Those hoping that a book called Venice and the Mongols would be a deep-dive into everything Marco Polo will be disappointed, for that most celebrated of Venetians warrants only a single chapter. Authors Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici focus rather more on Venice’s forays—commercial and territorial—into the Black Sea, where they ran up against the Mongols in Crimea. After the Fourth Crusade and the Mongol’s westward conquests, “The Pontic area,” write the authors, “became a common space, a nexus between Asia and Europe” at what was respectively the western- and eastern-most expansion of each.