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This article deals with the fates of the two notaries, Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto de Smeritis, who served in the 1430s in the Venetian colony in Tana (today Azov), placed in the mouth of the River Don where it flows into the Sea of Azov. In this article the author established based on the notarial documents the chronology of the arrival and departure of our two notaries together with the chronology of the arrival and departure of the respective consuls. Further, based on the self-identifications of the notaries the author inferred that that the self-description of the notary and, more broadly, of any person in notarial deeds varied considerably, and there is no reason to see any clear relationship between the formula and the legal status of the person. The imbreviaturae of the notarial documents drawn up by the notaries Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto Smeritis mainly, although with a few exceptions, in Tana from 1430 to 1440 are stored in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, in the sections Notarili Testamenti and Cancelleria Inferior, Notai. After the death or the termination of the activities of public notaries, the Cancelleria Inferior received these imbreviaturae. The deeds of Varsis and Smeritis are the only notary documents of Venetian origin that came to us from Tana in the 1430s. Joining the notarial College, Venetian notaries were not always able to find a place in Venice and went to practice overseas, often combining their work with other positions, most often the clerical ranks, and then they returned home. In the overseas colonies the functions and responsibilities of a notary were much wider than in the metropolis – they included not only the drafting of the private notarial deeds, but also participation in the management of the colonial chancery and administration, the drafting of the official documents of the curial office of the consul, etc. The position of a notary could be combined with other administrative and ecclesiastic posts in the colonies. The notaries in the overseas Venetian trading stations were simultaneously priests, and this can be often seen in Tana, since they could combine in one person a number of essential functions (the chancellor of the consul’s curia, the chaplain, the notary). In Tana, the Venetians lived compactly within a community, which determined the special role of the notary, who performed in relation to them, in addition, the duties of the pastor. One of their tasks was to draw up private notarial deeds for the individuals, although their work as notaries was not limited to this, as it is discussed in this article.

This article is devoted to the flow of migrants from the French kingdom to the Genoese colonies.

This paper is focused on the image of the Other in early modern European imperial discourses as exemplified by Venetian discourse about Istria and English discourse about Ireland, which have not been previously compared, in the narratives by Pietro Coppo, Fynes Moryson, John Davies and Barnabe Rich. The authors of the article have analyzed mechanisms of construction of the Image of the Other and political or rhetorical context of its instrumentalization. The examination of English imperial discourses about Ireland and Venetian discourse has demonstrated instrumentalist nature of early modern ethnographic discourses of the Other. Imperial discourse of the Other justified sovereignty of the metropole over the periphery and also communicated knowledge about the Other in order to suggest possible solutions to the problems of governance.

This paper is focused on the issues of cultural hierarchies in early modern European imperial discourses in all-European discourse about Muscovy and Ottoman Empire and English discourse about Ireland, which have not been previously compared, in the narratives by Petrus Petreus, Paul Rycaut, Fynes Moryson and John Davies. The authors of the article have analyzed mechanisms of building the cultural hierarchies and compares different traditions of ethnographical descriptions with each other. The authors under consideration not only create cultural hierarchies, but also instrumentalize the image of the Other to some extent. They focus on government, laws, religion and manners. The choice of these aspects aims to highlight problems important not for (or not only for) the Other, but for authors` societies themselves. The fact that most accounts describe relative barbarians rather than absolute also can be a consequence of such instrumentalization, because comparison between “us” and the Other becomes important.

Crimea was historically a crossroads of civilizations, and in particular in the times of the medieval Genoese and Venetian colonization. The topic of the interactions between the Italian newcomers and the local Greek population was many times addressed in historiography. The predominantly ‘imperial’ and ‘oppressionist’ vision of the Genoese activity on the Black Sea was balanced out in the recent decades by highlighting the facts of collaboration, cooperation, and cultural exchange between the Italians and the Greeks. More attention was given to brokerage, namely the networks of local Greek intermediaries and go-betweens, who helped Italians in their dealings with different languages, traditions, and indigenous peculiarities. Their role was particularly important when they acted as translators and interpreters and assisted the Italian newcomers to navigate in the indigenous society. The Italian domination over the Black Sea did not therefore destroy the older economic structures; instead, as in the case with many other early modern colonial experiences, it relied on them and used them for mutual benefit.

This study is focused on two documents: an act of the Doge and the government of Venice, which gave ambassadors Giacomo Dolfino and Giacomo Contarini the power to negotiate and conclude a peace treaty with Michael Palaiologos on March 12, 1265 and the contract that the emperor concluded with these ambassadors on June 18, 1265. These sources are part of a set of documents concerning the relationship of the Venetian Republic with the Byzantine Empire.

