Genoa and Venice, as leading maritime powers in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, founded numerous trading posts and "colonies". These foundations fostered intense transfer processes, widespread mobility—far beyond elite circles—and a constant exchange of raw materials, goods, and objects. The resulting entanglement of spaces, practices, and visual cultures poses particular challenges for research.

This volume brings together contributions from two conferences held in Heidelberg and Kraków. The authors—historians and art historians from different fields—explore the premodern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, focusing not only on the "mother cities" and the comparison between them, but above all on regions often studied separately due to disciplinary divisions, political circumstances, and the linguistic diversity of the source material and literature: Eastern European realms, Byzantium, the Aegean, Cyprus, the Golden Horde and the Crimean Khanate, and the Iberian Peninsula.