The Economy Of Latin Greece 203
ter transportation facilities more easily than individual peasants. They could
also take advantage of their standing and authority to acquire from their own
or other villeins, at imposed prices, the products they wished to market. Such
a practice may have been fairly common when they had agreed to deliver at a
given time specific amounts of products to a private customer, to a merchant,
or to the state with respect to wheat in Crete. Venetians and other Latin set-
tlers holding fiefs in Crete often sold the cheese they bought from their Greek
villeins, in addition to the produce of their own flock. In 1279 and 1280 Pietro
de la Caliva of Candia made advance payments for the exclusive right to pur-
chase the entire yield of sheep cheese and wool from some fiefholders and
their villeins holding land in the area of Sitia, in eastern Crete.29 In 1381 Ioannes
Laskaris Kalopheros, a fiefholder in the Frankish Morea, sold in Modon around
950 kilograms of raw silk representing the production of more than 550 peas-
ant households, clearly not only silk produced by his own villeins.30 The lords
of Santorini acted as sole middlemen between local cotton producers and for-
eign merchants, selling the entire yield from their island. The maintenance of
this role was furthered by the maritime isolation of Santorini.31 There is no
evidence regarding the commercialisation of the peasants’ or the landowner’s
cotton in the Frankish Morea, yet we may postulate a pattern similar to the one
attested in Santorini.
Large landowners acted as middlemen in the particular pattern of commer-
cialisation of some specific commodities, namely currants, acorn-cups and
kermes. Currants, dried small black and seedless grapes, grown in Corinthia
and the regions of Argos and Nauplion were used as sweeteners. The yield
was fairly small, there was a high foreign demand, and this was primarily an
expensive export-oriented commodity. As a rule the landowners exercised a
monopoly over purchases from their own villeins, and the overlord, the duke of
Athens and the lord of Argos and Nauplion over all the produce of his respec-
tive lordship. The landowners and the overlord took advantage of their monop-
olistic standing as sole purchasers to impose standard sale prices, regardless of
the annual yield or market conditions, whereas supply and demand were at
play at the stage of commercialisation, which involved export. The two-tier
monopsony ensured large profits both to the large landowners and to the
overlord. The strict channelling of currants attested in the second half of the
29 David Jacoby, “Cretan Cheese: A Neglected Aspect of Venetian Medieval Trade,” in
Medieval and Renaissance Venice, ed. Ellen E. Kittel and Thomas F. Madden (Urbana,
1999), pp. 52–53, repr. in Jacoby, Commercial Exchange, viii.
30 Jacoby, “Changing Economic Patterns,” pp. 217–18.
31 Saint-Guillain, “Les ducs de l’Archipel.”