By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Byzantine reconquest of
1261 had made its mark on Latin expansion in the Aegean and the Balkans.
With the treaty of Nymphaion on 13 March 1261,Michael VIII Palaiologos
(1258–82) granted the Genoese access to the Black Sea. Similar access was
granted to the Venetians in the years that followed, and their principal
conquests since the Fourth Crusade were recognised. A chain of trading
posts and ports of call thus stretched along the main sea routes and was
dominated by the Italian maritime republics; Andronikos II Palaiologos
(1282–1328) had abandoned the maintenance of a Byzantine fleet as too
costly (see above, p. 810). At the heart of this nexus of great trade routes,
leading from Italy to Constantinople and the Black Sea, Cyprus and Lesser
Armenia, Syria and Alexandria, was the Aegean. Control of its coasts and
islands became a vital necessity for the Italian maritime republics and the
object of frantic competition; from this sprang the three ‘colonial’ wars
between Genoa and Venice in the course of the fourteenth century. Their
only result was a de facto carve-up of the Aegean: Venice had the western
and southern coastline, with Messenia, Crete and Negroponte, Genoa the
eastern coasts with Chios, Lesbos and the islands of the northern Aegean,
while the Catalans would disrupt this Italian maritime and commercial
hegemony through their seizure of the duchy of Athens and rapid development
of piracy.1
As a result, the Aegean and the Balkans found themselves part of a
mercantile economy geared to satisfying the needs of the west for foodstuffs
and raw materials. They entered a colonial-style exchange system, receiving
artisanal products from the west – mainly woollen cloths and linen – in
exchange for supplying all that was needed for their manufacture. Local and
regional trade was subordinated to the fluctuations and rhythms of longdistance
trade dominated by the Italians, to whom Greek traders deferred.2
These trends were established in two successive phases over the century
following the restoration of the Byzantine empire in 1261, and we need to
examine these phases before going on to consider the mercantile economy’s
infrastructure, trade routes and commodities.
World History
