The Black Sea: A History

Charles King's The Black Sea, A History, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, is a scholarly regional history tracing the Black Sea basin's peoples, empires and religious traditions, Greek colonial, Byzantine, Ottoman, Slavic, from antiquity through the modern era, treating the sea itself as the connecting thread across societies more commonly studied in national isolation. King is a historian of the region working across multiple national historiographies and languages. Its strength is that connective regional framing, letting the book trace how religious and cultural exchange actually moved around the Black Sea's coasts rather than stopping at a single modern national border. Its limit is that covering millennia across an entire sea basin in one volume necessarily treats any single tradition or period at survey depth rather than in specialist detail, so a claim about a specific community or era within that long span benefits from a narrower, more focused source alongside King's synthesis.