I had a feeling way back when that Genoa was important.

I’m getting an upside down/back to front vibe from this. But, it is another step forward.

 

From Americans in the Levant :

 

Demetrio Vivaldi, the future consul of Caffa (Feodosia, Black Sea), in a letter sent from Chios to Genoa in August 1453 relates to have heard the new of the fall of Constantinople cried by a sailor of a Genoese ship crossing his one off Cape Sant’Angelo. That event, which shook the whole world like few other ones in the history, ran on the waves through the sea before diplomatic dispatches.
This letter belongs to a group of important Genoese unpublished records written in the periods immediately preceding and following the fall of Constantinople. They are reports sent to the Genoese government from the colonies of Chios and Caffa in which the political, military and trade situation of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas is explained. From them we got news on the movements of the Turkish fleet, on the organisation of a diplomatic mission to Mohammed II and on the situation inside the Genoese colony of Pera after the surrender. But, above all, it emerges the evidence that, before the military conquest, the Turks had ousted the Genoese from the control of trade in the Black Sea having opened new ports of call and courses.