Try to imagine a group of shareholders who, instead of buying government bonds, agree to finance a military expedition, conquer an island in the Aegean, plant a Genoese flag on it, and govern it as a private company for two centuries, collecting dividends from the trade of a resin and a rock. It’s not a novel of colonial political fantasy. It’s exactly what happened to Chios, a Greek island just off the coast of Anatolia, when in 1346 a company of Genoese merchants called the Maona occupied it and effectively turned it into a corporate colony.
Genoa did not have an empire in the sense that Rome, or later London and Paris, understood it. It did not send royal armies or hoist state flags in the name of an absolute sovereign. It sent its merchants, armed with capital and contracts, and let them — not the city government — make history. The Maona of Chios is perhaps the most striking example of this distinctly Genoese attitude: building an empire with the tools of finance, not the tools of the crown.
What was a maona: the joint-stock company that conquered an island
The word “maona” comes from the Arabic mu’awana, which means mutual aid, mutual assistance. In Genoese commercial language of the late Middle Ages, it indicated a consortium of private citizens who pooled capital to finance a risky venture — often military, almost always profitable — then dividing the proceeds in proportion to their shares. It’s no exaggeration to call it an ancestor of the modern joint-stock company: there were “places” (the shares, exactly like stocks), there were distributed profits, there was even a board of directors.
Genoa had already experimented with this mechanism elsewhere — also in the management of its own public debt, another story of unscrupulous finance that deserves its own chapter. But with Chios the maona took a qualitative leap: from financial instrument to instrument of territorial governance. The company that conquered the island in 1346, led by the Zaccaria family and later placed under the control of the Giustiniani family, did not limit itself to doing business on Chios. It settled there, administered it, defended it, taxed it. For the Republic of Genoa it was perfectly convenient: expansion occurred at zero cost to the public coffers, the investors bore the risk, and in return the city obtained a strategic outpost in the heart of the eastern Mediterranean, at the gates of Constantinople.
The monopoly that was worth an island: alum and mastic
Why such interest in a relatively small island, nearly three thousand kilometers from Genoa by sea? The answer lies in two products that today sound almost bizarre, but in the Middle Ages were worth their weight in gold: alum and mastic.
Alum was a mineral essential to the European textile industry: it was used to fix colors in the dyeing of wool fabrics, a process without which the entire Flemish and Italian wool industry simply could not function. Chios and the surrounding areas of Anatolia controlled by the Genoese — particularly Phocaea, on the coast opposite the island — were among the main sources of supply of this material in the eastern Mediterranean. Whoever controlled the alum mines controlled, in practice, an essential gear in the continental textile economy.
Mastic was even more singular: an aromatic resin that oozes from a particular shrub, Pistacia lentiscus, which grows almost exclusively in the southern part of the island of Chios. Used in pharmacology, in perfumery, in cooking — and still today a distinctive ingredient in Greek sweets and liqueurs — Chios mastic was a product that could not be found elsewhere in comparable quantities and quality. The Giustiniani made it an iron-fisted monopoly: production was regulated, supervised, taxed to the last penny. Anyone caught smuggling mastic risked the most severe penalties. An entire island economy was bent around a shrub.
The Giustiniani: a family that became government
Over time, control of the Maona of Chios concentrated in the hands of the Giustiniani family, which even adopted this surname en masse — a typically Genoese operation, where great consorted houses often united names and interests to strengthen political and patrimonial unity. Members of the family who resided on the island were not officials sent from Genoa with a term mandate: they were colonists, permanently settled, who built palaces, fortifications, churches, and administered local justice for generations.
Imagine the life of a Genoese merchant-administrator in Chios in the fifteenth century: he probably spoke a mixture of Genoese and Greek, often married local women, lived between two worlds. Genoa remained the distant motherland, the political and religious reference point, but daily life was consumed among the orange groves of the island, trading with Turkish and Byzantine merchants, and the ever-increasing tensions with the Ottoman Empire advancing relentlessly from the east. It was a fragile balance, maintained with diplomacy more than with force: the Giustiniani paid tribute to the sultan when needed, cultivated commercial relations with everyone, and thus managed to prosper in a corner of the world contested between empires far greater than themselves.
