260 Jacoby
Benjamin of Tudela also visited Corinth, to which he ascribed 300 Jews
under three leaders. There is no further evidence about the city’s Jews until
one of the sons of Moses Galimidi fled from Negroponte and found refuge in
Corinth between 1300 and 1303. His move to that city suggests the existence
of a local Jewish community. After the earthquake of 1303 he left Corinth for
Thebes, which may hint at a larger Jewish exodus. Corinth experienced an
economic and demographic contraction following the earthquake, and its
decline was hastened by the attack and looting of the city in 1312 by the Catalan
Company established in the Duchy of Athens. Corinth’s condition was further
aggravated by depopulation and a production slump in its countryside as a
result of recurrent Turkish raids from the 1340s. The local Jewish community
is not documented during that period of crisis. Corinth’s economy recovered
to some extent in the 1360s.17 In 1365 a consortium of Jews, whose names are
not recorded, obtained at auction the collection of the chomerchio grande of
Corinth, apparently the tax on commercial transactions. The sum of 340 hyper-
pyra it paid for that year was superior to the total amount paid by others for
the remaining urban taxes.18 Since the data are limited to 1365, we do not know
whether Jews were involved in the collection of urban taxes in other years. In
any event, the operation suggests the presence of Jewish residents in the city.
Abraham Kalomiti, member of the prominent family based in Negroponte,
lived shortly before 1394 in Corinth, where he served in a financial capacity
in the household of the city’s lord, the Florentine Nerio i Acciaiuoli. He held
the office of “weigher of currants” and was in charge of the sale of these dried,
small black grapes.19 Somewhat later he acted on behalf of Carlo i Tocco, count
of Cephalonia, who had taken hold of Corinth, and pawned jewels formerly
belonging to Nerio i Acciaiuoli in return for a large loan provided by some Jews
of Negroponte.20 The Ottomans occupied Corinth in 1395.
Benjamin of Tudela refers to 50 Jews under three leaders in Patras. The wan-
dering Spanish mystic, Abraham Abulafia, stayed for some time in the city in
1261/62, when he married a local Jewish woman, and again in 1279.21 Evidence
17 On the evolution of Corinth’s economy and population in that period: David Jacoby,
“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. 220–21, 231, 242.
18 Jean Longnon and Peter Topping, eds., Documents sur le régime des terres dans la princi-
pauté de Morée au xive siècle (Paris, 1969), pp. 162–63. The collection of each of the other
taxes was granted either to one or two individuals.
19 Jacoby, “Rural Exploitation,” p. 259.
20 Jacoby, “The Demographic Evolution,” p. 165.
21 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, p. 227, no. 22, and pp. 231–32, no. 26.