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In the south, Greece was divided among a number of competing political units. After 1204 the dukes of Athens (mostly of French or Italian origin) controlled much of central Greece, with their main base at Thebes. They had political interests to the north and in the Peloponnese. However, in 1311 the Catalan Grand Company established its power over the duchies of Athens and Thebes, turning out their Latin lords. Under the protection of the Aragonese king Frederick II of Sicily (three sons of whom became dukes of Athens), they dominated the region until the Navarrese Company (an army of mercenaries originally hired by Luis of Evreux, brother of Charles II of Navarre, to help assert his claim over Albania and then temporarily in the service of the Hospitallers, a military-monastic order) took Thebes in 1378 or 1379. This weakened Catalan power and opened the way for the Florentine Acciajuoli, lords of Corinth, to take Athens in 1388. The latter then ruled all three regions until their defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in the 1450s.
The Peloponnese
In the Peloponnese the political rivalry between the Byzantines and the Frankish principality of Achaea dominated. The principality was at its most successful under its prince William II Villehardouin (1246–78), but in 1259 he had to cede a number of fortresses, including Mistra, Monemvasiá, and Maina, to the Byzantines. Internecine squabbles weakened resistance to Byzantine pressure, especially from the 1370s onward, when Jacques de Baux hired the Navarrese Company to fight for his claim to the principality. Upon his death in 1383, the Navarrese exercised effective political control over the Frankish territories under the commanders of the company. The last Navarrese prince, Pierre de Saint-Superan, joined the Ottomans in 1401 to raid Byzantine possessions in the southern Peloponnese; he died in 1402. He was succeeded by his widow, Maria Zaccaria, representative of an important Genoese merchant and naval family. She passed the title to her nephew Centurione II Zaccaria, who lost much of the territory to the Byzantine despotate of the Morea. In 1430 he married his daughter to the Byzantine despotēs Thomas Palaeologus, handing over his remaining lands as her dowry. From that time on, the Byzantine despotate of the Morea effectively controlled most of the Peloponnese. However, the Ottoman presence and the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 effectively ended that final period of Byzantine rule. The Morea resisted Ottoman conquest until 1460, when it was finally incorporated into the Ottoman Empire (a year earlier than the empire of Trebizond, which fell in 1461). All of Greece was by that time under Ottoman authority, with the exception of some of the islands, which retained a tenuous independence under Venetian or Genoese protection.
Serbian and Ottoman advances
Byzantine power in the northern Greek regions was effectively destroyed by the expansion of the Serbian empire under Stefan Dušan, the results of which included the loss of Epirus, Thessaly, and eastern Macedonia. From the 1350s the Ottomans established themselves in Europe, taking the chief towns of Thrace in the 1360s and Thessalonica in 1387. Apart from the despotate of the Morea, therefore, and certain of the Aegean isles, there remained in Greece no Byzantine imperial possessions by the beginning of the 15th century.
The islands
A particularly complex picture is represented by the islands, which were a focus for the activities of the Seljuqs and later the Ottomans, the Venetians and Genoese, and the Byzantines. Following the Fourth Crusade, much of the southern part of the Aegean came under Venetian authority, and, although Byzantine power was restored for a while in the late 13th century, Náxos (Náchos) remained the centre of the Latin duchy of the Archipelago, established in 1207 among the Cyclades by Marco Sanudo, a relative of the Venetian doge, or magistrate, with a body of plundering merchants and nobles. Initially under the overlordship of the Latin emperor at Constantinople, the duchy later transferred its allegiance to Achaea in 1261 and to Naples in 1267, although Venice also claimed suzerainty. The Sanudo family was replaced in 1383 by the Lombard Crispi family, which retained its independence until 1566. At that time the duchy was conquered by the Ottomans, although it was ruled by an appointee of the sultan until 1579, when it was properly incorporated into the state.
