The Latin and Greek Churches in former Byzantine Lands 179
d’Avesnes. Strangely enough, one of the chronicles not used was Muntaner’s
own chronicle of the Catalan conquest of central Greece.67
On Crete the Greek clergy played a leading role in teaching Greek and more
specifically in training their pupils to read Greek ecclesiastical manuscripts.
In 1317 the priest Michael Pedhiotes undertook to instruct Manuel the son of
Vasilis Kharokopos how to read church manuscripts in one year and later in
this century Ioannes de Rodo arranged for his brother Nicholas to learn how
to read from a Greek priest. In 1387 the priest Demetrios Corner took as his
student Niccolò the son of Giorgio Abramo, who may have been a Venetian,
undertaking to teach him how to read secular and religious works. Greek
learning seems to have involved the lection of exclusively religious texts, since
being able to read the Psalter was a prerequisite for ordination in the Greek
Church. Some western saints such as Saints Francis of Assisi and Bartholomew
are included in the iconographic programmes of Greek churches in Crete, but
an influx of anti-Unionist Greek clergy from Byzantine lands in the first half
of the 15th century is reflected in two dedicatory inscriptions painted in 1436
and 1445 and found in two small Cretan churches commissioned by Greek
Cretan priests. Both these inscriptions, mentioning the penultimate Byzantine
emperor John viii Palaiologos in their dating, proclaim clearly the allegiance
of these priests to Byzantium. One observes that the school founded by way of
a bequest by the Uniate cleric Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond on his estates
outside Candia, with the object of affording Greeks instruction in the Roman
Catholic faith, was neither popular nor successful. Established in 1462, it ended
up simply providing a source of income to impecunious Uniates by the time of
the Ottoman conquest of 1669.68
Interesting examples of fusion of Latin and Greek elements are found
in the architecture of medieval Greece and Cyprus. Gothic architecture in
Cyprus enjoyed a flowering in the 13th century, when the cathedral of the Holy
Wisdom in Nicosia and the monastic church of the Praemonstratensian abbey
of Bellapais near Keryneia were built. In the first half of the 14th century the
new Gothic cathedral of St Nicholas of Famagusta was built for the town’s
67 Anthony Luttrell, “Greek Histories Translated and Compiled for Juan Fernández de
Heredia, Master of Rhodes, 1377–1396,” Speculum 35 (1960), 401–07, repr. in idem, The
Hospitallers in Cyprus, xx; Teresa Shawcross, The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in
Crusader Greece (Oxford, 2009), pp. 38–39 and 265–66.
68 McKee, Uncommon Dominion, pp. 119–20; Kalopissi-Verti, “Relations between East and
West,” p. 20; David Jacoby, “From Byzantium to Latin Romania: Continuity and Change,” in
Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean, p. 25; Tsirpanlis, Κληροδότημα, pp. 126–29
and 166–75.