In the ephemeral overseas world (terre d’outre mer) which medieval Western Christendom won for itself in “the Crusades” at the expense of the moribund [Islamic] Syriac Society and the prematurely decadent Orthodox Christendom [Greece did not fall to an Islamic power until the fifteenth century], the feudal cosmos which the Crusaders created in this new colonial domain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Christian Era actually was swallowed up, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by the new city-state cosmos which had latterly come into being in Italy.
At the time of the original conquests, which were mainly achieved in the First Crusade and in the Fourth, the lion’s share of the conquered territories was parcelled out into feudal principalities, while the Italian maritime city-states, whose sea-power had contributed so much to the success of these joint Italian and Transalpine enterprises, had to content themselves with the acquisition of a number of comparatively small (though commercially and navally important) enclaves. By the end of the story, on the eve of the total extinction of Latin dominion in the Levant at the hands of the ’Osmanlis, the relative extent of the Italian and the Transalpine holdings of Latin territory in the Levant had been completely reversed. In so far as the ci-devant Frankish feudal principalities had not been reconquered by the Orthodox Christians and the Muslims, the remnants had been mostly preserved in virtue of their transfer from incompetent Transalpine to competent Italian hands. The change of régime which this transfer involved was striking; for, in the Frankish principalities overseas, the principles of feudalism had been carried to greater logical extremes, under artificial cultivation, than they had ever attained in their spontaneous growth on their native European soil, whereas the Italian colonial régimes which eventually took their place were anticipations of the modem Western methods of colonial exploitation.
The outstanding example of this process is the history of the Latin Kingdom of Cyprus, which was founded in A.D. 1191-2. As a result of a local conflict which broke out in A.D. 1372 between the Genoese and Venetian colonies in Cyprus, the reigning French dynasty of the House of Lusignan fell foul of the Genoese and was compelled to cede to the Genoese Republic the sovereignty over the port of Famagusta, with a monopoly of the foreign trade of the island. Famagusta was reconquered from the Genoese by the Cypriot Crown in A.D. 1464, but the enfeebled feudal power could only maintain itself by inviting a Venetian protectorate in A.D. 1466; and this protectorate duly led on, in the usual manner of protectorates, to annexation. In the last chapter of its history, from A.D. 1489 until the Ottoman Conquest in 1571, Latin Cyprus was a Venetian colony.
Another example is the Levantine career of the Acciajuoli – a family of Brescian steel-manufacturers who had settled in Florence and taken to banking. In A.D. 1334, Niccolò Acciajuoli, who was the confidential banker of the Angevin Court of Naples, took advantage of his financial and political transactions on behalf of his royal clients in order to acquire estates for himself in the Frankish feudal principality of Achaia. In 1358, Niccolò obtained from the ruling Angevin prince of Achaia the hereditary governorship of Corinth. Niccolò’s sons mortgaged Corinth to their second cousin Nerio Acciajuoli; and in 1385-8 Nerio conquered the Frankish Duchy of Athens (which included Boeotia as well as Attica) from the Catalans, who had conquered it themselves from the French in 1311. The Florentine dominion in Central Greece which was thus established in 1388 lasted until the Turkish annexation of Athens in 1456 and of Thebes in 1460.
A Study of History, Vol III, OUP, 1934 (footnote)