The remaining islands were held at different times by the Venetians, the Genoese, the Hospitallers, and the Turks. Rhodes played a particular role in the history of the Hospitallers’ opposition to the Ottomans. Until the early 13th century the island had been in the hands of a succession of Italian adventurers, most of whom acknowledged the overlordship of the emperor at Nicaea. In 1308 the Hospitallers took control, having been based on Cyprus since 1291, the time of their expulsion from the Holy Land. Rhodes fell in 1523, when the Hospitallers were permitted to remove to Malta. Of the northern Aegean islands, Lemnos remained Byzantine until 1453 before coming for a while under the rule of the Gattilusi of Lésbos, whose independence of the Ottomans ended in 1462. In 1460 it was awarded to Demetrius Palaeologus, formerly despotēs of the Morea, along with the island of Thasos (the latter having come under Ottoman domination in 1455). In 1479 it was occupied by Ottoman forces and officially incorporated into the Ottoman state. Other islands had equally checkered histories. Náxos and Chíos (Khíos) fell in 1566, although complete Ottoman control was not achieved until 1715, when Tenedos, which remained under Venetian control until that year, was taken.
The real exception to the Ottoman success in the Aegean, however, was Crete. Separately administered until the 820s, when it was seized by Spanish Arabs, it was conquered in 961 by the general and later Byzantine emperor Nicephoros II Phocas. After 1204 it was handed over to Boniface of Montferrat, who proceeded to sell it to Venice. Although oppressive and unpopular, Venetian rule witnessed the evolution of a flourishing Italo-Hellenic literary and political culture. After a long siege of Candia (now Irákleio) and the creation and collapse of temporary alliances between Venice and various Western powers on the one hand and the Ottomans and their supporters on the other, the island passed into Ottoman hands in 1669.
Economic and social developments
In spite of the political instability after 1204, Greece seems to have experienced relative prosperity in the later Byzantine period. Population expansion accompanied an increase in production as marginal lands were brought under cultivation, and trade with major and minor Italian mercantile centres flourished. Although hostility at the level of state politics was endemic, social relations between the ruling elites of Byzantine- and Latin-dominated areas were not mutually exclusive. Intermarriage was not uncommon, and a certain way of life seems to have evolved. This contrasted with the attitude of the peasantry and the ordinary population, whose perceptions were shaped by the Orthodox church, Greek or Byzantine (“Roman”) identity, and hostility to the Western church and its ways. The Ottoman conquest was not seen as necessarily worse than Latin domination. In some cases it was certainly welcomed as less oppressive.
John Frederick HaldonCultural continuity
The history of medieval Greece has played an important part in attempts to understand the relationship between ancient and modern Greece. The issue of the continuity between ancient and modern Greeks has been an extremely controversial one, in both scholarly and political contexts. The claim that modern Greeks are the direct cultural and biological descendants of the “ancient Hellenes” has long been a central tenet of the national ideology on which the Greek state was founded. Scholars such as the Austrian-born 19th-century German historian Jakob Fallmerayer argued that, as a result of the large Slav and Albanian invasions during the medieval period, the latter-day population of Greece could not be entirely of Greek “racial” origin. Greek scholars in such diverse disciplines as archaeology, linguistics, folklore, and history have attempted to identify “survivals” from ancient Greek culture that can still be found in its modern counterpart. Although there certainly are significant similarities that demonstrate continuities in some aspects of Greek culture, there are also equally important differences that demonstrate discontinuities in other aspects of Greek culture. Unfortunately, scholarship on this issue has often been overshadowed by nationalist and romantic political agendas of Greeks and non-Greeks alike.
The Slavs
From the late 6th to the 8th century, a large number of Slavs entered what is now Greece. Although the evidence of place-names suggests some lasting Slavic influence in parts of Greece, it is qualified by the fact that the process of re-Hellenization that occurred from the later 8th century seems to have eradicated many traces of Slavic presence. Evidence of tribal names found in both the Peloponnese and northern Greece suggests that there were probably extensive Slavic-speaking populations in many districts, and from the 10th to the 15th century Slavic occupants of various parts of the Peloponnese appear in sources as plunderers or as fiercely independent warriors. Whereas the Slavs of the south appear to have adopted Greek, those of Macedonia and Thessaly retained their original dialects, becoming only partially Hellenophone in certain districts.
