Victor Ostapchuk The Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Dnipro River Refugium Aside from considerations of global history, there are good reasons for includ- ing the Black Sea basin in a conference and volume dedicated to Mediterranean rivers and river communities. The two seas are physically connected, and throughout much of their history there was close connectivity between them thanks to projection of political power and colonization, as well as commer- cial and cultural interaction. If we consider Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Italian, and Ottoman presences in the Black Sea and its coastal areas, it can be said that more often than not it was within the orbit of the Mediterranean rath- er than a region apart. On the other hand, control of the northern Black Sea coast by these powers was always limited, if not precarious, in the face of no- madic or semi-nomadic powers that ruled the Pontic steppe – for example, the Scythians, Sarmatians, Pechenegs, Polovtsians-Qipchaqs, and Mongols. Even the presence of the Ottomans in the northern Black Sea did not extend far beyond the coast into the steppes to the north, despite their suzerainty over the Crimean Khanate, a Tatar successor state to the Golden Horde ruled by a Chinggisid dynasty, whose dominions did extend beyond the Crimean penin- sula into these steppes. Leaving aside physical and human connections between the two seas, their basins are vastly different in their physical geography. There are superficial similarities – approximately half of the Mediterranean basin (western North Africa and most of the northern side) and half of the Black Sea basin (Anatolia, Caucasus, southern coast of Crimea) have a mainly rugged even mountain- ous coastal area. The remainder – the Sahara coast (Libyan and Egyptian des- erts) and the Pontic steppe (both western and northern) – are primarily flat. The fluvial spaces of the two mostly rugged zones also exhibit some super- ficial similarities – the total respective lengths of the main rivers are about the same, though the catchment area of this portion of the Mediterranean is greater than the total for the Anatolian, Caucasus, and southern Crimean portions. However, when it comes to the mostly flat zones, there is a world of * I would like to thank Caroline Finkel, Peter Golden, Oleksandr Halenko, Michael Khodarkovsky, Markus Koller, Maryna Kravets, and Joo-Yup Lee for their comments on ear- lier versions of this article. © Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657786367_011 274 Victor Ostapchuk Figure 10.1 Mediterranean and Black Sea drainage basins with a dividing line between these two basins (V. Ostapchuk and Agata Chmiel).