Download PDF | Carr, Mike_ Chrissis, Nikolaos G. - Contact and conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204-1453_ crusade, religion and trade between Latins, Greeks and Turks-Routledge (2014).
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List of Contributors
ilker Evrim Binbas (PhD Chicago) is Lecturer of Early Modern Asian Empires at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests embrace the historiography, political thought and intellectual activity of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Islamic world, with particular focus on the Timurids and the Ottomans. He is currently working on a monograph on informal intellectual networks in Timurid Iran and Central Asia in the fifteenth century.
Mike Carr (PhD London) is a Rome Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. He has also held a postdoctoral research fellowship in maritime history at the Institute of Historical Research in London. He has published a number of articles on cross-cultural interaction between Latins, Greeks and Turks in the Mediterranean, and is now working on a monograph on merchant crusaders, based partly on his PhD research and also on research undertaken in the Vatican archivio segreto.
Nikolaos Chrissis (PhD London) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Athens. He has taught history at the universities of London and Birmingham. His main interests revolve around Byzantine—western interaction, the crusades and the papacy. He has published a number of works on these subjects, including his monograph Crusading in Frankish Greece: A Study of Byzantine— Western Relations and Attitudes, 1204-1282.
Bernard Hamilton (FSA, FRHistS.) is Professor Emeritus of Crusading History at the University of Nottingham and president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE). Among his numerous publications are The Leper King and his Heirs and The Christian World of the Middle Ages. He is currently working on a book to be called The Crusades and a Wider World, which is a study of the impact of crusading on the growth of geographical knowledge about the rest of the world among people in western Europe.
Peter Lock (FSA, FRHistS.) was Professor of History at York St John University. He has written extensively on the history and archaeology of medieval Greece, and is the author of The Franks in the Aegean, 1204-1500. He has recently completed a translation of Marino Sanudo’s Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis for the Ashgate ‘Crusader Texts in Translation’ series.
Rhoads Murphey (PhD Chicago) is Reader in Ottoman Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research has encompassed Ottoman state structures, administration and the military, as well as cultural history and relations with the West, from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. His publications include Studies in Ottoman Society and Culture, 16th-18th Centuries and Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700, as well as numerous articles and chapters in collective works.
Judith Ryder (PhD Oxon) is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. She has studied Theology and Byzantine History at St John’s College, Oxford. Her monograph The Career and Writings of Demetrius Kydones was published with Brill in 2010. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Prosopography of the Byzantine World, and is now General Editor of the new series of ‘Translated Texts for Byzantinists’, which launched with its first volume in 2012.
Teresa Shawcross (PhD Oxon, FRHistS) teaches Byzantine History at Princeton University. She was previously Assistant Professor in Medieval European and Mediterranean History at Amherst and Mt Holyoke Colleges, and a Research Fellow in History at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. Her book, The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece, and her other recent publications deal mainly with the political, social and cultural consequences of the fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade. She is currently completing a monograph on late medieval theories and practices of empire.
Acknowledgments
The present volume arose out of the conference Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, held at the Institute of Historical Research in London on 9 July 2010. We would like to acknowledge our debt to the institutions and learned societies that supported the conference and made this volume possible. Funding and organizational support were provided by: the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London; the Institute of Historical Research (IHR); the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE); the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (SPHS); the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies (SPBS); and the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA).
We would also like to thank all the speakers (including Dimitris Kastritsis and Anthony Luttrell, whose papers at the conference could not be included in the present volume as they were due to appear in print elsewhere), as well as all the others who contributed to the programme and running of the conference, namely Susan Edgington, Jonathan Harris, Judith Herrin, Clare Norton, Thomas Smith and Mark Whelan. As regards the volume, we would like to thank George Mastrakoulis for designing the maps, as well as Patrick Cole and all the staff at Ashgate for their hard work in helping prepare this book. Finally, we would like to extend our special thanks and gratitude to Bernard Hamilton who, as president of the SSCLE, warmly embraced and encouraged the project from its early days, and graciously accepted our invitation not only to participate with a paper but also to compose the Conclusions section for this volume.
