262 Jacoby
a parnas, when it experienced messianic excitement in 1257.31 Glarenza was a
new city established in the 1260s along the western coast of the Peloponnese,
at a short distance from Andravida.32 It rapidly became the major port of the
Frankish Morea.33 Considering the Jewish settlement pattern of that period,
we may safely assume that Jews settled in Glarenza shortly after its estab-
lishment, although none is attested there until 1306. The Jewish community
appears to have been small at that time.34 A Jewish surgeon resided in the city
before 1395, when he was hired by the Venetian authorities to serve in Corfu.35
Glarenza apparently began to decline in the late 14th century. According to an
estimate made in 1391 for Amadeo of Savoy, who aspired to become prince of
the Frankish Morea, there were only about 300 households or between 1200
and 1500 inhabitants in the city, including Jews.36 In 1430 a Catalan pirate cap-
tured and deported the Jews remaining in the city.37
There were several Jewish communities in the Duchy of the Archipelago.
Between 1300 and 1303 a son of Moses Galimidi fled from Negroponte, where
he had been involved in silk business, to Andros, presumably the city bear-
ing that name.38 The island of Andros produced both raw silk and silk tex-
tiles in that period.39 A Jew copied several works in Syros in 1307/08.40 The
copy of another manuscript was completed in 1410 in the city of Naxos.41 In
1431 a Jewess of Andros, mother-in law of Xenos of Andros who had moved to
Candia, was the villana or subject of the lady of Andros, wife of Andrea Zeno.42
31 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 224–26, no. 21, and see also ibid., pp. 79–81, 100.
32 Angeliki Tzavara, Clarentza, une ville de la Morée latine, xiiie–xve siècles (Venice, 2008),
pp. 26–29.
33 Tzavara, Clarentza, pp. 201–300; see also Jacoby, “Italian Migration,” pp. 105–06.
34 Tzavara, Clarentza, pp. 194–96.
35 Andrea Nanetti, ed., Documenta veneta Coroni & Mothoni rogata: Euristica e critica docu-
mentaria per gli oculi capitales Communis Veneciarum (secoli xiv e xv), 2 vols. (Athens,
1999), 1:166–67, no. 3.56.
36 Jacoby, “Italian Migration,” p. 106.
37 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, p. 308, no. 127. Contrary to Bowman, ibid., p. 85, these
were clearly permanent residents of Glarenza.
38 See above, n. 10.
39 David Jacoby, “Silk in Mediaeval Andros,” in Captain and Scholar: Papers in Memory of
Demetrios I. Polemis, ed. Evangelos Chrysos and Elizabeth A. Zachariadou (Andros, 2009),
pp. 145–47.
40 Adolf Neubauer, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library and in the
College Libraries of Oxford (Oxford, 1886), cols. 521–22, no. 1467.
41 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 297–98, no. 110.
42 Personal communication of Guillaume Saint-Guillain.