Tana

Most importantly for Dati, Tana is "the most remote and most foreign place that you can sail to, from where we started our trip at the beginning [the Strait of Gibraltar]" (4.36.5–7). In other words, you can travel east through the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Tana, but Tana is as far as you can go on on a ship. On the site of the ancient city of Tanais, very close to what is now the major Russian port of Rostov-on-Don (the Don being the Tana River), Tana was a major nexus connecting European trade routes with Asian ones, both to and from Italy, central Europe, Russia, Persia, and the routes in Astrakhan that led to China along the northern routes of the Silk Road. Among the goods traded in and through Tana were caviar, grain, wine, amber, salt, fur, salted fish, horses, and enslaved people, as well as spices and silk from further east. In Dati's day Tana was a fortified city controlled by the Genoese from their base at Caffa, but it hosted large communities of Venetian, Jewish, Russian, and Circassian traders.