ABSTRACT
After having defined colonization as three forms of domination (political, economic, and cultural), the author retraces the different stages of the expansion of Venice and Genoa in the East, from the end of the 10th to the end of the 15th centuries. This expansion necessitated an emigration overseas, which we can estimate to about 100,000 people in the Latin states of the East in the 12th century, and to a few thousand in Venetian Crete, in the Genoese outposts of Pera and Caffa in the 13th century, and on the island of Chios at the end of the 14th century. This emigration took place under the initiative of certain merchants or of the two Italian communes and remained insufficient to populate the overseas colonies.
