Ravano dalle Carceri

Ravano dalle Carceri († 1216 ) was an Italian knight of the fourth crusade and lord of Negroponte ( Euboea ). He came from an influential family from Verona , his brothers Riondello and Enrico officiated as Podestà in Verona and as Bishop of Mantua, respectively .

Life

During the course of the crusade nothing is reported about Ravano, however, like almost all Lombards after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, he may have joined the retinue of Margrave Boniface von Montferrat , who had risen to become King of Thessaloniki . In August 1205, Ravano was one of the three Lombard knights who were appointed by Jacques d'Avesnes to be a three- lord ( terzieri ) of Euboea. While he received the southern third with Karystos , the middle third around Chalkis was given to his relative Gilberto da Verona and the northern third around Oreos was given to Pegoraro dei Pegorari.

After Boniface's death in 1207, the Lombard knights, under the leadership of Oberto von Briandrate, rose against the rule of the child king Demetrius and the supremacy of the Latin emperor Heinrich . Ravano joined this movement. However, the emperor was able to move into Thessaloniki in the spring of 1209 and take Biandrate prisoner, and the lords of Thebes-Athens and Achaia submitted to his sovereignty at the subsequent Parlement of Ravennika . The Lombards demonstratively stayed away from this imperial assembly and holed up in the Kadmeia of Thebes . Ravano himself led unsuccessful negotiations on the Gulf of Volos with the emperor's envoys, Conon de Béthune and Anseau de Cayeux . At the same time he had become the sole lord of Euboea after his overlord Jacques d'Avesnes and Gilbert da Verona died and Pegoraro dei Pegorari had returned to their Italian homeland.

Ravano tried to use the generally uncertain situation to completely break free from the sovereignty of the Latin Empire. In May 1209 he sent his brother, Bishop Enrico of Mantua, to Venice to offer the Maritime Republic sovereignty over Euboea, including extensive trade privileges. The abandonment of the Lombards on the Kadmeia and thus the end of the uprising at the end of May 1209 ruined these plans. Biandrate, who had been released and moved to Evia, tried to win him over to a renewed uprising against the emperor, but he refused after the emperor personally entered Evia for three days. Nevertheless, the past events ushered the dominance of Venice on Euboea, since the trade agreement agreed by Ravano remained in place. In 1211 a Venetian Bailli arrived on the island, which from then on became an important political factor alongside the island ruler, even though the formal sovereignty of the Latin Empire remained.

Under Ravano a Latin church hierarchy was formed on Euboea with four dioceses in Chalkis, Karystos, Zorkon and Avalona, ​​which were subordinate to the Archdiocese of Athens . His personal relationship with the clergy, on the other hand, was tense, mainly because he regularly misappropriated church property. He also tried to reach an arrangement for coexistence with the local Greek Orthodox clergy, but in 1208 the Archbishop of Athens intervened. Because of a relationship with a married nobleman by the name of Isabella, whom he later married, Ravano was finally banned from the church by the archbishop , which was not granted until 1212 by Pope Innocent III. was repealed.

Death and succession

Ravano dalle Carceri died in 1216, from his marriage to Isabella he left behind a daughter named Bertha.

The succession on Euboea turned out to be complicated, not without the help of the Venetian Bailli. The rule on the island was again and now finally divided into three parts, from which Isabella and Bertha received the south (Karystos). The center (Chalkis) went to the brothers Guglielmo and Alberto , who were the sons of the former owner Gilberto da Verona. The north (Oreos) was given to the nephews and adopted sons of Ravano, Rizzardo and Marino . The latter married a daughter of the former owner Pegoraro dei Pegorari.

literature

• John. B. Bury: The Lombards and Venetians in Euboia (1205-1303), in: The Journal of Hellenic Studies 7 (1886), pp. 309-352
• Louis de Mas Latrie: Les Seigneurs tierciers de Négropont , in: Revue de l'Orient latin 1 (Paris, 1893), pp. 413-432
• Kenneth M. Setton, Robert Lee Wolff, Harry W. Hazard: A History of the Crusades, Volume II: The Later Crusades, 1189-1311 (2006)