334 Georgopoulou
on specific locales and monuments based on archival information has elu-
cidated the meaning and function of colonial societies from a post-colonial
perspective both in the field of crusader studies and architectural history and
has opened up new ways of looking at colonial settlements.19 Sally McKee’s
monograph Uncommon Dominion based on archival documents from 14th-
century Venetian Crete, insists on the slippery nature of terms such as “Greek”
and “Latin” when referring to territories when co-habitation is prolonged.
Used in coeval governmental and notary documents these legal terms are apt
to designate, on the one hand, the local Greek population that had lived on
Greece since the Byzantine period, and on the other hand the newcomers
(colonists and others) who came primarily from France or Italy and were
Latin Catholic Christians. The economic, civic, and social relations of Latins
and Greeks in the 14th century show “diminishing distinctions between [the]
communities” according to McKee’s careful study of notary documents from
Crete; in the testaments of the Latins, for instance, we detect a nexus of social
relations, economic interactions, and emotional attachments to their Greek
family members and servants.20 A similar condition is apparent in the shared
“material life” and architecture.21 On the other hand, the urban environment
that the Venetians constructed in Crete embodied a colonial framework that
promoted Venetian hegemony. A daily encounter with that landscape pre-
sented an uneven space for Greeks and Venetians in Candia. Along the same
“Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Works,” Journal
of Modern History 82 (2010), 127–55; and Eric R. Dursteler, “On Bazaars and Battlefields:
Recent Scholarship on Mediterranean Cultural Contacts,” Journal of Early Modern History
15 (2011), 413–34.
19 My book Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, and Heather E. Grossman, “Building Identity:
Architecture as Evidence of Cultural Interaction between Latins and Byzantines in
Medieval Greece,” are examples of such attempts. More dissertations have taken as
their topic the cultural complexities of the colonial societies in Greece, e.g. Monika
Hirschbichler, “Monuments of the Syncretic Society: Wall Painting in the Latin Lordship
of Athens, Greece (1204–1311),” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Maryland,
College Park, 2005); Diana Newall, “Art, Artist, Patron, Community in Venetian Crete
1200–1450,” (unpublished doctoral thesis, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University
of London, 2006); and Christina Stancioiu, “Objects and Identity: An Analysis of Some
Material Remains of the Latin and Orthodox Residents of Late Medieval Rhodes, Cyprus,
and Crete,” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009).
20 Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity
(Philadelphia, 2000), pp. 6, 86–99, and 168–71, and eadem, “The Revolt of St. Tito,” pp. 190–
96; Maria Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, p. 8.
21 Sally McKee, “Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete,” Speculum 70 (1995),
27–67, esp. 66.