THIS BOOK IS about Podillya, a territory that emerged at a contested borderland between farming communities and nomads in the middle of the fourteenth century. In a European context, this emergence could be considered a late one, but the very location of the region on a European map explains the timing. Located at the very end of the route from the East to the West through which the nomads of Asia migrated to the present-day European territories of Ukraine, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria, Podillya was the perfect place for nomads to choose either to move farther across the ravines covered with forests and the Carpathian Mountains, or to stay between the Dnieper, the Southern Bug, and the Dniester Rivers. Naturally, nomads chose the steppe, a more familiar environment. So did the farmers, who were reluctant to leave a known area, and chose to stay there until the end of the eighteenth century. Before the middle of the thirteenth century nomads mostly either passed this part of their route without a more extended stop or settled here for a substantial time. This book tells the story of how, under particular circumstances, the confrontations between the settler and nomadic populations resulted in the formation of a new region in the borderland between East and West.

Written history and archaeological evidence testify that the region has been continuously inhabited since the time of the Cimmerians, who were later ousted or assimilated by the Scythians. The history of the Scythians and their successors is similar. Mentioned in written sources, the peoples living between the Dnieper and Dniester Rivers until the late Middle Ages were nomads. Those moving from East to West expelled, exterminated, or assimilated them. This was the fate of those peoples living on the edge of the Eurasian steppe.

Here, in Podillya, Christian nobles met Muslim nomads. This territory emerged in the historical narrative when the Lithuanian dukes and the Polish King Casimir III the Great (1333– 1370) divided the legacy of the Ruthenian Kingdom and pushed the Tatars back to the steppe.