A Sea at the Crossroads of the Middle Ages

If the arrival of the Goths in the third century brought a period of decline for the cities on the northern and western coasts of the Black Sea, the invasion of the Huns, a few decades later, brought disaster.

navales du Bas Danube et de la mer Noire au ler-VIe siecles (Oxford, 1996); Octavian

Bounegru, ‘The Black Sea area in the trade system of the Roman empire’, Euxeinos, 14 (2014):8-16.

‘Roman’,^[681] it restored its sovereignty by summarily eliminating its Gothic mercenaries in 400 BCE. It progressively reasserted control over its tra­ditional territories in the Black Sea region, while the nomadic Khazars dominated the north of Crimea and the Kerch Strait. For the Byzantines, however, the area held a different importance altogether, since it formed, according to Braudel, ‘Constantinople’s backyard’ or its ‘preserve’ and provided a vital source of supply for its inhabitants.^[682]

Reality was slightly more complicated. Confronted by the arrival of successive waves of new settlers in the region - most notably the Slavs - the Byzantine Empire practised the shrewd strategy of establishing alli­ances and counter-alliances that permitted its rulers to use its army and navy with great parsimony,^[683] while keeping direct control of the Crimean coast.^[684] And even though the Eastern Roman Empire lost control of the Black Sea’s western coastline up to the Danube following the arrival of the Bulgars, Constantinople - a metropolis at a time when Western ‘cit­ies’ were little more than large villages - nonetheless continued to inspire awe and admiration.^[685]

In what is modern-day Ukraine, the Rus’ principality of Kiev pros­pered under the authority of the Vikings, whereas to the east the Christian kingdom of Georgia governed an area from the Kuban (east of Crimea) to Caucasia.

Byzantium’s decline came in part from the invasion of the Seljuk Turks who established an Islamic sultanate in the heart of Anatolia, as well as from the competition of the merchant city-states of Venice and Genoa. The impoverished empire could no longer maintain a sufficient army as well as a crucially important navy. Venice, in particular, profited from the Fourth Crusade, which saw Constantinople sacked in 1204 (the city, still technically impregnable, was captured by treachery). This tragic event occurred at the same moment that Georgia enjoyed great power and prosperity; it was under its aegis that the Greek empire of Trebizond was founded at the western end of the route to Persia. The Byzantine Empire managed somehow to recover and (although a shadow of itself) to restore its control over Thrace and western Anatolia.

Every era brought its own collection of invaders, some more devastat­ing than others. In the 1230s, the Mongols conquered and subjugated both the Seljuk and Georgian kingdoms. Their extraordinary military capabilities supported unlimited ambitions and fierce methods. For the principality of Kiev, already weakened by political divisions, their arrival spelt worse than disaster: it was obliteration. Furthermore, the Mongols did not capture this land in order to develop it: they merely collected war spoils and tribute. The area north of the Black Sea was once more reduced for a long period to a near-deserted countryside. Apart from the Thracian coast and pockets of coastal Anatolia still controlled by the Byzantines, the Black Sea thus largely came under Mongol domination.^[686]

Yet these misfortunes also afforded new opportunities.

The Crimean Tatars meanwhile held the hinterland. These were a new people formed from the Mongol elite, who had brought in their wake Turkic tribes from Central Asia.^[691] In 1347, the Tatars, attempting to take Kaffa from the Genoese, transmitted the bubonic plague to the besieged population, who in turn likely spread the terrible epidemic to the West through the ships that sailed back to northern Italy.^[692] A sizable propor­tion of the European population died from the Black Death precipitating a demographic crisis from which the continent would take centuries to emerge.