A History of the Crusades (49 page)

It is against this background that beginning in the fourteenth century we start to find complaints that Latins were attending Greek services. It may be that in many instances such behaviour followed from the absence of Latin priests, but often people would have done so out of preference: intermarriage and bilingualism must have had some effect on social and religious attitudes. Occasionally too we find instances of Greeks or other eastern Christians who had been converted to Latin observance. In the fifteenth century the Cypriot Audeth family provides evidence of the erosion of traditional loyalties. The Audeths were Syrian Jacobites, but in the 1450s one of their number was a canon of Nicosia cathedral and later titular Latin bishop of Tortosa; at about the same time another member of the family endowed masses in his will in Jacobite, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, and Armenian churches as well as in the Latin cathedral at Nicosia. It is hard to know how common such switching of allegiance was or to analyse satisfactorily the elements that motivated it. The blurring of confessional divisions was mirrored in contemporary art and architecture. For example, icons survive that are clearly the work of Greek masters but which bear Latin inscriptions or that bear Greek inscriptions but which were commissioned by Latin donors; a king of Cyprus composed a Latin office for use on the festival of a Greek saint, Hilarion; at Famagusta the Greek cathedral was rebuilt in the fourteenth century in a thoroughly western style of Italianate Gothic; elsewhere there is a hybridization of architectural forms with motifs taken from both western and Orthodox traditions. Some church buildings betray signs of alteration to allow separate altars for use by Latin and Greek priests. It was in Crete that the cross-fertilization of artistic traditions had its greatest effect with the development of the school of painting which had El Greco as its most famous member. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cretans were producing popular literature in Greek largely modelled on Italian prototypes. Western travellers sometimes looked askance at those Latin settlers in the East whose speech and dress had come to resemble that of their
Greek neighbours, but the fact that such changes occurred suggests that far from remaining polarized, society had melded together to an appreciable extent.

In Cyprus the kings habitually employed Orthodox Greeks to staff their central financial department, the
secrète
, and there by the 1460s they were issuing letters in French, Italian, or Greek as necessity dictated. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it would seem that a tightly knit group of Orthodox ‘civil service’ families dominated the personnel. The early fifteenth-century Cypriot historian, Leontios Makhairas, belonged to one of these families, and his chronicle, influenced by the demotic Greek of the time, provides a valuable insight into the extent to which western loan words had been absorbed by the local intelligentsia. It also reflects the attitudes of a member of that class: proud and defensive of his Orthodoxy with perhaps a hankering after the order of a bygone, imperial age; quizzical of converts from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, but also loyal and respectful towards his Lusignan masters.

To a large extent the rulers in the Latin East were content to allow their subjects to live as they always had done. In Crete and southern Greece a class of Greek landowners survived the takeover, and by 1300 they had persuaded the authorities to accept them as an integral part of the social hierarchy. Rural communities generally retained their pre-conquest organization, the chief difference being that the ruler or the landholder to whom taxes were due was now Latin rather than Greek. There is no reason to suppose that the Latin regimes were any harsher on the peasantry than their predecessors had been, and indeed it may well be that the lot of the
paroikoi
, the unfree serfs, if anything improved. Alongside their agrarian wealth, most rulers could expect some share in the profits of commerce. The Venetian territories were administered by officials sent from Venice for whom the need to facilitate their merchants’ enterprise remained a priority. Indeed, furthering the interests of Venetian commerce was the principal
raison d’être
of many of their overseas possessions. But all rulers could benefit from tolls on trade and from the general prosperity that commercial activities could bring.

