A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  The Duchy of Athens

  During the thirteenth century the duchy of Athens had flourished under the rule of the Burgundian La Roche family. The dukes had been more than able to hold their own despite the fluctuating fortunes of their neighbours to north and south, and the duchy had enjoyed the benefits of prosperity, dynastic stability, and military success. In 1308 Duke Guy II died childless, and the duchy passed to a cousin, Walter of Brienne. Within a short time of his accession Walter was faced by the arrival on his northern border of the army of mercenaries known as the Catalan Company. As a fighting force it had had its origins in southern Italy during the wars between the Angevins and the Aragonese that had begun in the aftermath of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. In 1303 the Catalans had hired their services to the Byzantine emperor who had used them against the Turks of Asia Minor; they then turned against their paymaster and did an immense amount of damage to Byzantine territory in Thrace before moving into Thessaly. Walter thought he could use the Catalans to further his own ambitions to dominate that region; a campaign fought in 1310 was highly successful, but Walter was not prepared to reward them in line with their expectations. They advanced into his duchy and in March 1311 crushed his forces in a battle fought by the river Kephissos. The Athenian knights, reinforced by contingents from elsewhere in Frankish Greece, were induced, like the English at Bannockburn three years later, to charge into a marsh. The slaughter was immense. Walter himself was killed and the Catalans were able to occupy the whole of his duchy.

  The new regime lacked international recognition. The Catalans naturally turned to the Aragonese royal house for support and accepted the nominal overlordship of successive members of the Sicilian branch of the family as dukes. But the hostility of the Angevins of Naples, the French, and the papacy towards the Aragonese kept them isolated. There could be no co-operation between Catalan Athens and Angevin Achaea, and so the mutual support that had normally been a feature of relations between the two major Frankish principalities in southern Greece in the previous century no longer applied. The Briennes, who were well connected in both France and Naples, could count on papal backing, and when in 1331 Walter of Brienne’s son and namesake, Walter II, led a substantial army in an attempt to regain his patrimony the expedition had the status of a crusade. Even so, he was unable to make any headway against the Catalans, though he and his heirs continued to intrigue against them. For most of the time until the early 1370s the papacy kept the Catalan leadership under the ban of excommunication, and it was only the increasing danger from the Turks that from the 1340s onwards brought about a gradual softening of papal attitudes.

  In the opening decades of the fourteenth century the Catalan Company had been a formidable power, but with the passage of time its prowess dwindled. In 1379 the Navarrese Company invaded the duchy and seized Thebes, leaving, as we have seen, the Catalans holding Athens but little else. The beneficiary was the Florentine lord of Corinth, Nerio Acciaiuoli, who by the mid-1380s had occupied almost all the former Catalan territories and who completed his conquest with the occupation of the Acropolis at Athens in 1388. Nerio turned to King Ladislas of Naples for legitimization of his acquisitions, but on his death in 1394 the despot of the Morea seized Corinth, while the Venetians, anxious to pre-empt an Ottoman take-over, occupied Athens. Venetian rule lasted until 1402 when Nerio’s bastard son, Antonio, who in the meantime had gained control of Thebes, wrested the city from them. In Venice Antonio’s success was viewed as a major humiliation, but once it became clear that he was not going to follow it by attacking Negroponte the Venetians chose to acquiesce. Antonio was to rule until his death in 1435. The Ottoman threat, which in the 1390s had assumed major proportions, had receded and Athens once again enjoyed a measure of prosperity. After 1435 the duchy passed to Antonio’s cousins. The family retained Athens itself until the Turkish take-over of 1456 and was allowed to keep Thebes until 1460 when the Ottomans had the last duke murdered.

  The Genoese in the Aegean and Black Sea

  The Fourth Crusade had established Venice as the dominant western maritime power in Romania, and the interests of Genoa, her great rival, had for a time suffered in consequence. However, with the demise of the Latin regime in Constantinople in 1261, the Genoese came into their own. It was then that they acquired Pera, the suburb on the opposite side of the Golden Horn from the Byzantine capital, which they turned into a major centre for trade. But their commercial enterprise spread far further afield. By 1280 the Genoese had taken control of Kaffa in the Crimea, and until late into the fifteenth century their merchants were to be found at many other trading centres around the shores of the Black Sea. These Black Sea ports gave them access to Russia and, more importantly, to Asia. Before the end of the thirteenth century there were Genoese-owned ships on the Caspian Sea and an appreciable Genoese mercantile community in Tabriz. In the first half of the fourteenth century we find them trading in India and China. Access to Asia for these more distant ventures was either via Pera and the Black Sea or through the Cilician Armenian port of Ayas. Disruption of trade routes in inner Asia and a loss of confidence following the Black Death meant that after about 1350 such ventures largely ceased, but there was still considerable profit to be had through trade in the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Levant.

