Venice, and then the Adriatic, was the main route to Byzantium for the whole Medieval period, for anyone coming to the former eastern Roman empire from or through northern Italy. The geographical position of the sea makes that inevitable. The west–east sea route via Sicily worked for some Europeans, but only on a large scale after the Normans conquered the island from the Arabs in the late eleventh century and even then less prominently than the Adriatic did; the land route through Hungary, which had a border with Byzantium in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, suited some armies, but it was never an easy passage; and the Danube was underused as a route for a long time. So the Adriatic had a major role as a path to the Byzantine empire in every Medieval century, and this book amply shows what sorts of roles it took, in the sometimes dramatically changing economic and political environments of nine centuries.