The Latins in Greece: A Brief Introduction 19
of Greece was always far beyond the ambitions of this volume. Rather, this
book was conceived as an introduction to the field of study of Latin Greece and
an overview of the essential aspects of the societies that emerged in the after-
math of the Fourth Crusade with an emphasis on their social, religious and
political institutions. It aims to provide the reader with a sampler of the direc-
tions in which the study of the Latin states of Romania has been moving in the
last, say, 30 years. It has to be remembered that the polities in question were
neither cohesive nor static; conditions, therefore, that obtained in one did not
always occur in others and even within each political entity things changed
dramatically during the centuries of Latin rule. Moreover, as has already been
mentioned, certain periods and regions are much better studied than others.
The chapters that follow adopt varying approaches, both to the subject matter
and to the scope, some opting for a narrower geographical and temporal focus,
and some providing broader overviews of the regions and period in question,
thus reflecting partly the preferences and field of expertise of each author and
partly the editors’ ambition to cover as wide a geographical area as possible
within the confines of the volume. In their diversity the chapters also reflect
some of the peculiarities of the field itself: thus, certain regions and polities
(namely Venetian Crete and Frankish Morea) feature in its pages much more
prominently than others. The book sets out to achieve two goals: taken as a
whole we hope that this collection of studies will provide the newcomer to
Latin Greece with a concise, accessible and up-to-date introduction to the sub-
ject and to the current state of research. At the same time, individually, each
study should serve even more specialised historians as a useful reference tool
on each specific topic. To this end, an extensive and fairly specialised bibliog-
raphy is appended to the end of this volume.
Given the manner in which the Latin states of Greece were born, it is only
fitting to begin this volume with a chapter on Crusades and Crusaders in
Medieval Greece. The creation of a Latin Empire on the lands of Byzantium
along with the later expansion of the Turks, had the side-effect of turning
Greece and the Aegean into a legitimate target for crusading—a new develop-
ment in the 13th century. Nikos Chrissis’s chapter examines these crusading
efforts undertaken by the West in support of the Latin regimes of Greece and
traces the effects of these efforts in crusading ideology and practice from the
13th to the 15th centuries. Though these crusades were more often than not
abject failures in military terms, they were instrumental in shaping the rela-
tions between Latins and Greeks in the political field and became an omni-
present feature of the political and diplomatic landscape of medieval Greece.
The two chapters that follow turn their attention from the international to
the domestic, to examine how the polities that were created in the aftermath
of the Fourth Crusade were structured socially and politically. Charalambos