  The Genoese were not particularly interested in acquiring land for its own sake. What they wanted were places in which their merchants could trade securely. Kaffa remained in their hands until 1475; Pera until 1453, and Famagusta in Cyprus, which they captured in 1373, until 1464. Rivalry with the Venetians was intense. Since early in the thirteenth century Venice had dominated the southern and western waters of the Aegean; Genoa by contrast sought to assert its influence over the eastern and northern parts. But it was left to individual Genoese to acquire territory. In the 1260s the Emperor Michael VIII had granted the Zaccaria family Phocaea on the western coast of Asia Minor and the right to exploit its alum deposits. The Zaccarias proceeded to found New Phocaea, and in 1304 Benedetto Zaccaria occupied the nearby Byzantine island of Chios. His kinsmen’s rule in Chios lasted until 1329 when the Greeks were able to reclaim it. However from 1346 Chios and Phocaea were again in Genoese hands, now governed by a business consortium known as the Mahona of Chios. The island was noted for its production of mastic, but the Genoese developed its port as a centre for trade in other commodities, notably alum from Phocaea and slaves. In the first half of the fourteenth century the Genoese began to cast covetous eyes at the more northerly island of Lesbos, but it was not until 1354 that a Genoese adventurer named Francesco Gattilusio, who had come to prominence for his role in the coup which ousted the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, acquired this island. The Ottomans took control of Phocaea and New Phocaea in 1455 and seized Lesbos in 1462. Chios, however, remained in Genoese hands until 1566.

  Venetian Romania

  In the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade Venice acquired direct sovereignty over Crete and the twin ports of Coron and Modon in the south of the Peloponnese, and at the same time encouraged individual members of Venetian patrician families to take control of many of the smaller Aegean islands for themselves. Chief among the beneficiaries of this policy were the Sanudi who from early in the thirteenth century ruled over the Cyclades and Sporades with the title of ‘duke of Naxos’ or ‘duke of the Archipelago’. In 1383 their duchy passed to the Crispi family. Other Venetians acquired islands for themselves and held them as vassals of the dukes of Naxos. Technically the Sanudi were vassals of the princes of Achaea and so not dependent on Venice in any formal sense, but in practice the Venetians were careful to ensure that these islands were held by their own people as part of their policy of keeping the approaches to Constantinople in friendly hands. The Sanudi were vigorous rulers, but even they could not prevent the islands being ravaged by pirates and, especially in the case of some of the smaller islands, being systematically depopulated by Turkish slavers. Frequently rulers had to induce settlers from elsewhere to come to make good the losses. The islands be
came notorious as havens for corsairs, and the generally unstable political and military situation was exacerbated by some long-running feuds among the local lords. By the 1420s the dukes of Naxos were tributary to the Ottomans, but their duchy was still to have a long history. The last duke was not deposed until 1566, and vestiges of Christian lordship in these smaller Aegean islands continued until 1617 when a group of minor islands, of which Siphinos was the most important, finally passed under direct Turkish rule. Venice herself held Tenos and Kythera until the eighteenth century.

