Professor Vincent is an Honorary Member of the Faculty of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. Much of his research has focused on society and literature in Crete under Venetian rule.

He taught Modern Greek Studies at the University of Sydney for 25 years and has been a visiting professor at several Greek universities. He has also carried out research in Venice as a guest of the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies.

He explained to those present that from the earliest stages of its history, Venice extended its political and commercial influence across the Adriatic, establishing a vast dominion that at various times controlled lands from Candia (today Crete), which it governed from 1211 to 1569, to the Ionian Islands, including Zakynthos, Cephalonia, Ithaca and Corfu.

As Professor Vincent elaborated, different varieties of Italian were used in administration, legal documents and trade across the so-called Stato da Mar, the maritime territories of the Venetian Republic.

It’s often assumed that because Italy was divided into small states, kingdoms, duchies and republics, Italians only began to use the Italian language in everyday life in recent centuries. But as early as the 1200s, Italian, with regional variations, was already widely employed across the Mediterranean as a lingua franca for commerce, intergovernmental relations, science and literature.

Italian, strongly marked by Venetian inflections, became a frontier language. Its use in official documents and publications, often alongside Greek, continued long after the fall of the Venetian Republic and even after the Ionian Islands came under British control.

In Greece, Italian was considered a language of prestige and was used mainly by the elite, colonists and public administrators. In Cyprus, for example, French remained dominant until the end of the 15th century, as Italian began to take hold due to the influence of Genoese militias in the region and was later established as the official language during Venice’s long rule.

This Italian-oriented cultural tradition in the Ionian Islands produced, among others, Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827) and Greece’s national poet Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), who was educated in Italy.

If this topic is of interest to you, you can find many of Professor Vincent’s work here.