Medieval Greece

Medieval Greece

Greece had an incredibly complex history in the medieval period, from the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 until the fall of Crete to the Turks in the seventeenth century. Before and after this, it had hundreds of years as part of a large and stable empire, the Byzantine and the Ottoman; a fairly stable and slow-changing condition (though not without historical questions, such as the puzzle of when and how exactly the nature of the population changed from Greek to Slav). In between these periods of stability, though, come four and a half centuries of turmoil, incredibly complex political manoeuvring among fragmenting states, all of which is little known in Western European histories.
The diversion of the Fourth Crusade to sack Constantinople was one of the more cynical crimes of history. Internal conflicts made the empire an easy target, and the commercial ambition of the Venetians made it a tempting prize to them (and they were organising the transport for the crusade). The capture of Constantinople caused the disintegration of the empire, particularly its European provinces, which had already been carved up among the participants in the Fourth Crusade before it took place. Greece was divided into four or five small states, some still ruled by Greek aristocrats, others taken over by the conquerors and reorganised along Western feudal lines, with the Venetians gainiing many important ports and commercial privileges.

http://www.geocities.com/athens/academy/6422/rev0188.html

Medieval Greece

Medieval Greece

The history of the medieval period in Greece is extremely confusing. With the power of the Byzantine Empire partially broken and in rapid decline various foreign and Greek groups fought to control localised fiefdoms. It is not my intention to even attempt to put together any sort of synopsis - other writers have done much better than I could. Hetherington has as clear an overview as is possible in the early part of his Byzantine & Medieval Greece, Cheetham's Medieval Greece is a good longer academic narrative and Lock's The Franks in the Aegean is an excellent contemporary take on the period and has a useful chronology.
In the mid to late middle ages a mixture of Franks (basically French - but often a long time wandering around the Mediterranean), Italians - primarily Venetians, Pisans and Genoese - and Catalans all made their historical mark on Greece. However the underlying Greek speaking populace remained pretty constant and these conquerors and rulers have left little trace of their occupation save the medieval castles which dot the hilltops and the extremely rare examples of gothic features in churches. Of Frankish culture it is hard to find any traces whatsoever such was the hold of the Orthodox Church on the imaginative horizons of the population. One caveat - to talk of nation states in the medieval period is to project and impose modern ideologies and cultural and ethnic preconceptions back into a past where they would not be recognised.
go to the site:
www.zorbas.de/maniguide/medieval.html