Appropriately for a colonial expansion into an alien environment, increasingly detailed studies have appeared of the fortified centers of Frankish power, even if we still await modern archaeological and architectural study of the castles to match meticulous holistic monographs such as that for the contemporary Crusader castle of Belmont in the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Harper and Pringle 2000; cf. also Kennedy 1994). But there is a growing body of castle studies, building on older summaries by Bon (1937, 1969) and Andrews (2006 [1953]).This includes a Minnesota University team (Brenningmeyer et al. 1998, Cooper 2002, Coulton 2009), case studies by Burridge (1996), Gregory (1996), Vionis (2006), and the Archi-Med Venetian fortification project (Triposkoufi and Tsitouri 2002). The elaboration of Byzantine strongholds which were contemporary to Frankish states can best be seen in the remarkable ruins of the town and castle of Mistra (the latter originally constructed by the Franks) studied by several Greek scholars since Orlandos in the 1950s (Avramea et al. 2001).
Pringle’s (1989) remarks for the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem serve equally well for Frankish Greece: the fortified centers of power were alien features in the landscape, representing both physically and symbolically the imposition of a foreign military elite upon a largely peasant native population. Frankish strongholds either mark the residences of the major barons (such as Chlemoutsi, the Athenian Acropolis, the Kadmeia at Thebes), or key strategic strongholds for movement by land or sea (such as Acrocorinth or Monemvasia). Contemporary texts allow distinctions between landscapes controlled directly by aristocrats from castles or fortified towns, and those where a few castles of the great lords were surrounded by innumerable towers where their dependent knights or soldiers dominated Greek villages. Attica, centered on Athens, and Boeotia, with its twin towns of Thebes and Livadheia, seem to be typical for the latter, whilst much of the Peloponnese seems organized in the first fashion with many striking castles.
It was formerly assumed that the Attic-Boeotian towers were built to police routes, but careful analysis (Lock 1986, 1996, Langdon 1995) shows otherwise (Figure 19.1). Firstly they are, in contrast to the isolated military watchtowers of Classical-Hellenistic Greece, rarely in very high locations permitting intervisibility with each other, or even commanding wide views in varied directions. Secondly, they are usually associated with an indigenous contemporary village. Their typical design is a two - to three-story rectangular structure with access via a door only at the first or even second floor, reached by a wooden stairway. The ground floor, accessible purely from within through an opening from the first floor, for defensive reasons, is a barrel-vaulted storeroom, whilst the upper floors form the public rooms and private living quarters of the permanent inhabitants. A fighting platform appears at roof level, and in well-preserved cases this is crenellated.
Sources and parallels from Western Europe whence the occupants and the design originated, indicate that these towers housed knights and even men-at-arms (milites), who administered Byzantine villages as fiefs within the lordship of regional barons. The ground-floor stores housed provisions against attack, but more normally contained the tax-dues in various agricultural products from dependent Greek villages. The
• Medieval tower site (3 Frankish centre H Land above 200 meters 0 5 10 15 20 25 km
(For key to the numbering of the sites see the inventory on pages 111—123)
Figure 19.1 Distribution of Frankish-era feudal towers and urban centers in Boeotia. The now destroyed tower on the Athens’ Acropolis is also marked.
P. Lock, “The Frankish towers of Central Greece.” Annual of the British School at Athens 81 (1986), 101—123, Figure 1.
Public rooms were necessary for administration, including judicial procedures, since the feudal elite had wide-ranging legal powers over their peasantry. Much grander versions, but with similar plans, appear as strongpoint-keeps and symbols of power built into the castles of the regional barons (such as that formerly at the entrance to the Athens Acropolis, demolished in 1875, and a survivor lying within the Museum at Thebes).
The intimate ties to local villages can be illustrated by the tower on the approaches to the modern town of Haliartos, in Boeotia. Although lying on the former main road linking the Peloponnese to Northern Greece, its location on a small rise is poorly suited to spot enemy movements, and is invisible to other local towers. Our surface survey around the houses of modern Haliartos revealed a Byzantine, Frankish, and
Early Ottoman village underlying the present town, which the feudal tower looked down onto.
