The Franks in the Aegean

1204-1500

Peter Lock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317899716
• Subtopic: Byzantine History

Despite the enormous literature on the crusades, the Frankish states in the Aegean (set up in the wake of the Fourth Crusade in 1204) have been seriously neglected by modern historians. Yet their history is both compelling in itself - these were the last crusader states to be set up in the eastern Mediterranean and among the last to fall to the Turks - and also valuable for the case study they offer in medieval colonialism. Peter Lock surveys the social, economic, religious and cultural aspects of the region within a broad political framework, and explores the clash of cultures between the Frankish interlopers and their Byzantine subjects. This is a major addition to crusading studies.

Chapter 1

The Frankish Aegean: Background, Context and Problems

The Frankish states in the Aegean were set up after the capture of Constantinople by French and Venetian crusaders in 1204. The world of the Frankish Aegean was small-scale and complex. It was politically fragmented and lacked any real focal point. The mountainous terrain fostered any impetus for regionalism and tended to accentuate the process of fragmentation. The external political influences with which the rulers of these states had to contend were also diverse, disunited and frequently opposed to one another. In brief they may be listed as the papacy, the royal courts in Paris, Naples, Palermo, and Barcelona, the Vlacho-Bulgarian kingdom centred on Tirnovo, the Serbs and Albanians, the Seljuks of Rum at Konya, and the various Greek successor states to Byzantium in Arta, Thessalonika, Nicaea and Trebizond. This world was only in small part a creation of the western crusaders. The Byzantine empire into which the Frankish conquerors moved was very old in 1204. Just as they needed guides to the towns and territories which they acquired, so the modern reader coming fresh to the medieval Aegean may well feel the need for an overview before venturing further. This chapter is for them. Those readers who are already familiar with medieval Byzantium may skip through this first chapter if they wish. Like many of the Venetian crusaders in 1204 they will already know what they are looking for. A full chronological summary of the principal political and military events of the period from 1204 to 1500 is provided in Appendix 1 and a list of rulers will be found in Appendix 2.

The Byzantine empire

In 330 the emperor Constantine refounded the city of Byzantium on the Bosphorus as Constantinople, the City of Constantine. It remained the capital of the Byzantine empire until 1453.¹ The term Byzantine was a creation of French scholars in the seventeenth century. The people of the empire called themselves ‘Rhomaio’, the inhabitants of the Roman empire (basilieia ton Rhomaion). They thus acknowledged that their territorial possessions and many of their political traditions were the legacy of the late Roman empire. At the same time they were not fossilised Romans. Their language was Greek and their religion Christianity. The empire was the first Christian state and its armies might be said to be always fighting for God in the defence of an empire which encompassed the civilised Christian world. Between the fourth and the seventh centuries there had been many cultural and perceptional changes which had turned the eastern Roman empire into medieval Byzantium. Precisely when it is appropriate to speak of the Byzantine rather than the late Roman empire is a matter of debate. Alexander Kazdhan and Ann Wharton Epstein have drawn attention to the importance of the seventh century in this process and have emphasised the organisation of space as an important marker. The urban culture of antiquity had given place to a society based in the countryside. Towns were fewer in number and the survivors enjoyed an enhanced status. In the Aegean the towns of Thessalonika, Thebes and Corinth retained commercial and administrative importance although they were dwarfed by Constantinople. This megalopolis monopolised the resources of the empire along with its political, cultural and official religious life. Within towns, street-scapes and buildings were becoming smaller in scale and introspective in design. The ancient forum (agora) was replaced by stalls in alleys and streets and the great public baths gave place to small privately-operated bathhouses. The theatres and the circuses were closed. The Aegean of late antiquity had become medieval.

