Stefan Stantchev

Stefan Stantchev earned his doctorate in history at the University of Michigan in 2009 and joined the faculty of the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University shortly thereafter.

Stantchev's research interests focus on the religious, economic, political, and military factors that shaped power relations within Europe and throughout the Mediterranean, circa 1000 to circa 1600. His work thus engages topics that are often treated separately, such as economic and church history, trade and war, foreign policy and religious identity, family structures and networks of economic activity. It also transcends the boundaries typically drawn between Western, Byzantine, Ottoman and Balkan history. Consequently, his teaching interests are equally broad: ancient, medieval and modern Europe, Byzantine, Balkan and Ottoman history.

His first book, "Spiritual Rationality: Papal Embargo as Cultural Practice" (Oxford University Press, 2014), offers the first book-length study of embargo in a pre-modern period and provides a unique exploration into the domestic implications of this tool of foreign policy. During this time of an increasing papal role within Christian society, the church employed restrictions on trade with Muslims, pagans, 'heretics,' 'schismatics,' disobedient Catholic communities and individual Jews in order to facilitate papally-endorsed warfare against external enemies and to discipline internal foes. Papal embargo was not only the sum total of individual trade bans, but also a legal and moral discourse that classified exchanges into legitimate and illegitimate ones, compelled merchants to distinguish clearly between themselves as (Roman) Christians and a multitude of others as non-Christians, and helped order symbolically both the relationships between the two groups and those between church and laity. Papal embargo's chief relevance thus lay within Christian society itself, where it functioned as an intangible pastoral staff. While sixteenth-century developments undermined it as a policy tool and a moral discourse alike, papal embargo inscribed the notion of the immorality of trade with the enemy into European thought.

Stantchev's latest book explores the relations between Venice and the Ottoman Empire from 1381 to 1517. Venice, the Ottomans, and the Sea (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers a comprehensive study of Venice’s economic and political relations with the Ottoman Empire in the transitional period between the Middle Ages and early modernity. The book provides an integrated view, transcending the paradigms of trade—Ottoman territories as a land of opportunity—and crusade—the Ottomans as a threat—to uncover the interplay between economic structures and political decision-making that shaped the period between the end of Venice’s most devastating war with Genoa in 1381 and the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517. From a broader Mediterranean perspective, the book highlights the intersections of political, social, economic, and technological factors behind accelerated historical change in the second half of the fifteenth century and offers a case study in the ways in which a Mediterranean elite maintained its privileged position over time.

Meanwhile, Stantchev's work on church history has continued to explore themes related to papal pastoral and disciplinary measures resulting in the publication of  “Formation and Refiguration of the Canon Law on Trade with Infidels,” in Christianity and International Law (Cambridge 2021) and a major study co-authored with Benjamin Weber:  “In Coena Domini: A Hierocratic Weapon or a Pastoral Staff?,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 38 (2021). Stantchev has also continued his work on economic sanctions, editing the first volume dedicated to the subject for the medieval period: Economic Warfare and the Crusades (PUM, 2025), which features chapter authors from Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, France, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. 

Stantchev typically teaches HST 102 Ancient and Medieval Europe, HST 350 Later Middle Ages, HST 495 Historical Methods, and two classes he developed and added to ASU's curriculum: HST 360 Holy Wars and Crusades and HST 430 The Ottoman Empire. In addition, Stantchev directed the New College MA in Interdisciplinary Studies in 2016-2020 teaching the introductory MAS 502 course. 

Stantchev has held a variety of service appointments, including election as West Valley Campus Faculty Assembly President, ASU representative to the PAC 12 Academic Leadership Coalition, and co-chair of the joint ASU Senate/Provost Office Digitally Enhanced Teaching and Learning Committee.