Download PDF | Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis, Peter Lock (eds.) - A Companion to Latin Greece-Brill Academic Publishers (2015).
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Notes on Contributors
Julian Baker is curator of medieval and later coins at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis (Birmingham, 2002) dealt with medieval Greek numismatics. Dr Baker has published on the monetary history of medieval Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans.
Nikolaos G. 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, the papacy, and Byzantine identity. His publications include the monograph Crusading in Frankish Greece: A Study of Byzantine-Western Relations and Attitudes, 1204–1282 (Turnhout, 2012), while he also co-edited the volume Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean, 1204–1453 (Farnham, 2014).
Nicholas Coureas works as a Senior Researcher at the Cyprus Research Centre in Nicosia on the history of Lusignan Cyprus (1191–1473). He has published various articles and books on this subject, including the monograph The Latin Church in Cyprus 1195–1312 (Aldershot, 1997) and its sequel The Latin Church of Cyprus 1313–1378 (Nicosia, 2010).
Charalambos Gasparis is Research Director of the Institute of Historical Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece. He is a specialist in the Venetian domination in the Greek territories during the Late Middle Ages. He has published books and articles on rural society and the economy, commerce and city life in Crete and other Venetian colonies in the Aegean. He has also edited Latin sources concerning Venetian Crete from 13th to 15th century.
Maria Georgopoulou is the Director of the Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Her publications focus on the artistic and cultural interactions of Mediterranean peoples in the Middle Ages and include Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, 2001).
David Jacoby is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has published extensively on intercultural exchanges and maritime trade between the West and Byzantium, the Crusader states and Egypt in the 11th–15th centuries; medieval silk production and trade, and the Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Latest collection of studies: Travellers, Merchants and Settlers across the Mediterranean, EleventhFourteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2014). He is currently working on a book on Crusader Acre and another on Silk and Silk Textiles in Byzantium and the Medieval Mediterranean.
Sophia Kalopissi-Verti is Professor Emerita of Byzantine Archaeology at the University of Athens. She is the author, among other, of Dedicatory Inscriptions and Donor Portraits in Thirteenth-Century Churches of Greece (Vienna, 1992), and co-editor of a collective volume on Archaeology and the Crusades (Athens, 2007). Her numerous articles focus on Byzantine painting, church inscriptions, artistic and cultural interrelations between Byzantium and the West, and issues of patronage and painters.
Peter Lock Professor of History at York St John University, retired in August 2008. He is the author of Franks in the Aegean (London, 1995), The Routledge Companion to the Crusades (London, 2006), and has translated The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross by Marino Sanudo Torsello (Farnham, 2011). He has edited The Archaeology of Medieval Greece (Oxford, 1996) with Guy Sanders.
Gill Page studied Classics at Corpus Christi College Oxford before completing an MA in Medieval History at the University of Manchester and a PhD at the University of Leeds. Her study of medieval Greek identity was published by CUP as Being Byzantine in 2008. Dr Page is an independent scholar and partner in the medieval music ensemble Trouvère, for which she has edited and translated many lyrics of the trouvères and troubadours.
Anastasia Papadia-Lala is Professor of Early Modern Greek History at the University of Athens. She specialises in the history of the Greek-Venetian East, 13th–18th centuries (social history, urban communities, philanthropy and social welfare, revolts and rebellions, culture and education). She has published three monographs and numerous articles.
Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis studied for his PhD at the Institute for Medieval Studies of the University of Leeds and is now Lecturer in History at Edge Hill University. He is the author of The Latin Religious Orders in Medieval Greece, 1204–1500 (Turnhout, 2012).
Note on Rendition of Proper Names and Transliteration
We have tried, as far as possible, to use the forms of proper names most familiar to an English-speaking audience, even at the expense of consistency. In the case of western rulers and other widely-known persons, these are usually the anglicised versions of their names, for example, William de Villehardouin (rather than Guillaume de Villehardouin). We have used the non-anglicised versions in the cases where these are so well-established that it would be pedantic not to. The same consideration has been used with regards to Greek names. The names of very famous people, such as emperors, appear in their most familiar i.e. anglicised form.
