Early modern Constantinople was one of the chief crossroads of the Medi-terranean: it was a cultural middle ground in which East and West met and mixed. As one traveller observed, Constantinople and its chief suburb Galata 1 were a cultural mosaic: ‘The natural inhabitants of this city are Greeks, Turks and Jews; infinite then the other men of various and distant nations who are living here’. 2 The heterogeneous makeup of Constantinople led Europeans to view the city as a liminal space, a place of danger. A Venetian diplomat wrote that Constantinople ‘may be called a golden vase full of poison, and a Paradise inhabited by spirits of Hell, because there is not a vice in the universe that is not found in her’. Another observer opined that ‘the liberty of Turkish living . . . would have the power to make a saint a devil’. 3 Constantinople was especially dangerous for women and children, considered spiritually weaker and morally ‘more exposed to the pressures of the Muslims’. One Venetian bailo (ambassador and consul at the Porte) recommended that youths under the age of twenty not be allowed in the city as ‘once they arrive here we run the manifest peril that they be stolen by Turks with the loss of their souls’. 4