Today's Issues of Researches in the History of the Theodoro Principality: Polemic Notes
This article addresses the most important of disputable issues in the history of the Theodoro principality analysed by modern scholarship. It discusses the aspects of general chronology of the period of independence of this principality, the origin of its ruling dynasty, and the characteristics of its foreign policy and the state borders. Particular attention has been paid to the events of the military and political catastrophe of the 1390s, which plaid the decisive role for the shaping of the independent polity in the South-Western Crimea. The article supplies analysis of almost all known building inscriptions from the ancient city of Mangup, the capital of the Theodoro principality. Despite they are known long since, these monuments continue to form the most important sources for interpretations of political history of Mangup and the Theodoro principality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in general.