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The Colonies of Genoa in the Black Sea Region
This book focuses on the network of the Genoese colonies in the Black Sea area and their diverse multi-ethnic societies. It raises the problems of continuity of the colonial patterns, reveals the importance of the formation of the late medieval/early modern colonialism, the urban demography, and the functioning of the polyethnic entangled society of Caffa in its interaction with the outer world. It offers a novel interpretation of the functioning of this late medieval colonial polyethnic society and rejects the widely accepted narrative portraying the whole history of Caffa of the fifteenth century as a period of constant decline and depopulation.
Evgeny Khvalkov is an Associate Professor at the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg.
Acknowledgments
Since this book evolved from my doctoral thesis, it is my pleasure to thank my supervisor Prof. Luca Mola and my second reader Prof. Jorge Flores for their direction, assistance, and guidance at each stage of my research. Their recommendations and suggestions have been invaluable for this project. I owe my deepest gratitude to Prof. Sergey P. Karpov, who introduced me to the world of the Italian documentary sources on the history of the Black Sea region and thus contributed into shaping my professional interests when I was an undergraduate student. Indeed, I owe to him an honour to be one of the researchers in the field of the Genoese colonization in the aforementioned area. I am indebted to Prof. Michel Balard for many ideas which have helped me to broaden the scope of my research, as well as for many references to the relevant sources and literature that I used here. Not least Iam thankful to him for the very fact of existence of his seminal work La Romanie Génoise (XIle-début du XVe siécle), which shaped my reading curriculum and was in many ways a starting point for the present research, covering the period until 1400 and promising mind-provoking challenges to a young scholar who would dare to follow Prof. Balard in his footsteps, but to go beyond this date and emerge into the richness of the sources coming from the fifteenth-century Caffa.
This thesis would not have been possible had not Dr. Andrey L. Ponomarev, who sadly passed away in 2014, laid down solid methodological groundings of both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the vast empirical material of the books of accounts known as Massariae Caffae. It is only now that I realize how much I have learned from this person, and how much more I could have learned from him.
Tam most thankful to a number of more senior colleagues for their valuable comments on my work—Laura Balletto, Alfonso Assini, Giustina Olgiati, Carlo Taviani, Serena Ferente, Anna Talyzina, Dmitriy Khitrov, Antonella Romano, Bartolomé Yun Casalilla—just to name a few of those who have made available their support in a number of ways. Not least am I indebted to my fellow colleagues—Christophe Schellekens, Davide Gambino, Alejandro Garcia Monton, Oleg Rusakovskiy, Carolina Obradors Suazo, and José Miguel Escribano Paez—for their constant support and valuable comments on my research, as well as to Michal Wasiucionek for helping me with reading relevant literature in Romanian and Turkish. I am thankful to Ekaterina Galyuta, who kindly prepared maps for this volume. I express my thanks to the team of the state archives of Genoa and Venice for their kind assistance, which gave me an opportunity to work with the manuscripts. I am grateful to my friends working in the fields of the economics and social sciences—Margarita Zavadskaya, Philipp Chapkovskiy, Gordey Yastrebov, Igor Skulkin, Ilya Archakov, and Mathilde Van Ditmars—who offered me their kind support in a tricky and difficult process of applying mathematical models and quantitative methods to my source material. Last, but not the least, I express my deep thankfulness to my parents and relatives, who supported and continue to support me on my way.
Introduction
The period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was a time of significant economic and social progress in the history of Europe. The development of industry and urban growth, the increasing role of trade and the expansion of geographical knowledge led to an époque of colonial expansion for Italy. Its maritime republics, Genoa and Venice, became cradles of commercial development and represent an early modern system of international long-distance trade in the late medieval period. These city-states came to the forefront of world history not only because of their commercial importance and the commercial mechanisms of exchange they introduced and adopted but also because of their naval importance and the establishment of their overseas settlements.
The Italians transcended the barriers of locality and parochialism and penetrated parts of the world previously little known to Europeans. Both Genoa and Venice conducted long-distance trade, relying on a network of colonies and trading stations, spread mainly across the Levantine and Black Sea area, which were always a crossroads and a contact zone for different civilizations because of its geographical location. The latter was extremely important from a commercial point of view—that is, for the expansion of the Republic of Genoa, which is why Genoa was particularly focused on the region of the Black Sea.!
The city of Caffa (now known as Theodosia)’ on the Crimean Black Sea coast lay at the centre of the Genoese network of colonies, trading stations, and overseas domains situated far from the metropolis. Caffa was the biggest centre of commerce in the Black Sea and was an outpost that played a pivotal role in the Genoese system of international long-distance trade. From its emergence around 1260s-1270s (see the following discussion) until it fell to the Ottomans in 1475, the city was a veritable crossroads of cultures.
