c. 1280 Foundation of Genoese colony at Kaffa, Crimea.
1296 Venetian fleet attacks Genoese at Kaffa.
1347 Black Death reaches Kaffa, then spreads to Europe.
1370 Timur (Tamberlane) begins his career of conquest.
3 95 Timur sacks Tana, on river Don, and goes on to invade India.
1423-40 Establishment of Crimean Tatar Khanate, independent of the Golden Horde, under the Giray dynasty.
1453 Ottoman Turks (Mehmet the Conqueror) capture Constantinople.
1461 Trebizond surrenders to Turks.
1475 Fall of Mangup-Theodoros, Kaffa, Tana, etc. to Turks and Tatars.
1480 Tsar Ivan III forces Tatars to retreat, at battle on the river Ugra.
1569 Union of Lublin completes Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
1637 Cossacks capture Azov from Turks, but lose it again.
1695-6 Peter the Great constructs a Russian navy at Voronezh, destined for the Azov and Black Seas.
1696 Peter captures Azov. 1772 First Partition of Poland.
1774 Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji: Russia expels Ottoman Turks from part of Black Sea coast.
1783 Empress Catherine II (the Great) of Russia annexes Crimea; end of the independent Tatar Khanate.
French Revolution.
Russia storms Ismail, Turkish-held city at Danube mouth.
Treaty of Jassy between Turkey and Russia: advances Russian frontier on the Black Sea to the Dniester.
Second Partition of Poland.
Foundation of Odessa.
Third (and final) Partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria.
1815 Congress of Vienna.
1821 Greek War of Independence.
1825 Exile of Adam Mickiewicz in Odessa and Crimea. Death of Tsar Alexander I; accession of Nicholas I; Decembrist Conspiracy in St Petersburg.
1828—9 Russo-Turkish War.
1830 November rising in Poland.
1841 Death of Lermontov in a duel at Pyatigorsk.
1848 Foundation of Polonezkoy (Polish settlement) in Turkey by Prince Adam Czartoryski.
185 3-6 Crimean War.
1855 Death of Adam Mickiewicz at Constantinople.
January rising in Poland.
Russian annexation of northern Caucasus. 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War.
1905 Revolution in Russia.
1914 Outbreak of First World War.
Fall of tsardom; Bolshevik Revolution.
Collapse of German and Habsburg empires; end of First World War. Poland regains independence. Allied intervention in Russian civil war begins.
1919-20 Polish-Soviet War. Brief period of Ukrainian independence.
1920 Evacuation of Denikin's White armies from Novorossisk. Mustafa Kemal heads Turkish nationalist rebellion against partition of Turkey.
Greek invasion of Turkey repelled.
Republic proclaimed in Turkey. The 'Exchange' of populations between Greece and Turkey.
1928 Stalin assumes supreme power in the Soviet Union. 1933 Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. 1939 Outbreak of Second World War.
1941 Nazi Germany invades Soviet Union: 1941-5 Great Patriotic War.
Soviet forces recapture Crimea. Deportation of Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Ingush.
Collapse of Nazi Germany. Yalta and Potsdam conferences. 1949 Deportation of the Greeks in the southern regions of USSR.
Death of Stalin.
Crimea ceded to Ukraine from Russia by Nikita Khrushchev.
Mikhail Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Explosion in nuclear power station at Chernobyl, in Ukraine.
Catastrophic spread of ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi in Black Sea.
Collapse of Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Revolution in Romania; death of President Nicolae Ceausescu.
Lithuania declares independence. Gorbachev becomes President of the USSR.
1991 (June) Boris Yeltsin elected President of Russia.
1991 (August) Failed putsch against Gorbachev, led by Gennadi Yanayev and others. CPSU suspended and later dissolved.
1991 (December) Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Independence
of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc.
Abkhazian-Georgian war. Convention for the Protection of the Black Sea signed by six riparian states.
Russian parliament refuses presidential order to dissolve. Troops loyal to President Yeltsin bombard parliament into surrender.
1994—5 Russian Army suppresses self-proclaimed independence of Chechnya, in northern Caucasus.
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1 According to Professor Peter Schreiner of Cologne, an expert on Byzantine diet, an agricultural labourer on average wages needed to work for only fifteen days to earn the price of a 45-kilogram barrel of caviar. Professor Schreiner remarks that a German farm worker today would have to spend all his earnings for eighteen months in order to buy the same barrel.
2 Richelieu became prime minister of France in September 1815, less than three months after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, and his friendship with the tsar helped him to secure the withdrawal of Allied occupation troops after only three years. Before his time in Odessa, he had taken part on the Russian side in the storm of Ismail in 1790. (see p. 97), where he is said to have rescued a Turkish child from Cossacks about to murder her. Byron used this incident in Don Juan, but attributed it to his eponymous hero.
3 Upton was a civil-engineering genius who could not keep his hand out of the till. Raised in Davcntry, he got into trouble for running a post-office and embezzling the postal fees; he then became one of Telford's most trusted road-builders and developed the main highway to Holyhead. In 1816, he was charged with pocketing construction funds by forgery — a capital offence. Upton jumped bail and escaped to Russia, where he became chief engineer at Sevastopol and built not only the sluice tunnels for the naval dockyard but many of the forts whose capture cost thousands of British lives during the Crimean War a few years later.
4 Scotland forms a curious exception. Although there are large and well-organised Scottish diasporas in North America and Australasia, the Scottish National Party's plan for an independent Scotland would restrict citizenship to those resident in Scotland (whatever their ethnicity) or born there, and their children. This determination to avoid ethnic nationalism seems admirable, but it enraged the late Scottish Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, who protested that any 'Greek, Tasmanian or the bastard child of an American serviceman' would have more rights in Scotland than an emigrant of pure Scots descent.
5 Harald Hardrade (the Ruthless) belonged to the Scandinavian-4Varangian' military elite whose raiding voyages for a time connected the Black and Baltic Seas. They were the founders of the 'Kievan Rus' kingdom on the Dnieper, which was the precursor of the Russian state. Born in Norway, at the age of fifteen he fought on the losing side in the battle of Stiklestad (1030) against the Danes, and fled to the court of Jaroslav the Wise at Kiev. Later he enlisted in the Byzantine service under the emperor Michael IV, and commanded the Empire's Varangian mercenaries in wars from Sicily to Palestine.
After his flight from Constantinople, Harald returned to Kiev, married Jarosla
v's daughter Elisabeth ('the gold-decked maid'), and went on northwards to seize the Norwegian throne. He ruled until 1066, when he was killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge during an attempt to conquer England.
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