The decisive shift in the fortunes of Byzantium was unsurprisingly to come from the West, through an unholy alliance between the ruthless maritime, commercial empire of the Republic ofVenice and a mot-
Crete
Figure 17.5 The fragmented territorial powers of the Aegean in 1402 (Venice, Genoa, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Ottomans). Albanian colonization is also indicated. Residual pockets under Byzantine rule are in black.
Cerigotto
Ley collection of Frankish (mainly French and Italian) barons. The Fourth Crusade diverted its forces from the increasingly difficult war in the Holy Land, where the Crusader states were losing their territories to Islamic armies, to sack a softer target, the capital of another Christian state, Constantinople, in 1204. The conquest of much of Byzantine Greece followed, which was partitioned between major and minor Western feudal lords. Important pockets of Byzantine power under aristocratic families survived: in Epirus the Despotate of Arta under the Angeloi, an imperial statelet at Nicaea in Northwestern Anatolia under the Lascarids, and another on the Black Sea at Trebizond under the Comnenoi. Although the Byzantines recaptured the capital in 1261, expelling the Frankish emperor and establishing their own, final dynasty, the Palaeologi, and although the Peloponnese saw the creation and steady expansion of a Palaeologan satellite province at Mistra, the disintegration of the Byzantine heartland was now irreversible.
The Western Crusaders and their allies the Venetians occupied large areas of Greece, but Serbia and Bulgaria also extended their realms into Byzantine Greece during the fourteenth century. By this time the Turks had occupied most of Anatolia, providing a launching-pad for one of their constituent statelets, the Ottomans (founded by Osman) in the Northwest of the region, to steadily expand Islamic conquest into Greece and the Balkans. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, Byzantine power was confined to the capital and its hinterland, Thessaloniki its second city, some island pockets, and a portion of the Peloponnese centered on Mistra (Figure 17.5).
The capital itself in this “Late Byzantine” era (contemporary to the “Frankish period” in Crusader-occupied Greece, see Chapter 18), degenerated into a series of villages amid ruins and gardens, with perhaps 50,000 occupants remaining from tenth-century estimates of500,000, and its trade largely in the hands of resident Italians. If anything the provincial city ofMistra near ancient Sparta was more prosperous. Despite or perhaps even because of all this (see Chapter 18), a Late Byzantine florescence in art and architecture is attested, with a distinctive style, strongly influential on the emergent Italian Renaissance. In return, Palaeologan architecture incorporates Western features.
Developments in the Late Byzantine town and country
Our knowledge of rural archaeology from historic sources and regional surface survey shows that, despite disruption caused by the Frankish conquest, the progressive infill of the Greek countryside by a dense network of farming villages from the eleventh century onwards does not cease until the fourteenth century. Moreover, although the official sources for political and social history have suggested worsening conditions for Byzantine society in town and country from a highpoint in the eleventh century, the archaeological picture contradicts this, whilst the latter matches local archives such as monastic records, from which trends concerning village numbers and their populations can be inferred. If the central state became terminally weak and its income minimal, the dense villages and numerous towns of the Aegean indicate a parallel, more flourishing image. Clearly rural productivity was high, allowing provincial magnates to live in some style in towns, import fine ceramics and luxuries, and invest in monastic and church endowments. The balance between those towns which were primarily residences to their rentier class and provided local markets and services, and those which were significantly producing industrial products and agricultural surpluses for interregional trade, remains, as we have seen, disputed, but will emerge from increasing archaeological investigations. The failure of a widespread entrepreneurial middle class or assertive artisan class to emerge in the towns, for example stimulating the rise of a more autonomous “communal” politics, seems at present to argue for the former view of urban society. Only Thessaloniki, with an exceptional international role in trade, produces a short-lived emergence of popular power.
Nonetheless, all our sources confirm a general collapse of settlement in both Byzantine and Frankish areas during the fourteenth century. The impact of the Black Death from the mid-fourteenth century is considered to have reduced European populations by a third to a half, whilst Greece’s woes were augmented by constant aggression fTom Byzantium’s enemies over its remaining territories, as well as their own mutual wars (Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, Venetians, Catalans, Navarrese, Florentines, etc.). A similar demographic collapse occurred not only in the two great cities of the Empire but throughout its few other remaining regional towns. This chaos was resolved by the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman armies under Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, linked to the absorption of the Greek Mainland and almost all the Aegean islands, as well as virtually all of the Slav states of the Balkans, into the rapidly-expanding Ottoman Empire. The subsequent “Ottoman Peace” (Pax Ottomanica), offered the opportunity for native Greek populations to recover from the military and economic disasters of the preceding 150 years. Despite being now within an Islamic state, this is remarkably what occurred in the following period up till 1600 AD.
World History