“Genuensis ergo mercator” — “Genoese, therefore merchant”: this is how medieval chroniclers summed up the identity of an entire people, for whom commerce was not just one profession among others, but a way of being in the world.
— recurring expression in medieval Genoese mercantile chronicles
Palazzo San Giorgio: where the revenues from the Aegean arrived
And it is here that history returns to Genoa, physically. The revenues that arrived from Chios — the income from the mastic monopoly, the alum taxes, the commercial duties — flowed into the financial circuits of the Republic, and in particular into that extraordinary institution that was the Bank of San Giorgio, headquartered in the Palazzo San Giorgio on the harbor front. It was no accident that the Bank of San Giorgio, the oldest public bank in Europe, was intimately linked to these colonial enterprises: it managed public debt, but also overseas territorial concessions, in an interweaving of state finance and private finance that is perhaps the most modern and surprising aspect of this entire story.
Walking today along the Porto Antico, with the painted facade of Palazzo San Giorgio standing out against the sky, it is difficult to imagine that within those walls discussions took place about budgets that included the price of mastic from a Greek island three thousand kilometers away. Yet it is precisely there that the threads of a Genoese power were woven together — a power built not on legions, but on ledgers.
The end of an era and the signs that remain
Genoese rule over Chios lasted about two centuries, until 1566, when the island fell under Ottoman control — the last, tenacious Genoese outpost in the Aegean to yield to the Turkish expansion that had already swallowed Constantinople. It was the quiet end of a colonial experiment that was more unique than rare: an island governed not by a royal viceroy, but by a family of merchant-shareholders.
Today on Chios you can still find tangible traces of those two centuries: fortifications, watchtowers, the urban layout of the medieval borough of the main city that still bears the marks of Genoese urban planning. In Genoa, on the other hand, the most visible sign remains precisely Palazzo San Giorgio: its facade, its main hall, tell the story of a city that thought — and administered — on a Mediterranean scale, not just a civic one. Walking today through the caruggi of the historic center means traversing the same streets where these merchants returned from their long voyages, where they unloaded shipments of mastic and alum, where they negotiated the freight rates of galleys destined for the Aegean.
A detail that surprises: the island that paid two masters
There is a paradox that makes this story even more fascinating: for much of its rule, the Maona of Chios had to pay tributes both to Genoa and, periodically, to the powers that overlooked the area — Byzantines first, Ottomans later. It was not a colonial domination in the classical sense of unilateral exploitation: rather, it was a negotiated balance, made of payments, reciprocal commercial concessions, mixed marriages, cultural exchanges. A model of flexible, almost diplomatic power, far removed from the muscular image we often associate with European colonialism of the centuries that followed. Genoa, after all, had always preferred ledgers to armies: it was a republic of merchants, not conquerors, and even on Chios this vocation remained intact until the end.
Experience Genoa where it all began
Those who walk along Porto Antico today, their gaze sweeping from the Lanterna to Palazzo San Giorgio, are retracing the same mental pathways of those merchants who conceived of the Mediterranean as a single unified territory, without rigid borders between the motherland and its most distant extensions. Staying in the historic center of Genoa means waking up every morning just steps away from those places where the fates of a Greek island three thousand kilometers away were decided — a perspective that changes the way you look at these alleys, these facades, this port.
If this history has piqued your curiosity and you want to discover what other secrets the caruggi, Porto Antico, and the palaces that saw merchants, bankers, and admirals pass through are hiding, Genoa awaits you with the same willingness as always. We at genovabb.it can handle the practical side — finding you an authentic home in the heart of the city — while you lose yourself in the stories that every stone here has to tell.
