Thíbai

Thebes stands in the plain of Boeotia, around the ancient citadel of the Cadmea. The city of Cadmus and Oedipus was a great power in classical Greece: its army defeated Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BC, before Alexander the Great destroyed the city in 335. Rebuilt after his death, Thebes found new prosperity in Byzantine times, when its silk weavers supplied a prized cloth to distant markets.

After the Fourth Crusade, the Frankish dukes of Athens made wealthy Thebes a centre of their rule. Nicholas of Saint Omer built a castle on the Cadmea, and the Catalan Company used the city as its capital after conquering it in 1311. In 1379 the Navarrese Company seized Thebes with the aid of its Latin archbishop. The Ottomans captured it in 1458 and called it İstefe; apart from a brief Venetian interlude, it remained under their rule until the Greek War of Independence.