Land and Landowners in the Greek Territories 101
Third Crusade. This was followed, after the Fourth Crusade, by the Principality
of Achaea, the Duchy of Athens and by Corfu, which came into the hands of the
Angevins in the mid-13th century. These states shared the Frankish ancestry of
their lords and the feudal traditions which these lords brought with them. In
all cases, as indeed was the case with Venice, the new lords resolved that the
landowning regime in their conquered lands ought to change. The matter was
dealt with differently in each of the above mentioned territories but all sets of
rulers (Lusignan, Villehardouin, de la Roche and Angevins) attempted, on the
one hand, to please their own people who formed their power base, and on the
other to reach a compromise with the local Byzantine landowners. In the fol-
lowing section we shall outline the particularities that emerged during the 13th
and 14th centuries in each of these territories (with the exception of the Duchy
of Athens, concerning which not enough information is available).
The Kingdom of Cyprus
The recipients of the land of Cyprus were many and diverse, ranging from the
king himself and his Frankish nobles, the Latin and Greek Church, the military
orders and the monasteries, to small, distinct groups of small landholders like
Greeks and Turcopoles. The Greek landowners of Cyprus were weakened dur-
ing the final period of Byzantine rule after Isaac Doukas Komnenos had seized
power on the island in 1184 and their destruction continued with the arrival of
Richard the Lionheart. By the establishment of the Lusignan family in 1192 the
Greek archons who had remained on the island lost a great part of their lands,
mainly those that belonged to the state and to the Byzantine emperor, but part
of their private ones as well. Those Greeks who acceded to the new political
and social situation did not join the lower strata of the new Frankish feudal
class, nor did they form a secondary aristocracy, with its own social character-
istics. They were affluent and continued to enjoy high social status among the
Greeks, but they were not noble knights like the Franks. Their lands were not
burdened by military responsibilities ( for obvious reasons) and therefore they
cannot be termed feudatories.36
36 For the Greek landowners under Frankish dominion see Angel Nikolaou-Konnari,
“Greeks,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angel Nikolaou-Konnari and
Christopher Schabel (Leiden, 2005), pp. 26–31, 41–57; Jean Richard, “Οι πολιτικοί και
κοινωνικοί θεσμοί του μεσαιωνικού βασιλείου” [“The Political and Social Institutions of the
Medieval Kingdom”], in Iστορία της Kύπρου: Mεσαιωνικόν βασίλειον, Eνετοκρατία [History of
Cyprus: The Medieval Kingdom, Venetian Rule], ed. Theodoros Papadopoullos (Nicosia,
1995–96), 4A:354–55.