This resulted in the emergence of a mixed and cosmopolitan ethnic and cultural environment that gave birth to a new syncretic society comprising features characteristic of Western Europe, the Mediterranean area, and the Near East as well as those of Central and Eastern Europe. The history of these societies and cultures may be regarded as one of the histories of unrealized potential of intercultural exchange that began with the penetration of Italians to the Black Sea basin and stopped soon after the Ottoman conquest of Crimea. The city of Caffa, which is in the centre of the present study, is studied as a frontier zone for Latin Christendom and a contact zone for many civilizations. In this sense, the syncretic society of Caffa was a reliable reflection of the essence of the Mediterranean, and from the Caffian perspective, we can see the Mediterranean world as a whole in the époque prior to the Age of Discovery. Studying the Genoese colonies on the Black Sea, we are studying the Mediterranean, or, rather, Eastern Mediterranean cultural syncretism.
Although the Genoese were trading actively in Crimea as early as the thirteenth century, the period during which Caffa flourished (and respectively the trade of its metropolis in the Black Sea area) ran from the fourteenth to (arguably) the fifteenth centuries. As a pivotal point for Genoese trade with the East, Caffa then became a centre of the economic and social life of the Genoese on the Black Sea, as well as the administrative centre of a political unit called Genoese Gazaria.
This was a network of Genoese cities, towns and castles, trading stations, landed domains and fortified coastal settlements: in other words, a Genoese overseas domain in the Black Sea basin that provided the Italians with a political and administrative frame for their commercial activity. These settlements began to appear in the thirteenth century all along the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, connecting Western Europe, Italy, Central Europe, Latin Romania, the Byzantine Empire,’ the Empire of Trebizond, the Muslim Near East, and the entire Eastern Mediterranean with Eastern Europe, Caucasus, steppes of Cumania and the Golden Horde, and Middle and Eastern Asia by its traffic routes. Research on the history of Caffa and the impact of Italians on its social life, culture, and mentality also implies studying and narrating the history of Genoese Gazaria as a territorial entity, because the majority of relevant written sources reporting data on other settlements of Gazaria were produced in Caffa. It is clear, then, that although focusing on Caffa in the fifteenth century in the present study, I will not confine myself to within its city walls. My research also comprises an investigation of different aspects of the history of the Genoese overseas empire of Gazaria as a whole; however, because of the limitations imposed by the sources, this can only be done through the lens of the sources from Caffa and focusing mainly on this city. In studying the Genoese colonies on the Black Sea, we study the Mediterranean. By looking at Caffa, we look at Gazaria as a whole.
Whereas Crimea was historically a crossroads of civilizations, in the case of the Italian presence in the East, it is in a certain sense unique for the Middle Ages and early modernity. Certainly, in pre-modern or early modern times, it was also sometimes possible to see a similarly broad variety of cultures, nations, and identities elsewhere all interacting with each other within a fairly limited space and the same intensive transcultural contacts and commercial networks of such transnational character. For instance, in Spain, Sicily, or Northern Africa,° Latin Christians cohabitated with the Arabs and Jews; the Levant was a contact zone for many cultures; the Byzantines were in continuous and close contact with both Westerners and the Turks. The peculiarity of the Crimea, however, lies not in the quantitative fact that it was inhabited by many different peoples, but rather in the fact that all the aforementioned types of transcultural and interethnic interactions that occurred in the Mediterranean met there together in a single melting pot: the peninsula united Christians and Muslims, Greek Orthodox and Monophysites, Italians and Greeks, Tatars and Armenians, and Caucasians and Syrians.’
Another important element was the fact that over the course of time the Italian newcomers settled and interacted with the local population. Thus we should state the existence of the colonial situation within a syncretic ethnic and cultural environment. Research on the history of Genoese Gazaria and its political role, trade, and society thus occupies an important place in studies on late medieval history. It allows us to better understand the role of the overseas Italian colonies in a broader context of the history of the Black Sea area, Eastern Europe, Central and Western Europe, and the Middle East, and—finally—in the context of global history in the period, when the world and history started becoming global, at the dawn of the First Age of Globalization.
This research presents the Black Sea region mainly through sources originating from Caffa and it therefore lies thematically somewhere on the border between Frontier Studies and Urban Studies. However, it is not easy to place the field here since the research implies a multidisciplinary study with different and overlapping fields. Caffa cannot, for example, be categorized within recognized urban taxonomies. A provisional definition could therefore instead probably be “a culturally syncretic colonial urban centre,” uniting Latino-Christian, Byzantine-Greek, Slavic and Russian, nomadic Turkic and Tatar, Caucasian, Armenian, Jewish, and Eastern Mediterranean cultures. This syncretic society undoubtedly constituted a bridge between Europe and Asia, just as certain other Mediterranean societies did. What is more, it was not only a crossroads of Eastern Mediterranean cultures but also a connecting point between the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, and even more important for us, it was a bridge between the world of the Middle Ages and the modern world of capitalism, colonialism, and globalization.
