110 Gasparis
thanks to the great revolts of the local landowners, which continued through-
out the entire 13th century. In Cyprus, despite initial difficulties at the end of the
12th century, those Greeks who remained on the island retained their property,
albeit somewhat reduced. In other territories the inclusion of local landown-
ers into the landowning regime was smoother. Ιn the Peloponnese and Corfu
reactions by the local landowners seem to have been more muted, perhaps
because the new rulers’ efforts to confiscate private lands were not sustained.
Though our information is very limited concerning the other Latin territories,
we know that the Byzantine landowners of Euboea had also been integrated
into the new feudatory class immediately after the conquest of 1205.53 We
know very little about the Greek landowners of the Aegean islands (Cyclades
and Dodecanese). During the first half of the 13th century the Venetian lords
of the Cyclades (the Sanudo family in the Duchy of Naxos, the Ghisi family in
the islands of Tenos and Myconos) accepted the Greek local archons as their
vassals, and allowed them to keep their land and be integrated in the lower tier
of the small Latin feudal class.54 In Rhodes, the Knights Hospitaller guaran-
teed with the agreement of c.1309 that the property and personal status of the
island’s Greeks would be respected, but in practice the order controlled most
of the land and leased it to Latins and Greeks. In fact in Rhodes “no class of
archons or Greek nobles survived, and since initial attempts to create a group
of Latin fief-holders were, with few exceptions, unsuccessful, there was never
any significant class of individuals with permanent, heritable lordship over the
land and people.”55
The lands that devolved to the new rulers were then distributed amongst
Frankish knights and Venetian colonists, who in each case formed the core of
the feudal class. The position of Greek landowners within this class presents
certain small but interesting distinctions in each area. In Crete the Greeks were
introduced into the feudal class in a state of political weakness, since they had
53 David Jacoby, “The Demographic Evolution of Euboea under Latin Rule, 1205–1470,” in
The Greek Islands and the Sea, ed. Julian Chrysostomides, Charalambos Dendrinos and
Jonathan Harris (Camberley, 2004), pp. 134–38, repr. in David Jacoby, Travellers, Merchants
and Settlers across the Mediterranean, Eleventh-Fourteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2014), ix;
Silvano Borsari, L’ Eubea veneziana (Venice 2007), pp. 42–45.
54 Jacoby, La féodalité, pp. 246–48, 284; Jacoby, “Social Evolution in Latin Greece,” p. 200;
Marina Koumanoudi, “The Latins in the Aegean after 1204: Interdependence and
Interwoven Interests,” in Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and its Consequences, ed.
Angeliki E. Laiou (Paris, 2005), pp. 247–67, esp. 259–67.
55 Anthony Luttrell, “The Greeks of Rhodes under Hospitaller rule: 1306–1421,” Rivista di
Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici n.s. 29 (1992), 196, repr. in Anthony Luttrell, The Hospitaller
State on Rhodes and its Western Provinces, 1306–1462 (Aldershot, 2007), iii.