Januli I da Corogna was the first autonomous lord of the Aegean island of

Sifnos Sifnos ( el, Σίφνος) is an island municipality in the Cyclades island group in Greece. The main town, near the center, known as Apollonia (pop. 869), is home of the island's folklore museum and library. The town's name is thought to come f ...

. As his name reveals, Januli da Corogna probably hailed from Coruña, and was a

Knight Hospitaller The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem ( la, Ordo Fratrum Hospitalis Sancti Ioannis Hierosolymitani), commonly known as the Knights Hospitaller (), was a medieval and early modern Catholic military order. It was headq ...

. In 1307, he seized the island of Sifnos, renounced his allegiance to the Knights, and declared himself its lord. Like most of the

Cyclades The Cyclades (; el, Κυκλάδες, ) are an island group in the Aegean Sea, southeast of mainland Greece and a former administrative prefecture of Greece. They are one of the island groups which constitute the Aegean archipelago. The nam ...

, Sifnos had come under the Sanudo-ruled Duchy of the Archipelago in the aftermath of the

Fourth Crusade The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) was a Latin Christian armed expedition called by Pope Innocent III. The stated intent of the expedition was to recapture the Muslim-controlled city of Jerusalem, by first defeating the powerful Egyptian Ayyubid S ...

. It was then recovered for the

Byzantine Empire The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

by the adventurer

Licario Licario, called Ikarios ( gr, Ἰκάριος) by the Greek chroniclers, was a Byzantine admiral of Italian origin in the 13th century. At odds with the Latin barons (the "triarchs") of his native Euboea, he entered the service of the Byzantine em ...

in the 1270s, and remained under Byzantine control until captured by Januli. The Sanudo Dukes of the Archipelago, who considered the island rightfully theirs, protested Januli's action, but in vain. The Corogna family continued to hold the island as an independent lordship until 1456, when it passed to the Gozzadini family, who in turn ruled it until it was annexed by the

Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University) ...

in 1617.

References

Sources

* * {{cite book , first = William , last = Miller , author-link = William Miller (historian) , title = The Latins in the Levant, a History of Frankish Greece (1204–1566) , publisher = E.P. Dutton and Company , location = New York , year = 1908 , url = https://archive.org/details/latinsinlevanta00millgoog 13th-century births 14th-century deaths Knights Hospitaller Lords of the Crusader states Sifnos