Trebizond, August 1438
The council met in the hall above the harbor with the seaward shutters folded back. Heat had stood in the citadel since noon, and the only relief was the wind that came up off the water in the afternoon, John had told the steward to open the room to it and let the harbor in with the air. A clerk had set out watered wine and a dish of salted almonds.
John took the chair at the head and stood a moment behind it before he sat, looking down at the water. A round ship lay with her yards down while lighters worked between her and the customs steps, and a string of mules waited on the quay with their loads still on their backs, the drovers squatting in what shade the warehouse threw. He had watched this same harbor from this window for nine years now, and most days it told him nothing he did not already know.
Kapoulos took the place at his right with a leather case under his arm that he did not open. The rest arranged themselves down the table in the order they always kept. Doranites the protovestiarios came with his tally rolls and sat near the head. Theodoros Kabazites had ridden up from Chaldia three days before, and the dust of the western roads was still worked into the creases of his hands. The Metropolitan folded his own hands over his pectoral cross and kept his eyes on the open shutters, as though the harbor air were something he was enduring. At the foot of the table, where John had put him by his own choice and not by any right of birth, sat Alexios Tzanichites, whose house had once held land in the valleys and now held a share in the silk that came up from Tabriz.
"Theodoros, you rode the farthest to be here," John said. "You begin."
Kabazites set both forearms on the table. His Greek came rougher than the court men's, with the flattened vowels of the marches in it.
"Amasya Bey has turned his face back to us, and that is the whole of why I came up myself. While the Karaman business kept him busy he had no eyes to spare for our valleys. Now he has won it, and a man who has just won looks round for the next soft thing in reach. We sent gifts a few months ago. Weeks later the raids started again."
"We had that report," Doranites said.
"You had the report. I have the valleys it came out of." Kabazites went on. "Since the Forerunner's feast his riders have been in the high paths above Santa, twice in three weeks, parties of forty or fifty horse, light and quick. They drove off what cattle the slopes still carried and they fired a granary at Lariskhane that I had filled with my own grain in the spring, and the headman there, who is my wife's cousin, sent me a handful of the ash in a cloth so that I would not be able to call it a rumor when I stood in front of you."
"Forty horse is not a war," the Metropolitan said.
"No. It is a man learning the road before he brings the rest of it." Kabazites turned to John. "He does not need the cattle, Majesty, and a bey raiding for cattle would not ride the same two paths in front of us twice and let us watch him do it. He is finding out how fast we answer and how far we are willing to come out after him, and once he has that he will come with the army that stood against the Ottomans in the field and did not break. I can hurt the small parties. I cannot stop that."
"How many can he put on the road?"
"Eight thousand if the Çepni clans ride with him. Six without them, and six is more than I can hold the western marches against with the garrisons I have." He spread the dusty fingers flat on the wood. "I need horse that can reach the valleys inside a week, and I do not know where it rides from. That is what I came up the road to say, and the rest of it I will leave to wiser men than a frontier soldier."
John let it sit. He looked down the table to Doranites. "Tell us about the treasury. The good part first — Theodoros has left us short of it."
Doranites unrolled the nearer of his tallies and weighted the corner with the silver cup. "The good part is that for three years the wagons have not rolled with tribute, and the harbor runs fuller than my father ever saw it. The Tabriz roads are open again with the war over, the silk comes up to us by land, and the alum factor at Kerasous shipped more this spring than the two before it together." He ran a nail down the column and let the roll curl shut against the cup. "By the count, we are richer than we have been since the old emperor's time. That is the good part, and I will not pretend it is small."
"And the part you are about to spoil it with."
"The part I am about to spoil it with is that the Genoese take the cream of all of it before it ever reaches our hands. Our own harbor lands the goods and their hulls carry them on; they set the freight and the insurance, they hold our paper from three lean years, and they make sure I do not forget the figure when I sit down with their factor."