There is no lack of studies on either Levantine history or the history of Italian colonies overseas. Numerous general works and more focused studies provide us with a broad historiographical context. In recent decades, there has been particular progress in historiography. Nevertheless, a sound understanding and knowledge of the Genoese cities, colonies, and trading stations on the Black Sea coast in the fifteenth century is lacking, and the secondary literature on the subject is neither sufficient nor consistent. The functioning of the colonial system of Gazaria, its administrative and legal framework, hinterland, agriculture and craftsmanship, aspects of society and ethnicity, urban culture, and transnational interaction have only been superficially studied. Very few large-scale studies focus on Caffa and Genoese Black Sea domains in particular and for their own sake.
There is still a certain contradiction between the scale and availability of the source evidence. In particular the history of Caffa in the fifteenth century has been little studied; the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries are much better covered by an influential study by Michel Balard ‘La Romanie Génoise,’ dealing with the three colonial domains of Genoa and relying on a vast amount of the archival sources. In more recent works, the emphasis is still on the earlier period; that is the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One explanation for this is that there is a greater amount of available sources for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Many of these are published, and today, generalizations based on existing published sources and secondary literature without a deep engagement in the archival research are more plausible. Many researchers have studied these published sources (e.g. the statutes or the documents related to the administration), narratives and travelogues (often semi-legendary), and paid little or no attention to the vast amount of notarial deeds and books of accounts preserved from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.? Moreover, there is a certain bias that I have mentioned before—since the second half of the last century the academic world has been more inclined to treat the fifteenth century (following mostly, although not exclusively, the trend established by R. Lopez) as a period of decline of the Genoese Black Sea trade, or at best its regionalization and reduction.
Therefore, the period and the region are disregarded, and the main part of the most relevant evidence, the archival sources for the history of Caffa have neither been published nor thoroughly investigated. At the same time, the point of decline or increase of the Genoese Black Sea commercial activity is highly questionable. Were the external political (the Ottoman conquest) or internal economic factors the main reason for its cease that led to the transfer of capital to the west, including financing the Hispanic colonial enterprises starting from the colonization of Northern Africa and the Canary Islands to be continued in the new world? This and many other questions have to be answered. Notwithstanding the fact whether the fifteenth century of Genoese Gazaria was only a depressive period of decay of long-distance trade that began long before a final loss of the colonies to the Ottomans or a spring of the Genoese system of investments that later flourished on the west, in essence a big capitalist venture, or even an energetic trial run for future European colonialism in the Age of Discovery.
In most general terms, the goal of this study is to go deeper into various aspects of the history of Caffa largely based not only on the published sources and secondary literature but also on the vast amount of original archival sources that have been studied either superficially or not at all (I refer mainly about the books of accounts and the notarial registers of the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, see the following for an overview of the sources). There are several substantial historical narratives which focus on Caffa. Indeed, the most pivotal and classical work in this field is the already mentioned La Romanie Génoise by Balard.
This is an histoire totale focusing on Genoese Romania as a whole and thus taking in Chios, Pera, and Caffa. Balard laid a solid foundation with this work and no further research in this area can ignore what he has done. There are also no grounds to reproach him for taking such a broad scope, because his research on Caffa was done as meticulously as on the two remaining colonies and has not yet been superseded, although has been amended in certain points. Nonetheless, the problem remains as Balard’s study largely leaves the post-1400 period untouched and deals mainly with the thirteenth—fourteenth centuries, as do most of the preceding and following general narratives written about Caffa. Previous writers did not focus much on the fifteenth century, and no one has ever tried to focus on a particularly interesting transitional period and to trace the Genoese—Ottoman transformation and continuity after the fall of Gazaria in 1475-1484. Similarly, no one has tried to carry out research within a single study of late Genoese and early Ottoman documents. Thus the authors who wrote about Caffa did not undertake a research into a broad variety of the fifteenth-century archival sources covering 1400-1475, and this is exactly what I do in this volume.'°
Speaking in more particular terms, my main research question is how Gazaria, the Genoese overseas domain on the shores of the Black Sea, and its syncretic colonial society adapt—or fail to adapt—to the hard political situation of the fifteenth century created by Ottoman expansion and the shifting of trade routes that took place in the second half of the fourteenth century? What was the political and economic importance of Caffa in this rapidly changing world of the Eastern Mediterranean/Black Sea? How did the colonial model change in the course of the 1380s—1470s? How did this society shaped by the 1380s and relying mainly on a network of urban communities react to the challenges laid before it in the course of the fifteenth century, what was its survival resource in the emergency created by the Ottoman menace, how did the interethnic relations affect Caffa in terms of contributing to its survival against the Ottoman threat or actually contributing to its decay, and how did Caffa transform answering to the aforementioned challenges?