  In the early thirteenth century the Venetians had taken advantage of the situation in the former Byzantine lands to gain staging posts along the main route to Constantinople and the Black Sea. Coron and Modon, ‘the two eyes of the Republic’ on the south-western tip of Greece, were useful ports of call on the way to both the Aegean and the Levant. Nearer Constantinople the island of Negroponte (or Euboea) had been part of the territory assigned to Venice at the time of the Fourth Crusade, but in the event it came into the control of three Lombard families who held their lands as fiefs of the Venetians. A Venetian bailo had charge of the principal port, the city of Negroponte, but it was only gradually that Venice came to acquire direct control over the rest of the island, a process which was more or less complete by the 1380s. Negroponte remained the most important piece of Venetian territory between Crete and Constantinople until it fell to the Turks in 1470. There were two major breaks in the chain of Venetian-controlled ports along the route to Constantinople. One lay at the southern end of the Adriatic. After 1204 the Venetians had hoped to acquire Corfu, but it was denied them. Eventually, however, in 1386 they did obtain this island, and they held it until the collapse of the republic in 1797. The other break in the chain lay in the approaches to Constantinople itself. Here the Venetians wanted the island of Tenedos which is strategically situated opposite the entrance to the Dardanelles, but their rivals, the Genoese, also had designs on it, and eventually the conflicting ambitions of the two cities led to war. The hostilities lasted from 1376 to 1381 and, despite the dramatic spectacle of a Genoese blockade of Venice, they ended inconclusively with Tenedos being declared a no man’s land from which its Greek inhabitants were to be expelled.

  After the war of Tenedos the growth of Ottoman power, coupled with the weakness of the Latin principalities in southern Greece and the effective end of any pretensions of the rulers of Naples to overlordship there, provided Venice with both the opportunity and the pretext to acquire additional territory. Besides Corfu, she acquired other footholds at the southern entrance to the Adriatic in the general area of what is now Albania. Further south she gained Lepanto (Naupaktos) on the Gulf of Corinth in 1407 and Navarino on the western coast of the Peloponnese in 1417. On the Aegean coast the Venetians had bought Argos and Nauplia in 1388, and eventually, in 1462, Monemvasia came under their rule. For a few years, as we have seen, the banner of Saint Mark even flew over Athens and Thessalonica (1423–30). In time all these were to succumb to Ottoman pressure. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 meant that these islands, ports, and fortresses lost their focal point. They were still valuable in themselves, but increasingly Venice’s political and commercial interests were shifting away from Romania and towards her territorial possessions in northern Italy which in the fifteenth century were expanding dramatically. What Venice could not do was hold back the Ottoman advance. To preserve her trade she attempted to pursue policies of appeasement. When these failed there was war. In the war of 1463–79 she lost Negroponte; in the war of 1499–1503 she lost Modon, Coron, and Navarino; in the war of 1537–40, Monemvasia, Nauplia, and some islands including Aegina. In the war of 1570–3 she lost Cyprus.

  Cyprus and Crete were Venice’s two most substantial acquisitions in the eastern Mediterranean. Cyprus was in Venetian hands for less than a century and during that time enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity. Crete, however, had been acquired after the Fourth Crusade and remained a Venetian possession for almost five centuries. Once the Venetians had got over the initial problems of taking control, they found themselves confronted with a sequence of rebellions led by the local Cretan landowners. The most serious of these erupted in the 1280s under the leadership of Alexis Kallergis and lasted for sixteen years. In the end the Venetians had to allow the indigenous Cretans to retain their property and customs, and they even had to make concessions with regard to the Orthodox Church hierarchy. In 1363 it was the turn of the Venetian settlers in Crete to rebel against their home government. What sparked the revolt were the excessive demands being placed upon them by the Venetian administrators in the island. It lasted until 1367 and was suppressed with relentless savagery on the part of the authorities. After that the population remained generally docile. Acculturation between Greeks and Latins proceeded and the island prospered. This prosperity was interrupted by Turkish raiding, notably in 1538, 1562, and 1567. The Venetians invested heavily in fortifying the main towns, as the castle and walls at Iraklion, or Candia as it was then known, and the huge fortress at Rethymnon bear witness. But military strategists realized that when the Turks decided to attack Crete in earnest, its defence would depend on Venice’s ability to use naval power to intercept the invading army. It was not until 1645 that the blow finally fell. The Turks were able to take advantage of Christian indecision and gain the initiative. By 1648 they had overrun the whole of Crete except for Iraklion. The siege of Iraklion lasted for a further twenty-one years, and the ‘War of Candia’ came to be viewed throughout Europe as an epic struggle. During that time the Venetians won several major naval engagements, and when in 1669 they surrendered Iraklion they managed to salvage naval bases in Crete at Suda, Spinalonga, and Grabusa which they held until 1715, together with the islands of Tenos and Kythera and some areas in Croatia which they had recently conquered at Ottoman expense.

