The greatness of Soldaya was, however, of short duration: another people, more active, and endowed with a bolder spirit of mercantile enterprise than the Greeks, came forward about the same period, and concentrated in its own hands the whole heritage of the great epochs that had successively shed lustre on the peninsula from the day when the Milesians founded their first colonies on the Cimmerian Bosphorus. Being already possessed of important factories in Constantinople, the Genoese had long been aware of the circumstances of the Black Sea, and the immense resources it would place at the disposal of enterprising men who should there centralise for their own profit all the commercial relations of Europe with Russia, Persia, and the Indies. The rivalry which then existed between them and the Venetians, accelerated the execution of their projects, and in 1820, after having secured the territory of the ancient Theodosia, partly by fraud, partly by force, they laid the foundation of the celebrated Caffa, through which they became sure masters of the Black Sea, and sole proprietors of its commerce. With the arrival of the Genoese the Tauris saw the most brilliant epochs of its history revived. Caffa became by its greatness, its population, and its opulence, in some degree the rival of Constantinople, and its consuls, possessing themselves of Cerco, Soldaya, and Cembalo, made themselves masters of all the southern coast of the Crimea. Other equally profitable conquests were subsequently made beyond the peninsula. The galleys of the republic entered the Palus Maeotis; Tana, on the mouth of the Don, was wrested from the Tatars; a fortress was erected at the mouth of the Dniestr; several factories were established in Colchis, and on the Caucasian coast, and even the imperial town of Trebisond was forced to admit one of the most important factories of the republic on the Black Sea. The Genoese colonies thus became the general emporium of the rich productions of Russia, Asia Minor, Persia, and the Indies; they monopolised for more than two centuries all the traffic between Europe and Asia, and presented a marvellous spectacle of thriving greatness. All this glory had an end. Mahomet's standard was planted over the dome of St. Sophia in 1453, and the intercourse of the Crimea with the Mediterranean was broken off. The destruction of the Genoese settlements was then inevitable; and the republic, despairing of their preservation, assigned them over to the bank of St. George, on the 15th of November, 1453. The consequences of this cession which put an end to the political connexion of the colonies with the mother state, were of course disastrous. Despair and loss of public spirit fell upon the colonists, individual selfishness predominated in all their councils, and the consular government, before remarkable for its integrity and its virtues, instead of uniting with the Tatars, and rendering its own position with regard to the Porte less perilous, completely disgusted them by a total want of honesty, and by selling its aid for gold to all the parties that were desolating the Crimea. So many faults were followed by the natural catastrophe. Caffa was forced to surrender at discretion to the Turks on the 6th of June, 1473, and some months afterwards all the points occupied by the Genoese fell one by one into the hands of the Ottomans.
After the disaster of the Genoese colonies, the great lines of communication of the trans-Caucasian regions, the Caspian, the Volga, the Don, and the Kouban, were broken, having lost their feeders, and all the commercial relations with Central Asia were for a while suspended. The Venetians, who had obtained from the Turks the right of navigating the Black Sea, in consideration of a yearly tribute of 10,000 ducats, strove in vain to take the place their rivals had lost; they were expelled in their turn from the Black Sea, the Dardanelles were closed against all the nations of the West, and the Turks and their subjects, the Greeks of the Archipelago, alone possessed the privilege of passing through the strait. In our remarks on the Caspian we have already pointed out the new outlets which the Eastern trade procured for itself by way of Smyrna, and the great revolution which followed Vasco de Gama's discovery.