The island of Crete, situated at the crossroads of three continents, has experienced three long periods of foreign occupation in medieval and modern times. The Arab occupation, from 827 to 961, left almost nothing in the way of material remains and little or no evidence of cultural interchange. The Arabs fortified the main town with a deep defensive ditch which gave its name to the town: El Khandak, or in Greek Chandax. In the form Candia this appellation came to be applied to both the town and the whole island in the later Middle Ages. The second occupation, by the Most Serene Republic of Venice, is by far the longest of the three and the subject of this book. It lasted from 1211, when the Venetians finally succeeded in taking possession of the prize for which they had paid 1,000 marks to Boniface of Montferrat, until the Fall of Candia in 1669, after a siege lasting twenty-one years. Thus began the third period of occupation, by the Ottoman Turks, which was to end only in 1897. The physical evidence of the Turkish occupation is, of course, still visible in Crete today: domestic architecture and fortifications, as well as much of the paraphernalia of everyday life, bear witness in Crete, as in other parts of Greece, to the centuries of Ottoman domination.