The Project Gutenberg eBook of Essays on the Latin Orient, by William Miller.

BY
WILLIAM MILLER, M.A. (Oxon.)
HON. LL.D. IN THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF GREECE: CORRESPONDING
MEMBER OF THE HISTORICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF GREECE:
AUTHOR OF THE LATINS IN THE LEVANT

This volume consists of articles and monographs upon the Latin Orient and Balkan history, published between 1897 and the present year. For kind permission to reprint them in collected form I am indebted to the editors and proprietors of The Quarterly Review, The English Historical Review, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Die Byzantinische Zeitschrift, The Westminster Review, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and The Journal of the British and American Archæological Society of Rome. All the articles have been revised and brought up to date by the light of recent research in a field of history which is no longer neglected in either the Near East or Western Europe.

From the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. Greece lost her independence for a period of nearly two thousand years. During twenty centuries the country had no separate existence as a nation, but followed the fortunes of foreign rulers. Attached, first to Rome and then to Constantinople, it was divided among various Latin nobles after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and succumbed to the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From that time, with the exception of the brief Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese, and the long foreign administration of the Ionian Islands, it remained an integral part of the Turkish Empire till the erection of the modern Greek kingdom. Far too little attention has been paid to the history of Greece under foreign domination, for which large materials have been collected since Finlay wrote his great work. Yet, even in the darkest hours of bondage, the annals of Greece can scarcely fail to interest the admirers of ancient Hellas.

The victorious Romans treated the vanquished Greeks with moderation, and their victory was regarded by the masses as a relief from the state of war which was rapidly consuming the resources of the taxpayers. Satisfied to forego the galling symbols, provided that they held the substance, of power in their own hands, the conquerors contented themselves with dissolving the Achaian League, with destroying, perhaps from motives of commercial policy, the great mart of Corinth, and with subordinating the Greek communities to the governor of the Roman province of Macedonia, who exercised supreme supervision over them. But these local bodies were allowed to preserve their formal liberties; Corfù, the first of Greek cities to submit to Rome, always remained autonomous, and Athens and Sparta enjoyed special immunities as “the allies of Rome,” while the sacred character of Delphi secured for it practical autonomy. A few years after the conquest the old Leagues were permitted to revive, at least in name; and the land tax, payable by most of the communities to the Roman Government, seemed to fulfil the expectation of the natives that their fiscal burdens would be diminished under foreign rule. The historian Polybios[1], who successfully pleaded the cause of his countrymen at this great crisis in their history, has contrasted the purity of Roman financial[2] administration with the corruption of Greek public men, and has cited a saying current in Greece soon after the conquest: “If we had not perished quickly, we should not have been saved.” While this was the popular view, the large class of landed proprietors was also pleased by the recognition of its social position by its new masters, and the men who were entrusted with the delicate task of organising the conquered country at the outset of its new career wisely availed themselves of the disinterested services of Polybios, who enjoyed the confidence of both Greeks and Romans. Even Mummius himself, the destroyer of Corinth, if he carried off many fine statues to deck his triumph, left behind him the memory of his gentleness to the weak, as well as that of his firmness to the strong, and might have been taken as the embodiment of those qualities which Virgil, more than a century later, held up to the imitation of his countrymen.

The pax Romana, which the Roman conquest seemed likely to confer upon the jealous Greeks, was occasionally broken in the early decades of the new administration. The sacred isle of Delos, which was then subordinate to Athens, and which had become the greatest mart for merchandise and slaves in the Levant since the destruction of Corinth, and the silver-mines of Laurion, which had of old provided the sinews of naval warfare against the Persian host, were the scenes of servile insurrections such as that which about the same time raged in Sicily, and a democratic rising at Dyme not far from Patras called for repression. But the participation of many Greeks in the quarrel between Rome and Mithridates, King of Pontus, entailed far more serious consequences upon their country. While the warlike Cretans, who had not bowed as yet beneath the Roman yoke, sent their redoubtable archers to serve in his ranks, the Athenians were seduced from their allegiance by the rhetoric of their fellow-citizen, Athenion, or Aristion, a man of dubious origin, who had found the profession of philosopher so paying that he was now able to indulge in that of a patriot. Appointed captain of the city, he established a reign of terror, and included the Roman party and his own philosophic rivals in the same proscription. He despatched the bibliophile Apellikon, who had purchased the library of Aristotle, with an expedition against Delos, which failed; but a similar attempt by the Pontic forces was successful, and the prosperity of the island was almost ruined by their ravages. When the armies of Mithridates reached the mainland, there was a great rising against the Romans, and for the second time the plain of Chaironeia witnessed a battle, which on this occasion, however, was indecisive. A great change now took place in the fortunes of the war.[3] Sulla arrived in Greece, routed the Athenian philosopher and his Pontic colleague in a single battle, cowed most of the Greeks by the mere terror of his name, and laid siege to Athens and the Piræus, which offered a vigorous resistance. The groves of the Academy and the Lyceum furnished the timber for his battering rams; the treasuries of the most famous temples, those of Delphi, Olympia and Epidauros, provided pay for his soldiers; the remains of the famous “long walls,” which had united Athens with her harbour, were converted into siegeworks. The knoll near the street of tombs, on which a tiny church now stands, is supposed to be part of Sulla’s mound, and the bones found there those of his victims. An attempt to relieve the besieged failed; and, as their provisions grew scarce, the Athenians lost heart and sought to obtain favourable terms from the enemy. In the true Athenian spirit, they prayed for consideration on the ground that their ancestors had fought at Marathon. But the practical Roman replied that he had “not come to study history, but to chastise rebels[2],” and insisted on unconditional surrender. In 86 B.C. Athens was taken by assault, and many of the inhabitants were butchered; but, in spite of his indifference to the glories of Marathon, the conqueror consented to spare the fabric of the city for the sake of its ancient renown. The Akropolis, where Aristion had taken refuge, still held out, and the Odeion of Perikles, which stood at the south-east corner of it, perished by fire in the siege. Want of water at last forced the garrison to surrender, and the evacuation of the Piræus by the Pontic commander made Sulla master of that important position also. To the Piræus he showed as little mercy as Mummius had shown to Corinth. While from Athens he carried off nothing except a few columns of the temple of Zeus Olympios, a large sum of money which he found in the treasury of the Parthenon, and a fine manuscript of Aristotle and Theophrastos, he levelled the Piræus with the ground, and inflicted upon it a punishment from which it did not recover till the time of Constantine. Then he marched to Chaironeia, where another battle ended in the rout of the Pontic army, and the Thebans atoned for their rebellion by the loss of half their territory, which the victor consecrated to the temples of Delphi and Olympia as compensation for what he had taken from them. A fresh Pontic defeat at Orchomenos in Bœotia ended the war upon Greek soil, but the struggle long left its mark upon the country. Athens still retained her privileges, and the Cappadocian King Ariobarzanes II, Philopator and his son, restored the Odeion of Perikles[3], but many[4] of her citizens had died in the siege, and the rival armies had inflicted enormous injuries on Attica and Bœotia, the chief theatre of the war. Some small towns never recovered, and Thebes sank into a state of insignificance from which she did not emerge for centuries.

The pirates continued the work of destruction, which the first Mithridatic war had begun. The geographical configuration of the Ægean coasts has always been favourable to that ancient scourge of the Levant, and the conclusion of peace between Rome and the Pontic king let loose upon society a number of adventurers, whose occupation had ceased with the war. The inhabitants of Cilicia and Crete excelled above all others in the practice of this lucrative profession, and many were their depredations upon the Greek shores and islands. One pirate captain destroyed the sanctuaries of Delos and carried off the whole population into slavery; two others defeated the Roman admiral in Cretan waters. This last disgrace resulted in the conquest of that fine island by the Roman proconsul Quintus Metellus, whose difficult task fully earned him the title of “Creticus.” The islanders fought with the desperate courage which they have evinced in all ages. Beaten in the open, they retired behind the walls of Kydonia and Knossos, and when those places fell, a guerilla warfare went on in the mountains, until at last Crete surrendered, and the last vestige of Greek freedom in Europe disappeared in the guise of a Roman province. Meanwhile, Pompey had swept the pirates from the seas, and established a colony of those marauders at Dyme, the scene of the previous rebellion[4]. Neither before nor since has piracy been put down with such thoroughness in the Levant, and Greece enjoyed, for a time at least, a welcome immunity from its ravages.

But the administration of the provinces in the last century of the Roman Republic often pressed very heavily upon the unfortunate provincials. Even after making due deduction for professional exaggeration from the charges brought by Cicero against extortionate governors, there remains ample evidence of their exactions. The notorious Verres, the scourge of Sicily, though he only passed through Greece, levied blackmail upon Sikyon and plundered the treasury of the Parthenon, and bad governors of Macedonia, like Caius Antonius and Piso, had greater opportunities for making money at the expense of the Greeks. As Juvenal complained at a later period, even when these scoundrels were brought to justice on their return home, their late province gained nothing by their punishment, and Caius Antonius, in exile on Cephalonia, treated that island as if it were his private property. The Roman[5] money-lenders had begun, too, to exploit the financial necessities of the Greeks, and even so ardent a Philhellene as Cicero’s correspondent, Atticus, who owed his name to his long sojourn at Athens and to his interest in everything Attic, lent money to the people of Sikyon on such ruinous terms that they had to sell their pictures to pay off the debt. Athens, deprived of her commercial resources since the siege by Sulla, resorted to the sale of her coveted citizenship, much as some modern States sell titles, and subsisted mainly on the reputation of her schools of philosophy. It became the fashion for young Romans of promise to study there; thus Cicero spent six months there and revisited the city on his way to and from his Cilician governorship, and Horace tells us that he tried “to seek the truth among the groves of Academe[5].” Others resorted to Greece for purposes of travel or health, and the hellebore of Antikyra (now Aspra Spitia) on the Corinthian Gulf and the still popular baths of Ædepsos in Eubœa were fashionable cures in good Roman society. Moreover, a tincture of Greek letters was considered to be part of the education of a Roman gentleman. Cicero constantly uses Greek phrases in his correspondence, and Latin poets borrowed most of their plumes from Greek literature.

The two Roman civil wars which were fought on Greek soil between 49 and 31 B.C., were a great misfortune for Greece, whose inhabitants took sides as if the cause were their own. The struggle between Cæsar and Pompey was decided at Pharsalos in Thessaly, and most of the Greeks found that they had chosen the cause of the vanquished, whose exploits against the pirates and generous gift of money for the restoration of Athens were still remembered. But Cæsar showed his usual magnanimity towards the misguided Greeks, with the exception of the Megareans, whose stubborn resistance to his arms was severely punished. Most of the survivors of the siege were sold as slaves, and one of Cæsar’s officials, writing to Cicero a little later, says that as he sailed up the Saronic Gulf, the once flourishing cities of Megara, the Piræus and Corinth lay in ruins before his eyes[6]. It was Cæsar, however, who in 44 B.C., raised the last of these towns from its ashes. But the new Corinth, which he founded, was a Roman colony rather than a Greek city, whose inhabitants were chiefly freedmen, and whose name was at first associated with a lucrative traffic in antiquities, derived from the plunder of the ancient tombs. Had he lived, Cæsar had intended to dig a canal through the Isthmus—a feat reserved for the reign of the late King George. On Cæsar’s death, his murderer, Brutus, was enthusiastically welcomed by the Athenians, who erected[6] statues to him and Cassius besides those of the ancient tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton. The struggle between him and the Triumvirs was decided at Philippi in Greek Macedonia, near the modern Kavalla, but had little effect upon the fortunes of Greece, though there were Greek contingents on either side. After the fall of Brutus, Antony spent a long time at Athens, where he flattered the susceptible natives by wearing their costume, amused them by his antics and orgies on the Akropolis, gratified them by the gift of Ægina and other islands, and scandalised them by the presence of Cleopatra, upon whom he expected them to bestow the highest honours. When the war broke out between him and Octavian for the mastery of the Roman world, Greece for the second time became the theatre of her masters’ fratricidal strife. At no previous time since the conquest had the unhappy country suffered such oppression as then. The inhabitants were torn from their homes to serve on the ships of Antony, the Peloponnese was divided into two hostile camps according to the sympathies of the natives, and in the great naval battle of Aktion the fleeing ship of Cleopatra was pursued by a Lacedæmonian galley. The geographer Strabo, who passed through Greece two years later, has left us a grim picture of the state of the country. Bœotia was utterly ruined; Larissa was the only town in Thessaly worth mentioning; many of the most famous cities of the Peloponnese were barren wastes; Megalopolis was a wilderness, Laconia had barely thirty towns; Dyme, whose citizens had taken to piracy again, was falling into decay. The Ionian Islands and Tegea formed pleasant exceptions to the general misery, but as an instance of the wretched condition of the Ægean, the islet of Gyaros was unable to pay its annual tribute of £5. The desolation of Greece impressed Octavian so deeply that he founded two colonies for his veterans on Hellenic soil, one in 30 B.C. on the spot where his camp had been pitched at the battle of Aktion, which received the name of Nikopolis (“City of victory”) in memory of that great triumph, the other at Patras, a site most convenient for the Italian trade. In both cases the numbers of the Roman colonists were augmented by the compulsory immigration of the Greeks who inhabited the neighbouring cities and villages. This measure had the bad effect of increasing the depopulation of the surrounding country, but it imparted immediate prosperity to both Patras and Nikopolis, and the factories of the former gave employment to numbers of women, while the celebration of the “Aktian games” at the latter colony attracted sight-seers from other places. Augustus, as Octavian was now called, made an important change in the administration of Greece, separating it from the Macedonian[7] command, with which it had hitherto been combined, and forming it in 27 B.C. into a separate senatorial province of Achaia, which was practically identical with the boundaries of the Greek kingdom before 1912, and of which Cæsar’s recently founded colony of Corinth was made the capital. But this restriction of the limits of the province did not affect the liberties of the different communities, though here and there Augustus altered their respective jurisdictions. Thus, in order to give Nikopolis a share in the Amphiktyonic Council, he modified the composition of that ancient body, and he enfranchised the Free Laconians who inhabited the central promontory of the Peloponnese, from Sparta; thus founding the autonomy which that rugged region has so often enjoyed[7]. But Athens and Sparta both continued to be “allies of Rome,” Augustus made a Spartan Prince of the Lacedæmonians, and honoured them by his own presence at their public meals. If he forbade the Athenians to sell the honour of citizenship, he allowed himself to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, and his friend, Agrippa, presented Athens with a new theatre. As a proof of their loyalty and gratitude, the Athenians dedicated a temple on the Akropolis “to Augustus and Rome,” a large fragment of which may still be seen, and erected a statue of Agrippa, the pedestal of which is still standing in a perilous position at the approach to the Propylæa. It was in further honour of the master of the Roman world, that an aqueduct was constructed from the Klepsydra fountain to the Tower of the Winds, which the Syrian Andronikos had built at a somewhat earlier period of the Roman domination. The adjoining gate of Athena Archegetis was raised out of money provided by Cæsar and Augustus, a number of friendly princes proposed to complete the temple of Olympian Zeus, while an inscription still preserves the generosity of another ruler, Herod, King of the Jews, towards the home of Greek culture.

The land now enjoyed a long period of peace, and began to recover from the effects of the civil wars. A further boon was the transference of Achaia from the jurisdiction of the Senate to that of the Emperor soon after the accession of Tiberius, who, whatever his private vices may have been, was most considerate in his treatment of the provincials. He sternly repressed attempts at extortion, kept his governors in office for long terms, and, when an earthquake injured the city of Aigion on the gulf of Corinth, excused the citizens from the payment of taxes for three years. The restriction of the much-abused right of asylum[8] in various temples, such as that of Poseidon on the island of Tenos, and the delimitation of the Messenian and Lacedæmonian boundary, showed the interest of the Roman Government in Greek affairs; and the cult of the Imperial family, which was now developed in Greece, was perhaps due to gratitude no less than to the natural obsequience of a conquered race. The visit of the Emperor’s nephew, Germanicus, to Athens delighted the Athenians and scandalised Roman officialdom by the Imperial traveller’s disregard of etiquette; and it was insinuated by a prejudiced Roman even at that early period that these voluble burgesses, who talked so much about their past history, were not really the descendants of the ancient Greeks, but “the offscourings of the nations.” So deep was the impression made by the courtesy of Germanicus that, several years later, an impostor, who pretended to be his son Drusus, found a ready following in Greece, which he traversed from the Cyclades to Nikopolis. It became the custom, too, to banish distinguished Romans, who had incurred the Emperor’s displeasure, to an Ægean island, and Amorgos, Kythnos, Seriphos, and Gyaros were the equivalent of Botany Bay. The last two islets in particular were regarded with intense horror, and Juvenal has selected them as types of the worst punishment that could befall one of his countrymen[8]. Caligula, less moderate than Tiberius in his treatment of the Greeks, carried off the famous statue of Eros from Thespiæ, for which his unaccomplished plan of cutting the Isthmus of Corinth was no compensation. Claudius restored the stolen statue, and in 44 A.D. handed over the province of Achaia to the Senate—an arrangement which, with one brief interval, continued to be the practice of the Roman Government for the future. Meanwhile, alike under Senatorial and Imperial administration, the Greeks had acquired Roman tastes and had even adopted in many cases Roman names. If old-fashioned Romans complained that Rome had become “a Greek city,” where glib Hellenic freedmen had the ear of the Emperor and starving Greeklings were ready to practise any and every profession, the conservatives in Greece lamented the introduction of such peculiarly Roman sports as the gladiatorial shows, of which the remains of the Roman amphitheatre at Corinth are a memorial. The conquering and the conquered races had reacted on one another; the Romans had become more literary; the Greeks had become more material.

It was at this period, about 54 A.D., that an event occurred which profoundly modified the future of the Greek race. In, or a little before,[9] that year St Paul arrived at Athens, and, stirred by the idolatry of the city, delivered his famous speech in the midst of the Areopagos. The unvarnished narrative of the Acts of the Apostles does not disguise the failure of the great teacher’s first attempt to convert the argumentative Greeks, to whom the new gospel seemed “foolishness.” But “Dionysios the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them,” believed, thus forming the small beginnings of the Church which grew up there in later days. From Athens the Apostle proceeded to Corinth, where he stayed “a year and six months.” The capital of Achaia and mart of Greece was a fine field for his missionary labours. The Roman colony, which had now been in existence almost a century, had become the home of commerce and the luxury which usually accompanies it. The superb situation, commanding the two seas, had attracted a cosmopolitan population, including many Jews, and the vices of the East and the West seemed to meet on the Isthmus—the Port Said of the Roman Empire. We may trace in the language of the two Epistles, which the Apostle addressed to the Corinthians later on, the main characteristics of the seat of Roman rule in Greece. The allusions to the fights with wild beasts, to the Isthmian games, to the long hair of the Corinthian dandies, to the easy virtue of the Corinthian women, all show what was the daily life of the most flourishing city of Greece in the middle of the first century. Yet even at Corinth many were persuaded by the arguments of the tent-maker, and a Christian community was founded at the port of Kenchreæ on the Saronic Gulf. At the outset the converts were of humble origin, like “the house of Stephanas, the first fruits of Achaia”; but Gaius, Tertius, Quartus, and “Erastus, the chamberlain of the city,” were persons of better position. That a man like Gallio, the brother of Seneca the philosopher and uncle of Lucan the poet, a man whom the other great poet of the day, Statius, has described as “sweetness” itself, was at that time governor of Achaia, shows the importance attached by the Romans to their Greek province. St Paul had not the profound classical learning of the governor’s talented family, but the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which he wrote during this first stay at Corinth, have conferred an undying literary interest on the capital of Roman Greece. Silas and Timotheus joined the Apostle at that place; and after his departure the learned Alexandrian, Apollos, carried on the work of Christianity among the Corinthians. But the germs of those theological parties, which were destined later on to divide the Greek Christians, had already been planted in the congenial soil of Achaia. The Christian community of Corinth, with the fatal tendency to faction[10] which has ever marked the Hellenic race, was soon split up into sections, which followed, one St Paul, another Apollos, another the supposed injunctions of St Peter, another the simple faith of Christ. Even women, and that, too, unveiled, like the Laises of Corinth, had taken upon themselves to speak at Christian gatherings, and drinking and the other sensual crimes of that luxurious city had proved temptations too strong for some of the new converts. This state of things provoked the two Epistles to the Corinthians and the second visit of the Apostle to the then Greek capital, where he remained three months, writing on this occasion also two Epistles from Greece—that to the Romans and that to the Galatians. For the sake of the greater security which the land route afforded, he returned to Asia through Northern Greece, accompanied among others by St Luke, whose traditional connection with Greece may be traced in the wax figure of the Virgin, said to be his work, in the monastery of Megaspelæon, and in the much later Roman tomb venerated as his, at Thebes. With the exception of his delay at Fair Havens on the south coast of Crete, we are not told by the writer of the Acts that St Paul ever set foot on Greek territory again; but he left Titus in that island “to ordain elders in every city,” and contemplated spending a winter at Nikopolis. A tradition, unsupported, however, by good evidence, has been preserved to the effect that he was liberated from his Roman imprisonment, and it has been supposed that he employed part of the time that remained before his death in revisiting Corinth and Crete. His “kinsmen,” Jason and Sosipater, bishops of Tarsus and Ikonium, preached the Word at Corfù, where one of them was martyred, and where one of the two oldest churches of the island still preserves their names[9]. The Greek journey of the pagan philosopher, Apollonios of Tyana, who tried to restore the ancient life of Hellas and to check the Romanising tendencies of the age, took place only a few years after the first appearance of the Apostle of the Gentiles in Greece.

