146 chapter four
comes Sinopolis, belonging to the Sultan of turkia, who is likewise subject.
Next, the territory of Vastacius, whose son is named ascar after his mater-
nal grandfather and who is independent. But Westwards from the mouth
of the tanais as far as the Danube everything is theirs, and even beyond
the Danube in the direction of constantinople, Blakia—assan’s territory—
and Little Bulgaria as far as Sclavonia all pay them tribute, and over and
above the tribute stipulated, in recent years they have further levied on each
household one axe and all the unwrought iron that has been found.
and so we put in at Soldaia on the 12th Kalends of June [21 May 1253].
[.. .]
at that I spoke [.. .] to the prefects [capitaneos] of the city, or rather to
the prefects’ deputies, since the prefects had gone to Baatu with the tribute
during the winter and had not yet returned. [.. .]
the merchants from constantinople advised me to take wagons, or, bet-
ter still, to buy my own covered wagons, in which the russians [Ruteni]
carry their furs. [.. .]
there are lofty promontories along the sea coast from Kerson as far as the
mouth of the tanais, and between Kerson and Soldaia lie the forty Settle-
ments [quadraginta castella], of which nearly every one has its own dialect:
the population included many Goths, whose language is Germanic. [.. .]
towards the far end of the territory there are many large lakes, and one
their shores are salt-water springs [.. .]. these salt-springs yield Baatu and
Sartach a sizeable revenue, for men come there for salt from all over russia
and give for every cartload two cotton cloths worth half an yperperon. In
addition, many ships arrive over the sea for the salt, all paying tax according
to their capacity [secundum quantitatem sui].
Now on the third day after we left Soldaia, we encountered the tartars;
and when I came among them I really felt as if I were entering some other
world.15
William of rubruck’s report on the state of affairs in the Black Sea region
a decade after the Golden horde’s foundation are irreplaceable as a sum-
mary of the changes which the local political and commercial regimes
underwent as a result of the region’s integration into the immense ching-
gisid realm.
the surprising feature of the franciscan friar’s survey of these two
aspects is the contrast between the scale of strongly-marked political
change and the absence of any comparable transformation in the struc-
tures of Black Sea commerce. the most conclusive proof of continuity
here is precisely that in the first decade of Mongol rule the dominant com-
mercial axis of Soldaia-Sinope still functioned on the same scale as it had
15 rubruck/Jackson, pp. 61–71.