  The surrender of Iraklion was not the end of Venetian involvement in Romania. In 1684 the Holy League under the aegis of Pope Innocent XI comprising Venice, Austria, and Poland came into being to make war on the Ottomans. The Venetians took the lead in overrunning southern Greece in a campaign that is remembered chiefly for the destruction of the Parthenon during the siege of Athens of 1687. In 1699 at the peace of Karlowitz Venice’s possession of the Peloponnese was confirmed, but in 1715 the Ottomans were able to reconquer it with little opposition. When in 1718 the peace of Passarowitz brought hostilities to an end, Venice still retained the Ionian islands and the nearby mainland strongholds of Butrinto, Parga, Prevéza, and Vonitza.

  During the later Middle Ages diversity and fragmentation were the most obvious characteristics of the Latin East. At first glance we see assorted outposts of the West clinging precariously to the margins of the Islamic world in which French and Italian landowners lorded over Greek peasants while all around Venetian and Genoese merchants and seafarers quarrelled over trade. A closer examination, however, shows a more complex structure of relationships. The crusades to the East had been aimed primarily at the Muslim world, but the lands that were now under Latin rule had all been wrested from the Christian Greeks. In the thirteenth century the Byzantines had had some success in winning back lost territory, but except in the Peloponnese, where the despots of the Morea eventually extinguished the principality of Achaea in 1430, the Byzantine threat to the Latin possessions had evaporated by about 1300. In the fourteenth century it was the Latins who once again were gaining at Greek expense as Rhodes, Chios, and Lesbos passed from Byzantine into western hands. Venice and Genoa profited from and even promoted the dynastic strife that so weakened the empire from the 1330s onwards. For example, in the 1350s Venice actively supported the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, while Genoa backed his rival, John V Palaeologus. Later, in the 1370s, Venice looked to John V to give them the coveted prize of Tenedos at the same time as Genoa was helping John’s rebellious son, Andronicus, in the hope that they could thus forestall their rivals and acquire the island for themselves. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the Italians were a
ble to dominate ever more fully the commercial life of Constantinople, enriching themselves at Byzantine expense. The Genoese colony at Pera flourished while Constantinople itself languished. From 1343 the Byzantine crown jewels were held in pledge in Venice, and, as it turned out, they were never to be redeemed.

  Though on occasion the emperors benefited from western crusading enterprises, the Latins established in the Aegean could not or would not offer them any substantial help in the face of Ottoman advance. Not even the Hospitallers on Rhodes were in a position to have any tangible effect on the fortunes of the empire. In any case the attitudes of both the Greeks and the Latins to the Turks could on occasion be distinctly ambivalent. During the Byzantine civil war in the 1340s, John Cantacuzenus allied with the Ottoman leader Orkhan to whom in 1346 he gave his daughter in marriage. Then in 1352 the Genoese, who were hostile to Cantacuzenus, also entered a formal alliance with Orkhan. It was in the confused political circumstances of these years that the Ottomans first established themselves on European soil. In 1387 the despot of the Morea was using Turkish troops in his war against the principality of Achaea; in 1388 the Venetians were upbraiding the lord of Corinth, Nerio Acciaiuoli, for assisting the Turks in attacking their territory; in 1394–5 the Turks in conjunction with the ruler of Achaea, Peter of San Superan, were attacking the despot. In the kaleidoscopic shifting of alliances at this period both Greeks and Latins showed a readiness to side with the Turks against their fellow Christians. Sometimes they did so out of fear of what might happen to them if they refused Turkish demands for assistance; on other occasions they deliberately set out to use the Ottomans to score off their co-religionists. Thus in 1399 Antonio Acciaiuoli and the Turks were threatening to seize Athens which earlier had belonged to Antonio’s father and which the Venetians had subsequently taken. Among the Christian rulers in Romania only the Venetians and the Hospitallers consistently avoided alliances with the Turks, while in the hundred years from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth the Genoese had a long and profitable alliance with them. Indeed, the Genoese were even drawn into the dynastic conflicts which from time to time convulsed the Ottoman sultanate, as for example in 1421 when they were providing Murad II with ships and troops in his struggle with his brother, Mustafa. The Ottoman–Genoese alliance ended in 1450 with a seemingly unprovoked Turkish attack on Lesbos. With the exception of Chios, the Genoese lost all their possessions in the Aegean and Black Sea to the Turks within a few years of the fall of Constantinople in 1453.