Preface
The papers published in this volume were delivered at a one-day conference held at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research in July 2010. They covered aspects of the interaction between Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the period 1204 to 1453 and examined themes such as crusading, religion and trade. It was a very sunny summer’s day and, even with the metal-framed windows of Senate House wide open, the room was decidedly warm. Yet there was no lack of attention among those present.
The organizers, Mike Carr and Nikos Chrissis, had come up with the idea of pairing a speaker who was well-known in the field with a younger scholar in three of the four sessions. The format worked very well, providing frequent changes of tone and delivery as well as prompting reflection on how different generations express their research findings. Regardless of how arguments were phrased and presented, however, one theme came out very clearly during the day: that conflict between human societies, whether physical or verbal, is only the tip of an iceberg of interaction, resting on an immense economic, cultural and religious convergence as well as divergence. With the papers now edited, indexed and published in this volume, readers will be able to explore that theme as well as the varied interests, topics and approaches of the authors.
There was one notable absentee at the conference: our colleague Konstantinos Ikonomopoulos, whose research on the Byzantine view of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre would have fitted well into its broad themes. Sadly Konstantinos died in October 2009 without being able to complete his PhD, but some of his findings have been published. His article ‘Byzantium and Jerusalem, 813-975: From Indifference to Intervention’ can be found in Papers from the First and Second Postgraduate Forums in Byzantine Studies: Sailing to Byzantium, ed. Savvas Neocleous (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 7—25. The conference and this volume are dedicated to his memory.
Jonathan Harris Royal Holloway University of London
Introduction
Nikolaos G. Chrissis and Mike Carr
One could be excused for feeling hesitant before delving into the world of Greece and the Aegean in the late medieval period. The complexity and fluidity of political circumstances alone can make any examination of the area a daunting task. Following the capture of Constantinople by the army of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, all semblance of political unity from the eastern coast of the Adriatic to the littoral of Asia Minor and the Black Sea disappeared. The Frankish and Venetian conquerors carved up a multitude of dominions out of the Byzantine territories, while no less than three Greek states (not to mention several semi-independent archontes) surfaced from the ruins of imperial collapse and claimed the inheritance of Byzantium.
This situation was complicated further in the fourteenth century by the appearance of a number of independent Turkish principalities, known as beyliks, on the Byzantine Anatolia frontier. The Turks soon replaced Greek control in the region, with the Ottomans eventually emerging as the dominant power amongst them. Thus, between the disintegration of the Byzantine Empire after 1204 and the consolidation of Ottoman power in the mid-fifteenth century, the area was an incredibly complex mosaic of peoples, religions and polities.
The need for research that cuts across sub-disciplinary boundaries, so often emphasized and widely acknowledged in modern historiography, is even more keenly felt with regard to this world of extreme political and religious fragmentation. Exploring the full range of interactions between Orthodox Greeks, Catholic Latins and Muslim Turks is a challenge for most individual scholars, not only on the basic level of linguistic skills needed to approach the available sources, but even more so on account of the diverse social relations and political and cultural traditions of each one of these groups. This was the stimulus for us to organize the conference on Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean in the summer of 2010 at the Institute of Historical Research in London, which eventually resulted in the present volume. Our main aim was, and remains, to contribute to a better understanding of the subject by combining the work of specialists in western medieval, Byzantine and Ottoman studies.
* Addressing issues of interaction between different ethnic and religious groups is par for the course for much of the historiography on the eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Ages — or in any other historical period for that matter. Yet, collective efforts dedicated to examining such cross-cultural and inter-religious contacts are rarer than one might expect for the post-1204 Byzantine East, and certain aspects of contact and conflict in the region have not received due attention.