Another visitor of a very different kind next arrived in the classic land. Nero had already displayed his taste for the fine arts by despatching an emissary to Greece with the object of collecting statues for the adornment of his palace and capital. Delphi, Olympia and Athens, where, in the phrase of a contemporary satirist, “it was easier to meet a god than a man,” furnished an ample booty, and the Thespians again lost, this time for ever, the statue of Eros. But Nero was not content with the sculpture of Greece; he yearned to display his manifold talents before a Greek audience, “the only one,” as he said, “worthy[11] of himself and his accomplishments.” Accordingly, in 66, he crossed over to Kassopo in Corfù, and began his theatrical tour by singing before the altar of Zeus there. Such was the zeal of the Imperial pot-hunter, that he commanded all the national games to be celebrated in the same year, so that he might have the satisfaction of winning prizes at them all in the same tour. In order to exhibit his musical gifts, he ordered the insertion of a new item in the time-honoured programme at Olympia, where he built himself a house, and at Corinth broke the Isthmian rules by contending in both tragedy and comedy. As a charioteer he eclipsed all previous performances by driving ten horses abreast, upsetting his car and still receiving the prize from the venal judges; as a victor, he had the effrontery to proclaim his own victory, and the number of his wreaths might have done credit to a royal funeral. In return for their compliance, the Greeks were informed by the voice of the Emperor himself on the day of the Isthmian games that they were once more free from the jurisdiction of the Senate and exempt from the payment of taxes[10]. The name of freedom and the practical advantage of fiscal immunity appealed with force to the patriotic and commercial sides of the Greek character, and outweighed the extortions of the Emperor and his suite to such a degree that Nero became a popular hero, in whose honour medals were struck and statues erected. To signalise yet further his stay in Greece, he bade the long projected canal to be dug across the Isthmus. This time the work was actually begun, and a prominent philosopher, who had incurred the Imperial displeasure, was seen digging away with a gang of other convicts. Nero himself dug the first sod with a golden spade, and carried away the first spadefuls of earth in a basket on his shoulders. But the task, of which traces may still be seen, was soon abandoned, and the dangers which threatened his throne recalled the Emperor to Italy. But first he consulted the Oracle of Delphi, which fully maintained its ancient reputation for obscurity and accuracy, but was bidden henceforth to be dumb. The two most celebrated seats of Greek antiquity, Athens and Sparta, he left, however, unvisited—Sparta, because he disapproved of its institutions; Athens, because he, the matricide, feared the vengeance of the Furies, whose fabled shrine was beneath the Areopagos[11].

The civil war, which raged in Italy between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian, had little influence upon Greece, except that it gave an adventurer, who bore a striking resemblance to the late[12] Emperor and shared his musical tastes, the opportunity of personating him. But this pretender, who had made himself master of the island of Kythnos, was soon suppressed[12], and Vespasian, as he visited Greece on his way from the East to Rome, could calmly study the condition of that country. The stern old soldier, who, in spite of his Greek culture, had fallen asleep during Nero’s recitations, had no sympathy with Greek antiquities, and maintained that the Hellenes did not know how to use their newly-restored freedom, which had involved the impoverished Roman exchequer in the loss of the Greek taxes. He accordingly restored the organisation and fiscal arrangements which had been in force before Nero’s proclamation, only that the province of Achaia under the Flavian dynasty no longer included Thessaly, Epeiros, and Akarnania. For a long time Greece had no political history; but we know that Domitian, like Tiberius, was as considerate towards the provincials as he was tyrannical to the Roman nobles; that he cherished a special cult for the goddess Athena; and that he deigned to allow himself to be nominated as Archon Eponymos of Athens for the year 93—an instance which shows the continuance of an institution which had been founded nearly eight centuries earlier. Trajan’s direct connection with Greece was limited to a stay at Athens on the way to the Parthian war, but he counted among his friends the most celebrated Greek author of that age, the famous Plutarch, who passed a great part of his time in the small Bœotian town of Chaironeia, where his so-called “chair,” obviously the end seat of one of the rows in the theatre, may still be seen in the little church. Like Polybios in the first period of the Roman conquest, Plutarch served as a link to unite the Greeks and their masters. At once an Hellenic patriot and an admirer of Rome, he combined love of the past independence of his country with a shrewd sense of the advantages of Roman rule in the existing circumstances. True, the Greece of his time was very different from that of the Golden Age. While the single city of Megara had sent 3000 heavy armed men to the battle of Platæa, the whole province of Achaia could not raise a larger number in his days. Depopulation was going on apace; Eubœa was almost desolate, and the inland towns of the mainland were mostly losing their trade, which was gravitating to the coasts. The expenditure of the Greek taxes at Rome led to the want of funds for public objects, and the Roman system of making immunity from taxation a principle of Roman citizenship divided the Greeks into two classes, the rich and the poor. The former led luxurious lives, built expensive houses, added acre to acre, and fell into the[13] hands of the foreign money-lenders of Corinth or Patras. The latter sank lower and lower in the social scale, and it was noticed that, while the Greek women had become more beautiful, the classic grace of Hellenic manhood had declined. But Greece continued to exercise her perennial charm on the cultured traveller. In spite of the Thessalian brigands, tourists journeyed to see the Vale of Tempe, and a race of loquacious guides arose, whose business it was to explain the history of Delphi. Men of the highest rank were proud to be made Athenian citizens, and one of them, Antiochos Philopappos, grandson of the last king of Kommagene, was commemorated in the last years of Trajan by the monument which is to-day one of the most conspicuous in all Athens.

The reign of Hadrian was a very happy period for the Greeks. A lover of both ancient and contemporary Hellas, which he visited several times, the Imperial traveller left his mark all over the country. We may gather from Pausanias, whose own wanderings began at this period, that there was scarcely a single Greek city of importance which had not received some benefit from this Emperor. Coins of Patras describe him as “the restorer of Achaia,” Megara regarded him as her “second founder,” Mantineia had to thank him for the restoration of her classical name. Alive to the want of through communication between the Peloponnese and Central Greece, he built a safe road along the Skironian cliffs, where now the tourist looks down on the azure sea from the train that takes him from Megara to Corinth. He provided the latter city with water by means of an aqueduct from Lake Stymphalos, and began the aqueduct at Athens which was completed by his successor. But this was only one of his many Athenian improvements. His affection for Athens, where he lived as a Greek among Greeks and had held the office of Archon Eponymos, like Domitian, led him to assign the revenues of Cephalonia to the Athenian treasury, to regulate the oil-trade, that important branch of Attic commerce, his edict about which may still be read on the gate of Athena Archegetis, to repair the theatre of Dionysos, and to present the city with a Pantheon, a library, contained within the Stoa which still bears his name and of which part is still standing, and a gymnasium. He also built there a temple of Hera, and completed that of Zeus Olympios, which had been begun by Peisistratos more than six centuries before and had provided Sulla with spoil. The still standing columns of this magnificent building formed the nucleus of the “new Athens,” which he founded outside “the old city of Theseus,” and to which the Arch of Hadrian, as the inscriptions upon it show, was intended as the[14] entrance. With another of his foundations, the temple of Zeus Panhellenios, was connected the institution of the Panhellenic festival, which represented the unity of the Greek race and, like the more ancient games, had a religious basis. Hadrian called into existence a synod of “Panhellenes,” composed of members of the Greek communities on both sides of the Ægean, who met at Athens and whose treasurer was styled “Hellenotamias,” or “steward of the Hellenes”—a title borrowed from the classical Confederacy of Delos. In name, indeed, the golden age of Athens seemed to have returned, and the enthusiastic Athenians heaped one honour after another upon the head of the great Philhellene. They adored him as a god, and the President of the Panhellenic synod became his priest; his statues rose all over the city, his name was bestowed upon one of the months, a thirteenth tribe was formed and called after him, and the thirteen wedges of the repaired theatre of Dionysos contained each a bust of Hadrian; even an unworthy favourite of the Emperor was dubbed a deity with the same ease that we convert a charitable tradesman into a peer.

Hadrian’s two immediate successors continued his Philhellenic policy. Antoninus Pius erected new buildings for the use of the visitors to that fashionable health-resort, the Hieron of Epidauros; and in graceful recognition of the legend, according to which the founders of the first settlement on the Palatine were emigrants from Pallantion in Arkadia, raised that village to the rank of a city, with the privileges of self-government and immunity from taxes. Marcus Aurelius seemed to have realised the Utopian ideal of Plato, that philosophers should be kings or kings philosophers. The Imperial author of the Meditations wrote in Greek, had sat at the feet of Greek teachers, and greatly admired the products of the Greek intellect. But his reign was disturbed by warlike alarms, and it is noteworthy that at this period the first of those barbarian tribes from the North, which inflicted so much injury upon Greece in later centuries, penetrated into that country. The Greeks showed, however, that they had not in the long years of peace, forgotten how to defend themselves. At Elateia the Kostobokes—such was the name of the marauders—received a check from a local force and withdrew beyond the frontier[13]. In spite of his distant campaigns, Marcus Aurelius found time to visit Athens, restored the temple at Eleusis, was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and founded in 176 the Athenian University. It was, indeed, the heyday of Academic life, and Athens was under the Antonines the happy hunting-ground of professors, who received salaries from the Imperial exchequer, and[15] enjoyed the privilege of exemption from costly public duties. One of their number, Herodes Atticus of Marathon, has, by his splendid gifts to the city, perpetuated his fame to our own time. His vast wealth, united to his renown as a professor of rhetoric, not only made him the most prominent man in Athens, where he held the post of President of the new Panhellenic synod, but gained him the Roman consulship, the friendship of Hadrian, and the honour of instructing the early years of Marcus Aurelius. When Verus, the colleague of the latter in the Imperial dignity, visited Athens, it was as the guest of the sophist of Marathon; when the University was founded, it was Herodes who selected the professors. The charm of his villas at Kephisia, then, as now, the suburban pleasaunce of the dust-choked Athenians, and in his native village, has been extolled by one of his pupils, while the Odeion which still bears his name was erected by him to the memory of his second wife[14]. He also restored the Stadion, which had been built by Lykourgos about five centuries earlier, and within its precincts his body was interred. There still exist remains of his temple of Fortune, a goddess of whom he had varied experiences. For his vast wealth and the sense of their own inferiority caused the Athenians to revile their benefactor, and as many of them owed him money, he was naturally regarded as their enemy until his death. Many other Greek cities benefited by his liberality; he built a theatre at Corinth and restored the bathing establishment at Thermopylæ; and he was even accused of making life too easy for his fellow-countrymen because he provided Olympia with pure water by means of an aqueduct, of which the Exedra is still visible.

It was at this period, too, that the traveller Pausanias wrote his famous Description of Greece, a work which gives a faithful account of that country as it struck his observant eyes. Compared with what it had been in Strabo’s time, the land seemed prosperous in the age of the Antonines, though some districts had never recovered from the ravages of the Roman wars. Much of Bœotia was still in the desolate state in which Sulla had left it; Ætolia had not been inhabited since Octavian carried off its population to Nikopolis; the lower town of Thebes was quite deserted, and the ancient name was then, as now, confined to the ancient Akropolis, while the sole occupants of Delos were the Athenians sent to guard the temple. But Delphi was in a flourishing condition, the Roman colonies of Patras and Corinth continued to prosper, and among the ancient cities of the Peloponnese, Argos and Sparta still held the foremost rank, while the much more[16] modern Megalopolis, upon which such high hopes had been built, shared the fate of Tiryns and Mycenæ. Moreover, despite the robbery of statues by Romans from Mummius to Nero, Pausanias found a vast number of ancient masterpieces all over the country, and even the paintings, with which Polygnotos had adorned the Stoa Poikile at Athens, were still visible. As for the relics of classical lore and prehistoric legend, they abounded in every city that could boast of a hero, and the remark of Cicero was as true in the time of Pausanias, that in a Greek town one came upon the traces of history at every step. In the second century, too, good Doric was still spoken by the Messenians; and, if the pure Attic of Plato had been somewhat corrupted at Athens by the presence of many foreign students, it was still preserved in all its glory by the peasants of Attica. The writings of Lucian at this period show how even a Syrian could, by long residence at Athens, acquire a masterly gift of Attic prose. The illusion of a classical revival was further kept up by the continuance of ancient institutions, even though they had lost the reality of power. Pausanias mentions the existence, and describes the composition, of the Amphiktyonic Council in his time, when it was still the guardian of the Delphic oracle. The Court of the Areopagos preserved its ancient forms at Athens; the Ephors and other Spartan authorities had survived the disapproval of Nero; the Confederacy of the Free Laconians, though reduced in size, still included eighteen cities; Bœotia and Phokis enjoyed the privilege of local assemblies. The great games still attracted competitors and spectators; the great oracles still found some believers, who consulted them; and the old religion, if it had little moral force, was, at least in externals, still that of the majority, though philosophers regretted it and enlightened persons like Pausanias inclined to a rational interpretation of the myths, and told stories of bribes administered to the Pythian priestess. Christianity had made little progress in Greece during the three generations that had elapsed since the last visit of St Paul. Mention is, indeed, made by the Christian historian, Eusebius, of large communities at Larissa, Sparta, and in Crete; but Corinth still remained the chief seat of the new faith, and the Corinthian Christians still retained that factious spirit which St Paul had rebuked. Athens, as the home of philosophy, was little favourable to the simplicity of the Gospel; but the celebrated Athenian philosopher, Aristides, was not only converted to Christianity, but presented an Apology for that creed to Hadrian during his residence in the city; while another Athenian, Hyginos, was chosen Pope in the age of the Antonines. Anacletos, the second (or, in other lists, fourth) Bishop of Rome after[17] St Peter, is said to have been a native of Athens, and a third, Xystos, perished, as Pope Sixtus II, in the persecution of Valerian. The tradition that Dionysios the Areopagite, became first Bishop of Athens[15], and there gained the crown of martyrdom, and that St Andrew suffered death at Patras, has been cherished, and in the case of Patras has had a considerable historical influence.

With the death of Marcus Aurelius the series of Philhellenic Emperors ended, and the Roman civil wars in the last decade of the second century occupied the attention of the Empire. Without taking an active part in the struggle, Greece submitted to the authority of Pescennius Niger, one of the unsuccessful candidates, and this temporary error of judgment may have induced the Emperor Septimius Severus to inflict a punishment upon Athens, the cause of which is usually ascribed to a slight which he suffered during his student days there. His successor, Caracalla, by extending the Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire, gave the Greeks an opportunity, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. From that moment the doors of the Roman administration were thrown open to all the races of the Roman dominions, and the nimble-witted Greeks so obtained a predominance in that department such as they acquired much later under Turkish rule. From that moment, too, they considered themselves as “Romans,” and the name stuck to them long after the Roman Empire had passed away. But Caracalla, while he thus made them the equals of the Romans in the eyes of the law, increased the taxes which it had long been the privilege of Roman citizens to pay, while he continued to exact those which the provincials had paid previous to their admission to the citizenship. The reductions made by his successors, Macrinus and Alexander Severus, were to a large extent neutralised by the great depreciation of the currency, which began under Caracalla and continued for the next half century. The Government paid its creditors in depreciated money, but took good care that the taxes were paid in good gold pieces. The worst results followed: officials were tempted, like the modern Turkish Pashas, to recoup themselves by extortion for the diminution in their salaries; trade with foreign countries became uncertain, even the specially thriving Greek industries of marble and purple dye must have been affected, and possessors of good coin buried it in the ground. Amid this dismal scene of decay, Athens continued to preserve her reputation as a University town. Though no longer patronised by cultured Emperors, she still attracted numbers of pupils to her lecture rooms; and the name[18] of Longinus, author of the celebrated treatise, On the Sublime, adorns the scanty Athenian annals of this period. That the drama was not neglected is clear from the inscription which records the restoration of the theatre of Dionysos by the Archon Phaidros during this period. But the philosophers and playgoers of Athens were soon to be roused by the alarm of an invasion such as their city had not experienced for many a generation.

Hitherto, with the unimportant exception of the raid of the Kostobokes as far as Elateia, Greece had never been submitted to the terrors of a barbarian inroad since the Roman Conquest, The Roman Empire had protected Achaia from foreign attack, and even the least friendly of the Emperors had allowed no one to plunder the art treasures of the Greek cities except their own occasional emissaries. Hence the Greece of the middle of the third century preserved in many respects the same external appearance as that of the same country four hundred years earlier. But this blessing of peace, which Rome had conferred upon the Greeks, had had the bad effect of training up a nation which was a stranger to the arts of war. Caracalla, indeed, had raised a couple of Spartan regiments; but the local militia of the Greek cities had had no experience of fighting, and the fortifications of the country had been allowed to fall into ruin. Such was the state of the Greek defences when in 250 the Goths crossed the Balkans and entered what is now South Bulgaria. Measures were at once taken to defend the Greek provinces. Claudius, afterwards Emperor, was ordered to occupy the historic pass of Thermopylæ, but his forces were small and most of them had been newly enrolled. The death of the Emperor Decius, fighting against the Goths, increased the alarm, and the siege of Salonika thoroughly startled the Greeks. No sooner had Valerian mounted the Imperial throne, than they signalised his reign by repairing the walls of Athens, which had been neglected since the siege of Sulla[16], and it was perhaps at the same time that a fort and a new gate were erected for the defence of the Akropolis[17]. As a second line of defence the fortifications across the Isthmus were restored, and occupied, just as by Peloponnesian troops of old on the approach of the Persian host. But these preparations did not long preserve the country from the attacks of the Goths. Distracted by the rival claims of self-styled[19] Emperors, Valens in Achaia, and Piso in Thessaly, who had availed themselves of the general confusion to declare their independence, and visited by a terrible plague which followed in the wake of the Roman armies, the Greeks soon had the Gothic hosts upon them. A first raid was repulsed, only to be repeated in 267 on a far larger scale. This time the Goths and fierce Heruli arrived by sea, and, after ravaging the storied island of Skyros, captured Argos, Sparta, and the lower city of Corinth. Athens herself was surprised by the enemy, before the Emperor Gallienus, whose admiration for the ancient city had been shown by his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries and his acceptance of the Athenian citizenship with the office of Archon Eponymos, could send troops to her assistance. But at this crisis in her history, Athens showed herself worthy of her glorious past. At that time one of her leading citizens was the historian Dexippos, whose writings on the Scythian wars, preserved now only in fragments, were favourably compared by a Byzantine critic with those of Thucydides[18]. But Dexippos, if a less caustic writer, was a better general, than the historian of the Peloponnesian war. He assembled a body of Athenians, addressed them in a fiery harangue, a fragment of which still exists[19], and reminded them that the event of battles was usually decided by bravery rather than by numbers. Marshalling his troops in the Olive Grove, he accustomed them little by little to the noise of the Gothic war cries and the sight of the Gothic warriors. The arrival of a Roman fleet effected a timely diversion, and the barbarians, taken between two hostile forces, abandoned Athens and succumbed to the Emperor’s arms on their march towards the North. Fortunately they seem to have spared the monuments of the city during their occupation, and we are told that the Athenian libraries were saved from the flames by the deep policy of a shrewd Goth, who thought that the pursuit of literature would unfit the Greeks for the art of war[20]. Dexippos, who proved by his own example the compatibility of learning with strategy, has been commemorated in an inscription, which praises his merits as a writer, but is silent about his fame as a maker, of history—known to us from a single sentence of the Latin biographer of Gallienus[21]. Yet at that moment Greece needed men of action rather than men of letters. For another Gothic invasion took place two years later, and from Thessaly to Crete the vessels of the barbarians harried the coasts. But the interval had been used to put the defences of the cities into[20] repair; and such was the ill-success of the invaders, who could not take a single town, that they did not renew the attack. For more than a century the land was spared the horrors of a fresh Gothic war. The great victory of the Emperor Claudius II over the Goths at Nish and the abandonment of what is now Roumania to them by his successor Aurelian secured the peace of Achaia. Although the three invasions had resulted in the loss of a considerable amount of moveable property and of many slaves, who had either been carried off as captives or had escaped from their Greek masters to the Gothic ranks, the recovery of Athens and Corinth seems to have been so rapid that seven years after the last raid they were among the nine cities of the Empire to which the Roman Senate wrote announcing the election of the Emperor Tacitus and bidding them direct any appeals from the Proconsul to the Prefect of the City of Rome—a clear proof of their civic importance.

But the Greeks soon looked for the fountain of justice elsewhere than on the banks of the Tiber. With the reign of Diocletian began the practice of removing the seat of Government from Rome, and that Emperor usually resided at Nicomedia. His establishment of four great administrative divisions of the Empire really separated the two Eastern, in which Greece was comprehended, from the two Western, and prepared the way for the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine and the ultimate division of the Eastern and Western Empires. Diocletian’s further increase in the number of the provinces, several of which were grouped under one of the Dioceses, into which the Empire was split up for administrative purposes, had the double effect of altering the size of the Greek provinces, and of scattering them over several Dioceses. Thus Achaia, Thessaly, “Old” Epeiros (as the region round Nikopolis was now called), and Crete, formed four separate provinces included in the Mœsian Diocese, the administrative centre of which was Sirmium, the modern Mitrovitz. The Ægean islands, on the other hand, composed one of the provinces of the Asian Diocese. The province of Achaia had, however, the privilege of being administered by a Proconsul, who was an official of more exalted rank than the great majority of provincial governors. Side by side with these arrangements, the currency reform of Diocletian and the edict by which he fixed the highest price of commodities cannot fail to have affected the trade of Greece, while his love of building benefited the Greek marble quarries.

After the abdication of Diocletian the Christians of Greece were visited by another of those persecutions, of which they had had experience under the Emperor Decius half a century earlier. But on[21] neither occasion were the martyrdoms numerous, except in Crete, and it would appear that Christianity in Greece was less prosperous, or less progressive, than the same creed in the great cities of the East, where the victims were far more numerous. Constantine’s toleration made him as popular with the Greek Christians as his marked respect for the Athenian University made him with the Greek philosophers, and it is, therefore, no wonder that in his final struggle against his rival, Licinius, he was able to collect a Greek fleet, which mustered in the harbour of the Piræus, then once more an important station, and forced for him the passage of the Dardanelles. But the reign of Constantine, although he found a biographer in the young Athenian historian, Praxagoras[22], was not conducive to the national development of Greece. Adopting the administrative system of Diocletian, he continued the practice of dividing the Empire into four great “Prefectures,” as they were now called, each of which was subdivided into Dioceses, and the latter again into provinces. The four Greek provinces of Thessaly, Achaia (including some of the Cyclades and some of the Ionian Islands), Old Epeiros (including Corfù and Ithake), and Crete (of which Gortyna was the capital), formed part of the Diocese of Macedonia in the Prefecture of Illyricum, whereas the rest of the Greek islands composed a distinct province of the Asian Diocese in the Prefecture of the Orient. Thus, the Greek race continued to be split into fragments, while at the same time the levelling tendency of Constantine’s administration gradually swept away those Greek municipal institutions, which had hitherto survived all changes, and thus the inhabitants of different parts of the country began to lose their peculiar characteristics. A few time-honoured vestiges of ancient Greek freedom existed for some time longer; thus the Areopagos and the Archons of Athens and the provincial assembly of Achaia may be traced on into the fifth century. But their place was taken by the new local senates, composed of so-called Decuriones, who were chosen from the richest landowners, and who had to collect, and were held personally responsible for, the amount of the land-tax. This onerous office was made hereditary, and there was no means of escaping it except by death or flight to a monastic cell; even a journey outside the country required a special permit from the governor, and the rich Decurio, like the mediæval serf, was tied down to the land which he was so unfortunate as to own. Even an Irish landlord’s lot seems happy compared with that of a Greek Decurio, nor was the provincial who escaped the unpleasant privilege of serving the State[22] in that capacity greatly to be envied. The exaction of taxes became at once more stringent and more regular—a combination peculiarly objectionable to the Oriental mind—and the re-assessment of their burdens every fifteen years led the people to calculate time by the “Indictions,” or edicts in which, with all the solemnity of purple ink, the Emperor fixed the amount of the imposts for this new cycle of taxation. That the ruler himself became conscious of the inequalities of his subjects’ contributions was evident half a century later when Valentinian I allowed the citizens of each municipality to elect an official, styled Defensor, whose duty it was to defend his fellow-citizens before the Emperor against the fiscal exactions of the authorities.

