«Caput Totius Maris Maioris». About the Monograph by Prof. A.G. Emanov «The Celestial Jerusalem or the Babylon: The Fate of Medieval Caffa’s / Feodosia’s. Saint-Petersburg: Aletheia, 2022. 734 p.»

The review considers prof. A. G. Emanov’s interpretation of the stadial process of urbanisation in the area of Caffa (Feodosia, Crimea) from proto-town nuclei - to the pre-city, from it - to the early city and from the latter - to the full urban status of  πόλις / civitas, correlated with the phenomenon of cosmopolis. It had its own political organisation, sovereignty, which implied the conclusion and cancellation of international treaties, the extension of senorial power to the agrarian periphery and other cities of the Crimean seashore, had its own urban law, developed on the basis of the customs of Greeks, Armenians, Tatars, Jews and Genoese, its own structure of urban citizenship, which included three categories of citizens (habitatores, burgenses, cives) and encompassed all confessions and ethnicities, its system of control and measuring standards and counting and monetary units, independent forms of economic activity and universal cultural code embodied in the city emblematics and heraldry.