It has been more than 20 years since the volume Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204 was published.' It was a seminal work, two contributors and one editor of which actually participated in the Contact and Conflict conference. Many of the essays in that volume are classics, still useful (and much used) to this day. Nonetheless, there have been major advances since then, for example, in the thriving field of crusade studies; furthermore, the 1989 volume focused on the interaction between Greeks and Latins without for the most part bringing into the discussion the third element, the Turks, except for a single contribution.” A number of volumes on eastern—western interaction in the context of the crusades have come out since, but the majority of them focus mostly on Outremer; when they address the Byzantine East it is usually for the period before and up to the Fourth Crusade. Meanwhile, works that consider western interaction with the Turks usually focus on the period after 1453, largely outside of the context of the crusades.* Furthermore, there is a tendency in such collective works for the voice of specialists in the history of the Muslim world not to be heard as much as that of their western medievalist colleagues.* The present volume, therefore, is almost unique in bringing together research by medievalists, Byzantinists and Ottomanists in order to explore relations between Greeks, Latins and Turks over the entire period from 1204 to 1453.5
The essays presented here explore various factors that defined contact and conflict between the three sides, with a view to highlighting salient themes that run through this period, as well as evaluating some wider changes that occurred over time. The volume lays particular emphasis on the crusades and the way they affected interaction in this area in the late Middle Ages. The reason for this is twofold. Crusade studies have attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years and the impact of the crusades on Byzantine history up to 1204 has been repeatedly examined in the past.° However, there has been little work on the way crusading was implemented in the area from the thirteenth century onwards.’ As a crusading front, Frankish Greece and the Aegean is relatively unexploited by comparison to other theatres of activity, such as Outremer, Iberia or the Baltic. Secondly, the crusade can provide narrative and thematic cohesion to an otherwise baffling nexus of shifting relations in a region which lacked a clearly identified political centre for over two-and-a-half centuries. Nevertheless, the contributions included here are by no means limited to crusading per se but rather use it as a starting point to examine various aspects of contact, including trade, interfaith relations and geographical exploration.
The present volume, therefore, makes available original research in the form of new interpretations, themes and sources, but at the same time it is also meant to make the history of the region in this period more widely accessible. In particular, this collection of essays aims to familiarize those with an interest in the area (whether Byzantinists, crusade historians or Ottomanists) with the latest advances in the other relative fields. Bearing this in mind, in this volume we have all attempted to explain our findings in terms intelligible to those working outside our particular sub-fields, and to outline the relevant debates in our areas of expertise when appropriate. Similarly, even though this introduction is not meant as a detailed survey of the current state of research on Frankish Greece and the Aegean, we hope that it will provide the reader with a basic bibliographical background to some of the works which we feel are most relevant to this field.*
Historical Outline: Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204—1453
Latin presence in Romania (Popavia) was from the outset fragmented. Though the Latin emperor installed in Constantinople was theoretically the overlord of all the former imperial domains, in practice his direct control extended to a rather limited territory on both sides of the Straits and to some of the nearby islands in the northern Aegean. Nominally the heir of the political institutions of Byzantium, it proved difficult for both the Latin emperor and the strongest lords among the Frankish host to shake off their feudal background. Combined with the patchy and piecemeal progress of the conquest, this resulted in the establishment of some practically autonomous Latin ‘crusader’ states in Greek lands, the most important of which, besides the Latin Empire, were the kingdom of Thessalonica, the duchy of Athens and Thebes, the principality of Achaia and the duchy of the Archipelago (in the Cyclades). Alongside these feudal lordships, there were also several Venetian colonies administered by representatives of the metropolis, while still under the obligation to provide support to the Latin emperor. The most important Venetian possessions were Modon and Coron in the Peloponnese, and Crete which remained in the hands of the Serenissima until the seventeenth century.’
On the eve of the attack on Constantinople, the Frankish and Venetian crusaders had drawn up a document dividing all the lands of the empire among themselves. A complete conquest was never achieved, however. Three successor Byzantine states were set up at Nicaea in Asia Minor, at Arta in Epiros and at Trebizond on the coast of the Black Sea. Trebizond was soon cut off from most of the developments further west, but Nicaea and Epiros were to play a central role in the affairs of Greece and the Aegean as major rallying points for resistance to the Latins."
