Episode 302 - Colonial Occupation

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 302

Colonial Occupation

Today we're going to talk about the Latin occupied parts of Byzantium.

Several listeners asked about this, about why Greece wasn't involved much in the narrative, about how the Latins governed and how the local Romans felt about the occupation.

Let's just remind ourselves which areas were still occupied when Constantinople was captured by Nicaea.

Bordering the territory of Epirus in central Greece is our first Latin lordship, the Duchy of Athens, which controlled the territory of Attica.

To the south you have the Principality of Achaea, which covered all of the Peloponnese, aside from a couple of Venetian ports.

And then you had the Duchy of the Archipelago, which controlled the islands off the coast, now known as the Cyclades.

Next, we have the various Venetian acquisitions, islands and ports like Cephalonia, Zakynthos, and Euboea.

The most significant of these was the island of Crete.

Finally, we shouldn't forget Cyprus, which had essentially been absorbed by Utramir at this point.

It was taken by the armies of the Third Crusade, and so the experience of the Romans living there is worth adding to the mix.

There were, of course, other lands captured by the Latins during this period, but they had all been retaken by Roman forces by 1261.

Most of the places I just listed never will be.

The Greek lands will be absorbed by the Ottomans in the 15th century, Cyprus will remain under Latin rule until the sixteenth century, and Crete will be in Venetian hands until the seventeenth.

What becomes obvious when you locate these places on a map is that they are all directly connected to the sea routes heading east.

All the territory to the north which the Latins had taken was gone.

Roman political organization was too strong for them.

But these lands, constantly in touch with the power of Western Europe and vital to the interests of the Italian trading states, remained in Latin hands.

When looked at like this, it's easier to understand how the crusading project was always likely to engulf Byzantium.

The Romans were in the way of Western European expansion.

Between the sweaty fantasy of Jerusalem and the cold reality of Alexandrian trade, the Latins had to secure their routes eastwards.

The Byzantines, with their claims to universal authority, their alternate vision of Christianity, and their friendly relations with Muslim states, were an awkward member of the club.

It would be better if they were eliminated and a loyal Latin king ran their affairs for them.

It was difficult then for the Byzantines to retake these lands.

Italian ships now dominated the waves, not just physically, but ideologically.

Nicaea had its own navy, but to go to war with Venice over Crete would have been suicidal.

Not only could the Venetians alone do tremendous damage, but any attack on Latin sea lanes would be viewed as a move against Utramir.

The Byzantines could not afford to provoke the papacy.

There was every chance that another crusade would be sent against them.

So Crete and Cyprus were on their own.

Greece, much closer to home, was a different matter.

When the narrative resumes, there will be an attempt to retake some of Greece, but the rugged landscape gives defenders a considerable advantage, and the Latins were too embedded there to be easily removed.

Listeners were interested to know why the lands of Athens and the Peloponnese were absent from much of the narrative.

Their position so far south explains why they weren't an obvious target for Nicaea, but why didn't the Romans of Epirus try to capture lands which bordered their own?

As you know, we have no history written by the Romans of Epirus, so we can only draw conclusions based on their behavior, and the Epirates seem to have been entirely fixated on expanding northwards rather than southwards.

I think we can explain this in several ways.

One is clearly ideological.

For most of the last half century Constantinople was up for grabs, as was Thessaloniki.

For any ambitious Roman that was the obvious direction to expand.

Another reason is geography.

From the plains of Thessaly, the richest area in Epirus, it is easier to advance north than south.

The road onward to the empire's first and second cities are dotted with open plains, while the journey south to Athens requires the traversing of several mountain ranges.

Beyond Athens you'd have to cross the Gulf of Corinth,

a famous choke point which the Latins could defend, and then the Peloponnese beyond that is pretty rugged terrain.

The army of Epirus was usually just a couple of thousand men, not the kind of force that was equipped for serious campaigning.

Even Nicaea, with an army three times that size, lacked the logistical capability to overcome such obstacles easily.

Finally, there is geopolitics.

Once Epirus was established as a sort of state in central Greece, it found a natural modus vivendi with the Latins.

The Epirates wanted to attack the Nicene position in the north, something the Latins were happy to encourage, and so a peaceful border with Athens was in everyone's interests.

A determined effort to conquer the Latin south would have brought Epirus into conflict with the wider Latin world, including the Venetian-occupied ports of Mithoni and Coroni in the southwest of the Peloponnese, ideal points to land enemy troops and drive the Epirates out.