Annales Beneventani is a series of Latin chronicles from the Santa Sophia monastery in Benevento, southern Italy. The entries in the annals were originally annual. There are three manuscripts of the Annales Beneventani, each of which comes from the convent of Santa Sophia; all three editions of the annals differ. The first manuscript came down to us as part of the Vatican Codex, which also contained a Psalter, a sacramentary, an antiphonary, and published documents. The second was found in 1724 in benevento. The third was also created in the church of Santa Sophia. In this translation, we tried to reconcile three manuscripts.

 

In the 15th century, the Black Sea region became a source of export of slaves to Europe and the Middle East. Tatar raids on Russian principalities were among the tools of bringing the slaves to the Mediterranean markets. The Italian colonies on the Black Sea, primarily the Genoese Caffa, became the main source of thre supply of slaves. This was facilitated by political instability and constant wars in the region, the collapse of the Golden Horde, the confrontation between Moscow and Lithuania, and the dynastic wars in the Principality of Moscow. For the Russian lands, irrespective of their political affiliation, that was a period of raids done by khans who sought not so much stable payments of tribute, but rather loot and, above all, slaves that could be sold through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean markets. The article is accompanied by fragments of chronicles that demonstrate the picture of Tatar raids on Russian lands during the years 1422 – 1455.

This study presents a surveyofthe formation of thecollection of Nikolai PetrovichLikhachev (1862-1936), a great collectorand Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, through his life and research interests. This collection was unique for Russia at that time. As a researcher and a collector, Likhachev laid the foundations for the professional study of watermarks and paper studies, medieval diplomatics and sigillography, scholarly art history (in the sphere of icons) in Russia. The Museum of Palaeographycreated by Likhachev included rich material on the history of writing in Europe, Asia, North America and the European colonies of the New World, encompassing a wide chronological period -from the turn of the 4-3 millennia BC to the beginning of the 20th century. His collectionshapedthe schools of the Russian and Soviet Egyptology, Assyriology, Hellenic and Medieval studies, Arabic studies, Byzantine studies, and Slavic studies. The present paper is a contribution to the studies of both his activity as a scholar and an antiquarian,and the shaping of his collection.

In the XIII – XV centuries medieval Europe has made progress in trade and transition to market economy, which resulted in the foundation of a number of Venetian and Genoese overseas colonies in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea area. The stability of Pax Mongolica had a positive effect on long-distance trade with the Central and Eastern Asia and India. Genoa began colonizing the area earlier than its main competitor, Venice. The Venetians came to the area and founded their trading stations in Tana and Trebizond. In the XV century the goods from the Eastern Europe prevailed over those from the Central and Eastern Asia, especially the slaves. In exchange the Venetians and the Genoese imported cotton, woolen, and silk fabrics, raw cotton, rice, soap, glass, ceramics, jewelry and swords. All the foreign policy of the Italian maritime republics in relation to the Eastern countries was mainly to provide the most favorable trade regime and the regime of taxes, tolls and duties: reduce of abolish commerchium, to prevent the abuse of merchants, to unify measures for tax collection, to extend the privileges, to guarantee the safety of traffic, and to obtain reparations and compensations. The Italian merchants settled in the Northern Black Sea region due to the fact that the Tatar khans were well of the importance of the international trade in their territory and realized the possible profits from trade. The stabilization in the region and the rise of trade was a trend running through the first half of the fifteenth century. The amounts of incanti and trade volume were high. The figures decreased sharply during the years of military turmoil and increased during the rise of trade with the Levant. The size of the sums paid on the auction can serve as an indicator of the vitality of trade relations. Thus, based on these figures (especially for the 1436 – 1439), we can infer that the 1430s were the time of the greatest prosperity of the Venetian trade in the Northern Black Sea during the whole fifteenth century.