With the exception of a brief period under the inspired leadership of the Latin emperor Henry of Hainault (1206-16), the Latins generally found themselves on the defensive. In order to defend the Frankish possessions from the resurgent Greeks, calls for reinforcements were issued to the West. A number of crusades were proclaimed by the papacy, for example, in 1205—1207 to stabilize the recent conquests, in 1222—25 to protect Thessalonica, and in 1235-40 to break the combined pressure of Nicaea and the Bulgarian kingdom on the Latin Empire. However, these efforts met with limited success and any results were evanescent. Latin presence in Greek lands was progressively eroded in the thirteenth century. Theodore of Epiros destroyed the kingdom of Thessalonica in 1224 and for a while seemed likely to reclaim Constantinople as well. Eventually this was accomplished by Nicaea, which became the greatest power in the region from the 1230s onwards. Michael Palaiologos took the ultimate prize of control over the imperial capital in 1261. A new crusade, in 1262—64, was proclaimed by Pope Urban IV to recover Constantinople and to buttress the principality of Achaia, the most important remaining Frankish state in Greece, but this attempt fared no better than the earlier ones."
A major new power entered the stage in the 1260s, in the person of Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France and crowned as king of Sicily as the papal champion against the Hohenstaufen. In 1267 Charles undertook to lead a campaign to restore the Latin Empire, while he was also recognized as the suzerain of Achaia (and in 1278 he gained direct control of the principality after the death of Prince William I). The Angevins represented the greatest threat to Byzantium for the following 15 years. During this period, Charles was locked in a duel with Michael Palaiologos where the two sides pitted their military, diplomatic and financial means against each other. The Byzantine emperor managed to hold back Angevin designs by a variety of manoeuvres, including the agreement with the papacy that led to the Union of the Greek and Roman Churches at the Second Council of Lyon (1274)." But the final blow to Charles’ ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean came with the uprising of the Sicilian Vespers (1282), which destroyed his power base in Sicily. The war that followed involved French, Spanish and Italian fleets and armies in clashes throughout the Mediterranean for two decades."
It would not be until the early fourteenth century that western claimants to the throne of Constantinople would reappear with the goal of restoring the Latin Empire, but the plans of Charles of Valois and Philip of Taranto came to nothing.'4 Meanwhile, the rise of Turkish power in Anatolia and the loss of the last Latin outposts in Outremer in 1291 would lead to a reorientation of policies and crusading priorities in the Levant.' In the process, the enfeebled Byzantine Empire gradually came to be seen as an ally, or as a Christian state in need of rescue, rather than as a target for crusading aggression.
The catalyst for this change was the gradual replacement, in the late thirteenth century, of Byzantine and Seljuk control of Anatolia by that of the Turkish beyliks: a patchwork of small dynastic principalities which, by the early fourteenth century, had established themselves across Asia Minor, stretching from the fringes of the Mongol Ilkhanate and Greek Trebizond in the east, to the shores of the Aegean in the west. By the second decade of the fourteenth century the maritime beyliks of the Aegean coast, especially those of Aydin and Menteshe, had begun to threaten Latin and Greek territories in the Aegean and Greece by launching raids into the sea, sometimes in alliance with one another, and at other times in league with the Catalan rulers of Athens or other disparate Christian groups in the region.'® In these early encounters it was the newly established Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes and the Genoese Zaccaria lords of Chios who most tenaciously defended their territories from Turkish attack, although the Venetians also began to engage in limited military action as their possessions became endangered.!’
The increasing pressure from the beyliks culminated in Venice taking the initiative against the Turks in 1333, when the Republic, along with other local Christian powers — the Hospitallers, Cyprus and initially Byzantium — together with the papacy and France, formed a naval league to defend the Aegean from Turkish raids. This league, without Byzantine participation in the end, won some important victories over the Turks in 1334, but once it had disbanded later in the year, the Turkish raids resumed. In the following decade, the Turks, in particular those of Aydin, began to launch raids into the Aegean with increasing frequency and penetration, exacting tribute from a number of Christian territories and even threatening Venetian Crete, the most powerful of all Latin possessions. By this point, the severity of the Turkish menace had become well-known in the West, leading Pope Clement VI to proclaim a crusade against the main perpetrator of these raids, Umur Pasha, the lord of Smyrna, in 1343. This crusade managed to capture the port of Smyrna in 1344, leading to the death of Umur in 1348 and the temporary subjugation of Aydin."
