Land and Landowners in the Greek Territories 111
no access to political authority. They did however share equal rights in admin-
istering their land and equal military responsibilities towards Venice as their
Venetian peers and thus some Greek feudatories became very affluent. The
openness of the feudal class of Crete eventually allowed the accession of other
Greeks (with the approval of course of the authorities), who in turn reinforced
the various economic strata of the Venetian feudal class. In the Principality
of Achaea and in Angevin Corfu, Greek landowners formed an institutionally
lower tier of the feudatory class: they had no political and judicial authority
and the ownership and inheritance of their fiefs were governed by different
terms. In Lusignan Cyprus, the few landowning Greeks cannot be counted as
part of the small and relatively closed feudal class, which was comprised exclu-
sively of Catholic Frankish knights.
Though the land regime in Venetian Crete seems to have been defined by a
clear and relatively uniform institutional framework, in the Frankish areas we
can observe a number of interesting exceptions which relate to the particular
political and social conditions of each state. Such are the cases of the casaux de
parçon in the Principality of Achaea and the Turcopoles in Cyprus.
A common feature in all our cases is the responsibility for military service in
return for the land acquired. These responsibilities were determined accord-
ing to the size and/or number of fiefs of equal value. In Crete military service
continued to be based on the original estimation of a fief ’s value according to
particular tax units. In other territories like Achaea and Corfu, by contrast, it
seems that after a certain point military service was determined on the basis
of a fief ’s annual income. We do not know, however, whether a realistic annual
evaluation of the fief ’s revenue was conducted or whether the estimation
remained theoretical. In Crete, particularly in the 14th century, personal mili-
tary service began to be replaced by forms of taxation, which was based always
on the initial size of the fiefs and not on the revenues.
Depending on the polity in question, the feudatory appears sometimes
more and sometimes less powerful, both politically and militarily. In Crete,
feudatories, particularly the upper tier of their class, participated in govern-
ment, yet they had no judicial power, neither at a high level nor within their
own fiefs. Initially all of them were required to reside in the towns (later on,
from the 14th century onwards a lot of them, and especially the lowest tier,
resided occasionally or permanently in the countryside) and their military
power was supervised strictly by the Venetian central authorities. In more
“feudalised” states, like the Principality of Achaea and Cyprus, an even smaller
tier of the feudatories, i.e. the tier of the lieges, co-governed with the prince or
the king and sat in the High Court. The feudatories of Achaea, unlike Cyprus,
had wide political powers within their fiefs, like the right to mint coins and to