Probable
representation of an archon,
Andreas Pavias, Crucifixion, late 15th
C.
Archons
essentially disappear in 1460 with the Ottoman conquest. The term
was used for Greek merchants and the more-privileged Greek citizens
of Venetian terre, there were no archons in the Byzantine
sense in the Venetian territories, before or after 1460 -- with the
exception of
an Andronikos Palaiologos, and though the Venetians never granted
that title, records indicate that he behaved in the autocratic,
anarchic tradition of the previous generations of archons.
What
archons we can trace in the Morea after 1460 are the men identified
by Venetians as capi, or
kapetanioi.
Recall that Mehmed called Kladas re'is
(head, capo
-- archon).
It is probable that Petro Bua, the Rallades, and the other archons
who moved into the Ottoman system also received that title. The
letters of the Venetian, Jacopo Barbarigo,
provveditor-general
of the Venetian military in 1464-65,
describe elements of the transformation of the archon
class into a mobile and salaried professional military class which
came into its full flower in late fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century Italy with Theodoros Palaiologos and Mercurius Bua.
A
comparison of the list
of twelve archons who gave allegiance to Mehmed, with Barbarigo's
lists, makes the change clear. Twice Barbarigo lists men who he says
are the
leading men of the Morea – homini
da conto, zentilhomini, i molti principali, le persone de i
condition – for
a total of 22 names half Albanian, half Greek. The
small number of names is striking. Where
are the rest of the archons? Doukas
gives a straight-forward explanation as of 1460:
After taking all
of the Peloponnesos, the tyrant installed his own administrators and
governors. Returning to Adrianople, he took with him Demetrios and
his entire household, the palace officials and wealthy nobles from
Achaia and Lakedaimonia and the remaining provinces.
Rallis,
Bua, Kladas, and others reappear by 1462 or 64: they were neither
taken away nor killed off. But this removal, combined with
emigration, is a reasonable and efficient way to explain the
remarkable disappearance of what appears to be very nearly a whole
class of people. Meanwhile, in the Morea Mehmed installed not
only Turkish administrators and governors, but men of quality he had
acquired in previous conquests. The list of timar holders includes a
Russian, an Albanian, two men from Ioannina, brothers from Thessaly,
and individuals from Lamia and Veria. With
a very few exceptions, we lose sight of those Moreotes who might
have been absorbed into the Ottoman land-holding system in the Morea.
Outside the Morea, we know of only two Moreote archons: Matthaios Asan, kefali
of Corinth who surrendered Corinth and arranged for the surrender of
Mistra, was given Ainos, and a military command in Mehmed's Bosnian
campaign. His brother-in-law Demetrios Palaiologos, former Despot of
the Morea, was given Imbros and Lemnos, and half of the income from
Thasos and Samothraki -- a total of 300,000 aspers annually, plus
another 100,000 aspers from Mehmed's treasury.
Barbarigo
calls the men on his lists stratioti,
and says that their support will guarantee Moreote support
for the Venetian effort. Since he calls them both kapetanioi,
and stratioti,
it is not clear what he understands by stratioti.
Twenty years later, stratioti
had become the general term for Greek and Albanian horsemen on
contract and their leaders provisionati
but within the Byzantine system, stratiotai
were the men who held pronias,
or what the Venetians called provisioni.
What we see is a certain number of
large families – Kladas, Bua, Rallis – who formerly had
authority over large areas of land and taxpayers and troops,
continuing within the Venetian system where they primarily commanded
bands of troops. This was wartime and the land they had previously
held was for the most part changing back and forth between Venetian
and Ottoman control. Most of the land in the small Venetian
territories -- Methoni, Koroni, Nauplion, Monemvasia -- was rented
out for growth of cash crops. Some was used as payment for for
stratioti where
they farmed and kept their horses -- they were responsible for their
own food supplies and equipment.
Thus a small number of the landholding class became a professional
salaried military class within the Venetian system. With the Ventian
conquests early in the war, a few kapetanioi
had taken over control of various areas. Manuel Rallis, followed by
his son Michaeli, had taken over Chlemoutsi and Clarentza which had
formerly been under the control of George and John Rallis, their
relatives and first-cousins of the despots. The more specific records
are of landholdings in Mani.
After the
Kladas revolt, with no war at hand, the Venetians had to keep the
kapetanioi
pacified. This is illustrated over and over in the letters of
Bartolomeo Minio who reports his helplessness when kapetanioi
seized extra land they were not supposed to have, and then refused to
pay taxes. The kapetanioi
continued
the anarchic tradition of the archons but they still needed cash and
a protective umbrella. That is what they kept saying – they wanted
to be under the shade of Venice, but they really wanted to do what
they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. Similar pacification
of certain Cretan archons, such as the Kalergis family, had been
necessary for two hundred years.
