The role of merchants in the crusades has fascinated me for a while now, especially the careful balancing act they had to play between defending the faith and trading with the perceived enemies of Latin Christendom. I initially came across the topic when studying for my PhD at the University of London, where my supervisor Professor Jonathan Harris pointed me towards the fourteenth-century Aegean as a fruitful area of research. Here the Latin response to the collapse of Byzantium and the rise of the Anatolian Turks added another layer to the practices of trade and crusade. I explored these areas further during my time as an Alan Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and as a Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome (BSR). This book is therefore a combination of my PhD thesis and my postdoctoral research.

I owe a great debt of thanks to the many people who have provided me with invaluable assistance on an academic and personal level over the years spent researching and writing this book. First and foremost is Jonathan Harris whose careful guidance during my PhD, as well as kind support and advice in subsequent years, has helped to shape my research, teaching and approach to history in general. I would also like to express my sincerest gratitude to Bernard Hamilton and Tony Luttrell for kindly reading draft manuscripts of this book and providing encouraging and helpful corrections and comments. Likewise, I am grateful to Georg Christ and Cristian Caselli for commenting on provisional chapters, Renee Shenton and Hannes Kleineke for help with Latin and palaeography, Brian Mclaughlin for help with Greek, Petros Mechtidis for providing me with the image of Smyrna, and Caroline Palmer for assistance during the editing process. I am also indebted to the staff of the libraries and archives I have used, especially those of the IHR, BSR and the Archivio segreto Vaticano. Finally, I am thankful to those who assisted me with my original PhD, of whom there are too many to mention, as well as my thesis examiners Norman Housley and Brenda Bolton. Any mistakes in this book are purely my own.