Empire of Trebizond in the context of "The Crimean Steppe"

Crimea (/kraɪˈmiːə/ kry-MEE-ə) is a peninsula in Eastern Europe, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, almost entirely surrounded by the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. The Isthmus of Perekop connects the peninsula to Kherson Oblast in mainland Ukraine. To the east, the Crimean Bridge, constructed in 2018, spans the Strait of Kerch, linking the peninsula with Krasnodar Krai in Russia. The Arabat Spit, located to the northeast, is a narrow strip of land that separates the Syvash lagoons from the Sea of Azov. Across the Black Sea to the west lies Romania and to the south is Turkey. The population is 2.4 million, and the largest city is Sevastopol. The region, internationally recognised as part of Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since 2014.

Called the Tauric Peninsula until the early modern period, Crimea has historically been at the boundary between the classical world and the steppe. Greeks colonised its southern fringe and were absorbed by the Roman and Byzantine Empires and successor states while remaining culturally Greek. Some cities became trading colonies of Genoa, until conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Throughout this time the interior was occupied by a changing cast of steppe nomads, coming under the control of the Golden Horde in the 13th century from which the Crimean Khanate emerged as a successor state. In the 15th century, the Khanate became a dependency of the Ottoman Empire. Lands controlled by Russia and Poland-Lithuania were often the target of slave raids during this period. In 1783, after the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Russian Empire annexed Crimea. Crimea's strategic position led to the 1854 Crimean War and many short lived regimes following the 1917 Russian Revolution. When the Bolsheviks secured Crimea, it became an autonomous soviet republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It was occupied by Germany during World War II. When the Soviets retook it in 1944, Crimean Tatars were ethnically cleansed and deported under the orders of Joseph Stalin, in what has been described as a cultural genocide. Crimea was downgraded to an oblast in 1945. In 1954, the USSR transferred the oblast to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on the 300th anniversary of the Pereyaslav Treaty in 1654.

Trabzon is a city on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey and the capital of Trabzon Province. Historically known as Trebizond, the city was founded in 756 BC as Trapezous by colonists from Miletus. It was added into the Achaemenid Empire by Cyrus the Great and was later part of the independent Kingdom of Pontus that challenged Rome until 68 BC. Thenceforth part of the Roman and later Byzantine Empire, the city was the capital of the Empire of Trebizond, one of the successor states of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In 1461 it came under Ottoman rule. During the early modern period, Trabzon, because of the importance of its port, again became a focal point of trade to Persia and the Caucasus. Today Trabzon is the second largest city and port on the Black Sea coast of Turkey with a population of almost 300,000. The urban population of the city is 330,836 (Ortahisar), with a metropolitan population of 822,270. Trabzon has 18 districts in total.

The Theme of Cherson (Greek: θέμα Χερσῶνος, Thema Chersōnos), originally and formally called the Klimata (Greek: τὰ Κλίματα), was a Byzantine theme (a military-civilian province) located in the southern Crimea, headquartered at Cherson.

The theme was officially established in the early 830s and was an important centre of Black Sea commerce. Despite the destruction of the city of Cherson in the 980s, the theme recovered and prospered, enduring until it became a part of the Empire of Trebizond after the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

The Principality of Theodoro (Greek: Αὐθεντία πόλεως Θεοδωροῦς καὶ παραθαλασσίας), also known as Gothia (Γοτθία) or the Principality of Theodoro-Mangup, was a Greek principality in the southern part of Crimea, specifically on the foothills of the Crimean Mountains. It represented one of the final rump states of the Eastern Roman Empire and the last territorial vestige of the Crimean Goths until its conquest by the Ottoman Empire by the Ottoman Gedik Ahmed Pasha in 1475. Its capital was Doros, also sometimes called Theodoro and now known as Mangup. The state was closely allied with the Empire of Trebizond.

Greeks have been present in what is now southern Russia from the 6th century BC; those settlers assimilated into the indigenous populations. The vast majority of contemporary Russia's Greek minority populations are descendants of Medieval Greek refugees, traders, and immigrants (including farmers, miners, soldiers, and churchmen/bureaucrats) from the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Balkans, and Pontic Greeks from the Empire of Trebizond and Eastern Anatolia who settled mainly in southern Russia and the South Caucasus in several waves between the mid-15th century and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. As during the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks, the survivors fled to the Upper Pontus (in the USSR).

In former Soviet republics, about 70% are Greek speakers who are mainly descendants of Pontic Greeks from the Pontic Alps region of northeast Anatolia, 29% are Turkish-speaking Greeks (Urums) from Tsalka in Georgia, and 1% are Greek speakers from Mariupol in Ukraine.