The Albanians
The Albanians in the 14th century began to advance into Greece’s western coastal plain, where they served both Byzantine and Serbian overlords and ruled independently under various warlords and chiefly families. They were also present in considerable numbers in Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica (Attikí), and the Peloponnese, serving as soldiers and farmers and colonizing deserted lands. Albanians arrived in large numbers in the Peloponnese during the reign of the despotēs Manuel Kantakouzenos, who brought them there to serve as soldiers and to resettle depopulated regions. The reason for their migration to these areas remains debated. These early Albanian-speaking settlers constitute a group distinct from the economic migrants from Albania, who settled in Greece in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and who are simply known as “Albanians” (Greek: Alvanoi).
The Aromani (Aromanians)
The Aromani (Vlachs) played an important role in central and southern Thessaly. They have generally been identified with the indigenous pre-Slav populations of Dacian and Thracian origin, many of whom migrated into the less-accessible mountainous areas of Greece and the northern Balkan region because of the Germanic and Avar-Slav invasions and immigration of the 5th–7th century. The Aromani maintained a transhumant pastoral economy in those areas. Their language belongs to the so-called Macedo-Romanian group and is closely related to that known from the 13th century on as Romanian (Daco-Romanian). It is essentially rooted in late Latin but heavily influenced by the Slavic dialects with which the Daco-Thracian populations were in regular contact. By the 11th century the Aromani are described as communities of shepherds who moved with their flocks between their winter pastures in Thessaly and summer pastures in Mount Gramoz and the Pindus range. They are found in Byzantine armies and are mentioned in many documents dealing with landholdings in northern Greece, where—as is often the case in relations between settled and nomadic populations—they were regarded as troublemakers and thieves. Byzantines were often imprecise in their use of ethnic names, and the Aromani seem frequently to have been confused with the Bulgarians, through whose territory they also wandered on their seasonal routes and pasturage. A major modern debate about the role of the Aromani in the establishment of the second Bulgarian empire after 1185 continues and is strongly marked by nationalist sentiment.
Emerging Greek identity
As the Byzantine Empire declined, the predominant role of Greek culture, literature, and language became more apparent. For Christians of the early and middle Byzantine worlds, the terms Hellene and Hellenic generally (although not exclusively, since in certain literary contexts a classicizing style permitted a somewhat different usage) had a negative connotation, signifying pagan and non-Christian rather than “Greek.” From the 12th century, however, in the context of increasing conflict with western European culture on the one hand and the encroaching Turkish powers on the other, that situation changed. Gradually, a more self-consciously Greek consciousness began to develop, and a greater interest in “Hellenic” culture in a positive sense eventually evolved. Byzantines began to refer to themselves not just as “Romioi” (literally, “Roman,” referring to members of the Eastern Roman [that is, Byzantine] Empire). In the decades prior to the Greek War of Independence, the Greeks began to identify themselves as “Hellenes” and assert their identity with the ancient Hellenic world. Among learned circles a deep interest in the Classical past was cultivated. Although there was a powerful secularist tradition in this, culminating in the ideas of the Neoplatonic Byzantine philosopher George Gemistus Plethon, who argued for the implementation of the political-philosophical system outlined in Plato’s Republic, it was the combination of popular Orthodoxy (and strongly anti-Western ecclesiastical sentiment) with a specifically Greek identity that shaped the Byzantines’ notions of themselves in the twilight years of the empire. With the political extinction of the empire, it was the Greek Orthodox Church and the Greek-language community, in both “Greece” and Asia Minor, that continued to cultivate this identity as well as the ideology of a Byzantine imperial heritage rooted in both the Roman and the Classical Greek past.
John Frederick Haldon Loring Danforth The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica