Caffa on the Black Sea

Xu Shanwei Encounters the Mediterranean · Instalment Eight By Clio Walker. This adaptation is published with the authorization of Professor Xu Shanwei. It is an AI-assisted contemporary editorial adaptation based on The Westward Transmission of Eastern Learning and the Revival of Western Culture and material actually consulted. The first-person historian is an editorial narrator, not Professor Xu’s recorded speech, new work, personal travel account, or a chapter-by-chapter reproduction. Authorization does not imply his individual review of new interpretations.

On 6 June 1289, after the bell for terce, a sale was entered in a notary’s register at the Genoese loggia in the Black Sea port of Caffa.

Antonius, a spice merchant acting for Obertus Ratas, sold a child named Jascascius, about twelve years old, to Georgius Ventus. The price was 430 aspers, a silver currency used locally. A baker named Johanimus and another man witnessed the transaction. The notary set down seller, buyer, witnesses, price, place, and time, giving the sale legal effect in the merchants’ world.

I would like to begin our visit to Caffa with this disturbing contract. Seen only along merchants’ routes, the city can easily become an exhilarating picture: Italian ships passed through the Bosporus to Crimea; roads across the steppe carried inland goods to the harbour; Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Jews, and Muslims appeared in the same body of documents; distant silk, spices, and news changed hands. Yet the twelve-year-old child also belonged to the network. He was not a traveller. He was merchandise.

Caffa is therefore a city that cannot be contained by the word “prosperity.”

On a modern map, Caffa corresponds to Feodosiia on the southeastern coast of the Crimean Peninsula. It stands on the northern shore of the Black Sea, its bay opening southward. Xu’s original text places it on the “southern Black Sea coast,” which needs correction. Its position mattered. A ship sailing southwest could pass Constantinople and enter the Aegean and Mediterranean. Roads north and east joined the steppe under the Golden Horde and more distant Eurasian routes. Where sea lanes and land routes met, Caffa could connect otherwise separate markets.

We should not imagine this coast as empty ground awaiting Italian discovery. The area of Feodosiia had an ancient urban past and local societies of its own. In the thirteenth century, Crimea lay within the political world created by the Mongol conquests and ruled by the Golden Horde. The Genoese acquired room to settle and trade on the khans’ land. They did not turn a masterless coast into their country merely by drawing it on a nautical chart.

The exact year in which the trading post was founded remains uncertain. The familiar date is 1266. Archaeological and historical-geographical work has also proposed a more cautious range between 1268 and 1275, with 1275 regarded as especially plausible. We need not force the evidence into a single year. A consul is attested by 1281. By the time Lamberto di Sambuceto arrived around 1288, a repeatable commercial order was already functioning.

Lamberto had first practised in Chiavari in Liguria. At Caffa, a different sea and a different clientele came before his desk. His surviving registers cover several stretches of 1289 and 1290. They preserve 903 documents, nearly six hundred of them commercial. They concern not only great merchants and overseas ventures but loans, commissions, exchange, ship hire, partnerships, employment, wills, and private disputes.

The notary’s work had a rhythm. Surviving dates show little or no activity on Saturdays, Sundays, and major religious festivals. Clients most often arrived in the early afternoon between the canonical hours. April, June, and August were busy; before autumn, merchants hurried to settle affairs ahead of the unfavourable sailing season. We need not invent Lamberto grinding ink, looking up, or urging a customer to speak. More than nine hundred acts already show how one desk compressed a hurried port into words that others could later invoke.

Before a cargo went aboard, expected profits could already be divided at that desk. One person entrusted capital to a traveller and stipulated how accounts would be settled on his return. Another borrowed to acquire goods. A shipowner hired hands for a voyage. A merchant appointed an agent to collect a debt elsewhere. Ports transformed chance encounters into long-distance commerce through these repeatable procedures as well as through ships. Strangers did not need to trust one another entirely when instruments, guarantors, and recognised rules carried part of the risk.

Spice merchants were particularly active within this system. Scholars have identified at least nine in Lamberto’s records. They received payments, borrowed, exchanged currency, chartered ships, and bought and sold merchandise; their warehouses could also serve as places where contracts were concluded. A “spice merchant” was not necessarily a shopkeeper guarding a few sacks of pepper. The title might conceal finance, storage, shipping, and several categories of goods.

Goods did not come from a single direction. Spices, silk, sugar, salt, wine, and alum entered Black Sea commerce along different routes; people subjected to forced sale moved within the same network. Neither every commodity nor every person arrived on one ship or travelled one uninterrupted road. Placing them together on a map tells us that Caffa was a place of transshipment and recombination. It does not prove the existence of a frictionless “Silk Road” running directly from China to Genoa.

Long routes were usually assembled from many short ones. A merchant from the steppe brought goods to the coast; a local intermediary explained prices and practices; an agent in the port arranged storage; a shipmaster chose the next leg; and a partner in Constantinople or another Mediterranean market took over. War, customs dues, debt, or the sailing season could sever any link. Caffa’s strength lay not in abolishing such obstacles but in gathering enough people who could connect the next segment.

