Medieval Tana, at the mouth of the Don, in the northeastern part of the Sea of Azov, was the most distant trading post of the Genoese and Venetian colonial system in the Levant.1 This settlement, built along the so-called Mongol Road that linked the Lower Danube with Beijing through Central Asia, began to be visited by Italian merchants starting in the second half of the thirteenth century.2 A multi-ethnic population formed by Westerners—above all Venetians and Genoese, but also Florentines—and Orientals—Tatars, Greeks, and Armenians—inhabited its different quarters. In the fourteenth century, the Venetian quarter was characterized by the presence of several stone houses, including that of a consul, a loggia under which the notary worked, two Franciscan churches (St. Mary’s and St. Francis’s), and at least two other churches, St. James’s and St. Raphael’s.3The physiognomy of medieval Tana can be reconstructed based on written sources conserved not only in the archives of Italian cities like Venice and Genoa, as one might think, but also elsewhere; for example, in the collections of the Saint Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as Sergey Pavlovich Karpov pointed out in his article “Documents on the History of the Venetian Trading Post at Tana in the Second Half of the Fourteenth Century” (1991).4 Among these sources, mostly unpublished, the notary deeds are of particular importance. They provide details of the town’s social life, economic structures, trade exchanges, colonial administration, ethnic origins of inhabitants, and urban development.With her book At the Borders of the West, Francesca Pucci Donati makes available to scholars the summaries of 592 deeds—primarily commercial agreements, but also powers of attorney and wills—drawn up in Tana and its surroundings by seven Venetian notaries: Benedetto Bianco, Marco Marzella, Nascimbene Scarena, Francesco di Boninsegna di Strada di Mantova, Vittore Scaliperio, Niccolò Natale, and Andrea Scapazio. They succeeded one another, working at the service and under the supervision of Venetian consuls, between 1359 and 1388. The original documents are conserved in the State Archives of Venice. For each deed, Pucci Donati provides essential information such as date, content, name and residence of all persons present (including witnesses), and places mentioned in the text. The summaries are listed chronologically in seven sections, one for each notary. An index of names completes the book.Most of the commercial agreements concern the slave market. A much smaller number relate to wine, fish, caviar, hide, and the silver trade. Very few regard salt, cloth, iron, and wheat, and only one concerns wax. On the whole, they call attention to the highly commercial role of Tana and to its functioning as a trading post between East and West.Although the attention of scholars has already been attracted by the slaves bought and sold in this settlement,5 there is still much to say about wine and other products. With regard to wax, for example, the contract drawn up in Tana is similar to ones closed in the Genoese colony of Kilia, at the mouth of the Danube, around the same time. On 11 April 1360, before the notary Benedetto Bianco, the brothers Rizzardo and Antonio di Riva, Genoese citizens living in Tana, promised to deliver wax and other goods for a value of 30 silver bars (sommi) to the Venetian merchants Giacomo Giuntini and Giuliano de Grazia; more precisely, Rizzardo and Antonio undertook to provide a quantity of goods equal to 10 bars by the following 10 May and the rest by 20 June.6 As in Kilia, the suppliers needed an interval, between agreement and delivery, to look for wax and carry it home. Unfortunately, as in most of Kilia’s contracts, the place of origin of the wax is not mentioned. Nevertheless, the geographical position of Tana seems to suggest a Russian or Crimean source. In any case, a single agreement regarding this commodity does not allow us to determine if the wax market was monopolized by Westerners in fourteenth-century Tana, as in thirteenth-century Caffa, or was also open to Orientals, as in fourteenth-century Kilia.7As this example shows, the Venetian documents summarized by Pucci Donati are extremely useful and increase our knowledge not only of the history of Tana and of the slave trade, but of all aspects of the social and economic history of the Black Sea region in the late Middle Ages— especially if integrated with similar sources, like the Genoese deeds drawn up in Kilia and in other colonies of the Pontic basin.8
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May 23, 2024
Alan Sangster 
Open Access
