194 Jacoby
rural management and Byzantine taxation and capable of ensuring communi-
cation with the local population. Fiscal surveys, called catastica, were drafted
in Greek for more than a whole century after the conquest in the Venetian
territories of Coron and Modon, and the use of Greek in this respect continued
as late as the second half of the 14th century in the Frankish Morea.11 The pres-
ervation of Byzantine administrative, fiscal and legal institutions and practices
is illustrated by the structure and operation of large estates in the 14th-century
Frankish Morea, by state legislation and administration in Venetian territories,
as well as by numerous agricultural and pastoral contracts drafted in Crete,
which abundantly use Greek terms.
The diversified environment in large areas of Latin Greece enabled varied
and complementary economic activities. Rural exploitation was based on poly-
culture and polyactivity. There was continuity in the patterns of land and water
uses, crops and types of cultivation, animal breeding and pastoral activity, as
well as in the production of wine, cheese, wool and silk. Land use combined
cereal cultivation, viticulture, the growing of olive and other fruit-bearing
trees, as well as livestock breeding and transhumant pastoralism. Harsh winter
conditions in mountainous areas drove shepherds and their large flocks to the
plains. In the Peloponnese limited grazing areas also compelled them at times
to cross political boundaries. Rural exploitation extended to woodland and
scrubland, which yielded a large variety of products: timber, firewood, pitch,
pine-resin, some of which used in the production of resinous wine, charcoal,
acorns serving as pig-fodder, tannin-rich acorn-cups and galls used in tanning,
the costly kermes yielding a vermilion colourant applied in the dyeing of tex-
tiles, as well as cattle-food and wild game. Wetlands, lakes, marshes, rivers,
fishponds and saltpans offered further resources.
The large estates of the Frankish Morea included the landowner’s demesne
land and small peasant holdings. Continuity prevailed in the forms of their
exploitation. The availability or scarcity of labour was not the only factor deter-
mining the modes of exploitation of demesne land. The use of a single mode or
the combination of several ones varied from one estate to the other, in relation
to the size and location of the land, the nature and quality of soil and crops,
and specific local conditions. Large tracts of demesne land such as the mas-
saria or zevgilatio, a large seigniorial farm, were generally farmed by peasants
11 David Jacoby, “Multilingualism and Institutional Patterns of Communication in Latin
Romania (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries),” in Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean
1000–1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication, ed. Alexander D. Beihammer, Maria G.
Parani and Christopher D. Schabel (Leiden, 2008), pp. 27–28, 43–48.