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The Fall of Candia
equipment. Foscarini describes how at the biennial parade of the feudarchs
at Candia, the so-called knight would borrow a horse from a
friend, and send some farm-labourer into the parade, ignorant of the
arts of horsemanship and of bearing arms; the crowd would run to see
this ridiculous spectacle, and pelt the riders with stones and rotten
oranges. Such knights, now totally Hellenized, recalled their origin only
by their resounding Latin names; Dandolo, Cornaro, Venier, Grmiani,
Sanudo and the rest.
Those fiefs assigned to Cretans were no better. The fiefs had originally
been granted to the aristocrats of Crete, the archontopouli. But this
privileged class had increased; in 1573 there were four hundred wellattested
descendants of the archontopouli entitled to call themselves
feudarchs. But the number of fiefs remained the same, thirty-five.
Hence a subdivision, of the fiefs, and those bitter rivalries among the
impoverished Cretan aristocrats which led to blood-feuds like that
between the Pateroi of Sphakia and the Papadopouloi of Rethymnon;
a feud bitter and destructive, for the Pateroi’s descents to the lowlands
caused enough damage to invite Cavalli’s punitive expedition of 1571.
It was not only the Cretan feudarchs whose numbers had swelled.
Signal service to the Republic earned its reward: either elevation to the
Cretan nobility, or for the very few, like the Kallergis family, to the
nobility of Venice itself. With the passage of time it had become possible
to buy one’s admission to the ‘Nobilitas Cretensis’, Substantial privileges,
too (exemption from service in the galleys or on the coastal
fortifications), had been distributed recklessly, sometimes even to serfs
or to whole communities, which therefore attracted the inhabitants of
other villages. The balance of the population was thus affected.
The peasants, contadini, were the ones who stood to suffer from the
feudal system and from every abuse of it. Liable for service on land
and sea, exploited by the feudarchs at home; living, most of them, in
the words of Corner, ‘without bread, with only olives, carobs and
water’. Foscarini reports that the Venetian cavalieri had reduced the
peasants to a condition worse than that of slaves, so that they dared not
even complain of any injustice. They were tyrannized in such a manner
that all their produce was appropriated by the knights. ‘Sono di piu i
contadini obligati et aggravati di tante altre angarie che cosa incredibile’ The
angarie are compulsory services.
Such was the state of Crete revealed by Foscarini. Without energetic
reform the island would be like a rotten fruit ready to fall into the lap
of the waiting Turks. Foscarini did what he could. He purged the
catalogue of feudarchs, made military service compulsory again, and
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