1346–1347
Also known as: Treaty-privilege for the Venetians
A sworn privilege granting Venetian merchants safe trade throughout the empire at a fixed 3% duty — the one surviving charter of the corpus addressed not to a monastery but to a foreign trading power.
Where every other charter here grants land and immunity to a monastery, this one regulates a foreign trade. It is the settlement of a running quarrel: unlike Byzantium, which let Venetian merchants trade duty-free, Ivan Alexander's chancery held them to a firm fiscal policy, and had confiscated the goods of Venetian nobles who refused to pay. The charter fixes the terms that ended the dispute — a 3% duty, scheduled port and weighing fees, judicial protection against seizure, and the right to build churches and loggias — and so opens a rare window onto the customs regime, the coinage, and the Black Sea ports of the fourteenth-century empire.
It is also a document of the tsar's own person: he swears the privilege on God, the Virgin, the True Cross, St Petka of Tarnovo and his own soul, and closes by branding any who break it a traitor to his empire.
The privilege followed years of friction over customs on the Black Sea coast — the Venetian senate was moved to treat with Bulgaria after nobles such as Niccolò Pisani and Lorenzo Foscarini lost goods worth 1,000 and 4,000 hyperpyra to seizures ordered by the tsar. Its oath on St Petka of Tarnovo is pointed: her relics, brought to Tarnovo by Ivan Asen II after Klokotnitsa, made her the city's protector. Because Bulgaria struck no gold, the hyperpyra it reckons in are Byzantine coins then circulating on Bulgarian markets. The named ports — Sozopol, Anchialo, Mesembria, Varna, Kilia and others — map the empire's Black Sea trade.
On this text: A synopsis in our own words. On the charter and its background see V. Gyuzelev, Венеция и Генуа… (1981); the text is edited among Duychev's charters.
The tsar swears — by God the Father, the Virgin, the True Cross, St Petka of Tarnovo and his own soul — that all Venetian merchants may come and go with their ships and goods throughout the empire, safe and unharmed, paying three per hundred (3%) in duty.
It sets scheduled charges — so many grosh per hundred hyperpyra of weight, an aspron and a quarter per kantar, harbour dues of one or two hyperpyra by ship size — and provides that no one bears another's penalty, that a wrecked ship's goods and people are to be saved, and that unsold goods may leave freely.
No Venetian's house may be sealed or impounded without first going to court; the goods of one who dies may be handled only by Venetians; and they may build churches and loggias where they please — a legal footing for Venetian colonies in Varna, Nesebar, Anchialo and Sozopol.
Whoever dares oppose the privilege is to be counted a traitor to the empire — the supreme authority's guarantee of the Venetians' persons and property, against their own strict observance of the state's fiscal rules.
