Society, Administration And Identities In Latin Greece 125
The central administration of the Hospitallers in Rhodes was conducted
via the Grand Master, the senior administrative and military official, and a
council made up of elected members of each of the order’s tongues (Provence,
Auvergne, France, Italy, Aragon, England, Germany and Castile). The highest
offices were the grand commander, the marshal, the hospitaller, the admiral,
the drapier, the treasurer, the grand chancellor and the turcopolier.
At the apex of the social hierarchy were the members of the order, divided
into three principal classes: the knights, the sergeants and the chaplains, res-
idents of an exclusive fortified quarter around the castle, the collachium. In
the rest of the massive walled city or borgo resided a large population of mer-
chants and shipowners, lawyers and clerics, artisans and workers, both Latin
and Greek, enjoying a form of communal organisation, the interest-bearing
money-lending activities being mainly in the hands of the prosperous Jewish
community. Properties in the town and throughout the island were granted
mainly through non-feudal tenures to both Latins and Greeks. In the Rhodian
countryside and on the lesser islands, the local leading groups met together as
a universitas grecorum.
The greater part of the population was composed of Greek landless peas-
ants, both unfree (parichi) and free ( francomati) living within a system of oner-
ous economic and social oppression, as well as of marinarii, who possessed
hereditary obligations to serve at sea.19 These historical conditions account
for the voluntary departure from the city in 1522 of numerous Greek inhabit-
ants together with the Knights and, on the other hand, the tolerant attitude of
much of the Rhodian peasantry to the Ottoman conquest.
Τhe Italian Maritime Republics and Their Greek Lands:
Venice and Genoa
Among the several Latin dominions set up in the Greek lands after 1204,
Venetian rule was to prove the longest-lasting and was preserved until 1797
when Venice itself and, hence, its few remaining Greek territories—the
19 Concerning the social stratification and especially the Greek population, see Anthony
Luttrell, “The Greeks of Rhodes under Hospitaller rule: 1306–1421,” Rivista di Studi
Bizantini e Neoellenici n.s. 29 (1992), 193–223, repr. in Anthony Luttrell, The Hospitaller
State on Rhodes, iii; Tsirpanlis, Ανέκδοτα έγγραφα. Specifically concerning landowner-
ship and the few cases of feudal tenure, see Anthony Luttrell, “Feudal Tenure and Latin
Colonization at Rhodes: 1306–1415,” English Historical Review 85 (1970), 755–75, repr. in
Luttrell, The Hospitallers in Cyprus, Rhodes, iii.