venice’s maritime empire in the early modern period 165
often succeeded, by diplomatic means combined with family strategies,
to secure the election of Venetians patricians, citizens, and subjects to
important benefices throughout the empire, including the stato da mar.140
As a matter of fact, in the Republic’s overseas dominions the foremost
challenge in the religious and ecclesiastical sphere was not so much assur-
ing the election of its own patricians and citizens but, rather, the religious
affiliation of its subjects and the existence of rival ecclesiastical hierar-
chies in the stato da mar. The issue was all the more complicated, consid-
ering that in trying to keep its multi-religious empire together, Venice also
had to cope with external interferences of various interested parties: the
papal curia, several Catholic organizations, the Greek Orthodox patriarch,
and later also Russia.141
Recent historiography tends to turn away from what is presented as a
dichotomous vision of relations between Orthodox Greeks and Roman
Catholics, especially in Crete. It has been argued that the strict separation
that underlay the original colonial arrangements established by Venice
in the early 13th century could not withstand the centuries-long develop-
ment of a society in which the “Latins” constituted a small minority.142 This
interpretation has received special emphasis in studies of early modern
Crete, which has even been depicted as a harmonious society, in which
“religious freedom and a measure of political tact, combined with a pro-
longed religious dispute with Rome, united all Cretans, both Orthodox
and Catholic, on the side of Venice.”143
Yet it was not so easy to ignore the basic doctrinal differences between
eastern and western Christianity, the institutional subjugation of the Greek
Church to the Latin one, as well as external developments, such as the
Catholic Reformation, and, in the 18th century, the Russian intervention in
Mediterranean politics. All these brought cultural and religious antagonisms
de Constantinople (1464–1497), et son rôle dans la politique orientale du Saint Siège,”
Annuario dell’Istituto Romeno di Cultura e Ricerca Umanistica di Venezia 8 (2006), 155–56.
140 Paolo Prodi, “The Structure and Organization of the Church in Renaissance Venice:
Suggestions for Research,” in John R. Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), p. 418;
Laven, Renaissance Italy, pp. 205–206; Gaetano Cozzi, “Venezia nello scenario europeo
(1517–1599),” in Gaetano Cozzi, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello, eds., La
Repubblica di Venezia nell’età moderna. Dal 1517 alla fine della Repubblica (Turin, 1992), p. 21.
141 Benjamin Arbel, “Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox in the Early Modern
Venetian State,” in Nili Cohen and Andreas Heldrich, eds., The Three Religions (Munich,
2002), pp. 73–86.
142 McKee, Uncommon Dominion.
143 Nikolaos M. Panagiotakes, El Greco—the Cretan Years (London, 2009), p. 7.