330 Georgopoulou
Cyclades, showcase the impact of the colonial presence on the urban environ-
ment. Large projects like the refurbishment of urban centres with city walls
and administrative structures (e.g. Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete), the
construction of dominating castles (e.g. Chlemoutsi) and free-standing towers
in the countryside,9 or the foundation of major mendicant centres to serve the
newcomers who followed the Latin Catholic rite, brought to Greece a special-
ised workforce and the mastermind of imported master masons/architects.10
Nevertheless, even the largest group of imported builders cannot negate the
importance of local geology, climate, building materials, and regional prac-
tices. Hence, what is significant is to appreciate how new political and social
requirements affected the built environment.
Following 1204 certain “foreign” forms were implanted on Byzantine soil. The
impetus of the first settlement left on the ground some critical structures that
marked the arrival of new settlers: palaces, fortifications, administrative, and
novel religious structures. Several of these structures were housed in reused
buildings and changes were confined to decorative and symbolic additions
while at other times new imposing structures changed the landscape radically.
The Latin interventions on the urban landscape can be categorised on several
levels: (a) the manipulation of the Byzantine past (reused palaces, refurbished
city walls or Byzantine churches turned into Latin rite churches); (b) the use
of the privileged intra muros urban space as a means to “fix” social-political-
colonial relationships of people into a readable pattern; (c) significant place-
ment, signage, and naming of symbolic structures in the landscape; (d) the
importance of the patronage of monastic, i.e. Cistercian, and mendicant
orders; and (e) the linkage of colonies into a political/imperial whole.
9 Kevin Andrews, Castles of the Morea; revised ed. with a foreword by Glenn R. Bugh
(Princeton, 2006); Anna Triposkoufi and Amalia Tsitouri, eds., Venetians and Knights
Hospitallers: Military Architecture Networks (Athens, 2002).
10 Beata Kitsiki-Panagopoulos, Cistercian and Mendicant Monasteries in Medieval Greece
(Chicago, 1979) and Olga Gratziou, Η Κρήτη στην ύστερη μεσαιωνική εποχή: η μαρτυρία
της εκκλησιαστικής αρχιτεκτονικής [Crete in the Late Medieval Period: the Evidence of
Ecclesiastical Architecture] (Herakleion, 2010). It is useful to compare the situation in
the crusader states of the Holy Land where building campaigns represented major colo-
nial undertakings by the colonisers to impress their presence on the colonial landscape.
See Jaroslav Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187 (Cambridge, 1995);
idem, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291
(Cambridge, 2005); Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem:
A Corpus, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1993–2009); idem, Secural Buildings in the Crusader Kingdom
of Jerusalem: An Archaeological Gazetteer (Cambridge, 1997).