The Landscape of Medieval Greece 363
On the islands of the Aegean archipelago, special care was given to create
the necessary structures to defend the towns from raids and pirate assaults.
Fortified settlements with houses built in rows used their back side as the
fortification wall of the settlement in Lindos (Rhodes), Kimolos, Antiparos,
Mastichohoria in Chios by the Genoese, and Naxos.103 Such planned settle-
ments seem to have close parallels with crusader settlements in the Levant.104
Free standing Byzantine houses are still scattered in the kastra of the main-
land, e.g. Geraki.105
The built environment depends to a large degree on unpretentious domes-
tic structures that make up not only rural areas but even the bulk of the urban
fabric. As in most medieval towns that have outlasted the Middle Ages, few
remains of domestic architecture can be still detected intact; the houses of
Mistra, a few houses and villas in Crete, fortified settlements (kastra) in the
Aegean islands (Antiparos, Paros, etc.) or structures in rural Peloponnese
uncovered in surveys give some idea of the landscape.106 Arguably little has
changed in the Aegean in terms of settlement and house designs since the
13th century. Only the island of Syros saw extensive rebuilding in the 19th
century.107 Moreover, the buildings and fortifications of Canea and Rethymnon,
for instance, suffered only minor damage in the later medieval period and
a large number of them were reused by the Ottomans but they preserve an
image of the urban landscape that fits the 15th and 16th centuries and not
necessarily the medieval period. Remains of houses of the Frankish period
and especially from the rule of the de la Roche family (1205–1311) have been
103 Sigalos, “Middle and Late Byzantine Houses,” pp. 53–81, esp. 68.
104 Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
(Cambridge, 1998); Adrian J. Boas, Crusader Archaeology: The Material Culture of the Latin
East (London, 1999).
105 Lefteris Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. (Oxford, 2004); idem,
“Middle and Late Byzantine Houses,” pp. 65 and 70.
106 Cooper, Houses of the Morea; Athanassopoulos, “Landscape Archaeology,” pp. 79–105;
Bintliff, “Frankish Countryside,” pp. 1–18; idem, “Reconstructing the Byzantine
Countryside: New Approaches,” in Byzanz als Raum: zu Methoden und Inhalten der his-
torischen Geographie des östlichen Mittelmeerraumes, ed. Klaus Belke (Vienna, 2000),
pp. 37–63.
107 Bintliff, The Complete Archaeology of Greece, p. 425.