The transference of the capital to Constantinople, enormous as its ultimate results have proved to be, was at first a disadvantage to the inhabitants of Greece. We are accustomed to look on the centre of the Byzantine Empire as a largely Greek city, but it must be remembered that, at the outset, it was Roman in conception and that its language was Latin. Almost immediately, however, it began to drain Greece of its population, attracted by the prospects of work and the certainty of “bread and games” in the New Rome. In the days of Demosthenes Byzantium had been the granary of Athens; now Attica, always unproductive of wheat, began to find that Constantine’s growing capital had to import bread-stuffs for its own use, and the Athenians were thankful for an annual grant of corn from the Emperor. The founder wanted, too, Greek works of art to adorn his city, and 427 statues were placed in Sta Sophia alone; the Muses of Helikon were carried off to the palace of the Emperor; the serpent column, which the grateful Greeks had dedicated at Delphi after the battle of Platæa, was set up in the Hippodrome, where one of its three heads was struck off by the battle-axe of Mohammed II.

The conversion of Constantine to Christianity had the natural effect of bringing within the Christian ranks those lukewarm pagans who took their religious views from the Emperor. But the comparative immunity from persecution which the Christians of Greece had enjoyed under the pagan ascendancy led them to treat their opponents with the same mildness. There was no reaction, because there had been no revolution, and the devotees of the old and the new religion went on living peaceably side by side. The even greater temptation to the subtle Greek intellect to indulge in the wearisome Arian controversy, which so long convulsed a large part of the Church in the East, was rejected owing to the fortunate unanimity of the bishops who were sent from Greece to attend the Council of Nice.[23] Their strong and united opposition to the heresy of Arius was re-echoed by their flocks at home, and the Church, undivided on this crucial question, became more and more identified with the people. After Constantine’s death the harmony between the pagans and the Christians was temporarily disturbed. Under Constantius II the public offerings ceased, the temples were closed, the oracles fell into disuse; under Julian the Apostate a final attempt was made to rehabilitate the ancient religion. Julian seemed, indeed, to the conservative party in Greece to have restored for two brief years the silver age of Hadrian, if not the golden age of Perikles. The jealousy of Constantius, by sending him in honourable exile to Athens, had made him an enthusiastic admirer of not only the literature but the creed of the old Hellenes. It was at that time that he abjured Christianity and was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and when he took up arms against Constantius it was to the Corinthians, Lacedæmonians, and Athenians that he addressed Apologies for his conduct. These manifestoes, of which that to the Athenians is still extant among the writings of Julian, had such an effect upon the Greeks, flattered no doubt by such an attention, that they declared in his favour, and on his rival’s death they had their reward. The temples were re-opened, the altars once more smoked with the offerings of the devout, the great games were revived, including the Aktian festival of Augustus, which had fallen into decline with the falling fortunes of Nikopolis. Julian restored that city and others like it, and the Argives did not appeal in vain for a rehearing of a wearisome law-suit with Corinth to an Emperor who was steeped to the lips in classic lore. At Athens he purged the University by excluding Christians from professorial chairs, Christian students were often converted, like the Emperor, by the genius of the place, and the University became the last refuge of Hellenism in Greece, when Julian’s attempted restoration of the old order of things collapsed at his death. Throughout this period, indeed, the University of Athens was not only the chief intellectual centre of the Empire—for Rome had ceased, and the newly founded University of Constantinople had not yet begun, to attract the best intellects—but it was the all-absorbing institution of the city. Athenian trade had gone on decaying, and under Constans, the son of Constantine, the people of Athens were obliged to ask the Emperor for the grant of certain insular revenues, which he allowed them to devote to the purchase of provisions. So Athens was now solely a University town, and the ineradicable yearning of the Greeks for politics found vent, in default of a larger opening, in such academic struggles as the election of a professor or the merits of the rival corps[24] of students. These corps, each composed as a rule of students from the same district, kept Athens alive with their disputes, which sometimes degenerated into pitched battles calling for the intervention of the Roman governor from Corinth. So keen was the competition between them, that their agents were posted at the Piræus to accost the sea-sick freshman as soon as he landed and enlist him in this or that corps. Each corps had its favourite professor, for whose class it obtained pupils, by force or argument, and whose lectures it applauded whenever the master brought out some fresh conceit or distorted the flexible Greek language into some new combination of words. The celebrated sophist Libanios, and the poetic divine, Gregory of Nazianzos, respectively the apologist and the censor of Julian, have left us a graphic sketch of the student life in their time at Athens, when the scarlet and gold garments of the lecturers and the gowns of their pupils mingled in the streets of the ancient city, which still deserved in this fourth century the proud title of “the eye of Greece.”

The triumph of paganism ceased with the death of Julian; but his successor Jovian, though he ordered the Church of the Virgin to be erected at Corfù out of the fragments of a heathen temple opposite the royal villa[23], proclaimed universal toleration. His wise example was followed by Valentinian I, who repealed Julian’s edict which had made the profession of paganism a test of professorial office at Athens, and allowed his subjects to approach heaven in what manner they pleased. The Greeks were specially exempted from the law forbidding nocturnal sacrifices because it would “make their life unendurable.” The Eleusinian mysteries were permitted to be celebrated, and Athens continued to derive much profit from those festivals. It was fortunate for the Greeks that, at the partition of the Empire between him and Valens in 364, the Prefecture of Illyricum, which included the bulk of the Greek provinces, was joined to the Western half, and thus fell to his share. His reign marked the last stage of that peaceful development which had gone on in Greece since the Gothic invasion of the previous century. A few years after his death the Emperor Theodosius I publicly proclaimed the Catholic faith to be the established creed of the Empire, and proceeded to stamp out paganism with all the zeal of a Spaniard. The Oracle of Delphi was closed for ever, the temples were shut, and in 393 the Olympic games, which had been the rallying point of the Hellenic race for untold centuries, ceased to exist. As a[25] token of their discontinuance the statue of Zeus, which had stood in the temple of the god at Olympia, was removed to Constantinople, and the time-honoured custom of reckoning time by the Olympiads was definitely replaced by the prosaic cycle of Indictions. Yet Athens still remained a bulwark of the old religion, and the preservation of that city from the great earthquake which devastated large parts of Greece in 375 was attributed to the miraculous protection of the hero Achilles, whose statue had been placed in the Parthenon by the venerable hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries.

But a worse evil than earthquakes was about to befall the Greeks. After more than a century’s peace, the Goths crossed the Balkans and defeated the Emperor Valens in the battle of Adrianople. The Greek provinces, entrusted for their better defence to the strong arm of Theodosius, escaped for the moment with no further loss than that caused by a Gothic raid in the North and by the brigandage which is the natural result of every war in the Balkan Peninsula. But, on the death of that Emperor and the final division of the Roman Empire between his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, in 395, the Goths, under their great leader, Alaric, attacked the now divided Prefecture of Illyricum. The evil results of the complete separation of the Eastern from the Western Empire were at once felt. The Greek provinces, which had just been attached to the Eastern system, might have been saved from this incursion if the Western general, Stilicho, had been permitted by Byzantine jealousy to rout the Goths in Thessaly. As the arm of that great commander was thus arrested in the act of striking, Alaric not only was able to penetrate into Epeiros as far as Nikopolis, which at that time almost entirely belonged to St Jerome’s friend, the devout Paula, but he marched over Pindos into Thessaly, defeated the local militia, and turned to the South upon Bœotia and Attica. The last earthquake had laid many of the fortifications in ruins, the Roman army of occupation was small, and its commander unwilling to imitate the conduct of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The monks facilitated the inroad of a Christian army. The famous fortifications of Thebes had been restored, but they did not check the course of the impetuous Goth, who, leaving them unassailed, went straight to Athens. A later pagan historian has invented the pleasing legend that Pallas Athena and the hero Achilles appeared to protect the city from the invaders. But the Goths, who were not only Christians but Arian heretics, would have been little influenced by such an apparition. Athens capitulated, and Alaric, who bade spare the holy sanctuaries of the Apostles when, fifteen years later, he entered Rome, abstained from destroying the[26] artistic treasures of which Athens was full. But the great temple of the mysteries at the town of Eleusis, and that town itself, so intimately associated with that ancient cult, were sacrificed either to the fanaticism of the Arian monks who followed the Gothic army, to the cupidity of the troops, or to both. The last hierophant seems to have perished with the shrine, of which he was the guardian, and a pagan apologist saw in his fall the manifest wrath of the gods, angry at the usurpation of that high office by one who did not belong to the sacred family of the Eumolpidæ. Henceforth the Eleusinian mysteries ceased to exist, and the home of those great festivals is now a sorry Albanian village, where ruins still mark the work of the destroyer. Megara shared the fate of Eleusis, the Isthmus was left without defenders, and Corinth, Argos, and Sparta were sacked. Those who resisted were cut down, their wives carried off into slavery, their children made to serve a Gothic master. Even a philosopher died of a broken heart at the spectacle of this terrible calamity. Fortunately, Alaric’s sojourn in the Peloponnese was shortened by the arrival of Stilicho with an army in the Gulf of Corinth. The Goths withdrew to the fastnesses of Mount Pholoe, between Olympia and Patras, and it seemed as if Stilicho had only to draw his lines around them and then wait for hunger to do its work. But from some unexplained cause—perhaps a court intrigue at Constantinople, perhaps the negligence of the general—Alaric was allowed to escape over the Gulf of Corinth into Epeiros. After devastating that region he was rewarded by the Government of Constantinople with the office of Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial forces in the Eastern half of Illyricum, which comprised the scenes of his recent ravages. The principle of converting a brigand into a policeman has often proved successful, but there were probably many who shared the indignant feelings of the poet Claudian[24] at this sudden transformation of “the devastator of Achaia” into her protector. But Alaric could not rebuild the cities, which he had destroyed; he could not restore prosperity to the lands, which he had ravaged. We have ample evidence of the injury which this invasion had inflicted upon Greece in the legislation of Theodosius II in the first half of the next century. Two Imperial edicts remitted sixty years’ arrears of taxation; another granted the petition of the people of Achaia that their taxes might be reduced to one-third of the existing amount on the ground that they could pay no more; while yet another relieved the Greeks from the burden of contributing towards the expenses of the public games at Constantinople. There is proof, too, in the pages of a contemporary[27] historian, as well as in the dry paragraphs of the Theodosian Code, that much of the land had been allowed to go out of cultivation and had been abandoned by its owners. Athens, however, had survived the tempest which had laid waste so large a part of the country. True, we find the philosopher Synesios, who visited that seat of learning soon after Alaric’s invasion, writing sarcastically to a correspondent, that Athens “resembled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaughtered victim,” and was now famous for its honey alone. But the disillusioned visitor makes no mention of the destruction of the buildings, for which the city was renowned. Throughout the vicissitudes of the five and a half centuries, which we have traversed since the Roman Conquest, one conqueror after another had spared the glories of Athens, and even after the terrible calamity of this Gothic invasion she remained the one bright spot amid the darkness which had settled down upon the land of the Hellenes.

The period of more than a century which separated Alaric’s invasion from the accession of Justinian was not prolific of events on the soil of Greece. But those which occurred there tended yet further to accelerate the decay of the old classic life. Scarcely had the country begun to recover from the long-felt ravages of the Goths, than the Vandals, who had now established themselves in Africa, plundered the west and south-west coasts of Greece from Epeiros to Cape Matapan. But at this crisis the Free Laconian town of Kainepolis showed such a Spartan spirit that the Vandal King Genseric was obliged to retire with considerable loss. He revenged himself by ravaging the beautiful island of Zante, and by throwing into the Ionian Sea the mangled bodies of 500 of its inhabitants[25]. Nikopolis was held as a hostage by the Vandals till peace was concluded between them and the Eastern Empire, when their raids ceased. Seven years afterwards, in 482, the Ostrogoths under Theodoric devastated Larissa and the rich plain of Thessaly. In 517 a more serious, because permanent enemy, appeared for the first time in the annals of Greece. The Bulgarians had already caused such alarm to the statesmen of Constantinople that they had strengthened the defences of that city, and it was probably at this time that the fortifications of Megara were restored. On their first inroad, however, the Bulgarians penetrated no further into Greece than Thermopylæ and the south of Epeiros. But they carried off many captives, and, to complete the woes of the Greeks, one of those severe earthquakes to which that country is liable laid Corinth in ruins.

The final separation of the Eastern and Western Empires tended to identify the interests of the Greeks with those of the Eastern Emperors, to make Greek the language of the Court, and to encourage the Greek nationality. But from that period down to the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Imperial city grew more and more in importance at the expense of the old home of the Hellenes, and Greece became more and more provincial. But it seems an exaggeration to say with Finlay that during those eight centuries “no Athenian citizen gained a place of honour in the annals of the Empire.” To Athens, at least,[30] belongs the honour of having produced the Empress Eudokia, wife of Theodosius II, whose acts of financial justice to her native land she may have prompted, such as that which, in 435, reduced the tribute of the dwellers in Greece by two-thirds, while she is said to have founded twelve churches in her native city, among them the quaint little Kapnikarea, so conspicuous a feature of modern Athens, if we may trust the belief embodied in the inscription inside. The daughter of an Athenian professor, Leontios, celebrated alike for her beauty and accomplishments, she went to Constantinople to appeal against an unjust decision which had enriched her brothers but had left her almost penniless. She lost her case, but she won the favour of Pulcheria, the masterful sister of Theodosius, and was appointed one of her maids of honour. She used this favourable position to the best advantage, gained the heart of the young Emperor, who was seven years her junior in age and many more in knowledge of the world, and had no scruples about exchanging paganism and the name of Athenais for Christianity and the baptismal title of Eudokia. She showed her Christian charity by forgiving and promoting her brothers; she kept up her literary accomplishments by turning part of the Old Testament into Greek verse; but she was accused of ambition and infidelity, the latter charge being substantiated by a superb apple, which the Emperor had presented to his wife, which she in turn had sent to her lover, and he, like an idiot, had placed on the Emperor’s table! She died in exile at Jerusalem, a striking example of the vicissitudes of human fortunes. Yet even in the time of her power, she could not, perhaps would not, prevent her husband’s persecution of the religion which she had abjured. His orders to the provincial authorities to destroy the temples or to consecrate them to Christian worship were not always carried out, it is true. But the pictures of Polygnotus, which Pausanias had seen in the Stoa Poikile at Athens, excited the covetousness of an Imperial governor, and the gold and ivory statue of Athena by Phidias vanished from the Parthenon for ever[26]; the temple of Zeus at Olympia was destroyed by an earthquake or by Christian bigotry, the shrine of Asklepios on the slope of the Akropolis was pulled down, while the heathen divinities became gradually assimilated with the Christian saints, in whom they finally merged. Thus Helios, the sun-god, was converted into Elias, whose name is so prominent all over the map of modern Greece; the wine-god Dionysos became a reformed character[31] in the person of St Dionysios, and the temples of Theseus and Zeus Olympios at Athens were dedicated to St George and St John. By a still more striking transformation the Parthenon was consecrated as a church of the Virgin during the sixth century, and was thenceforth regarded as the Cathedral of Athens. The growth of Christianity is observable, too, from the lists of Greek sees represented at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, while the importance of Corinth as the seat of the Metropolitan of Achaia is shown by the synod which was held there to settle a point of Church discipline in 419. In spite, however, of its political separation from Rome, we find Greece making appeals to the Pope when grave theological questions arose. At this period the Archbishop of Salonika was regarded as the official head of all the Greek provinces in Europe, yet when he seemed to the orthodox Epeirotes to be affected with heresy, they sent in their adhesion to Rome.

Theodosius II was not content with the destruction of temples; he desired the final disappearance of such vestiges of municipal freedom as Constantine had spared. In the same spirit of uniformity in which he codified the law, he swept away the remains of Lycurgus’ system at Sparta and the Court of Areopagos. Yet, as institutions usually survive their practical utility in a conservative country, we are not surprised to find the name of an Eponymos Archon as late as 485. And the University of Athens still lived on, fighting the now hopeless battle of the old religion with all the zeal of the latest Neo-Platonic school of philosophy. The endowments of that school and the patriotism of rich Athenians, like Theagenes, one of the two last Archons, and known as the wealthiest Greek of his day, made up for the withdrawal of Imperial subsidies, and the bitter tongue of Synesios could still complain of the airs which those who had studied at Athens gave themselves ever afterwards. “They regard themselves,” wrote the philosopher, “as demi-gods and the rest of mankind as donkeys.” But the university received a severe blow when, in 425, Theodosius enlarged and enriched the University of Constantinople with a number of new professorial chairs. If his institution of fifteen professors of the Greek language and literature gave that tongue an official position in what had hitherto been mainly a Latin city, it also attracted the best talent—men like Jacobus, the famous physician of the Emperor Leo the Great—from Greece to Constantinople, which thus acted as a magnet to the aspiring provincials, just as Paris acts to the rest of France. The last great figure of the Athenian University, Proklos, whose commentaries on Plato are still extant, was engaged in demonstrating[32] by the purity of his life and his doctrines that a pagan could be no less moral and more intellectual than a Christian. The old gods, deposed from their thrones, seemed to favour their last champion; so, when the statue of Athena was removed from the Akropolis, the goddess appeared to the philosopher in a dream and told him that henceforth his house would be her home. The famous Bœthius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was translated by our King Alfred, is thought to have studied at Athens in the last years of Proklos, and earlier in the fifth century the charming Hypatia, whom Kingsley has immortalised for English readers, may be numbered among the ladies who at that time sought higher education at Athens and softened by their presence the rough manners of the masculine students. But, with the death of Proklos, the cause of polytheism and the prosperity of the university declined yet more. The shrewd young Greeks saw that there was no longer a career for pagans; even the rich benefactor of Athens, Theagenes, was converted to Christianity. Justinian dealt the university its death-blow in 529 by decreeing that no one should teach philosophy at Athens, and by confiscating the endowments of the Platonic school. Seven philosophers, of whom the most celebrated was Simplikios, the Aristotelian commentator, resolved to seek under the benevolent despotism of Chosroes, King of Persia, that freedom of speech which was denied to them by Justinian. They believed at a distance that the barbarian monarch had realised the ideal of Plato—a philosopher on the throne; they went to his court and were speedily disillusioned. Home-sick and heart-broken, they begged their new patron to let them return to die in Greece. Chosroes, who was at the time engaged in negotiating a treaty of peace with Justinian, inserted a clause allowing the unhappy seven “to pass the rest of their days without persecution in their native land,” and Simplikios was thus enabled, in the obscurity of private life, to compose those commentaries which are still studied by disciples of Aristotle[27]. Thus perished the University of Athens, and with it paganism vanished from Greece, save where, in the mountains of Laconia, it lingered on till beyond the middle of the ninth century. The ancient name of “Hellenes” was now exclusively applied to the remnant which still adhered to the old religion, so much so that Constantine Porphyrogenitus[28] in the tenth century called the Peloponnesian Greeks “Graikoi,” because “Hellenes” would have still meant idolaters. All the subjects of Justinian were collectively described as “Romans,” while those who inhabited Greece came gradually to be specified as “Helladikoi.”

The reign of Justinian marked the annihilation of the ancient life in other ways than these. He disbanded the provincial militia, to which we have several times alluded, and which down to his time furnished a guard for the Pass of Thermopylæ. This garrison proved, however, unable to keep out the Huns and Slavs who invaded Greece in 539, and, like the Persians of old, marched through the Pass of Anopaia into the rear of the defenders. The ravages of these barbarians, who devasted Central Greece and penetrated as far as the Isthmus, led Justinian to repair the fortifications of Thermopylæ, where he placed a regular force of 2000 men, maintained out of the revenues of Greece. He also re-fortified the Isthmus, and put such important positions as Larissa, Pharsalos, Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, with the Akropolis, in a state of proper defence. But these military measures involved a large expenditure, which Justinian met by appropriating the municipal funds. The effect of this measure was to deprive the municipal doctors and teachers of their means of livelihood, to stop the municipal grants to theatres and other entertainments, to make the repair of public buildings and the maintenance of roads—the greatest of all needs in a country with the geographical configuration of Greece—most difficult. The old Greek life had centred in the municipality, so that from this blow it never recovered; fortunately, the Church was now sufficiently well organised to take its place, and henceforth that institution became the depository of the national traditions, the mainstay in each successive century of the national existence. Yet another loss to Greece was that of the monuments, which were taken to Constantinople to make good the ravages of the great conflagration, caused by the Nika sedition. The present church of Sta Sophia, which Justinian raised out of the ashes of the second, was adorned with pillars from Athens as well as marble from the Greek quarries, and thus once again, as St Jerome had said, other cities were “stripped naked” to clothe Constantinople. Earthquakes, which shook Patras, Corinth, and Naupaktos to their foundations, completed the destruction of much that was valuable, and the bubonic plague swept over the country, recalling those terrors of which Thucydides and Lucretius had left such a striking description in their accounts of the pestilence at Athens in the days of Perikles. The King of the Ostrogoths, Totila, after twice taking Rome, sent a fleet to harry Corfù and the opposite coast of Epeiros, plundered Nikopolis and the ancient shrine of Dodona. It was in consequence of this and similar raids that the Corfiotes finally abandoned their old city and took refuge in the present citadel, called later on in the tenth century from its twin peaks (Κορυφοί) Corfù, instead of Corcyra. The[34] Bulgarians, a few years later, made a fresh raid as far as Thermopylæ, where they were stopped by the new fortifications. In short, the ambitious foreign policy of Justinian, the powers of nature, and the increasing boldness of the barbarians, contrived to make this period fatal to Greece. Yet the Emperor bestowed one signal benefit upon that country. By the importation of silkworms he gave the Greeks the monopoly, so far as Christendom was concerned, of a valuable manufacture, which was not infringed till the Norman invasion six centuries later.

