Land and Landowners in the Greek Territories 91
the Venetian volunteers. The drawback for Venice was that a number of great
and powerful feudatories found themselves concentrated around Candia,
thus endangering Venice’s future sovereignty over the island. Simultaneously
though, this group of landowners offered a feeling of security, for they would
be able to defend the colony should the need arise.
Following this initial experience, things became clearer and Venice’s colo-
nial strategy more realistic in the subsequent colonisation documents. There
are two defining characteristics in these new documents: the number and
type of fiefs that each feudatory would receive is listed and there are subsidies
offered to each of the participants. The former allows us to classify the feudato-
ries into financial strata. The available information from the second and third
colonisations confirm Venice’s belated attempt to create a “feudal pyramid”
in Crete, whose members would occupy different financial tiers. This pyra-
mid ensured that the feudatory class would be more coherent and balanced
compared to the original system that only distinguished between knights and
sergeants; even disregarding the problems concerning the ratio of knights to
sergeants, the inequalities of wealth between the two tiers were too great for
the original system to be viable.
In 1222, eleven years after the first mission, the territory of Rethymnon was
colonised. The land of this territory had been estimated to 60 cavallarie (360
serventarie). Only 315 of these serventarie were eventually handed out, indi-
cating perhaps that participation in the expedition was smaller than planned.
These serventarie were distributed between 67 feudatories. We can discern
seven gradations in the amount of land that these feudatories received: at
the lower end were feudatories who received just one serventaria each and
at the higher end landowners who got two and a half cavallarie. Within these
tiers there existed three zones, defined by the size of each feudatory’s fiefs.
This constitutes a formally laid out financial pyramid in which the smallest
numerically class also owns the largest proportion of land. The largest tier,
numerically, was that of the feudatories who owned just one serventaria or one
cavallaria. The in-between and top-tier strata remain in the minority, proving
that Venice insisted, to an extent, on the original theoretical plan of having
two clearly defined strata of knights and sergeants within the feudatory class,
each of which would own one unit of land. At the same time, however, Venice
proceeded, albeit cautiously, towards the creation of middle strata, for rea-
sons that are not immediately apparent but can be surmised. In other words,
Venice decided to implement of her own accord, what would inevitably hap-
pen eventually.
We can draw further conclusions from the distribution of the land of Canea
in 1252. The attempt here to organise the territory more systematically, once