198 Jacoby
Morea. Shortly before 1354 Jacobo Buzuto from Brindisi, chief administrator
of the fiefs held by Niccolò Acciaiuoli, restored vineyards and renewed the
operation of salt pans that had been neglected. Nicola de Boiano, in charge
of the estates of Marie of Bourbon in 1361, recorded disagreements and liti-
gation with other feudatories with respect to her assets and rights, and took
firm action to regain whatever had been lost. He expressed his dissatisfaction
with the performance of several of Marie’s officers in charge of local affairs
and removed them, as well as those exceeding their competence, and replaced
them with trustworthy and experienced men. He intended to find leasehold-
ers who would resume the cultivation of land abandoned by villeins put to
flight by Turkish incursions. In one village he realised that a specific plot of
seigniorial land was unsuitable for the growing of wheat, and decided that
it should be converted into a vineyard. Aldobrando Baroncelli, whose family
had close connections with other Florentine families settled in the Kingdom
of Naples, served in Greece from 1379 to 1382 at least as agent for Angelo and
Lorenzo Acciaiuoli. In 1379 he promised to increase the yield from the village
of Sperone, which belonged to Lorenzo, by the proper use of beasts of labour
and seeds.
The Italian landowners and stewards devoted particular attention to inten-
sive cultivation relying on manure and irrigation and to the introduction of
new cash crops. Irrigation had already been practiced in the Byzantine period,16
yet appears to have been extended after 1204. It is attested in 1118 for cotton and
vegetable cultivation in Crete and for gardens and orchards in the bishoprics
of Athens and Negroponte in 1209, thus shortly after the conquest. Cistern and
well water was used for small pieces of land, yet irrigation was mostly based
on the diversion of streams. In Crete both cotton and flax cultivation in the
early 14th century was based on irrigation.17 Great landowners could more eas-
ily than peasants take advantage of the water flowing through their land or
along the latter’s borders and muster the large resources needed for the build-
ing and maintenance of expensive watering systems. In the Frankish Morea
irrigation was particularly applied to seigniorial land. The feudal fragmenta-
tion of landholding and the absence of a strong central authority in that region
must have hampered the large-scale exploitation of water resources, achieved
in Venetian-ruled Euboea and Crete.18
16 Alan Harvey, Economic Expansion in the Byzantine Empire, 900–1200 (Cambridge, 1989),
pp. 127–33; Maria Gérolymatou, “La gestion de l’eau dans les campagnes byzantines (8e–
15e siècle), “ Revue des Études Byzantines 63 (2005), 195–205.
17 Theotokes, Θεσπίσματα, 1:47–48, no. 12.
18 For Crete, see also Charalambos Gasparis, Η γη και οι αγρότες στη μεσαιωνική Κρήτη, 13ος –14ος
αι. [Land and Peasantry in Medieval Crete, 13th–14th Centuries] (Athens, 1997), pp. 105–10.