free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

Roman, Byzantine and Arab Crete
successful. ‘Mais s’étant un peu trop abandonné au plaisir et à la débauche,’
wrote Dapper, ‘aussi bien que ses soldats, s’imaginant que les Sarazins étoient
abatus, et ces derniers aiant un jour été avertis que lui et toutes ses troupes étoient
ensevelis dans le sommeit et dans le vin, . . . ils vinrent fondre sur eux avec tant
d’impétuosité et de furie, qu’ils les taillèrent en pièces.’ Thereafter the Saracens
terrorized the Aegean. It was not until 961 that Byzantium, forced by
the Saracen pirates to reorganize her fleet, recovered Crete. Nicephorus
Phocas subdued the enemy after a ten-month siege, during
which he catapulted the heads of Muslim prisoners over the walls of
Khandak as a grim warning to the defenders. He erected a fortress,
which the Venetians later took over and named Castel Temenc, on the
route from Khandak to the Messara plain. And he reduced the Arabs
to serfs who worked the lands of Cretan masters unless they could
redeem themselves. Then Phocas left, to become emperor two years
later. His campaign marked the beginning of the resurgence of Byzantine
naval power, for Cyprus followed Crete back into the fold, and
Phocas was able to boast to the Italians that he alone disposed of a
really strong fleet. His successors, the warrior Tzimisces and Basil the
Bulgar-slayer, were no less militant.
For Crete, the second period of Byzantine rule was comparatively
uneventful, and so poorly documented that it is impossible to say
whether the establishment of foreign settlements, claimed by some
scholars on the strength of Slavic and Armenian place-names such as
Armenochori and Sklaverochori, ever took place. The second could mean
‘Village of Slaves’ as well as ‘Village of Slavs’. One group of colonists,
however, certainly was sent to stiffen the morale and to undertake the
government of this turbulent island. The Emperor Alexius Comnenus I
sent certain families of Byzantine nobles, endowed with special privileges,
to settle in Crete and constitute an aristocratic ruling class.
Tradition, and late documentary evidence (designed to prove descent
from this élite and therefore suspect of forgery), would have it that these
families were twelve. Not even this is certain. These nobles were called
the archontopouli: chieftains. Their descendants, under many different
names assumed as the families ramified and mingled with the indigenous
Cretans, crop up again and again in the bloody history of the Cretan
revolts.