An Eastern European capital city of Caffa from Golden Horde period to Ottoman Empire

Abstract

The present article was initially based on the thought of evaluating Kefe’s pre-Ottoman period. The title shaped itself during the writing process. Kefe was not indeed an ordinary city, but a continental capital city. We have determined the title from this understanding. As Balard, Veinstein, Malowist, and my monograph were analyzed in the later stages of the writing process, the situation of Kefe between the pre-Ottoman and the Ottoman periods became evident. In accordance with these analyses, a change in the scope of the article was made and the idea of comparison was determined as the central idea. At this stage, the effort to revive the protected and lost elements of Caffa in different periods of sovereignty emerged all by itself. This tendency became a totally dominant conception after some period, and I felt free to compare Caffa of Genoese and the Ottoman period. In this sense, I have revaluated Michel Balard and Gilles Veinstein’s comprehensive essay on the subject of “continuity and change” that I had reviewed before, but I had not focused on. The present study at first examines fthe historical phases of Caffa from an administrative and legal point of view, and then analyzes the organization of the space and the demographic structure in the urban perspective. In the following stages, the data obtained about the economic, financial and commercial structure in the Genoese and Ottoman periods are analyzed comparatively.

Keywords

• caffa
• ottoman
• crimea
• genoese
• golden horde
• trade
• population
• money
• law
• black sea