The political history of Byzantium was one of peaks and troughs, in which the revivalist rhetoric of imperial renewal was important. It centred on the person of the emperor. Both Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) and his grandson Manuel I (1143–80) came out well in this respect from the political and military fluctuations of their reigns. Not so their successors Andronikos I Komnenos (1183–85) and Isaac II Angelos (1185–95) who were openly blamed for the plight of the empire in 1200. However, even if these men had not been so ineffectual as rulers they did not cause the malaise of the empire. In 1000 Byzantium was the richest and most cultured state in western Europe. Its artefacts influenced craftsmen from Venice to Winchester. Its religion had recently been adopted in Kiev and its missionaries ranged as far as Scandinavia. The frontiers of the empire extended from the River Araxes in eastern Turkey to the River Volturno near Capua in southern Italy, and from the Crimea to the River Yarmuk in the Lebanon and included the islands of Crete and Cyprus. Two centuries later it has been aptly dubbed the ‘Sick man of Europe’. Considerable tracts of territory had been lost. In 1071 the Normans captured Bari and Brindisi, the last Byzantine outposts in Italy. On 26 August in the same year the Byzantines were defeated at the battle of Manzikert in eastern Turkey. For reasons by no means clear this defeat was followed by the rapid occupation of Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks. Effective Byzantine control in that area was confined to the coasts of the Aegean and the Sea of Marmora. Its northern frontiers in Macedonia and Thrace were disputed by Serbs and Bulgarians, eager to reassert their independence of Byzantium. Imperial control in Greece was insecure. The Normans from southern Italy had conducted unsuccessful but destructive invasions of Greece in 1082, 1147 and 1185. In the Aegean the disbandment of the fleet in 1182 had opened the sea-lanes to pirate attacks. In this atmosphere of instability and insecurity it is hardly surprising that local inhabitants looked to their own defence and turned for protection to powerful landowners and officials with territorial ambitions of their own, independent of the emperor in Constantinople.

Much of this might explain the separatist movements in the empire of the late twelfth century, a process in which the men of the Fourth Crusade were soon to participate. It does not explain the attack on Constantinople in 1204. The First Crusade (1096–99) brought large numbers of westerners to Constantinople for the first time. Even before that, about the middle of the eleventh century, western mercenaries were to be found serving in the ranks of the Byzantine army. Wealth and the rumours of wealth attracted the more ambitious and enterprising from the west into Byzantine service and commercial ventures. Some Latin nobles like the brothers Renier and Conrad de Montferrat rose to prominence at the imperial court and for the first time westerners meddled directly in the court politics of Byzantium. Less exalted westerners who had come east to grow rich by trade in Byzantine dominions received a rude shock in the 1180s when the emperors of the day sought to bolster their precarious positions by pandering to the xenophobic inclinations of the Constantinopolitan mob. There was no serious proposal to conquer Byzantium in order to protect western commercial interests in the 1180s. That possibility was first aired as the result of a crusade and the Byzantine part in the crusading enterprise. The Byzantines had taken on the role of protectors of the crusader states in the Holy Land and until the time of the Third Crusade in 1188–89 were generally seen in the west as reliable supporters of the crusades against Islam. In 1188 Isaac Anglos accepted a subsidy from Saladin to hold up the Third Crusade. His hostility towards Frederick Barbarossa almost provoked an attack on Constantinople in 1188, whilst rumours of Byzantine unreliability circulated in crusading circles in the west. Nothing happened on that occasion but the idea once formed would not go away.

The financial straits of the warriors proceeding on the Fourth Crusade, and the generous endowments promised by the exiled Alexios Angelos in return for crusader support to place him on the Byzantine throne, brought together the idea of capturing Constantinople, the opportunity to intervene in Byzantine political life and the military means to accomplish both. It was this combination of desperation, greed and idealism which was to lead to the assault on Constantinople in April 1204.

Conquest and newcomers

In the year following the capture of Constantinople, the French crusaders went on to capture Thessalonika and central Greece east of the Pindos Mountains and to begin the subjection of the Peloponnese, an enterprise that was still going on in the 1240s. The Latin emperor Baldwin I and his followers tried to subdue Thrace and the lands of Asia Minor opposite Constantinople. They achieved no conquest worth the name due to the fierce and determined opposition of the Bulgarians and the Greeks of Nicaea. It was only the hostility between their opponents which saved the Latins from being driven from Constantinople in the 1220s. Thessalonika was lost to the Greeks in 1224 and Constantinople followed in 1261. Shortly thereafter the restored Byzantine government in Constantinople gained possession of the strongholds of Mistra, Maina and the port of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. From these bases a war of recovery was mounted against the Latins. The principality of Achaia was not completely recovered by the Greeks until 1430, just 30 years before the whole of the Aegean was incorporated into the Ottoman empire. The Latin lordships of central Greece held on despite almost continuous incursions by the Greeks from Epiros and Thessaly in the years from 1210 to 1236 until they too were extinguished by the Ottoman Turks in 1460. The Venetians concentrated upon securing harbours from which they could protect the sea-lanes essential to their Constantinopolitan and Black Sea trade. They left the conquest of the Aegean islands to the sons of Venetian noble families and only on Crete did they embark upon substantial colonial conquest in the name of the home government.

