Reuven Amitai
“Pride in Slavery – The Mamluks Look Back at their Slave Past and Qipchaq Steppe Origin”
As is well known, the military elite that founded and maintained the early Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517) in Egypt and Syria started off their career as young slaves taken mostly from the Turkish-speaking tribes nomadizing north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and possible even further east. These slaves were brought to emporia in and near Crimea, and then transported via the Black Sea and the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean and from there mainly to Alexandria. These young Mamluks (literally “owned”) spent years in the military schools of the Sultanate, receiving both a military and civil/religious education. Around the age of 18 they were manumitted, and joined the ranks of their patrons’ units, be they sultans or officers (some more senior than other), serving as mounted archers. The Arabic historical sources composed in the Mamluk Sultanate were very aware of both this provenance from the western Eurasian Steppe (referred to as the Qipchaq Steppe, in recognition of the largest Turkish ethnic grouping there), and of course, recognized the critical stage of slavery that the young Mamluks underwent in their journey to full membership in the military-political elite (some becoming officers and a few even sultans). This information is not especially new to scholarship, although it can be further studied and analyzed. What is apparently not yet fully recognized is that there is some expression that the Mamluks themselves were aware and proud of their tribal Eurasian Steppe provenance, and also their experiences as slaves. This last-mentioned matter will be at the heart of my lecture at the conference.
Dimiter Angelov
“The Black Sea and Theodore II Laskaris”
The paper considers the limited presence of the Black Sea in the writings of the Nicaean emperor Theodore Ii Laskaris. In what contexts did the author speak about the Black Sea? What do the descriptions tell us about knowledge of the geography of the Black Sea in the empire.of Nicaea? And why was the author far more interested in other areas of Asia Minor? These and other questions will be considered in an attempt to contribute to a better understanding of the role of the Black Sea area for the administration of the empire of Nicaea.
Michael Balard
“Caffa in the XIIIth Century: origins, urban landscape, population and trade”
According to their alliance with Michael VIII Palaeologus, the Genoese began trading in the Black Sea at the end of the sixties of the XIIIth Century. To avoid the concurrence of the Venetian Soldaia, they were allowed to establish a little trading-post in an old byzantine colony, Theodosia, quite ruined in 1270-1275, which from that date took the name of Caffa. The first notarial deed discovered in the Genoese archives which mentions the baricat asper, the money of the place, is from November 1276. In the two last decennaries of the XIIIth Century, Caffa is a little town, surrounded by a ditch and a palissade, but not yet by walls. As soon as 1281 the Genoese Commune settles a consul for the administration of the trading-post, which welcomes emigrants from Liguria (74% of the names quoted in Lamberto di Sambuceto’s deeds) but also from many Italian cities, though it is impossible to distinguish permanent inhabitants and passing merchants. Trading is the most important activity of the new population: importation of woolen cloth and linen, exportation of grain, spices, furs and alum, often paid by silver ingots. Caffa knows an actual prosperity, ruined in 1308, when the Tatars conquer the city. One must expect 1316 for the reconstruction of Caffa by the Genoese.
Hannah Barker
“What Makes a Community? Black Sea Diasporas in the Medieval Mediterranean”
Using the framework for diaspora studies outlined by Kim Butler, I will examine the presence of people from the Black Sea in the Mediterranean during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There are many ways in which such people could have drawn the boundaries of community: based on their status as enslaved, freed, or free; based on their gender or family ties; based on their connections with a language, religion, ethnicity, or homeland; based on their presence in and adaptation to a particular Mediterranean hostland. Which among these possibilities did people from the Black Sea use to construct diasporic communities? I will focus especially on people identified as Tatar or Circassian, and how those ethnic categories intersected with other aspects of their identities.
Nicola Di Cosmo
“Global Encounters on the Black Sea Between Visions and Frictions: Revisiting the Crisis of 1343”
This paper explores a specific moment in the relationship between Mediterranean merchants (chiefly Venetian and Genoese) and Asian peoples (mainly Turks and Mongols) in the context of the growing commercial links established on the Black Sea in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries. In particular, it focuses, as a case study, on the catastrophe that befell the Venetian and Genoese residents in Tana (Azaq) in 1343. Faced with potential annihilation at the hands of the ruler of the Golden Horde, the two Mediterranean Republics shifted their stance from mutual rivalry and competition to cooperation in order to resist the Mongol onslaught and retain their Black Sea commercial bases. This unique and unprecedented political alliance, while mutually advantageous, failed after a few years, when the Republics made separate peace agreements with the Mongols, and started a new, destructive war between them. This episode is emblematic of the problems that the agents of the “first globalization” met in the context of the Mongol conquest and the subsequent establishment of a global system of commercial relations that included Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. In addition to identifying the motives behind the crisis, this talk presents an analysis of why the Mongol-led effort to create a system of worldwide trade and exchange eventually failed. The paper will highlight the difficulties of creating a “middle ground’ in which cultural, political, religious, and legal differences could be effectively mediated.