Answering these questions immediately raises certain problems. Time and development of historical knowledge have created a gap in terms of analysis and interpretation of the source data due to the backwardness of the methodological approaches applied in the field so far. Surprisingly, while certain aspects of the (mainly economic) history of Caffa and the entire Black Sea region were seriously and meticulously studied for the last 150 years or even longer mainly by the generations of scholars working in the positivist or neo-positivist theoretical and conceptual frameworks (and thanks to them we indeed have a general idea of how the Italian overseas colonies and trade functioned), in recent decades this unique situation and this unique region with its most intensive interactions of nations and cultures were almost completely disregarded by scholars working in the theoretical and methodological frameworks of cultural anthropology, the history of mentality, urban history, local social history, frontier studies, colonial studies, and so forth. A possible explanation for this is the Eurocentrism of most of the researchers of the Italian colonies. This is not only due to the limitations imposed by the sources (which obviously reflect the performance of the Italians better than that of the local Orientals),'' but also due to their own bias they were interested mainly in the Italian presence on the Black Sea, largely ignoring the issues connected to the other nations. Perhaps it is because the histories of Caffa and of the Italians on the Black Sea bear a theoretical and methodological stamp of the previous age of historiography; it was not until recent times that the interaction of the Italians with the local population provoked any academic interest whatsoever.
Yet another explanation is the political embeddedness of the scholarly discourse on the overseas colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narratives on the ‘Italians overseas’ were to a large extent not the histories of interaction, but the histories of the alleged expansion of a nation. Obviously, these studies were done in the dominating paradigms of national histories. To put it even more sharply,
professional historical scholarship emerged and developed as an intellectual artefact of the national-state era of world history . . . [it] emerged at a time of intense nationalism and energetic state-building projects in Europe, and historians lavished attention on the national states, which they construed as discrete and internally coherent communities, rather than the many other social, cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial groupings that they might have taken as units of analysis.'?
Albeit there was no Italian nation-state in the Middle Ages, a large part of the scholarly literature on the Italian colonies was written bearing in mind the nation-state perspective of history.
Another significant problem in this field, as in many others, is the huge gap between the scholars working with the written sources (mainly in the Italian archives) and those working with the material ones (mainly in situ in the Black Sea area). This gap is even more problematic given the difference in national scholarly traditions, as well as in cultural and language barriers: most scholars dealing with the archives are from Western Europe! (obviously, with certain exceptions, as a strong tradition laid by Kaprov in Lomonosov’s, as well as the Romanian school), whereas most of the archaeologists and other people working with more ‘material’ things have a Soviet background and are based in Russia and the rest of the post-Soviet area, some of them do not read foreign languages and thus have inadequate access to the unpublished archival sources.
Thus notwithstanding that both the research into documental sources (mainly stored in Italy) and the investigation of the material sources (mainly situated locally) have long-lasting traditions, these two barely overlap and there has been little or no interaction between people working on the same subject, but in different fields. Historians and archaeologists (as well as epigraphists, etc.) still tend to work separately and rarely take into the work of colleagues from a different discipline into account. In the monographs and articles written in Italy or France, we rarely find a single reference to a work of some local Crimean archaeologist!* (or to any work written in Russian whatsoever), whereas those same archaeologists are often unaware (or have only a very vague idea) of the material on the history of their own area stored in Italy. There are at least three barriers here: (1) the barrier of type of sources and professional division to those working with the written sources and those dealing with the material ones, (2) language barriers, and (3) barriers of space that make the interaction among scholars difficult. As a result, most of the studies ignore to a certain extent the work of other scholars, the results reached by different teams do not overlap, and any kind of interdisciplinary approach is rare. Patrick Manning’s observation that “historians are an omnivorous group, one that eventually consumes the data and the methods of every other investigative group”! is a remote ideal in our field. This is yet another problem that the present study will try to overcome. “Science recognizes no borders and has always striven for universal understanding.”
The following words were written 20 years ago, but remain relevant today:
Modern historiography investigates with particular interest either the most brilliant or the less studied civilizations. The Black Sea region in the Middle Ages deserves a double interest—it was a part and a crossroad of several great civilizations and it is among the less studied for its own sake.!”
