ABSTRACT
Between the Western and Byzantine worlds on the one hand, and the inorganic world of the Mongol steppes on the other hand, the Genoese colony of Caffa, founded in the early 1270s, became one of the main points of contact between Europe and Asia over a period of two centuries, a major boundary city, characterised by its ethnic cosmopolitanism and by its strong trading influence all over the Pontic area. But one may ask whether the Genoese Gazaria was an actual frontier defined by natural limits, or by an awareness of linguistic or cultural discrepancies. It is not necessary to examine here the concept of frontier, to which many historians, among them Frederick Jackson Turner and Friedrich Ratzel, paid attention, looking at the history of the modern world.2 But, starting from a recent essay by Pierre Toubert, we need to ask what the idea of the boundary means for the medieval Crimea: is it a line traced on a map, or a blurred zone to which both Westerners and Tatars laid claim? What might be the social consequences of any boundary definition?3 Depending on the attitude of the external powers, the Tatar khanates and, in the fifteenth century the Ottomans, the structure of the frontier differed during the two centuries examined here.