Transliteration of Greek names generally follows the Greek, rather than the Latin spelling; thus, Palaiologos (rather than Palaeologus) and Komnenos (rather than Comnenus), except, once again, for cases where a different spelling is particularly well-established. In the case of Greek place-names we have opted again for the most familiar version, even at the expense of consistency; thus, for example Macedonia (rather than Makedonia), Achaea (rather than Achaia), Naupactus (rather than Nafpaktos). The dedications of Greek churches appear in their English forms, where a direct and obvious correspondence exists, for example St George (rather than Hagios Georgios). Where the connection is less obvious, we have given the Greek form, for example Hagioi Tessarakonta.
The Latins in Greece: A Brief Introduction Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis The Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople by the crusaders cast a long shadow on Greece’s subsequent history and on relations between Greeks and western Europeans down to the present day. Pope John Paul ii’s apology to the Orthodox for the events of the crusade, in 2001, and the satisfaction with which it was received by certain sections of the clergy and of wider Greek society serves to illustrate, if not the actual impact of the events themselves, at least popular perceptions of the events in Greece and the West as well as the use made of these events in 20th-century historiography. Today, the relations of the medieval western world with the Greek/Byzantine East may be more relevant than ever.
The Eurozone crisis of the early 2010s has been accompanied by the re-emergence in segments of the press and society (both Greek and western European) of negative national stereotypes emphasising the differences between Greek and western-European culture and questioning whether a union between the two is viable or indeed desirable. The terms ‘Latin Greece’, which features in the title of this volume, and ‘medieval Greece’, which also features in the book, may require some explanation. Here, they are used as shorthand to refer to the Latin polities that were founded on Byzantine lands in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.
They can be taken therefore as rough synonyms for the political entity known as the Latin Empire of Constantinople or Romania, as it was more commonly called by Latin contemporaries. These polities were the product of conquest. Even before the conquest of Constantinople was achieved on 12 April 1204, the crusading army, comprised of Frankish knights and Venetians, had inadvertently laid the foundations of the new empire by agreeing on a pact, aimed at safeguarding the interests of the participants in the expedition in the event of the siege’s success. Following the city’s capture and the installation of a Frankish knight, Baldwin of Flanders, in the throne of Constantine, the crusaders set about partitioning the Byzantine Empire amongst themselves.
This was a daunting task not only militarily, but administratively as well, for the conquerors first had to determine what lands and resources were there for the taking and how they might be equitably divided. In the event, both the theoretical division and the conquest of the new lands were achieved rapidly if somewhat haphazardly. Out of this process a number of Latin crusader polities emerged which either owed allegiance to the emperor at Constantinople but were in practice governed independently, or, as was the case with Crete, were ruled as colonial appendages of western European powers.
The first such state to be founded was also the shortest-lived one: Boniface of Montferrat, who had led the Fourth Crusade and had hoped to be elected emperor, conquered much of northern Greece and founded what would later be known as the Kingdom of Thessalonica. The suzerainty of Constantinople over the kingdom was implicitly acknowledged when, in 1209, Emperor Henry crowned Boniface’s orphaned son Demetrios as first king of Thessalonica. The kingdom’s fall to the Greeks of Epirus in 1224 was a stark reminder to the West of the precariousness of the new empire’s position. Faced only with sporadic resistance, Frankish contingents of knights carried the expansion southwards, eventually founding the lordship (later duchy) of Athens and Thebes, the counties of Boudonitsa and Salona, in central Greece and the Frankish state par excellence in the Aegean, the Principality of Achaea, in the Peloponnese. The new lords of these territories were the vassals of the emperor of Constantinople.
The conquest progressed at an equally rapid pace in the islands. Euboea (called Negroponte by the Latins), in Latin hands since 1204, was assigned by Boniface of Montferrat to three Lombard nobles, known as triarchs, each ruling a third of the island. Between 1209 and 1216 the entirety of the island had come under the control of a single one of these lords, Ravano dalle Carceri, who placed himself under the suzerainty of Venice. Thereafter, the island occupied a peculiar position whereby it technically owed allegiance to the empire but was in all but name a Venetian appendage, ruled by the Serenissima. Venetian subjects, led by Marco Sanudo, also embarked on the conquest of the Aegean islands and the establishment of the Duchy of the Archipelago, with its “capital” at the island of Naxos. The establishment of the Venetian nobility in the Aegean islands, again, meant that while technically the islands were held of the emperor (and of the prince of Achaea after 1248), their rulers had to balance their own interests and those of their suzerains against those of their motherland.1 Venice’s most important domain however, was the island of Crete. Realising Crete’s advantageous position, Venice conquered the island and began a well-planned colonisation campaign in 1211.
