Stratioti, numbers, horses

Chesepritri* off the coast of Candia, south of Tolo. 
Mid-16th C, redrawn 18th C.

From the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, identified as Poros.

What Albanian word would the French have heard as Chesepritri?  

In January I wrote an entry about how the number 6000 became the definitive number whenever the troop strength of the Morea was estimated.  This works very well, if you take some simplistic calculations.  Sphrantzes said that there were 30,000 Albanians.  Assume half were males, 15,000.  Evidence from various population groups in medieval and pre-modern Greece suggests that from 37-54% were under the age of 14, or 5550-8100.  That  is a very wide range, from 9850 down to 6900 adult males, and if you consider the ones too old or too injured to fight, or those needed to keep an eye on the settlements and herds, 6000 is quite reasonable.

There is one other estimate of stratioti numbers in the Morea to consider.

Chesepritri is the green island, farther down the coast than this suggests. 

The blue is Ropolı/Romvi, the red Daskalo in the bay off Tolo.

Nauplion upside-down. Piri Re'is, 1574 edition of 1520s map. 
Piri Re'is's islands should be rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

In 1465, Jacopo Barbarigo (in charge of Venetian forces in the Venetian-Ottoman war in the Morea) said that the territories of Methoni and Koroni could only support about 150 horses each -- he was having a difficult time getting feed for the stratioti's horses, and many had starved to death.  Although he was stationed in upper Mani, he had to keep most of his forces up in Nauplion territory.

He said he had a total of 1500 stratioti, in addition to the Italian troops. He estimated that there were between 2000 and 3000 stratioti fighting with the Ottoman troops. This would be a total count of 3500-4500 stratioti in the Morea.  What happened to the other 1500-2500?

Στὸ βουνὸ would be my guess, assuming there had been about 6000 earlier.  The Ottomans are only recorded as having one battle in the field with stratioti, and that was in 1423.  Barbarigo gives accounts of one side coming upon the other en route, or an occasional ambush, but all other accounts concern sieges and raiding the countryside.  Stratioti, with horses, did not think much of sieges, from either side.

 Chesepritri more accurately located by GoogleMaps,
triangular plain of Canda right, Nauplion upper left.  

In the Nauplion area, the stratioti had been given the land at Aria and Candia, in the flat triangular plain south-east of the coastal mountains and the narrow road past the bay of Drepanon. (The area produces artichokes today.)  In theory, and following the Byzantine system, stratioti had land on which to support themselves and their families, and otherwise they were paid in loot.  In practice, as Minio found in the summer of 1480, stratioti could not collect their harvest and then pay their harvest taxes, if they had to be armed and on full alert for an Ottoman attack just at harvest time.  Or, as Barbarigo kept trying to explain to Venice, stratioti could not feed themselves if they had been away from home for three years and were always on the move. (For more on stratioti pay, here.)  

This gets us to Chesepritri, the large island in the bay between Tolo and Candia.  The French map emphasizes pastures which are difficult to have confidence in looking at the aerial map of the island.  I do not know how many farm plots and how many horses the plain of Candia could maintain.  This site on horses suggests 1 1/2 acres of good pasture land -- 6 stremmata -- dung-free, per horse.  So I suspect that Chesepritri's pastures provided a home for some of the stratioti's horses, probably the mares and foals, as the others would at times be needed immediately.

Chesepritri itself, showing that the 16th-C map was not too far off.  

Modern houses in just about the same locations, some pasture areas.

* Thanks for the Chesepritri map to Pavlos Plessas, himself from a stratioti family known at the time the original map was made, the Blessi.

Piri Re'is and the Candy-Colored Mountains of the Argolid

Map of the Argolid Peninsula by Piri Re’is.  Before 1540.
(You may need to click on the map to get the whole thing.)

This is Piri Re'is' lovely map of the Argolid. Pierre MacKay transliterated and translated the Ottoman Turkish for me.

Starting in upper left, going down the west coast, then up the east:

- The unlabeled river of Lerna, Arhos/Argos probably Stymphalia above by the pink mountain. 

- Kale-i Anabolu/Fortress of Nauplion on its peninsula.

- The blue-grey island is Ropolı/Romvi, the red Plateia.

- The coast to the right of the little green island is labelled Eski Anabolu/Old Nauplion= Asine. 

- The bottom-left island is Suluca (Water Island) Spetses, with three springs and two ships in port.

- Spetsopoula to the right, with Kavoiskilı/Cape of Dogs marked just above. 

- Up in the large central bay is Fanar/Phanari, below it Kastri.

- Termia/Thermissi the red castle above yellow Çamlıca (Pine Tree Island)/Hydra. 
- Dokos the blue to Hydra's upper left.

[Notice the little dots between the long cape and the little red island indicating shoals and reefs.]

- The square red island is Damala-ı-Venedig.

- Under the blue arrow, Pâtarina. 
- Pink island above the arrow, Satika. 
- Blue island inside circle, Porto Dina.

- In gulf, Atina Körfezi/Gulf of Athens.

Along the base of the mountains, Liva-ı-Mora Mensübdir/Attached to Province of Morea.