However, the Crusade of Smyrna did little to permanently reduce Turkish dominance in the region. In contrast, as the strength of the coastal beyliks began to wane in the latter half of the fourteenth century, one principality began to rise in their place — that initially established within landlocked boundaries in northwestern Anatolia by Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. In 1326, the year of Osman’s death, the important city of Bursa was captured from the Byzantines, followed by Nicaea/Iznik in 1331, taken by Osman’s son and successor Orkhan. By 1350 the Ottoman war machine had virtually eliminated Byzantine power in Asia Minor and had annexed the coastal beylik of Karasi, providing access to the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. The next crucial point in the expansion of Ottoman power came in 1354 when an army crossed the Dardanelles and seized the fortress of Gallipoli from the Byzantines, marking the first Turkish foothold in Europe. Under the reign of Murad I the Ottomans continued their expansion into Europe and across Asia Minor, capturing the second city of Byzantium, Thessalonica, in 1387 and, under Sultan Bayezid I, subjugating the Anatolian maritime beyliks of Menteshe and Aydin in 1389-90. Christian armies were raised to challenge the advancing Ottoman armies but were routinely defeated, such as the Serbs at Maritsa in 1371 and the crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396 and Varna in 1444."
By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had emerged as the dominant power in the region, and, under Bayezid I, even laid siege to Constantinople itself. After the defeat of Bayezid at Ankara by the Mongol chief Timur in 1402, the pre-eminence of the Ottomans was briefly challenged. Bayezid was imprisoned by Timur and the tributary states of Aydin and Menteshe, along with the other subjugated Anatolian beyliks, were temporarily restored, but within years the Ottomans had re-asserted their control over these territories and once again commenced their expansion under the rule of Mehmed I. By the mid-point of the fifteenth century, large swathes of Greece had come under Ottoman control and many Aegean islands, such as the Genoese colonies of Lesbos and Chios as well as the Venetian duchy of Naxos, became tributary states. The confirmation of Ottoman supremacy in the region came in 1453, when Mehmed II, ‘the Conqueror’, captured Constantinople, crowning over a century of Ottoman expansion and creating an empire which could rival that of Byzantium in its heyday. Although the language of crusading against the Turks persisted into the early modern period, the Ottoman Empire was gradually integrated into the diplomatic system of European powers, and its control over the Balkans was no longer seriously challenged.”
Fluidity and Ambiguity: Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean Helpful as this schematic outline of events might be, however, we should be on our guard against a narrative that paints too neat a picture of events in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, be that one of Byzantine resurgence versus chronic Frankish weakness in the thirteenth century, or the collapse of united Christian resistance in the face of Turkish expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The reality on the ground was anything but neat. First of all, the Nicaean project of resurrecting the Byzantine Empire was never complete. To say nothing of faraway Trebizond, Epiros remained independent and frequently hostile, despite efforts to bring it into the fold through matrimonial alliances or force of arms. In the Peloponnese, the Latin principality of Achaia shrank as the Byzantine despotate of Morea gradually absorbed its territories, but it survived to the fifteenth century and the Byzantine takeover was only completed less than 30 years before the Ottoman conquest.
Most of the islands in the Aegean remained under Venetian control; as regards the three largest ones, Negroponte was fought over fiercely, with the Byzantine reconquest by Licario in the 1270s proving ephemeral, until the island eventually fell to the Turks in 1471; Crete remained firmly in Venetian hands down to 1669, although it was rocked by various native rebellions, some of which had links with the government at Nicaea/Constantinople; Rhodes, on the other hand, passed from the control of the semi-independent Gabalas dynasty to Nicaea in the mid-thirteenth century, only to be conquered by the Knights Hospitallers in the early fourteenth century and become the order’s base for 200 years, before it was eventually lost to the Ottomans (c. 1307-1522). Meanwhile, the return of the Byzantine government to Constantinople and the concentration on western affairs left the eastern flank exposed. This was exploited not so much by the collapsing Seljuk state, as by nomadic Turcomans who gradually overran most of Asia Minor and formed the Turkish beyliks which eventually emerged on the formerly Byzantine-controlled coast.
