Venice, the Ionian Sea and the Southern Adriatic after the Fourth Crusade
Résumé
The conquest of Constantinople by the Frank and Venetian crusaders in 1204 marked the beginning of a new era for Venice in the Aegean and the Adriatic alike. The Partitio Romanie, the act sharing the spoils of the Byzantine empire between the conquerors attributed most of Byzantium’s former Adriatic possessions to the Venetians. However, Venice was able to secure this new influence in the area only through a process of negotiations with the local powers, most of them established after the collapse of the empire, embodied in a series of diplomatic documents. This chapter examines the range of modalities through which these relations were established and later textual history of the associated documents. The Venetian strategy initially achieved only limited success; however the preservation of the texts of those documents later assumed a political and historiographical function which strengthened Venetian ambitions in the Adriatic.