328 Georgopoulou
common Roman ancestry and historical background, shared religious doctrine
and concomitant art, offer a common setting upon which varying architectural
solutions were attempted and realised in the 13th and 14th centuries. There
is no uniform opinion among scholars regarding the correct term that cap-
tures the relationship between the new states (principalities or kingdoms) that
were created on the remains of the Byzantine Empire after 1204. I view post-
1204 Greece as a colonial landscape where urban planning and architecture
addressed at least two (or more) communities separated by religious and ethnic
differences. The term “colony” assumes the settlement and control of a foreign
power over another country, so stricto sensu it is anachronistic for describing
the situation in Latin Greece.5 Admittedly, the term works better for Venetian
Crete than for the Principality of Achaea and the Aegean islands, which rep-
resent different forms of governance often made up of settlements that never
took the form of serious state intervention. In fact, there are instances when
the political realities do not support such a schema. For example, during the
rule of Prince William ii Villehardouin, who ascended the throne of Achaea in
1248 and died in 1278, the Peloponnese was de facto independent and until 1261
de iure under Constantinople. Nonetheless, the political independence of the
principality does not necessarily translate into cultural neutrality as William ii
and his court would carry with them a cultural baggage that tied them with
their ancestral lands and also their new patria.6
My essay focuses on cases where there was major involvement of the ruling
state authorities and a parallel religious hierarchy and I posit that the subse-
quent architectural output which shaped the public, official landscape of Latin
Greece—or rather what is left of it—can be best understood in colonial terms.
Various forces, sometimes conflicting, shaped the landscape. The efforts of the
ruling authorities were affected by their cultural ties with their homeland, the
mother city’s imperial aspirations, and local political exigencies. On the other
side of the spectrum lay the collective interests and individual aspirations of
the local people. In addition to the different political entities that left their
mark on the built environment, the Latin religious orders, which tried from the
5 See the relevant discussion in Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth
of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 7–18; and especially on Crete Maria Georgopoulou,
“Crete between the Byzantine and Venetian Empires,” in The Province Strikes Back: Imperial
Dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean [=Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at
Athens xiii], ed. Giovanni Salmeri and Björn Forsen (Helsinki, 2008), pp. 63–78, esp. 63–65.
6 I would like to thank the anonymous reader of the essay who forced me to elucidate this
point.