About the book: 2001 / The book offered to the reader is dedicated to the history of the Black Sea region, the shores of which in the Middle Ages were a crossroads of different civilizations, a busy trade bridge between the West and the East, a zone of confrontation between Byzantium, the world of the steppes, increasingly subordinated to Islamic culture, and the Italian maritime republics, primarily Genoa and Venice, which were actively making their way to the markets of the entire Mediterranean. The peak of these contacts falls on the 13th–15th centuries, forming, as it were, the chronological center of the book. Its geographical center is the two key regions of North-Eastern Anatolia (Pontus) and the Azov region. The sea routes of the Mediterranean ended there and the caravan routes of the East began. The Azov region and Crimea (with the main cities of Kaffa and Tana, on the site of modern Feodosia and Azov) - Trebizond - Constantinople formed a kind of triangle, on the sides of which there were sea routes, waves of Western European colonization and lines of tension in the struggle for political hegemony in the region.