Tag: Fourth Crusade

Medieval Greece – A Forgotten World

Project lead of the 2022 project Dating the Medieval Towers of Chalkida, Greece, Dr Andrew Blackler, gives an update on how work on the project has progressed.

Mention the Acropolis to anyone and they will probably immediately identify it with Greece. Yet the Norman invasions of Greece just fifteen years after the battle of Hastings are almost unknown. Few will know too that the magnificent horses adorning St Mark’s Basilica in Venice were pillaged from Constantinople in 1204, and that much of Central Greece and its islands were ruled for nearly three hundred years by a succession of western adventurers from as far away as Catalan Spain, until the region’s annexation by the Ottoman empire at the end of the fifteenth century. This is simply illustrated in the figure below, based on a map of Central Greece by the Venetian cartographer Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti c.1485. at a time when Athens was just a small provincial town whilst Negroponte was a major city.

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Figure 1: Three Centuries of Western Rule

This is the background to the five-year survey of the hinterland of medieval Chalkida (Negroponte) on the island of Evia (Euboea), which I was invited to join by Professor Joanita Vroom of the University of Leiden Dr Alexandra Kostarelli of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Euboea in 2020 – the first major archaeological survey in Greece to focus exclusively on the medieval period. Initially, times were tough as the COVID shutdown and lack of funding restricted our work, but slowly our team established a track record supported by sponsorship from institutions such as the Castle Studies Trust (2022).

This project, in conjunction with the National Centre of Scientific Research laboratory at the University of Athens, undertook the radiocarbon dating of sections of wood taken from within the walls of a group of medieval towers, a ubiquitous feature of the region. It was very successful. For the first time we were able to conclusively prove that the more than one hundred towers, that once stood on the island, were not built immediately after 1204 as part of a colonial process of control and exploitation, but during the fourteenth century, probably to protect local villages against pirate attack from the sea, an endemic problem of the era.

Figure 2: Taking wood samples from a tower, copyright Dr Andrew Blackler

During five years of work over the summer months our team of over thirty specialists and student volunteers has now recorded all the known medieval monuments of the region. Using intensive surface survey techniques and trial excavation trenches, evidence from ceramic, coin, glass, iron, fauna and bone finds is slowly allowing us to reconstruct a picture of the medieval life of the region. Trading links have also been identified east as far as the Black Sea and Palestine, and west to other centres around the Mediterranean. More recently, we have attracted major sponsorship and are now undertaking geophysical surveys to identify structures hidden under the earth, digital reconstruction of selected monuments and have even instituted a second phase of radiocarbon dating. In parallel, specialists have been investigating the medieval archives of the Republic of Venice and Ottoman administrative records held in Istanbul. A detailed report of the results of the first two years’ survey campaigns can be found at https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3293423&journal_code=PHA&download=yes

I will leave you with a final thought: the medieval world, despite the slow pace of travel, was much more inter-connected than people generally believe. Two examples illustrate this. Many know that Harald Hardrada, king of Norway and the last great Viking, invaded England in 1066, and was killed at Stamford Bridge just weeks before the battle of Hastings. Few realise that he made his fortune fighting for over ten years in the elite Byzantine Varangian Guard, and that this had probably helped fund his claim to the Norwegian throne. Recent analysis of finds in the British Museum from Sutton Hoo also suggests that Anglo-Saxon mercenaries were even fighting alongside the Byzantine emperor Justinian in Asia Minor as early as the sixth century. This is the sort of international research that the ‘seed capital’ provided by the Castle Studies Trust has spawned over the last three years.

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The Fourth Crusade: new evidence challenges long-held opinions

The final results are in and Dr Andrew Blackler, project lead for the Dating of the Towers of Chalkida, Greece, reveals the surprising findings of the project we funded in 2022 to try and date the hundreds of towers in the region.

In the autumn of 1204 forces of the Fourth Crusade, fresh from their capture of Constantinople, annexed central Greece. Studies have been undertaken of the major fortifications they constructed, but little is known about the hundreds of towers, which are today a ubiquitous reminder to the modern tourist of the medieval period in the region.

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The traditional interpretation is that they were built by the incoming westerners- the minor nobility – as part of a process of colonisation, to display and impose their power over the local Greek population. Yet, since no scientific study has ever been undertaken, we could not even be sure when they were built, and therefore why they were constructed or by whom – until now.

Figure 1: Map of Central Greece with Survey area on the island of Evia (Euboea)
 and the towers sampled (inset)

Following a two-year research program, funded by the Castle Studies Trust and led by Andrew Blackler, a member of the five-year ‘Hinterland of Medieval Chalkida’ survey, surviving towers in central Greece have now been dated using modern laboratory techniques. In October 2022 a team, including technical staff from the Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology ‘Demokritos’ in Athens and from the Ephorate of Antiquities in Chalkida, took samples of wood and mortar from seven surviving towers on the island of Evia (Euboea). This is the second largest in Greece and runs two hundred kilometres down its eastern seaboard. The island, just seventy kilometres north of Athens, is separated from the mainland by a narrow strait only thirty-nine metres wide, the tidal flows of which even Aristotle failed to solve! Chalkida, its capital, became the Venetian administrative centre (as Negroponte) of its Aegean possessions in 1390 and, following its capture by the Ottomans in 1470, their capital of Central Greece for 350 years until the formation of the modern Greek state.

Figure 2. The ruins of a typical tower (Mistros)image description

All of the towers (walls about 8 x 8 metres and height up to 18 metres) were in an advanced stage of collapse. Samples were taken of the wood inserted to provide internal lateral structural integrity to their walls, and of the mortar used to bind their rough stonework. This ensured that these materials were not part of a more recent repair or renovation, which would have been the case for beams used to support the multiple floors of the towers, but part of the original construction phase. The ten timber samples obtained were then subjected to a process of radiocarbon (14C) dating, whilst the mortar was analysed using optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and other techniques (pXRF and XRD) at the Demokritos laboratory.

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The results have been exceptional. Six towers from different topographic locations (coastal, floodplain, mountain areas) have been dated with 95% certainty to a period between 1270 and 1434. Unfortunately, the accuracy for most samples was only approximately +/- fifty years due to fluctuations in the cosmic concentration of 14C in the earth’s atmosphere caused by solar activity during the fourteenth century: there were therefore two possible dating ranges identified. Two samples were of sufficient quality that, using what is known as ‘wiggle’ analysis, more accurate dating was obtained.

Figure 3. An example of one sample showing the wiggle in the calibration curve, that causes widening of the calibrated ages and splitting of the ranges.

The analysis of the mortar samples also demonstrated that two towers had two phases of construction. It is difficult to know whether this was a deliberate action or simply a reconstruction due to the collapse of the upper levels, given that the region is subject to frequent seismic activity. More importantly, since we could not identify any timber samples for one tower, it was possible to show that the chemical composition of this tower’s mortar was similar to two other towers in its immediate vicinity and thus was possibly also constructed in the fourteenth century.

The general conclusion, therefore, is that all the towers studied were probably built at least a century, or five generations, after the annexation of the region by western forces, and no towers were built immediately after the Crusaders took control. The ’colonial’ interpretation of their role is thus overturned or, at the least, requires reconsideration. Rather, their construction appears to have been a reaction by landowners to increasing instability in the region following invasion of the island by Byzantine forces in the 1270’s, the threat of attack by the mercenary Catalan Company who took control of Thebes and Athens in 1311, and a growing fear of seaborne assault by Turkish corsairs in the fourteenth century.

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