This book traces the diplomatic, cultural, and commercial links between Constantinople and Venice from the foundation of the Venetian Republic to the Fall of the Byzantine Empire. It aims to show how, with the encouragement of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Venetians came to dominate first the Genoese and thereafter the whole Byzantine economy. At the same time, the author points to those important cultural and, above all, political reasons why the relationship between the two states was always inherently unstable.