Even though it was the Ottomans who captured Constantinople and extinguished Byzantium, their rise was also far from straightforward and their success far from inevitable. For most of the early fourteenth century it was the coastal beyliks of Menteshe and Aydin which wielded the most power in Asia Minor, and for the majority of the period Turkish sea power remained inferior to that of the Italians in the Aegean or of the Hospitallers. Even the Ottoman land armies could be defeated, as was proved by Timur when he brought the mighty Sultan Bayezid to heel in 1402. This is to say nothing of the conflicts between the Ottomans and the other Anatolian beyliks and the internal strife which beset the Ottoman ruling dynasty, especially during the early fifteenth century, which probably more than anything gave the Byzantines something to work with in delaying the eventual conquest of the imperial city.
Furthermore, discussion of political boundaries is by no means the whole story. Alliances and conflicts did not follow strictly confessional or ethnic lines. The coalition that the Nicaean army defeated at Pelagonia in 1259 included the Greek rulers of Epiros and Thessaly, alongside the prince of Achaia and troops sent by Manfred of Sicily.2! The Genoese allied with Michael Palaiologos against Charles of Anjou, while discontented members of the Byzantine aristocracy offered their support to Charles of Valois against Andronikos II in 1307-10.”
The Latin lords of Greece fought among themselves, not much more rarely than they did against Greek or Turkish enemies; one need only think about the revolt of the Lombard lords of Thessalonica against Emperor Henry in 1207-1209, or the war that the prince of Achaia fought against the Lombards and Venetians of Negroponte and the duke of Athens in 1256—58.”3 Moreover, the duke of Naxos, Niccolo Sanudo, allied with Andronikos HI to capture Chios from the Genoese lord Martino Zaccaria in 1329, barely four years before both Sanudo and Andronikos agreed to ally with Venice for the naval league against the Turks.% During the Byzantine civil wars of the mid-fourteenth century, things became even more complicated as each side courted local Latin, Serb, Bulgarian and Turkish rulers to further their cause. To give one particularly well-known example, the establishment of the first Ottoman foothold in Europe at Gallipoli in 1354 is largely regarded as a result of the Ottoman alliance with Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, who had allowed the Turks to cross the Dardanelles to accompany him on campaign in Thrace against John V and his Serbian and Bulgarian allies.”
Even harder to describe in black-and-white terms is the everyday life of Greek populations under Latin or Turkish rule. Complex issues of coexistence, loyalties and identity arise. For example, can we really speak of segregation or acculturation between Greeks and Latins? Relevant studies suggest the appearance of elements of anew mixed identity, forged between the conquerors and the conquered, particularly in the areas where Latin control was long-lasting, such as Frankish Achaia and Venetian Crete; most of these studies, however, also warn about the limits of this development.** There is evidence of persisting loyalties towards the Byzantine government and — particularly — ecclesiastical hierarchy in ‘exile’, as well as of indifference or even support towards the newly installed Latin regimes. Such issues were not limited to the populations under foreign rule.
The collapse of the imperial order and the dismemberment of the Byzantine state generated an intense anxiety and a crisis of identity even among those Byzantines who remained free from conquest.”’ The radically changed circumstances required not only new ways of action but also new ways of thinking. It is telling that two recent publications start their examination of this period with the question of what exactly was Byzantium in the thirteenth century.” Parallels can, of course, be drawn on the Latin and Turkish sides; at times the Latin lords in the Aegean embraced Byzantine imperial identity as a marker of legitimacy and, as the Ottoman state began to replace that of Byzantium, the identity of Italian merchant communities in particular became more malleable in order to make coexistence possible under Turkish rule.” The Turks for their part also benefitted from a fluidity of relations with both Greeks and Latins, not least in the development of Ottoman economic and administrative institutions.
Outline of the Present Volume
This volume consists of four parts, arranged roughly in chronological order, which encompass a variety of topics while maintaining a unity of focus on the factors affecting contact and conflict between Greeks, Latins and Turks.
