WITH THESE PAGES, this book and the story it tells come to an end. The emergence of a new region on the contested border with the steppe at the very eastern boundary of Europe at that time was one of the outcomes of the battle between settlers and nomads in the late medieval period. Podillya or Podolia, the new name on the map of the European continent, became one of the few areas where, for a few hundred years, specifically from the middle of the fourteenth century through the late eighteenth century, the imaginary East, having retreated at the beginning, in all sorts of ways tried to remind the putative West of the impossibility of peaceful coexistence. Nowhere else in Europe had the steppe moved so far to the west, and nowhere else had European farmers moved so far to the east.

The establishment of this region seemed not so consequent given the previous history of the area and European realities, because, starting from the middle of the fourteenth century, this land uncontestably belonged to the nomads. Coming afar from the north, the Koriatovych brothers took advantage of the weakness of the Golden Horde, undermined by civil war and the Black Death. They took the territory under their control and gained control over important trade routes running through this part of the world. In such a way, the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper Rivers moved into their domain. New cities started to emerge along the routes running northwest from the Black Sea, and from Cherkasy in the east and Terebovlya in the west. They became the centres of the castle districts. The Koriatovyches were not alone in their intent to take advantage of the situation, which facilitated the establishment of new regions and new states. The same circumstances fostered the creation of the Moldavian Principality in the interfluve of the Dniester and Prut Rivers.

Having established the Podolian Principality in the middle of the thirteenth century, the Koriatovych brothers could not manage it without close ties to the western kingdoms. Their vassal relations with the Polish King Casimir III the Great and later with his successor Louis I of Hungary ensured the existence of Podillya on a very contested and dangerous borderland.