The Account of Vladimir Monomach’s “Crimean Campaign” in the Sources from the Early Modern Period

Abstract

This paper addresses the account of Vladimir Monomach’s campaign against the Crimea, which appears to be a source to uncover historical imagination of writers, travellers, and researchers from the sixteenth to nineteenth century rather than to understand Byzantine-Rus’ relations. It has been proved that the said plot is based on the information provided by diplomatist Sigismund von Herberstein (1486–1566), who was interested in the origin of the insignia of the Grand Princes of Moscow. The Austrian supplied a story to belittle prestige of the Grand Prince’s barmy, stating that Vladimir Monomach took this shoulder ornament as trophy when he defeated the leader of Genoese city of Caffa (modern Feodosia). It has been demonstrated that other Western chroniclers borrowed this account and transformed it, sometimes far beyond recognition. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it found the way to works of Eastern European historians who studied the history of Russia and the Crimea to make its contribution to misinterpretation of Cafa as ancient Chersonese and Byzantine Cherson. Travellers have documented a local legend of the grand mosque in Caffa allegedly reconstructed from the church where Prince Vladimir the Saint was baptised in the late tenth century. When the studies in the past of the Crimea started following the reunification of the peninsula with Russia, the result was the discovery of the site of ancient Chersonese. However, the idea of historicity of the Rus’ campaigns against the Crimea in the eleventh century established in the scholarship for long, due to the authority of Vasilii Tatishchev and Vasilii Vasil’evskii. Taking their own understanding of historical processes into account, different historians tried to find out a more or less appropriate chronology of one or two campaigns and to inscribe them into the known context of Byzantine-Rus’ relations

Keywords

• византийский крым, записки путешественников, херсонес, кафа, владимир мономах, сигизмунд фон герберштейн, мацей стрыйковский