The Landscape of Medieval Greece 347
from their Byzantine past, the authorities invested them with a Venetian
front—in their appearance, architectural details, function or name. Then,
an appropriate mythology was forged around them through the integra-
tion of local cults into civic ceremonial.60 This ingenious two-fold strategy
linked the physical and historical revision of the buildings and the institutions
they reflected. Like other political structures of the Byzantines, the reuse of
these buildings by the new masters of Crete manifested that Venice had law-
fully inherited the imperial status of Byzantium in the Levant. This strategy
presented the Venetians not as villains but rather as the noble successors of
the Byzantine Empire.
The semiotics of urban versus suburban space also reinforced the hege-
monic presence of the Venetians in Candia. By safeguarding those who lived
inside, fortification walls demarcated the most important space as the space
within the walls (intra muros). The city walls reinforced since the Byzantine
period with round or square towers, demarcated the space that was privi-
leged. The Venetians placed their administrative buildings, their churches,
and their marketplace inside the city walls in the very places that had until
then constituted the core of the Byzantine city.61 Since the newcomers rep-
resented only a minority of the population, the locals found their own ways
to manipulate the colonial space. In Venetian Candia the suburbs outside the
city walls were the area left to the locals; because they were unfortified, the
suburbs could expand at will, unprotected but with greater freedom and less
policing. Dozens of older and new Orthodox churches built from the early 14th
century on occupied new city quarters that for all intents and purposes must
have been totally Greek. When new Latin mendicant convents were planned in
the mid-14th century they occupied areas in Candia’s suburbs that westernised
thoroughfares, which led from the countryside to the main land gates of the
city, e.g. the Augustinian friary of the Saviour and St Mary of the Crusaders,
which also ran a hospital.62 On the other hand, the Jewish community of
the city was dealt with differently. Occupying a less desirable area in town,
on the bay of Dermata, where the working of the hides made the air unhealthy,
the Jewish community was forced to reside within a highly circumscribed
neighbourhood adjacent to the Dominican friary of St Peter the Martyr.63
60 Maria Georgopoulou, “Late Medieval Crete and Venice: An Appropriation of Byzantine
Heritage,” Art Bulletin 77.3 (1995), 479–96.
61 Georgopoulou, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies, pp. 165–91.
62 Georgopoulou, “Late Medieval Crete and Venice,” pp. 479–96.
63 Maria Georgopoulou, “Mapping Religious and Ethnic Identities in the Venetian Colonial
Empire,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26.3 (1996), 467–96.