The history of Greece becomes very obscure after the death of Justinian, and the historian must be content to piece together from the Byzantine writers such stray allusions as those chroniclers of court scandals make to the neglected fatherland of the Greeks. The salient fact of this period is the recurrence of the Slav invasions of Justinian’s time. We learn that in 578 or 581 an army of 100,000 Slavonians “ravaged Hellas” and Thessaly[29]; in 589, under the Emperor Maurice, the Avars, according to the contemporary historian, Evagrios, “conquered all Greece, destroying and burning everything[30].” This passage has given rise to a famous controversy, which at one time convulsed not only the learned, but the diplomatic world. In 1830 a German scholar, Professor Fallmerayer, published the first volume of a History of the Peninsula Morea during the Middle Ages, in which he advanced the astounding theory that the inhabitants of modern Greece have “not a single drop of genuine Greek blood in their veins.” “The Greek race in Europe,” he wrote, “has been rooted out. A double layer of the dust and ashes of two new and distinct human species covers the graves of that ancient people. A tempest, such as has seldom arisen in human history, has scattered a new race, allied to the great Slav family, over the whole surface of the Balkan peninsula from the Danube to the inmost recesses of the Peloponnese. And a second, perhaps no less important revolution, the Albanian immigration into Greece, has completed the work of destruction.” The former of these two foreign settlements in the Peloponnese, that of the Slavs and Avars, was supposed by Fallmerayer to have taken place as the result of the above-mentioned invasion of 589, and his supposition received plausible confirmation from a mediæval document. The Patriarch Nicholas, writing towards the end of the eleventh century to the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, alludes to the repulse of the Avars from before the walls of Patras in 807, and adds that they “had held possession of the Peloponnese for 218 years (i.e. from 589), and had so completely[35] separated it from the Byzantine Empire that no Byzantine official dared to set his foot in it[31].” A similar statement from the Chronicle of Monemvasia[32]—a late and almost worthless compilation—was also unearthed by the zealous Fallmerayer, who accordingly believed that he had proved the existence of a permanent settlement of the Peloponnese by the Slavs and Avars between 589 and 807, “in complete independence of the Byzantine governors of the coast.” It was in the coast-towns alone and in a few other strongholds, such as Mt Taygetos, that he would allow of any survival of the old Greek race, and he triumphantly pointed to the famous name of “Navarino” as containing a fresh proof of an Avar settlement, while in many places he found Slavonic names, corresponding to those of Russian villages. Another evidence of this early Slavonic settlement seemed to be provided by the remark of the very late Byzantine writer, Phrantzes, that his native city of Monemvasia on the south-east coast, which used to supply our ancestors’ cellars with malmsey, was separated from the diocese of Corinth and raised to the rank of a metropolitan see about this identical time, presumably because many Greeks had taken refuge there from the Slavs, and were cut off from Corinth. Finally, a nun, who composed an account of the pilgrimage of St Willibald, the Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Eichstätt, in 723, stated that he “crossed to Monemvasia in the Slavonian land,” an expression which Fallmerayer hailed as a proof that at that period the Peloponnese was known by that name. It need not be said that Fallmerayer’s theory was as flattering to Panslavism as it was unpleasant to Philhellenes. But it is no longer accepted in its full extent. No one who has been in Greece can fail to have been struck by the similarity between the character of the modern and the ancient Greeks. Many an island has its “Odysseus of many wiles”; every morning and evening the Athenians are anxious to hear “some new thing”; and the comedies of Aristophanes contain many personal traits which fit the subjects of the present king. Nor does even the vulgar language contain any considerable Slavonic element, although there are a certain number of Slavonic place-names to be found on the map, including perhaps Navarino. Moreover, the contemporary historian, Theophylact Simokatta, makes no mention of the invasion of 589, though he minutely describes the wars of that period. Yet, as we shall see later, there is no doubt that at one time there was a great Slavonic immigration into Greece, but it took place about 746, instead of in 589, and the incoming Slavs, so far from[36] annihilating the Greeks, were gradually assimilated by that persistent race, as has happened to conquering peoples elsewhere.

But Fallmerayer was not content with wiping out the Greeks from the Peloponnese. He next propounded the amazing statement that the history of Athens was a blank for four centuries after the time of Justinian, and explained this strange phenomenon by a Slavonic inundation in that Emperor’s reign. In consequence of this invasion, the Athenians were said to have fled to Salamis, where they remained for 400 years, while their city was abandoned to olive groves and utterly neglected. These “facts,” which the learned German had culled from the chronicle of the Anargyroi Monastery[33], which, however, distinctly says “three years,” and not 400, and refers to Albanians, not Slavs, have since been disproved, not only by the obviously modern date of that compilation, which is now assigned to the nineteenth century, and which refers to the temporary abandonment of Athens after its capture by Morosini in 1687, but by the allusions which may be found to events at Athens during this period of supposed desertion. Thus, we hear of an heretical bishop being sent there towards the end of the sixth century, and we have the seal of the orthodox divine who was Bishop of Athens a hundred years later[34]. An eloquent appeal was made by the Byzantine historian, Theophylact Simokatta, to the city to put on mourning for the Emperor Maurice, who died in 602, and sixty years later another Emperor, Constans II, landed at the Piræus on his way to Sicily, spent the winter at Athens, and collected there a considerable force of soldiers. Even some few traces of culture may be found there in the century which followed Justinian’s closing of the university. St Gislenus, who went as a missionary to Hainault, and a learned doctor, named Stephen, were both born at Athens, and the former is stated to have studied there. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century, the famous Empress Irene first saw the light in the city, which had already given one consort to an Emperor of the East. Thus, if comparatively obscure, Athens was not a mere collection of ruins in an olive grove, but a city of living men and women which had never (as Zygomalas wrote to Crusius in the sixteenth century) “remained desolate for about 300 years.”

The attacks of the Slavs and of the newly-founded Arabian power marked the course of the seventh century. In 623 the Slavs made an incursion into Crete, and that island, of which we have heard little under the Imperial rule, was also visited by the Arabs in 651 and 674.[37] But though the Cretans were forced to pay tribute to the Caliph, Moawyah, they were treated with kindness by the politic conqueror. About the same time as this second Arab invasion, and while the main Arab force was besieging Constantinople, a body of Slavs seized the opportunity to settle in the rich plain of Thessaly, and it is from one of their tribes that the present town of Velestino, so often mentioned in the war of 1897, received its name. Yet this tribe soon became so friendly that it assisted the Greeks in the defence of Salonika against a Slavonic army—a further proof of the readiness with which the Slavs adopted the Greek point of view. It is clear also that the command of the Imperial troops in Greece was regarded as an important post, for we find it entrusted to Leontios, who made himself Emperor. The Greek islands were still used as places of detention for prisoners of position. Thus Naxos was chosen as the temporary exile of Pope Martin I by the Emperor Constans II, and the future Emperor Philippicus was banished to Cephalonia.

A new era opened for the Empire with the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 716. In the first place, that sovereign completed the reform of the system of provincial administration, which had lasted more or less continuously since the time of Constantine. In place of the old provincial divisions, the Empire was now parcelled out into military districts, called Themes—a name originally applied to a regiment and then to the place at which the regiment was quartered. The choice of such a title indicates the essentially military character of the new arrangement, which implied the maintenance of a small division of troops in each district as a necessary defence against the Avars, Slavs, and Arabs, whose depredations had menaced provinces seldom exposed to attack in the old times. Six out of the twenty-eight Themes comprised Greece, as she was before the late Balkan wars. The Peloponnese, with its capital of Corinth, formed one; Central Greece, including Eubœa, formed another, under the name of Hellas, but its capital was Thebes, not Athens; Nikopolis, which comprised Ætolia and Akarnania, and Cephalonia (the latter created a separate Theme later on, and including all the Ionian Islands) were two more; the Ægean Sea, popularly known as the Dodekannesos, or “twelve islands,” composed one of the Asian Themes, and Thessaly was a part of the Theme of Macedonia. Both the military and civil authority in each Theme was vested in the hands of a Commander, known as strategós, except in the case of the Ægean Islands, where the post was filled by an Admiral, called droungários. Under the strategós were the protonotários or “judge,” who was a judicial and administrative authority, and two military[38] personages, one of whom, the kleisourárches, was so-called because he watched the mountain passes, like the later Turkish derben-aga. So far as Greece is concerned, the eclipse of Athens by Thebes, perhaps owing to the silk industry for which the latter city was famous in the Middle Ages, is a very noticeable feature of the new administration.

Another reform of Leo the Isaurian aroused the intense indignation of the inhabitants of Greece. We have seen that the spread of Christianity in that country had been facilitated by the assimilation of pagan forms of worship in the new ritual. It was natural that a race, which had been accustomed for centuries to connect art with religion and to seek the noblest statuary in the temples of the gods, should have regarded with peculiar favour the practice of hanging pictures in churches. When therefore Leo, whose Armenian origin perhaps made him personally unsympathetic to the Greeks, issued an edict against image-worship, his orders met with the most bigoted resistance in Greece. It may be that a more searching census for the purposes of the revenue had already rendered him unpopular; but to those who know how strong is the influence of the Church in the East, and what fierce disputes an ecclesiastical question kindles there, the edict of the Emperor will seem ample ground for the Greek rising of 727. An eruption at the volcanic island of Santorin was interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure at the doings of the iconoclast sovereign; while Pope Gregory II addressed two violent missives to the Emperor, and probably encouraged the agitation in Greece, which still acknowledged him as spiritual head of the Church. The “Helladikoi,” as they were now called, and the seamen of the Cyclades fitted out a fleet under the leadership of a certain Stephen; and, with the co-operation of Agallianos, one of the Imperial military officials, set up an orthodox Emperor, named Kosmas, and boldly set sail for Constantinople—a proof of the resources of Greece at this period. But the result of this naval undertaking was very different from that which Greece had equipped on behalf of Constantine. A battle was fought under the walls of the capital between the two fleets. The Emperor Leo, availing himself of the terrible invention of the Greek fire, which had been used with such deadly effect in the recent Saracen siege of Constantinople, annihilated his opponents’ vessels. Agallianos, seeing that all was lost, leaped into the sea; Stephen and Kosmas fell by the axe of the executioner. We are not told what punishment was meted out to the Greeks, but, in consequence of the strong attitude of opposition which the Papacy had taken up to the Emperor, Leo in 732 deprived the Pope[39] of all jurisdiction over Greece, and placed that country under the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The next important event in the history of Greece was the great plague, which broke out at Monemvasia in 746 and spread all over the Empire. The political consequences of this visitation were far-reaching. For not only was the population of Greece diminished by the increased mortality there, but it was further lessened by emigration to Constantinople, where there were openings for plasterers and other skilled workmen, and where great numbers had died of the epidemic. The place of these emigrants in the Peloponnese was taken by Slav colonists, and this is the true explanation of the Slavonic colonisation, which Fallmerayer placed so much earlier. In the celebrated words of the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, “All the open country was Slavonised and became barbarous, when the plague was devouring the whole world[35].” It seems from the phrase “open country,” that such Greeks as remained behind crowded into the towns, and that the rural districts were thus left free for the Slavs to occupy. And this is confirmed by the Epitome of Strabo’s Geography, compiled apparently about the end of the tenth century, which states that at that time “All Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were inhabited by Scythian Slavs.” The memory of this Slavonic occupation has been preserved by the Slavonic names of places, which Colonel Leake was the first to notice. That the Slavs excited the alarm of the Byzantine government is clear from the fact that in 783 Staurakios was despatched by the Empress Irene to crush their efforts at independence. The Empress was actuated by love of Greece as well as by motives of policy, for she was a native of Athens, like her predecessor, Eudokia. At the age of seventeen she had been selected by the Emperor Constantine Copronymos as the wife of his son, Leo IV, and the premature death of her husband left her the real mistress of the Empire, which she governed, first as Regent for her son and then as sole ruler, for over twenty years. One of the earliest acts of her Regency was to send the expedition against the Slavs. Those in Thessaly and Central Greece were forced to pay tribute; those in the Peloponnese yielded a rich booty to the Byzantine commander. But the Slavs were not permanently subdued, as was soon evident. Irene, for the greater security of her throne, had banished her five brothers-in-law to Athens, which was, of course, devoted to her, and was at that time governed by one of her kinsmen. But the five prisoners managed to communicate with Akamir, a Slav chieftain who lived[40] at Velestino, and a plot was formed for the elevation of them to the throne. The plans of the conspirators fell into the hands of Irene’s friends, and the prisoners were removed to a safer place. Irene, however, was dethroned a little later by Nikephoros I, and banished to Mitylene, where she died. In spite of her appalling treatment of her son, whom she had dethroned and blinded in order to gratify her greed of power, tradition states that she showed her piety and patriotism by the foundation of several churches at Athens. Some of her foundations disappeared in the storm and stress of the War of Independence; others were removed to make way for the streets of the modern town; but the Church of the Panagia Gorgoepekoos, or so-called old Metropolis[36], which still stands, is ascribed to her, and the ruins of the monastery which she built and where she at one time lived strew the beautiful island of Prinkipo. Even with her death her native city did not lose its connection with the Byzantine Court. Among her surviving relatives at Athens was a beautiful niece, Theophano, who was married to a man of position there. Nikephoros, anxious, no doubt, like all usurpers, to connect his family with that of the Sovereign whom he had deposed, resolved that the fair Athenian should become the consort of his son, Staurakios. He accordingly snatched her from the arms of her husband and brought her to Constantinople, where her second marriage took place. But this third Athenian Empress did not long enjoy the reward of her infidelity to her first husband. Staurakios survived his father’s death at the hands of the Bulgarians a very few months, and his consort, like Eudokia and Irene, ended her life in a monastery.

The Slavs of the Peloponnese believed that their chance of obtaining independence had come during the troubled reign of Nikephoros, when the Saracens under Haroun Al Rashid and the growing power of the Bulgarians menaced the Byzantine Empire. They accordingly rose, and, after plundering the houses of their Greek neighbours, laid siege in 807 to the fortress of Patras, which was the principal stronghold of the old inhabitants in the north-west of the country. The Slavs blockaded the city from the land side, while a Saracen fleet prevented the introduction of supplies by sea. The besieged, knowing that the fate of Hellenism in the Peloponnese depended on their efforts, held out against these odds in the hope that they would thus give the Imperial commander at Corinth time to relieve them. At last, when all hope of deliverance seemed to have disappeared, they sent out a horseman to one of the hills in the direction of Corinth to see if the longed for army of relief was in sight. His orders were to[41] gallop back as soon as he caught a glimpse of the approaching Imperialists and to lower the flag which he carried, so that his comrades in Patras might have the glad news at once. But his eyes in vain searched the road along the Gulf of Corinth for the gleam of weapons or the dust that would announce the march of soldiers. Sadly he turned his horse towards Patras, when, at a spot where he was in full view of the walls, his steed stumbled and the flag fell. The besieged, believing that help was at hand, were inspired with fresh courage, and, sallying from the gates, inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Slavs, which was followed up after the arrival of the relieving force three days later by the restoration of the Imperial authority along the west coast. At that age so great a victory was naturally ascribed to superhuman aid. St Andrew, the patron-saint of Patras, who, as we have seen, was believed to have suffered martyrdom there, and whose relics were then preserved there, had caused the scout’s horse to stumble and had been seen on a milk-white steed leading the citizens in their successful onslaught on the Slavs[37]. The gratitude, or policy, of the government showed itself in the dedication of the spoil and captives to the service of the church of St Andrew, and the Slavonic peasants of the neighbourhood became its tenants and paid it a yearly rent. The Archbishop of Patras, who had hitherto been dependent upon Corinth, was raised by Nikephoros to the rank of a Metropolitan, and Methone, Korone and Lacedæmon, were placed under his immediate jurisdiction. The political object and result of this step, which was ratified by later Emperors, was to hellenise the vanquished Slavs by means of the Greek clergy. Moreover, the policy of Nikephoros in organising Greek military colonies round the Slav settlements in Greece, tended to check Slavonic raids. Public lands were bestowed on these colonists whose establishment contributed much to the ultimate fusion of the two races. Thus, the defeat of the Slavs before Patras and the wise measures of Nikephoros prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slavonic State, like Servia or Bulgaria, and from that date the tide, which had at one time threatened to submerge the Greek nationality there, began to ebb. Of this phenomenon we shall be able to watch the progress.

A generation elapsed without a renewal of the Slav agitation in the Peloponnese; but about 849 a fresh rising took place. On this occasion the appearance of a Byzantine commander in the field soon caused the collapse of the rebels. Two Slavonic tribes, however, the Melings and Ezerits, which inhabited the slopes to the west, and the[42] plain to the east of Mount Taygetos, were enabled by the strength of their geographical position to make terms with the Byzantine government, and agreed to pay a small tribute which was assessed according to their respective means[38]. The Church continued the work of the soldiers by building monasteries in the Slavonic districts, and from the middle of the ninth century the Greek element began to recover lost ground. Nearly all the Slavs and the last of the Hellenic pagans in the south of Taygetos were then converted, and the adoption of Christianity by the Bulgarians cannot have failed to affect the Slavonic settlers in the Byzantine Empire. Of the revived prosperity of Greece we have two remarkable proofs. In 823 that country raised a fleet of 350 sail for the purpose of intervening in the civil war then raging between the Emperor Michael the Stammerer and a Slavonic usurper, and this implies the possession of considerable resources. Still more striking is the story of the rich widow, Danielis of Patras. About the time of the Byzantine expedition against the Slavs of Taygetos, the future Emperor, Basil I, then chief groom in the service of a prominent courtier, was at Patras in attendance on his master, who had been sent there on political business. One day, as the comely groom was entering the church of St Andrew, a monk stopped him and told him that he should become Emperor. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of a fever, which, by detaining him at Patras after his master’s departure, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Moved by philanthropy or the prophecy of the monk, Danielis took the sick groom into her house, bade him be a brother to her son, and, when he had recovered from his illness, provided him with a train of thirty slaves to accompany him to Constantinople, and loaded him with costly presents. When, in 867, the monk’s forecast was fulfilled, and Basil mounted the Imperial throne, he did not forget his benefactress. He not only promoted her son to a high position in his court, but invited the aged lady to Constantinople. In spite of her age and infirmities, Danielis travelled in a litter, accompanied by 300 slaves, who took in turns the duty of carrying their mistress. As a gift to the Emperor, she brought 500 more, as well as 100 maidens, chosen for their skill in embroidery, 100 purple garments, 300 linen robes, and 100 more of such fine material that each piece could easily be packed away in a hollow cane. Every kind of gold and silver vessel completed the list of presents, which would not have disgraced a brother sovereign. When she arrived, she was lodged like a queen and addressed as “mother” by her grateful protégé. Basil’s gratitude was rewarded by[43] fresh favours. Danielis called for a notary and made over to the Emperor and her own son a part of her landed estates in the Peloponnese. Finding that Basil had tried to atone for the murder of his predecessor, which had given him the throne, by the erection of a church, she had a huge carpet manufactured by her own workmen to cover the splendid mosaic floor. Once again, on the death of her favourite, she journeyed to Constantinople to greet his son and successor. Her own son was by that time dead, so she devised the whole of her property to the young Emperor Leo VI. At her request, a high official was sent to the Peloponnese to prepare an inventory of her effects. Even in these days a sovereign would rejoice at such a windfall. Her loose cash, her gold and silver plate, her bronze ornaments, her wardrobe, and her flocks and herds represented a princely fortune. As for her slaves, they were so numerous that the Emperor, in the embarrassment of his riches, emancipated 3000 of them and sent them as colonists to Apulia, then part of the Byzantine Empire. Eighty farms formed the real property of this ninth century millionairess, whose story throws light on the position of the Peloponnesian landed class, or archontes, at that period. Danielis was, doubtless, exceptionally rich, and Patras was then, as now, the chief commercial town in the Peloponnese. But the existence of such an enormous fortune as hers presupposes a high degree of civilisation, in which many others must have participated. Even learning was still cultivated in Greece, for the distinguished mathematician Leo, who was one of the ornaments of the Byzantine Court, is expressly stated to have studied rhetoric, philosophy and science under a famous teacher, Michael Psellos, who lectured at a college in the island of Andros, where his pupil’s name is not yet forgotten[39].

But while the Greeks had thus triumphed in the Peloponnese, they had lost ground elsewhere. Availing themselves of the disorders in the Byzantine Empire, when the Greek ships were all engaged in the civil war of 823, a body of Saracens, who had emigrated from the south of Spain to Alexandria, descended on Crete, at that time recovering from the effects of an earthquake, but still possessing thirty cities. Landing at Suda Bay, they found the islanders mostly favourable, or at any rate indifferent, to a change of masters. Reinforced by a further batch of their countrymen, the Saracens resolved to settle there. A Cretan monk is said to have shown them a strong position where they could pitch their camp; so they burnt their ships and established themselves at the spot indicated, the site of the present[44] town of Candia, which derives its Venetian name from the Chandak or “ditch” surrounding it. The conquest of the island was soon accomplished—a clear proof of the islanders’ apathy when we remember the heroic defence of the Cretans in more recent times. Religious toleration reconciled many to the sway of the Saracens; in the course of years a number of the Christians embraced the creed of their conquerors, helping to man their fleets and sharing the profits of that nefarious traffic in slaves of which Crete, as in former days Delos, became the centre. One district, which we may identify with Sphakia, was permitted to enjoy autonomy. For Greece the rule of the Saracens in Crete was a serious misfortune. Cretan corsairs ably led by Christian renegades, in quest of booty and slaves, ravaged the Cyclades and the Ionian Islands, and menaced the coast towns of the mainland, whither the terrified inhabitants of Ægina and similarly exposed spots migrated in the hope of safety. The efforts of the Byzantine government to recover “the great Greek island,” which was now a terror to the whole Levant, were for more than a century unsuccessful, and during 138 years Crete remained in the possession of the Saracens. Occasionally their fleet was annihilated, as in the reign of Basil I, when the Byzantine admiral, hearing that they meditated a descent upon the west coast of Greece, conveyed his ships across the Isthmus in the night by means of the old tram-road, or diolkos, which had been used by the contemporaries of Thucydides, and has even now not entirely disappeared. By this brilliant device he took the enemy by surprise in the Gulf of Corinth, and destroyed their vessels. But new fleets arose as if by magic, and Basil was obliged to strengthen the garrisons of the Peloponnese. His successor, aroused to action by their daring attacks upon Demetrias and Salonika, both flourishing cities which they devastated and plundered, equipped a naval expedition, to which the Greek Themes contributed ships and men, with the object of recapturing Crete. But neither that nor the subsequent armada despatched by the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was destined to succeed. At last, in 961, the redoubtable commander, Nikephoros Phokas, restored Crete to the Byzantine Empire. But even at that early period, Candia began to establish the reputation which it so nobly increased during the Turkish siege seven centuries later. Its strong fortifications for seven long months resisted the Byzantine general; but he patiently waited for a favourable moment, and at last took the place by storm. The most drastic measures were adopted for the complete reduction of the island. The broad brick walls of Candia were pulled down; a new fortress called Temenos was erected on the height of Rhoka some[45] miles inland, to overawe the inhabitants. Some of the Saracens emigrated, others sank into a state of serfdom. As usual the missionary followed the Byzantine arms, and the island attracted many Greek and Armenian Christians; the name of the latter still lingers in the Cretan village of Armeni; among the former were some distinguished Byzantine families, whose descendants furnished leaders to the insurrections later on. In the conversion of the Cretan apostates back to Christianity, an Armenian monk called Nikon, and nicknamed “Repent Ye” from the frequency of that phrase in his sermons, found a fine field for his labours. The Christian churches, for which Crete had once been famous, rose again, and the reconquest of the island gave to Nikephoros Phokas the Imperial diadem, to the deacon Theodosios the subject for a long iambic poem, and to Nikon the more lasting dignity of a saint. But, in spite of his efforts, not a few Arabs retained their religion, and the Cretan Mussulmans of Amari are still reckoned as their descendants.