As we just saw, before Constantinople was retaken, the forces of Epirus ended up in alliance with Latin troops to try and stop Nicaea from becoming dominant in the region.

So clearly it was never a priority for the Epirates to try and bring all of Greece under their sway.

Some listeners asked, though, why wasn't Latin Greece a power in its own right?

Why didn't it have an army of 2,000 men and attack Epirus, or Nicaea, or whatever?

The answer there is that the Latins would have to recruit from the local Roman population in order to have a fighting force that size, and they couldn't trust the local Romans.

There's every chance that if they marched Roman troops north into Epirus, those men would have defected defected or turned on their new masters.

An ominous segue into the question, so what was life like in Latin occupied territory?

Those of you who've read Antony Caldellis' new book will know that chapter 31 is called A New France, Colonial Occupation.

In it he argues that the Latin takeover of Roman lands was essentially the beginning of European colonialism, centuries before its more famous appearance on the world stage.

Now, of course, we've seen many occupations in our time together, both by the Romans and against them.

We saw Justinian capture Africa and Italy, we saw the Caliphate lift the eastern provinces from Constantinople, and we saw Byzantium take over Arab, Armenian, and Bulgarian states.

What is it that makes one occupation colonial and another something different?

Professor Caldalez argues that what made this a colonial enterprise were the following factors.

First, the occupying force dismantled the existing political system and replaced it with their own, reducing the native population to second class status.

This was then rigidly enforced by law, ethnic stratification, and prejudice, so that people arriving from Western Europe automatically had more rights and opportunities than any native, regardless of their own status.

Next, the economy of the conquered land was reoriented towards Western European needs, rather than the natural rhythms of the Eastern Mediterranean.

And finally, the enterprise was justified on religious grounds.

The souls of the colonized were now the responsibility of Latin clergy who reported to Rome.

Compromise with local norms was therefore very difficult.

In practice, this meant that the Romans suffered a massive loss of land and wealth.

Huge tracts of the countryside were confiscated and handed over to Latin landlords, reducing many Romans to the status of peasants with little hope of social mobility.

The Latins were not incentivized to convert the locals into Western Europeans, since their superior status was justified by the ethnic and religious division between the two peoples.

This led to a pretty miserable experience for the average Roman.

Humiliation and impoverishment were being coupled with a sense that their subordination was permanent.

Professor Cordellis's analysis is compelling as usual, but I am not here to talk about later European colonialism in any detail, nor am I trying to make moral judgments, though inevitably some may slip through.

What I think his argument captures is the unusual nature of the Latin occupation, the way in which the conquerors kept themselves separate from the locals.

The sense I get is that the Latins didn't really want to be here.

They hadn't actually coveted these lands for their own value.

They were a means to an end.

A safe route to Jerusalem for the Latins, a safe route to Alexandria for the Venetians.

Hopefully you can can see the contrast with most of the conquests we've covered on this podcast.

Justinian's annexation of Africa was presented as a liberation.

The incoming administration tried to restore property which the Vandals had seized to the Roman families who'd been disinherited.

While Basil II's victory over Bulgaria was described by me as more of a corporate takeover,

little changed in the daily life of most Bulgarians, and many of their leading generals moved seamlessly into Roman service.

Yes, Roman administrators and clergy moved in, but all sorts of concessions were offered to pacify the locals.

They were allowed to pay tax in kind, worship in their own language, and were offered the same legal rights as any Roman citizen.

The formation of the Caliphate has elements in common with the Latin takeover.

The Arabs came with a new religion, lived apart from their subjects, and reoriented trade towards the desert rather than the sea.

But they generally left the local systems of tax and justice in place, and after a certain period of time, they did welcome converts and encouraged people to learn Arabic.

Finally, the Byzantine occupation of Arab border towns in the 10th and 11th centuries had a ruthless attitude to religious differences.

Local Muslims were told to either abandon their faith or abandon their homes, but those who remained behind were able to maintain their status and property.

I'm sure many Muslim families were as devastated as the Romans of the 13th century, but the government at Constantinople was offering them a deal:

stay and receive the same rights as everyone else, or leave peacefully.

The Romans under Latin occupation were rarely given such choices.

Again, I don't want to steer too hard towards moral condemnation.

Conquest is always bloody, lives are always ruined, and the new elites always hold themselves apart from those they've captured to some extent.

Nor was Roman administration just to everyone.

Though it was often indifferent to race and background, there were always exceptions.

Jews were treated as second-class citizens throughout the era of the Christian Empire.

