of Crete’s central role was not immediate. In the aftermath of the purchase of Crete from the Crusader Boniface of Monferrat, Venice saw the island’s obvious economic potential but had not decided on a method of rule. Genoese pirates (or so Venice construed them) easily took most of the island in 1206. The spirit of rivalry awoke the Venetians; they quickly dispatched forces to chase off their sworn nemeses. When Venice finally defeated the Genoese in 1211, it imported settlers, at first predominantly military men, in the following decades.55
Unlike most other holdings in the Stato da mar where feudal barons were allowed to retain control, Venice saw that in order to develop Crete into a central hub of sea power, it needed to retain direct control. To be sure, Cretan land was given in exchange for military service; most of the Greek-speaking rural population lived under feudatories.56 But feudal power was highly limited by the island’s governor, the duke of Crete, who would become the most important colonial representative in the Stato da mar.57 Venice sent its best and brightest to rule its prized possession: a full 25 percent of the men who served in Crete’s top two positions, duke and captain, were also elected to the prestigious Avogaria di Comun, the primary metropolitan court hearing criminal prosecutions from subject territories.58 Others, including Crete’s first duke, Jacopo (Giacomo) Tiepolo (r. 1218–20), rose to the position of Doge of Venice. Venice and Crete, just eighteen days’ sail by ship in brisk summer breezes, remained in sustained contact, and both the metropole and its favored colony were ruled at the top by many of the same patrician administrators.59
In its colony of Crete, Venice aimed to replicate itself, a virtual Venice “Beyond-the-Sea.”60 To a large extent, Crete modeled itself on the lagoon city in developing its roles as “import-export capital” and ship-building center.61 At first, Venice even divided the island into six districts (sestieri), reproducing the very urban structure of the metropole. The inefficiency of this system when applied to Crete, however, led to redistricting by the early fourteenth century.62 As the center of the Mediterranean naval empire, only Crete was outfitted with an arsenal—as in the metropole—in which to build and repair galleys that could be easily dispatched across the region.63
Unlike the city of Venice, Crete provided fertile land that produced staples for export, including grain, wine, fruit, olive oil, and products from the island’s sheep, including cheese, hides, and wool. Venice’s lack of hinterland in this period made basic foodstuffs essential not only for reasons of profit but for feeding the metropole and the Republic’s army.64 But more economically important in the long run, the capital city of Candia was a trade node for goods produced far to the east. The port also served as a hub for Venice’s slave trade from the thirteenth century.65 Until the Fourth Crusade, Crete played a secondary role in Venice’s commerce, as most convoys took the route hugging the Peloponnese toward the Levant. But it would become a key point in the Venetian maritime networks after 1204.66 Its star would rise even higher after the fall of the Crusader States in 1291, when Candia became the chief way station for Venetian vessels, and would hold this honor through much of the fifteenth century.67
A New Social World
While the economic advantages of Crete ensured its status as first colony of the Stato da mar, other considerations made ruling and inhabiting Venetian Crete more complicated. New social realities after 1204 were as important as the redrawn eastern Mediterranean map. Venice had sent Latin-rite settlers from the lagoon to the island, but Crete was no vacuum. Indeed, the maritime holdings were more diverse than Venice’s mainland, or terraferma, territories, both in terms of the multiplicity of languages and religions of the inhabitants and in terms of the complexity of religious interactions especially between Latin and Greek Christians.68
In comparison to the island’s native Greek inhabitants, Venetians would never make up more than a small fraction of the population. Greek speakers, loyal to the idea of Byzantium and dedicated to the Orthodox Church, chafed against their Venetian-speaking, Latin colonial overlords who contributed to the demise of the empire. But more than political resentments, the Greeks and Latins—alongside other minority groups, particularly Jews but also Armenians and others—had to learn each other’s cultural sensibilities, holiday calendars, religious attitudes, and social habits.
For Venice, this called for new approaches to rule. It had to figure out how to be a successful colonial sovereign. Such heterogeneity was not only new for Venice and its government apparatus; the introduction of Venice, its agents and allies, into these colonies actually changed the nature of the dominions too. While the traditional narrative tells of a highly segregated, socially stratified colonial society in which Latins and Greeks did not mix, recent scholarship has shown the untenable nature of such claims.69 Crete’s Latin and Greek Orthodox populations became entangled through an emotional and biological web of marriage and childbearing that makes it difficult to separate the “Greek” and “Latin” strands. The entrée of Latins, particularly the nascent Veneto-Cretan nobility, onto the island began a wave of demographic and cultural shifting that is still not fully understood.70 That Crete served as a locus of interaction between people of different cultures, religions, and ethnicities must inform our understanding of the island and indeed the whole eastern Mediterranean in this period.
The focus on Crete’s Jews in this study allows for a reevaluation of this major social shift. The historiography of Venetian Crete—and indeed the eastern Mediterranean more broadly in its post-1204 context—has tended to characterize the societal reality and its concomitant tensions as a sharp bifurcation, a world of Latin versus Greek that influenced conflicts over politics, language, religion, and social affiliation.71 Scholars have long noticed that the sources produce an enormous amount of information about Jews but have chosen not to frame that group as a central part of the narrative.72 But, in the daily social life of Candia, Jews were a prominent subgroup. Jews and Latins each made up roughly the same percentage of Candia’s demographic—about a thousand people in each community—in comparison to a much larger Greek Orthodox population. In Crete’s social theater, Jews were neither numerically small nor minor in terms of available evidence about them. Expanding the colonial history of Venice so as to embrace the Jews helps delineate the contours of Candiote society more accurately and accounts for a significant amount of evidence that has not heretofore been considered.
This approach also offers a new layer to the ongoing debate over the colonizer/colonized divide, an enduring dichotomy in postcolonial studies that oversimplifies the realities of colonial society.73 Sally McKee broke down the artificial Latin/Greek division in Uncommon Dominion by showing that the social and religious lives of Greeks and Latins intersected and that strict colonial divisions intended to create a formally segregated hierarchy were kept in the breach. Consideration of this Jewish dimension illustrates that other players existed—and that they do not fit neatly within a dichotomous colonial model. Rather, the Jews of Candia were in some ways aligned with the colonized populations: legally they were subjects without citizenship rights, and linguistically they spoke the same Greek as their majority subject neighbors. Yet in other ways they were nested somewhere between the Greek subjects and the Latin colonizers, serving the colonial cause through professional and economic channels, and allying with the Venetian government at important moments (in particular, during anti-Venetian rebellions).74 Thus the position of Jews in Candia’s society offers an alternative view of colonial reality that, instead of comprising two groups existing at opposite poles, consisted of groups that occupied various and variable points on a spectrum in relation to their subject status and colonialism.75
Indeed, the choice to emphasize the colonially inflected position of this Jewish population and the colonial nature of the justice they consumed is meant to situate this study within the apparent “Jewish Imperial Turn” that some scholars of modern colonial societies have recently identified.76 The complexity of Jewish interaction with, and place within, colonial empires has emerged as an urgent scholarly focus among historians of modern Jews. As premodernists become increasingly comfortable, and
