In the passage above Giovanni Boccaccio tells the tale of the Amalfitan merchant Landolfo Rufolo, a story which encapsulates the splintered Aegean world of the fourteenth century. Landolfo, like many Italian merchants, had amassed great riches from trading in the eastern Mediterranean, but after losing his fortune he turned to piracy and redoubled his wealth by preying on Turkish vessels. Landolfo's luck, however, soon ran out when he fell victim to the hazards of the Aegean Sea: first he was forced to take shelter on a small island after a sirocco blew up, and then his vessel was seized by two Genoese merchant ships who had also sought shelter on the same island. As Boccaccio writes, ‘Landolfo was taken on board one of the two stout merchantmen, while his vessel was stripped bare then scuttled, leaving the prisoner in nothing but his shirt’.

The story of Landolfo aptly demonstrates the insecurity of the Aegean, where the high concentration of islands and a mixture of competing peoples and states made the region notoriously difficult to police. Ships were vulnerable to attack and piratical raids were a constant threat to those living near the shore. The situation was compounded by the lack of a dominant power in the region, where Latins, Greeks and Turks all vied for control, but rarely enjoyed supremacy. As Steven Epstein has commented, ‘No other region of Europe or the Mediterranean became a cynosure of so many ethnicities in such a small place’. It is within this land of maximum fragmentation, at a time when the tales of knights and hermits had been replaced by those of merchants and pirates, that the Latin powers would trade and ally with, but also struggle against, the Turkish and Greek peoples of the region.

The Aegean Sea was politically and geographically fragmented, but also of enormous strategic importance. It is this combination that made control of the region such a great aspiration, but also so difficult to achieve.