Eurydice Georganteli
“Money, Markets, and Identities in the Late Medieval Black Sea Region”
This paper considers the profound changes in the markets and built environment of the Black Sea region from the second quarter of the 13th century, against the backdrop of the consolidation of Mongol power, the establishment of the Empire of Trebizond as the western terminus of the Silk Road, and the increased economic role of Genoa through the establishment of communities with legal, fiscal, and religious rights. What did the minting and inscriptions of Golden Horde coins mean for the populations and cities of the area? What was the relationship between Golden Horde political and economic centers, such as Solkhat, and Genoese-dominated Kaffa? Are the craftsmanship, style, and script on metalware of the Golden Horde a reflection of broader patterns of commercial and religious connectivity? Is the presence of Trapezuntine coin vis-à-vis the dearth of Nicene ones in Crimea indicative of the economic zones of the two empires? Finally, what was the political and economic role of the restored Byzantine Empire, once the overarching power in the region, especially along the western Black Sea coast?
Rachel Goshgarian
“The 13th-century Geography of Vardan Arevelts’i: A Window into Late Medieval Armenian Conceptions of Regions and Borders”
Chakraborty-Spivak explained in her 1994 essay, “Will Postcolonialism Travel?” that “Armenia cannot lean toward existing theories. It cannot be comfortably located in the generally recognized lineaments of contemporary imperialism and received postcolonialism. It has been too much in the interstices to fit such a location. Indeed, that is its importance. Its history is diversified, with many loyalties crosshatching so small a place, if indeed it is more a place than a state of mind over the centuries.” (Spivak, 2008) Our sources tell us that in the late medieval period (here, the 11th through the 15th centuries) Armenia was, in many respects, a place beyond our contemporary notions of geography and location. Armenia, in the late medieval period, was Armenia because Armenians lived there and continued to participate in an Armeniannate sphere, circumscribed by a particular Armenian tradition of imagining the world, and not always because they wielded cultural, legal or political hegemony over a specific geography. How does one, then, understand the ways in which Armenians understood frontiers – if the Armeniannate is bound not by geography, but, rather, by a cultural sensibility and a shared concept of the history of the world and the place of Armenians therein, written primarily by church-educated men?
With this contribution, Goshgarian will consider a 13th-century “Geography” composed by an Armenian, church-educated man in an attempt to offer insight into the ways in which he understood the geographies in which he lived and traveled, and whose life’s trajectory took him to many places of note, including: Gandzak (Ganja, Republic of Azerbaijan), Goshavank (Republic of Armenia), Tabriz (Islamic Republic of Iran), Sis (Kozan, Republic of Turkey), and beyond.
Dmitry Korobeynikov
“Peoples and Settlement around the Black Sea: the travels of Ibn Sa’id al-Maghribi (d. c. 1286)”
The Black Sea (the Bahr Nitish, or Bahr Puntus) in Arabic geography usually forms an entity of its own, yet this was not the case in the “Geography” of Ibn Sa’id, the Maghribine collector of Arabic poetry from Spain and an eponymous traveller at the time of political fragmentation after the Mongols conquests. His travels around the ‘Sea of Sudaq’, the ‘Sea of Abkhaz’ and so on shows the passable areas and settlements in the 1260s and the 1270s.
Nicholas S. M. Matheou
“Armenia Maritima? Between Caucasia and Crimea in the Global Long Thirteenth Century“
In 1200 Crimea and the Azov Sea was home to few Armenian speakers. By the mid fourteenth century, however, the region housed a thriving and organised community with as many as forty-four churches. Indeed, by 1350 identified Armenians likely formed the second largest component in the population after Turkic speakers, prominent enough for Latin sources to name the sea of Azov “lacus Armeniacus” and the wider region “Armenia maritima”. The first part of this paper outlines the material and textual evidence for the community’s emergence, ranging from ceramics to manuscript colophons, Latin documents and Armenian histories, and focusing on evidence for migrants from south Caucasia rather than Cilicia. From this overview a rough chronology and indications of the migrants’ origin points begins to emerge. This then sets up the second part of the paper, which explores the interrelated local, interregional and global dynamics behind the movement. Questions include the migrants’ socioeconomic statuses and roles, connections between migration and the relative decline of south Caucasian cities such as Ani and Dvin, and the relationship to Afro-Eurasian wide developments, especially commercialisation and the rise of the Mongol world-empire. Perhaps most revealing is the question of how these dynamics and the resulting “push-pull” factors are realised in space—in short, is this evidence for connectivity across the Black Sea as such, or is the sea more or less incidental to a movement governed by other political and economic factors? The answers to these questions demonstrate the centrality of Caucasia, Crimea and the wider Black Sea region to the global transformations of the later Middle Ages.