Though conquered as a direct result of the Fourth Crusade, Crete was not part of the Latin Empire and was subsequently ruled as a dependence of Venice, by colonial authorities appointed from the metropolis. Venice’s acquisition of Crete, along with the Peloponnesian harbour-towns of Modon and Coron, were instrumental in ensuring her mastery of the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the Late Middle Ages. Other Latin polities in Greece were created as an indirect result of the crusade. Genoa, who had been excluded from the whole enterprise, managed to re-establish a presence by allying herself with the Greeks of Nicaea in 1261 and being rewarded with trade privileges and quarters in the capital and other coastal areas after Michael viii’s reconquest of Constantinople. In 1304 the Genoese Benedetto Zaccaria managed to take the island of Chios, which was thereafter controlled by Genoese agents until 1566 (except for the period 1329–46, during which it reverted to Byzantine control). At the start of the 14th century the Knights Hospitaller, now expelled from the Holy Land, also embarked on the conquest of an island base in the Aegean. By 1309, they had conquered Rhodes, where they moved their headquarters, and proceeded to establish their authority over the rest of the Dodecanese.
The islands of the Ionian Sea had known Latin rule even before the Fourth Crusade, having been captured by William ii of Sicily in 1185. At the time of the crusade, Cephalonia, Zakynthos (Zante) and Lefkada (Santa Maura) were ruled by the Orsini family, under the title of Counts Palatine. Corfu, which was awarded by the Partition Treaty to Venice, was leased to ten Venetian nobles, who only managed to hold on to it until 1214, at which time it was taken over by the Greeks of Epirus. The newly established polities had to contend with the indigenous populations and with the remnants of the previous regime. Indigenous resistance was haphazard at best, but certain local magnates, such as Leo Sgouros (d. 1208) managed to at least put up a fight.
The town of Monemvasia, in the Peloponnese, was exceptional in managing to withstand the Franks until 1248. Much more formidable, during the years of the conquest was the opposition of the Bulgarians under their leader Kalojan. His resistance to Latin expansion in the Balkans led not only to the capture and death of Emperor Baldwin in 1205 and to the death of Boniface of Montferrat in 1207, but also to the relinquishing of substantial crusader gains in Thrace. Kalojan’s own death in October 1208 was a blessing for the nascent Latin Empire. Though resistance at a local level remained limited among the Greeks, three rival Greek states emerged as successors of the Byzantine Empire, the so-called Empire of Trebizond, the Empire of Nicaea and the Despotate of Epirus. The first of these remained peripheral to the political developments of Latin Greece, but the other two posed enormous threats to the emergent Latin states.
Throughout the first half of the 13th century the rulers of Epirus put the Latin rulers of northern and central Greece under incessant pressure culminating in the capture of Thessalonica in 1224. The threat from Epirus subsided in subsequent decades as the Epirote rulers were forced into alliances with the Franks, hoping to counter the rising power of their Nicaean rivals. It was indeed the emperors of Nicaea who succeeded in recapturing Constantinople in 1261, thus reviving the Byzantine Empire. A warning shot had been fired two years earlier, when the Nicaeans had defeated the combined Epirote and Frankish forces at the battle of Pelagonia, capturing the Prince of Achaea, William ii de Villehardouin in the process. Though the Greek recapture of Constantinople brought an effective end to the Latin Empire, the demise of this political entity was not formally acknowledged in the West and titular Latin emperors continued to lay claim to the Constantinopolitan throne for more than a century.
The revival of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople coincided with a resurgence of the Greeks in the Peloponnese; having re-established bases in Maina, Monemvasia and Mistra, from the 1260s onwards the Byzantines made significant inroads against the Franks of the Morea. The ability of the Latins to secure their possessions in Greece was severely hampered by their inability to maintain peace among themselves. In 1255 a serious war broke out between the Prince of Achaea (William ii de Villehardouin) and the Lord of Athens (Guy de la Roche), over William’s attempts to extend his overlordship to the island of Negroponte.
The prince won the war, after defeating his opponents at the battle of Karydi in 1258, but his success was short-lived, for, as we have seen, in the next year he was captured by the Nicaeans after a disastrous defeat at Pelagonia. The Italians of Greece were even less amenable to peaceful co-existence: the Veneto-Genoese rivalry was transferred to, and intensified in the Aegean, once the Genoese managed to get a foothold in the region. Four wars were fought between the two cities, culminating in the catastrophic war of Chioggia (1258–70; 1294–99; 1350–51 and 1375–81). The loss of Constantinople and the declining fortunes of the Franks in the Morea proved that the Frankish states were incapable of surviving as independent entities. At Viterbo in 1267 William ii signed a treaty with Charles of Anjou (brother of the French king Louis ix and newly-crowned king of Naples and Sicily) recognising him as his sovereign and ceding the principality to the Angevins following his own death.
For Charles, who entertained serious hopes of seizing the throne of Constantinople, the acquisition of the Morea was a stepping stone in his campaign against the Byzantine Emperor Michael viii Palaiologos. Along with the Peloponnese, Charles also acquired Corfu, which had been briefly held by Manfred of Sicily whom Charles defeated, dispossessed and executed after the battle of Benevento in 1266. Corfu was formally surrendered to Charles in 1272, starting the period of Angevin domination of the island, which would last until 1386. The death of Prince William in 1278 ushered in a new era for Frankish Morea, during which the principality would be ruled by representatives of the Angevins. Though the annexation of the principality ensured that assistance from the West would be forthcoming, it also meant that the fortunes of the Peloponnese would be subsumed in the broader politics and ambitions of the Angevins and be ruled by delegates in the name of absentee princes. For a brief period, the Franks of Athens and Thebes could revel in the knowledge that theirs was the only surviving independent Frankish crusader state in Greece, whose lords could still trace their lineage back to the conquest. In the 14th century, however, all this was about to change.
In 1311, a group of Catalan adventurers known as the Catalan Grand Company, who had previously served as mercenaries for the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos ii but had since fallen out with him, arrived at the duchy after having terrorised Asia Minor and most of mainland Greece. In a pitched battle at Halmyros they annihilated the Burgundian knights and took over Athens, with most of central Greece soon to follow. That once in Athens the Catalans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle of recent years in favour of settlement and state-building made little difference to the other Latin states of Greece. Their violent establishment and continued aggression earned them the hostility of the Franks and repeated sentences of excommunication from the papacy. The Venetians were also wary, fearing that the Catalans would put an end to the Venetian trade monopoly in the Aegean. In an effort to legitimise their conquests the Catalans of Athens recognised the Aragonese kings of Sicily as their suzerains.
Thereafter, the title of Duke of Athens passed to members of the Aragonese royal family, while the duchy was governed through vicars (much like the Principality of Achaea after the Angevin cession). The suzerainty of the Aragonese of Sicily, though it might have provided the Catalans with a powerful patron, did little to improve relations with the Angevin-dominated Morea, and in fact further embroiled the Latin polities of Greece in the rivalries and disputes of western Europe. The Catalans burst into medieval Greece in spectacular manner, but their domination of Athens and Thebes ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Moreover, the hardened soldiers of fortune were replaced by the unlikeliest of conquerors—a branch of the cultured and urbane Acciaiuoli family of Florence. The Acciaiuoli had first acquired claims to territories in the Peloponnese as payment for funding Angevin expeditions in the Morea in the 1320s, and in subsequent decades had expanded these claims through bequests and purchase. Throughout the 1370s and ’80s Nerio Acciaiuoli extended his domains by conquest into the Duchy of Athens, ousting the Catalans from Athens and the newly-installed Navarrese adventurers from Thebes in 1388. The dynasty that he established ruled the Duchy of Athens and Thebes until its fall to the Ottomans.
The 14th century also witnessed the beginning of the Turkish ascendency both in mainland Greece (where Turkish mercenaries were employed by the Catalans) and in the islands which were increasingly faced with Turkish raids. Meanwhile the Byzantines of Mistra continued to inflict heavy losses on the Angevins of the Morea. Through all this, only Venice, among the western powers managed not only to hold on to her domains but to expand them and prosper. The process had not been easy: throughout the 13th century the colony of Crete had been threatened by a series of uprisings by local Greek magnates fighting to recover the privileges they had lost with the Venetian conquest. An even greater threat emerged in 1363, when certain Venetian feudatories rebelled on account of a taxation dispute, appeased the Greeks and declared the island an independent kingdom.