In some cases rulers or landowners would invest in agricultural or industrial processes. A good example is provided by the sugar industry that was developed in both Crete and Cyprus. The growing of sugar cane requires plentiful supplies of water, and so almost certainly the industry entailed changes in land use from the usual types of mixed arable farming to the production of this one cash crop. Sugar factories such as those excavated at Kouklia and Episkopi in Cyprus would have been expensive to build and would have needed a large labour force. Owners would therefore have needed substantial capital, and they may have employed slaves to work the factories. Not surprisingly it was only the wealthiest individuals or corporations that could engage in sugar refining: the king at Kouklia; the Hospitallers at Kolossi; the Venetian Cornaro family at Episkopi. The product would have been almost all exported to western Europe, and in the case of the Hospitallers and the Cornaros the profits would have been mostly exported as well: to Rhodes as part of the Cypriot responsions or to Venice to swell the fortune of one of the leading patrician families. This example of an agrarian-cumindustrial enterprise leads naturally to the question of how far the Latin regimes in the eastern Mediterranean prefigured the colonial enterprises of a later epoch. In certain aspects the Cypriot sugar industry anticipates the plantations in the Caribbean, but the parallel is far from complete.

Everywhere in the Latin East the ruling élite was alien, intruding into societies in which language, social organization, and religion differed from its own. That in itself was unexceptional: the ruling élite in the Ottoman empire was just as intrusive, at least in the European sector, and the Mamluk élite in Egypt was racially distinct from the indigenous inhabitants and kept itself aloof from them. But the Latin regimes varied considerably. In the Venetian possessions the local governors were appointed from Venice by the republic for a fixed term to administer the territory in accordance with the republic’s requirements. At the other end of the spectrum, the kings of Cyprus were answerable to no one and governed their kingdom in their own interests. In a political sense therefore the Venetian ports and islands can be dubbed colonies, while Lusignan
Cyprus cannot. The Genoese possessions, which enjoyed greater autonomy than did their Venetian counterparts, and Achaea and Athens under Angevin or Aragonese suzerainty fall somewhere between these extremes.

But can the Latin East be said to have been colonial in an economic sense? Venice and Genoa both looked to their overseas territories to provide foodstuffs and raw materials: wine, olive oil, grain, dried fruit, alum from Genoese Phocaea, sugar, and later cotton from Crete and Cyprus. The Venetians in particular tried to ensure that their merchants and shipowners traded between Venice itself and their eastern markets, but the Genoese were less regulated, and Genoese ships bearing the produce of the Genoese possessions were under less obligation to unload in their home port. So although the Latin East did send primary products to Europe, it is again only in the case of Venice that the relationship can be considered thoroughly colonial. Otherwise produce was sold in other parts of the Mediterranean world. The more valuable commodities, such as silk from Thebes, mastic from Chios, and sugar, required higher levels of investment, but they never developed to same extent as the monocultures which typified the economies of the Canaries, the Caribbean, or the southern United States in later times. As a result, nowhere in the East found itself totally dependent on just one product and so ran the risk of disaster if the market collapsed. The idea that the local economy was geared to serve the interests of a distant ruling power did not apply. For the Italian maritime republics a sizeable proportion of the wealth came from long-distance trade in luxury goods. So far as the Latin East was concerned, this entailed a share in the profits from what was essentially a transit trade. Constantinople, Famagusta, Ayas in Cilician Armenia, and the Black Sea ports all flourished, at least for a time, as entrepôts in the eastern spice trade and their prosperity depended heavily on the continued presence of western merchants. These merchants collectively wielded considerable economic power, but that did not necessarily enable them to dominate the local political establishment.

In the rural areas the landlords exploited their rights over the
land and the peasantry and creamed off the profits. Many landlords, even in Venetian Crete, lived locally. Others did not, and that meant that the profits from the land could well be taken out of the local economy altogether. Thus for example, at least some of the wealth generated by the sugar plantations and refinery at Episkopi in Cyprus belonging to the Cornaro family would have left the island to enrich the family in Venice. Clearly the Cornaros’ investments prefigured later colonial enterprises, but on the other hand it could be argued that they were behaving no differently from the landholders of an earlier, Byzantine age who had syphoned off the agrarian profits from the provinces of the empire to support themselves and their households in Constantinople.

