A Historiographical Overview of Studies on the Venetian Tana from the Beginnings to the 2010s

Abstract

This article offers a brief glance on the studies done on the history of the Venetian colony in Tana, in the embouchure of the River Don on the shores of the Sea of Azov. The study of the history of Italian trade on the Levant in general and in the areas of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov in particular, including the Venetian colony in Tana, boasts a considerable historiographical tradition. The author, however, limits himself here to the classical studies and intentionally does not go beyond the year 2010. The scholars of the XIX – early XX centuries laid down grounds for the scientific study of the Venetian trade and the development of its Black Sea colonies. To a certain extent the emergence of the social and economic history of the Levant and the Black Sea region were made possible thanks to the publication of sources. The authors of the first half of the XIX century, who studied this subject, were limited mainly to source studies, and even until now the study of history of the Italian presence on the Mediterranean and Black Seas in the XIII – XV centuries starts with a study of a range of unpublished archival sources. The early XX century was marked by intensive work on the identification and publication of the new sources. Some fundamental studies on the history of the Venetian politics and colonization in the Black sea were written. Further steps in the study of the Venetian expansion in the Black Sea area were made based on the materials of the Venetian archive. These projects tended to be collective and to be done in close relationship among the scholars from different countries. There appeared several studies on the history of the Venetian trading station in Tana. A number of researchers developed the problems of economic history of the region. The major problems of the Italian colonization were carefully studied in the recent decades. In the late XXth and early XXIst centuries there appeared a lot of studies of the Venetian and Genoese trading stations in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov area, some of them were particularly focused exactly on Tana.