The number of surviving towers in Attica-Boeotia is impressive, despite the destruction of many noted in Early Modern Travelers’ accounts. Our fieldwork argues that Frankish towers control existing Byzantine villages which either survived as settlements from Late Antiquity, or reflect the ninth - to eleventh-century recolonization of the countryside. The major Frankish centers were usually ancient towns, such as Thebes and Livadheia for Boeotia, and elsewhere Corinth and Athens.
The immigrant colonizing power was insecure, not only through the antagonism of the surviving Byzantine forces, but from other potential conquerors in Greece, who proved successful in the case of the Catalan mercenary Grand Company of the early
The Village of VM4 Zaratova-Panaya
In the micro-landscape of the Valley of the Muses (see Figure 8.4), the Frankish impact is dramatic (Bintliff 1996a, Vroom 1999). Early in the thirteenth century, a feudal tower is erected 500 meters from the low-lying Byzantine village of Askra-Zaratova, on a high crag, and concurrently the majority of the villagers were displaced to a hillside immediately below the tower. Papal letters show that the new Catholic bishop, imported by the Franks, remained at Askra, and became the object of predation by
The minor feudal occupier of the tower, a mere “soldier” (miles) rather than a proper knight (Lock 1995). Symptomatic of a class of unscrupulous adventurers who headed East to make their fortunes by exploiting local populations and other colonizers, this tower-holder beat the bishop up and burnt his crops, then calmly proceeded to Thebes to receive mass from the superior bishop! The new village (site VM4) shows a more extensive area than Middle Byzantine Askra, reflecting that continuous expansion of population seen elsewhere, despite increased feudal pressure on villagers.
Fourteenth century, and the Ottoman Turks of the fifteenth century. The towers from which dependent villages were controlled were thus necessarily constructed against raids rather than for comfort. Finding the best location for a tower could mean moving the dependent village a kilometer or more, as happened in the case of Askra-Zaratova, relocated to our site VM4 but still within its definable settlement-chamber (see Box), or at Mount Tsalika in the Peloponnese (Gregory 1996). Where an ancient city site shrank to a Byzantine village, an interval tower of the Classical fortifications could be remodeled into a Frankish tower, seen in Boeotia at Thisbe and Chaeroneia. Near ancient Tanagra in Boeotia, a series of Middle Byzantine villages remain flourishing, from our surface ceramic study, in their Frankish phase. At two at least, a tower was constructed, one through remodeling its existing church.
A more spectacular example of Frankish rural settlement appeared during a severe drought in 1989, which lowered the surface of Boeotian Lake Ylike to levels rarely seen since the nineteenth century. Old reports of a submerged Frankish tower led us to visit the Klimmataria location, where we discovered not only the tower but a contemporary surrounding farm-complex (rather than an indigenous older village), its walls washed clean by the lake and the similarly washed ceramics lying in each room and open space. We were able to make a detailed plan of the site and collect the ceramics in each architectural context (Color Plate 19.1). Parallels can be found for such rural estates from the contemporary Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Ellenblum et al. 1996, Ellenblum 1998) and with an excavated example from the Mesogaia rescue excavations in Attica (Gini-Tsofopoulou 2001). The medieval phase architecture of the site is highlighted in the colors red, light brown, and purple (the last-named is the feudal tower). It consists of a rectangular courtyard, with the small (at least two-story) feudal tower in its western edge. Rectangular rooms, probably only single-story, range the four sides of the court, with an exit to the northeast leading to an outer sector in which a range of three very long rooms, also single-story, project away from the court (stables?). West of the tower there are additional structures, in part built onto Greco-Roman buildings. Following Western feudal custom, the lord’s own share of the land (demesne), separate from the villagers under his control whose surpluses came to him by right, was farmed separately, and perhaps the Klimmataria estate center, far from any known village, represents such a rural focus.