Through the combination of brutal force and compromise, the Venetians managed to put down all these rebellions and establish in Crete (and its capital Candia in particular) a well-run bureaucratic regime modelled on Venice’s own and powered by the lucrative commerce of the Eastern Mediterranean. By the early 14th century, there were no longer any pretensions that Negroponte was anything but Venetian and by 1386 Venice also annexed the Angevin island of Corfu at the request of the local population. The willing surrender of territories to the Venetians would be repeated time and again, as local populations realised that the Serenissima was the only power strong enough to resist the Turks.
The Knights Hospitaller were also faced with similar responsibilities to protect the beleaguered Latin domains. In 1376 they leased the Principality of Achaea from Joanna, Queen of Naples and Princess of the Morea, for five years and tried to organise a counter-offensive with the help of Navarrese mercenaries. Though these campaigns met with some success, they also resulted in the introduction of a new faction with its own territorial ambitions in Latin Greece. If the 14th century was an age of flux and decline for the Latins of Greece, the 15th was one of panic and collapse. Even under the mounting pressure of the Turks, the Latins of Greece were unable to put up a united front.
The Acciaiuoli of Athens fought against the Venetians of Negroponte and eventually became clients of the Sultan in order to defend their claims. In the Peloponnese, the tiny remnants of the principality were passed on from the Navarrese to a branch of the Genoese Zaccaria family and in 1430 to the Byzantines of Mistra, not through conquest, but through marriage. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was understood by all, not just those present in Greece, to prefigure Turkish expansion into Europe. By 1460 almost all of mainland Greece was under the control of Mehmed ii, with the exception of Modon and Coron and several other fortresses that had come under the protection of Venice.
The Venetians, usually pragmatic and reluctant to antagonise the Turks, spent most of the 1460s campaigning for a new crusade to stave off the Ottoman onslaught. The western powers, however, remained non-committal and when war came Venice could only rely on her Hungarian and Albanian allies, who were as threatened by the Turks as her own colonies. The first Ottoman-Venetian war (1463–79) was a disaster for Venice, who was forced to relinquish most of her possessions in Greece.
The most traumatic loss was the island of Negroponte, which fell despite putting up heroic resistance. The brutality of the sack and the wholesale slaughter of the city’s population shocked European public opinion. Despite the losses Venice held on to Modon and Coron (until 1500), Monemvasia, Navarino and Nauplion (until 1540), and Lepanto (until 1499). She also managed to claim through treaty the Ionian Islands, which the Turks had seized from the Counts Palatine, and hold them, along with Corfu, until the dissolution of the Venetian Republic in 1797. More importantly, she retained her most significant possession, the island of Crete, until 1669.
With the Venetians forced into a treaty, Mehmed was free to turn his attention to the Knights Hospitaller, who, since their installation on Rhodes had been the most aggressive of the Christian powers, albeit through small-scale piratical attacks. In the summer of 1480 the town of Rhodes suffered a horrific siege, but somehow the Hospitaller, mercenary and Greek defenders managed to overcome the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Turks and retain the island.
The victory was widely publicised in the West, but there was little cause for celebration: with Latin and Greek resistance gone, a Turkish fleet was able to sack Otranto in the same summer. Moreover, though the Hospitallers had won an important victory, it must have been clear to contemporaries that their days in the Eastern Mediterranean were now numbered. Undoubtedly, one of the most unsavoury aspects of this phase of Latin domination of Greece is the unwillingness of the Venetians and Hospitallers to unite against their common enemy. During the Ottoman-Venetian war, the Knights had actively disrupted the Venetian campaign; in 1480 the Venetians returned the favour by remaining aloof while Rhodes was being pounded by Turkish cannon. The end of the 15th century found the Latin states of Greece all but extinct. The dukes of the Archipelago were allowed to carry on ruling their islands until 1566 as were the Genoese lords of Chios, but both had been reduced to tributaries of the Sultan long since.
The Hospitallers continued to hold Rhodes and the Dodecanese until 1522, at which point a second siege forced them to admit defeat and surrender the island to the Turks. Only Venice continued to maintain a significant presence in Greece, well into the early modern period and in the case of the Ionian Islands until the dissolution of the Republic itself. Despite their sorry state at the end of the 15th century, it is worth reminding ourselves that these tiny polities founded as a result of the Fourth Crusade outlived the crusader states of the Middle East by several centuries.
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