Sanudo Family

The Sanudo family rose to prominence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the Venetian dynasty that established and ruled the duchy of the Archipelago from the Greek island of Naxos. It included the chronicler Marino Sanudo Torsello (d. 1337), a prominent crusading publicist and historian of Latin Greece, as well as his namesake, the historian Marino Sanudo the Younger (d. 1533). The latter kept a very full Diari of events in Venice for a period of thirty-eight years as well as composing Le Vite dei Dogi, both of which are important sources for Venetian history.

The first Sanudo to be recorded by name was a certain John who was one of the signatories to the Treaty of Cit-tanova in 1009. According to the chronicler Andrea Dan-dolo, by the 1170s the family was regarded as one of the noblest of Venice, having possible associations with the ancient family of Candiani, one of the founding families of the city. The Sanudi were well connected in Venetian governing circles and also had established links in the Aegean through Marco Sanudo Constantinopolitani, who may have been the father or the grandfather of Marco Sanudo, the conqueror of the Archipelago. The latter’s mother was a sister of Enrico Dandolo, whose election as doge the family backed in 1192.

Four members of the family were present on the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204). Probably with the support of his uncle, Enrico Dandolo (d. 1207), Marco (d. 1227) embarked on the conquest of the Cyclades, setting up the center of his island duchy on Naxos in 1204-1205 and expelling a Genoese force from Apalire in 1206. Besides Naxos, Marco occupied the islands of Paros, Antiparos, Melos, Siphnos Thermia, Ios, Amorgos, Kimilos, Sikinos, Syra, and Phole-gandros. He was so well established by 1212 that he was able to respond to a call for assistance from the Venetian authorities on Crete to help suppress a rising on that island.

In the third generation, the Sanudi created island lordships on Melos, Nio, Paros, and Syra for their younger sons. Marriage alliances with them allowed other Latin families in Greece to gain material and dynastic interests in the Archipelago. The direct male line of the Sanudi died out in 1362 with the death of Duke Giovanni I. The title passed to his daughter Fiorenza, who, as the widow of Giovanni dalle Carceri, was already the regent of Negroponte. She died in 1371, and the duchy passed to her son Niccolo dalle Carceri, on whose murder in 1388 it passed to the Crispi family.

-Peter Lock

Bibliography

Boffito, Giuseppe, “Nuove lettere di Marino Sanudo il Vecchio,” La Bibliofilia 42 (1940), 321-359.

Kunstmann, Friedrich, “Studien uber Marino Sanudo Torsello

Den Alteren,” Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Historische Klasse 7 (1853), 695-819.

Laiou, Angeliki E., “Marino Sanudo Torsello, Byzantium and the Turks: The Background to the Anti-Turkish League of 1332-34,” Speculum 45 (1970), 374-392.

Lane, Frederic C., Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

Setton, Kenneth, The Papacy and the Levant, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976).

Tyerman, Christopher J., “Marino Sanudo Torsello and the Lost Crusade: Lobbying in the Fourteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982), 57-73.