80 Gasparis
to him. The archons rebelled, but the situation soon changed with the arrival
first of the Knights Templar and then of Guy de Lusignan, in mid-1192. The
new king, already aware of the landowners’ reaction to Richard’s plans, acted
more forcefully and seized most of their land, starting with the public imperial
land under their control and moving on to the sequestration of part of their
private lands, as well as of ecclesiastical property. In any case, he needed to
distribute this land to the Frankish knights that followed him and to those who
would later come to the island, on whom he would depend for the defence and
administration of the island. As we shall see, those Byzantine landowners who
remained on the island eventually settled for a marginal position and acceded
to the new political and social conditions.13
From the above, one may deduce that one of the main issues that the Latin
conquerors (Franks as well as Venetians) in Greece had to contend with was
that of the land and its local owners. They were well aware of the dangers of
both recognising the ownership and power of the landowners and of confis-
cating the land in an attempt to weaken them. As the Venetian documents
relating to Corfu and Euboea show, in their initial attempt to resolve the issue
the new lords tried to appear conciliatory, declaring that the pre-existing sta-
tus quo would be respected, without however explaining what that meant in
practical terms. Soon afterwards, however, Venice would adopt a much more
uncompromising position in Crete and attempt to marginalise the Byzantine
landlords. In practice, the status of the local landowners (private, ecclesiastical
or monastic) suffered minor or major changes, depending on the new ruler, the
territory, the manner of conquest and the pre-existing forms of landownership.
The rich archival material pertaining to Crete, along with the growing schol-
arship of recent years, allows us to focus our attention now on this Venetian
colony and to describe in depth the formulation and evolution of the land-
ownership regime on the island, from the beginning of the 13th century to
the first decades of the 15th century. Among the rest of the Latin domains,
which are not as well served by the surviving primary sources for this period,
we have opted to look at the examples of Cyprus, the Peloponnese and Corfu,
whose land regimes will be examined more briefly, with recourse to the sec-
ondary literature on the subject. Our purpose is to place the example of Crete
within a wider geographical and historical context and to attempt, wherever
possible, a comparison between the landowning practices of the Venetians
13 Angel Nikolaou-Konnari, “Greeks,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angel
Nikolaou-Konnari and Christopher Schabel (Leiden, 2005), p. 27; Peter W. Edbury, “Franks,”
in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angel Nikolaou-Konnari and Christopher
Schabel (Leiden, 2005), pp. 77–78.