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chapter 10The Landscape of Medieval Greece
Maria GeorgopoulouThe dissolution of the Byzantine Empire after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 and
the advent of the Latin crusaders, Venetians and Franks, had a tremendous
impact on the political and physical landscape of medieval Greece. The new
political divisions created on Greek soil following the breakup of the Byzantine
Empire, including Venetian Crete and the islands of the Aegean Archipelago,
Frankish Peloponnese, and the Despotate of Epirus, resulted in separate
regional cultural developments.1 The different western Europeans who settled
on Greek lands used Latin as their official language, spoke a variety of vernacu-
lar languages, and followed the Latin Catholic rite, which set them apart from
the local Greeks who were Orthodox Christians.2 It is primarily the shared
cultural heritage of the “Latins” that allows us to consider Greece as a unit in
this chapter.
This essay offers an overview of the architecture and urban environment of
Latin-ruled towns in medieval Greece. It focuses on monuments on Crete, the
Peloponnese, and the Aegean islands and surveys their general characteristics
and form within their historical context. The Byzantine provinces of Greece
were conquered by foreign lords who managed to establish their presence for
centuries. The architectural landscape that resulted from this encounter is
dominated by large public buildings sponsored by Latin overlords and religious
structures built by monastic orders (mostly Cistercians) and the mendicant fri-
ars, which brought to Greece western European (sometimes referred to as “cru-
sader”) architectural forms, whereas the local traditions continued to flourish
1 For the division of Romania see Antonio Carile, “Partitio terrarum Imperii Romanie,” Studi
Veneziani 7 (1965), 125–305; William Miller, The Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish
Greece (1204–1566) (London, 1908); Peter Lock, The Franks in the Aegean, 1204–1500 (London,
1995); David Jacoby, “The Encounter of Two Societies: Western Conquerors and Byzantines
in the Peloponnese after the Fourth Crusade,” The American Historical Review 78 (1973),
873–906, repr. in idem, Recherches sur la Méditerranée orientale du xiie au xve siècle: Peuples,
sociétés, économies (London, 1979), ii; Angeliki E. Laiou, “Observations on the Results of the
Fourth Crusade; Greeks and Latins in Port and Market,” Medievalia et Humanistica 12 (1984),
47–60.
2 The most complete treatment of the subject is Giorgio Fedalto, La chiesa latina in Oriente,
3 vols. (Verona, 1973–81).