It might be offtopic as it concerns mainly the town dwellers but I found this paper very interesting also with the picture of the interactions between the locals and the new elite and change of ethnic (and confessional) affiliations:
INHERITED STATUS AND SLAVERY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY AND VENETIAN CRETE*
Author(s): Sally McKee Source: Past & Present, No. 182 (Feb., 2004), pp. 31-53 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
.............
..................
Something from the paper torzio gave in his post:
https://www.researchgate.net/public...age_predominates_in_a_Cretan_highland_plateau
I could not find concrete numbers on the proportion of slaves on Crete during the centuries of Venetian rule. Some other papers report serious numbers of slaves on Mallorca (up to 36% at some point) but I could not find any specific data for Crete (and the paper describes mainly city dwellers).
INHERITED STATUS AND SLAVERY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ITALY AND VENETIAN CRETE*
Author(s): Sally McKee Source: Past & Present, No. 182 (Feb., 2004), pp. 31-53 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
It stands to reason,
also, that female slaves as sexual partners and the children they
produced were more widespread than even the considerable
numbers in the records indicate. The evidence from Venetian
Crete tends strongly to suggest not only that men maintained
long-term relationships with servile women, but that they had
even longer ones with the children produced by such unions. As
noted before, illegitimate children by slave women show up as
beneficiaries in wills and as active parties in notarial documents.
That they are not hard to find testifies to their acknowledged
presence in society and perhaps in the sentiments of their fathers...
.............
............At the highest and lowest levels of society, there were those
whose claims to be Latin threatened to blur the boundaries
established by the authorities. At the highest, recognition as a
Latin meant access to wealth. At the lowest level, it meant free-
dom. Their claims, therefore, needed substantiation. For the
people of the middling social rank living in the city of Candia,
no great advantage accrued from claiming to be Latin. And so
it comes as no surprise that, on that social level, discerning the
ancestry of the skilled and unskilled labourers of Candia in the
sources is almost impossible, and probably it was not parti-
cularly clear to the people themselves of that time, since inter-
marriage at that social level was very common..
.............Because there were both sanctioned (by marriage) and
unsanctioned (concubinage) unions between the members of
the different communities at all levels of society, determining
who was or was not Latin became a problem that had to be
solved through the imposition of standards of proof. Most
people fell relatively easily into one community or the other,
depending on their families' social rank and political allegiance.
The increasing number of illegitimate children of mixed par-
entage, however, meant that a growing proportion of the popu-
lation wished to but could not assign itself to the group most
desirable from the point of view of rights and privliges...
Three types of legal status existed in Venetian Crete. The
unfree peasantry, who resided in and toiled upon the great agri-
cultural estates throughout the island, constituted the villeins,
who were Greek-speaking adherents of the Eastern Church
whose ancestors had once served Byzantine masters under the
label of paroikoi. Slave status applied to those men and women
who had been brought by merchants to the island, where they
were bought either by residents in the colony or by merchants
from elsewhere to be exported elsewhere. In the first half of the
fourteenth century, the majority of slaves were Christian
Greeks captured in Asia Minor, mainland Greece or the
Aegean islands. The end of the century witnessed the replace-
ment of Greek slaves by more and more people from the Black
Sea region: Tatars, Circassians, Bulgars, Turks, Russians and
others. Finally, free status constituted the only other legal con-
dition recognized in Crete, although the free population of
the colony itself was certainly economically and politically
stratified.
Only one status was coextensive with an ancestral group: the
Latins...
..................
But conversion to the Roman rite did not suffice to win a slave
or a villein's freedom. Claiming to be the child of a Latin
father, however, did. The colonial administration's attempts to
devise standards of establishing Latin ancestry came far too late
to be effective or meaningful, since the population had been
sexually mixing from the colony's birth in spite of ban on
marriages between Latins and Greeks. The important point is
that such standards were devised only because the lines be-
tween the two ancestral groups were becoming blurred at the
highest and lowest levels of society where property and legal
capacity were at stake...
...But other evidence, like the case involving
Pietro Porco's sons makes clear that at some point in the first
decades of the fourteenth cen-
tury free status began to descend automatically to the children
Latin men had by slave women. In 1271 Bellamore Rosso, a resi-
dent of Candia, had drawn up an instrument of manumission for
his son Bonaventura by his slave woman Bona.
Within thirty years, the situation had changed. Among the
approximately eight hundred wills that survive from the four-
teenth century many were made by testators who looked to the
future of their slaves and the children they had by them.
Although numerous men freed slave women in their wills, none
of them freed the sons and daughters they had by them. Nor in
the wills of relatives left in charge of those children is there any
indication that before dying the fathers had formally manumitted
them. The children are all assumed to be free...
Something from the paper torzio gave in his post:
Based on the age of the R1b-associated Y-STR variation for the Crete-without-Lasithi-Plateau population,the genetic affinity between R1b haplogroups from North Italy and Crete might be the imprints of an Italian geneflow before the end of the Minoan civilization and/or more recent migrations during the Roman and Venetian ruling periods. Finally, it is possible that the more recent age for the R1b-associated Y-STR variation in the Lasithi Plateau population as compared with the estimate for the rest of eastern Crete could have resulted from population bottle-necks in the mountain plain. Alternatively, these lineages might have been introduced to the Lasithi highland plain long after their presence in other regions of the island...
https://www.researchgate.net/public...age_predominates_in_a_Cretan_highland_plateau
I could not find concrete numbers on the proportion of slaves on Crete during the centuries of Venetian rule. Some other papers report serious numbers of slaves on Mallorca (up to 36% at some point) but I could not find any specific data for Crete (and the paper describes mainly city dwellers).