Not surprisingly it was military difficulties which led to the appearance of newcomers in the Aegean in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Genoese appeared in 1260 enlisted by the Greeks of Nicaea to provide naval support for a planned assault on the Latins in Constantinople. The attack did not materialise in the form envisaged, but the Genoese stayed on to exploit the concessions they had gained as payment for their support. The Angevins of Naples, a cadet branch of the French royal family, entered the politics of the Aegean in 1267 in response to an appeal from the Latin ruler of the Peloponnese for military support against the Greeks of Mistra, who in turn were the first to introduce the Turks into the warfare of the Aegean by using them as mercenaries in their armies sent to the Peloponnese in the mid-1260s. Finally, the Catalan mercenaries who were employed by the duke of Athens to campaign on his behalf against the Greeks of Thessaly in 1309, turned against him and killed him in 1311. They established themselves as rulers of the duchy of Athens and sought the political support of the king of Aragon, who in 1312 became yet another factor in the politics of the Aegean world.

The Frankish states in the Aegean

Even the seemingly straightforward task of listing the Frankish states in the Aegean which were established after the partition of the Byzantine empire in 1204 is not as easy as at first it might appear. For convenience I have enumerated the six territories which had some form of settled political organisation by 1210. They were the Latin empire of Constantinople, the kingdom of Thessalonika, the lordship or megaskyrate (later duchy) of Athens and Thebes, the duchy of the Archipelago, the triarchies of the island of Euboea or Negroponte, and the principality of Achaia. In addition to these six, there were numerous family holdings like the counties of Boudonitza and Salona, which were usually dependent upon the lords of Athens and Thebes, and a variety of Italian lords installed on islands in the Cyclades, Sporades and Ionian Group who were dependent on Venice or the duke of the Archipelago on Naxos. There were in excess of 30 different dynasties of such lordlings during the period of Frankish control in the Aegean. Finally, there were a few strictly colonial territories administered by officials sent out from Venice or Genoa for fixed annual or biennial tours of duty, and taking their direction from and responsible to the home government. In this group were the two castellans of Modon and Coron, the duke of Crete, and after 1346 the representatives of the Genoese chartered company or mahona on Chios.

No short account can be entirely satisfactory, especially in a subject which sits uneasily on the edge of two great historical fields of study, the history of Byzantium and the history of the crusades. Does it belong to both or neither? Was the cultural contribution and social reaction of the Franks in the Aegean entirely negative or can positive and original responses to unique problems be identified? My own approach is to see the Frankish states as both an important part of the war against Islam and the succouring of the Holy Land and as a unique experiment in the conquest and settlement of lands which possessed their own rich cultural heritage. However, as archaeological and historical research proliferate, there is a need for an up-to-date account which provides the student with the developments and shifts in emphasis since William Miller produced his fine study, The Latins in the Levant, in 1908.

The Aegean world had an existence in the geographical terminology of the thirteenth century as ‘Romania’ or the ‘imperium Constantinopole’ and its component parts of Graecia, la tere d’Ebire (Epiros), Vlachia and la Turkie were identifiable if not precisely defined in the chronicles and letters of the time. Venetian writers of the fourteenth century frequently referred to Negroponte (Euboea), Crete, and the Peloponnese as forming part of ‘Romania Bassa’. There was apparently no equivalent reference to the lands between the Isthmus of Corinth and the Bosphorus as Upper Romania.²

