A historically interesting insight, on a musical level, is when one manages to detect the influences and the traces left, upon the songs of the islands, by all those having passed through his region. This part of the Mediterranean has, since the ancient days, been a crossroad of differents aways and a gateway to the world as it was known at the time. Later, it became a gateway to the West for the commercial and cultural products (music being one of them) of the East. It is the songs of this region that the first musical influences of the West can be traced. The conguering Crusades for example (French, Genoveze and most of all, the Venetians), many of whom remainded in the insular regions, brought with them and left behind as heritage, some of the basic elements of the island song as it is today: musical instruments (the violin), dances (the Ballos), melodies, musical and poetical forms (rhyme). They carried back home the fifteen-syllabe verse, to use it in their own folk songs (particularly the French). This is a typical example of mutual influence between two, relatively distant, musical cultures.