Contacts of Genoese Gazaria and Persia based on the materials of the "Acts of the Genoese notaries"

Abstract

Introduction. The article examines the features of economic relations between the Black Sea region and the Persian region within the West Asian system of international relations of the Late Middle Ages. The relevance of the research consists in addressing a little-studied topic in order, firstly to identify and generalize existing knowledge, and secondly to discover new ones using previously unexplored source base. Materials and methods. In the article toponymic, onomastic and other evidence of the existence of persistent economic interaction between the Northern Black Sea region and the states of the territory of modern Iran are shown based on the material of Russian modern historiography and the sources of the collection "Acts of Genoese Notaries". There were used statistical and typological methods, and also the method of content analysis of Genoese act material of the XIV–XV century. Results. A number of problematic issues have been successfully resolved, for example, the degree of usefulness of the Genoese act material for works on this topic or the degree of its study in Russian historiography. Conclusion. The encountered difficulties are formulated as specific problems to be solved in the course of future research, based on the material of high-precision source material, the available historiographical evidence on this problem is confirmed and clarified to a certain extent. Soviet and modern historiography has shown, however, a clearly insufficient level of study of the problem of the Western Asian-Black Sea economic relations of the Late Middle Ages. In these studies, it is reflected at a specific level - almost only in the form of an inventory of goods and a list of settlements and regions with which trade was carried out.