Doranites' mouth thinned. "And there is a second thing. The muskets and the cannons that broke the Ottomans — I have put the question to two factors who would know. The price they name is steep, steep enough that I would want it set against a year's customs before I agreed to it. And neither could tell me whether the Emperor sells such things abroad at all, or keeps them for his own hand. That is a question only he can answer."
Tzanichites spoke from the foot of the table for the first time, quietly. "The fire-sticks come out of the Morea, and out of Constantinople now. Every factor on the quay tells the story from the City a little differently, which is usually how I know there is something true under it." He turned the stem of his untouched cup. "They say he is rebuilding the City and sparing no expense. They say he has great ships in the water that carry their guns along the side, not only at the bow, and that one broke an Ottoman line off Gallipoli with a single turn of her broadside. How many he has, the stories quarrel over — a dozen, says one; two and the slips full of more, says a Ragusan who wintered there, and I take the Ragusan. And they say he pays for a good deal of it out of his book workshops. Latin scripture, sold to Italians by the crate."
"A war fleet off selling books." John shook his head. "I would not have credited it, but I have stopped disbelieving things about this man."
Tzanichites set the cup down. "He is not a rumor any longer, Majesty. He sits a long way west of us, but a power that has grown to that size does not stay where it started, and I think we all of us in this room know it, whether or not we have said it out loud."
John reached for his wine, found the cup empty, and a boy came off the wall to fill it before he had to ask. He drank a little and set it down. Outside, the lighters knocked against the round ship's hull and a drover called to his mules.
"Then we are at the matter," he said. "There is a bey on our western paths learning the road to our gate, and there is an emperor in the west who has grown larger than any of us reckoned for when we last took his measure. Tell me what we do, and say it plainly, because the wind will turn off the land by evening and I would like this closed before it does."
It was Kabazites who said the word first, because it was a soldier's answer. "The White Sheep."
"Go on."
"Uthman Beg is strong now in a way he was not a few years ago. The Black Sheep keep him busy to the south, but his hands are freer than they were, and his horse sits on our own border, a week's ride at most and less if the passes stay dry. He has fought the Karamanids himself and he carries no love for Amasya." Kabazites looked round the table. "A daughter of the house to Uthman, or a niece, and the day Gürz Necib rides for us he finds the White Sheep behind him. That is help I can count on a calendar. The Roman kind I will believe when I see one of his sails come round the point."
The Metropolitan stirred, and John waited for it, because he had known from the moment he opened the shutters that it would come.
"A Komnene princess given to a Turkmen lord," the old man said, his hands tightening on the cross. "We say it is how we have always lived as though the saying of it settled the matter and closed God's mouth on it. We have given our daughters to men who pray toward Mecca and called it statecraft, and God has been patient with us a long while, and I would ask this table not to read His patience as His blessing." He turned his face from the shutters at last. "I cannot stop it. I have not stopped it before, and I am too old to think I will start now. But let a priest say it once across this table before the table goes and does it once more."
No one answered him to his face. Tzanichites looked at the grain of the wood in front of him with the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth, and Kabazites studied his own dusty hands, and the quiet did the work that an argument would have done louder and worse.
"It is heard, Father," John said. "It is heard, and the marriage will go forward, because Theodoros is right that horse from the east arrives and horse from the west may not." He set his hand flat on the table. "Doranites, sound the road to Uthman's court, quietly. Nothing in writing until you have brought me back what the bride buys in numbers — how many horse, and in what season they will ride, and not a page of warm friendship in fair words."
"Majesty." Doranites made a mark on the edge of his roll.
"That settles the east, then." John turned his cup a quarter and left it. "Now the west. I will say the hard part myself, rather than wait to be reminded of it."
He had their faces now. Out on the harbor the round ship's mate was paying off his hands.
"We reached for Constantine twice, and came up short both times. The marriage first — he set it aside the way a busy man sets aside a thing that does not serve him. Then the liturgy: we named him emperor of the Romans in our own churches, him and not Demetrios, and sent it west with warm words. He took it kindly. I am told he was pleased." John turned the cup and stopped it. "And then he broke the Ottomans at Edirne and walked into the City, and a man with Constantinople in his hand does not write back to Trebizond about a line in a liturgy."
