172 Coureas
writing a commentary on Aristotle’s Sentences that included a detailed expla-
nation of Peter Auriol’s position with regard to them.56
Mendicants were active in the fields of education. The Franciscan library
in Candia housed nearly 200 manuscripts, mainly in Latin, as was recorded
during an inventory made in 1417, while another one of 1448 recorded the
existence of over 290 volumes. In 1370 the prior of the Augustinian monastery
placed two Greek manuscripts in possession of the prior of the Greek monas-
tery of Mt Sinai resident in Candia for the latter to sell them. Guy de Ibelin, a
Dominican bishop of Limassol in Cyprus, possessed a library numbering 52
books on his death in 1367, while the Spanish Dominican Alfonso Buenhombre,
resident in Famagusta between 1339 and 1342 translated works from Arabic
into Latin by way of promoting missions to the East. The Dominican conver-
sion of Byzantine intellectuals in Constantinople to Roman Catholicism in the
14th century, after the end of the Latin Empire, was a notable achievement.
Furthermore, the Franciscans established a school of theology in Nicosia in
the early 14th century. Their contribution to the visual arts also deserves men-
tion. Following his appointment as archbishop of Patras the Franciscan Peter
Corner had the long hall in his palace adorned with frescoes depicting the
story of the fall of Troy. In Cyprus the Dominican archbishop John del Conti
donated in 1325 an antependium to the cathedral of Pisa, where he had previ-
ously been archbishop, decorated with biblical scenes, notably a panel depict-
ing the saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the former attired as a
friar and the latter as a bishop, an allusion to John’s own double role as Latin
archbishop and Dominican friar.57
The mendicants’ activities as preachers earned them the gratitude of the
Latin populations, and this was often expressed in their wills. Wills from
14th-century Cyprus record the bequests of Latins, especially merchants,
to the individual members of the Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian and
Carmelite Orders in Nicosia and Famagusta, as well as to the houses of these
Orders, although the last two orders were remembered less than the first two.
In Venetian Crete the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians likewise
56 Coureas, Latin Church 1195–1312, pp. 229–35; idem, Latin Church 1313–1378, pp. 72–73, 304–
23, 339–48, 433–34 and 444–45; Ranner, “Mendicant Orders in Achaia,” pp. 164–65; McKee,
Uncommon Dominion, p. 106; Christopher Schabel, “Peter of Candia and the Prelude to the
Quarrel at Louvain,” Επετηρίς Κέντρου Επιστημονικών Ερευνών 24 (1998), 87–124; Tsougarakis,
Latin Religious Orders, pp. 299–305 and 311–22.
57 McKee, Uncommon Dominion, pp. 120–21; Ranner, “Mendicant Orders in Achaia,” p. 169;
Coureas, Latin Church 1313–1378, pp. 290–98; Tsougarakis, Latin Religious Orders, pp. 116
and 203–10.