Society, Administration And Identities In Latin Greece 129
These social categories were based upon the two main features of the local
organisation, on the one hand extensive landownership, mainly of feudal
character, and on the other civil social structures. These contradictory features
nevertheless merged harmoniously at the highest level, since the nobles/feu-
datories, though forming an organic part of the countryside, of necessity lived
in the city and thus held membership in the local communal council.
In the Greek-Venetian territories, the landowners constituted a powerful
class who were favourably disposed to Venetian dominion despite the differ-
ence of their ethnic extraction and rite. Their number and origin depended
upon the stance of the locals towards the Venetians. In those regions where
violent reaction broke out against Venetian rule, such as in Crete, the new
landowners, in the main Venetian colonists belonging to well-known families
of the metropolis among whom the island had been shared out after 1211, ini-
tially fully replaced the former proprietors. The old Greek-Orthodox landown-
ing families of Byzantine extraction (the Hagiostefanites, Scordilis, Melissenoi,
Varouchas, Chortatzis, Kallergis) were at first excluded from the new system.
Nevertheless, following a series of uprisings, most of these families had, by the
mid-14th century, capitulated to the Venetians, receiving in exchange social
privileges and fiefs. This landowning class would, over the ensuing centuries,
grow in power through the addition of new members, both Latins and Greeks,
who acquired territorial domains either via concessions made by the state or
through purchase. In any case, they preserved the pro-Venetian orientation of
their predecessors.
On the other hand, in Corfu, Euboea, Tenos, Mykonos and Parga, regions
which between 1386 and 1401 had been brought under Venetian dominion with
the consent of their inhabitants, the land remained in the hands of the original
owners, Catholic Αngevins and other Latins but also Orthodox Greeks, both
locals and refugees of former Venetian-controlled areas.
On the islands of Zakynthos and Cephalonia, sparsely populated at the time
of their incorporation (at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centu-
ries) into the Venetian state, the very few landowners, descendants of earlier
western overlords, were integrated into the local landownership system. At
the same time, the need for effective defence of the islands and the quest for
exploitation of their production potential impelled the Venetians to invite col-
onists from the rest of the Venetian as well as from the Ottoman-ruled Greek
lands, mainly Greeks, but also Albanians, to whom large expanses of land were
conceded in exchange for military service.
The landownership regime implemented by Venice on her Greek colonies
has already been discussed in the previous chapter. Suffice it to say here that
Venice adopted a feudal vocabulary and parcelled out lands to both Latins and