This paper focuses on the Guizolfi family and showcases the aftermath of the Genoese colonization of the Black Sea area, highlighting the complex and entangled multiple identities that resulted from more than two centuries of the Genoese presence there. The Guizolfi were a Genoese patrician clan that was integrated into both the life of the Genoese Black Sea colonies and the local environment of Circassian and Zikh nobility. The prominent role it played in Eastern Europe went far beyond the Genoese Gazaria in the course of the late Middle Ages and early Modernity. Guizolfi intermarried with the local Circassian nobility and were quite successful in playing on double identities. One of the last representatives of this family in the area, Zaccaria Guizolfi, took measures to resist the Ottoman threat, but later on he began considering moving to the Russian Principality of Moscow, where Ivan III Vasilyevich was happy to accept the Christians who were fleeing from the Ottomans from the South. Zaccaria Guizolfi negotiated the terms of his potential service at the court of Ivan III, but finally failed to travel to Muscovy and found his way at the service of the Khans of Crimea. What is more interesting is a supposed link between Zaccaria and certain events in the religious life of Russia. Since long time ago, Zaccaria Guizolfi, Prince of Taman, also known as Zaccaria Skara from the above-mentioned correspondence with Ivan III, was identified by some scholars as a Jew Scharia, who was a heresiarch of the Judaizing heresy in Novgorod and Moscow. This point is a matter of ardent debate in historiography for decades, and till now there is little certainty on this matter.

The collection of Western European manuscripts gathered by Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev (1862–1936) and currently stored in the Scientific and Historical archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the Archive) contains, among other documents, a number of those coming from the Latin West. The vast majority of this array comes from Italy (about 5,000 documents), of which about a third are original notarial deeds. There are over 10,000 storage units related to the history of Italy in the collection of the Western European section of the Archive. The collection is divided into fonds, and the focus of this research is on the 6th collection, “Venice and its possessions”, containing notarial deeds analysed by a team of scholars. These manuscripts provide information about economic and social aspects of life in the rural communes of Val d’Astico, located in Northern Vicentino. Here we describe the geographical and historical peculiarities of the region in order to place the documents in their particular context and to better understand it. All of these documents are instrumenta rather than imbreviaturae, and, at least when it comes to the deeds drawn up by Pietro di Zennaro, we can treat this set as having a certain unity. Within this study, one of our main objectives was preparation of these documents for critical publication. The source material studied here still has to be contextualized and researched in a more profound manner; however, we can clearly see now that the investigation of the deeds stored here are more than promising.

This article is based on the Venetian documents coming from the chancery of the Venetian Senate and the notarial deeds drawn by the Venetian notaries Niccolò di Varsis and Benedetto di Smeritis in the 1430s in the Venetian trading station in Tana and it examines the system of international relations in the fifteenth century Mediterranean and Eastern Europe and the place of the Venetian colony in Tana in it. The Venetians and the Genoese began to explore the Black Sea region in the mid-thirteenth century, and by the mid-fourteenth century their colonial expansion in the area resulted in a network of colonies and trading stations. The international situation in the Black Sea region was very complex. The Venetians had to play a hard game among such political actors in the region as the Golden Horde (later the Khanate of Crimea), the Principality of Theodoro, the Ottoman Empire and the Genoese colonies. While Genoa in fact established a whole colonial empire on the shores of the Black Sea and Azov Sea, Venice had to rely on Tana and Trebizond; still Venice managed to maintain parity, to appropriately take care of the security of the colony, and at times to create for Genoa significant difficulties (as in the case of the rebellion in Cembalo). The sources speak rather in favor of improving of the trading situation in Tana in the first half of the fifteenth century. The number of ships only slightly decreased, and the number of visits of the Venetian mudae to Tana in this period increased significantly compared to the fourteenth century. The parking time in Tana in the first half of the fifteenth century was consistently longer than in Trebizond, Sinope, Caffa and other Black Sea ports, and the amount of the incanti grew steadily from 1436 years, reaching their peak in 1448; then they increased till 1452. Despite temporary bursts of instability, the trade grew till 1453 and was still surviving till the final conquest of the Italian colonies by the Ottomans in 1475.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the Black Sea region became an area of ​​increasing political importance. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in this region (the Black Sea and the Azov Sea) and, more broadly, in the regions of Southeastern and Eastern Europe, the interests of numerous political players were confronted: Genoa, Venice, Florence and Pisa, Papal Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdoms of England, France and Aragon, the Duchy of Burgundy, the Byzantine Empire, Georgia, Russian principalities, Tatar states, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, Hungary and Wallachia, the Mamluk Sultan and, finally, the growing Ottoman Empire were just a short list of actors on the political scene at the time. However, against the background of the growing Ottoman threat, neither the metropolis of the colonies itself, Genoa, nor Casimir IV, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, nor Vladislaus II, King of Bohemia and of Hungary, who was also an enemy of the Ottomans, could help Caffa. Caffa and other Genoese and Venetian colonies were captured by the Ottomans in 1475. Thus, we can see that the Southeastern Europe saw many wars in the fifteenth century, which eventually led to the domination of the Ottoman Empire.

