144 chapter four
certainly the cuman territories were also connected, via the Black Sea,
to other commercial networks: although the documentary evidence leaves
much to be desired, there is no doubt that crimean coastal towns had
ties to trebizond under the Great comnenid dynasty, and to constanti-
nople when it was occupied by the crusaders and the Venetians in 1204:
for example, two years after the occupation a ship left the city usque in
Soldadea [= Soldaia].11
William of rubruck attests to the fact that the cuman nomad chieftains
profited greatly from trade, which was probably in the hands of Greek and
armenian long-distance merchants, until the Mongol invasion. rubruck
crossed the crimea in 1253 but knew enough to report on the recent past
of the peninsula’s ports: “Before the tartars came, the comans used to live
in this plain and would force the cities and fortresses I have mentioned
to pay them tribute.”12
the Mongol incursion of 1223 only briefly upset Black Sea trade, but
the cuman princes’ ability to draw revenue from this commerce was
brought abruptly to a close in 1238, when the Mongols invaded for good
and all. friar William records the aftermath of the invasion as recounted
to him by a merchant who had been present at this second attack on the
crimea: “When the tartars appeared, the cumans entered the province in
such numbers, all fleeing as far as the sea coast, that they would eat one
another, the living those who were dying; so I was told by a merchant who
saw the living seizing on and tearing with their teeth the raw flesh of the
dead, as dogs do with corpses.”13
4.1.2 Batu: Black Sea Trade in the Shadow of Tabriz
the earliest Westward wave of pan-Mongol expansion was unleashed
between 1236 and 1242, and led naturally into the anti-Seljuk expedition of
the steppe to the North of the Black Sea, the route fell into utter disuse, and from 1261 its
function was taken over by the Genoese-dominated sea route connecting the Northern
Black Sea towns to egypt’s great city port, alexandria, via constantinople (see chapter
4.2).
11 for this and for other, less specific references in the sources to the same theme, see
Brătianu, Mer Noire, pp. 227–228, and his general conclusion on Black Sea trade under the
Latin empire of constantinople (1204–1261): “While the cumans ruled the steppe, the rich
Kuban valley was held by a multitude of minor alan nobility, fractious and quarrelsome,
so that regional commerce never attained more than local significance, with the possible
exception of the slave trade which had flourished since antiquity.”
12 rubruck/Jackson, p. 70; these civitates et castra are Kersona, Matrica [= tmutarakan]
and Soldaia.
13 Ibid.