The expansion of military and commercial populations from Western Europe is the product of a medium-term cycle of recovery and growth there from the ninth to thirteenth centuries AD, after the traumas associated with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The eruption into Greece was anticipated by Norman colonization of Southern Italy, whilst Germanic and Scandinavian warriors and traders were active in settling and trading into Slavic Central and Eastern Europe. A particular extra element for the Aegean was the early capitalist commercial impact on the region from neighboring Italy. Climatic improvements in the same period (“The Early Medieval Warm Era”) are also linked to demographic growth in Western Europe. The fourteenth-century population decline is a general European phenomenon too, combining a phase of climatic deterioration, ecological problems due to over-exploitation of land, and increasing civil and foreign warfare. In the long term, the Byzantine-Frankish rise and decline is part of an agrarian demographic and economic cycle seen as characteristic for pre-industrial European mixed-farming populations (Ladurie and Goy 1982). Only one clear element sets this cycle apart, and that is the first development of Italian commercial states, which begin to create new mentalities and conditions of life in the Aegean during this period, and lastingly in the regions where Venice maintains control into the post-Medieval era. For the short term, the temporary capture of Constantinople by the Franks and their conquest of large areas of Greece appear less significant in the framework of the already advanced domination of the Byzantine economy by Italian commercial interests. Cultural mergers make a similar point, as does the convergence of Byzantine semi-feudalism with the full Frankish form for Greek peasantries. A clearer historical disruption is formed by the relentless rise of Turkish states in Anatolia. The weakness of the hinge region of Greece and the Balkans between powerful Islamic states and similarly strong Christian states further west meant that the fate of this area was unpredictable. In fact the decisive division of power was to be set in the Adriatic, so that only the Ionian Islands remained beyond Islamic control.
World History
