The Latin conquest of Constantinople on 13 April 1204 heralded a new
era in the history of the Byzantine lands, known in the Christian west as
Romania. It dealt a severe blow to the military might, political organisation
and prestige of the empire, furthering and hastening its disintegration –
begun some twenty-five years earlier – and leading to its dismemberment.
In March 1204, about a month before the fall of Constantinople, the leaders
of the crusader armies and the commander of the Venetian army and fleet,
Doge Enrico Dandolo, reached agreement on five major issues: electing a
Latin emperor, the empire’s political regime and military organisation, partitioning
the lands of Romania (the partitio Romaniae) and, finally, electing
a Latin patriarch of Constantinople and other ecclesiastical matters.
On 9 May 1204 Count Baldwin of Flanders was elected emperor, gaining
a quarter of the empire and two imperial palaces in Constantinople.
From his domain the new emperor Baldwin I (1204–5) granted many fiefs
to crusader knights and mounted sergeants. He also assigned to Venice its
share of three-eighths of Constantinople, land outside the City and various
revenues. At this stage only Constantinople was in Latin hands. The difficulties
encountered by the Latins in the conquest of the Byzantine empire,
which was never completed, and the individual expeditions undertaken by
various Latin knights and commoners, as well as by the Venetian state,
prevented systematic implementation of the partition plan. Instead, the
extensive territories occupied by the Latins in the European part of Romania
and many islands in the Aegean became a mosaic of political entities,
many of them small. Most of their rulers were linked to each other within
complex webs of vassalage which changed over time (see below, pp. 765–8,
771).
Boniface ofMontferrat, who had expected to be elected emperor, gained
Thessaloniki from the Venetians, to whom he sold Crete. Although a vassal
of Baldwin I, in 1204 Boniface established an independent kingdom extending
from Thrace to the area of Corinth in central Greece. After conquering
Euboea – called Negroponte by the Latins – in 1205 he granted it first to
a French knight and, following the latter’s death the same year, to three
Veronese noblemen (known as the terciers, or terzieri in Italian). Thereafter,
except for the years 1208–16, the island was divided into three main
feudal units until its wholesale occupation by Venice in 1390.On the Greek
mainland Boniface awarded several small lordships to French and Italian
knights under his suzerainty in Attica and Boeotia. These regions were soon
united within the duchy of Athens under Othon of La Roche, who from
1210/11 also held Argos andNauplion in the Peloponnese fromGeoffrey I of
Villehardouin, the ruler of the Frankish principality of Achaia.1 A few years
earlier, in 1205, Geoffrey andWilliam of Champlitte had jointly begun the
conquest of the Peloponnese and laid the foundations of the principality.
In 1204 or 1205 Marco I Sanudo, nephew of the doge of Venice, established
a duchy in the Aegean with its centre at Naxos, which from 1207 he
held directly from the Latin emperor. In association with fellow Venetians
and foreigners, and with the backing of Venice, Sanudo conquered other
islands in the Cyclades in the same year, which he granted out in fief. Small
lordships were also created elsewhere in the Aegean. Corfu was occupied by
Venice in 1207 and awarded to ten of her citizens, yet lost around 1215 to the
Greek ruler of Epiros,Michael I Angelos Doukas (1205–15). Finally, Venice
extended its sway in 1207 over the two ports ofModon and Coron in southern
Messenia, at the south-western tip of the Peloponnese, and between
1207 and 1211, over the island of Crete (in the face of Genoese opposition).
These were the first colonies of an overseas empire, parts of which were to
survive up to the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Italy in the
last years of the eighteenth century. The extreme political and territorial
fragmentation of Romania in the wake of the Latin conquests was in sharp
contrast to the earlier unity of Byzantium. It accounts to a large extent for
the diversity of the political and social regimes established in Latin Romania,
as well as for the nature and orientation of demographic currents and
economic activity in the region. While the encounter between the Latins
and the overwhelmingly Greek local population generated a break at the
political level, it resulted in continuity and some measure of accommodation
in other spheres.2
World History
