The Economy Of Latin Greece 187
and redistribution of urban and especially rural resources, the most important
components of which were land, the peasantry, and public rights of taxation.2
Prior to 1204 Latin settlement in the Byzantine provinces was limited to
merchants residing in a few urban centres. After the Fourth Crusade it swiftly
expanded in Latin Greece, the social and geographic origin of the settlers was
more varied, and their geographic distribution far more extensive. Western
knights and their retinue hailing from Capetian France and neighbouring
lordships settled in the territories of continental Greece, while others from
northern and central Italy established themselves in the Aegean islands they
had conquered. They were later joined by their kinsmen and other members
of the knightly class from their lands of origin. The quest for landed fiefs was
the main incentive prompting their settlement in Latin Greece. They resided
in castles and fortified mansions in the countryside or in the main cities of
feudal lordships, as in Thebes and Corinth. Other knights permanently lived in
the major city located in the vicinity of their fiefs, such as Negroponte, Naxos
or Patras. Some had a secondary residence in Andravida, Glarenza, Modon or
Coron. The strong political links existing between the Kingdom of Sicily and
the Frankish Morea after 1278, when the principality came under the rule of
Charles i, stimulated the immigration of knights from southern and central
Italy to the Peloponnese.3
Venice implemented a highly structured and institutionalised immigration
policy in Crete in order to consolidate its rule in the island. From 1211 to 1252
it settled three small groups of Venetians liable to military service, in return
2 This section is largely based on the following studies of mine: “Italian Migration and
Settlement in Latin Greece: The Impact on the Economy,” in Die Kreuzfahrerstaaten als mul-
tikulturelle Gesellschaft. Einwanderer und Minderheiten im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E.
Mayer (Munich, 1997), pp. 97–127, repr. in David Jacoby, Byzantium, Latin Romania and the
Mediterranean (Aldershot, 2001), ix; idem, “Changing Economic Patterns in Latin Romania:
The Impact of the West,” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim
World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy P. Mottahedeh (Washington dc, 2001), pp. 197–233, repr.
in David Jacoby, Commercial Exchange across the Mediterranean: Byzantium, the Crusader
Levant, Egypt and Italy (Aldershot, 2005), ix; idem, “Rural Exploitation and Market Economy
in the Late Medieval Peloponnese,” in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval
Peloponnese, ed. Sharon E.J. Gerstel (Washington dc, 2013), pp. 213–75.
3 On Italian migration to Latin Greece, see also Angeliki Tzavara, “The Italians in 13th Century
Frankish Morea: Some Reflections on Old and New Sources,” in Liquid and Multiple:
Individuals and Identities in the Thirteenth-Century Aegean, ed. Guillaume Saint-Guillain and
Dionysios Stathakopoulos (Paris, 2012), pp. 173–93; Charalambos Gasparis, “Great Venetian
Families outside Venice: The Dandolo and the Gradenigo in 13th-Century Crete,” in ibid.,
pp. 55–74.