Crimean Goths and Principality of Feodoro

Most of the ruins on the Mangup summit belong to a forgotten, improbable principality of the Middle Ages. The fortress of Feodoro - Mangup contained an independent Greek principality, ruled by the Prince of Gothia. But what did `Greek' mean up here, or `Gothic'?

The Goths came to the Black Sea and to Crimea from an unusual direction, from the north-west rather than from the east. A proto-Germanic confederation of peoples from southern Scandinavia, they had occupied Crimea in the third century AD, in the course of their conquest of most of the Black Sea's northern shore. A hundred years later, the Black Sea Goths were defeated by the Huns. Many headed westward, on the next leg of a migration which in the time of their great-grandchildren would deposit them in Italy as the army of their king, Theodoric the Great. But some remained in the Crimean mountains. Christianised and then incorporated into the Byzantine Empire, they were still there in the sixth century when the emperor Justinian I fortified Mangup as part of a line of strong-points intended to shield the coastal cities against an attack out of the steppes.

When the Khazars conquered Crimea in the eighth century, John, Prince-Bishop of Gothia, sallied down from Mangup to lead an unsuccessful rising against the Khazars, but the Byzantine emperors betrayed him. They preferred to come to terms with the Judaised Khazars, recognising them as powerful allies who could form a buffer-zone between the Empire and wilder nomad nations approaching the Black Sea from the steppe; two Byzantine emperors -- Justinian II and Constantine V -- married Khazar princesses. Gothia went back to its hill and left history for nearly seven hundred years.

Below this `Lost World' on its plateau, the world continued to change, but Gothia kept on worshipping in its huge basilica and ignoring the turmoils at the foot of its cliffs until - in 1475 - the Ottoman Turks arrived. Mopping up the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, after their capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks and their Crimean Tatar allies stormed the Principality of Feodoros on its mountain and brought Gothia to an end.

The Basilica of Constantine and Helen, dating from the ninth century, stood desolate for a time. In 1579, a Polish nobleman scrambled up to look at it. Marcin Broniewski (`Broniovius') had been sent by King Stefan Batory on a diplomatic mission to Mehmet Giray, khan of the Crimean Tatars, and he wrote an elegant Latin account - Tartariae Descriptio - which was translated into English a century later by Samuel Purchas. `Marcopia' [Mangup] . . . hath had two Castles, Greek Temples and Houses sumptuous, with many cleere Rils running out of the stone: but eighteene yeers after that the Turkes had taken it (as the Greeke Christians affirm) it was destroyed by a sudden and horrible fire.'

Broniewski found still standing `the Greeke Church of Saint Constantine, and another meane one of Saint George. One Greeke Priest and some Jews and Turkes dwell there; Oblivion and Ruine hath devoured the rest; nor are there men or Stories of the quondam inhabitants, which I with great care and diligence everywhere sougth in vaine.' Yet Broniewski had been able to question the Orthodox priest, who told him that `a little before the Turkes besieged it, two Greeke Dukes of the Imperial bloud of Constantinople or Trapezond [Trebizond], there resided, which were after carried alive into Constantinople, and by Selim the Turkishe Emperour slaine. In the Greeke Churches on the walls are painted Imperiall Images and Habits . . .'

Nothing remains of the basilica but foundations, and the archaeologists can only dream of what those `Imperiall Images' might have shown them. The zone of the spirit is almost empty now. The only inhabitants of Mangup are a colony of Russian hippies, out where the plateau juts to the north-east in terrifying bowsprit of bare stone overhanging a thousand feet of air.

from "Black Sea"
By Neal Ascherson