Byzantine Rule at the Bosporos (Last Quarter of the Eleventh to the Early Thirteen Century)
Recently, there appeared a significant number of academic publications and discussions at scholarly conferences addressing the eleventh-century “Crimean Khazaria” and the problem of its localization. This discussion is related to the events in the Crimea and the Taman in the tenth and eleventh centuries, in connection to the return of the Bosporos under Byzantine power. In 2017, Constantine Zuckerman published an extensive work entitled “The End of Byzantine Rule in North-Eastern Pontus” to offer a “new vision” of the last stage of Byzantine power in the Bosporos in the late tenth century, followed by its rapid decline and final disappearance in the Crimea and the Taman in the last third of the eleventh century. The given study presents a polemic with Zuckerman since it would be difficult to agree with his conclusions in general and particular respects. There is need to assume that all the known (not numerous) categories of sources supply arguments that from the 1080s to the fall of Constantinople in 1204 on the Bosporos area, i. e. the Kerch peninsula and the Taman peninsula, continued to live under rule of the Byzantine Empire.