THE KLADAS AFFAIR AND DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (1480-1485)* Diana Gilliland Wright A f ter a Greek kapetanios with a Venetian lag began a private war against the Turks in late 1480, there ensued ive years of diplo- matic eforts between the Porte and the Signoria to settle the afair and manage its subsequent efects in the Morea. A striking, though uneven, diplomatic record survives in formal documents, letters and a chronicle which provide extensive evidence for the mutual liking and even friendship between the Venetians and Turks involved who negotiated between and across levels of rank to deal with an issue on which they were agreed. On 9 October 1480, the Greek kapetanios Krokodēlos Kladas led a band of at least a hundred and ifty horsemen from Koroni in a private war against the Turks in Mani. 1 Again, on 15 December, Thodoros Bua * This paper is derived the irst chapter of my forthcoming book The Knight and Death : The Kladas Afair and the 15th-Century Morea. Some of the original research was done on grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in 1998 and 2003, and subsequent re- search to an neh Fellowship to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for 2008-2009. 1 The spelling of Krokodēlos varies widely in Greek texts : Venetian spellings have even more variation. I use the spelling in an inscription commemorating a fourteenth-century Krokodēlos – possibly his great-grandfather – donation to a church, in which the name Krokovnth[lo~] occurs alone. The spelling in much of the rest of the inscription is less than perfect. Published transcriptions of the inscription have been ‘corrected’. See D. Feis- sel, A. Philippidis-Braat (eds.), Inventaires en vue d’un recueil des inscriptions historiques de Byzance : iii , Inscriptions du Péloponnèse, « Travaux et Mémoires », 9, 1985, pp. 353-354 ; also G. Stamirēs, ÔH ejpigrafh; tou` Krokontuvlou, « Peloponnhsiakav », 3-4, 1958-1959, pp. 84- 86. A photograph of the inscription is found in N. Moutsopoulos, ∆Apo; th;n buzantinhv , « Peloponnhsiakav », 1, 1956, pp. 129-202. For earlier records of the Kladas name see my Dis- sertation Bartolomeo Minio : Venetian Administration in 15th-Century Nauplion, Washington dc, The Catholic University of America, 1999, appendix 8. The Byzantine writer Mazaris made a pun of the name, treating it as « Crocodile » but he was the only one to leave a record of doing so, and he did so only once. It does not appear in any Venetian material. Mazaris’ Journey to Hades, Bufalo (ny), 1975, p. 84. Mazaris may well have done so in part «studi veneziani» · lxvii · 2013