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I The Colony ofCrete "OUf City's Eyeand Right Hand" IN I 368, POPE URBAN V wrote to the Latin archbishop ofCrete to express his concern that the Greek church in the Venetian colonies was gaining ascendancy over the indigenous populations that Venice ruled. After studying the reports he had received ofGreek priests ministering to those faithful to the rites ofthe Greek church, he instructed the archbishop to invoke the assistance of the Venetian colonial regime in Crete, in order to prevent learned Greeks there from being ordained in any other rites but the Latin ones. For, he wrote, "as we have been pleased to learn, our beloved sons, the doge and the comune of Venice, wield in the island of Crete uncommon dominion over Latins and Greeks." The pope arrived at the heart of the matter concerning the colony's unusual character more easily than most historians have done in hindsight. Venice had established in its Mediterranean possession a regime that fit no ordinary model. It would be anachronistic to ascribe to Urban an insight that only in the present day begins to make sense, now that modern states, their huge apparatus, and their capacity to rule distant territory have long been a reality.Yetcontained in his single observation is a hitherto unnoticed clue to the roots of modern colonization and modern ethnicity. At the heart of the colony's novel character is the role of the Venetian state and its impact on the people it ruled. It shaped the colonial government and, as a consequence , the lives of the island's inhabitants, both Latin and Greek. The pope correctly perceived that Venice exercised a greater dominion over Crete than over any other of the colonies that made up the Venetian overseas empire and than any other state power had achieved thus far. Two principal features that set the colony apart from every Venetianruled territory, including the city of Venice itself, were its size and the distance between the city and the colony. Until it acquired the island in 121 I, the Venetian state had governed no land mass greater than the collection ofone-hundred-odd tiny islands that formed its city and a thin strip of 20 Chapter One ports on the mainland lying along a short arc around the lagoon. Crete was the largest territory the Venetian state would rule until the fifteenth century, when the Comune made its first foray onto terra firma.?No previous experience , except for that acquired in ruling itself, had provided a template for the government ofVenice, when they set about securing and settling Crete. Furthermore, the distance of the island from the metropolis and consequently the time it took to communicate with the island meant that ruling Crete was no mean achievement for a fledgling colonial power. Crete lay approximately a month away by galley from Venice, and so direct rule required a more sophisticated bureaucracy and methods of communication than mere expansion into contiguous territory would have demanded. Prior to the conquest ofCrete, communicatingwith Venice'smerchant community in Constantinople furnished the most comparable experience in long-distance direction of policy." Like Genoa, Aragon, and other commercial powers of its time, Venice during the eleventh century sponsored merchant quarters in foreign cities around the Mediterranean, the most prestigious and powerful of which was located in Constantinople." Although the podesta of the most important Venetian overseas base had to answer to the Senate back in the metropolis, the great distance between the cities, in combination with the importance of Venetian trade in the Byzantine empire, afforded that Venetian magistrate considerable power and autonomy in negotiations with the Byzantine emperor," It has become virtually an axiom in Venetian historiography that the community in the Byzantine capital rivaled the metropolis in importance to Venice's economic health. Its importance did not come without its dangers. The civil servants at work in the Palazzo Ducale overlooking the lagoon must have realized that there were problems inherent in such a community, which was large in comparison to the Venetian communities in other port cities, and distant enough to threaten to slip out of the Senate's control, as indeed the Venetian community in the Byzantine capital had once threatened to do." Implicit and occasionally explicit in all its communications with the community in Constantinople was a reminder that there but for the grace ofthe Senate went the Venetians of Byzantium, and therefore obedience to the mandates issuing from the lagoon was of the highest necessity. Consequently...

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