The Galata Tower, the Genoese Christea Turris above the Golden Horn
The tower the Genoese colony rebuilt in 1348 and called Christea Turris, crowning the walls of Galata across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. A foreign merchant community raising a fortified tower opposite the imperial capital is the whole quarrel over the straits in one building.
Genoa did not hold Constantinople; it held the suburb across the water, and in 1348 it fortified that suburb with a stone tower higher than anything on the Byzantine shore. The gesture was read exactly as it was meant. Within a year the emperor was at war with the colony he had licensed, and Venice was drawn in behind him — the opening of a struggle over the Bosporus in which the empire increasingly became the ground the two Italian republics fought over rather than a party to the fight. The tower still stands in the Karaköy quarter of Istanbul. See the Genoese-Venetian rivalry and the fourteenth-century crisis on the Bosporus.
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