64 Chrissis
risk posed to its trade or its possessions in the East often made the republic dil-
atory or non-committal when it came to military action against the Ottomans.136
One should not also forget the members of the military orders who were, in
a sense, “professional” crusaders. All three international orders, the Templars,
the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order, had a presence in Frankish Greece
from the beginning, though their role in the defence of the land seems to have
been quite limited. A new military order, that of the Hospital of St Sampson,
was actually founded specifically in Romania in the 13th century, although it
too failed to make an impact. More important was the role of the Hospitallers
once they established their headquarters in Rhodes, in 1307–09. In the years
to come, and down to the fall of Rhodes in 1522, the Order of St John would
become one of the main participants in crusades against the Turks, on account
both of the geographical position of its domains and of its perceived mission
to defend the faith. The order contributed to the naval leagues in roughly equal
measure with Venice, took part in the Crusade of Nicopolis under its Grand
Master-elect, Philibert de Naillac, and remained a bulwark against Ottoman
naval expansion in the Aegean until the 16th century—although fighting alter-
nated with periods of peace and commercial relations with Muslim powers.137
Some of the leading participants in the crusades could have even closer per-
sonal interests for their involvement. One such case is Martino Zaccaria, who
was appointed commander of the papal fleet for the Crusade of Smyrna. The
Zaccaria family had been involved in alum trade in the Eastern Mediterranean
since the late 13th century, and Martino had been the lord of Chios and Phocaea,
initially at the toleration of the Byzantine government; but he had been ousted
from his domains and taken prisoner to Constantinople by Andronikos iii in
- It was only in 1337 that he had been released, six years before his appoint-
ment at the crusade. The choice of Martino as the commander of the papal
galleys was made presumably on the grounds of his extensive local knowledge.
That was not Martino’s first connection to crusading either: in 1323, he had
successfully petitioned the pope for a crusade indulgence to be granted to those
136 See in general: Freddy Thiriet, La Romanie vénitienne au moyen âge: le développement et
l’exploitation du domaine colonial vénitien, xiie–xve siècles (Paris, 1959); Nicol, Byzantium
and Venice, esp. p. 148.
137 See in general: Lock, Franks, pp. 233–39; Peter Lock, “The Military Orders in Mainland
Greece,” in The Military Orders, vol. 1: Fighting for the Faith and Caring for the Sick,
ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 333–39; Dionysios Stathakopoulos, “Discovering
a Military Order of the Crusades: The Hospital of St. Sampson of Constantinople,” Viator
37 (2006), 255–73; Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers of Rhodes Confront the Turks:
1306–1421,” in Christians, Jews and Other Worlds: Patterns of Conflict and Accommodation,
ed. Philip F. Gallagher (Lanham, 1988), pp. 80–116; Nicolas Vatin, “The Hospitallers at
Rhodes and the Ottoman Turks, 1480–1522,” in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 148–62.