In 1304 a Genoese noble named Benedetto Zaccaria took a Byzantine island and told its rightful owner he had done it for the owner's own good. Benedetto, who already controlled the alum-rich town of Phocaea on the Anatolian coast, seized Chios and then explained to the court in Constantinople that he had acted only to keep the island out of the hands of Turkish pirates. The Byzantine emperor, Andronikos II Palaiologos, had no fleet capable of throwing him off and so did the only thing he could: he accepted the seizure and dressed it up as a grant, leasing Chios to the man who had already taken it. So began the Lordship of Chios, twenty-five years in which one ambitious family ran an Aegean island as if it were their own kingdom.
The Zaccaria treated Chios as an inheritance. When Benedetto I died in 1307, the island passed to his son, Paleologo Zaccaria — named for his mother's imperial family — and when Paleologo died in 1314, it went to Martino and Benedetto II, cousins of Paleologo who had been co-heirs to the wider Zaccaria possessions. It was a small domain but a rich one, yielding an annual income of 120,000 gold hyperpyra, the Byzantine coin, from mastic and trade. The lease, granted at first for ten years and renewed at five-year intervals, kept up the polite fiction that the family ruled on the emperor's behalf. In practice the Zaccaria answered to no one but themselves, governing a Greek population from a fortified base while paper bound them, ever more loosely, to a Constantinople that could not enforce its claims.
Of all the Zaccaria, Martino reached highest. With a small army and fleet he built Chios into the core of a little maritime realm that gathered in other islands off the Anatolian shore, including Samos and Kos. He won real victories against the Turkish pirates who plagued these waters, and his successes drew praise from his Latin contemporaries, and Philip of Taranto, the titular Latin emperor of Constantinople, in 1325 honored him with the grand and largely imaginary title 'King and Despot of Asia Minor.' It was a heady moment for a Genoese adventurer on a borrowed island. But Martino's ambition was beginning to outrun his judgment, and in pushing it he had quietly aimed himself away from the empire that still, on paper, owned the ground beneath his feet.
Martino's hold tightened into something harder. He had leaned increasingly toward the Latin and Papal powers and away from Byzantium, and around 1325 he shoved his co-lord Benedetto II aside to rule Chios alone. For a while it did not matter, because the aging Andronikos II had no means to act and renewed the lease in 1324. Then the throne changed hands. In 1328 his grandson, the young and energetic Andronikos III Palaiologos, took power in Constantinople, and the calculation shifted. The new emperor was looking for an opening, and Martino, by building an unauthorized fortress on the island, handed him a pretext.
What undid the lordship in the end was not an imperial decree but the will of the people Martino ruled. A leading Chian noble named Leo Kalothetos traveled to the new emperor and his chief minister, John Kantakouzenos, and proposed on behalf of the island's Greeks that Byzantium take Chios back. Andronikos III agreed at once and sailed against Martino with a large fleet. The Genoese lord barricaded himself in his castle, but the ground gave way beneath him: the native Greek population defected, his co-ruler Benedetto II surrendered, and Martino, isolated, capitulated. Benedetto II asked to govern the island in the emperor's name with the same rights Martino had held; Andronikos III refused, and named the loyal Kalothetos instead. In 1329, the Lordship of Chios was finished.
Byzantine rule, restored at the islanders' own request, did not last long. In 1346, with the empire torn by a civil war, another Genoese, Simone Vignoso, seized the island again. This time the conquerors organized themselves not as a noble dynasty but as a corporation: the Maona di Chio e di Focea, a chartered company that ran Chios for profit. Under the Maona, control passed to the Giustiniani family, who held the island for more than two centuries, until it finally fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1566. The Zaccaria's brief, brash lordship had been only the first act of a long Genoese presence, but it set the pattern: Chios was a prize rich enough that someone was always reaching for it.
The Lordship was centered on the castle and harbor of Chios town, on the island's east coast near 38.40 N, 26.02 E, with the Zaccaria's mainland base of Phocaea on the Anatolian coast to the east-northeast and their wider island holdings, including Samos and Kos, stretching south along the Turkish shore. Chios lies in the northern Aegean; the airport is LGHI. From altitude the medieval Castle of Chios, much of it built and rebuilt across the Genoese and Ottoman centuries, anchors the old town beside the harbor, with the narrow Chios Strait and the Anatolian mainland clearly visible just to the east.