As we have noted earlier, despite the recorded shrinkage of the Byzantine capital during the Late Byzantine era, and the catastrophic contraction of the Empire due to the settlement of the Franks and the Ottoman Turks, those villages which we have studied in Boeotia and which came under Frankish rule from the early thirteenth century, show no clear decline from the archaeological evidence. If we consider their size and external trade contacts as evidenced in pottery finds, if anything there may be continued growth in rural settlements during the Frankish thirteenth century. As noted by Gregory (2006) here archaeological realities appear to contradict the historical sources, which emphasize warfare and disruption to life in the Aegean of this era. But all this changes drastically during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD.
Although most surface ceramic finds can only be generally dated to a transitional period termed “Late Frankish-Early Turkish,” which covers the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, it is notable that on Greek village sites studied from surface survey in Boeotia, distinctive fourteenth - to fifteenth-century pieces are usually absent, in contrast to those of the thirteenth or sixteenth centuries. This archaeological evidence now goes well with official history of this era, with incessant warfare between the Franks and the Byzantines, both
Figure 19.6 Boeotian settlements in 1466 by ethnicity and size after the Ottoman tax records (translated by Prof. M. Kiel).
J. L. Bintliff, “The two transitions: Current research on the origins of the traditional village in Central Greece.” In J. L. Bintliff and H. Hamerow (eds.), Europe Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Oxford 1995, 111—130, Figure 11.
Against the marauding Turks, and fighting too between different Frankish armies. In 1311 for example, a mercenary army of Catalans wiped out the majority of the established French nobility of Central Greece and assumed their fiefs. Even more destructive was the European-wide eruption of the Great Plague from the 1340s onwards, which may have killed up to one half of urban and rural population in its recurrent outbreaks. Meanwhile, Ottoman Turkish raids on the coastlands were enslaving rural populations and driving others into more remote upland refuge sites. The famous cliff-top monasteries at Meteora in Thessaly begin in the fourteenth century in a remote environment (Gregory 2006). Excavations at Frankish Corinth also show a total decline in the town during the fourteenth century (MacKay 2003).
Late Byzantine monastery estate-records support fourteenth-century decline (see Chapter 17). Uniquely detailed records of the demographic devastation of this era also come from an unexpected source, the Ottoman Imperial Tax archives (Kiel 1997). One of the earliest of these “defters” comes from 1466, not long after the Ottoman conquest of Greece, and the full effects of the cumulative catastrophic events can be seen in this first preserved Ottoman tax register for the province of Boeotia (Figure 19.6), a kind of “Domesday Book” of Final Medieval Boeotia. The population described as “Orthodox Greek” is confined to the two towns of the province, Thebes and Livadheia, and to a handful of large villages around the Mount Helicon massif (including the tower-site VM4 [“Panaya”] discussed earlier). Elsewhere it is apparent that the landscape has been largely deserted by its Byzantine inhabitants. The nominal authority in Boeotia in the final century before the Ottomans, the Dukes ofAthens andThebes, fully aware of the disastrous consequences of depopulation both on agricultural production and the ability of the Duchy to withstand the threat of Ottoman conquest, invited large-scale immigration into the region by semi-nomadic Albanian clans, who were in any case migrating by force into Southern Greece (Jochalas 1971).
In the 1466 defter the “newly-settled” Albanian (Arnavaudan) clans (as they are usually described, since the process continued under Ottoman encouragement), can be seen as a wide scatter of small semimobile hamlets (katuns). Careful work on the location of these Albanian villages shows that there must have been a deliberate policy to direct the newcomers to locations close to deserted Byzantine-Frankish village sites. Thus in the region in the north-center of the map above Lake Copais, just one tiny Greek village survives in 1466 (Topolya), but we see four small new Albanian hamlets. In the preceding Byzantine-Frankish era our field survey located several Byzantine villages and hamlets near these new colonies. One of the new Albanian foundations, Gjin Vendre, replaces a now-abandoned large Byzantine and Frankish village we termed site CN3, which in turn is a possible replacement for the adjacent ancient city of Hyettos (all three settlements are just a few hundred meters apart). We can assume that the inhabitants of CN3 and nearby Frankish-period hamlets, who may have been descendants of the ancient Hyettos city population, were either enslaved or killed by the natural or human threats of the fourteenth century, or had fled to one of the 1466 refuge “Greek” villages (shown in black). This required almost complete repopulation of the district by immigrants.
At another ancient Boeotian city, Thisbe, the case for a continuity of population on the ancient site, through Byzantine and Frankish times, together with a possible Slav admixture, is also strong (located in the southwest of the map, at the 1466 settlements Kakosi and Dobrena). Here depopulation during final Frankish times was severe but not complete, creating a fascinating settlement scenario. In 1466, next to the now inadequately small “Orthodox Greek” hamlet of Kakosi-Kastorya, which had formerly been a large, long-established and important Byzantine settlement, we find a new Albanian village, Dobrena (a name which may point to an abandoned Slav settlement selected for Albanian colonization). Here it seems the regional authorities, final Franks or the first Ottoman administration, deemed it advisable to boost the shrunken Greek community with new population.
In contrast, at the site of the ancient city ofThespiae, which continued as a village throughout the Byzantine and Frankish era, and where the Frankish lords were an Italian monastic order housed in a prominent tower, neither of the Frankish-period villages located by our survey survived the fourteenth-century crisis. This led to a sponsored recolonization, but onto a hill above the ancient and medieval settlements, by Albanian colonizers, founding the modern village till recently called Zogra Kobili (west of Thebes in the center of the map).
In the available series of villages studied by surface survey in Boeotia, despite the close spacing of Middle Byzantine and Frankish (Late Byzantine) villages, they are mostly small during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Nearly all are then abandoned during the crisis fourteenth century (cf. Figure 17.3b). But if the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are a period of generalized indigenous depopulation, they are clearly also one of a concentration of Greek survivors into large refuge villages, all within the context of disruptive warfare and piracy.
Moreover, if the policy of Albanian repopulation failed to prevent Ottoman conquest of the Southern Mainland during the fifteenth century, both events succeeded in providing a strong basis for the agricultural and demographic recovery once the privations of the Conquest had passed, in which the small number of large Greek refuge villages would prosper exceptionally well, as we shall see.
World History
