When the Ottomans, led by Sultan Mehmed II, captured Constantinople on May 29, 1453, bringing an end to the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantine Empire, they virtually controlled all the territories that had once been part of it. However, a Byzantine Greek state remained independent on the northeast coast of the Anatolian Peninsula.
The Sea, the Sea!
Xenophon recounts in his Anabasis, written around 385 BC, where he narrates the return journey of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries who had come to support Cyrus the Younger against his brother, King Artaxerxes II of Persia (among them was Xenophon himself, who would lead the army on the return), that the soldiers shouted for joy and exclaimed Thalatta! Thalatta! (the sea, the sea!) upon reaching it on the north coast of Anatolia.
But as the shout became louder and closer, and those who occasionally approached began to run at their maximum speed toward those shouting, and the shouts resumed continuously with an even greater volume as the number of people increased, Xenophon realized that something extraordinary must have happened. Therefore, he mounted his horse, took Lycius and the cavalry with him, and galloped to the rescue. Instantly, they heard the soldiers shouting and conveying the joyful word: “The sea, the sea.”
Xenophon, Anabasis, 4.7
No wonder after a challenging retreat route of almost four thousand kilometers through enemy territory. But Xenophon also indicates that the locals understood what the Greeks were saying.
Not only that, but they were also Greeks themselves and had been living there for at least 300 years.
Indeed, this was the Greek colony of Trapezous, founded by settlers from Miletus or Sinope in 756 BC on the coast of the Black Sea, east of present-day Turkey.
Pontic Greeks
The Greeks who inhabited that region are known as Pontic Greeks. They maintained their culture and language (Pontic Greek), a form of Greek that evolved differently from the current one, given the remote and isolated nature of the territory, virtually until the present day.
After the Ottoman conquest, they migrated to Russia, Georgia, Crimea, and other places in several waves, practically disappearing from the region in 1922 after more than 2,500 years of uninterrupted presence. Today, the exact number of Pontic Greeks scattered around the world is unknown, but there are about 2 million in Greece alone.
But much earlier, in 1204, they had founded their own kingdom, the Empire of Trebizond.
Empire of Trebizond
The city of Trapezounta, where Xenophon’s mercenaries arrived, was called Trapezous in Roman times, and later Trebizond during Byzantine rule (today, the Turks call it Trabzon).
In 1185, the overthrow and death of the last Byzantine emperor of the Comnenian dynasty, Andronicus I, forced his family to flee. Two of his grandchildren, Alexios and David, sought refuge in Georgia, at the court of Queen Tamar. With her help, they conquered Trebizond in April 1204, and later the entire coastal strip, occupying Sinope, Paphlagonia, and Heraclea Pontica.
Alexios proclaimed himself emperor and established his capital in Trebizond. The new Empire of Trebizond prospered and came to control territories in Crimea by the late 13th century. However, Muslim advances in Anatolia kept it isolated from other Greek states for virtually its entire existence.
Thus, they supported Tamerlane when he faced and defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara on July 20, 1402, even providing him with some ships.
They resisted an Ottoman naval attack in 1442, and when Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople on May 29, 1453, ending the Eastern Roman Empire, Trebizond sought help from France, which ignored them. They had to rely on the Aq Qoyunlu or White Sheep Turkomans, whose leaders the Byzantine princesses of Trebizond married.
These Aq Qoyunlu were a federation of Oghuz Turks and Sunni Muslims, enemies of the Ottomans, later allying with Venice and the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Rhodes.
The Empire of Trebizond would thus hold on for eight years after the fall of Constantinople. In 1461, Mehmed II besieged the city for 21 days, after which Emperor David capitulated with the condition that the lives of the citizens be respected and that anyone who wished to leave the city be allowed to do so.
Mehmed did not comply, and the city was plundered. The Empire of Trebizond was the last Byzantine Greek state to fall under Ottoman rule, 24 emperors and 257 years after its founding.
The Ottomans would take another 18 years to definitively eliminate Greek resistance in Pontus. During this time, many Pontic Greek nobles and aristocrats married emperors and kings from foreign dynasties, especially in Russia, Georgia, and Persia, to gain protection and assistance against the Ottoman threat.
Many families of all classes adopted Turkish language and Islam, but often remained crypto-Christians before returning to Greek Orthodoxy in the early 19th century.
The Republic of Pontus
Pontic Greeks still remained in Trebizond when the victorious allies of World War I gathered at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to agree on the armistice conditions with the defeated Central Powers (Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Austria, and Hungary).
There, the creation of a new Greek state in Trebizond, independent of Turkey but also of Greece, the Republic of Pontus, was proposed. The new state was supposed to include a large part of the northeastern region of the current Turkey.
However, the Prime Minister of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, expressed his fear in Paris that an independent Republic of Pontus would be too far away to receive military assistance from Greece and would be too weak to defend itself against a Turkish attack.
Therefore, the proposal did not prosper, and what could have been a resurgence of the Byzantine Greek Trebizond came to nothing.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on July 11, 2019. Puedes leer la versión en español en El Imperio de Trebisonda, el estado griego que sobrevivió a la caída de Constantinopla
Sources
A.A.Vasiliev, The Foundation of the Empire of Trebizond | Michel Kursanskis, L’Empire de Trébizonde et la Géorgie | George Finlay, Mediaeval Greece and the empire of Trebizond, A.D. 1204-1461 | Edwin Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire | Wikipedia
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