"And so we do not reach a third time," the Metropolitan said. "We do not go crawling to a man who prints Rome's scripture and kisses the Pope's ring—"
"We give our blood to an emir and you let it pass," Tzanichites said, low, and then heard himself and stopped, and looked down at the table. It had come out before he had decided to spend it, and he did not push it any further. The Metropolitan's color rose and he held his tongue, and the open shutter let in the knock of the oar against the hull and a gull going over.
John let the half-second pass and did not fill it for either of them. "The acknowledgment stands on paper, and it has stood there three years," he said. "What this table decides today is whether that is where it stays. Tzanichites — you began to say that a power that size does not stay where it starts. Finish it. You have been wanting to since you sat down."
The merchant took a moment, and when he went on he had put the heat away and left the plain reckoning behind it.
"He will not stop at the City, Majesty. He will not settle into a rebuilt palace while the whole of Anatolia lies open in front of him and full of Romans who still keep the right feasts. Sooner or later an emperor with ships and guns and a holy word to march under is going to come east."
He turned the cup once more and stilled it under his hand. "So the question in front of us is not whether he marches. It is what we are standing on when he does — a friend who chose him early, with ports to offer him and a clean acknowledgment already said in our churches, or one more small old crown sitting in his road that his captains note down as they pass it."
The Metropolitan drew breath to answer that, but it was Kapoulos who spoke, from John's right hand, and the room turned to him because he had not said a word since they sat.
"There is a thing the harbor says that the abbots would rather it did not, and the merchant is too careful of his place to say it for them, so I will." He had set his hand flat on the leather case but did not open it.
"Men in this town, and monks in the houses above it, say the Skopos now the way a man says a prayer that has at last been answered. We prayed two hundred years and paid and married our daughters off to khans, and then a Palaiologos out of the Morea broke the sultan in open field and walked back into the City, and they are proud of it in a way I have not seen our people proud of anything in my life. More than a few of them say, when the wine is in them, that they would sooner kneel to a Roman emperor come again than be ground down forever under one emir and then the next." He looked at John, not at the Metropolitan. "I wrote the letter that named him three years ago, Majesty. Better the feeling runs through this throne than past it."
The room held. The almonds sweated in their dish, and the salt had dried white along the rim. John looked at it and thought, without quite meaning to, of the line Kapoulos had put into the old letter three years back, that they had taken the sea's salt into their mouths and it agreed with the Skopos. It had been a flourish when Kapoulos wrote it. It read differently now.
Author's Note — On Trebizond
For readers who haven't kept a map of every corner of the Greek world handy: the Empire of Trebizond is the small Byzantine successor state on the southern Black Sea coast, ruled by the Komnenos dynasty since the sack of Constantinople in 1204. It has outlived the main empire by surviving the only way a small state can — paying tribute, marrying its daughters into stronger neighbors (Christian and Muslim alike), and playing Genoa, Georgia, the Turkmen confederations, and the Ottomans against one another.
A short timeline of what's come before in our story:
1429 — John IV takes the Trapezuntine throne, amid the kind of family circumstances the dynasty preferred not to record too closely.
Feb 1434(Book II, Ch. 10) — Trebizond sends Constantine an overture: a marriage and "familial alliance." Constantine, then still a Despot in the Morea, sets it aside as low leverage.
Early spring 1435(side story) John resolves to reach again — acknowledging Constantine as the true emperor of the Romans (over Demetrios) in the Trapezuntine liturgy, and invoking the Ieros Skopos.
1435–37 — Constantine breaks Murad, drives the Ottomans from Europe, and retakes Constantinople. The warm acknowledgment from Trebizond never converts into anything; his rise outpaces the relationship.
1437–38 — The Ottoman remnant fragments further (Yakub at Bursa, Karaman holding Ankara by the Cairo settlement), the Aq Qoyunlu "White Sheep" grow strong on Trebizond's eastern border, and the Amasya bey Gürz Necib — fresh from the Ottoman war — turns his attention back to Trebizond's valleys.