ABSTRACT
The first centuries of Venetian rule in Crete (c. 1210-1669) were surely one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the island. For more than two hundred and fifty years, with a few short periods of respite, Cretan Greeks were engaged in a continuous struggle to drive out their entrenched conquerors. Up to the middle of the fifteenth century no fewer than twelve major uprisings are recorded. It was only after the 1460s that the Venetians were finally able to establish undisputed control over the island. However, neither political and economic measures nor military vigilance was sufficient to secure Venetian domination. The Venetians soon realised that national awareness was closely associated with Orthodoxy, the creed of their Greek-speaking subjects. If the Greeks were to be won over by the Latin Church, this would ensure a greater degree of submission and a much more peaceful coexistence. Thus, from the very beginning the Venetians abolished the Orthodox hierarchy and kept the activities of the lower clergy under tight state control. Such measures were bound to exacerbate the historical animosity between Greeks and Westerners – Italians in particular – and tended to drive a deep psychological wedge between the Venetians and their Cretan subjects. They lived in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and distrust, each attached to their own traditions. Cultural interaction, the merging of Western and Byzantine that was to prove so fruitful later on, is scarcely evident before the fifteenth century, although there are some traces of Western influence, for instance in Cretan frescoes of the second half of the fourteenth century. The Greeks of Crete kept steadfastly to their own culture and continued to look to the declining Byzantine Empire for spiritual guidance and political and military succour. For two centuries after the conquest, the names of the Byzantine emperors continued to be remembered in church inscriptions in the countryside. The strength of the Byzantine tradition had become the moral and spiritual sustenance of the conquered. However, by the end of the fifteenth century Latin culture (but not Latin dogma) had found ways to penetrate slowly but steadily into the urban centres of the island. Of these there were three: the capital, Kastro or Megalo Kastro or Chandakas, as the city of Candia, today’s Heraklion, was called by the Greeks, a large and prosperous town of about 10,000 inhabitants around 1400, Chania (Canea) and Rethymnon (Rettimo). In the Cretan towns Italian culture could and
did take hold much more easily and in a manner more pronounced than in any other Greek-speaking territories occupied by the Venetians or the Genoese. Byzantine influence is clearly discerned in the sphere of education. In Byzantium education was largely associated with the Church. Young men were taught the rudiments by private instructors, usually members of the clergy, or in classes held within monasteries. From the little that is known, the same seems to have been the case among the Greeks of Crete. Private teachers, mainly ecclesiastics, taught in the cities as house-tutors or attracted a small number of students around them. These teachers would sign a contract with the parents and undertake to teach their charges reading and writing. Alongside the private teachers there were monastic schools, especially in the countryside. We have, for example, the case of the monk Athanasios, to whom Demetrios Kydones wrote the following in 1389:
Another learned Cretan monk of the same period is Joseph Philagris, who lived in southern Crete and is termed διδάσκαλος τῆς Κρήτης (‘teacher of Crete’), presumably because of his teaching and preaching in the monasteries of that remote area. Private instructors also taught Latin to both Venetians and Greeks in the cities, for whom the opportunity for more systematic schooling existed in the Latin monasteries. A Uniate Greek, Peter Philargis, who after a brilliant career in Italy and a short spell in Oxford later became Pope Alexander V (1409-1410), received his basic education in the monastery of St Francis of Candia, while Lauro Querini, the Venetian humanist, spent most of his life on the island (1420-1438, 1452-1479). From as early as the middle of the fourteenth century the conditions for studying Greek in Crete must have been quite satisfactory. It was at that time that a Greek of southern Italy came to Crete to study Greek: Leontios Pilatos, the Greek teacher of Petrarch and an acquaintance of Boccaccio. We also know that shortly before 1400 Joseph Philagris taught in southern Crete and compiled a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. Philagris was by no means the only Cretan scholar of the fourteenth century. A number of others are also known, such as Neilos Damilas, who was a theologian in the purest Byzantine vein. In parentheses, recent research indicates that the beginning of Cretan literature in vernacular Greek should be dated much earlier than thought, as far back indeed as the second half of the fourteenth century. During the course of the fifteenth century, there was a conspicuous increase in scholarly activity in Crete, which is certainly related to an improvement in the quality of the education provided. It would seem that the education a gifted student received in both Latin and Greek was, all things considered, of a high order, or at any rate more than adequate. A group of scholars formed around the protopapas (Orthodox archpriest) of Candia, Ioannis Symeonakis, a scholar and a well-known