The thriving medieval and early modern history and civilization(s) of the Black Sea region are disregarded. That is why we need to investigate the history of this region and address the main aspects of its social and economic life. Based on both published and unpublished original sources, I intend to produce a holistic picture of the life of the city in the context of the functioning of Genoa’s trade system on the Black Sea coast.
Last, but not least, even though many brilliant works on Caffa have been written, their availability has certain linguistic limitations. Most of these books and articles are written in French, Italian, Russian, and Polish, and there is still no general analytical monograph on Genoese Gazaria and region as a whole in English. Giving a panoramic overview of the history of Caffa to the English-speaking audience is among the aims of the present study. That is why I feel that an effort to write such a history in English will also contribute greatly to the scholarship, because it will bring the knowledge in the field to a wider circle of academics.
It is obvious that the first (and main) condition for a reliable reconstruction of the history and society of Caffa and the domains of Genoese Gazaria is a deep research into the archival (and other) sources. To have a comprehensive set of source evidence we have to do research into exactly those archival sources which have never been published, or have not yet been analyzed comprehensively and systematically. This is an ambitious attempt, but still a feasible one. Late medieval and early modern history is unique in two senses: first, we normally have enough source material for a reliable reconstruction (unlike the preceding period), and, second, the set of sources on one particular topic can be huge, but still sufficiently available to cover and comprehend it rather than to sink in it (unlike the following period). Studying Genoese Gazaria, we face a large and well-documented period. There are a number of more or less representative serial sources from Caffa, and we also have a huge number of other sources and secondary literature to contextualize the primary data. A scholar dealing with this field is privileged in the sense that he uses new sources in the context of the old historical narratives. Thus there is both enough of the source data and historiographical background to create some solid ground at the beginning, and at the same time there is enough room left for a researcher aiming to create a holistic picture of life in Gazaria through the analysis and comprehensive study of the sources.
The researcher must be ambitious and bold, and the study must be based on research into the archival sources in the context of already known ones. Such a study must follow a number of other guidelines in order to fill the gaps in the historiography. First, it must be a comprehensive history of Genoese Gazaria instead of being concentrated on some particular aspect of life. Second, there are available written sources produced in the administrative centre of an entire colonial domain. Naturally, sources from Caffa cover Gazaria as a unit. Therefore, taking Caffa (or rather sources originating from Caffa) as a starting point, I intend to expand my research to the entire Genoese overseas domain in the Northern Black Sea,'* using additional sources from and studies made of other Genoese settlements. Third, I do not take for granted either of the presuppositions already drawn on the political or economic reasons of the fall of Caffa or on decline, regionalization, or flourishing of the Italian Black Sea trade and urban life in the fifteenth century. I will instead try to approach this issue based on the new source evidence that will enable me to gain new insights and to make new considerations.
Furthermore, I will try to overcome at least partially the existing estrangement between the historians who work with the written sources and scholars focused on the material ones. Starting with the archival research and contextualization of the new data into the previous scholarship, I will also try to attract all possible types of sources, including the results of the excavations, numismatics, heraldry, epigraphy, onomastic, etc. Still dependent in a way on my non-material and non-archaeological educational background, I am lucky to be a Crimean aborigine, and familiar with the disciplines in question if not through systematic university training, then at least through constantly being in contact with the specialists in the fields concerned. In addition, I will try insofar as I can to introduce into the field more up-to-date methodological tools and an interdisciplinary approach, which is indispensable for the analysis of the complex reality that we find in medieval Crimea. In the words of Jerry Bentley: ... While the strategy of going local effectively undermines some of the assumptions of Eurocentric history, the strategy of going global by historicizing globalization offers opportunities to de-center Europe by situating European experience in the larger context of world history.!”
Another important issue is the perspective taken by a historian. Much can be written about the Eurocentrism of most previous studies as an issue to be overcome in one way or another. It is obvious that from the first steps the historiography of the Italian colonies on the Black Sea was written mainly by Italians and was mainly interested in the Italian presence on the Black Sea. It is largely due to the Eurocentric mental frameworks and the legacy of modern colonialism that the role of the local non-Western nations and cultures is still underestimated in the scholarship of the field, and so far, an integral study of the region in its diversity has not emerged.
