Giosafat Barbaro was a fifteenth-century diplomat and merchant who travelled from Venice through central Asia to foster good relations between Venice and its trading partners in the east. During his long career Barbaro visited the Genoan city of Tana (ancient Tanais) near the modern city of Rostov, the Ottoman Empire, Georgia and Persia. His accounts, written in 1487, and printed by Antonio Manuzio, a son of Aldus Manutius, between 1543 and 1545, provide some of the best Western European accounts of Georgia and the nomadic peoples of Central Asia in the late fifteenth century.