italian merchants from engaging in the [sale of slaves to the Mamluks]. … Venice, Genoa, and the Mamluks all recognized the significance of the … trade in the context of holy war. In principle, Venice and Genoa supported the efforts of crusaders and the papacy to undermine Mamluk power. In practice, they were willing to enforce specific policies, such as the embargo on war materials, for limited periods of time. The Mamluks, however, held the trump card: access to the lucrative market in spices and other eastern goods at Alexandria.”
We are not quite yet up to the time of Portuguese ships on Indian coasts.
As for Pedro’s view of the trade, he describes a transaction in Kaffa as follows. A person is stripped to the skin on full display. They then put on a cloak of felt, as if some sort of modesty is only now called for. A price is announced. Then the cloak is thrown off, and the person walks to and fro in demonstration of their body and health. The seller makes their promises, that in the event of death by pestilence within 60 days they “will return the price paid,” a peculiarly familiar idea in this grim context, a guarantee with the promise of your money back in the terms and conditions if anything went wrong.
And we read that Pedro took part in this business. He reported on what went on as a direct participant, as a buyer and slaveholder. He purchased two women and one man, and he says that at time of writing nearly 20 years later, he still had them with him in Córdoba, and, in a striking detail, their children also. Pedro was not just a witness to what went on there.
While in the region, Pedro visited the Don River, then, as now, flowing into the Sea of Azov and bringing with it a great deal of merchandise, including the sturgeon. It was a “very good fish,” Pedro said, “both fresh and salted,” and found as far away as Castille and Flanders. There were certain fish whose eggs were casked and carried to Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere, eggs which he found to be “very salty.”
Pedro wrote about the Tartars, and I won’t linger too long over that material, as we have visited them with other travellers and he did hit on many of the very same themes, of weapons and dress, horses and mobile housing. He wished to go among them and learn more, he says, but he was warned against doing so, was, quote, “advised against it, since it would be unsafe to venture among people who are constantly moving and live without restraint, owing obedience to no ruler.”
It was a little romantic, and also more than a little threatening, and as warnings went, it proved to be an effective one. Pedro was going to take that advice. He was not going to go out among the Tartars, was not going to be drinking the camel’s milk or eating horse meat beaten beneath the saddle on the ride. No mention of mare’s milk, so I guess he wouldn’t be enjoying that either.
Pedro would write that he wished to remain around Kaffa for a while, but you would not necessarily guess that based on his parting words on the region. There was not exactly a great deal of warmth.
“I desired greatly to remain in that country,” he wrote, “but the people were bestial, and the food did not agree with me. The country is almost as inaccessible as Greater India, where it is impossible to go, and there is little to see in other parts of the country, except those Christians I spoke of as miserable and ruined by the ill neighbourhood of the Tartars, and their want of a ruler to govern them; and so they will continue to suffer until God takes pity on them. The city of Kaffa is so cold in winter that the ships freeze in the harbour. Such is the bestiality and deformity of the people that I was glad to give up the desire I had to see more, and to return to Greece. I therefore collected my goods and departed from Kaffa.”
Pedro’s way back went via Trebizond, where again the emperor sought to keep Pedro there, and again Pedro refused. Their ship came to Constantinople, but they were not allowed to get too close to the city, not yet. There were worries over plague, and a quarantine had been arranged for any ships coming from the Black Sea. Those aboard were to spend 60 days in a shelter that had been built two leagues from the city before they were to be allowed to approach it, but Pedro would not be waiting 60 days. He was not born to be the type of person who had to.
He sent word to the city, requesting permission to proceed, and he says two seemingly contradictory things here. He says he saw two men dead of plague in the quarantine lodgings, but he also says that he didn’t stay in those lodgings, that he stayed well away from the others and instead spent two days in the fields. Maybe he entered the lodging but didn’t stay. Maybe he just saw the dead carried out. Maybe he lied.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Pedro would not need to wait around outside the city with the common folk. He would be collected by ship and reenter Constantinople long before those 60 days were up. He would spend some time there, seeing various churches and other sites which we’ve visited ourselves on previous episodes. He would go to see the city of Bursa with a Genoese friend who had a house there. He would see the Ottomans on the march, taking a route that brought them close to Constantinople and caused a great deal of alarm inside its walls that maybe this time the army was coming for them. “It would have been difficult to make much resistance,” Pedro wrote, so “It was, therefore, a gratifying thing to see so great a host depart without peril or labour.”
Pedro was two months in Constantinople and Pera, and then he departed, sailing out on the Sea of Marmara, just as he had arrived. The ship had entered the Dardanelles when some men were spotted on the shore trying to attract their attention, enslaved Christian who hoped to be picked up, the captain believed, telling Pedro he absolutely shouldn’t pay attention. But Pedro, at least in his version of events, insisted on going ashore and picking them up and was given a little boat with which to do so. A fight broke out, with some men who were not so happy to let the men go free rushing at the boat while others came in to support Pedro from the ship.
The enslaved Christians would be freed, and Pedro would make it back aboard suffering only an arrow in the foot. “It was well done,” he celebrated, “for we lost nothing and served God.” No word, as far as I can see, as to whether Pedro, who brought three enslaved with him, would actually set these “rescued” people free, or just ensure that they were instead sold to other Christians. Perhaps I will find some answer to that question by next time.
Next time on the podcast, we will, I believe, be wrapping up the Pedro story. I’ll hopefully have it out to you a lot more quickly than I managed this one—some months seem to be like that. Thank you very much for listening. I’ll talk to you then.