After the Fourth Crusade of 1204, Western European knights — primarily French and Flemish — established control over much of the Byzantine heartland, including the Peloponnese, which they called the Morea. The Principality of Achaea, which governed the Peloponnese under Frankish rule, was structured around twelve secular baronies, each assigned to a lord and measured in knight's fiefs — the unit of land calculated to support one mounted knight in service. Gritzena was among those original twelve. The Chronicle of the Morea, the verse history of the Frankish Peloponnese that survives in multiple languages, records that Gritzena comprised four knight's fiefs and was located in the region called Lakkoi — the upper Messenian plain, lying between Kalamata and the district known as Skorta. Its first lord was a certain Lucas, of whom nothing else is known beyond that single name.

For much of the thirteenth century, Gritzena seems to have been exactly what its thin documentary record suggests: a quiet agricultural backwater. The Principality of Achaea was not, for its first decades, a particularly contested place — the Franks had subdued the Peloponnese with surprising speed, and the local Greek population largely accommodated their new overlords. Gritzena sat in the inland plain between the mountains and the Messenian coast, probably productive farmland, probably unremarkable. There is no evidence that anyone bothered to build a castle there — in a region where every other barony seems to have anchored itself to a defensive work, the absence of any fortification at Gritzena is itself notable. It suggests a lordship that felt secure enough, or perhaps too modest in resources, to go without stone walls.

Everything changed in the 1260s, when the Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople in 1261 emboldened the Byzantines of Mystras — the fortified city in the southeastern Peloponnese that served as capital of the Byzantine Despotate of the Morea — to begin systematically eroding Frankish control of the peninsula. Barony after barony came under pressure, and Gritzena seems to have been among the early casualties. The barony re-enters the sources only once after its founding: the historian Antoine Bon tentatively identified "La Grite" in a document with Gritzena, and that document shows Geoffrey of Durnay in possession of the barony — possibly as compensation for his family's loss of the Barony of Kalavryta to the Byzantines of Mystras. After Geoffrey, the record goes dark again. The Durnay family disappears from the sources at the end of the thirteenth century, and Gritzena disappears with them.

What remains of Gritzena is the question of where it was. Scholars know it lay in the Lakkoi region, the upper Messenian plain. Beyond that, certainty fails. No castle, no surviving structure, no settled identification with a modern town anchors it to the landscape. The settlement of Gritzena — referenced in the barony's name — exists as a geographical reference without a confirmed location. This is not so unusual for rural medieval Messenia, where the Norman and Frankish superstructure rested lightly on a Greek-speaking population whose own records and place names often preserved different geographies. What Gritzena represents, in the end, is the limit of the historical record: a barony that functioned, mattered enough to be one of twelve, and then closed without leaving a ruin worth excavating or a document worth copying.