Crimea has been much in the news in the last few years, yet there is still a tendency to think of it as an appendage at the eastern extremity of Europe. Barely connected to the mainland, Crimea is comparable to Sicily. It is situated halfway across the Black Sea and has close connections to the north, as well as historical links to the opposite shores. Like Sicily, it has served as a centre of international trade and as one of the granaries of the Mediterranean lands. Like Sicily, too, it has hosted a variety of peoples, languages, religions and political regimes and has often been dependent on outside powers. But Crimea is larger than Sicily, and its physical environment is more varied, with steppe lands (that once grew plenty of wheat) in the north and mountains in the south. 

Kerstin S Jobst has efficiently and methodically mapped the history of the peninsula from the arrival of Greek colonists in the seventh century BC. Each short chapter starts with an interesting quotation from a historical source. This gives the book something of the flavour of a textbook, as does the occasional excess of detail (relating, for instance, to the succession of Tatar khans in late medieval and early modern Crimea). Fascinating aspects of Crimean history are glossed over more quickly than they deserve to be. It would be good to hear more about the apparent settlement created in Crimea by barbarian Goths in the early Middle Ages and about the supposed adoption of Judaism rather than Christianity or Islam by the rulers of the Turkic Khazar empire in around AD 800 – especially as Jobst is somewhat sceptical about the evidence in both cases. But there is much to compress into limited space, and her book offers greater coverage of the early history of Crimea than Neil Kent’s brisk Crimea: A History, published in 2016, which only devotes ten pages to the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the translator has muddled some of Jobst’s statements, as comparison with the original German edition (available via open access) reveals. I enjoyed, however, the reference to the ‘Mongol yolk’.

Jobst’s concentration on the political history of Crimea across the millennia means that she underemphasises the economic importance of the peninsula. Crimea needs to be situated more clearly in a wider European context. Greek traders and settlers built cities such as Pantikapaion that were painstakingly excavated by tsarist and Soviet