In an earlier chapter it has been suggested that in the central Middle Ages Palestine and Syria had been subjected to religious colonization. They were now lost, and to label western society in the Latin East in the late medieval period a colonial society is too sweeping. The rulers, settlers, and merchants were concerned to make enough money to secure their livelihoods. In some respects they anticipated the actions of the planters and colonial administrators of more recent times. But to concentrate attention solely on such features would be to distort reality. Western rule was not so different from what had gone before. The Latins did not set out to change society, and the indigenous population was probably no worse off than previously. The idealism of the crusaders of the twelfth century may not have been so much in evidence, but over and above the urge to make money and conserve their possessions the idea that the Latins were holding the forces of Islam at bay and defending Christendom was never totally eclipsed. The rulers of Cyprus, the Hospitallers on Rhodes, the Venetians in their centuries-long struggle against the Turks all recognized that they had a religious duty to maintain themselves in the face of Muslim assaults, and if their sense of spiritual motivation was mixed with the more mundane requirements of self-defence and the maintenance of their livelihood, they were neither the first nor the last to find themselves in that position.

ANTHONY LUTTRELL

A
T
the beginning of the fourteenth century the formal status of the professed members of a military order of the Latin church had changed little since these organizations had originated in the twelfth century, despite the progressive codification of canon law and the passing of new statutes and other legislation within individual orders. It had become less likely that brethren would be motivated by spiritual enthusiasms or by the prospect of action directly concerned with the recovery of Jerusalem, but most military religious still took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, while all were supposed to live according to their order’s constitution. Each order had a rule which had been approved by the papacy, whose capacity to intervene in an order’s affairs, or even to dissolve it, was demonstrated dramatically when Clement V suppressed the Temple in 1312. Except in Prussia and Livonia, brethren were less likely to confront an infidel enemy and more apt to be seeking a relatively secure if often undistinguished position in local society; it was also increasingly improbable that they would experience a common liturgical life within a sizeable community of religious. The various military religious orders differed considerably from one another, but in general they received knights, sergeants, priests, and sisters, all devoted primarily to the prosecution of an armed struggle against the infidel. Their members were not technically
permitted to take crusade vows, though naturally they participated in crusades fought against the infidel. By 1312 there was a growing distinction between the permanent holy war of the military orders, whose members were not supposed—except in certain specific situations—to fight fellow Christians, and the papally-proclaimed crusade, an occasional event directed against Latin and other Christians more often than against the infidel.

The psychological impact of the Templar affair must have been profound, but there was little immediate indication of any decline in recruitment to the other military orders. These orders’ very function had been the subject of widespread criticism and debate, with proposals for their union in a single order or even for the confiscation of all their lands. Furthermore, in 1310 the pope instigated a searching investigation into the gravest complaints against the Teutonic Order’s Livonian activities. In 1309 that order moved its principal convent or headquarters from Venice to Marienburg in Prussia, while in 1306 the Hospitallers initiated their conquest of Rhodes. This piratical invasion, probably not completed until 1309, preceded the attack on the Temple in 1307 and went far to preserve the Hospital from any similar assault. Though directed largely against Christian Greek schismatics, it gave the Hospitallers a variety of patently justifiable anti-infidel functions and an independence they had not enjoyed on Cyprus. The resulting prestige was cunningly exploited by the master, Foulques of Villaret, who visited the West and raised a papal–Hospitaller crusade which sailed from Italy in 1310 under the master’s command and made conquests against the Turks on the Anatolian mainland. After 1312 the Hospital was occupied throughout the West in an extended process of securing and absorbing the Templars’ enormous landed inheritance which the pope had transferred to it. The Hospital also faced a major financial crisis provoked by its expensive Rhodian campaign and by the extravagances of Foulques of Villaret which led to his deposition in 1317 and to the damaging internal disputes which ensued. The Iberian monarchs were extremely reluctant to accept the fusion of Templar and Hospitaller wealth and strength, arguing persistently that
the Temple had been endowed to sustain a peninsular rather than a Mediterranean reconquest; in Castile much Templar property was usurped by the nobility while new national military orders were created in Valencia and Portugal.