188 Jacoby
for land granted by the state. The first group of military settlers included mer-
chants who had previously traded in Crete. The others were also clearly aware
of the agricultural and pastoral resources of the island. In Crete some of them
combined trade with the holding of military tenements.4
Trade, banking and the exercise of crafts induced a far larger number of Latin
commoners, mostly Italians, to settle in the main ports and some inland cities
of Latin Greece. Their heaviest concentration occurred in Candia. Only a small
number of them settled in the Cretan countryside to engage in land cultivation
and the raising of animals. Venice’s rule over Crete, Modon, Coron, and a quar-
ter in the city of Negroponte prompted the concentration of Venetians in these
areas, yet Venetians also settled in Patras, Glarenza, Argos and Nauplia. The
political connection between southern Italy and the Principality of the Morea
from 1278 onward fostered commercial exchanges between these regions and
induced merchants and bankers active in the kingdom to extend their business
to the principality. A number of Sienese and Florentine merchants and bank-
ers operating in Glarenza and members of a few prominent Venetian families
engaged in trade obtained fiefs from the princes of the Frankish Morea in the
second half of the 13th and in the 14th century. The conquest of the duchy
of Athens by the Catalan Company in 1311 was followed by immigration from
Aragonese territories and by the establishment of economic ties with them.5
These various factors account for the diversity of the Latin population settled
in Latin Greece and the complexity of western involvement in the region’s
economy.
Latin lords as well as the Venetian government encouraged Latin settlement
in order to consolidate their rule, yet economic considerations were also of
major importance in that respect. The collapse of centralised Byzantine con-
trol over specific branches of trade and manufacture in 1204, among them silk,
brought about a striking departure from Byzantine economic attitudes, poli-
cies and practices. The political and territorial fragmentation of Latin Greece
created a climate of competition between Latin lords. In order to increase their
4 David Jacoby, “La colonisation militaire vénitienne de la Crète au xiiie siècle: Une nouvelle
approche,” in Le partage du monde: Échanges et colonisation dans la Méditerranée médiévale,
ed. Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (Paris, 1998), pp. 297–313, repr. in David Jacoby, Latins,
Greeks and Muslims: Encounters in the Eastern Mediterranean, 10th–15th Centuries (Farnham,
2009), iv.
5 David Jacoby, “L’état catalan en Grèce: société et institutions politiques,” in Els Catalans a
la Mediterrània oriental a l’edat mitjana, ed. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona, 2003),
pp. 79–101, repr. in David Jacoby, Travellers, Merchants and Settlers across the Mediterranean,
Eleventh-Fourteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2014), x.