The four brief papers following below continue the line of reports on the archival finds of the Western migrants to the Genoese overseas colony of Caffa from outside Liguria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, previously published in Archivio Storico Messinese,  Rassegna Storica Salernitana,  Studi Piemontesi,  Studi veneziani,  and Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria.  The main sources researched for these studies are Caffae Massariae – the public books of accounts of the treasury of the Commune of Caffa drawn by the officers called massariae. These officers were annually rotated and sent from metropolis (Genoa) to its colony (Caffa). Caffae Massariae reflect money transactions and operations of the treasury in the double-entry bookkeeping system. The sources are stored in the archival section of the Bank of Saint George.  Since Caffae Massariae quote (directly or indirectly) all those city inhabitants, who did with the administration any kind of financial transaction, they reflect the main flows of Latin migration from the West to the overseas Eastern colonies.

The main source for my study is a set of notarial deeds produced in Tana by the Venetian notaries Nicolo de Varsis and Benedetto Smeritis. These sources have not been published previously and have never been the subject of intensive study. Researchers have long regarded Venetian notarial acts as one of the most important sources of the economic, social, political, ethnic, and legal history of the Italian trading stations. The documents drawn up by the Italian notaries in the Levant, in the trading stations of the Eastern Mediterranean, and on the Black Sea coast  have attracted the attention of the scholars from different fields,  being a relevant source for reconstructing the history of the Italian republics, Eastern Europe, and the region at the edge of the Caucasus. Italian notarial documents are quite numerous because the trading stations’ commerce and political relations with the Byzantine Empire, Russian principalities, the Golden Horde, and the states of the East were intensive and this produced plenty of documentary material. Undoubtedly, a large part of the archives of the trading stations perished during the Ottoman conquest. Nevertheless, the republics retained copies of many original documents and books of accounts, which they sent to the metropolis and attached to the reports of officers. According to the legislation of the republic of Venice, notarial deeds passed from one notary to his successor  and then came to the archives. Currently, 1194 Venetian deeds are extant, drawn up in Tana by some thirty-four well-known notaries.  Later acts, in contrast to earlier, survived, as a rule, not as instrumentae (original papers), but as imbreviaturae (copies left by the notaries).  

 

The present study is devoted to the research into a set of the Venetian lettere ducali to the Marquises d’Este of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries collected by N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stored in the Western European section of the Saint Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the preparation of their full-text critical publication. The lettere ducali are an excellent source to study the Serenissima and its continental and overseas domains. The source material of the Venetian lettere ducali have long and not without reason been considered and actively investigated by researchers as one of the most important sources on the economic, social, political, legal, environmental, cultural, and ethnic history of Venice. In addition, Venetian sources often provide researchers with important material on the history of other states of the Italian Peninsula, including, in our case, the domains of d’Este. This explains the exceptional importance of studying lettere ducali as the most important source on the history of the Western European Middle Ages and early modern times. This study revealed historical material on the specific cities and regions of Italy (Venice, Treviso, Ferrara, Verona, Padua, the Po Delta), as well as the Venetian colonies in the Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus) and the Adriatic (Shkodra, Dalmatian Coast), history of international relations, history of economic relations, history of everyday life, history of state institutions and international law, history of a medieval document, history of Latin writing.

The present study is aimed at the research of the set of the Venetian lettere ducali of the fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries and the preparation of their full-text publication. Due to their diplomatic and paleographic characteristics, the lettere ducali stored in St. Petersburg are an example of a fairly well-developed chancery production, despite the chancery still being in the process of institutionalization at that point. At the same time, the lettere ducali are among the most widespread varieties of the documents issued by the Venetian Doges at that time. In this regard, the clarification of the criteria of authenticity and attributive features of these letters is the most urgent purpose of the project, given that the systematic publication and sequential study of the lettere ducali of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are yet to be done in the future. As regards the medieval and early modern chancery activity in the Venetian Republic, only the period up to the thirteenth century has been studied well enough; as for the later times, only minor sets of the authentic lettere ducali have been published. The documents in question from the manuscript collection of N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, have never been published, and went almost unnoticed in the scholarly discourse. The publication of these documents will allow the medievalists the study of the previously unknown sources. The extensive study of the diplomatic and paleographic peculiarities of the letters, their description and visualization, their attribution and the transcription of the notes of the scribes will provide the researchers of the given period with the tools of the historical criticism of this variety of documents. The preliminary outcomes of the research and the deep analysis of certain case studies found in the manuscripts are to be presented as scholarly articles in double-blind peer-reviewed journals, as well as in conference proceedings.

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