It is then the rivers and the sea writ large that consti-tute the geographic template upon which this volume was developed. Why the Mediterranean? And why riv-ers? Taking up Fernand Braudel’s notion of a hinterland that is connected to the Mediterranean world, the vol-ume looks to the reverberations and echoes of this clas-sic site far beyond its shores and into the continent both North and East.3 Conversely, it also looks to the recipro-cal effect: the world moved two-ways , not just from a Mediterranean seen as center toward its peripheries but also from deep into the Eurasian continent toward the Mediterranean itself. Indeed, the rivers create a com-plex texture—fine threads that crisscross Europe, some as main avenues while others diverge—connecting ter-ritories that on land routes would have been too distant to reach and even to imagine. Scholarship, however, has mostly neglected this secondary system of contact that swelled the Mediterranean in both directions.