History of Crete
The history of Crete goes back to the 7th millennium BC, preceding the ancient Minoan civilization by more than four millennia. The Minoan civilization was the first civilization in Europe.
During the Iron Age, Crete developed an Ancient Greece-influenced organization of city-states, then successively became part of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire, an autonomous state, and the modern state of Greece.
Prehistoric Crete
Excavations in South Crete in 2008–2009 revealed stone tools at least 130,000 years old, including bifacial ones of Acheulean type. This was a sensational discovery, as the previously accepted earliest sea crossing in the Mediterranean was thought to occur around 12,000 BC. This suggests that the island may have been visited by archaic humans during the Middle Pleistocene. During the Late Pleistocene, the island was ecologically isolated, and only inhabited by a few mammal species, including deer belonging to the endemic genus Candiacervus, a lineage of mice, a dwarf elephant, the Cretan otter, and the Cretan shrew, as well as the large terrestrial Cretan owl all of which but the shrew are now extinct.Stone tools indicate that the island was inhabited by Mesolithic hunter gatherers during the Early Holocene. The Neolithic begins on Crete around 9000 years Before Present /7000 BC. In the Neolithic period, some of the early influences on the development of Cretan culture arise from the Cyclades and from Egypt; cultural records are written in the undeciphered script known as "Linear A". The archaeological record of Crete includes Minoan palaces, houses, roads, paintings and sculptures. Early Neolithic settlements in Crete include Knossos and Trapeza.
For the earlier times, radiocarbon dating of organic remains and charcoal offers some dates. Based on this, it is thought that Crete was inhabited from about 130,000 years ago, in the Lower Paleolithic, perhaps not continuously, with a Neolithic farming culture from the 7th millennium BC onwards. The first settlers introduced cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs, as well as domesticated cereals and legumes.
Remains of a settlement found under the Bronze Age palace at Knossos date to the 7th millennium BC. Up to now, Knossos remains the only aceramic site. The settlement covered approximately 350,000 square metres. The sparse animal bones contain the above-mentioned domestic species as well as deer, badger, marten and mouse: the extinction of the local megafauna had not left much game behind.
Neolithic pottery is known from Knossos, Lera Cave and Gerani Cave. The Late Neolithic sees a proliferation of sites, pointing to a population increase. In the late Neolithic, the donkey and the rabbit were introduced to the island; deer and agrimi were hunted. The Kri-kri, a feral goat, preserves traits of the early domesticates. Horse, fallow deer and hedgehog are only attested from Minoan times onwards.
Minoan civilization and Mycenaean Period
Crete was the centre of Europe's most ancient civilization, the Minoans. Tablets inscribed in Linear A have been found in numerous sites in Crete, and a few in the Aegean islands. The Minoans established themselves in many islands besides Ancient Crete: secure identifications of Minoan off-island sites include Kea, Kythera, Milos, Rhodes, and above all, Thera.Because of a lack of written records, estimates of the Minoan chronology are based on well-established Minoan pottery styles, which can at points be tied to Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern chronologies by finds away from Crete and clear influences. Archaeologists ever since Sir Arthur Evans have identified and uncovered the palace-complex at Knossos, the most famous Minoan site. Other palace sites in Crete such as Phaistos have uncovered magnificent stone-built, multi-story palaces containing drainage systems, and the queen had a bath and a flushing toilet. The expertise displayed in the hydraulic engineering was of a very high level. There were no defensive walls to the complexes. By the 16th century BC pottery and other remains on the Greek mainland show that the Minoans had far-reaching contacts on the mainland. In the 16th century a major earthquake caused destruction on Crete and on Thera that was swiftly repaired.