The tenth century witnessed not only the recovery of Crete for the Byzantine Empire and for the Christian faith, but also the spread of monasteries over Greece. When Nikon had concluded his Cretan mission he visited Athens, where he is said by his biographer to have enchanted the people with his sermons, penetrated as far as Thebes, and then returned to Sparta, where he founded a convent and established his headquarters. Thence he set out on missionary journeys among the Slavonic tribes of the Melings and Ezerits, who had again risen against the Imperial authority and had again been reduced to the payment of a tribute. Those wild clans continued, however, to harry the surrounding country, and the monastery of St Nikon was only protected from their attacks by the awe which the holy man’s memory inspired. Long after his death he was adored as the guardian of Sparta, where his memory is still green, and the Peloponnesian mariner, caught in a storm off Cape Matapan, would pray to him, as his ancestors had prayed to Castor and Pollux. For Central Greece the career of the blessed Luke the younger was as important as that of St Nikon for the South. The parents of this remarkable man had fled from Ægina, when the Cretan corsairs plundered that island, and had taken refuge in Macedonia, where Luke was born. Filled with the idea that he had a call to a holy life, the young Luke settled as a hermit on a lonely Greek mountain by the sea-shore, where for seven long years he devoted himself to prayer. A Bulgarian raid drove him to the Peloponnese, where for ten years more he served as the attendant of another hermit, who, like the famous Stylites of old, lived on a pillar near Patras. After[46] further adventures, he migrated to Stiris, between Delphi and Livadia, where the monastery which bears his name now stands.

The absorption of the Christianised Slavs by the Greeks was occasionally interrupted by the Bulgarian inroads, which now became frequent. Since the foundation of the first Bulgarian Empire towards the end of the ninth century, the power of that race had greatly increased, and the Byzantine sovereigns found formidable rivals in the Bulgarian tsars. About 929 the Bulgarians captured Nikopolis, and converted it into a Slavonic colony, which was only reconquered by considerable efforts. Arsenios, Metropolitan of Corfù, who was canonised later on, and was for centuries the patron saint of the island, where his festival is still celebrated and his remains repose, fell into the hands of these invaders, but was rescued by the valour of the islanders[40], and a new tribe, called Slavesians, probably an offshoot of the Bulgarians, made its way into the Peloponnese. The troublesome clans of Melings and Ezerits seized this opportunity to demand the reduction of their tribute, which had been raised after their last rising. The Government wisely granted their demand, and so prevented a formidable insurrection. Athens was also disturbed by a domestic riot. A certain Chases, a high Byzantine official, had aroused the resentment of the people by his tyranny and the scandals of his life. Alarmed at the threatening attitude of the inhabitants, who had been joined by others from the country, he took refuge at the altar in the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the ancient Parthenon. But the sanctuary did not protect him from the vengeance of his enemies, who stoned him to death at the altar, thus showing less reverence for the Virgin than the ancient Athenians had once shown under somewhat similar circumstances for the goddess Athena.

The Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about the middle of the tenth century, has left us a favourable sketch of the Peloponnese as it was in his day. Forty cities were to be found in that Theme, and some idea of its resources may be formed from the statement that the Peloponnesians excused themselves from personal service in an Italian campaign by the payment of 7200 pieces of gold and the presentation of 1000 horses all equipped[41]. The purple, parchment, and silk industries, as well as the shipping trade, must have yielded considerable profits to those who carried them on, and the presence of many Jews at Sparta in the time of St Nikon, who tried to expel them, shows that there was money to be made there. His[47] biography represents that city—of which the contemporary Empress, Theophano, wife of Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas, was perhaps a native[42]—as possessing a powerful aristocracy, and as having commercial relations with Venice. The reconquest of Crete, by freeing the coast-towns from the depredations of pirates, naturally increased the prosperity of Greece. Schools rose again at Athens and Corinth, and from that time down to the beginning of the thirteenth century the country improved, in spite of occasional invasions. Thus, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel captured Larissa and carried off many of its inhabitants, as well as the remains of the Thessalian Archbishop, St Achilleios, which had long been the chief relic of the place. His standards were twice seen south of the Isthmus, and Attica was ravaged by his forces. To this period we may refer the statement above quoted that “all Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were occupied by Scythian Slavs.” But when they arrived at the river Spercheios on their return march, they were surprised by a Byzantine army and utterly defeated. The Emperor Basil II, surnamed “the Bulgar-slayer,” completed the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, and on his triumphal progress through Northern and Central Greece in 1019 found the bones of the slain still bleaching on the banks of the Spercheios. After inspecting the fortifications of Thermopylæ, he proceeded to Athens, which no Byzantine Emperor had visited since the days of Constans II. The visit was an appropriate sequel to the campaign. For the first time for centuries the Byzantine dominions extended from the Bosporos to the Danube, and the Balkan peninsula once again was under Greek domination. In the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the very centre and shrine of the old Hellenic life in bygone days, the victorious Emperor offered up thanks to Almighty God for his successes, and showed his gratitude by rich offerings to the church out of the spoil which he had taken. The beauty of the building, which he seems to have enhanced by a series of frescoes, traces of which are still visible, was justly celebrated in the next generation, and one curiosity of that holy spot, the ever-burning golden lamp, is specially mentioned by the author of the so-called Book of Guido, and by the Icelandic pilgrim, Saewulf. Other persons imitated the example of Basil, and the restoration or foundation of Athenian[48] churches was one of the features of the first half of the eleventh century. Freed for the time from corsairs and hostile armies, Greece was once more able to pursue the arts of peace unhindered. During the great famine which prevailed at Constantinople in 1037, the Themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese were able to export 100,000 bushels of wheat for the relief of the capital. The chief grievance of the Greeks was the extortion of the Imperial Government, which aroused two insurrections after the death of Basil. The first of these movements took place at Naupaktos, where the people rose against “Mad George,” the hated representative of the Emperor, murdered him, and plundered his residence. This revolt was suppressed with great severity, the archbishop, who had been on the side of the people, being blinded, according to the prevalent fashion of Byzantine criminal law. Some years later, the inhabitants of the Theme of Nikopolis murdered the Imperial tax-collector, and called in the Bulgarians, who had risen against fiscal extortion like themselves. While Naupaktos held out in the West, the Thebans, then a rich and flourishing community, abandoned their silk manufactories, and took the field against the Bulgarians[43]. But they were defeated with great loss, and it has even been asserted that the victors occupied the Piræus with the connivance of the discontented Athenians.

This surmise, which has, however, been rejected by the German historian of mediæval Athens, rests upon one of the most curious discoveries that have been made in connection with the place. Every visitor to Venice has seen the famous lions which adorn the front of the arsenal. One of these statues, brought home as a trophy by Morosini from the Piræus in 1688, has upon it a runic inscription, which has been deciphered by an expert. According to his version, the inscription commemorates the capture of the Piræus at this period by the celebrated Harold Hardrada, whom our King Harold defeated at Stamford Bridge, and who, in 1040, was commander of the Imperial Guard at Constantinople. In consequence, it appears, of an Athenian rising, Harold had been sent with a detachment of that force, composed largely of Norwegians, to put down the rebellion. After accomplishing their object, the Northmen, in the fashion of the modern tourist, scrawled their names and achievements on the patient lion, which then stood, like the lion of Lindau, at the entrance of the Piræus and gave to that harbour its later name of Porto Leone. It would be difficult to find a more curious piece of historical evidence than that a[49] monument in Venice should tell us of a Norwegian descent upon Athens.

Dissension among the Bulgarians led to their collapse, and Greece enjoyed a complete freedom from barbarian inroads for the next forty years, with the exception of a passing invasion by the Uzes, a Turkish tribe, who left no mark upon the country. Athens at this period was regarded by the Byzantine officials who were sent there as the uttermost ends of the earth, though at Constantinople Philhellenism had a worthy representative in the historian and philosopher Psellos, who constantly manifested a deep interest in “the muse of Athens.” A more curious figure, typical of that monastic age, was the Cappadocian monk Meletios, who established himself on the confines of Attica and Bœotia, and by means of his miracles gained great influence there. We find him descending from his solitary mountain to Athens to rescue a band of Roman pilgrims, who had taken refuge there and had been threatened with death by the bigoted Athenians. We hear of the convents which he founded in various parts of Greece, and it was to him that the land was largely indebted for the plague of monks, many of them merely robbers in disguise, which checked civic progress and injured all national life in the next century. Worse than this, the final separation of the Greek and Latin Churches in 1053, by kindling a fanatical hatred between West and East, brought countless woes upon the Levant, and was one of the causes of the Latin invasions which culminated in the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There now appeared, for the first time in the history of Greece, that vigorous race which in the same century conquered our own island. The Normans of Italy, under their redoubtable leader, Robert Guiscard, resolved to emulate the doings of William the Conqueror by subduing the Byzantine Empire, which seemed to those daring spirits an easy prey. They began by the annexation of the Byzantine provinces of Apulia and Calabria, and then turned their eyes across the Adriatic to the opposite coast. An excuse was easily found for this invasion. One of Guiscard’s daughters had been engaged to the son of the Emperor Michael VII. But the revolution, which overthrew Michael, sent his son into a monastery, and thus provided Guiscard with an opportunity of posing as the champion of the fallen dynasty. An impostor, who masqueraded as the deposed Emperor, implored his aid in the cause of legitimacy, and the great Pope, who then occupied the throne under the name of Gregory VII, bade the godly help in the contest against the schismatic Greeks. After long preparations Guiscard appeared in 1081 off Corfù, which surrendered to the[50] Norman invader, and then directed his forces against the walls of Durazzo, now a crumbling Albanian fortress, then “the Western key of the empire.” Menaced at the same moment by the Turks in Asia and the Normans in Europe, the Emperor Alexios I made peace with the former and then set out to the relief of Durazzo. But he did not trust to a land force alone, and as the Byzantine navy, like the Turkish fleet in our own days, had been neglected and the money intended for its maintenance had been misappropriated, he applied for aid to the mercantile Republic of Venice. The Venetians saw a chance of consolidating their trade in the Levant, and, as the price of their assistance, obtained from the embarrassed Emperor the right of free trade throughout the empire, where the Greek cities of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Nauplia, Methone, Korone, Corfù, Euripos, and Demetrias are specially mentioned as their haunts. But the aid of a Venetian fleet did not prevent the victory of the Normans over Alexios on the plain near Durazzo, where Cæsar and Pompey had once contended. The Emperor retreated to Ochrida, where, two generations earlier, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel had fixed his residence, while his conqueror, after taking Durazzo, marched across Albania and captured the city of Kastoria, which was defended by three hundred English, members of the Imperial Guard. Recalled to Italy by troubles in his own dominions and by the distress of his ally the Pope, Guiscard left the prosecution of the campaign to his son Bohemond, who penetrated into Thessaly, that historic battle-ground of the Near East. But the walls of Larissa and the gold of Alexios proved too much for the strength of the Normans, and Bohemond was forced to retire to Italy. He found his father fresh from his triumph at Rome, which he had delivered to the Pope, and ready for a second campaign against the Byzantine Empire. In 1084 Guiscard set sail again; after three naval battles with the Greeks and their Venetian allies, Corfù once more surrendered to the Normans, and their leader used it as a stepping-stone to the island of Cephalonia. But he contracted a fever there, which put an end to his life and to the expedition, of which he had been the heart and soul. The village of Phiskardo has perpetuated his name, thus marking this second attempt of the West to impose its sway upon the East.

Bohemond renewed, twenty-two years later, his father’s attacks upon the Byzantine Empire. In the meanwhile, as the result of his share in the first crusade, he had become Prince of Antioch—one of those feudal States which now adjoined the immediate dominions of the Eastern Emperor and exercised considerable social influence on the customs of his subjects. Aided by the Pisans, whose fleet ravaged[51] the Ionian Islands, Bohemond seemed likely to repeat the early successes of his father; but Alexios had learnt how to deal with the Latins, and the Normans’ second assault on Durazzo ended in a treaty of peace, by which Bohemond swore fealty to the Emperor. For the next forty years Greece had nothing to fear from the Normans, but the evil results of the alliance with Venice now became manifest. The Republic of St Mark had jealous commercial rivals in Italy, who envied her the monopoly of the Levantine trade. When, therefore, concessions were made to the Pisans and the previous charter of the Venetians was not renewed, the Empire found itself involved in a naval war with the latter, from which the defenceless Greek islands suffered, and which was only ended by the renewal of the old Venetian privileges. The mercantile powers of Italy had come to treat the Byzantine possessions much as modern European States regard Turkey, as a Government from which trading concessions can be obtained. But every fresh grant offended some one and gave the favoured party more and more influence in the affairs of the Empire. Fresh Venetian factories were founded in Greece, and the increasing prosperity of that country had the disadvantage of attracting the covetous foreigner.

Such was the state of affairs when, in 1146, Guiscard’s nephew, King Roger of Sicily, availing himself of an insult to his honour, invaded Greece with far greater success than had attended his uncle. The Sicilian Admiral, George of Antioch, occupied Corfù, with the connivance of the poorer inhabitants, who complained of the heavy taxation of the Imperial Government which in the twelfth century levied from that one Ionian Island about 9,000,000 dr. of modern money, or more than the present Greek Exchequer raises from all the seven, but was repulsed by the bold inhabitants of the impregnable rock of Monemvasia; then, after plundering the west coast, he landed his troops at the modern Itea, on the north of the Gulf of Corinth, and thence marched past Delphi on Thebes, at that time the seat of the silk manufacture. The city was undefended, but that did not save it from the rapacity of the Normans. Alexander the Great had, at least, spared “the house of Pindaros” when he took Thebes; but its new conquerors left nothing that was of any value behind them. After they had thoroughly ransacked the houses and churches they made the Thebans swear on the Holy Scriptures that they had concealed nothing, and then departed, dragging with them the most skilful weavers and dyers so as to transfer the silk industry to Sicily. This last was a serious blow to the monopoly of the silk trade which Greece had hitherto enjoyed so far as Christian States were concerned. The[52] secret of the manufacture had been jealously guarded; and the fishers who obtained the famous purple dye for the manufacturers were a privileged class, exempted from the payment of military taxes. Roger was well aware of the value of his captives; he established them and their families at Palermo, and at the conclusion of the war they were not restored to their homes in Greece. But the art of making and dyeing silk does not seem to have died out at Thebes, which, fifteen years after the Norman invasion, had recovered much of its former prosperity. When the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, visited it about 1161, he found 2000 of his co-religionists there, among them the best weavers and dyers in Greece, and towards the end of the century forty garments of Theban silk were sent as a present by the Emperor to the Sultan of Iconium. Although there are no silks now manufactured at Thebes and no mulberry-trees there, the plain near the town is still called by the peasants Morokampos, from the mulberry-trees which once grew upon it. From Thebes the Normans proceeded to the rich city of Corinth, which fell into their hands without a blow. Those who have ascended the grand natural fortress of Akrocorinth may easily understand the surprise of the warlike Normans at its surrender by the cowardly Byzantine commandant. “If Nikephoros Chalouphes”—such was his name—“had not been more timid than a woman,” exclaimed the Sicilian admiral, “we should never have entered these walls.” The town below yielded an even richer booty than Thebes—for it was then, as under the Romans, the great emporium of the Levantine trade in Greece—and laden with the spoils of Thebes and Corinth and with the relics of St Theodore, the Norman fleet set sail on its homeward voyage. Nineteen vessels fell victims to privateers, but the surviving ships brought such a valuable cargo into the great harbour of Palermo that the admiral was able to build out of his share the bridge which is still called after him, Ponte dell’ Ammiraglio. The Church of La Martorana as its older name of Sta Maria dell’ Ammiraglio testifies, was also founded by him. The captives, except the silk-weavers, were afterwards restored to their homes, and Corfù was recaptured by the chivalrous Emperor, Manuel Comnenos, after a siege, in the course of which he performed such prodigies of valour as to win the admiration of the Norman commander.

The revival of material prosperity in Greece after the close of this conflict was most remarkable, and in the second half of the twelfth century that country must have been one of the most flourishing parts of the Empire. The Arabian geographer, Edrisi, who wrote in 1153, tells us that the Peloponnese had thirteen cities, and alludes[53] to the vegetation of Corfù, the size of Athens, and the fertility of the great Thessalian plain, while Halmyros was then one of the most important marts of the Empire. Benjamin of Tudela tells us of Jewish communities in Larissa, Naupaktos, Arta, Corinth, Patras, Eubœa, Corfù (consisting of one man), Zante, and Ægina, as well as in Thebes, and this implies considerable wealth. Like St Nikon, he found them in Sparta, and we may note as a curious phenomenon the existence of a colony of Jewish agriculturists on the slopes of Parnassos. Salonika, where the Hebrew element is now so conspicuous, even then had 500 Jews. When we remember how rare are Jews in Greece to-day, except there and at Corfù, their presence in such numbers in the twelfth century is all the more strange. Nor were they all engaged in money-making. The worthy rabbi met Jews at Thebes who were learned in the Talmud, while the Greek clergy had also some literary representatives. It was about this time that the biography of St Nikon was composed; the philosophical and theological writings of Nicholas, Bishop of Methone, and Gregory, the Metropolitan of Corinth, belonged to the same epoch. Athens, after a long eclipse, had once more become a place of study. Yet, in point of wealth, Athens was inferior to several other Greek cities, and perhaps for that reason had no Jewish colony. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Greek Metropolitan of Athens before the Latin conquest, who was appointed about 1175, a full if somewhat pessimistic account of the condition of his diocese, which then included ten bishoprics. Michael was a man of distinguished family, a brother of the Byzantine statesman and historian, Niketas Choniates, and a pupil of the great Homeric scholar, Eustathios, who was Archbishop of Salonika. An ardent classical scholar, he had been enchanted at the prospect of taking up his abode in the episcopal residence on the Akropolis, of which he had formed the most glorified idea. But the golden dream of the learned divine vanished at the touch of reality. It was said of the Philhellenes, who went to aid the Greeks in the War of Independence, that they expected to find the Peloponnese filled with “Plutarch’s men”; finding that the modern Greeks were not ancient heroes and sages, they at once put them down as scoundrels and cut-throats. The worthy Michael seems to have experienced the same disillusionment and to have committed the same error as the Philhellenes. Fallen walls and rickety houses fringing mean streets gave him a bad impression as he entered the city in triumphal procession. His cathedral, it is true, with its frescoes and its offerings from the time of Basil the Bulgar-slayer, with its eternal lamp, the wonder of every pilgrim, and with the noble memories of the golden age of[54] Perikles which clung round its venerable structure, seemed to him superior to Sta Sophia in all its glory, a palace worthy of a king. And what bishop could boast of a minster such as the Parthenon? But the Athenians, “the off-spring of true-born Athenians,” as he styled them in his pompous inaugural address, did not appreciate, could scarcely even understand, the academic graces of his style. The shallow soil of Attica had become a parched desert, where little or no water was; the classic fountain of Kallirrhoe had ceased to run, the olive-yards were withered up by the drought. The silk-weavers and dyers, traces of whose work have been found in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, had disappeared. Emigration and the exactions of the Byzantine officials completed the tale of woe, which Michael was ever ready to pour into the ear of a sympathetic correspondent. In 1198, he addressed a memorial to the Emperor Alexios Comnenos III, on behalf of the Athenians, from which we learn that the city was free from the jurisdiction of the provincial governor, who resided at Thebes, and who was not even allowed to enter the city, which, like Patras and Monemvasia, was governed by its own archontes. But it appears that the governor none the less quartered himself on the inhabitants, and had thrice imposed higher ship-money on Athens than on Thebes and Chalkis. Nor did the Metropolitan hesitate to tell another Emperor, Isaac Angelos, that Athens was too poor to present him with the usual coronation offering of a golden wreath. Yet, when the Lord High Admiral came to Athens, he found merchantmen in the Piræus, and the Government raised more out of the impoverished inhabitants than out of Thebes and Eubœa. We must therefore not take too literally all the rhetorical complaints of the archbishop, which are incompatible with the great luxury of the Athenian Court under the French Dukes in the next century. As a good friend of Athens, he was anxious to make the city appear as poor as possible in the eyes of a grasping Government, for in the East it has always been a dangerous thing to appear rich. As a cultured man of the world, he exaggerated the “barbarism”—such is his own phrase, which would have staggered the ancient Athenians—of the spot where his lot had been cast. He derided the Attic Greek of his time as a rude dialect, and told his classical friends that few of the historic landmarks in Attica had preserved their ancient names pure and undefiled. Sheep grazed, he said, among the remains of the Painted Porch. “I live in Athens,” he wrote in a poem on the decay of the city, “yet it is not Athens that I see.” Yet Athens was at least spared the horrors of the sack of Salonika by the Normans of Sicily, whose great invasion in 1185 touched only the fringe of Greece.

Then, as in the war which broke out between Venice and the Empire some years earlier, it was the islands which suffered. After the attack by the mob on the Latin quarter of Constantinople, those Latins who escaped revenged themselves by preying upon the dwellers in the Ægean, whose flourishing state had been noted by Edrisi before that terrible visitation. Cephalonia and Zante were now permanently severed from the Byzantine sway, many Italians settled there, and after succumbing to Margaritone, the Sicilian admiral, Corfù, then a very rich island, became for some years the home of Vetrano, a Latin pirate, who was soon the terror of the Greek coasts. As if this were not enough, Isaac Angelos robbed many of the churches of their ornaments and pictures for the benefit of his capital, such as the famous picture at Monemvasia of Our Lord being dragged to the Cross, and extortion once more roused an insurrection in the Theme of Nikopolis. His successor injured Greek trade by granting most extensive privileges to the Venetians, who secured the commercial supremacy in the Levant. The Byzantine State was becoming visibly weaker every day, and the re-establishment of the second Bulgarian Empire suggested to a bold official, Manuel Kamytzes, the idea of carving out, with Bulgarian aid, a kingdom for himself in Greece. His attempt failed, but the growth of feudalism had loosened the old ties which bound that country to Constantinople. The power of the landed aristocracy, the archontes, as they were called, had gone on growing since the days of Danielis of Patras. Their rivalries threatened the Greek towns with the scenes which disgraced the cities of mediæval Italy, and some of them, like the great clan of Sgouros at Nauplia, were hereditary nobles of almost princely position. Large estates, the curse of ancient Italy, had grown up in Greece; the Empress Euphrosyne, for example, was owner of a vast property in Thessaly, which included several flourishing towns. Moreover, that province was no longer inhabited by a mainly Greek population; in the twelfth century it had passed so completely under Wallachian influence that it was known as Great Wallachia, and its colonists were the ancestors of those Koutso-Wallachs, who still pasture their herds in the country near the Thessalian frontier, descending to Bœotia in the winter, and who, in the war of 1897, were on the Turkish side. Finally a debased currency pointed to the financial decline of the Byzantine Government. In short, the Empire was ripe for the Latin conquest. It was not long delayed.

1. THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE

Professor Krumbacher says in his History of Byzantine Literature, that, when he announced his intention of devoting himself to that subject, one of his classical friends solemnly remonstrated with him, on the ground that there could be nothing of interest in a period when the Greek preposition ἀπό governed the accusative, instead of the genitive case. I am afraid that many people are of the opinion of that orthodox grammarian. There has long prevailed in some quarters an idea that, from the time of the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. to the day when Archbishop Germanos raised the standard of Independence at Kalavryta in 1821, the annals of Greece were practically a blank, and that that country thus enjoyed for nearly twenty centuries that form of happiness which consists in having no history. Fifty years ago there was, perhaps, some excuse for this theory; but the case is very different now. The great cemeteries of Mediæval Greece—I mean the Archives of Venice, Naples, Palermo and Barcelona—have given up their dead. We know now, year by year, yes, almost month by month, the vicissitudes of Hellas under her Frankish masters, and all that is required now is to breathe life into the dry bones, and bring upon the stage in flesh and blood that picturesque and motley crowd of Burgundian, Flemish and Lombard nobles, German knights, rough soldiers of fortune from Cataluña and Navarre, Florentine financiers, Neapolitan courtiers, shrewd Venetian and Genoese merchant princes, and last, but not least, the bevy of high-born dames, sprung from the oldest families of France, who make up, together with the Greek archons and the Greek serfs, the persons of the romantic drama, of which Greece was the theatre for 250 years.

The history of Frankish Greece begins with the Fourth Crusade. I need not recapitulate the oft-told story of that memorable expedition, which influenced for centuries the annals of Eastern Europe, and which forms the historical basis of the Eastern question. We all know, from the paintings of the Doge’s Palace, how the Crusaders set out with the laudable object of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, how they turned aside to the easier and more lucrative task of overturning the oldest Empire in the world, and how they placed on the throne of all the[58] Cæsars Count Baldwin of Flanders as first Latin Emperor of Constantinople. The Greeks fled to Asia Minor, and there at Nice, the city of the famous Council, and at Trebizond on the shores of the Black Sea, founded two Empires, of which the latter existed for over 250 years.

When the Crusaders and their Venetian allies sat down to partition the Byzantine Empire among themselves, they paid no heed to the rights of nationalities or to the wishes of the people whose fate hung upon their decisions. A fourth part of the Byzantine dominions, consisting of the capital, the adjacent districts of Europe and Asia, and several of the islands, was first set aside to form the new Latin Empire of Romania. The remaining three-fourths were then divided in equal shares between the Venetian Republic and the Crusaders, whose leader was Boniface of Montferrat in the North of Italy, the rival of Baldwin for the throne of the East. The Greek provinces in Asia, and the island of Crete had originally been intended as his share of the spoil; but he wished to obtain a compact extent of territory nearer his own home and his wife’s native land of Hungary, and accordingly sold Crete to the Venetians, and established himself as King of Salonika with sovereignty over a large part of Greece, as yet unconquered. The Venetians, with their shrewd commercial instincts and their much more intimate knowledge of the country, secured all the best harbours, islands and markets in the Levant—an incident which shows that an acquaintance with geography may sometimes be useful to politicians.

In the autumn of 1204 Boniface set out to conquer his Greek dominions. The King of Salonika belonged to a family, which was no stranger to the ways of the Orient. One of his brothers had married the daughter of the Greek Emperor Manuel I; another brother and a nephew were Kings of Jerusalem—a vain dignity which has descended from them, together with the Marquisate of Montferrat, to the present Italian dynasty. Married to the affable widow of the Greek Emperor Isaac II, Boniface was a sympathetic figure to the Greeks, who had speedily flocked in numbers to his side, and several of whom accompanied him on his march through Greece. Among these was the bastard Michael Angelos, of whom we shall hear later as the founder of a new dynasty. With the King of Salonika there went too a motley crowd of Crusaders in quest of fiefs, men of many nationalities, Lombards, Flemings, Frenchmen and Germans. There were Guillaume de Champlitte, a grandson of the Count of Champagne; Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble; Jacques d’Avesnes, son of a Flemish crusader who had been at the siege of Acre, and his two nephews, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer; Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, a[59] Rhenish warrior who had given the signal for setting fire to Constantinople; the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma, who had gone to Greece because at home every common man could hale him before the courts; Thomas de Stromoncourt, and Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona, brother of the podestà Realdo, whose name still figures on the Casa dei Mercanti there. Just as the modern general takes with him a band of war-correspondents to chronicle his achievements, so Boniface was accompanied by Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a troubadour from Provence, who afterwards boasted in one of the letters in verse which he addressed to his patron, that he “had helped him to conquer the Empire of the East and the Kingdom of Salonika, the island of Pelops and the Duchy of Athens.” Such were the men at whose head the Marquess of Montferrat marched through the classic vale of Tempe, the route of so many armies, into the great fertile plain of Thessaly.

While the Crusaders are traversing the vale of Tempe, let us ask ourselves for a moment, who were the races, and what was the condition, of the country which they were about to enter? The question is important, for the answer to it will enable us to understand the ease with which a small body of Franks conquered, almost without opposition, nearly the whole of Greece. The bulk of the inhabitants were, of course, Greeks; for no one, except a few propagandists, now believes the theory, so confidently advanced by Professor Fallmerayer 90 years ago, according to which there is not a single drop of Hellenic blood in the Greek nation, but the Kingdom of Greece is inhabited by Slavs and Albanians. At the time of the Frankish conquest, the Slavonic elements in the population, the survivals of the Slavonic immigrations of the dark centuries, were confined to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia and Laconia, where Taygetos was known as “the mountain of the Slavs.” The marvellous power of the Hellenic race for absorbing and hellenising foreign nationalities—a power like that of the Americans in our own day—had prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slav state, a Southern Serbia or Bulgaria, though such Slavonic names as Charvati near Mycenæ and Slavochorio still preserve the memory of the Slavonic settlements. As for the Albanians, they had not yet entered Greece; had they done so, the conquest would probably have been far less easy. Besides the Greeks and the Slavs, there were Wallachs in Thessaly, who extended as far south as Lamia, and who had bestowed upon the whole of that region the name, which we find employed by the Byzantine historian Niketas, of “Great Wallachia.” That the Wallachs are of Roman descent, scarcely admits of doubt;[60] at the present day the Roumanians claim them as their kinsmen; and the “Koutso”—or “lame,” Wallachs, so-called because they cannot pronounce chinch (or cinque) correctly, form one of the most thorny questions of contemporary diplomacy. The Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Greece about 40 years before the Frankish conquest, argued from their Scriptural names and from the fact that they called the Jews “brethren,” that they were connected with his own race. They showed, however, their “brotherly” love by merely robbing the Israelites, while they both robbed and murdered the Greeks.

In the south-east of the Peloponnese were to be found the mysterious Tzakones, a race which now exists at Leonidi and the adjacent villages alone, but which then occupied a wider area. Opinions differ as to the origin of this tribe, which still retains a dialect quite distinct from that spoken anywhere else in Greek lands and which was noticed as a “barbarian” tongue by the Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, in the fifteenth century. But Dr Deffner of Athens, the greatest living authority on their language, of which he has written a grammar, regards them as the descendants of the ancient Laconians, their name as a corruption of the words Τοὺς Λάκωνας, and their speech as “new Doric.” Scattered about, wherever money was to be made by trade, were colonies of Jews.

The rule of the Franks must have seemed to many Greeks a welcome relief from the financial oppression of the Byzantine Government. Greece was, at the date of the Conquest, afflicted by three terrible plagues: the tax collectors, the pirates, and the native tyrants. The Imperial Government did nothing for the provinces, but wasted the money which should have been spent on the defences of Greece, in extravagant ostentation at the capital. Byzantine officials, sent to Greece, regarded that classic land, in the phrase of Niketas, as an “utter hole,” an uncomfortable place of exile. The two Greek provinces were governed by one of these authorities, styled prætor, protoprætor, or “general,” whose headquarters were at Thebes. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Metropolitan of Athens before the conquest and brother of the historian Niketas, a vivid account of the exactions of these personages. Theoretically, the city of Athens was a privileged community. A golden bull of the Emperor forbade the prætor to enter it with an armed force, so that the Athenians might be spared the annoyance and expense of having soldiers quartered upon them. Its regular contribution to the Imperial Exchequer was limited to a land-tax, and it was expected to send a golden wreath as a coronation offering to a new Emperor. But, in practice, these privileges were apt to be ignored. The indignant Metropolitan complains[61] that the prætor, under the pretext of worshipping in the Church of “Our Lady of Athens,” as the Parthenon was then called, visited the city with a large retinue. He laments that one of these Imperial Governors had treated the city “more barbarously than Xerxes,” and that the leaves of the trees, nay almost every hair on the heads of the unfortunate Athenians, had been numbered. The authority of the prætor, he says, is like Medea in the legend; just as she scattered her poisons over Thessaly, so it scatters injustice over Greece—a classical simile, which had its justification in the hard fact, that it had long been the custom of the Byzantine Empire to pay the Governors of the European provinces no salaries, but to make their office self-supporting, a practice still followed by the Turkish Government. The Byzantine Government, too, following a policy similar to that which cost our King Charles I his throne, levied ship-money, really for the purpose of its own coffers, nominally for the suppression of piracy.

Piracy was then, as so often, the curse of the islands and the deeply indented coast of Greece. We learn from the English Chronicle ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, which gives a graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, that many of the islands were uninhabited from fear of pirates, and that others were their chosen lairs. Cephalonia and Ithake, which now appears under its mediæval name of Val di Compare—first used, so far as I know by the Genoese historian, Caffaro, in the first half of the twelfth century—had a specially evil reputation, and bold was the sailor who dared venture through the channel between them. Near Athens, the island of Ægina was a stronghold of corsairs, who injured the property of the Athenian Church, and dangerously wounded the nephew of the Metropolitan. Yet the remedy for piracy was almost worse than the disease. Well might the anxious Metropolitan tell the Lord High Admiral, that the Athenians regarded their proximity to the sea as the greatest of their misfortunes.

Besides the Byzantine officials and the pirates, the Greeks had a third set of tormentors in the shape of a brood of native tyrants, whose feuds divided city against city and divided communities into rival parties. Even where the Emperor had been nominally sovereign, the real power was in the hands of local magnates, who had revived, on the eve of the Frankish conquest, the petty tyrannies of ancient Greece. Under the dynasty of the Comneni, who imitated and introduced the ways of Western chivalry, feudalism had already made considerable inroads into the East. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, local families were in possession of large tracts of territory which they governed almost like independent princes. Of all these archontes, as they were[62] called, the most powerful was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had extended his sway over Argos “of the goodly steeds,” and had seized the city and fortress of Corinth, proudly styling himself by a high-sounding Byzantine title, and placing his fortunes under the protection of St Theodore the Warrior. The manners of these local magnates were no less savage than those of the Western barons of the same period. Thus, Sgouros on one occasion invited the Archbishop of Corinth to dinner, and then put out the eyes of his guest, and hurled him over the rocks of the citadel. The contemporary historian Niketas has painted in the darkest colours the character of the Greek archontes, upon whom he lays the chief responsibility for the evils which befell their country. He speaks of them as “inflamed by ambition against their own fatherland, slavish men, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of fighting the Latins.” The Emperor and historian, John Cantacuzene, gives much the same description of their descendants a century and a half later.

Such was the condition of Greece, when Boniface and his army emerged from the vale of Tempe and marched across the plain of Thessaly to Larissa. He bestowed that ancient city upon a Lombard noble, who henceforth styled himself Guglielmo de Larsa from the name of his fief. Velestino, the ancient Pheræ, the scene of the legend of Admetos and Alcestis, and the site of the modern battle, fell to the share of Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, whose name must have proved a stumbling-block to his Thessalian vassals. The army then took the usual route by way of Pharsala and Domoko—names familiar alike in the ancient and modern history of Greek warfare—down to Lamia and thence across the Trachinian plain to Thermopylæ, where Sgouros was awaiting it. But the memories of Leonidas failed to inspire the archon of Nauplia to follow his example. Niketas tells us that the mere sight of the Latin knights in their coats of mail sufficed to make him flee straight to his own fastness of Akrocorinth, leaving the pass undefended. Conscious of its strength—for Thermopylæ must have been far more of a defile then than now—Boniface resolved to secure it permanently against attack. He therefore invested the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, nicknamed by the Greeks “Marchesopoulo,” with the fief of Boudonitza, which commanded the other end of the pass. Thus arose the famous Marquisate of Boudonitza, which was destined to play an important part in the Frankish history of Greece, and which, after a continuous existence of over two centuries, as guardian of the Northern marches, has left a memory of its fallen greatness in the ruins of the castle and chapel of its former lords, of whose descendants, the[63] Zorzi of Venice, there are still living—so Mr Horatio Brown informs me—some thirty representatives in that city. Following the present carriage-road from Lamia to the Corinthian Gulf, Boniface established another defensive post at the pass of Gravia, so famous centuries afterwards in the War of Independence, conferring it as a fief on the two brothers Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer. At the foot of Parnassos, on the site of the ancient Amphissa, he next founded the celebrated barony of Salona, which lasted almost as long as the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Upon the almost Cyclopean stones of the classic Akropolis of Amphissa, which Philip of Macedon had destroyed fifteen centuries before, Thomas de Stromoncourt built himself the fortress, of which the majestic ruins—perhaps the finest Frankish remains in Greece—still stand among the cornfields on the hill above the modern town. According to the local tradition, the name of Salona, which the place still bears in common parlance, despite the usual official efforts to revive the classical terminology, is derived from the King of Salonika, its second founder. The lord of Salona soon extended his sway down to the harbour of Galaxidi, and the barony became so important that two at least of the house of Stromoncourt struck coins of their own, which are still preserved.

Boniface next marched into Bœotia, where the people, glad to be relieved from the oppression of Sgouros, at once submitted. Thebes joyfully opened her gates, and then the invaders pursued their way to Athens. The Metropolitan thought it useless to defend the city, and a Frankish guard was soon stationed on the Akropolis. The Crusaders had no respect for the great Cathedral. To these soldiers of fortune the classic glories of the Parthenon appealed as little as the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. The rich treasury of the Cathedral was plundered, the holy vessels were melted down, the library which the Metropolitan had collected was dispersed. Unable to bear the sight, Akominatos quitted the scene where he had laboured so long, and, after wandering about for a time, finally settled down in the island of Keos, whence he could at least see the coast of Attica.

Thebes with Bœotia and Athens with Attica and the Megarid were bestowed by the King of Salonika upon his trusty comrade in arms, Othon de la Roche, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle a serious dispute between him and the Emperor Baldwin, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between Boniface’s daughter and Baldwin’s brother and successor. Thus, in the words of a monkish chronicler, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans.” The[64] chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had thus succeeded to the glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself Sire d’Athènes, or Dominus Athenarum in official documents, which his Greek subjects magnified into “the Great Lord” (Μέγας κύρ), and Dante, who had probably heard that such had been the title of the first Frankish ruler of Athens, transferred it by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Half a century after the conquest, Othon’s nephew and successor, Guy I, received, at his request, the title of Duke from Louis IX of France—and Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Chaucer in The Knight’s Tale have by a similar anachronism conferred the ducal title of the De la Roche upon Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to the Lord of Athens on the part of the Greeks. Later Venetian authors, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story, that the Athenians sent an embassy to offer their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated “not without bloodshed by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche.”

We naturally ask ourselves what was the appearance and condition of the most famous city of the ancient world at the time of Othon’s accession, and the voluminous writings of the eminent man who was Metropolitan at that moment, which have been published by Professor Lampros of Athens, throw a flood of light upon the Athens of the beginning of the thirteenth century. The only Athenian manufactures were soap and the weaving of monkish habits, but the ships of the Piræus still took part in the purple-fishing off the lonely island of Gyaros, the Botany Bay of the Roman Empire. There was still some trade at the Piræus, for the Byzantine Admiral had found vessels there. It was then guarded by the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, which gave the harbour its mediæval name of Porto Leone, and on which Harold Hardrada, afterwards slain at Stamford Bridge, had scratched his name nearly two centuries before. We may infer, too, from the mention of Athens in the commercial treaties between Venice and the Byzantine Empire that the astute Republicans saw some prospect of making money there. But the “thin soil” of Attica was as unproductive as in the days of Thucydides, and yielded nothing but oil, honey, and wine, the last strongly flavoured with resin, as it still is, so that the Metropolitan could write to a friend that it “seems to be pressed from the juice of the pine rather than from that of the grape.” The harvest was always meagre, and famines were common. Even ordinary necessaries were not always obtainable. Akominatos[65] could not find a decent carriage-builder in the place; and, in his despair at the absence of blacksmiths and workers in iron, he was constrained to apply to Athens the words of Jeremiah: “the bellows are burnt.” Emigration, still the curse of Greece, was draining off the able-bodied poor, so that the population had greatly diminished, and the city threatened to become what Aristophanes had called “a Scythian wilderness.”

Externally, the visitor to the Athens of that day, must have been struck by the marked contrast between the splendid monuments of the classic age and the squalid surroundings of the mediæval town. The walls were lying in ruins, the houses of the emigrants had been pulled down, the streets, where once the sages of antiquity had walked, were now desolate. But the hand of the invader and the tooth of time had, on the whole, dealt gently with the Athenian monuments. The Parthenon, converted long before into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Athens, was almost as little damaged, as if it had only just been built. The metopes, the pediments, and the frieze were still intact, and remained so when, more than two centuries later, Cyriacus of Ancona, the first archæologist who had ever visited Athens during the Frankish period, drew his sketch of the Parthenon, which is still preserved in Berlin and of which a copy by Sangallo may be seen in the Vatican library. On the walls were the frescoes, traces of which are still visible, executed by order of the Emperor Basil II, “the slayer of the Bulgarians,” nearly two centuries earlier. Over the altar was a golden dove, representing the Holy Ghost, and ever flying with perpetual motion. In the cathedral, too, was an ever-burning lamp, fed by oil that never failed, which was the marvel of the pilgrims. So widespread was the fame of the Athenian Minster, that the great folk of Constantinople, in spite of their supercilious contempt for the provinces and their dislike of travel, came to do obeisance there. Of the other ancient buildings on the sacred rock, the graceful temple of Nike Apteros had been turned into a chapel; the Erechtheion had become a church of the Saviour, or a chapel of the Virgin, while the episcopal residence, which is known to have then been on the Akropolis, was probably in the Propylæa. The whole Akropolis had for centuries been made into a fortress, the only defence which Athens then possessed, strong enough to have resisted the attack of a Greek magnate like Sgouros, but incapable of repulsing a Latin army. Already strange legends and new names had begun to grow round some of the classical monuments. The Choragic monument of Lysikrates was already popularly known as “the lantern of Demosthenes,” its usual designation during the[66] Turkish domination, when it became the Capuchin Convent, serving in 1811 as a study to Lord Byron, who from within its walls launched his bitter poem against the filcher of the Elgin marbles. But, even at the beginning of the thirteenth century, many of the ancient names of places lingered in the mouths of the people. The classically cultured Metropolitan was gratified as a good Philhellene, to hear that the Piræus and Hymettos, Eleusis and Marathon, the Areopagos and Kallirrhoe, Salamis and Ægina were still called by names, which the contemporaries of Perikles had used, even though the Areopagos was nothing but a bare rock, the plain of Marathon yielded no corn, and the “beautifully-flowing” fountain had ceased to flow. But new, uncouth names were beginning to creep in; thus, the partition treaty of 1204 describes Salamis as “Culuris” (or, “the lizard”), a vulgar name, derived from the shape of the island, which I have heard used in Attica at the present day.

Of the intellectual condition of Athens we should form but a low estimate, if we judged entirely from the lamentations of the elegant Byzantine scholar whom fate had made its Metropolitan. Akominatos had found that his tropes, and fine periods, and classical allusions were far over the heads of the Athenians who came to hear him, and who talked in his cathedral, even though that cathedral was the Parthenon. He wrote that his long residence in Greece had made him a barbarian. Yet he was able to add to his store of manuscripts in this small provincial town. Moreover, there is some evidence to prove that, even at this period, Athens was a place of study, whither Georgians from the East and English from the West came to obtain a liberal education. Matthew Paris tells us of Master John of Basingstoke, Archdeacon of Leicester in the reign of Henry III, who used often to say, that whatever scientific knowledge he possessed had been acquired from the youthful daughter of the Archbishop of Athens. This young lady could forecast the advent of pestilences, thunderstorms, eclipses, and earthquakes. From learned Greeks at Athens Master John professed to have heard some things of which the Latins had no knowledge; he found there the testaments of the twelve Patriarchs, and he brought back to England the Greek numerals and many books, including a Greek grammar which had been compiled for him at Athens. The same author tells us, too, of “certain Greek philosophers”—that is, in mediæval Greek parlance, monks—who came from Athens at this very time to the Court of King John, and disputed about nice sharp quillets of theology with English divines. It is stated, also, though on indifferent authority, as Mr F. C. Conybeare of Oxford kindly informs me, that the Georgian poet, Chota Roustavéli,[67] and other Georgians spent several years at Athens on the eve of the Frankish conquest.

Othon de la Roche showed his gratitude to his benefactor, the King of Salonika, by accompanying him in his attack upon the strongholds of Sgouros in the Peloponnese. The Franks routed the Greek army at the Isthmus of Corinth, and while Othon laid siege to the noble castle above that town, Boniface proceeded to the attack on Nauplia. There he was joined by a man, who was destined to be the conqueror and ruler of the peninsula.

It chanced that, a little before the capture of Constantinople, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, nephew of the quaint chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, had set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine. On his arrival in Syria, he heard of the great achievements of the Crusaders, and resolved without loss of time to join them. But his ship was driven out of its course by a violent storm, and Geoffroy was forced to take shelter in the harbour of Methone on the coast of Messenia. During the winter of 1204, which he spent at that spot, he received an invitation from a local magnate to join him in an attack on the lands of the neighbouring Greeks. Villehardouin, nothing loth, placed his sword at the disposal of the Greek traitor, and success crowned the arms of these unnatural allies. But the Greek archon died, and his son, more patriotic or more prudent than his father, repudiated the dangerous alliance with the Frankish stranger. But it was too late. Villehardouin had discovered the fatal secret, that the Greeks of the Peloponnese were an unwarlike race, whose land would fall an easy conquest to a resolute band of Latins. At this moment, tidings reached him that Boniface was besieging Nauplia. He at once set out on a six days’ journey across a hostile country to seek his aid. In the camp he found his old friend and fellow-countryman, Guillaume de Champlitte, who was willing to assist him. He described to Champlitte the richness of the land which men called “the Morea”—a term which now occurs for the first time in history, and which seems to have been originally applied to the coast of Elis and thence extended to the whole peninsula, just as the name Italy, originally a part of Calabria, has similarly spread over the whole of that country. He professed his readiness to recognise Champlitte as his liege lord in return for his aid, and Boniface consented, after some hesitation, to their undertaking. With a hundred knights and some men-at-arms, the two friends rode out from the camp before Nauplia to conquer the peninsula.