The first part places Frankish Greece in the wider context of developments in East and West. The essay by Nikolaos Chrissis argues that western involvement in Romania bears close parallels with the other crusade fronts in the thirteenth century, such as the Baltic and the Albigensian Crusades, and that this crusading framework influenced both actions and perceptions between Latins and Greeks in the period. Bernard Hamilton, on the other hand, describes how the Latin conquest of Byzantium opened up new routes for western merchants, diplomats and friars to visit the Crimean Peninsula, the Caucasus and western Asia. As a result, western knowledge of, and familiarity with, the area grew immensely from the thirteenth century onwards.
The second part investigates the manifold and often contradictory ways in which the Byzantines responded to the Latin presence in the East. Teresa Shawcross examines the city of Athens before and after the Latin conquest, making a case about the importance of local interests and regional allegiances in shaping everyday life in a Byzantine province and consequently in affecting the possibilities for accommodation with the new Frankish masters. The growing prosperity of Athens in the late twelfth century and the worship of the Theotokos at the Parthenon, which turned the city into an important pilgrimage destination, initially acted as an incentive for successive conquerors but eventually won over the western settlers (as they had won over the snobbish bishops sent from Constantinople before the conquest) and guaranteed ‘a cohesive sense of identity’ for the local population.
Judith Ryder’s chapter looks at a fascinating section of the oration pro subsidio Latinorum of Demetrius Kydones, in which the author tries to demonstrate the reliability and valour of the westerners through certain episodes from the history of the crusades, in order to convince his compatriots to accept an alliance with western powers against the Turks. Both essays challenge the view that Byzantines harboured a monolithic resentment towards the West after 1204, and make the point that in the volatile and ever-changing political circumstances of the period, attitudes and perceptions were equally prone to readjustment and re-evaluation.
The third part consists of two closely related essays on fourteenth-century Latin relations with Greeks and Turks in the Aegean. Mike Carr examines the involvement of the Zaccaria lords of Chios in crusading activities against the Turks and argues that, rather than being mutually exclusive, the promotion of commerce in the East and defence of the faith were two complementary facets of their role as they perceived and projected it, that is, as frontline defenders of Christendom. Peter Lock draws from his research on the writings of the Venetian crusade propagandist Marino Sanudo Torsello and discusses how the image of the Greeks and Turks in his work changed over time. As the Turkish threat grew, Sanudo seems to have changed his view of the Greeks, from enemies to potential allies in the East.
In the fourth part, the focus turns to the Ottomans in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, offering a reassessment of their western frontier and reaction to crusading in that area. The chapter by Iker Evrim Binbag includes an analysis and translation of Ibn al-Jazari’s eyewitness account of the Battle of Nicopolis (1396), which offers a unique — and for the most part neglected — Muslim viewpoint of developments in that crucial moment for the history of the area. The contribution by Rhoads Murphey examines the priorities of Bayezid’s foreign policy, arguing that the sultan focused his attention on his eastern flank, effectively withdrawing from engagements in the west and showing little interest in confrontation with Christian powers. The chapter’s more general aim is to illuminate the fundamental principles and mechanisms of policymaking in the Ottoman state during the proto-imperial era, which have often been obscured under the influence of later developments and priorities.
One of the unifying themes of the various investigations in this volume, therefore, is that our understanding of intergroup interaction in this region can be enhanced by examinations both on the macro-level, which take in a view of developments in the wider world in East and West (Chrissis, Hamilton, Murphey), and on the micro-level, by focusing on how wider trends can be radically reshaped on account of local factors and regional peculiarities (Shawcross, Carr) or refracted through the lens of individual perceptions at crucial turning points (Ryder, Lock, Binbas).
In closing this introduction, we would like to note that as scholarship in Byzantine, crusade and Ottoman studies has been progressing in strides in recent years, it remains essential, but progressively more challenging, for scholars to remain conversant with research in the ‘sibling’ sub-disciplines. A sustained effort needs to be made to combine effectively the knowledge and insights produced in the various overlapping studies dealing with this turbulent period of change in the eastern Mediterranean. The present volume is only a small step; but one step, we hope, in the right direction.
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