The Pontic Greeks (Pontic: Ρωμαίοι, Ρωμιοί; Turkish: Pontus Rumları or Karadeniz Rumları; Greek: Πόντιοι, Ελληνοπόντιοι), also Pontian Greeks or simply Pontians, are an ethnically Greek group indigenous to the region of Pontus, in northeastern Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). They share a common Pontic Greek culture that is distinguished by its music, dances, cuisine, and clothing. Folk dances, such as the Serra (also known as Pyrrhichios), and traditional musical instruments, like the Pontic lyra, remain important to Pontian diaspora communities. Pontians traditionally speak Pontic Greek, a modern Greek variety, that has developed remotely in the region of Pontus. Commonly known as Pontiaka, it is traditionally called Romeika by its native speakers.

The earliest Greek colonies in the region of Pontus begin in 700 BC, including Sinope, Trapezus, and Amisos. Greek colonies continued to expand on the coast of the Black Sea (Euxeinos Pontos) between the Archaic and Classical periods. The Hellenistic Kingdom of Pontus was annexed by Rome in 63 BC becoming Roman and later Byzantine territory. During the 11th century AD, Pontus was largely isolated from the rest of the Greek–speaking world, following the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia. After the 1203 siege of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, the Empire of Trebizond was established on the Black Sea coast by a branch of the Komnenos dynasty, later known as 'Grand Komnenos'. Anatolia, including Trebizond, was eventually conquered by the Ottomans entirely by the 15th century AD. Greek presence in Pontus remained vibrant during the early modern period up until the 20th century, when, following the Pontic Greek genocide and the 1923 population exchange with Turkey, Pontic Greeks migrated primarily to Greece and around the Caucasus, including in the country of Georgia. Although the vast majority of Pontic Greeks are Orthodox Christians, those who remained in Northeastern Turkey's Black Sea region following the population exchange are Muslim; their ancestors having converted to Islam during the Ottoman period, like thousands of other Greek Muslims.

The Despotate of Epirus (Medieval Greek: Δεσποτᾶτον τῆς Ἠπείρου) was one of the Greek rump states of the Byzantine Empire established in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 by a branch of the Angelos dynasty. It claimed to be the legitimate successor of the Byzantine Empire during the subsequent struggle for Constantinople, along with the Empire of Nicaea and the Empire of Trebizond; its rulers briefly proclaiming themselves as Emperors in 1227–1242 (during which it is most often called the Empire of Thessalonica). The term "Despotate of Epirus" is, like "Byzantine Empire" itself, a modern historiographic convention and not a name in use at the time.

The Despotate was centred on the region of Epirus, encompassing also Albania and the western portion of Greek Macedonia and also included Thessaly and western Greece as far south as Nafpaktos. Through a policy of aggressive expansion under Theodore Komnenos Doukas the Despotate of Epirus also briefly came to incorporate central Macedonia, with the establishment of the Empire of Thessalonica in 1224, and Thrace as far east as Didymoteicho and Adrianople, and was on the verge of recapturing Constantinople and restoring the Byzantine Empire before the Battle of Klokotnitsa in 1230 where he was defeated by the Bulgarian Empire. After that, the Epirote state contracted to its core in Epirus and Thessaly, and was forced into vassalage to other regional powers. It nevertheless managed to retain its autonomy until being conquered by the restored Palaiologan Byzantine Empire in ca. 1337. In the 1410s, Carlo I Tocco, Count Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos, managed to reunite the core of the Epirote state, but his successors gradually lost it to the advancing Ottoman Empire, with the last stronghold, Vonitsa, falling to the Ottomans in 1479.

The Empire of Nicaea (Greek: Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων), also known as the Nicene Empire, was the largest of the three Byzantine Greek rump states founded by the aristocracy of the Byzantine Empire that fled when Constantinople was occupied by Western European and Venetian armed forces during the Fourth Crusade, a military event known as the Sack of Constantinople. Like the other Byzantine rump states that formed due to the 1204 fracturing of the empire, such as the Empire of Trebizond and the Despotate of Epirus, it was a continuation of the eastern half of the Roman Empire that survived well into the Middle Ages. A fourth state, known in historiography as the Latin Empire, was established by an army of Crusaders and the Republic of Venice after the capture of Constantinople and the surrounding environs.

Founded by the Laskaris family, it lasted from 1204 to 1261, when the Nicenes restored the Byzantine Empire after they recaptured Constantinople. Thus, the Nicene Empire is seen as a direct continuation of the Byzantine Empire, as it fully assumed the traditional titles and government of the Byzantines in 1205.