168 Coureas
A dearth of personnel, however, could stymie attempts to found Latin
houses in the place of Greek ones, as when it was proposed to send Cistercians
to man the abandoned Greek monastery of Rufinianae, with the Latin abbot
of St Angelos of Pera opposite Constantinople eventually having to take his
entire community there. Nonetheless, the Cistercians were especially active,
although not always successful, in founding houses in Latin Greece. At the
Greek monastery of Chortaïtis in the Kingdom of Thessalonica Boniface of
Montferrat called in Cistercian monks, but they had to leave when the Greek
monks resisted them, although this resistance was finally overcome, for in
1224 it was recorded as Cistercian. Yet twelve Cistercian houses were founded
in Latin Greece in the first twenty years after 1204, chiefly in Constantinople
and the Peloponnese, but also in Euboea and Crete. They included two dedi-
cated to Our Lady at Isova and Zaraka in the Peloponnese, St Gregory alias
Gergeri, although it is debatable if this was a Cistercian monastery as opposed
to an estate, and St Mary of the Varangians in Crete, St Archangelos in Euboea
and St Stephen, St Angelus, St Mary of Percheio, a nunnery, and Rufinianae
in Constantinople. The majority of these houses had previously been Greek.
A Cistercian house may also have been established at Patras before 1212 by
the monks of the house of Hautecombe in Savoy. Other Cistercian houses
in the Peloponnese included Pyrn near Monemvasia, probably a corruption
of the Greek Prinikos, although this identification is uncertain, and St Mary
de Verge near Modon. By the early 14th century, however, only Daphni was
still functioning. St Mary in Crete seems to have been abandoned by 1340, and
St Gregory, if it ever was a Cistercian house, continued to function perhaps
until the Ottoman conquest, as did the various Cistercian houses founded in
and around Nicosia in the early 13th century. The shortage of cultivable land
in Greece, the absence of lay brothers to work available land and above all the
collapse or contraction of the Frankish states by the end of the 13th century
help explain the Cistercian failure in continental Greece.52
Greater longevity was enjoyed by the various Benedictine monasteries
and nunneries founded in Nicosia and Famagusta in the course of the 13th
century, as well as the Holy Cross mentioned above, the abbot of which was
arrested by the Venetians in 1474 and eventually banished on account of
52 Richard, “Latin Church in Constantinople,” pp. 52 and 55; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The
Cistercians in the Latin Empire of Constantinople and Greece, 1204–1276,” Traditio 14
(1958), 78–96 and 118–19; Schabel, “Antelm the Nasty,” pp. 108 and 135; Jean Richard, “The
Cistercians in Cyprus,” in The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, ed. Michael Gervers
(New York, 1992), pp. 199–200; Coureas, Latin Church 1195–1312, pp. 191–99; idem, Latin
Church 1313–1378, pp. 405–10; Tsougarakis, Latin Religious Orders, pp. 35–78.