In contrast to the Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem, where large numbers of Frankish peasant villages were established, on the Greek Mainland Byzantine villages provided the base level of the feudal pyramid. Most appear to have stayed in their location, with the parasitical Westerners locating their controlling towers nearby.
Figure 19.2 Castle settlement at Geraki, Peloponnese.
E. Sigalos, Housing in Medieval and Post-Medieval Greece. Oxford 2004, 202.
We already observed in the preceding, Byzantine chapters that indigenous Greek Medieval rural settlements are currently hypothesized for the Mainland to be weakly-structured nucleated villages or hamlets, with dispersed longhouses the norm, rarely more than one story, emphasizing the agricultural activities associated with the house, or sometimes craft production for the community. We are better informed for Frankish-controlled settlement plans, although published examples are mostly settlements associated with feudal fortifications of the small castle or tower variety. In these sites, there may also be a
Defensive enclosure around the whole settlement, reminiscent of the Italian practice of incastellamento, where the lord walled in the dependent villagers, both to protect and to control them. The Frankish tower settlement at Panakton in Boeotia, perhaps only occupied for a few generations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Gerstel et al. 2003) possesses an inner enceinte around the feudal lord’s tower, then a larger outer defense enclosing a dispersed collection of irregularly-aligned longhouses and small rectangular buildings. In the center of the outer settlement is an East-West single-aisle church.
The rugged Frankish-Late Byzantine castle-village of Geraki (Figure 19.2) (Simatou and Christo-doulopoulou 1989-1990, Sigalos 2004) in Laconia in the Peloponnese possesses a more elaborate plan. The lord’s castle dominates with its elevated enceinte, centering on the Aghios Georgios church, with the complex building to its north probably the lord’s residence. Other houses are more typically scattered irregularly around the upper enclosure. In the lower settlement houses are of longhouse or smaller rectangular type, the majority being aligned along the contours of this steep slope. Some longhouses lie across the contours, and on sloping sites this usually indicates that they took advantage of the elevation difference to construct a cellar-floor on the downslope end of the building, creating a “one-and-a-half-story” house. It would be normally suggested that the feudal elite, their retainers, and craft specialists dwelt in the upper settlement, the dependent peasantry in the lower. However it has been suggested that in the outer settlement those houses with extra floors may mark status or wealth divisions within the non-lordly class.
Additional studies of Peloponnesian fortified castle-villages have been published by Burridge (1996: Vardounia), Gregory (1996: Mount Tsalika), and Ince and Ballantyne (2007: Paliochora), the former two constructed by the early Franks, the last-named largely under the control of Venetian feudal lords. In these examples a feudal keep and/or mansions for the elite contrast with simple homes for the dependent peasantry, and site locations are highly defensible. Multiple churches of simple plan seem to be chiefly donated by the elite members of such settlements. An inner, foreign elite enclosure, and external Greek peasant enclosure, recall sites already mentioned and also the castle-village of Kephalos on the Cycladic island of Paros (Vionis 2006).
Although we lack rural open settlement plans for this period, we can probably see their character from those of the lower, indigenous peasant classes attached to feudal strongpoints, since as we have seen, almost all Frankish towers or small castles exploited nearby or immediately adjacent peasant communities. Similar peasant settlement - and house-plans continue to be the norm throughout the Ottoman and Early Modern period. In general, Aegean rural settlement is typically nucleated from Early Byzantine to the end of
Ottoman times, with isolated farms becoming common only in the later nineteenth century AD. Independent rural estate-centers of feudal lords and the wealthy Ottoman landowners were the major exception to this tendency, and perhaps Klimmataria (above) represents an example. The Frankish conquest generally appears to have stimulated even denser rural settlement than previously and also growth in earlier villages. On Crete, survey also indicates that the Venetian impact is associated with a notable increase in population density over Middle Byzantine levels (Nixon et al. 2009).
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