The Latin and Greek Churches in former Byzantine Lands 177
onto the city, placed under Hospitaller administration after 1374, until 1402
when Timur Leng conquered it.64
Less successful was Hospitaller intervention in Latin Greece a few years
later. In 1376 Queen Joanna of Naples leased the Latin Principality of Achaea,
which was under attack from Turkish pirates, to the order for five years, in
return for an annual rent. The Hospitaller commander of the Peloponnese
sent two mercenary companies to protect Achaea but on the expiry of their
contract in 1379 they began seizing territories for themselves. An expedition to
the Peloponnese led in 1377 by the Hospitaller Grand Master Juan Fernández
de Heredia was likewise unsuccessful, capturing Lepanto in central Greece but
then suffering defeat at Arta by the Albanians. The Hospitallers successfully
fought off Mamluk attempts to conquer Rhodes in the 1440s, sent two gal-
leys to assist Venice in their failed defence of Euboea against the Ottomans in
1470 and successfully withstood the Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1480. In 1522,
however, the Ottomans under Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent successfully
besieged and conquered Rhodes and the order, forced to evacuate the island,
eventually established itself on Malta in 1530. With its departure from Rhodes
ended the presence of Latin military orders in Greece.65
The Latin and Greek Churches’ Contribution to Literature,
Architecture, the Visual Arts and the Phenomenon of
Cross-Acculturation
The Latin Church in Greece produced few men of letters. Among them was
the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke who participated in the Second
Council of Lyon in 1274 and became the Latin archbishop of Corinth in 1278.
He had visited Nicaea, Constantinople and Thebes, the Dominican house of
which was a centre of scholarship, in 1260 and aimed to translate Aristotle’s
works and certain later Greek commentators from Greek into Latin. Among
64 Norman Housley, The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378 (Oxford, 1986),
pp. 23–49; Coureas, Latin Church 1313–1378, pp. 97–132; Lock, “Military Orders in Mainland
Greece,” p. 337; Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers of Rhodes Confront the Turks:
1306–1421,” in Christians, Jews and Other Worlds: Patterns of Conflict and Accommodation,
ed. Philip F. Gallagher, (Lanham, 1988), pp. 80–100, repr. in Anthony Luttrell, The
Hospitallers of Rhodes and their Mediterranean World (Aldershot, 1992), ii.
65 Anthony Luttrell, “The Principality of Achaea in 1377,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 57 (1964),
340–45, repr. in idem, The Hospitallers in Cyprus, xxii; Helen Nicholson, The Knights
Hospitaller (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 53–67.