Land and Landowners in the Greek Territories 89
In October 1211 the Venetian participants in the first colonisation swore faith
to Venice and promised to observe faithfully all the terms of the Concessio.
Their oath was recorded in the document of the promissio, which reiterated
all their rights and responsibilities and which they then signed.25 The content
of this promissio was what all the new feudatories of Crete subsequently swore
to obey.
The Fief
The fief (feudum or militia) was an aggregation of elements, the most impor-
tant of which was the village with its people and land (corpus casalis cum suis
habenciis, pertinenciis et villanis). Therefore the fief was comprised of real
estate (settlements, land, houses, urban estates) and the human workforce
(villani) which it enclosed. As a rule, the land of a fief was concentrated in a
particular area but from early on we also encounter fiefs whose land was scat-
tered around different territories. Changes to the configuration of a fief could
only be made provided the fief ’s value did not decrease, thus ensuring that the
owner would always be able to fulfil his military responsibilities as they had
been originally defined. The fief therefore formed, at least in the early period of
Venetian rule (13th–14th centuries), the foundation of landownership and the
nucleus of social organisation in Venetian Crete. The population was essen-
tially divided into the feudatories who owned the land and the peasant popu-
lation who cultivated it.
Taxation, in the form of military service, burdened the fief and not the feu-
datory. Thus, it was the fief that defined someone as a feudatory and not the
other way round. In other words, whoever accepted land and was approved
by the authorities became automatically a feudatory and was required to ren-
der military service. The link connecting the feudal class was the land and not
social or economic background. This became particularly evident in the 14th
century.
Feudatories could freely manage their fiefs: they could lease them, sell them,
donate them, exchange them or alienate them in any other way. All of these
actions, however, and especially the more permanent ones, could only be
undertaken with permission from the duke and his councillors, who, as repre-
sentatives of the Venetian Republic, retained direct ownership of all the land
of Crete.
As we have already seen, in the document of the Concessio the colonists
were divided into two tiers, the knights (milites) and the sergeants (pedites).
25 The oath of the feudatories of the sexterium of Santa Croce is published in Tafel and
Thomas, Urkunden, 2:136–42, no. 230.