Controversial issues of historical geography
1st half of the 15th century

Nicholas Zharkikh

Conclusions

1. Vytautas’ "Black Sea estate" is a historiographical misunderstanding. All lists of geographical names that supposedly speak of it come from one source – a hypothetical plan for the division of Moldavia between Emperor Sigismund and King Jagiello, concluded in 1429.

2. Kachybejiv, mentioned in these lists, was at that time and remained for a long time afterwards an uninhabited tract, in which the Turks in the middle of the 18th century built the Hadzhibey castle. Neither Lithuanians nor Poles ever owned this empty place, and "castles, cities and ports" existed only in the thoughts of the colonizers and on paper, and not in reality.

3. Black Town from the "state of Vytautas" should be considered a parallel name for White Town, modern Bilgorod-Dnistrovsky. It was owned by Moldavia from the end of the 14th century, which built fortifications there and had its own administration. Neither the Lithuanians nor the Poles ever had any power there.

4. The name Mayak (lighthouse) from the "estate of Vytautas" can be applied with some probability to the lower reaches of the Dniester at its confluence with the estuary. It was a tract and a crossing. A permanent settlement was founded there only at the end of the 18th century, after the region came under the rule of the Russian Empire. A Mayak in a narrow sense was the name given to the ruin of a tower of ancient times on the Nadlymanske settlement, which served as a landmark for crossing the Dniester.

5. The mentions of Karavul in the 1st half of the 15th century cannot be tied to a single point; it should be thought that there were several guard posts called karauls / karavuls. Karavul on the Dniester can be found in the vicinity of modern Rashkov, but there are no mentions of a fortification of that name – only a village.

6. Sokilets, mentioned in 1391 – 1434, should be considered a castle on an island in the middle of Boh river near the village of Sokiltsi, Haisyn district, Vinnytsia region. Archaeological remains of a fortification from the late 14th – early 15th centuries have been investigated there. This castle, destroyed in the 1430s, was rebuilt in 1603. Other settlements in Vinnytsia with names similar to Sokilets, founded in the late 16th – early 17th centuries.

7. The reason for the halt in Rus’ colonization at the mouth of the Murafa – Bratslav – Cherkasy border was not the opposition of the Tatars, but apparently the exhaustion of the colonization potential (people willing to move to new lands).