Iron Age and Archaic Crete
The collapse of the Mycenaean civilization was followed by the appearance of the first Greek city-states in the 9th century BC and the epics of Homer in the 8th century BC. Some of the Dorian cities that prospered on Crete during those times are Kydonia, Lato, Dreros, Gortyn and Eleutherna.Classical and Hellenistic Crete
In the Classical and Hellenistic period Crete fell into a pattern of combative city-states, harboring pirates. In the late 4th century BC, the aristocratic order began to collapse due to endemic infighting among the elite, and Crete's economy was weakened by prolonged wars between city states. During the 3rd century BC, Gortyn, Kydonia, Lyttos and Polyrrhenia challenged the primacy of ancient Knossos.While the cities continued to prey upon one another, they invited into their feuds mainland powers like Macedon and its rivals Rhodes and Ptolemaic Egypt. In 220 BC the island was tormented by a war between two coalitions of cities. As a result, the Macedonian king Philip V gained hegemony over Crete which lasted to the end of the Cretan War, when the Rhodians opposed the rise of Macedon and the Romans started to interfere in Cretan affairs. In the 2nd century BC Ierapytna gained supremacy on eastern Crete.
Roman, Byzantine, and Arab Crete
, ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus in northern Anatolia, waged war against the Roman Republic in the year 88 BC in order to halt the advance of Roman hegemony in the Aegean Sea region. Mithridates VI sought to dominate Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, waging several hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful wars to break Roman dominion over Asia and the Hellenic world. He has been called the greatest ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus.Since 133 BC western and central Anatolia had been under Roman control, but Hellenistic culture remained predominant. On the pretext that Knossos was backing Mithridates VI, Marcus Antonius Creticus attacked Crete in 71 BC and was repelled. Rome sent Quintus Caecilius Metellus with three legions to the island. After a ferocious three-year campaign, Crete was conquered by the Roman army in 69 BC, earning the commander Metellus the agnomen "Creticus". At the archaeological sites, there seems to be little evidence of widespread damage associated with the transfer to Roman power: a single palatial house complex seems to have been razed. Gortyn seems to have been pro-Roman and was rewarded by being made the capital of the joint Roman province of Crete and Cyrenaica.
Further annexations by Rome, in particular of the Kingdom of Pontus by Pompey, brought all of Anatolia under Roman control, except for the southeastern frontier with the Parthian Empire, which would remain unstable for centuries, causing a series of military conflicts that culminated in the Roman–Parthian Wars. Gortyn was the site of the largest Christian basilica on Crete, the Basilica of Saint Titus, dedicated to the first Christian bishop in Crete, to whom the Apostle Paul addressed one of his epistles. The church was founded in the 1st century AD. The island of Crete continued to be a province of the Eastern Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Byzantine Empire, a quiet cultural backwater, until it fell into the hands of Andalusian Muslims under Abu Hafs in the years 820s AD, who established a piratical emirate on the island. The archbishop Cyril of Gortyn was killed and the city so thoroughly devastated it was never reoccupied. Candia, a city built by the Andalusian Muslims, was made capital of the island instead.
The Emirate of Crete became a center of Muslim piratical activity in the Aegean Sea, and a thorn in Byzantium's side. Successive campaigns to recover the island failed until the Byzantine reconquest of Crete in 961 AD, when the Byzantine Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas defeated and expelled the Muslim Arabs and Berbers from Crete for the Byzantine Empire, and made the island into a theme.
The Byzantine Greeks held power over the island until the Fourth Crusade. In its aftermath, possession of the island was disputed between the Italian maritime republics of Genoa and Venice, with the latter eventually solidifying their control by 1212. Despite frequent revolts by the native population, the Venetians retained the island until 1669, when the Ottoman Empire took possession of it.
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Venetian Crete (1205–1669)
The most important of the many rebellions that broke out during that period was the one known as the revolt of St. Titus. It occurred in 1363, when indigenous Cretans and Venetian settlers exasperated by the hard tax policy exercised by Venice, overthrew official Venetian authorities and declared an independent Cretan Republic. The revolt took Venice five years to quell.
During Venetian rule, the Greek population of Crete was exposed to Renaissance culture. A thriving literature in the Cretan dialect of Greek developed on the island. The best-known work from this period is the poem Erotokritos by Vitsentzos Kornaros. Another major Cretan literary figures were Marcus Musurus, Nicholas Kalliakis, Andreas Musalus, and other Greek scholars and philosophers who flourished in Italy in the 15–17th centuries.
Georgios Hortatzis was author of the dramatic work Erophile. The painter Domenicos Theotocopoulos, better known as El Greco, was born in Crete in this period and was trained in Byzantine iconography before moving to Italy and later, Spain.