LE COMMERCE PONTIQUE AU XVe SIÈCLE VU À TRAVERS LES MARCHANDISES D’OUTRE-MER VÉHICULÉES EN MOLDAVIE
Études balkaniques (Sofia) 2024, N 3, DOI: https://doi.org/10.62761/645.EB.LX3.13
Andrei MIREA
Institut of History « Prof. Nicolae Iorga », Romanian Academy, Romania
The Fifteenth-Century Black Sea Trade as Seen Through the Overseas Goods Carried to Moldavia
Abstract: The article analyses several commodities that are broadly called either “Tartar merchandises” or “overseas goods” in the trade privileges issued in favour of the merchants of Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg) by the voivodes of Moldavia during the fifteenth century. After a historiographical and methodological discussion, the following oriental commodities are studied in the context of the fifteenth-century Pontic commerce: lemon, tebenka, plain silk, and kamka. The Slavo-Romanian sources are compared with data provided by various late medieval sources (such as the registers of Genoese Caffa, the complaints of Russian merchants, the Ottoman customs records or the accounting books of the city of Lviv) in an attempt to reconstruct as much as possible, the sources of supply that produced the aforementioned goods and the trading networks through which such commodities were conveyed to the northwestern coasts of the Black Sea.
Keywords: Pontic commerce, the Moldavian route, Tartar merchandises, oriental trade, medieval Black Sea