This is partially due to the nature of the sources, but it seems to me that neither the superabundance of the sources of Western origin written in Latin and in Italian vernacular nor the lack of indigenous written sources is the main reason. The main problem is that scholars continue to think of the Black Sea region Eurocentrically. We are doomed to look at the historical process in the region from the prospective given by the European written sources, and this situation cannot be changed entirely. It can, however, be improved by going deeper into the research of transnational contacts. My intuition here is to take as a starting point the sources of Italian origin, but to look at them through intercultural and transnational interaction, and to use a limited number of the non-Italian sources that can give a different angle and different prospective. One of the main methodological assumptions is that through the studies of cultural interaction in Crimea I try to move beyond the dominant Eurocentric narratives produced by the scholars who wrote primarily about Genoese or Venetians, and used any other data at best as a context. This does not imply an attempt or acclamation to re-evaluate the contribution of the West into the economic progress that led to the creation of the new world system. What I mean by rejecting Eurocentrism is merely a change in the scope. I am equally interested in the Genoese, Venetians, other Latin people, Greeks, Russians, Armenians, Jews, Tatars, and other components of that culturally syncretic society, and the organization of Gazaria’s rural setting will be examined alongside the interaction between the metropolis and the colonial administration.
Introducing an interdisciplinary approach, overcoming the disconnection between written and material sources and reconsidering the Eurocentric prospective are, however, tools rather than the main agenda of my study. My expected outcome is an overview of the history of Genoese Gazaria at different levels and in various aspects, considering policies, administration, economy, society, culture, mentality, and so forth. That is, a holistic study that will show based on the analysis of the sources, the main trends in the adaptations and transformations of the Genoese Black Sea colonies in the fifteenth century. I will therefore try to take a closer and more detailed look at different aspects of the life of the Italian settlements during the fifteenth century, and as far as my sources will allow it. Naturally, I will structure this study thematically, so that each chapter deals with a specific objective connected to certain aspect of the settlements’ life or a certain angle of approach.
The first task was a study of the role of the Genoese domains against the background of the political history and international relations in the region. As in the case with the later colonial experiences, the Italians applied certain political strategies of securing the hegemony.”! Yet we must, however, keep in mind that Genoese colonization was largely a private undertaking (strikingly, like many other modern ones, managed by companies until the nineteenth century).?* Furthermore, based on the canvas of events in Eastern Europe and the Near East, and in the context of Italian history in the given period,’ I expected to draw conclusions as to the nature and modes of application of the aforementioned strategies. It was once stated that the central point in all Genoese international politics was to secure favourable conditions for commerce. How did this work in practical terms? How did the Italians interact on a high level with the local sovereigns? How much and in what sense were the policies connected with the commercial situation? What can be said on the commercial dimension of these policies? How did Genoa manage its diplomatic network in the region? My first chapter therefore deals with the early stages of the Italian penetration to the Black Sea area, the origins of the Genoese colonies, and the colonial system in its formation.
The technical chronological end of the first chapter is 1400; however, reading the present study, we should constantly keep in mind a much more important landmark—the 1380s—which is the time of the final shaping of the Genoese colonial domain, and, at the same time, the point from which we have more abundant and more reliable serial source material. Thus, in general terms, it makes sense to divide the history of Gazaria 1 from the thirteenth century until the 1380s (the final shaping of the Genoese Black Sea colonial system); 2 from the 1380s until 1453 (the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, the closure of the straits, the transition of the colonies to the Bank of Saint George” and a growing, although never absolute, isolation of the colonies from the metropolis); and 3. from 1453 until 1475 (the fall of Caffa and most of other colonies).
The following chapters are dedicated to the evolution and transformation of different dimensions of life in the Genoese Caffa and Gazaria in the period following the 1380s. In order to understand these developments, I had to constantly present the background in a broader chronological perspective. The physical layout of the region in question (including the urban environment of Caffa) is another integral part of this study, alongside the topography and physical conditions of the colonies, as well as different aspects which can best be described as ‘spatial’. Research into the urban and rural layout can give important evidence on the intensiveness of connections between the urban Italian settlements and their hinterland. This should answer the following question: How deep did Genoese colonization go, and was it really limited to a network of coastal towns? It is obvious that the Crimea’s involvement in the Italians’ long-distance trade provoked profound changes in the urban environment, presumably affecting most of the Greek towns of the Northern Black Sea, even those which were relatively isolated. The scale of the Italian trade’s impact was certainly greater in places such as Caffa, Soldaia, or Tana, more modest in the case of smaller coastal towns and villages, and even smaller in the case of other places situated alongside the main regional commercial routes. But how deep did Italian expansion go? Was it restricted by the walls of their fortresses and urban settlements, and independent or semi-independent trading stations, or was the interaction between the cities and towns intensive, and did the Genoese penetrate into the rural area in terms of exploitation of their colonies? I use as a starting point the sources written in the urban environment and by Westerners; however, they also reflect, albeit to a lesser extent, the life of the hinterland. Thus a study of the agricultural life and the rural layout will also be an integral part of this study.
