Discussion About the History of the Bosporus of Kimmeria in the Late 9th to11th Centuries

Introduction. Written sources contain contradictory and scant information about the Cimmerian Bosporus in the late 9th – 11th centuries. Analysis. Researchers of Jewish-Khazar documents published in 1912, 1913, and 1932 believed that Kerch (Bosporus) was the center of the Khazar province of Bosporus from the early 8th to the mid-10th centuries. Byzantinists, however, concluded that the city of Bosporus was returned to the Eastern Roman Empire during this period. Letter No. 97 of Patriarch Photius of Constantinople clearly indicates the subordination of the city of Cimmerian Bosporus to the Eastern Roman Empire no later than 868. According to N. Oikonomides, the mention of a strategos of the Bosporus theme in the Escorial Taktikon of 971–975 indicates its establishment in the second half of the 10th century. As the article shows, historians have often arbitrarily not only interpreted but also edited the text of John Skylitzes’s terse statement about the subjugation of a certain country to Khazaria in January 1016. This country (χώρα) could not have been located in Cherson, the Bosporus, Klimata, or the Azov region. John Skylitzes did not refer to Cherson as Khazaria in his work. He called the captured George Tzul the archon of the country of Khazaria, not the strategos of a theme. Results. Archon George Tzul, unlike the strategos of Cherson, George Tzul, and George Tzul, protospatharios of the Bosporus, did not hold the title of imperial protospatharios. According to the text of letter No. 3, sent by Metropolitan Michael Choniates of Athens to the tax collector Constantine Pegonites, Byzantium continued to control Cherson, Klimata, and the Cimmerian Bosporus around 1180. Funding. The work was carried out within the framework of the project for the state assignment of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation No. FZEG-2023-0004 on the topic “Historical experience of interethnic interaction in Crimea from ancient times to modern times.”