So I'm not saying the Latin regimes were more harmful or hateful than others, but what stands out is the efforts made to impose Western ways on the natives to reinforce those differences and to avoid adaption as much as possible.

The damning verdict often rendered on these Latin states is the absence of any popular movement in their favour.

Roman culture survived intact to a degree that it didn't in most comparable occupations in the region.

Far, far more Romans converted to Islam in Anatolia under Seljuk rule than ever converted to the Catholic right.

I think this is a reflection of Latin indifference to Byzantine lands.

Again, this conquest was a means to an end, not a goal in itself.

Those who were attracted to move to Byzantium were often those who had no prospects at home, not always ideal settlers.

The Latins didn't always psychologically commit to their new homes in the way that other conquerors did.

Most of the new Latin states were located on the sea routes.

Sailors arrived every day with news from back home.

Crusading ideology carried with it contempt for anyone who wasn't a Latin Christian.

The derision aimed at Jews and Muslims was now directed against the intransigent Greeks, who stubbornly refused to accept their errors.

Several listeners asked if the Latins Romanized at all, and the answer is generally no.

The Venetians built new town squares modelled after the Piazza San Marco, while the French lords were proud to speak French as well as anyone in Paris and maintained their chivalric manners, at least towards one another.

Onto their Roman subjects they imposed feudal practices, wiping away Roman traditions and replacing them with the laws and customs of Western Europe.

These Latin lords did not want to develop independent traditions, they wanted to be seen as an extension of France or Venice, so that their cousins back home would respect them, aid them, and ideally join them in their new life.

According to Professor Caldellis,

no purer form of feudal relations exists in medieval history than that codified for the principality of Achaia,

i.e., the Peloponnese.

This purity reflects the fact that local norms could be completely erased and a new dynamic established from scratch.

If there was a dispute between two senior lords in Greece, it could be submitted to the French king for adjudication,

while ecclesiastical decisions were sent to Rome for the pontiff's approval.

Pope Honorius III referred to the conquered lands as

virtually a new France,

which, as Professor Cordelles points out, anticipates the naming practices of later European colonies.

The early waves of settlement were littered with abuse and violence, not just from the military elite.

Many clergymen in the West came to Byzantium seeing it as a land of opportunity.

Rather than save souls, many came to escape debt or criminal charges.

Others were just greedy, bad at their jobs or uninterested in the needs of the locals.

The popes did not look kindly on reports of terrible behavior, but there was little they could do from a distance, and it was impossible to enforce a unified policy on the Latin colonists as each territory operated in a different manner to the next.

Cyprus was a particularly sad case for the native population.

Early uprisings against Latin rule were met with massacres, and the island changed ownership several times during this period.

Each time the new Latin rulers would confiscate more and more land to give to their followers.

As Outramir collapsed under Saladin's advance, boatfuls of refugees would appear, all demanding handouts.

The Roman elites largely abandoned the island, leaving the remaining population to be ruthlessly exploited.

A Western bishop who visited in twelve eleven commented that, quote, the Greeks all obey the Franks and pay tribute like slaves.

The vast majority of Cypriot Romans refused to adapt to Catholic norms.

Their clergy would sneak off to Nicaea to be ordained and return to offer Orthodox services.

The Latins did not attempt to force churches in the countryside to change their ways, so this was mostly tolerated, and this allowed Romans who had a dispute to seek out an Orthodox priest to adjudicate matters rather than go anywhere near a Latin court.

A famous Cypriot ascetic, Neophytus the Recluse, had the scene of Christ's betrayal painted at his hermitage.

The soldiers led by Judas were dressed as crusaders, and the

Dogs was written underneath.

There was more organized resistance on Crete.

The locals outnumbered their Venetian masters by at least ten to one, and several uprisings had to be put down by calling in reinforcements.

These bloody conflicts forced the Venetians to offer some concessions.

Property rights and legal freedoms were painfully clawed back, and at least around the capital Candia, there was intermarriage and some cultural mingling.

But as the Venetians were agents of another state, they were never likely to go entirely native.

The most advantageous situation for the Romans was probably in Greece.

Here the Latins were so thin on the ground that they had to make deals with local leaders.

The crusaders admitted the local Roman landowners onto the lowest echelons of the feudal elite.

These Romans demanded that it be put in writing that they need not abandon their faith or give up their lands, and these concessions helped dilute thoughts of insurrection,

as did the building of castles throughout the region.

In Greece we get closest to a new France, with the Latins living amongst their subjects and thus maintaining a closer relationship with them, though again few concessions were made to the legal distinction distinction between a Catholic Latin and a heretical Greek.