Lamberto’s clientele brings some of those people into view. Alongside wealthy shipowners and merchants were blacksmiths, bell-founders, leather workers, coopers, caulkers, physicians, and furriers. Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Jews, and Muslims whom Latin documents grouped under the loose name “Saracens” also came before him. Some transactions required an interpreter. A name and occupation do not tell us on which street a person lived, but they do prove that Caffa’s commerce could not function in Genoese alone.

An interpreter did more than replace words in one language with words in another. Parties had to understand what debt, maturity, surety, and price meant in this instrument. Currencies, weights, and terms of status from different regions had to fit a form the notary could write. Culture moved here first as an urgent practical question: how could both sides acknowledge that this business had been completed?

Xu, drawing on earlier scholarship, describes Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians living closely together. The formulation captures one side of Caffa’s multiethnic life, but it should not be expanded into a portrait of effortless equality. A notarial register proves that different people entered the same legal space. It cannot certify friendship among them. The need for an interpreter itself shows that linguistic and institutional distances remained.

Documents and archaeology from the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show Genoese people in a privileged political position; substantial Armenian, Greek, Tatar, and Jewish communities; and Catholic, Orthodox, and Armenian churches within the urban landscape. That was the city after further growth. Much of the surviving fortress and the religious architecture also belongs to a later period. We cannot transport it wholesale into 1289 and claim that Lamberto already saw the completed scene outside his window.

The distinction matters. The port’s diversity was real, and so were its hierarchies. The people eligible to serve as consul, those whose legal forms were recognised most easily, residents of the most strongly defended core, and customers who required an interpreter did not occupy the same position. Cultural exchange rarely erased difference. More often, it required people of unequal status to learn how to act with one another.

Jascascius’s contract makes that inequality painfully clear. A spice merchant could trade wine and aromatics; he could also sell a child. The notary used the same precise language for the price and the witnesses. Legal clarity did not make the transaction just. It made title to a human being easier to transfer.

We do not know where Jascascius was born, how he was enslaved, or where he was taken after the sale. The act provides a name, an approximate age, and a price, but not his voice. To supply fear, resistance, or silence would pass beyond the evidence. To remove him because the evidence is silent would repeat the contract’s own perspective, seeing property where a person stood.

Recent scholarship on the slave trade has read Latin notarial acts beside Arabic materials, tax registers, law, and merchants’ accounts. It shows that the Black Sea trade was not an aberration managed by one religion or ethnicity. Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk Egyptian markets were entangled, while warfare, raiding, and debt around the sea continually produced people who could be sold. Merchants gained profits, states gained tax revenue and recruits, and households gained labour. Captured, separated, and transported people paid the cost.

Caffa was thus both a meeting place of languages and goods and a machine that converted violence into price. A raid on the steppe could become a formally valid sale at the port. A buyer might then send a person to Constantinople, the Aegean, Italy, or the eastern Mediterranean. Trade across religious boundaries did not abolish prejudice. It showed that different societies could share ways of treating people as property when profit was available.

None of this cancels the learning that genuinely occurred in the port. Merchants acquired languages, sailors learned new routes, artisans met unfamiliar materials, interpreters bridged institutions, and notarial forms adjusted to overseas conditions. But if a history of “exchange” selects only compasses, silk, and spices, it leaves the forcibly transported people of the same routes outside the frame.

Professor Xu places Caffa within the commercial channels through which eastern learning travelled west and argues that Italian activity tied the Black Sea more closely to the Mediterranean system. The point helps us see how goods, knowledge, and news covered long distances. Later scholarship makes the picture fuller. The channel was neither a one-way pipe nor solely a Latin western achievement. It depended on the political order of the khans, production and population in Crimea and the steppe, local communities’ labour, and many people who did not enter the network by choice.

The notarial register has another revealing limit. Those who came to Lamberto’s desk needed Genoese instruments and possessed some ability to use them. People who never signed an act, undertook casual labour, carried disputes to another court, or lacked the standing to ask a notary for a line of writing disappear more easily. Nine hundred and three documents are an extraordinary record. They are not a census of the entire city.

Reading the contracts therefore requires two actions. First, attend closely to what they write: names, trades, prices, deadlines, witnesses, and canonical hours. Then look at what they omit: how goods were acquired, what translation lost, whether an enslaved person understood the instrument, and who outside the walls paid for commercial success. Archives are most powerful not when they make the past seamless but when they give shape to its gaps.

Let us return finally to the Genoese loggia on 6 June 1289. What survives is not a harbour film that we may decorate at will, but a restrained series of facts: a spice merchant acting as agent, a buyer, two witnesses, a child about twelve years old, and 430 silver coins. The very composure of the record lets us see both faces of Caffa.

