108 Gasparis
Church structure) and of course private owners. Fiefs were granted by the king
to a wide range of recipients: members of the aristocracy of the Kingdom of
Naples, high officials of Corfu, illustrious Italian residents of the island, mem-
bers of the local Byzantine aristocracy and other Greek residents. The land-
owning class included both the great landowners/feudatories (feudatarius or
baro) and small private owners, who largely followed in the footsteps of the
old Byzantine decarchiae.50 The goods granted as fiefs (mostly lands and agri-
cultural facilities but occasionally also public revenues) were selected by the
supreme authorities themselves, from among the property of the state. The
state’s property would occasionally expand, due to feudatories dying heirless
or, occasionally, due to heirs not seeking the ratification of their inheritance.
Fiefs could of course be inherited but, as was the case in Venetian Crete, the
heir was required to seek the ratification of the inheritance by the authorities.
Fiefs were distinguished into two categories, depending on the time of their
granting: the old fiefs (feudi antiqui) and the new ones (feudi nuovi). The for-
mer category included all the properties of the Byzantine period which had
since been ratified by the king; the latter included the grants that had been
made later, during the period of Angevin overlordship. Their main differ-
ence related to their legal status and therefore to their mode of inheritance.
Following the traditions of the Kingdom of Naples, the old fiefs fell under the
ius Longobardorum and thus could be bequeathed to any descendant as well as
the owner’s widow. By contrast, the new fiefs followed the ius Francorum and
could only be inherited indivisibly by the firstborn son. During the 14th cen-
tury this changed to allow inheritance by daughters as well. Most of the fiefs in
Angevin Corfu belonged to this second type.
As was the case everywhere else, the main responsibility of the landown-
ers was the provision of military service in the king’s army, provided that the
feudatory’s annual income amounted to at least 20 ounces of gold. This, as we
saw, was also instituted in the Principality of Achaea. Feudatories with smaller
incomes could commute the service, as could some of the greater landown-
ers under certain conditions.51 The land regime developed in Corfu under the
50 On the similarities between the barony and the Byzantine pronoia, see Catherine
Asdracha and Spyros Asdrachas, “Quelques remarques sur la rente féodale: Les Baronies
(Pronoiai) de Corfu,” Travaux et Mémoirs 8 (1981), 7–14; eidem, “Στη φεουδαλική Κέρκυρα:
από τους παροίκους στους vassali angararii” [“Feudal Corfu: from the Paroikoi to the Vassali
Angararii”], Τα Ιστορικά 3 (1985), 77–94.
51 For the landownership regime in Corfu see Spyros N. Asonitis, Ανδηγαυική Κέρκυρα
(13ος–14ος αι.) [Angevin Corfu (13th–14th Centuries)] (Corfu, 1999), pp. 179–208.