In general, Greece seems to have been the most prosperous of the new acquisitions which helped smooth the path of conquest.

New ports popped up to connect local farmers to Italian shipping, and with the elites of Constantinople gone, Greek producers were glad of fresh markets.

In time this disconnected southern Greece from the Roman economy further north, with Byzantine coins increasingly being replaced by Venetian, French, and English currency.

Though these conquests brought new territories under the papacy's jurisdiction, there was a complete failure to convert the Orthodox to Catholic ways.

Outright persecution was rare.

When it did happen, the Romans who were tortured or executed became martyrs to the locals.

The Latin lords were not keen on continuing these practices since it encouraged rebellion.

So Latin clergy would minister to the ruling classes, while Roman priests would be allowed to operate amongst their people.

They were strictly controlled by the Latin bishops, but few were actually forced to adopt Catholic practice.

Roman priests continued to marry and to use leavened bread in the Eucharist.

Antony Caldelles describes this as a don't ask, don't tell approach to the problem.

Latin bishops knew it was fruitless to try and force the issue, but were not keen to report that to Rome.

Of course, the pontiffs were aware of the situation.

They received reports from those passing through.

A Venetian writing a century after the sack of Constantinople conceded that the Latins

were unable to bring the hearts of the people to obey the Church of Rome.

He went on to say that the local Romans cleave to their heresy and are devoted to Greek things,

and that if given the chance, they will express this openly.

Another forty years on, and a Latin who'd visited Constantinople told the Pope bluntly that by this point, doctrinal differences were almost irrelevant.

The Greeks hate the Latins because of all the evils that we have inflicted on them.

Now, of course, as with any occupation, there was some intermingling.

Those Romans who lived and worked with the Latins would end up adopting Latin practices or marrying into the elite, and some Latin lords did learn and appreciate Greek.

Now, over time, the numbers doing this increased dramatically.

It couldn't fail to, since a young Latin princeling would have had Greek servants and Greek playmates surrounding him Greek speaking, I should say Romans, of course.

This is particularly evident in Greece itself, where the Latin aristocracy would have been comfortably bilingual by the end of the thirteenth century.

This has left us a collection of Latin literature which was translated into the local Greek tongue.

This is particularly interesting since it's vernacular Greek, not the classicizing Greek of the texts coming from Nicaea.

In other words, writers like Acropolites or the Emperor Theodore II were trying to write in the style of Thucydides or Xenophon, as most Constantinople historians had always done, whereas the French romances that were being translated into Greek were written in the language of ordinary people.

Professor Caldelles notes that a similar phenomenon took place in Anatolia, where the great Sufi poet Rumi wrote many verses in vernacular Greek.

This is a Muslim from Persia writing out Greek words phonetically in Arabic.

He too was surrounded by so many Greek-speaking Romans that a bilingual elite developed, and he decided to write for this audience in their own language.

His poems include, says Professor Caldellis, all the most vulgar sexual words which the locals used.

So while the Roman elites in Nicaea continued to preserve their high culture, the equivalent of me doing this podcast in Shakespearean English, the elites of the Latin and Turkish bits of Byzantium were actually capturing the spoken language of everyday people.

Both Latin and Turk, by the way, call the local language Romaic, as often as they call it Greek.

And there was no doubt that people in East and West still called themselves Romans.

In legal documents from Cyprus and Crete, the locals have defiantly changed words meaning Greek back to Roman.

While in Greece, where the Romans were a part of the feudal elite, the local records studiously refer to their Greek-speaking subjects as Romans, something which the authorities elsewhere refused to do.

Some listeners asked whether life was better for Romans under the Turks in Anatolia or in occupied Latin territory, and of course the experience of different peoples varies wildly.

I talked about life in Anatolia back in episode 249.

It was certainly easier to become a Seljuk than it was to become a Latin.

Not that it was easy.

To truly adapt one would need to abandon both orthodoxy and your Roman identity, which was never a popular option.

In neither region did the locals convert en masse to the new order during this period, and in neither were there constant violent uprisings.

Where Romans do have a voice, they seem to have found the imposition of Latin practice more hateful than living under a Muslim regime.

The hypocrisy of an alternate Christianity viewed as more loathsome than an alien faith.

But again, that depends on the particular circumstance of each community and individual.

Next time, we're going to talk about the challenges facing the Nicene as they pack their suitcases in preparation for the big move to Constantinople.

And we ask that difficult question: was the Roman Empire back on the map, or was this just another territorial acquisition for the Empire of Nicaea?

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then current base monthly monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.