ABSTRACT
This chapter, which is the central part of my study, engages in a reconstruction of the society of Caffa in terms of ethnicity and religious affiliation of its inhabitants. The interaction of people of different identities in a mixed and indeed, entangled, society raises a number of issues. Starting with a presentation of the variety of ethnic groups present in the city, it further deals with the macrogroups aggregated based on the religion of the people. These macrogroups become key units of quantitative analysis in the second subchapter of Chapter 5. This is followed by a discussion of such related matters as contacts between Latins and Orientals, religious institutions in Caffa, mixed marriages and other forms of domestic partnership, and family and familial clan in the city. The Latin migration to Caffa underwent a structural change which led to a much greater dispersion that can be best characterized by the word ‘internationalization.’ Unlike the fourteenth century when immigrants came mainly from Liguria and Piedmont, the fifteenth century brought its own changes: Before and especially after 1453, more and more people, mainly mercenary soldiers, were coming from other areas of Italy as well as the rest of Latin Europe, from England, France, Burgundy, the Netherlands, and the German states to Poland and the Czech realms. Contrary to many estimates made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Latins constituted the absolute majority among the macrogroups of Caffa. They were followed by Greeks, who were apparently less prestigious and wealthy than the Armenians, but more numerous. The Armenians seemed to be a fairly ‘privileged’ group among the Orientals, but not as numerous as is often thought; however, apparently, they were the most loyal to the Genoese administration, and the most favoured by the Latins. In the fifteenth century, the city’s population was slowly decreasing, but the dynamics of this urban decay determined by the Ottoman threat and constringent conditions is interesting: before 1453, the Latin community diminished insignificantly or even grew, the Greeks and Armenians decreased significantly, while the Muslims increased slightly as a relative share of the total population after 1453, mainly thanks to the arrival of Muslim merchants from Asia Minor trading in Caffa. The conclusions of the chapter on the demography of Caffa together with the analysis of trade dynamics make me doubt the reliability of four points dominating a bigger part of the previous historiography: (1) that the Genoese colonies fell mainly due to economic rather than political reasons, (2) that the Genoese Black Sea trade was in deep decline in the first half of the fifteenth century, (3) that the keyword characterizing the Genoese Black Sea in the first half of the fifteenth century is its supposed ‘regionalization’, and (4) that Caffa was dramatically depopulating already before the 1453.
