ABSTRACT
Syropoulos’s narrative of the Byzantine delegation’s journey gives us a rare glimpse into the conditions that prevailed in the former territories of the Byzantine Empire in the Aegean and the Ionian seas. Syropoulos describes these places as a world of insecurity and dissolution, and emphasizes the disrespectful and even hostile reception of the Byzantine delegation there by the local authorities and the Latins settled in these areas. His account allows us to study Byzantine-Latin interaction and Byzantine perception of the Aegean world in the late medieval period through the eyes of a high rank official. However, Syropoulos’s account is informed by his writing agenda and his overall critical view of the Latins, as many contributors in this volume have successfully argued.1 Thus, the notion of the Venetian colonies around the Aegean as hostile and alien environments needs to be examined in depth and in combination with the archaeological and artistic data of fifteenth-century Greece. In this regard, the case of negroponte can be instructive.
