" The successors of the son of Mithridates reigned only in accordance with the caprice of the Eoman emperors; and their territory, after being frequently devastated by the Huns and the Goths, was finally conquered in 375 a.d. by those barbaric hordes which ultimately subverted the whole civilised world, and various tribes of whom for a thousand years occupied the Tauric Peninsula. Amongst these, the Khazars were the most celebrated, who seem at one time to have considered Kertch a place of some importance, while a great part of the peninsula took the name of Khazaria from them. In the early part of the
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. KERTCH FROM THE NORTH. 171
thirteenth century a great number of Circassians established themselves in the Crimea, and the town of Kerteh became subject to a prince of that nation. It was aboiTt this time that the Genoese possessed themselves of the southern shore of the Crimea, and established a colony at Caffa, with the permission of the Khan of Khazaria, whose authority they were soon in a position to set at defiance, and with whom they waged an uncertain war, until Bathi, the grandson of Zingis Khan, leader of the Golden Horde, on his way from the deserts of Tartary to the conquest of Eussia, invaded the Crimea, exterminated the Comanes, who then possessed it, and the Tartar capital was fixed at Esld Krim.
" In 1365 the Greek colony of Soudagh, which had at one time attained an important mercantile position, enfeebled by intestine disorders, fell a prey to that all-absorbing maritime power under which Caffa had become so celebrated. A hundred years afterwards these restless adventurers became embroiled with the nation who now occupied the Peninsula, and to whom they owed their deliverance. Their colonies were besieged by the Tartars by land, and blockaded by a fleet which the Porte had sent to the assistance of the Khans, who had become tributary to the Ottoman empire. The destruction of the Genoese colonies was tantamount to an annihilation of commerce in these seas.
" For three hundred years the Cimmerian Bosphorus remained closed, and^ the ruins of once flourishing cities lay strewn upon its shores."
In 1774 Kerteh, then a Turkish town of comparatively trifling importance, was ceded to the Russians, whose conquests have gradually extended from the Baltic to the Caspian, and who count among their subjects the inhabitants of the plains and of the mountains which are washed by the Danube, the Dniester, the Bug, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Kouban. As time wore on, Kerteh, fostered by the Eussian Government, regained much of its ancient importance. The tribune of commerce was established there, as well as the quarantine station; and the trade of the place had attained such a degree of development in 1851 that in that year no less than one thousand vessels entered the Straits of Kerteh.
The drawing of Mr. Simpson which has suggested these preliminary remarks on the history of a i^lace to which so much interest both of the past and present attaches, is a view of Kerteh taken on the road from that town to Yenikale, at the moment when the rear — or, rather, the stragglers — of the army were passing. The large hill round which Kerteh is built, and on which the Acropolis may formerly have stood, is called the Mountain of Mithridates; from the prevalent belief that the palace or fortress of that monarch, whence he threw the body of his son Zephanes into the sea, once stood there; and in the time of Dr. Clarke traces of its foundation were still visible near to a small semi-circular excavation in the rock.
On the summit of this eminence stands a small modern temple, Ionic in
THE EAST.
style, surmounted by a cross, and with a cruciform window or opening on its eastern side. This temple is erroneously supposed by Mr. Eussell to mark the tomb of Mithridates, whereas tradition ascribes that name to a gigantic tumulus distant from Kertch about four versts on the road to Kaffa. The building, in fact, covers the grave of Stamkoffsky, a former Governor of Kertch, to whose antiquarian researches on the spot science is said to have been deeply indebted. Behind the temple the remains of a wall are still to be seen, and are probably the same as those mentioned by Clarke.
To the right of it the ground rises into what was once a tumulus, which has been excavated, and which now displays nothing but the bare rock, in the centre of which is a hollow just the size of a human body, the earth which has been dug up round it being thickly mixed with human bones.