20 Tsougarakis
Gasparis’s chapter deals with one of the key factors affecting the administration
and social organisation of any medieval state, that is, the distribution of landed
estates. The various Latin regimes of Greece adopted different principles in
their approaches to land tenure and administration, influenced partly by the
socio-political traditions of their founders’ homelands and partly by the exi-
gencies of the realities on the ground in their newly-conquered domains. One
of the main issues that all conquerors had to contend with, was how to deal
with the pre-existing landowners and to what extent they should be embed-
ded into the newly emerging social hierarchy. The chapter focuses primarily on
the land regime of Venetian Crete, for which an abundance of diplomatic evi-
dence has been preserved, but also surveys the Frankish territories, including
the Kingdom of Cyprus, which in some ways served as a model for the Frankish
territories of mainland Greece, having come under Latin control earlier, during
the Third Crusade. Anastasia Papadia-Lala’s contribution deals with a different
aspect of social organisation, by examining the socio-administrative structures
of the Latin states. After reviewing briefly the administrative structures of the
Frankish lordships, Papadia-Lala turns her attention to the Venetian Stato da
Mar and examines in particular the social stratification of the ethnically mixed
urban populations and the evolution of the civic communities and councils
which became a dominant feature of Venetian rule and whose development
marked the passage into the early modern period.
One of the greatest issues that the unplanned and unsanctioned (by the
papacy) conquest of Byzantium raised was that of the relationship of the
Roman Church to its Greek Orthodox counterpart. After the conquest, and
despite his earlier protestations, Innocent iii famously envisioned that
the political subjugation of the Greeks would entail the return of the Greek
Church to Roman obedience—a hope that was frustrated almost immediately.
Accordingly, the religious colonisation of Byzantium by Latin clergy, was one
of the most tangible, influential and controversial effects of the conquest. Of
course, this was not the first time that the Latin Church found itself ruling over
a Greek flock and its clergy: this had happened already in southern Italy, in the
Holy Land and most pertinently (and recently) in Cyprus. Nicholas Coureas’s
essay on the two Churches synthesises the material relating to the installa-
tion of the Latin Church in Greece, with particular reference to the diocesan
restructuring that took place, the questions of jurisdiction that arose as a con-
sequence of the conquest and the migration of the regular and military orders
to the Greek lands.
The following contribution by David Jacoby on the economy of Latin Greece
deals with an essential but often overlooked aspect of life in medieval Greece.