Marco I Sanudo

Marco I Sanudo (died 1227) was a nephew of Venetian doge Enrico Dandolo and was a participant in the Fourth Crusade. In 1207, he gathered a fleet and captured the island of Naxos, laying the foundations of the Duchy of the Archipelago in the Aegean Sea.

In 1209, Marco conquered all the islands remaining outside the parameters of the partition treaty of the Latin Empire. Eventually, however, he received all the islands as a fief of the empire, on comparatively free tenure, from Henry of Flanders. His original title was Duke of the Aegean Sea (Αιγαιον πελαγος). Marco granted all the conquests to his fellow conquerors as fiefs: Marino Dandolo, his cousin, received Andros; Andrew and Jeremiah Ghisi received Tenos, Myconos, and the norther Sporades; John Querini received Astympalaea; Jacob Berozzi received Thera; and Leonardo Foscolo received Anaphi. Naxos, Paros, Melos, Siphnos, Cythnos, and Syros remained in Marco's demesne. Marco was a wise ruler, who had the loyalty of both his Venetian subjects and his Greek and was on happy terms with his own lord, the emperor of Constantinople, who generally left him alone.

Marco died in 1227, two years after Otto de la Roche, the first duke of Athens, departed for France, three years after the Kingdom of Thessalonica collapsed, and a short while before the death of Geoffrey I of Villehardouin, Prince of Achaea. In a very short time, the whole political landscape of Frankish Greece was radically altered.

Sources

• Setton, Kenneth M. (general editor) A History of the Crusades: Volume II — The Later Crusades, 1189 – 1311. Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard, editors. University of Wisconsin Press: Miliwaukee, 1969.