copyist (who died before 1452). Separately from (or perhaps in conjunction with) their teaching, his circle nurtured antiquarian and literary studies in the Byzantine tradition of the Palaiologan period and at the same time maintained close ties with persons related to the Italian Renaissance. A notable Italian scholar of the Renaissance, Rinuccio Aretino, who was a student of Symeonakis, praises his teacher in no uncertain terms: ‘vir nostrae aetatis litteratissimus, cuius industria, opera et diligentia derivatum est quicquid graecarum litterarum ad nos effluxit’. A one-time member of the Symeonakis circle was probably Georgios Trapezountios (erroneously called George of Trebizond) (1395-1472/3), a major scholar of the early Renaissance, who on his arrival in Italy in 1415, a young man little over twenty and already ‘educatus’, held his own against no less a scholar than Guarino Veronese in a debate on Pindar and Greek metre, and demonstrated an excellent knowledge of Homer, Euripides, Plato, Herodotus and Plutarch. Symeonakis is also the author of a monody on the death of a teacher of Greek in Candia, Konstantinos Mylaios, whom he describes as a good mathematician, grammarian and rhetorician, an excellent instructor of children and a staunch defender of Orthodoxy. Another student of Symeonakis was probably the copyist Michael, writer of the first running commentary on Thucydides, and others. Thucydides must have been read and appreciated in Crete at that time, given the fact that an important branch of the textual tradition of his Histories derives from a copy that goes back to fifteenth-century Crete. The same can be said of the texts of other classical authors, such as Apollonius Rhodius. The importance of the Cretan scriptoria has not yet been fully appreciated. In the words of J.E. Powell (though one might quibble with the accuracy of some of his views): ‘During the second half of the fifteenth century, Crete was what it never had been before and never was to be again, a prime centre of Greek culture.’ In the same context Powell stresses the importance of the role of Byzantine refugees, ‘taking the classics with them not only direct to Italy but also to the Greek island of Crete . . . and there multiplying them at an astonishing rate to earn a living and satisfy the demands of their Italian patrons’. Although most fifteenth-century scholars and copyists were native-born Cretans, there can be little doubt of the role played by learned Byzantine refugees in Crete and of their contribution to the improvement of education and the diffusion of the arts and crafts in Crete. This is borne out by the impressive number of Cretan scholars and copyists who were active during the second half of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century in Crete and Italy. These scholars played a significant part in the dissemination of Greek culture in the West, particularly as teachers of Greek and as editors and printers of Greek texts, and some of them distinguished themselves as noteworthy figures of the Italian Renaissance. Here are some names: Dimitrios Damilas, who published in Milan the first book wholly in Greek in Europe (1474); Zacharias Kalliergis, printer and editor of the Etymologicum Magnum, one of the most exquisitely produced Renaissance books (1499), as well as other texts; Markos Mousouros, ‘the most gifted classical scholar his nation ever produced’, editor of
a host of editiones principes in the Aldine presses and teacher of some of the bestknown Renaissance scholars, including perhaps Erasmus; Dimitrios Doukas, editor of the Greek text of the celebrated Complutensian Polyglot Bible; and Frangiskos Portos, one of the first Greek Protestants, professor of Greek at the University of Geneva and teacher of Carlo Sigonio and Isaac Casaubon. All these men had received their formative education in Crete. Another facet of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Cretan culture that should not be overlooked is the extent of literacy. For instance, in the original notarial acts of an early sixteenth-century notary of Candia, who is also a well-known Renaissance scribe, Emmanuel Gregoropoulos, there are surprisingly few instances of witnesses who were unable to sign their own name. It should be noted that the majority of these people were middle class (mostly merchants), though some were smalltime artisans: carpenters, coopers, tailors and so on. Some of the signatures have obviously been written with difficulty, others with ease, most of them in Greek, a few in Latin and still fewer in Hebrew. This would certainly indicate that at least a knowledge of reading and writing, which presuppose some schooling, was not uncommon, even among the less privileged classes of the urban society of Candia and presumably of the other two cities of the island as well. In the years after the fall of Constantinople, when hopes for liberation and national restoration ceased to be realistic, the gap between the Greek and the Latin communities in Crete became progressively narrower and mutual distrust gradually gave way to greater understanding and cooperation. This development had the effect of multiplying and intensifying the various cultural contacts and exchanges between Crete and Venice. The Venetians, of course, continued to favour the Latin Church, and the Vatican continued to encourage the conversion of the Cretans to Catholicism, especially after the Council of Florence, whose edicts were never fully accepted in Crete. Doctrinal controversies, however, had by now lost their contentiousness. The urban society of late Renaissance Candia and of the other Cretan cities had by and large been freed from the narrow-minded medieval religious fanaticism of the preceding centuries. By the sixteenth century a modus vivendi had been reached on doctrinal matters, the main cause of dispute. The official authorities and the Catholic Church in Crete were content in the belief that the Greeks of the island were abiding by the edicts of the Council of Florence, a belief that overlooked reality. On the other hand, the Orthodox accepted the Catholic bishops not as representatives of the Church of Rome but as religious agents of the Venetian state, and they acknowledged the spiritual jurisdiction of the Catholic hierarchy only on condition that they could appeal to the Venetian authorities against its decisions, which in any case had to conform with Orthodox canon law. In other words, there was a kind of political, and not ecclesiastical, recognition of the Catholic hierarchy by Orthodox Cretans, who in most other respects enjoyed ample freedom, guaranteed by Venice, to practise their religion without interference or hindrance, and also retained the significant right to have their priests ordained by Orthodox bishops outside Crete.
