Research seminar: Hybrids on the Frontier: Power and identity of Italian families in Latin Greece (13th–15th century)

Traditional scholarship focusing on the presence of “Latins” in post-1204 Eastern Mediterranean often frames Italian families that governed parts of this region as either colonial agents imposing foreign rule or outsiders failing to adapt to Greek and Byzantine societies. Such binary interpretations obscure the nuanced strategies of governance, legitimacy, and local integration that these families actually employed.

In my presentation, I revisit these historiographical assumptions by comparing the most notable Italian families—originating from Angevin Naples and its ally, Florence (Acciaiuoli, Tocco, and Buondelmonti), Genoa (Gattilusio, Giustiniani, and Zaccaria), and the Republic of Venice (Arimondo, Quirino, Venier, or Giustinian)—tracing patterns of their dynastic legitimation, mercantile authority, and “state”-backed oligarchic rule across the Adriatic and the Aegean. The comparison of these dynastic, mercantile, and “state”-backed strategies of power highlights the hybridity of the families’ identities. Overall, this hybridity demonstrates that the regions which the families possessed and governed in Latin Greece in the 13th–15th centuries were spaces of negotiation, conditional belonging, and cultural translation, rather than sites of straightforward “colonial” domination. 

Nada Zečević (University of Zagreb) is in Leeds this autumn to work with the International Medieval Congress as coordinator of its special thematic strand on Temporalities for IMC 2026. Nada studied at the Central European University in Budapest. Before joining the University of Zagreb, she was director of the Centre for the Study of the Balkans at Goldsmiths, University of London. Nada’s work focuses on the Balkan Peninsula and Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages. She is one of the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022).