Well the very short answer is that Mediterranean city-states established trading colonies in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, but whether these were “colonies” in the modern sense is debatable. Were they like modern colonies, were they proto-colonies (and the inspiration for early modern colonialism), or were they not colonies but something else entirely? I’m not sure how to answer the question from a Byzantine perspective (I don’t think anyone ever talks about Byzantine imperial outposts as “colonies”, since there’s a much different dynamic going on there), but I can talk a bit about the Italian trading colonies.

There were trading outposts in the crusader states in the eastern Mediterranean, especially in Acre and Tyre, and in Nicosia, Famagusta and elsewhere on crusader Cyprus. Were they colonies? Typically there were distinct neighbourhood where Italian merchants lived - the Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans had their own neighbourhoods, and sometimes there were other merchants from other city states (e.g. Amalfi, but not always Italians - there were also communities from Marseille). An official representing the government of the mother city was present (a podesta, a consul, a bailo, etc.), and there was probably a semi-permanent population of merchants and their families. There were also legal officials and notaries to handle all the business in the community. Sometimes the different Italian neighbourhoods had disputes with each other and at one point in the 1250s-1260s, there was open warfare between the Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians in Acre. Otherwise, some of the Italian population was temporary or seasonal. They would come when the sailing season began in the spring and go back home again in the fall, or come and go throughout the summer.

But those were just commercial neighbourhoods within crusader cities - and the cities themselves were conquered, not founded, by the crusaders. Were the crusader states themselves colonies though? That’s a good question too, and something I talked about in a previous question (short answer: No! But also…yes?). The Italians also had commercial neighbourhoods in Constantinople, but again, they were just neighbourhoods in someone else’s city. Were they really “colonies”?

The same pattern was repeated in the Black Sea as well, the Venetians and Genoese had commercial privileges in Byzantine and Mongol towns along the coast of the sea. The biggest one was the city of Kaffa (or Caffa) on the Crimean peninsula, which was a Genoese trading colony. The basic history of Kaffa is relatively simple: in the 12th century, up until the Fourth Crusade in 1204, both the Genoese and the Venetians had privileges in Constantinople, but they weren’t allowed to trade directly in the Black Sea. The sea was regarded as a “Byzantine lake”, and only Greeks were allowed to sail there.

In 1204 the Empire was conquered by crusaders and it was split up between the crusaders and the Venetians, so the Genoese were virtually shut out of any trade opportunities in Byzantine lands, including the Black Sea. But the Venetians were more concerned with governing the empire, and they already had access to the markets of Asia through the crusader states in the Mediterranean, so they didn’t really bother with the Black Sea. Meanwhile, the Genoese allied with the Byzantine rump state in Nicaea, which managed to take back Constantinople in 1261. In return (well, simplifying a bit here) the restored Byzantine Empire gave the Genoese exclusive rights to trade in the Black Sea.

It’s not entirely clear when the Genoese reached Kaffa, but it was probably around 1270. Kaffa differs a bit from Acre, Tyre, or Constantinople, because it wasn’t really a pre-existing city ruled by someone else. It had existed in the past - it was the ancient Greek Theodosia, and the Khazars had also ruled the area long before in the 8th and 9th centuries, so the Byzantines and later the Genoese still called it “Gazaria”. In the 10th century it was conquered by Kiev, and in 1238 it was conquered by the Mongols. So in 1270 the Genoese were definitely not the first to arrive and there was already an ancient city on the site of Kaffa. But it was largely in ruins and the people there were rural farmers.

The Genoese rebuilt the city, and in the 14th century it had walls, a Genoese governor (a “consul”), a bishop, a court, a mint, notaries and other legal/commercial officials, a busy port with room for hundreds of ships - it was a major city, almost a rival to Genoa itself. One end of the Silk Road from the Mongol heartland in Asia and China was Acre and Tyre on the Mediterranean, which was good for Venice, but after 1291, the crusader states on the mainland were all destroyed and Venice’s access to Asia was greatly reduced. Another end point was Genoese Kaffa:

“The spires of Christian churches (both Orthodox and Catholic) rose beside the minarets and domes of Moslem mosques and Jewish synagogues; and Franciscan and Dominican missionaries mingled in the streets with Armenian popes and Jewish rabbis. And here - from the caravans which had arrived from the Far East, from the neighboring markets of Solgat, the Tartar capital, and from the surrounding rich fields of the Crimea - came as rich a variety of trade as the world has ever seen. Here European and Levantine traders sold Grecian wines and Ligurian figs, and the linen and woollen stuffs of Champagne and Lombardy, and purchased precious silks from China, carpets from Bokhara and Samarkand, furs from the Ural Mountains and Indian spices, as well as the produce of the rich black fields and forests of the Crimea.” (Khvalkov, pg 113)

The Genoese were probably a small minority of the population even though they were governed it. The city was also filled with

“Greeks, Armenians, Vlachs, Trapezuntines, Circassians, Mingrelians, Sutars, Poles, Georgians, Russians, Franks, Jews, Tatars, Turks, Arabs, and Iranians. Such an ethnic composition formed a bulwark against the dynamic in Europe of persecution, pogrom, and forced mass conversion.” (Slater 274)

Population estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000, so no one is really sure how many people lived there. But even at the lowest estimate, that’s an enormous city, for the Middle Ages. And although it looks like everyone lived together in peace and harmony, there was also warfare with the Mongols just beyond the city, and Kaffa was probably Europe’s biggest slave market. “Tatar” (Mongol and maybe Chinese) slaves were sold there and brought to Europe, the Ottomans in Anatolia, and to the Mamluks in Egypt.

War against the Mongols was probably how the Black Plague spread to Europe. It’s possible that it reached Europe through other routes as well, but the traditional story is that the Mongols were besieging Kaffa in 1346, the inhabitants caught the plague, and the Genoese brought it back to Europe. They had no understanding of how the disease was transmitted though…they thought that the Mongols caused it by catapulting dead bodies over the walls. Now we know it’s spread by rats and fleas, but infected rats probably got on board Genoese ships, if that’s really how it was passed on to the rest of Europe.

The plague was devastating, but the Genoese continued to rule Kaffa until 1473 when the Ottoman Empire conquered it. By then, Kaffa had declined, because the Ottomans had already conquered Constantinople in 1453 and the Black Sea was closed off to Italian trade. So the Genoese had to look elsewhere for trade opportunities, first in Spain, and then of course they were involved in the early exploration of the Americas (e.g., Christopher Columbus was Genoese).

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