The Western impact of Eastern events: The crusader consequences of the Fall of Caffa in the light of new Italian sources
The Western impact of Eastern events: The crusader consequences of the Fall of Caffa in the light of new Italian sources

Summary/Abstract: As several other major Ottoman successes, the conquest of Caffa was no real surprise neither for the “Free Christian World”, nor for the unstable “Crusader Commonwealth”. The main features that enabled this conquest to sink into contemporary politics and ideology derived from the close connection, of virtually modern geopolitical nature, between three different levels of geographical and political determinations. The first level was established by the power relations between the states of East–Central Europe (namely Hungary, Poland and Moldavia at that time), trapped on Christian soil between their Italian and Ottoman counterparts. The second was built by the already traditional pontic connection between politics and commercial interests at that Dniestr and Danube Mounds and in the Crimean Peninsula. The third level was chiefly a product of Ottoman attempts to establish the empire’s hegemony in both the Black and the Mediterranean Sea. All three levels played a considerable in role in shaping the military and political events of 1475 in particular and of the 1470’-1480’ in general and helped (re-) establish what would be viewed as the main features of the that age of the later crusades in East–Central Europe: domestic limitations of potential anti-Ottoman action, political and dynastical Christian rivalry that stretched beyond the so called East–Central European area and Ottoman military superiority on land and sea.

• Details
• Contents