its conversion; in the period of Byzantine weakness at the end of the seventh century, it would have been exposed both to the Slavic tribes who occupied the mainland and to Arab raiders from the sea. Archaeological evidence suggests the island was abandoned about 700 AD.
When Saint Theodore of Cythera led a resettlement after the Byzantine reconquest of Crete in 962, he found the island occupied only by wandering bands of hunters. He established a great monastery at Paliochora; a town grew up around it, largely populated from Laconia.
When the Byzantine Empire was divided among the conquerors of the Fourth Crusade, the Republic of Venice took her share, three eighths of the whole, as the Greek islands, Cythera among them. She established a coast patrol on Cythera and Antikythera to protect her trade route to Constantinople; Cythera was one of the islands Venice continued to hold despite the Greek reconquest of Constantinople and the Turkish presence all over the Near East.
Cytherans still talk about the destruction and looting of Paliochora by Barbarossa; it has become an intrinsic part of the Kytherian folklore, yet one can easily accept the stories of locals by noticing the number of monasteries embedded in the rocky hillsides to avoid destruction by the pirates.
When Napoleon put an end to the Venetian Republic in 1797, Cythera was among the islands incorporated in that most distant department of France, called Mer-Égée. Cythera shared a common destiny with the other Ionian islands, during turbulent Napoleonic era, and is still accounted one of them; it was counted as one of the Cyclades in antiquity.
In 1799, the Ionian islands became the Septinsular Republic, nominally under Turkish suzerainty, but in practice dominated by Russia; in 1807, France took them back; in 1809, the British seized the islands set up one of their first protectorates, the United States of the Ionian Islands, and held them for nearly half a century;
