BUSINESS AND THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE IN A MULTIETHNIC SOCIETY: CAFFA IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGESStefan Stantchev (Sofia)
Late medieval Caffa has been attracting scholars' attention for a long time. Business and interethnic relations have been the two main reasons for this interest - not by chance. On the one hand, Genoese Caffa was one of the biggest commercial centers in Europe because it was both a beginning and ending point of the international trade through the Mongol empire and a collecting point for local Black Sea area resources, exported from Caffa to the West. At the same time, Caffa was a city inhabited by different ethnic and religious communities, such as Westerners (mostly people from present-day Italy, France, and Spain, in a word, Latins), but also Orientals, who probably formed the vast majority of the city population; among them were Greeks, Armenians, Muslims, and, later, Jews.
The documented development of Genoese Caffa starts in the thirteenth century, when the settlement was nothing more than a small commercial emporium, but it grew quickly and in the fourteenth century Caffa was one of the most important economic centers not only in Eastern Europe, but in the whole Mediterranean as well. When the Ottomans finally conquered it in 1475, Caffa was probably one of the largest European cities. In this period, which covers roughly two centuries, the Genoese maintained their rule over a city in which non-Latin population was increasingly growing. The preserved documents shed some light upon the way these different communities lived and interacted together in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Using available published source material, the goals of this paper are as follows:
·To briefly examine the patterns of economic behavior of the different ethnic groups as they appear in notarial deeds, which form the bulk of the available source material;
·To examine how the Genoese treated the Oriental population in their statutory laws and administrative correspondence, and thus,
·To show the Genoese tolerance towards the other ethnic groups and to discover the reasons for this attitude, but also:
·To compare Caffa with other parts of the Mediterranean and with Genoa's great rival - Venice, which will show two different answers to the problem of how to deal with the Others so as to have profitable business in the East.
Finally, the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that business interests in the Middle Ages could bring different ethnic and religious groups closer to each other. Moreover, it also aims at demonstrating the limits of this policy of tolerance, in order to show the peculiarity of a medieval cosmopolitan city, which was similar but at the same time different from a modern one.