Crete İsland

Crete History

Stone tools found on Crete and dated to some 130,000 years ago have led to the claim that early hominids must have at least briefly settled on Crete, but the true human settlement of the island began not much before 6500 BCE.

By 3000 BCE the Minoan civilization—a Bronze Age culture named for the legendary ruler Minos—was emerging. In its first centuries that culture produced little more than circular vaulted tombs and some fine carved stone vases, but by about 2000 BCE the Minoans had begun to build “palaces” on the sites of Knossos (Knosós), Phaestus, and Mallia (Mália).

The Minoan civilization was centred at Knossós and reached its peak in the 16th century BCE, trading widely in the eastern Mediterranean. The Minoans produced striking sculpture, frescoes, pottery, jewelry, and metalwork.

By about 1500 BCE Greek mainlanders from Mycenae had assumed an influential role in Minoan affairs. Those Mycenaeans introduced a form of writing known as Linear B, used largely for record keeping.

After Crete suffered a major earthquake that destroyed Knossós and other centres about 1450 BCE, power in the region passed decisively to the Mycenaeans, with whom Crete was closely associated until the commencement of the Iron Age in 1200 BCE. About that time the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, moved in and organized the island.

Crete played a supporting role in the revival of Greek civilization that began in the 9th century BCE, and during Athens’s heyday in the 5th century BCE Crete fascinated the Greeks as a source of myths, legends, and laws.

By 67 BCE the Romans appeared and completed their conquest of Crete by converting it into Cyrenaica, a province linked with North Africa. In 395 CE the island passed to Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire); the Arabs gained control over parts of Crete after 824 but lost them back to the Byzantines in 961.

In 1204, in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, Crusaders sold the island to Venice, which fitted Crete into its growing commercial empire. The native Cretans, however, never abandoned their Orthodox religion, Greek language, and popular lore. The Ottoman Turks, who were already in control of parts of Crete, wrested the capital city of Candia (now Irákleio) from the Venetians in 1669 after one of the longest sieges in history.

Crete stagnated under Turkish rule, and native uprisings were always foiled, including those in 1821 and 1866. The Turks were finally expelled by Greece in 1898, after which the island held autonomous status until its union with Greece in 1913.