The conquest of the Morea has been compared with that of England by the Normans. In both cases a single pitched battle decided the fate[68] of the country, but in the Morea, the conquerors did not, as in England, amalgamate with the conquered. The Hastings of the Peloponnese was fought in the olive-grove of Koundoura, in the North-East of Messenia, and the little Frankish force of between 500 and 700 men easily routed the over-confident Greeks, aided by the Slavs of Taygetos, who altogether numbered from 4000 to 6000. After this, one place after another fell into the hands of the Franks, who showed towards the conquered that tact which we believe to be one of the chief causes of our own success in dealing with subject races. Provided that their religion was respected, the Greeks were not unwilling to accept the Franks as their masters, and on this point the conquerors, who were not bigots, made no difficulties. By the year 1212, the whole of the peninsula was Frankish, except where the Greek flag still waved over the impregnable rock of Monemvasia, the St Michael’s Mount of Greece, and where at the two stations of Methone and Korone in Messenia Venice had raised the lion-banner of St Mark. Insignificant as they are now, those twin colonies were of great value to the Venetian traders, and there is a whole literature about them in the Venetian Archives. All the galleys stopped there on the way to Syria and Crete; pilgrims to the Holy Land found a welcome there in “the German house,” founded by the Teutonic Knights, and as late as 1532 there was a Christian Governor at Korone. The population was then removed to Sicily, and of those exiles the present Albanian monks of Grottaferrata are the descendants.

I have now described the conquest of the mainland; it remains to speak of the islands, which had mostly been allotted to Venice by the treaty of partition. But the shrewd Government saw that its resources could not stand the strain of conquering and administering the large group of the Cyclades. It was, therefore, decided to leave to private citizens the task of occupying them. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that day, and on the bench of the Consular Court, as we should now call it, at Constantinople, sat the very man for such an enterprise—Marco Sanudo, nephew of “the old Doge Dandolo.” Sanudo descended from the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, equipped eight galleys and was soon master of seventeen islands, some of which he distributed as fiefs to his comrades. Naxos alone offered any real resistance, and, in 1207, the conqueror founded the Duchy of “the Dodekannesos” (or “Twelve Islands,” as the Byzantines called it), which soon received the title of the “Duchy of Naxos,” or “of the Archipelago”—a corruption of the name “Ægeopelagos,” which occurs as early as a Venetian document of 1268. This delectable Duchy lasted, first under the Sanudi, and then under the Crispi,[69] till 1566, while the Gozzadini of Bologna held seven of the islands down to 1617, and Tenos remained in Venetian hands till it was finally taken in 1715 and ceded to the Turks by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718. For persons so important as the Dukes it was necessary to invent a truly Roman genealogy; accordingly, the Paduan biographer, Zabarella, makes the Sanudi descend from the historian Livy, while the Crispi, not to be beaten, claimed Sallust as their ancestor, and may, perhaps, be regarded as the forbears of the late Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi.

The two great islands of Crete and Eubœa had very different fortunes. Crete, as we saw, was sold by Boniface to the Venetians, and remained a Venetian colony for nearly five centuries. Eubœa, or Negroponte, as it was called in the Middle Ages, was divided by Boniface into three large baronies, which were assigned to three Lombard nobles from Verona, who styled themselves the terciers, or terzieri. We have no English equivalent for the word; perhaps, borrowing a hint from Shakespeare, we may call them “the three Gentlemen of Verona.” But Venice soon established a colony, governed by a bailie, at Chalkis, the capital of the island, and the subsequent history of Negroponte shows the gradual extension of Venetian influence over the Lombards.

The seven Ionian Islands naturally fall into three divisions. Kythera (or Cerigo) in the far South; the centred group, consisting of Zante, Cephalonia, Ithake, and Levkas (or Santa Maura); and Corfù and Paxo in the North. Of these divisions, the first fell to the share of a scion of the great Venetian family of Venier—a family which traced its name and descent from Venus, and naturally claimed the island, where she had risen from the sea. Zante, Cephalonia and Ithake had a very curious history—a history long obscure, but now well ascertained. They belonged to Count Maio (or Matteo) Orsini, a member of the great Roman family, who came, as the Spanish Chronicle of the Morea informs us, from Monopoli in Apulia. This bold adventurer, half-pirate, half-crusader,—a not unusual combination in those days—thus succeeded to the realm of Odysseus, which was thenceforth known, from his title, as the County Palatine of Cephalonia. Corfù with its appendage of Paxo, was at first assigned to ten nobles of the Republic in return for an annual payment. But, ere long, those two islands, together with Levkas, which is scarcely an island at all, were included in the dominions of a Greek prince, the bastard Michael Angelos, who had slipped away from the camp of Boniface, and had established himself, by an opportune marriage with the widow of the late Byzantine governor, as independent Greek sovereign of Epeiros. His wife was a[70] native of the country; his father had been its governor; he thus appealed to the national feelings of the natives, whose mountainous country has in all ages defied the attacks of invading armies. A man of great vigour, he soon extended his sway from his capital of Arta to Durazzo in the North, and to the Corinthian Gulf in the South, and his dominions, known as the principality, or Despotat of Epeiros, served as the rallying point of Hellenism—the only portion of Greece, except Monemvasia, which still remained Greek.

I would fain have said something of the inner life of Frankish Greece—of its society, of its literature, and of the great influence which women exercised in its affairs. But for these subjects there is no time left. I would only add, in conclusion, that the Frankish conquest of Greece affords the clue to one of the vexed problems of modern literature—the second part of Goethe’s Faust, which an American scholar, Dr Schmitt, has shown to have been inspired by the account given in the Chronicle of the Morea, a work which was first printed by Buchon in 1825, at the time when Goethe was engaged on that part of his famous tragedy. Its origin is obvious from the following lines, which he puts into the mouth of his hero:

2. FRANKISH SOCIETY IN GREECE

We saw in the last essay, how at the beginning of the thirteenth century a small body of Franks conquered nearly the whole of Greece, and how, as the result of their conquests, a group of Latin states sprang into existence in that country—the Duchies of Athens and of the Archipelago, the principality of Achaia, the County Palatine of Cephalonia, the three baronies of Eubœa, and the Venetian colony of Crete, while at two points alone—in the mountains of Epeiros and on the isolated rock of Monemvasia, so well-known to our ancestors as the place whence they obtained their Malmsey wine—the Greek flag still waved. In the[71] present essay, I would give some account of Frankish organisation, political and ecclesiastical, of Frankish society, and of Frankish literature.

The usual tendency of the desperately logical Latin intellect, when brought face to face with a new set of political conditions, is to frame a paper constitution, absolutely perfect in theory, and absolutely unworkable in practice. But the French noblemen whom an extraordinary accident had converted into Spartan and Athenian law-givers, resisted this temptation, nor did they seek inspiration from the laws of Solon and Lycurgus. They fortunately possessed a model, the Assizes of Jerusalem which had been drawn up a century before for that Kingdom, and which, under the name of the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania—a work still preserved in a Venetian version of 1452 drawn up for the island of Eubœa—was applied to all the Frankish states in Greece. This feudal constitution, barbarous as it may seem to our modern ideas, seems to have worked well; at any rate, it was tried by the best test, that of experience, and lasted, with one small amendment, for 250 years. In Achaia, about which we have most information, a commission was appointed, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five leading Greeks, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, for the purpose of dividing the Morea into fiefs and of assigning these to the members of the conquering force according to their wealth and the numbers of their followers, and the book, or “register” as the Chronicler calls it, containing the report of this commission, was then laid before a Parliament, held at Andravida, or Andreville, in Elis, now a small village which the traveller passes in the train between Patras and Olympia, but then the capital of the principality of Achaia.

According to this Achaian Doomsday-book, twelve baronies, whose number recalls the twelve peers of Charlemagne, were created, their holders, with the other lieges, forming a High Court, which not only advised the Prince in political matters but acted as a judicial tribunal for the decision of feudal questions. In the creation of these twelve baronies due regard was paid to the fact that the Franks were a military colony in the midst of an alien, and possibly hostile, population, spread over a country possessing remarkable strategic positions. Later on, after the distribution of the baronies, strong castles were erected in each upon some natural coign of vantage, from which the baron could overawe the surrounding country. The main object of this system may be seen from the name of the famous Arcadian fortress of Matagrifon, a name given also to our Richard I’s castle at Messina[45], (“Kill-Greek,”[72] the Greeks being usually called Grifon by the French chroniclers), built near the modern Demetsana by the baron of Akova, Gautier de Rozières, to protect the rich valley of the Alpheios. The splendid remains of the castle of Karytaina, the Greek Toledo, which dominates the gorge of that classic river, which the Franks called Charbon, still mark the spot where Hugues de Bruyères and his son Geoffroy built a stronghold out of the ruins of the Hellenic Brenthe to terrify the Slavs of Skorta, the ancient Gortys and the home of the late Greek Prime Minister, Delyannes. The special importance of these two baronies was demonstrated by the bestowal of 24 knights’ fees upon the former and of 22 upon the latter. The castle-crowned hill of Passavâ, so-called, not, as Fallmerayer imagined, from a Slavonic Passau, but from the French war-cry Passe Avant, still reminds us how Jean de Neuilly, hereditary marshal of Achaia and holder of four fiefs, once watched the restless men of Maina; and, if earthquakes have left no mediæval buildings at Vostitza, the classic Aigion, where Hugues de Lille de Charpigny received eight knights’ fees, his family name still survives in the village of Kerpine, now a station on the funicular railway between Diakophto and Kalavryta. At Kalavryta itself Othon de Tournay, and at Chalandritza to the south of Patras Audebert de la Trémouille, scion of a family famous in the history of France, were established, with twelve and four fiefs respectively. Veligosti near Megalopolis with four fell to the share of the Belgian Matthieu de Valaincourt de Mons, and Nikli near Tegea with six to that of Guillaume de Morlay. Guy de Nivelet kept the Tzakones of Leonidi in check and watched the plain of Lakonia from his barony of Geraki with its six fiefs—a castle which has been surveyed by the British School at Athens—and Gritzena, entrusted to a baron named Luke with four fiefs depending on it guarded the ravines of the mountainous region round Kalamata. Patras became the barony of Guillaume Aleman, a member of a Provençal family still existing at Corfù, and the bold baron did not scruple to build his castle out of the house and church of the Latin Archbishop. Finally, the dozen was completed by the fiefs of Kalamata and Kyparissia (or Arkadia, as it was called in the Middle Ages, when what we call Arcadia was known as Mesarea) which became the barony of Geoffroy de Villehardouin. In addition to these twelve temporal peers there were seven ecclesiastical barons, whose sees were carved out on the lines of the existing Greek organisation, and of whom Antelme of Clugny, Latin Archbishop of Patras and Primate of Achaia was the chief. The Archbishop received eight knights’ fees, the bishops four a piece, and the same number was[73] assigned to each of the three great Military Orders of the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St John, and the Templars. When, a century later, the Templars were dissolved, their possessions went to the Knights of St John. In Elis was the domain of the Prince, and his usual residence, when he was not at Andravida, was at Lacedæmonia, or La Crémonie, as the Franks called it.

After the distribution of the baronies came the assignment of military service. All vassals were liable to render four months’ service in the field, and to spend four months in garrison (from which the prelates and the three Military Orders were alone exempted), and even during the remaining four months, which they could pass at home, they were expected to hold themselves ready to obey the summons of the Prince. After the age of 60, personal service was no longer required; but the vassal must send his son, or, if he had no son, some one else in his stead. Thus the Franks were on a constant war footing; their whole organisation was military—a fact which explains the ease with which they held down the unwarlike Greeks, so many times their superiors in numbers. This military organisation had, however, as the eminent modern Greek historian Paparregopoulos has pointed out, the effect of making the Greeks, too, imbibe in course of time something of the spirit of their conquerors. It is thus that we may explain the extraordinary contrast between the tameness with which the Greeks accepted the Frankish domination, and their frequent rebellions against that of the Turks. All over the Levant and even in Italy the Frankish chivalry of Achaia became famous. They fought against the luckless Conradin at Tagliacozzo, and the ruse, which won that battle and which Dante has ascribed to Erard de Valéry, is attributed by the Chronicle of the Morea to Prince William of Achaia. Round the Prince there grew up a hierarchy of great officials with high-sounding titles, to which the Greeks had no difficulty in fitting Byzantine equivalents. The Prince himself bore a sceptre, as the symbol of his office, when he presided over the sessions of the High Court.

We learn from the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania something about the way in which the feudal system worked in the principality of Achaia. Society was there composed of six main elements—the Prince, the holders of the twelve great baronies, the greater and lesser vassals (among whom were some Greeks), the freemen, and the serfs. The Prince and his twelve peers alone had the power of inflicting capital punishment; but even the Prince could not punish any of the barons without the consent of the greater vassals. If he were taken prisoner in battle, he could call upon his vassals to become[74] hostages in his place, until he had raised the amount of his ransom. No one, except the twelve peers, was allowed to build a castle in Achaia without his permission, and without it any vassal, who left the country and stayed abroad, was liable to lose his fief. Leave of absence was, however, never refused if the vassal wished to claim the succession to a fief abroad, to contract a marriage, or to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, or to the Churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome or to that of St James at Compostella. But in such cases the vassals must return within two years and two days. The vassals were of two classes, the greater (or ligii) and the lesser (or homines plani homagii), who took no part in the Council of the Prince. A liege could not sell his fief without the Prince’s consent; but if the liege were a widow—for the Salic Law did not obtain in Frankish Greece, and ladies often held important fiefs—she might marry whom she pleased, except only an enemy of the Prince. When a fief fell vacant, the successor must needs appear to advance his claim within a year and a day if he were in Achaia, within two years and two days if he were abroad. It was the tricky application of this rule which led to the succession of Geoffroy de Villehardouin to the throne of Achaia. Champlitte had been summoned away to claim a fief in France, and had requested his trusted comrade in arms to act as his viceroy till he had sent a relative to take his place. When the news reached the Morea that a young cousin of Champlitte was on his way, Geoffroy resolved to use artifice in order to prevent his arrival in time. He accordingly begged the Doge to assist him, and the latter, who had excellent reasons for remaining on good terms with him, managed to entertain his passing guest at Venice for more than two months. When, at last, young Robert de Champlitte put to sea, the ship’s captain received orders to leave him ashore at Corfù, and it was with difficulty that he managed to obtain a passage from there to the Morea. When he landed there he had, however, a few days still in hand; but the crafty Villehardouin managed by marching rapidly from one place to another to avoid meeting him till the full term prescribed by the feudal pact had expired. He was then informed that he had forfeited the principality, which thus fell to Villehardouin by a legal quibble. The pious did not, however, forget to point out later on, that the crime of the founder of the dynasty was visited upon his family to the third and fourth generation, as we shall see in the sequel.

There was a great difference between feudal society in Achaia and in the Duchy of Athens. While in the principality the Prince was merely primus inter pares, at Athens the “Great Lord” had at the most one[75] exalted noble, the head of the great house of St Omer, near his throne. It is obvious from the silence of all the authorities, that the Burgundians who settled with Othon de la Roche in his Greek dominions were men of inferior social position to himself—a fact further demonstrated by the comparative lack in Attica and Bœotia of those baronial castles, so common in the Morea. Indeed, it is probable that, in one respect, the Court of Athens under the De la Roche resembled the Court of the late King George, namely, that there was no one, except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on equal terms. But in Frankish, as in modern Athens, the family of the sovereign was soon numerous enough to form a coterie of its own. The news of their relative’s astounding fortune attracted to Attica several members of his clan from their home in Burgundy; they doubtless received their share of the good things, which had fallen to Othon; one nephew divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes, another more distant kinsman became commander of the castle of Athens. Other Burgundians will doubtless have followed in their wake, for in the thirteenth century Greece, or “New France,” as Pope Honorius III called it, was to the younger sons of French noble houses what the British colonies were fifty years ago to impecunious but energetic Englishmen. The elder Sanudo, who derived his information from his relatives, the Dukes of Naxos, specially tells us that this was the case at the Achaian Court. He says of Geoffroy II of Achaia, that “he possessed a broad domain and great riches; he was wont to send his most confidential advisers from time to time to the Courts of his vassals, to see how they lived, and how they treated their subjects. At his own Court he constantly maintained 80 knights with golden spurs, to whom he gave their pay and all that they required; so knights came from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts; others because of crimes which they had committed at home.”

There was another marked distinction between Attica and the Morea. Niketas mentions no great local magnates as settled at Athens or Thebes in the last days of the Byzantine domination, nor do we hear of such during the whole century of Burgundian rule. Thus, whereas Crete, Negroponte, and the Morea still retained old native families, which in Crete headed insurrections, in Negroponte showed a tendency to emigrate, and in the Morea held fiefs and even occasionally, as in the case of the Sgouromallaioi, intermarried with the Franks, who usually, as Muntaner tells us, took their wives from France and despised marriages with Greeks even of high degree, Athens contained no such[76] native aristocracy. It is only towards the close of the fourteenth century that we hear of any Greeks prominent there, and then they are not nobles, but notaries. Only in the last two generations of Latin rule, is there a national party at Athens, in which the famous family of Chalkokondyles, which produced the last Athenian historian, was prominent. The Greeks of Attica were, therefore, mostly peasants, whose lot was much the same as it was all over the feudal world, namely that of serfdom. We have examples, too, of actual slavery at Athens, even in the last decades of the Latin domination.

Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small standard of classical Greece. Burgundian Athens embraced Attica, Bœotia, the Megarid, the ancient Opuntian Lokris, and the fortresses of Nauplia and Argos, which the “Great Lord” had received as a fief from the principality of Achaia in return for his services at the time of their capture. Thus situated, the Athenian state had a considerable coast-line and at least four ports—the Piræus, Nauplia, the harbour of Atalante opposite Eubœa, and Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of Corinth—the usual port of embarkation for the West. Yet the Burgundian rulers of Athens made little attempt to create a navy, confining themselves to a little amateur piracy. Venice was most jealous of any other Latin state, which showed any desire to rival her as a maritime power in the Levant, and in a treaty concluded in 1319 between the Republic and the Catalans, who then held the Duchy of Athens, it was expressly provided that they should launch no new ships in “the sea of Athens” and should dismantle those already afloat and place their tackle in the Akropolis.

We are not told where the first Frankish ruler of Athens resided, but there can be no doubt that, like his immediate successors, he fixed his capital at Thebes—for it was not till the time of the Florentine Dukes in the fifteenth century that the Propylæa at Athens became the ducal palace. The old Bœotian city continued, under the Burgundian dynasty, to be the most important place in the Athenian Duchy. The silk manufacture still continued there; for it is specially mentioned in the commercial treaty which Guy I of Athens concluded with the Genoese in 1240, and we hear of a gift of 20 silken garments from Guy II to Pope Boniface VIII. The town contained both a Genoese and a Jewish colony, and it was a nest of Hebrew poets, whose verses, if we may believe a rival bard, were one mass of barbarisms. But the great feature of Thebes was the castle, built by Nicholas II de St Omer out of the vast fortune of his wife, Princess Marie of Antioch. This huge building is described as “the finest baronial mansion in all the realm[77] of Romania”; it contained sufficient rooms for an Emperor and his court, and the walls were covered with frescoes illustrating the conquest of the Holy Land, in which the ancestors of the Great Theban baron had played a prominent part. Unhappily, the great castle of Thebes was destroyed by the Catalans in the fourteenth century, and one stumpy tower alone remains to preserve, like the Santameri mountains in the Morea, the name and fame of the great Frankish family of St Omer.

I have spoken of the political organisation of the two chief Frankish states of Greece; I would next say something of their ecclesiastical arrangements. The policy of the Franks towards the Greek Church was more than anything else the determining factor of their success or failure in Greece, for in all ages the Greeks have regarded their Church as inseparably identified with their nationality, and even to-day the terms “Christian” and “Greek” are often used as identical terms. Now, as that fair-minded modern Greek historian, Paparregopoulos, has pointed out, the Franks were confronted at the outset with an ecclesiastical dilemma, from which there was no escape. Either they must persecute the Orthodox Church, in which case they would make bitter enemies of the persecuted clergy and of the Nicene and Byzantine Emperors; or they must tolerate it, in which case their Greek subjects would find natural leaders in the Orthodox bishops, who would sooner or later conspire against their foreign rulers. This was exactly what happened as soon as the Franks abandoned the policy of persecution for that of toleration. At first, they simply annexed the existing Greek ecclesiastical organisation, which had subsisted, with one or two small changes, ever since the days of the Emperor Leo the Philosopher, ousted the Orthodox hierarchy from their sees, and installed in their places Catholic ecclesiastics from the West.