Administration and law normally indicate a connection between the metropolis and its colonies, and this field has been studied relatively well in the previous scholarship. However, a close look is needed in order to draw conclusions about the work of colonial administration maintained by the Republic of Genoa and afterwards by the Bank of Saint George. Another interesting issue would be to examine the connections between Genoa and Gazaria and among different cities and settlements within Genoese Gazaria, especially—among the administrative centre (Caffa) and the periphery (the rest). Was it really just a constellation of loosely connected trading stations, or a centrally managed and more or less consolidated territorial domain with an effective centre in Caffa?
The interaction of people of different identities in a mixed and indeed, entangled, society raises a number of issues. How intensive was this interaction, on what kind of level did it take place, and can we trace any dynamics of social transformation? Furthermore (and this is connected to overcoming Eurocentrism), while the percentage of Italian population in Gazaria grew over time, it is questionable whether they ever became the majority; in any case, a study of local ethnic and religious groups deserves a careful and meticulous scholarly approach. It was also not the case that the Italians absolutely dominated the Black Sea commerce, whereas the local people with their allegedly inferior culture remained in total obscurity, backwardness, and irrevocable stagnation. The reality was that the Italians’ commercial success was reached not only thanks to the advances made in navigation and their new commercial tools that they spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea but also because they strongly relied on the local networks of merchants (mostly Greek and Armenian), which existed before the Italian penetration to the Mare Maius and were therefore deeply rooted in the local realities. As in the future history of colonial expansion, the help of local brokers and go-betweens must have played a crucial role, but this question has never been sufficiently studied. To put it more generally—we have still a lot to understand in order to have a clear picture of Caffa and to answer the question: how did this culturally syncretic society work?
This research also comprises a close look at the society of Genoese Gazaria. I have focused on the demography, aggregation of different social groups, interconnectivity, social structure and stratification, geographical mobility,*> social mobility and its strategies, vertical and horizontal social ties, patron-client relations, brokerage, social networks, norms of social comportment, the behaviour of individuals within the social structure, their relationships, sociability, and other aspects of the urban population. Special attention has been paid to examining the ethnic and confessional structure of the society, interethnic marriages, legal standing of various ethnic groups, multiple identities, religious affiliation, proselytizing, etc. The predominantly ‘oppressionist’ vision of the Genoese activity on the Black Sea was balanced out in the recent decades by highlighting the facts of collaboration, cooperation, and cultural exchange between the Italians and the Greeks.”®
Shifting from the social history to the economic one, by investigating the issues of commerce and economy in general, I will reveal new data for estimating (and reconsidering) the economic role of Caffa in international trade, commerce in the Black Sea region, and the slave trade with Europe and Egypt. What I will question here are the decline of long-distance trade and the regionalization of commercial activity. Both remain controversial issues. Indeed, the routes of the European trade with Eastern Asia shifted in the fourteenth century towards the Levantine ports, while the Black Sea ports ceased to be a major intermediary in spice and silk trade. This led to a drop of profitability rates of luxury goods on the Black Sea. However, the drop in profits which happened after the crisis of trade of the fourteenth century does not per se mean the decline of trade; it may simply be evidence of the shifts in the trade’s structure which can be compensated by an increase of scale. The problem of ‘regionalization or long-distance trade’ leads me to another question: Were the patterns of commercial exchange similar to the previous experience of medieval trade, or did it have features of modern capitalism alongside its colonial trade patterns?
After the mid-fourteenth century, the silk and spices trade decreased, and a new pattern seems to have been established. This new pattern implied an export of the raw materials (furs, food, and timber) from the Black Sea region in exchange for the textiles and other products from Italy and the West, which looks more like a modern colonial model characteristic of a new world system. Another issue to be treated specially is the institution of slavery and the slave trade. Finally, there is an important historiographical problem that cannot be resolved in the present study (first, because of the geographical limits chosen), but it cannot be disregarded either. This problem is connected to the scale and the results of Italian trade’s influence on the regional economy of the late Byzantine/circum-Byzantine urban environment and on the activity of the local entrepreneurial class. This problem is not at all a recent invention,’ and I doubt whether even the abundant source material from Caffa can ever resolve it; however, I expect that my research will produce some evidence of the commercial activity (or conversely passiveness) of the local people, and thus make a contribution to this larger-scale debate.