- Castle, Kale-i Piade
- On blue mountain to the left, Vilayet-ı Mora/Province of Morea

The double rectangle at the top of the coastline is the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth going up to the pinkish İnebahti Körfezi/Gulf of Nafpaktos.

Corrections and other identifications will be welcomed.

Nauplion and Argos, picture upside-down, text right-side-up.
The big blue island is Ropolı/Romvi, known locally as "the tits of Aphrodite,"
as the image may suggest.  The red island is Daskalo.

 Nauplion and Bourdzi, right-side up.

 If anyone wants a larger copy of the main image, e-mail me.

Argolid Villages, 1700

Grimani shield, "palato d'argento e di rosso di otto pezzi."
Two versions from contemporary maps.

In 1700, the governor-general of the Morea, Francesco Grimani, ordered a census. It mapped territories, listed names, mapped out ownership of properties, and noted what was being grown on every tree. It itemized butcher shops, mills, ovens, shops and ergasteria. It specified whether houses were owned privately or by the state, and whether the roofs were tile or straw.  In recording personal information, the census distinguished between males and females, and grouped them by age: 1-16, 16-30, 30-40, 40-50, 50-60.  Men were vecchi at 60, women were vecchie at 50.

I have already written about the little Nauplion churches discoverable in the census, but what fascinates me now are the profiles of two villages printed in V. Panagiotopoulos, Πληθυσμος καὶ οἰκισμοι τὴς Πελοποννησοῦ, 13os-18os Aiōnas.

These villages are Kato Belesi and Mikro Lalouka.  (Laloukas is still there, east of Argos on the way to Ag. Triada. Can anyone tell me about Kato Belesi?) Between them, they had 30 families.

The sixteen families in Kato Belesi had an average household size of 4.7, with 1.6 children per household.  The fourteen in Mikro Lalouka had an average household size of 3.6 with 1.3 children.  (The current rate in Greece is 1.5.) These figures strongly suggest -- insist -- that parents were strictly controlling their fertility.  Even so, Belesi's children made up 35% of the population, and Lakouka's 40%. In Greece now children are about 15% of the population and in the US 21%.

Various studies of Greek households over time give similar results, and have been extremely assuring in the work I am attempting for the fifteenth century. Liata's numbers from a several Venetian censuses around 1700, give household sizes ranging from 3 to 4.97 , clustering between 3.4 and 3.9. Laiou found a maximum household size of 4.7 in 1300-1 and a minimum of 3.67 in 1338-41, in northern Greece.  Similarly, the percentage of children and adolescents in Kato Belesi and Mikro Lalouka fit Laiou's profiles for the 14th century, and Baxevannis' for the 1907 Peloponessos.

What is so remarkable to me in these village profiles is the extreme variety of domestic configurations they show.  Only two or three simply have the "nuclear" family of two parents and their children, a configuration that really only comes prominent in Western culture in the later 18th century (has anyone written about what a class- and income-related affair this is?), and "official" after 1900.  Because of the way the data is presented, it is sometimes tricky to decide whether or not two people are a married couple, or a parent and adult child, or some other relationship.

Here are some of the villagers of 1700:

Dimitri Rogachi had 5 of the 13 sons in the village. He was in his 40s and his wife in her 30s. Dimo Yianni and his wife, both in their 50s, had 5 girls in their household -- their grandchildren? These are the households in Kato Belesi with the largest number of children. For the other households, only three have 3 children, six have 2, and thirteen have 1. In Lalouka, only two households have 3 children, three have 2,  six have 1.

The widow Maria, in her 50s, had the care of three children. The household of the elderly Kosta Yanni had three children and a woman in her 40s.  Stamati Sochina's household consisted of 1 elderly man, two men and a woman in the 16-30 range -- might these be his two sons and the wife of one? Sotiri "of the widow" was 16-30 and lived with his widowed mother. Papa Giogachi, in his 40s, had a wife in her 30s and two daughters. The elderly Cap' Chiriachi and his slightly younger wife had the care of a child, as did Coglia Tanasi and Panno Sisa and their wives. Troublesome generation-gaps are common.

The household of Yanni Sisa consisted of two girls and a boy, all under 16, and no adults -- this worries me. The largest household, that of Kyriako Manessi, had nine individuals: a boy, two men and two women in the 16-30 range, two men in their 30s, and a couple in their 50s. This looks like three generations with three couples and a child, plus two extra men, but the configuration could be accounted for in other ways. The Manessi household was probably the best-off household in that village.

Each person who uses the Grimani data formulates it in different ways. The tables I am working on from Pangiatopoulos do not specify what kind of roofs these peoples' houses had, or how many olive trees they owned.  I would like to know more about their lives: I suspect they were difficult. I am recalling clichés such as "the short and simple annals of the poor."  The stories of the people of Kato Belesi and Mikro Lalouka were anything but simple.

Grimani shield from the Nauplion walls,
storehouse of Nauplion museum.

For more reading on the Nauplion census, see Ευτυχια Δ. Λιατα, Το Ναυπλιον και η Ενδοχωρα του απο τον 17^ο στον 18^ο αι (Αθηνα, 2002).