Evgeny Khvalkov - The Colonies of Genoa in the Black Sea Region: Evolution and Transformation

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.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

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11The Colonies of Genoa in the Black Sea Region

Evolution and Transformation

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The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography

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Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages

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First published 2018

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ISBN: 978-1-138-08160-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-11278-7 (ebk)

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Since this book evolved from my doctoral thesis, it is my pleasure to thank my supervisor Prof. Luca Mol 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 I am thankful to him for the very fact of existence of his seminal work La Romanie Gnoise (XIIe-dbut du XVe sicle), 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