Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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As the center of the Mediterranean naval empire, only Crete was outfitted with an arsenal—as in the metropole—in which to build and repair galleys that could be easily dispatched across the region.63
Unlike the city of Venice, Crete provided fertile land that produced staples for export, including grain, wine, fruit, olive oil, and products from the island’s sheep, including cheese, hides, and wool. Venice’s lack of hinterland in this period made basic foodstuffs essential not only for reasons of profit but for feeding the metropole and the Republic’s army.64 But more economically important in the long run, the capital city of Candia was a trade node for goods produced far to the east. The port also served as a hub for Venice’s slave trade from the thirteenth century.65 Until the Fourth Crusade, Crete played a secondary role in Venice’s commerce, as most convoys took the route hugging the Peloponnese toward the Levant. But it would become a key point in the Venetian maritime networks after 1204.66 Its star would rise even higher after the fall of the Crusader States in 1291, when Candia became the chief way station for Venetian vessels, and would hold this honor through much of the fifteenth century.67
A New Social World
While the economic advantages of Crete ensured its status as first colony of the Stato da mar, other considerations made ruling and inhabiting Venetian Crete more complicated. New social realities after 1204 were as important as the redrawn eastern Mediterranean map. Venice had sent Latin-rite settlers from the lagoon to the island, but Crete was no vacuum. Indeed, the maritime holdings were more diverse than Venice’s mainland, or terraferma, territories, both in terms of the multiplicity of languages and religions of the inhabitants and in terms of the complexity of religious interactions especially between Latin and Greek Christians.68
In comparison to the island’s native Greek inhabitants, Venetians would never make up more than a small fraction of the population. Greek speakers, loyal to the idea of Byzantium and dedicated to the Orthodox Church, chafed against their Venetian-speaking, Latin colonial overlords who contributed to the demise of the empire. But more than political resentments, the Greeks and Latins—alongside other minority groups, particularly Jews but also Armenians and others—had to learn each other’s cultural sensibilities, holiday calendars, religious attitudes, and social habits.
For Venice, this called for new approaches to rule. It had to figure out how to be a successful colonial sovereign. Such heterogeneity was not only new for Venice and its government apparatus; the introduction of Venice, its agents and allies, into these colonies actually changed the nature of the dominions too. While the traditional narrative tells of a highly segregated, socially stratified colonial society in which Latins and Greeks did not mix, recent scholarship has shown the untenable nature of such claims.69 Crete’s Latin and Greek Orthodox populations became entangled through an emotional and biological web of marriage and childbearing that makes it difficult to separate the “Greek” and “Latin” strands. The entrée of Latins, particularly the nascent Veneto-Cretan nobility, onto the island began a wave of demographic and cultural shifting that is still not fully understood.70 That Crete served as a locus of interaction between people of different cultures, religions, and ethnicities must inform our understanding of the island and indeed the whole eastern Mediterranean in this period.
The focus on Crete’s Jews in this study allows for a reevaluation of this major social shift. The historiography of Venetian Crete—and indeed the eastern Mediterranean more broadly in its post-1204 context—has tended to characterize the societal reality and its concomitant tensions as a sharp bifurcation, a world of Latin versus Greek that influenced conflicts over politics, language, religion, and social affiliation.71 Scholars have long noticed that the sources produce an enormous amount of information about Jews but have chosen not to frame that group as a central part of the narrative.72 But, in the daily social life of Candia, Jews were a prominent subgroup. Jews and Latins each made up roughly the same percentage of Candia’s demographic—about a thousand people in each community—in comparison to a much larger Greek Orthodox population. In Crete’s social theater, Jews were neither numerically small nor minor in terms of available evidence about them. Expanding the colonial history of Venice so as to embrace the Jews helps delineate the contours of Candiote society more accurately and accounts for a significant amount of evidence that has not heretofore been considered.
This approach also offers a new layer to the ongoing debate over the colonizer/colonized divide, an enduring dichotomy in postcolonial studies that oversimplifies the realities of colonial society.73 Sally McKee broke down the artificial Latin/Greek division in Uncommon Dominion by showing that the social and religious lives of Greeks and Latins intersected and that strict colonial divisions intended to create a formally segregated hierarchy were kept in the breach. Consideration of this Jewish dimension illustrates that other players existed—and that they do not fit neatly within a dichotomous colonial model. Rather, the Jews of Candia were in some ways aligned with the colonized populations: legally they were subjects without citizenship rights, and linguistically they spoke the same Greek as their majority subject neighbors. Yet in other ways they were nested somewhere between the Greek subjects and the Latin colonizers, serving the colonial cause through professional and economic channels, and allying with the Venetian government at important moments (in particular, during anti-Venetian rebellions).74 Thus the position of Jews in Candia’s society offers an alternative view of colonial reality that, instead of comprising two groups existing at opposite poles, consisted of groups that occupied various and variable points on a spectrum in relation to their subject status and colonialism.75
Indeed, the choice to emphasize the colonially inflected position of this Jewish population and the colonial nature of the justice they consumed is meant to situate this study within the apparent “Jewish Imperial Turn” that some scholars of modern colonial societies have recently identified.76 The complexity of Jewish interaction with, and place within, colonial empires has emerged as an urgent scholarly focus among historians of modern Jews. As premodernists become increasingly comfortable, and even adamant about, using the language of colonialism and the scholarly tools of postcolonial theory, there is no reason to limit the lines of inquiry about colonial Jews to the modern period.77 Moreover, in discerning the uniqueness of Candia—considering why Jewish behavior, local government, and social reality interacted as they did—I argue that a colonial model best explains the evidence. Colonial justice in Candia, and the society it reflects, may not be wholly other than medieval Iberia or northern Italy, but it is dissimilar enough to help explain why Candiote Jews fared differently than their Spanish or northern Italian counterparts. In short, colonial justice is good to think with, despite any limits we may find in applying such a model.
The social and political realities that obtained on colonial Crete, a setting that necessitated real flexibility of governance to accommodate the varying parties, made the island both squarely part of Christendom, a familiar and well-trodden transfer point for galleys and their crews, and something vaguely other, on the edges of “regular” civilization. That this was a common view becomes clear from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron in a story from the Fourth Day of his narrative, in which three sisters from Marseille elope to Crete with their lovers, only to find misery and death instead of love and freedom. For wealthy daughters of strict Marseille merchant society, Crete was a haven where they could live openly with their lovers without social repercussion but still reside safely within a familiar social world, going to banquets and meeting other well-bred young people.78 This fictionalized depiction of Crete as a hub of civilization hovering on the frontier of Christendom indeed maps onto the wider narrative of Venetian Crete. A frontier-like flexibility appears repeatedly in writings on Candia, benefiting Jews and others. Like the frontier societies of medieval Iberia, and indeed like the colonial societies of the early modern period, social complexity and distance from the center of power enabled social mores to adapt and empowered individuals to move beyond their assumed statuses.
But Crete was also a place where justice could be redefined and where rules could be bent, for better or worse.79 Boccaccio himself identified justice as a focus of Cretan governmental policy and believed that the island was a place where arrests and trials were common. He also portrayed the duke himself as an individual located