One was connection. People from different places used instruments, currencies, interpreters, and ships to join the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The other was cost. Some could travel, profit, and build careers through that network. Others were carried out of their former lives by it.

The two ends of the old world did meet at Caffa. The encounter never guaranteed who would enter the notary’s room as a merchant and who would appear only as a piece of property.

In the next instalment, we will leave the Black Sea for the foreign merchants’ lodgings of Alexandria. That city faced the same practical questions: how should strangers be housed, governed, and enabled to trade? Caffa’s question will travel with us. When a city opens its gates, who gains passage—and who is confined to the other side of its institutions?

Sources and editorial boundary

Research foundation: Xu Shanwei, The Westward Transmission of Eastern Learning and the Revival of Western Culture, user-supplied DOC. The section actually read was Chapter One, Section Two, “Commercial Activity in the Black Sea Region,” printed p.37 and digital p.38. It presents the Black Sea as part of the Mediterranean trading system, Caffa as a Genoese commercial centre, the 1289–1290 records of Lamberto, and the city’s multiple communities. The book locates Caffa on the “southern Black Sea coast”; modern geography and archaeology require correction to the southeastern coast of Crimea on the Black Sea’s northern shore. A phrase rendered in the electronic text as “no obvious ethical and moral separation” is too unstable to support a claim that ethnic separation did not exist.

Lamberto’s acts: Michel Balard, Gênes et l’Outre-Mer, I: Les actes de Caffa du notaire Lamberto di Sambuceto, 1289–1290 (1973). The Persée bibliographical record, accessible pages and two contemporary reviews were read, as was the description of the registers in De Gruyter’s public preview. This article does not claim a complete reading of all 903 Latin instruments: https://www.persee.fr/doc/ehess_0070-6957_1973_edc_12_1 ; https://www.persee.fr/doc/rebyz_0766-5598_1974_num_32_1_1491_t1_0389_0000_2 ; https://www.persee.fr/doc/bec_0373-6237_1975_num_133_2_450035_t1_0390_0000_001 . The surviving periods, total of 903 acts, nearly six hundred commercial records, work rhythms, occupations, and communities are paraphrased from these accessible portions.

The transaction of 6 June 1289: François Ledermann, “Utilisation du terme « speciarii » dans les comptoirs génois au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de la Pharmacie 94/349 (2006). Persée’s public text at p.101 was read for the act’s date, canonical hour, place, parties, approximate age, price, and witnesses: https://www.persee.fr/doc/pharm_0035-2349_2006_num_94_349_5952 . Nothing has been supplied about the child’s origin or later life. Chinese names are reading aids rather than claims about a single settled transliteration.

Historical geography and foundation chronology: S. G. Bocharov, “Ancient Economic and Social Concepts in the Genoese Gazaria Region” (2017), open full text in the University of Malta repository, pp.200–207. It was read for Caffa on Golden Horde land, uncertainty over the settlement date, the consul attested in 1281, and the later network of Black Sea and Azov Sea sites: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/34589/1/Ancient_Economic_and_Social_Concepts_in_the_Genoese_Gasaria_Region_2017.pdf . UNESCO’s tentative-list entry “Trading Posts and Fortifications on Genoese Trade Routes” supports the post-1261 network and the identification of Caffa with Feodosiia; its serial heritage nomination is not treated as proof of an unqualified regional “monopoly”: https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5575 . GeoNames 709161 supplies only the modern Feodosiia city reference point, 45.03199, 35.38153, not the exact location of Lamberto’s loggia, a quay, or the sale: https://www.geonames.org/709161 .

Communities and urban space: O. Gospodarenko, “Topography of Caffa (Kefe) Religious Monuments of the XIII–XV Centuries” (2018). Its public journal abstract was read for Genoese privilege, Armenian, Greek, Tatar, and Jewish communities, and the city’s several Christian traditions. The evidence chiefly concerns the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and is not projected backward as a complete plan of the city in 1289: https://www.eminak.net.ua/index.php/eminak/article/view/133 .

Enslavement and trading networks: Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500. The Penn Press description and contents were read for the study’s synthesis of Latin and Arabic materials and the entanglement of Genoese, Venetian, and Mamluk networks: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823660/that-most-precious-merchandise/ . Barker’s open chapter “Slavery in the Black Sea Region,” in Slavery in the Black Sea Region, c.900–1900 (2022), was also read for its discussion of warfare, raiding, law, and enslaved people’s experiences: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_9 . Later numerical estimates are not projected onto the thirteenth century, and later evidence is not used to invent a life for Jascascius.

Editorial and rights boundary: The narrative is organised around verifiable notarial detail. It invents no weather, harbour sounds, room furnishings, dialogue, private thoughts, or voyage. Commodities, occupations, interpretation, and institutions are described only at the level supported by the sources. Modern scholarship is paraphrased in original language rather than reproduced at length. The first-person historian is Clio Walker’s editorial guide, not Professor Xu’s personal recollection; authorization does not imply his review of each correction or new interpretation.