This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the somewhat sparse literature on the history of Latin Greece. It bears evidence to a growing interest amongst the scholarly community in the tangled political, social and cultural situation of the states and dominions created on the Greek mainland and in the Aegean in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (the considerably longer, more uniform, and better documented history of Frankish Cyprus and Venetian Crete conventionally being treated separately by scholars). The great merit of the book lies in the methodological reconsideration of the way in which to study Latin Greece, clearly presented in the introduction by the two editors, as well as in the interdisciplinary investigation of this world of complex political and social fragmentation and extreme cultural pluralism. Such a global approach goes beyond the conventional chronological periodisation and spans a variety of thematic or geographical categorisations of fields of studies, thus allowing fruitful conversation amongst Byzantinists, western medievalists and Ottomanists across traditional disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. The outcome of a 2011 conference, the volume is divided into four parts, according to both chronological order and thematic unity, each part consisting of two essays. The first part places Latin Greece within the context of eastern and western politics. Nikolaos Chrissis compares the nature of the western penetration in Byzantine territory with that of other crusader fronts in the West in the thirteenth century (notably, the Baltic and Albigensian France) and traces many interesting analogies in the way in which the crusading ideology determined perceptions and prejudices. Bernard Hamilton explores the new opportunities that the Latin conquest of Constantinople created for western merchants, diplomats and members of religious orders to visit and become familiar with areas in the Crimea, the Caucasus and western Asia. The two essays in the second part investigate the Byzantine reaction to their encounter with the Latins and question conventional historiographical trends according to which the overwhelming majority of the Byzantine population rejected contacts and interaction with the Westerners after 1204, suggesting that the reality was more complex and a lot less static. Teresa Shawcross's chapter offers an interesting interpretation of the successful integration of western settlers into the society of Athens in terms of episcopal and private prosperity in the late twelfth century, which prevented a serious social or cultural disruption. Demetrius Kydones's 1366 speech Pro subsidio Latinorum, a relatively overlooked text, constitutes the subject of Judith Ryder's contribution; in this oration, the Byzantine diplomat and man of letters presents some episodes from the history of the crusades in a way designed to demonstrate those virtues that rendered the Westerners the perfect allies of the Greeks against the Turks. The third part deals with the nature of the relations of the Latins with both Greeks and Turks in the Aegean in the fourteenth century. In his essay, Mike Carr suggests that trading with the infidel and, at the same time, participating in crusading campaigns were in the case of the Genoese Zaccaria of Chios not mutually exclusive but rather represented complementary aspects of their role as the Christian lords of a frontier land. Peter Lock traces the evolution of the image of the Greeks and the Turks in the writings of the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello as a result of the growing Turkish threat. The fourth part focuses on the Ottoman attitudes to crusading in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. İlker Evrim Binbaş offers a study and a translation of a largely neglected piece of Muslim historiography, the Damascene Shams al-Dĩn Ibn al-Jazarĩ's eyewitness account of the battle of Nicopolis (1396). Rhoads Murphey investigates Bayezid i's foreign policy, convincingly suggesting that the sultan's priorities lay in the East (Anatolia and the Balkans) and not in subjugating the western powers. This carefully edited volume is completed with a conclusion by Bernard Hamilton and an index. Both the introduction and the conclusion rightly underline the unifying themes of the various chapters in the volume, which the editors modestly describe as ‘only a small step … in the right direction’ (p. 14). I am sure that it will prove to be a stimulating contribution not only to the history of Latin Greece but to the way in which we study the history of Latin Greece, opening at the same time new vistas for the understanding of the medieval Mediterranean world at large in terms of both conflict and interaction.