6 Tsougarakis
The 14th century also witnessed the beginning of the Turkish ascendency
both in mainland Greece (where Turkish mercenaries were employed by the
Catalans) and in the islands which were increasingly faced with Turkish raids.
Meanwhile the Byzantines of Mistra continued to inflict heavy losses on the
Angevins of the Morea. Through all this, only Venice, among the western pow-
ers managed not only to hold on to her domains but to expand them and pros-
per. The process had not been easy: throughout the 13th century the colony of
Crete had been threatened by a series of uprisings by local Greek magnates
fighting to recover the privileges they had lost with the Venetian conquest.
An even greater threat emerged in 1363, when certain Venetian feudatories
rebelled on account of a taxation dispute, appeased the Greeks and declared
the island an independent kingdom. Through the combination of brutal force
and compromise, the Venetians managed to put down all these rebellions and
establish in Crete (and its capital Candia in particular) a well-run bureaucratic
regime modelled on Venice’s own and powered by the lucrative commerce of
the Eastern Mediterranean. By the early 14th century, there were no longer any
pretensions that Negroponte was anything but Venetian and by 1386 Venice
also annexed the Angevin island of Corfu at the request of the local popula-
tion. The willing surrender of territories to the Venetians would be repeated
time and again, as local populations realised that the Serenissima was the only
power strong enough to resist the Turks. The Knights Hospitaller were also
faced with similar responsibilities to protect the beleaguered Latin domains. In
1376 they leased the Principality of Achaea from Joanna, Queen of Naples and
Princess of the Morea, for five years and tried to organise a counter-offensive
with the help of Navarrese mercenaries. Though these campaigns met with
some success, they also resulted in the introduction of a new faction with its
own territorial ambitions in Latin Greece.
If the 14th century was an age of flux and decline for the Latins of Greece,
the 15th was one of panic and collapse. Even under the mounting pressure
of the Turks, the Latins of Greece were unable to put up a united front. The
Acciaiuoli of Athens fought against the Venetians of Negroponte and even-
tually became clients of the Sultan in order to defend their claims. In the
Peloponnese, the tiny remnants of the principality were passed on from
the Navarrese to a branch of the Genoese Zaccaria family and in 1430 to the
Byzantines of Mistra, not through conquest, but through marriage. The fall of
Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 was understood by all, not just those
present in Greece, to prefigure Turkish expansion into Europe. By 1460 almost
all of mainland Greece was under the control of Mehmed ii, with the excep-
tion of Modon and Coron and several other fortresses that had come under
the protection of Venice. The Venetians, usually pragmatic and reluctant to