Uli Schamiloglu
“The Mongol World Empire and Population Transformations in the Northern Black Sea Region”
The paper begins with an overview of the population landscape of the the Pontic Steppe and the territories to the north as far as the Middle Volga region in the century before the Mongol conquests of the early 13th century. While certain processes such as the slave trade had existed earlier, the Mongol conquests initiated (or coincided with) a series of fundamental processes transforming the populations in these territories. The Chinggisids brought with them new ethnic populations and reorganized the local populations they had encountered. With the establishment of the Italian colonies in the Black Sea, it appears that the export of human populations reached a higher level than before. The process of the Turkification of the Chinggisid élite of the western-most state of the Mongol World Empire, the Golden Horde, seems to have been thoroughly completed by the 14th century, if not earlier. The rise of an Islamic Turkic civilization in the new urban centers of the Golden Horde not only attracted scholars from around the Islamic world, these cities were also home to merchant colonies representing many different ethnicities which were probably not to be found in this region (with the possible exception of Volga Bulgaria) in the period before the 13th century. Of course, this tableau changes dramatically with the convulsive waves of the Second Pandemic in the mid-14th century. The large-scale demographic implosion results not just in the collapse of centralized state authority in the Golden Horde after 1359, it leads to the out-migration of certain nomadic populations and the in-migration of other new nomadic populations in the late 14th century. The new khanates established in the mid-15th century suggest that the population of these territories had declined greatly.
Rustam Shukurov
“Trebizond: Exchanges, Transfers and Migrations”
The significance of the Empire of Trebizond lay in the fact that the Pontic region did not have abundant natural resources and had a limited reserve of arable land. The empire thrived on international exchange because its territory was located at a crucial intersection of major economic routes, connecting the northern Black Sea region, the Near East, and the Western Byzantine lands. Trebizond was the main port on the southern coast of the Black Sea, and it served as a hub for trade and information exchange between Anatolia and the “northern” lands, such as Crimea, the Golden Horde, and Rus. It was through Trebizond that commercial and informational transactions took place, sustaining the infrastructure required for such an exchange. Trade operations, including the exchange itself and the maintenance of the infrastructure supporting it, provided a significant portion of the resources for both private individuals and the imperial authority to sustain their livelihoods. This paper explores the typology and significance of various forms of exchange that were characteristic of the empire of the Grand Komnenoi.
Filip Van Tricht
“The Mesembria (1257) and Daphnousia (1261) Campaigns: The Black Sea Component in a Latin Imperial Restoration Strategy?”
The Fourth Crusade with as its consequence the establishment of a Latin imperial dynasty in Constantinople opened up the Black Sea for the Western powers involved, including the city of Venice. In spite of control over and/or influence in various coastal areas (Thrace, Bithynia, Paphlagonia) Latin political or commercial involvement in the Black Sea region appears to have remained limited during the first decades after 1204. The Mongol expansion in the late 1230’s/early 1240’s changed this picture. Following a number of military confrontations emperor Baldwin II of Courtenay engaged in an active diplomacy with the Mongol court, as did many neighbouring rulers. At the same time the trade interests of the Venetian merchant community based in Constantinople seems to have grown markedly. During the final decade of Latin rule in Constantinople – often presented as the empire’s ‘ripe apple’ phase – two incidents may indicate an intensifying preoccupation with the Black Sea basin: the capture of Bulgarian Mesembria in 1257 and the attack against Nicaean Daphnousia in 1261. While both have mostly been treated as both isolated and unrelated exploits, the question can be posed whether these campaign were perhaps not rather part of a larger strategy to establish/expand Constantinopolitan influence in the region.
Ittai Weinryb
“Hypoxemia – the Art of exchange in the Medieval Black Sea”
For millennia now, more than eighty percent of the waters of the Black Sea are without oxygen dissolved in them, and as such anoxic. The lack of oxygen in the waters of the Black Sea basin had a very clear and present effect on the medieval environment of the region, in flora, in fauna, and in the human experience. For the modern scholar, the anoxic condition of the Black Sea means that any artefact, whether bronze sculpture or a shipwreck, would be preserved in its entirety without deterioration due to oxidation – enabling the study of objects found in the bottom of the Black Sea in a near-perfect condition.
The paper follows the most notable and unique characteristic of the Black Sea – its anoxic state – as a way for us to think of the art produced and found in and around the Black Sea during the Middle Ages. In thinking of site-specific art in the Middle Ages, we would like to consider how the anoxic Black Sea helped define and profess notions of creation and migration of artefacts in the long thirteenth century.