This book represents the first attempt to analyze historical and cultural developments in late medieval and early modern southeastern Europe as a set of mutually intertwined regional histories, burdened by the strong dichotomy between the almighty center—Constantinople—and the periphery that is rarely visible in both contemporary sources and modern scholarship. This mosaic of original studies is devoted to various regions of the Byzantine Balkans and their historical, artistic, and ideological idiosyncrasies, mirroring the complex character and composite and fragmented structure of this vast region. The focal points of the book are the two captures of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453, and the contributors analyze the significance of these catastrophic events on the political destiny of medieval Balkan societies, the mechanisms of adapting to the new political order, and the ever-present interconnectedness of a lower, regional elite across southeastern Europe that had remained strong even after the Ottoman conquest.

Here Molly Greene moves beyond the hostile "Christian" versus "Muslim" divide that has colored many historical interpretations of the early modern Mediterranean, and reveals a society with a far richer set of cultural and social dynamics. She focuses on Crete, which the Ottoman Empire wrested from Venetian control in 1669. Historians of Europe have traditionally viewed the victory as a watershed, the final step in the Muslim conquest of the eastern Mediterranean and the obliteration of Crete's thriving Latin-based culture. But to what extent did the conquest actually change life on Crete? Greene brings a new perspective to bear on this episode, and on the eastern Mediterranean in general. She argues that no sharp divide separated the Venetian and Ottoman eras because the Cretans were already part of a world where Latin Christians, Muslims, and Eastern Orthodox Christians had been intermingling for several centuries, particularly in the area of commerce. Greene also notes that the Ottoman conquest of Crete represented not only the extension of Muslim rule to an island that once belonged to a Christian power, but also the strengthening of Eastern Orthodoxy at the expense of Latin Christianity, and ultimately the Orthodox reconquest of the eastern Mediterranean. Greene concludes that despite their religious differences, both the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire represented the ancien régime in the Mediterranean, which accounts for numerous similarities between Venetian and Ottoman Crete. The true push for change in the region would come later from Northern Europe.