ABSTRACT
The material culture and the household goods of the Rhodian countryman, whose exposed life was very different from that of the protected town dweller, would mostly have been rather simple. Agriculture, especially in vineyards, and animal raising constituted the countryman’s main activities and required the usual implements and beasts. The defining characteristic of indigenous Rhodian country people, and of other countryside Greeks who were immigrants, was surely their deep attachment to their language and their religion. By the fundamental agreement reached when the town surrendered in 1309, the Rhodians acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman pope while retaining their Greek rite and Greek ecclesiastical practice. Especially important were private churches held through a form of iuspatronatus as foundations which had been built and endowed by a family or by an individual, who was sometimes a priest, and which might be inherited by successive generations.
