Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA was an economic historian specialising in the economic history of medieval Europe. He was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, Bessarabia, in the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kiev, leaving the USSR after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He had positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known worldwide as an economic historian of medieval Europe. He was married first to historian Eileen Power, then after her death he remarried to Lady Cynthia Rosalie Keppel.