The study of the medieval Caucasus has been rather neglected in Western European and North American academia, primarily because of contemporary political barriers to scholarly interchange with Russophone academia. Therefore, it is welcome to see an English translation of Lorenzo Pubblici's work, originally published in 2007 by Firenze University Press as Dal Caucaso al Mar d'Azov: L'impatto dell'invasione mongola in Caucasia fra nomadismo e societa sedentaria, and now updated for its third edition.
This work seeks to examine the transformations wrought by Mongol conquest and rule on the nomadic and sedentary societies of “Caucasia”—defined here to include the region from the Sea of Azov to Georgia. However, the book's ambitions are much more expansive, with its extensive contextualizing chapters aiming at nothing less than an integrated history of Eurasia from the Bosporus Strait to Karakorum, the erstwhile capital of the Mongol Empire. Its chronological scope is no less ambitious, with sections covering topics from the social organization of Georgian society in the first centuries CE, to the conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam under Ghāzān Khān (r. 1295–1304).
The first four chapters aim to provide context for the period of Mongol rule. The first chronicles the relationship between the Byzantine Empire and Caucasia up to the Fourth Crusade; the second introduces the steppe zone and the Qipchaq-Cuman peoples; the third provides an introduction to Georgia and the Northwest Caucasus; and the fourth gives an overview of Mongol society at the time of Chinggis Khan's rise to power.
The fifth and sixth chapters cover the Mongol expansion itself and the implementation of Mongol rule, respectively. The seventh chapter raises questions about the concept of Mongol religious tolerance, while the eighth chapter covers the demographic consequences of Mongol rule. The conclusion seeks to bring together the book's themes with a defense of the concept of the Pax Mongolica. Pubblici considers that Mongol Caucasia was particularly significant because it served as a conduit for mercantile and cultural interconnection, with a particular focus on Italian merchants’ access to trans-Eurasian trade networks. As Pubblici describes it, “steppe nomadism actively contributed to the West's cultural development, opening the doors of a hitherto unknown world” (p. 225).
On the positive side, it is excellent to see the cultures of Eurasia addressed holistically in a single work, and particularly one that positions Caucasia as a vital “hinge between cultures” (p. ix). Pubblici's interests are broad and embrace an extensive range of secondary literature in a wide variety of modern languages. Critically, this includes Russian, with Pubblici taking seriously the Russophone historiography of Qipchaq and Mongol society.
Unfortunately, the work's laudable ambitions are marred by major problems that seriously detract from its utility. The first relates to the book's scope. On the one hand, it is necessary to contextualize the various foreign powers with interests in Caucasia in order to understand its history and the reactions of Indigenous political actors. On the other hand, there is so much contextualization here that remarkably little of the work directly addresses thirteenth-century Caucasia. For example, it takes until page 135 to get to the first Mongol invasion of the region in 1220–23. At this point, only three pages of the book—heavily dependent on the Richards translation of Ibn al-Athīr—are devoted to this campaign. The second Mongol invasion of the Caucasus is even more sparsely treated. A mere two pages (pp. 144–45) cover the second Mongol campaign in the South Caucasus in 1235–36, while the major Mongol campaigns in the North Caucasus in 1238–40 are not mentioned at all.
Second, Pubblici's wide range of interests means that the work is spread much too thin in terms of its source base. For example, relatively little use is made of Georgian sources aside from a few references to the outdated 1849 Brosset translation of the Kartlis Tskhovreba, while the extensive Russophone secondary literature on Alania and Dagestan in the North Caucasus is not mentioned at all. Large parts of the book rely on older literature from the 1930s and 1940s, such as Gheorghe Brătianu, Boris Vladimirtsov, and W. E. D. Allen. While these works are still useful, they are not sufficiently contextualized here through the use of more recent literature.
As a result of these issues, the book's central theme—the impact of the Mongol conquests on the societies of Caucasia—is not treated in much detail. For example, the book's treatment of the lands of the Golden Horde (pp. 175–84) heavily utilizes Grekov and Iakubovskii's Zolotaia Orda, first published in 1937, and relies on evidence from the very different circumstances of the Iranian Ilkhanate, albeit with a few additions from the author's previous work on notarial deeds from the Black Sea colonies of Venice and Genoa. The short eighth chapter on demographic change (pp. 212–21), however, relies almost entirely on comparative evidence from Iran and Russia, rather than addressing Caucasia directly—for example, by utilizing Hannah Barker's work on the demographics of the Black Sea slave trade.Footnote 1 The work's treatment of the impact of the Mongols on Georgia and Armenia (pp. 163–71) is also rather superficial, relying on the chronicle of Kirakos Gandzakets'i, without taking into account the chronicler's bias against the Georgian Queen Rusudan (r. 1223–45) or using the detailed Georgian Hundred Years’ Chronicle or the extensive Armenian colophon evidence as a complement to it. Once again, there is no mention at all of the impact of the Mongol conquest on the sedentary peoples of the North Caucasus.
The resulting book is therefore likely to be too general for the taste of specialists in the various subject areas on which it touches. However, the work's regrettably numerous errors mean that it is also unlikely to be useful as an introduction for nonspecialists and students. For example, in the first few pages alone, it is stated that Mahayana Buddhism reached Tibet in the seventh century BCE (p. 2), while the seventh-century CE Persian opponents of Hēraklios are described as the Achaemenids—a dynasty that had fallen nearly a millennium before this (p. 8). These errors extend beyond unclear phrasing, terminology, and transcription to major historical misunderstandings. For example, Pubblici appears to argue (p. 7) that the Byzantine campaign of 1016 against a local nobleman's rebellion in eastern Crimea—a theme (administrative region) called Khazaria—constituted a conquest of the entire territory of the former Khazar Khaqanate, which covered the entirety of the steppe from the Don to the Volga. While the author's phrasing is somewhat unclear here, they appear to argue that the Byzantine Empire consequently played a leading political role in the Don Steppes until the Fourth Crusade—when in actuality, Byzantine influence in the eastern Black Sea had been reduced to a handful of imperial agents by the 1080s.Footnote 2 Similarly, Pubblici describes the inhabitants of the North Caucasus as all being “nomadic, pagan, steppe peoples” (p. 193). In fact, even in the thirteenth century, large settlements such as Magas and Nizhnii Dzhulat still existed in the North Caucasus plain and piedmont, and the region had been widely Christianized since the ninth century.
It is therefore regrettable that the potential of this work's central idea is not fulfilled. To be fair, I do not think that any single author would be capable of successfully composing a 250-page work with such a broad scope. The flowering of the laudable ambition of this project must, in my opinion, await the advent of a larger collaborative team of specialists.