The states founded by western Europeans in the Aegean began and ended with conquest. This gives some indication of the dogged and determined opposition of the Byzantines and of the lack of stability enjoyed by the Latin states. Their genesis was the conquest of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade on 12 April 1204. Their end came at various points from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries – Thessalonika captured by Theodore Komnenos Doukas in December 1224, Constantinople retaken by the Byzantines on 25 July 1261, Patras, the last outpost of the Frankish Morea, recovered by the Greek despot of the Morea in 1430, and the duchy of Athens conquered by the Turks in 1450. The Venetian and Genoese colonies survived into the early modern period but these too were eventually conquered by the Turks – Negroponte in 1470, Modon and Coron in 1500, Chios in 1566 and Crete in 1669, after the 24-year siege of Candia. The ragged nature of these beginnings and endings not only reflects the fragmented nature of the Frankish Aegean but also demonstrates that if some of the new crusader states were politically and economically unviable from the outset, the majority clearly had a fair chance of survival.

The Latin empire claimed suzerainty over the whole of the Latin Aegean, known collectively as Romania. In practice it was seldom exercised outside Thrace and more usually confined to the city of Constantinople and its hinterland. The weakness of the empire was due to a variety of factors. The greatest of these was poverty. Militarily unable to expand its frontiers or to establish any lasting peace with its enemies, its rulers could not exploit the resources of their new realm and instead became dependent on financial and military support from the west. In particular this included that of the pope and the king of France, eked out with loans from Venice and a variety of stop-gap measures involving the sale of relics and even the lead from their palace roofs. In turn this meant that its rulers were never entirely masters in their own house and never attained that status in the west to which their rank of emperor might have entitled them. With the exception of the emperor Henry (1206–16), the Latin emperors were a poor lot celebrated more for incompetence than strong military leadership. Henry was the only emperor to campaign in Greece and to enforce his overlordship there. The final year of his reign has been dubbed the apogee of the Latin empire. For the rest, their suzerainty consisted in underpinning the Latin claim to the Aegean, a role which they could exercise as well in exile in Italy as they could in Constantinople. Their poverty was exacerbated by the needs of defence. In 1205–7 the Vlacho-Bulgarians under Kalojan came near to overwhelming them, and again in the 1230s the Bulgarians seemed set fair to dominate Thrace and take Constantinople. The Greeks in Epiros and in Nicaea maintained pressure on both Constantinople and Thessalonika, driven by their desire to recapture the ancient capital of Byzantium. Thessalonika fell to Theodore Doukas, the despot of Epiros, in 1224, although it was lost in turn to John III Vatatzes of Nicaea in 1246. Thereafter the Latins became resigned to the loss of Constantinople. When the city fell to the Greeks in July 1261 its loss was barely noted in western Europe.

In March 1204 the leadership of the French and Venetian crusaders had laid down guidelines for the disposal of the lands and offices of the Byzantine empire in the event that their attack on Constantinople should prove successful. By the act of partition of September 1204, some effect was given to this earlier arrangement. The Latin emperor Baldwin received one-quarter of the former Byzantine territory and the Venetians and the French three-eighths each. This land had to be conquered and in this process the neat demarcations of the partition became overridden. Boniface of Montferrat, the unsuccessful candidate for the imperial throne, gained lands around Thessalonika not registered in the partition and proceeded to direct the distribution of territory in Thrace and Boeotia which formed part of the French crusaders’ condominium. The Venetians for their part received more territory than they could readily occupy. They had acquired the harbour towns of Modon and Coron in Messenia by 1209 and their colonisation of Crete began in 1211. These territories formed colonial possessions with officials sent out by and accountable to the Venetian senate. With regard to the Aegean islands, the Venetians sought to conquer and control these through the sons of their own wealthy famil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Genealogical Tables and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Currencies and Measurements
• 1. The Frankish Aegean: Background, Context and Problems
• 2. Sources and Historiography
• 3. The Crusader States of the North Aegean
• 4. The Latin States in Greece, 1204–1311
• 5. Mainland Greece in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
• 6. Venice, Genoa and the Aegean
• 7. Lordship and Government
• 8. The Latin Secular Church
• 9. The Religious Orders
• 10. Economic Aspects of the Frankish Aegean
• 11. Symbiosis and Segregation
• Appendix 1: Chronological Summary
• Appendix 2: Lists of Rulers
• Select Bibliography
• Genealogical Tables
• Maps
• Index