Finally, we should not forget that the economic, social, and cultural rise of Caffa provided a nurturing environment for a cosmopolitan culture and society diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, and language. Balard suggested the term ‘Latino-Oriental culture’, comprising linguistic, legal, and even religious aspects.2® Kramarovskii further discussed the Italian and, broader, Latin cultural element and its interaction with the local culture. Was the Latin culture simply brought from Italy, imposed in Crimea, and thereafter existed in a vacuum, or was there a synthesis? What exactly was syncretism of the society of Caffa? The mere coexistence of several different cultures, or their contact, exchange, and/or merging? In any case, the issues of intercultural exchange and transformation of culture and of mentality require an especially close and accurate look. An important role must be given here to brokerage,”? namely the networks of local intermediaries and go-betweens (particularly Greeks and Armenians), who helped Italians in their dealings with different languages, traditions, and indigenous peculiarities. Their role was particularly important when they acted as translators and interpreters and assisted the Italian newcomers to navigate in the indigenous society.*°
I should say a few words here about the territorial boundaries to justify the scope of my research. I would willingly write a panoramic study about the whole of Genoese Gazaria. Unfortunately, this is hardly possible because of the heterogeneity of the extant sources. Whereas there is an enormous amount of material from Caffa, the centre of Genoese Gazaria, the sources from all other settlements are fragmental, scarce, or (most often) not preserved at all. I can, for instance, draw a picture of the society and economy of Caffa based on an abundance of the notarial registers and accounts of massariae. Doing the same thing for a settlement such as Cembalo, from which almost no documents are preserved whatsoever, would only be possible with the help of some wizardry.
For some other settlements (such as Chilia or Tana) some source data (notarial deeds) is preserved, but it barely covers several years. We do, however, possess some systematic knowledge about other Genoese towns—the sources originated from Caffa reflect them inasmuch as they were all parts of the same administrative unit ruled from Caffa, and were all connected with their ruling city by the commercial connections. Thus, in most of my study, I speak about Caffa rather than Gazaria, having in mind that all other Genoese Black Sea settlements were ruled from Caffa and traded mostly through Caffa. I will try to present them here, especially as far as the topography and colonial administration are concerned. I will often use data on these towns to contextualize the history of Caffa. I will not, however, attempt to undertake a reconstruction of the society, economy, and ethnic composition, etc., of each of these settlements.*! Their histories are only used as a background for a history of their mothercity. In a sense, this research is a history of the entire Genoese Gazaria—but seen through the lens of Caffa—and, which is more important, it is a history of Caffa, and not of all Genoese settlements of Gazaria.
As regards chronology, I will try to provide enough data on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries inasmuch as this is needed to create the general background and contextualize the data I have taken from the archives. A comprehensive study of the early period and the so-called golden age of Caffa is necessary here to compare it with the following period and to trace the dynamics, transition, and transformation. However, I decided to focus mainly on the period between 1380s and 1475. Since I explained why exactly this period is particularly interesting, I must now justify why I cannot, on the one hand, focus on the fifteenth century exclusively and have to go back two preceding centuries, and, on the other, why I am not doing any original research on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The explanation is simple. The source material from the early period is more compact and very well researched, while the sources of the fifteenth century are abundant and unstudied. Thus published sources of the earlier period and secondary literature around them give a starting point for a study of the fifteenth-century Caffa. However, this material from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is very relevant not only for the purposes of creating a background, contextualizing, or giving to the reader the idea of ‘how it all began’.
The point is that most of the existing problematique in the field that I mentioned earlier can be more or less reduced to a single and more general question, or at least necessarily has something to do with it: how deep was the transformation of the Italian presence and the Italian colonies on the Black Sea caused by the commercial crisis of the fourteenth century, and to which exactly qualitative and quantitative shifts did it lead? Today, with our certain knowledge about the ‘golden age’ of trade, this keynote question would be a leitmotif permeating every study on Genoese Gazaria during the fifteenth century. A researcher has to put the data of the earlier period against the background of the previous one, and to define changes and/or continuity.
Our acquaintance with the studies that give a picture of Caffa in the thirteenth—fourteenth centuries provide us with a starting point for a general account; the archival sources of the fifteenth century are a challenge for an independent study, the results of which can answer this question, being compared to earlier scholarship. Problematizing the historical contexts, tracing the structural changes in the diachronic prospective, analyzing the logic and the factors underlying the dynamics, and incorporating the contextual elements into a broader scope are all done in this study in the history of a late medieval (or should we call it ‘early modern’?) experience of commercial and colonial expansion of the Genoese colony on the periphery of Latin Christendom in the context of the Italian cities and trading stations on the Black Sea coast, which will give a solid basis for further study of the Italian presence in the East. Another important result of my study is an MS Excel database which can be used in future research. I also aimed to place the role of the analysis of archival documents more precisely in contemporary historical methodologies as far as the reconstruction of medieval urban societies is concerned. Based on a massive archival work I have tried to provide a panoramic overview of the history of the Genoese Black Sea colonies to the English-speaking audience and to see how these colonies and their culturally syncretic societies functioned, adapted, and transformed on the actual dawn of capitalism and colonialism.
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