The Jewish Communities in the Social Fabric of Latin Greece 269
visited the city in 1161.78 Boniface of Montferrat, lord of Thessalonica (1204–07)
captured Euboea in 1205 and divided it into three fiefs. The holders of these
lordships and their successors are called triarchs in English, since each of them
ruled over one third of the island. On account of their origin they were consid-
ered “Lombards”, and this was also the name applied to their subjects. Ravano
dalle Carceri united the three lordships under his dominion for a brief period,
from 1208 to 1216, yet after his death they emerged anew as separate entities.79
Venice established in 1211 an outpost in Euripos, called Negroponte by the
Latins, gradually extended its property in the city in the following years, and
by 1256 had managed to merge its scattered urban possessions into a compact
quarter along the sea shore. Since the quarter enjoyed an exterritorial status,
the city was divided between Venice and the triarchs, who jointly ruled over
the non-Venetian section.80 However, Venice was the dominant economic and
political force in the city.
Like the Latins and the Greeks of Euboea, the Jews were divided into two
groups, subjects of Venice on the one hand and those of the triarchs, on the
other, as attested from 1268. Nevertheless all the Jews of the city of Negroponte
resided together in the Judaica inherited from the Byzantine period, attested
in 1245. It was situated along the Bay of Bourkos, outside the city’s wall, on
territory jointly ruled by the “Lombard” lords.81 The progressive consolidation
of Venice’s position in the city and the economic activity it promoted were
reflected within the local Jewish community. From the 1260s at the latest
78 See above, n. 6; on trade in Euripos, see also Ralph-Johannes Lilie, Handel und Politik
zwischen dem byzantinischen Reich und den italienischen Kommunen Venedig, Pisa und
Genua in der Epoche der Komnenen und der Angeloi (1081–1204) (Amsterdam, 1984),
pp. 119–20.
79 David Jacoby, La féodalité en Grèce médiévale: Les “Assises de Romanie”: sources, application
et diffusion (Paris, 1971), pp. 185–88.
80 David Jacoby, “La consolidation de la domination de Venise dans la ville de Négrepont
(1205–1390): Un aspect de sa politique coloniale,” in Bisanzio, Venezia e il mondo franco-
greco (xiii–xv secolo): atti del colloquio internazionale organizzato nel centenario della nas-
cita di Raymond-Joseph Loenerz o.p., Venezia, 1–2 Dicembre 2000, ed. Chryssa A. Maltezou
and Peter Schreiner (Venice, 2002), pp. 151–66, repr. in David Jacoby, Latins, Greeks
and Muslims: Encounters in the Eastern Mediterranean, 10th–15th Centuries (Farnham,
2009), ix.
81 Jacoby, “The Demographic Evolution,” p. 160; document of 1245 edited by François-Xavier
Leduc, “Enhancing Earlier and Managing Later Latin Identity and Power through Women:
The case of 13th-Century Euboea,” in Liquid and Multiple: Individuals and Identities in the
Thirteenth-Century Aegean, ed. Guillaume Saint-Guillain and Dionysios Stathakopoulos
(Paris 2012), p. 167.