2 Tsougarakis
which either owed allegiance to the emperor at Constantinople but were in
practice governed independently, or, as was the case with Crete, were ruled as
colonial appendages of western European powers.
The first such state to be founded was also the shortest-lived one: Boniface
of Montferrat, who had led the Fourth Crusade and had hoped to be elected
emperor, conquered much of northern Greece and founded what would later
be known as the Kingdom of Thessalonica. The suzerainty of Constantinople
over the kingdom was implicitly acknowledged when, in 1209, Emperor Henry
crowned Boniface’s orphaned son Demetrios as first king of Thessalonica. The
kingdom’s fall to the Greeks of Epirus in 1224 was a stark reminder to the West
of the precariousness of the new empire’s position.
Faced only with sporadic resistance, Frankish contingents of knights carried
the expansion southwards, eventually founding the lordship (later duchy) of
Athens and Thebes, the counties of Boudonitsa and Salona, in central Greece
and the Frankish state par excellence in the Aegean, the Principality of Achaea,
in the Peloponnese. The new lords of these territories were the vassals of the
emperor of Constantinople. The conquest progressed at an equally rapid pace
in the islands. Euboea (called Negroponte by the Latins), in Latin hands since
1204, was assigned by Boniface of Montferrat to three Lombard nobles, known
as triarchs, each ruling a third of the island. Between 1209 and 1216 the entirety
of the island had come under the control of a single one of these lords, Ravano
dalle Carceri, who placed himself under the suzerainty of Venice. Thereafter,
the island occupied a peculiar position whereby it technically owed alle-
giance to the empire but was in all but name a Venetian appendage, ruled by
the Serenissima. Venetian subjects, led by Marco Sanudo, also embarked on
the conquest of the Aegean islands and the establishment of the Duchy of the
Archi pelago, with its “capital” at the island of Naxos. The establishment of the
Venetian nobility in the Aegean islands, again, meant that while technically
the islands were held of the emperor (and of the prince of Achaea after
1248), their rulers had to balance their own interests and those of their suzer-
ains against those of their motherland.1 Venice’s most important domain how-
ever, was the island of Crete. Realising Crete’s advantageous position, Venice
conquered the island and began a well-planned colonisation campaign in 1211.
Though conquered as a direct result of the Fourth Crusade, Crete was not part
of the Latin Empire and was subsequently ruled as a dependence of Venice,
by colonial authorities appointed from the metropolis. Venice’s acquisition of
1 For an examination of this balancing act, see Marina Koumanoudi, “The Latins in the Aegean
after 1204: Interdependence and Interwoven Interests”, in Urbs Capta: the Fourth Crusade and
its Consequences, ed. Angeliki Laiou (Paris, 2005), pp. 247–65.