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Introduction Crete is Greek, despite the variety of imprints on its landscape and population made by Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, and the people of western Europe, the Latins. No one would deny that Cretans speak demotic Greek, or a dialect of it, and have done so for centuries. The legendary ferocity of the Cretan people came to stand for the Greek nation as a whole during the Second World War, when the army of the Third Reich invaded the island and met furious, bloody resistance. The image of Zorba the Greek, jubilantly dancing on the Cretan shoreline, drawn vividly by the Cretan author Nikos Katzanzakis and brought cinematically to life by Cacoyannis, furnished another side ofthe stereotype ofthe quintessential Greek man. Even Eleutheros Venizelos, who became in the early part ofthe twentieth century the first prime minister of a united Greece that included the island, was a Cretan. In the West, and to a certain extent in modern Greece itself, the island ofCrete became a metonym ofthe modern Greek nation. A little less than four centuries before the enosis, the proclamation of the Union of Crete with the mainland issued by the Assembly of Crete in 1908, and well before the founding ofthe Greek state in 1821, the Ottoman Turks had wrenched possession ofthe island from Venice after a protracted war that ended in 1669. In 121 1,458 years before that, Venice sponsored its first settlement of Crete. The Byzantine emperor's grip on the island had already been lost by that date. 1 The so-called Second Byzantine period had lasted for only one hundred and fifty years, from the time that the military general and subsequent emperor Nicephorus II Phocas managed to expel the Muslims, who themselves had previously captured Crete in the midtenth century. Prior to the Muslim period, the first Byzantines, the heirs of the Roman world, ruled the island. Measuring the impact ofconquerors on a conquered people simply by comparing the number ofyears each power's occupation lasted would be to simplify grossly the process whereby people become acculturated to one another. Nevertheless, it gives a twentieth-century student of history pause when the over four and a half centuries ofVenetian rule are placed alongside the three hundred and ninety years of Ottoman rule, the one and a half 2 Introduction centuries oflater Byzantine rule, and the century ofMuslim rule. The pause lengthens with the realization that the Venetian Comune kept possession of the largest Mediterranean island after Sicilyfor nearly fivecenturies, longer than the English held India, Spain held Mexico, or France held Quebec. Consequently, it is not unreasonable, even if rather ahistorical, to wonder why Crete's culture and people do not resemble more than they do italianized Sicily,hispanized Mexico, or anglicized India, whose most evident link to the power that once colonized them is language. Obviously, at least in the caseofCrete, the length ofoccupation does not play an essential role in the process of colonization and acculturation. Otherwise would not the Cretans resemble more closely in their cultural aspect the Venetians? A few years ago, on a warm day in early May, I stood talking with two Greek colleagues, both ofwhom I much admire, in the courtyard ofone of Athens's libraries, well beyond the reach ofthe trafficnoise and shaded from that spring's unusually strong heat. We three were participants in a conference , one of those whose principal aims were to bring together a relatively small group of scholars from around the world to talk about the subject to which most of those attending had devoted their careers, in this case, Latin Greece. As often happens at such gatherings, what was said in conversation outside the conference hall was as instructive as what was formally presented within. One ofthe men with whom I was speaking took collegial exception to a comment I had made during the afternoon's discussion period. The point I had sought to make earlier was in response to the frequent and - so it seemed to me - very vague use ofthe word, "identity;' a concept ill-defined and ill-understood by historians, including myself, if there ever was one. To prompt further thought about the use of"identity;' I proposed half provocatively and half seriously that for the next few years we observe a moratorium on the use of the word itself, in order to force ourselves to explain more precisely what we mean at those moments when it is the easiest word at hand. Afterward, in the...

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