Author Description

This book is about the Tocco family, the most prominent kindreds in Latin Greece during the 14th and 15th centuries. Originally from the Italian South, their five generations ruled the Greek regions of the Heptanese, Epiros and Peloponnese. By exploring the elaborate structures of their power, this monograph reveals an intricate nexus of dynamic personal and political relations, as well as larger socio-historical processes that transformed this family from junior nobility of the Angevin Naples into independent elite ruling a region on the crossroads between the Byzantine East and the Latin West. In doing so, this saga of the Tocco nobility, power and migration gives a critical overview of the early-modern and modern scholarship dealing with this family, cross-examining, at the same time, a most extensive pool of primary sources: Latin and Greek narratives, family documents and genealogies until now largely unpublished or little known to the scholarship, legal sources and diplomatic correspondence, commercial books and archeological reports.