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In the Croatian tradition of the study of Renaissance literature, Crete is mentioned almost entirely in connection with Ludovik Paskalić, who was a member of the Venetian military mission there in 1537 to 1538. Like Paskalić’s native land, this Greek island was ruled by the Republic of St Mark (and had been since 1204), which resulted in the 16th and 17th centuries in the creation of a hybrid culture that through the mediation of Venice absorbed numerous influences from the Italian Renaissance. Although much later than in Dubrovnik and Dalmatia, on Crete this gave rise to an intriguing vernacular literature that produced its most important works at the end of the 16th and in the first half of the 17th century, in other words, in just the few decades that preceded the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1669. These are Neo-Greek texts written in the Cretan dialect, primarily in the political verse taken from Byzantine literature and the oral tradition. However, local influences in this relatively small body of work are connected with marked elements of Italian Renaissance literature (Tasso, Ariosto, Guarini, Giraldi). In terms of genre, there are mainly tragedies, comedies, pastorals, religious dramas and romances, which engendered the most famous and best regarded work of all of Cretan Renaissance literature: the extensive lyrical-epic poem "Erotokritos" (???????????) of Vikentios Kornaros, thought to be an adaptation of the French courtly romance "Paris et Vienne". The romance of Kornaros, and other salient works of the Cretan Renaissance, such as the tragedy "Erofili" (???????) of Georgios Chortatzis and the anonymous lyric "Shepherdess" (??????????), enjoyed, in the centuries after their writing, great popularity, as shown by their even having become part of the oral tradition, some of them affecting the development of Modern Greek writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. From the above it is clear that there were certain correspondences, as well as many differences, between the Renaissance as experienced on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, in Dalmatia and Dubrovnik then, and in Crete. In both cases we can find on the one hand the direct transmission of Renaissance ideas and forms from Italy, the marked influence of folklore or the adjustment of the form to the domestic tradition, and on the other hand asynchronicity, different genre preferences and the selection of different Italian authors and works as creative exemplars or models. The objective of this paper is to find points of contact, formal, contextual and thematic, as well as the differences, between the Renaissance literatures of Crete and Dubrovnik-Dalmatia, with particular reference to the forms in which Italian influences were transmitted, the manner of using localisation and the reflection of contemporary reality, characterised by the Ottoman menace. The aim of this comparative analysis is to contribute to the knowledge of the different manifestations of the literary Renaissance in the eastern Mediterranean as broadly understood.
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