Thus, at Athens, a Frenchman, named Bérard, became the first Catholic Archbishop of Athens, and thus began that long series which existed without a break till the time of the Turkish conquest and was subsequently renewed in 1875. Later on, however, when the Florentine Dukes of Athens, at the end of the fourteenth century, permitted the Greek Metropolitan to reside in his see, he at once entered into negotiations with the Turks, and the same phenomenon meets us at Salona and other places. As Voltaire has said, the Greek clergy “preferred the turban of a Turkish priest to the red hat of a Roman Cardinal,” and this strange preference contributed in great measure to the downfall of Latin rule in the Levant. For, throughout the long period of the Frankish domination, the Catholic Church made hardly any headway[78] among the Greeks. The elder Sanudo, who knew the Levant better than most of his contemporaries, wrote to Pope John XXII, that the Western Powers might destroy the Byzantine Empire but could not retain their conquests, for the examples of Cyprus, Crete, the principality of Achaia, and the Duchy of Athens showed that only the foreign conquerors and not the natives belonged to the Roman faith. Even to-day, the Catholics of Greece come mostly from those Italian families, whose ancestors emigrated to the Levant in the Frankish period, and are mostly to be found just where we should expect to find them—in the Ionian Islands and the Cyclades, that is to say, in the two places where Latin rule lasted longest. Moreover, the Catholic Church did not receive the consideration which it might have reasonably expected from the Frankish rulers themselves. The correspondence of Innocent III, who sat on the Chair of St Peter at the time of the conquest, is full of complaints against the hostile attitude of the Franks towards the Roman clergy. The Archbishop of Patras was not safe even in his own palace, for the sacrilegious baron Aleman, who, as we saw, had received that town as a fief, considered the Archiepiscopal plan of fortifying the place against pirates as amateurish, carried the Primate off to prison, cut off his representative’s nose, and converted the palace and the adjacent church of St Theodore into the present castle. Geoffroy I de Villehardouin neither paid tithes himself, nor compelled his subjects to pay them; he forced the clergy to plead before the secular tribunals, and exempted the Greek priests and monks from the jurisdiction of the Catholic Archbishop. His son and successor, Geoffroy II, went even farther in this secular policy. When the Latin clergy refused to perform military service, on the ground that they owed obedience to the Pope alone, he confiscated their fiefs and devoted the funds which he thus obtained to building the great castle of Chlomoutsi, or Clermont, near Glarentza in the West of Elis, the ruins of which still remain a striking monument of the relations between Church and State in Frankish Greece. This castle took three years to construct; and, as soon as it was finished, Geoffroy laid the whole matter before Pope Honorius III. He pointed out that if the Latin priests would not help him to fight the Greeks, they would only have themselves to blame if the principality, and with it their Church, fell under the sway of those Schismatics. The Pope saw the force of this argument; the Prince ceased to appropriate the revenues of the clergy; and peace reigned between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. It is interesting to note, that, under the next Prince, the castle of Chlomoutsi became the mint of the principality, whence coins known as tournois, or tornesi, because they bore on them[79] a representation of the Church of St Martin of Tours, were issued for more than a century. Many thousands of these coins have been found in Greece, specimens may be seen in the Doge’s Palace and in the Museo Correr at Venice, and from this Achaian currency the castle received its Italian name of Castel Tornese. The town and harbour of Glarentza near it rose to be the chief port of the principality. Boccaccio mentions Genoese merchantmen there in one of the novels of the Decameron, in which a “Prince of the Morea” is one of the characters; the famous Florentine banking house of the Peruzzi had a branch there, and Pegalotti describes to us the weights, measures, and customs duties of this flourishing commercial place.

When we come to consider the social life of Frankish Greece, we are struck by the prominent part which women played in it, and in political life as well. The Salic law did not obtain in the Latin states of the Levant, except at Naxos under the Crispi, and, without expressing any opinion upon the thorny question of female suffrage, I do not think that it can be denied that the participation of the weaker sex in the government of a purely military community had disastrous effects. It happened on two occasions that almost the entire baronage of Frankish Greece was annihilated on the field of battle, and after the former of these disasters—the battle of Pelagonia in 1259, in which Prince William of Achaia was taken prisoner by the troops of the Greek Emperor of Nice—the fate of the principality was decided by the votes of its ladies. The Emperor Michael VIII was resolved to make the best use of the advantage which the rashness of the Prince had placed within his power, and demanded, as the price of his captive’s freedom, the cession of the three great fortresses of Monemvasia, Mistra, and Maina, the first of which had only recently been surrendered by the Greeks to the Franks, while the other two had been erected by Prince William himself. The question was submitted by Duke Guy I of Athens, who was then acting as Regent of Achaia, to a Parliament, convened at Nikli in 1262. At this “Ladies’ Parliament” there were only two other men present—for all the men of mark were either in prison or had been slain at Pelagonia—and their wives or widows had to take their place at the Council. Naturally, an assembly so composed was guided by sentiment rather than by reasons of high policy. In vain the statesmanlike Duke of Athens argued in scriptural language, that “it were better that one man should die for the people than that the other Franks of the Morea should lose the fruits of their fathers’ labours”; in vain, to show his disinterestedness, he offered to take the Prince’s place in prison or to pledge his own Duchy to provide a ransom. The[80] conjugal feelings of the ladies prevailed, the three castles were surrendered, and from that day dates the gradual recovery of the Morea by the Greeks. Two noble dames were sent, in strict accordance with feudal law, as hostages for their lord to Constantinople, and it is interesting to note the ingratitude with which one of them was treated by him in the sequel. While she was still in prison on his account, the great barony of Matagrifon, to which she was entitled as next of kin, fell vacant. But the Prince, who wished to bestow it upon one of his daughters, declined to invest her with it, on the technical ground that she had permitted the period of time allowed by the feudal code to elapse without appearing to claim the fief. Unable to obtain justice, she resorted to matrimony with one of the powerful barons of St Omer as the only means of compelling the Prince to give her what was hers. In this she was partially successful; but the incident throws a lurid light on the chivalry of the brave warrior, whom the author of the Chronicle of the Morea has made his hero.

It would be interesting to present a few portraits of the leading women of Frankish Greece. There were the two daughters of Prince William, of whom the elder, Princess Isabelle, succeeded him and whose hand was eagerly sought in marriage by three husbands; her younger sister, Marguérite, died in the grim castle of Chlomoutsi, the prisoner of the turbulent Moreote barons, who never forgave her for having married her daughter without their approval. There was Isabelle’s daughter, Matilda, who had already been twice a widow when she was only 23, and who was left all alone to govern the principality, where every proud feudal lord claimed to do what was right in his own eyes. Compelled by King Robert “the Wise” of Naples to go through the form of marriage with his brother, John of Gravina, a man whom she loathed, she was imprisoned for her contumacity in the Castel dell’ Uovo of Naples. There were the three Duchesses of Athens—Helene Angela, widow of Duke William, Regent for her son, and the first Greek who had governed Athens for 80 years; Maria Melissene, widow of Duke Antonio I, who tried to betray the Duchy to her countrymen the Greeks; and most tragic of all, Chiara Giorgio, a veritable villain of melodrama, widow of Nerio II, who fell in love with a young Venetian noble, induced him by the offer of her hand and land to poison the wife whom he had left behind in his palace at Venice, and expiated her crime before the altar of the Virgin at Megara at the hands of the last Frankish Duke of Athens, thus causing the Turkish conquest. Of like mould was the Dowager Countess of Salona, whose evil government drove her subjects to call in the Turks, and whose beautiful daughter, the[81] last Countess of that historic castle, ended her days in the Sultan’s harem. Another of these masculine dames was Francesca Acciajuoli, wife of Carlo Tocco, the Palatine Count of Cephalonia, the ablest and most masterful woman of the Latin Orient, who used to sign her letters in cinnabar ink “Empress of the Romans.” In her castles at Sta Maura and at Cephalonia she presided over a bevy of fair ladies, and Froissart has quaintly described the splendid hospitality with which she received the French nobles, whom the Turks had taken prisoners at the battle of Nikopolis on the Danube. “The ladies,” writes the old French chronicler, “were exceeding glad to have such noble society, for Venetian and Genoese merchants were, as a rule, the only strangers who came to their delightful island.” He tells us, that Cephalonia was ruled by women, who scorned not, however, to make silken coverings so fine, that there was none like them. Fairies and nymphs inhabited this ancient realm of Odysseus, where a mediæval Penelope held sway in the absence of her lord! Yet another fair dame of the Frankish world, the Duchess Fiorenza Sanudo of Naxos, occupied for years the astute diplomatists of Venice, who were resolved that so eligible a young widow should marry none but a Venetian, and who at last, when suitors of other nationalities became pressing, had the Duchess kidnapped and conveyed to Crete, where she was plainly told that, if she ever wished to see her beloved Naxos again, she must marry the candidate of the Most Serene Republic. And finally, we have the portrait of a more feminine woman than most of these ladies, Marulla of Verona, a noble damsel of Negroponte, whom old Ramon Muntaner describes from personal acquaintance as “one of the fairest Christians in the world, the best woman and the wisest that ever was in that land.”

Social life must have been far more brilliant in the hey-day of the Frankish rule than anything that Greece had witnessed for centuries. The Chronicle of the Morea tells us, that the Achaian nobles in their castles “lived the fairest life that a man can,” and has preserved the account of the great tournament on the Isthmus of Corinth—a mediæval revival of the Isthmian games—which Philip of Savoy, at that time Prince of Achaia, organised in 1305. From all parts of the Frankish world men came in answer to the summons of the Prince. There were Duke Guy II of Athens with a brave body of knights, the Marquess of Boudonitza and the three barons of Eubœa, the Duke of the Archipelago and the Palatine Count of Cephalonia, the Marshal of Achaia, Nicholas de St Omer, with a following of Theban vassals, and many another lesser noble. Messengers had been sent throughout the highlands and islands of the Latin Orient to proclaim to all and sundry,[82] how seven champions had come from beyond the seas and did challenge the chivalry of Romania to joust with them. Never had the fair land of Hellas seen a braver sight than that presented by the lists at Corinth in the lovely month of May, when the sky and the twin seas were at their fairest. More than 1000 knights and barons took part in the tournament, which lasted for twenty days, while all the fair ladies of Achaia and Athens “rained influence” on the combatants. There were the seven champions, clad in their armour of green taffetas covered with scales of gold; there was the Prince of Achaia, who acquitted himself right nobly in the lists, as a son of Savoy should, with all his household. Most impetuous of all was the Duke of Athens, eager to match his skill in horsemanship and with the lance against Master William Bouchart, accounted one of the best jousters of the West. The chivalrous Bouchart would fain have spared his less experienced antagonist; but the Duke, who had cunningly padded himself beneath his plate armour, was determined to meet him front to front; their horses collided with such force that the iron spike of Bouchart’s charger pierced Guy’s steed between the shoulders, so that horse and rider rolled in the dust. St Omer would fain have met the Count John of Cephalonia in the lists; but the Palatine, fearing the Marshal’s doughty arm, pretended that his horse could not bear him into the ring, nor could he be shamed into the combat, when Bouchart rode round and round the lists on the animal, crying aloud, “This is the horse which would not go to the jousts!” So they kept high revel on the Isthmus; alas! it was the last great display of the chivalry of “New France”; six years later, many a knight who had ridden proudly past the dames of the Morea, lay a mangled corpse on the swampy plain of Bœotia, the victim of the knife of Aragon. Besides tournaments, hunting was one of the great attractions of life in mediæval Greece; we hear, too, of an archery match in Crete, at which the archers represented different nations; we are told of great balls held in Negroponte, which the gay Lombard society of that island attended; and mention is made of the jongleurs who were attached to the brilliant Court of Thebes. Muntaner, who knew Duke Guy II and had visited his capital, has given us a charming account of the ceremony in the Theban Minster, when the last De la Roche came of age and received the order of knighthood—“a duty which the King of France or the Emperor himself would have thought it an honour to perform, for the Duke was one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a King, and eke one of the richest.” The episode gives us some idea of the wealth and splendour and open-handed generosity of the Burgundian Dukes of Athens.

In conclusion, I should like to say something about Frankish influence on the language and literature of Greece. We are specially told that the Franks of Achaia spoke most excellent French; but, at the same time, there is direct evidence, that in the second generation, at any rate, they also spoke Greek. The Chronicle of the Morea describes how Prince William of Achaia after the battle of Pelagonia addressed his captor in that language, and Duke John of Athens, according to Sanudo, once used a Greek phrase, which is a quotation from Herodotus. Later on, the Florentine Dukes of Athens drew up many of their documents in Greek, just as Mohammed II employed that language in his diplomatic communications. The Venetian Governors of Eubœa, however, who held office for only two years, had to employ an interpreter, who is specially mentioned in one of the Venetian documents. While a number of French feudal and Italian terms crept into the Greek language, as may be seen in the Cyclades at the present day, and especially in the Venetian island of Tenos, the Franks covered the map of Greece with a strange and weird nomenclature. Thus, Lacedæmonia became “La Crémonie,” the first syllable being mistaken for the definite article; Athens was known as “Satines,” or “Sethines,” Thebes as “Estives,” Naupaktos as “Lepanto,” Zeitounion, the modern Lamia, as “Gipton,” Kalavryta as “La Grite,” Salona as “La Sole,” Lemnos as “Stalimene,” and the island of Samothrace as “Sanctus Mandrachi.” Most wonderful transformation of all, Cape Sunium becomes in one Venetian document “Pellestello” (πολλοὶ στῦλοι), from the “Many columns” of the temple, which gave it its usual Italian name of “Cape Colonna.”

The Franks have too often been accused of being barbarians, whereas there is evidence that they were not indifferent to literature. Among the conquerors were not a few poets. Conon de Béthune was a writer of poems as well as an orator; Geoffroy I of Achaia composed some verses which have been preserved; Rambaud de Vaqueiras, the troubadour of Boniface of Montferrat, was rewarded for his songs by lands in Greece. Count John II Orsini of Epeiros ordered Constantine Hermoniakos to make a paraphrase of Homer in octosyllabic verse. We may say of this production, as Bentley said of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “it is a pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer”; still it is interesting to find a Latin ruler patronising Greek literature. The courtly poet was so delighted that he tells us that his master was “a hero and a scholar,” and that the Lady Anna of Epeiros “excelled all women that ever lived in beauty, wisdom, and learning.” Historical accuracy compels me to add that the “heroic and scholarly” Count had gained his throne by the murder of his brother, while the “beautiful, wise[84] and learned” Anna assassinated her husband! Throughout a great part of the Frankish period, too, people were engaged in transcribing Greek manuscripts. Several Athenians copied medical treatises, William of Meerbeke, the Latin Archbishop of Corinth in 1280, whose name survives in the Argive Church of Merbaka[46], translated Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, and Proklos, and one of the Tocchi—the Italian family which followed the Orsini as Counts of Cephalonia—employed a monk to copy for him manuscripts of Origen and Chrysostom. Yet, in 1309, a Theban canon had to go to the West to continue his studies; and, a century later, the Archbishop of Patras obtained leave to study at the University of Bologna.

But the chief literary monument of Frankish Greece is the Chronicle of the Morea—the very curious work which exists in four versions, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. The Italian version need not detain us, for it contains no new facts and is merely an abbreviated translation of the Greek, chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary, but characteristic, mutilation of the proper names. The Spanish version, made in 1393 by order of Heredia, the romantic Grand-Master of the Knights of St John, and the French version, found in the castle of St Omer—another proof of Frankish culture—are of great historic interest. But by far the most remarkable of all the four versions is the Greek—a poem of some 9000 lines in the usual jog-trot “political” metre of most mediæval and modern Greek poetry, composed, in my opinion, by a half-caste lawyer, who obviously had the most enthusiastic admiration for the Franks, to whom he doubtless owed his place and salary. With the exception of a few French feudal terms, this most remarkable poem may be read without the slightest difficulty by any modern Greek scholar,—a striking proof that the vulgar Greek spoken to-day is almost exactly the same as that in common use in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the Chronicle was composed. As regards its literary merits, opinions differ. As a rule, it is merely prose in the form of verse; but here and there, the author rises to a much higher level, and his work is a store-house of social, and especially legal information, even where his chronology and history have been shown by documentary evidence to be inaccurate.

The bright and chivalrous Frankish society has long passed away; but a few Italian and Catalan families still linger in the Cyclades, there are still Venetian names and titles in the Ionian Islands; the Tocchi were till lately represented at Naples and the Zorzi still are at Venice; the towers of Thebes and Paros, the Norman arch of Andravida, the[85] noble castles of Karytaina and Chlomoutsi, and the carvings and frescoes of Geraki still remind us of the romance of feudal Greece, when every coign of vantage had its lord, and from every donjon floated the banner of a baron.

3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE

It is satisfactory to note that, after a long period of neglect, the great romance of mediæval Greek history is finding interpreters. Since George Finlay revealed to the British public the fact that the annals of Greece were by no means a blank in the Middle Ages, and that Athens was a flourishing city in the thirteenth century, much fresh material has been collected, by both Greek and German scholars, from the Venetian and other archives, which throws fresh light upon the dark places of the Latin rule in the Levant. Finlay’s work can never lose its value. Its author had not the microscopic zeal for genealogies and minutiæ which distinguished Hopf; but he possessed gifts and advantages of a far higher order. He knew Greece and the Greeks as no other foreign scholar has known them; he had a deep insight into the causes of political and social events; he drew his picture, as the Germans say, in grossen Zügen, and he left a work which no student of mediæval Greece can afford to ignore, and every statesman engaged in Eastern affairs would do well to read. All that is now wanted is for some one to do in England what Gregorovius did in so agreeable a manner for the Germans—to make the dry bones of the Frank chivalry live again, and to set before us in flesh and blood the Dukes of Athens and the Princes of Achaia, the Marquesses of Boudonitza, the Lords of Salona, the Dukes of the Archipelago, and the three barons of Eubœa. Despite the vandalism of mere archæologists, who can see nothing of interest in an age when Greeks were shaky in their declensions, and of bigoted purists among the Greeks themselves, who strive to erase every evidence of foreign rule alike from their language and their land, the feudal castles of the Morea, of continental Greece, and of the islands, still remind us of the days when classic Hellas, as Pope Honorius III said, was “New France,” when armoured knights and fair Burgundian damsels attended Mass in St Mary’s Minster on the Akropolis, and jousts were held on the Isthmus of Corinth.

Of the Frankish period of Greek history the Chronicle of the Morea is the most curious literary production, valuable alike as an historical source—save for occasional errors of dates and persons, especially in[86] the earlier part—and as a subject for linguistic study. The present edition, the fruit of many years’ labour, is almost wholly devoted to the latter aspect of the Chronicle, about which there is much that is of interest. Versions exist in French, in Italian, and in Aragonese, as well as in Greek; and the question as to whether the Greek or the French was the original has been much discussed. The present editor, differing from Buchon and Hopf, believes that the French Livre de la Conqueste could not have been the original. In any case, the Greek Chronicle is of more literary interest than the French, because it throws a strong light on modern Greek. Any person familiar with the modern colloquial language could read with ease, except for a few French feudal terms, this fourteenth century popular poem, many of whose phrases might come from the racy conversation of any Greek peasant of to-day, and is very different from the classical imitation of the contemporary Byzantine historians. Its poetic merits are small, nor does the jog-trot “political” metre in which it is composed tend to lofty flights of poetry. We know not who was its author; but, on the whole, there seems to be reason for believing that he was a Gasmoulos—one of the offspring of mixed marriages between Greeks and Franks—probably employed, as his love of legal nomenclature shows, in some clerkly post. Unpoetical himself, he has at least been the cause of noble poetry in others; for, as Dr Schmitt shows, the second part of Goethe’s Faust has been largely inspired by its perusal; and the hero of that drama finds his prototype in the chivalrous builder of Mistra.

No chapter of this mediæval romance is more striking than the conquest of the Morea by the Franks and the history of their rule in the classic peninsula. At the time of the fourth crusade the Peloponnese was a prey to that spirit of particularism which has been, unhappily, too often characteristic of the Greeks in ancient, in mediæval, and in modern times. Instead of uniting among themselves in view of the Latin peril, the great archontes of the Morea availed themselves of the general confusion to occupy strong positions and to extend their own authority at the expense of their neighbours. The last historian and statesman of Constantinople before the Latin conquest, Niketas of Chonæ, has left us a sad picture of the demoralisation of society in Greece at that critical moment. The leading men, he says, instead of fighting, cringed to the conquerors; some were inflamed by ambition against their own country, slavish creatures, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of opposing the Latins[47]. Of these[87] archontes the most prominent was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had seized the Larissa of Argos and the impregnable citadel high above Corinth, and who, though he failed to imitate the heroism of Leonidas in the Pass of Thermopylæ, held out at Akrocorinth till his death.

Such was the state of the country when a winter storm drove into the haven of Modon, on the Messenian coast, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, a crusader from Champagne, and nephew of the chronicler of the conquest of Constantinople. A Greek archon of the neighbourhood, thinking that the opportunity was too good to be lost, invited the storm-bound warrior to aid him in the conquest of the surrounding country. Geoffroy was nothing loth; and the two unnatural allies speedily subdued one place after another. But, as ill-luck would have it, the Greek died; and his son, more patriotic or less trustworthy than the father, broke the compact with the Frankish intruder, and turned Geoffroy out of his quickly-won possessions. The crusader’s position was serious; he was in a hostile country and surrounded by an alien and suspicious population; but he was a man of resource, and, hearing that Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat and King of Salonika, had made a triumphal march through continental Greece and was at that moment besieging the great stronghold of Nauplia, he set out across the Peloponnese—a six days’ journey—and succeeded in reaching the Frankish camp. There he found an old friend and neighbour, Guillaume de Champlitte, to whom he confided the scheme which he had been revolving in his mind. “I come,” he said, so we learn from his uncle’s chronicle, “from a land which is very rich, and men call it the Morea”—a name which here occurs for the first time in the history of Greece, and the origin of which is still a puzzle to all her historians. He urged Champlitte to join him in the task of conquering this El Dorado, promising to recognise him as his liege lord in return for his assistance. Champlitte agreed, and the two friends, at the head of a small body of a hundred knights and some esquires, started on their bold venture[48].

The ease with which the little band of Western warriors conquered the peninsula, which had once produced the Spartan warriors, strikes every reader of the Chronicle of the Morea—the prosaic, but extremely curious and valuable poem in which the Frank conquest is described. The cause lay partly in the disunited state of Greek society and the feuds of the local archontes, but still more in the neglect of military training, due to the fact that the Byzantine emperors had long drawn[88] their best troops from the non-Hellenic portions of their heterogeneous dominions. It is remarkable that, apart from Sgouros, interned, as it were, on Akrocorinth, and a Greek archon, Doxapatres, who held a small but strongly situated castle in one of the gorges of Arcadia, the invaders met with little opposition. Greece, as we know from the complaints of Michael Akominatos, the last orthodox Archbishop of Athens before the conquest, had been plundered by Byzantine tax-gatherers and despised as a “Scythian wilderness” by Byzantine officials. So, when the inhabitants found that the Franks had no intention of interfering with their prized municipal privileges, they had no great objection to exchanging a master who spent their money at Constantinople for one who spent it in Elis at the new Peloponnesian capital of Andreville or Andravida. One pitched battle decided the fate of “the isle of Greece,” as the Franks sometimes called it. At the olive grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia, the small force of Franks easily routed a Greek army six times larger; and as the chronicler, always in sympathy with the invaders, puts it,

Yet a modern Greek historian of singular fairness, the late K. Paparregopoulos, has remarked how great was the change in the Turkish times. The descendants of the unwarlike Moreotes, who fell so easy a prey to the Frankish chivalry in 1205, never lost an opportunity of rising against the Turks after the Frankish domination was over. As he justly says, one of the main results of the long Latin rule was to teach Greek “hands to war and their fingers to fight.”

Thus, almost by a single blow, the Franks had become masters of the ancient “island of Pelops.” Here and there a few natural strongholds still held out. Even after the death of Sgouros his triple crown of forts, Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos, was still defended for the Greek cause in the name of the lord, or Despot, of Epeiros, where a bold scion of the imperial house of Angelos had founded an independent state on the ruins of the Byzantine Empire. The great rock of Monemvasia in the south-east of the Morea, whence our ancestors derived their Malmsey wine, remained in the hands of its three local archontes; while, in the mountains of southern Lakonia, a race which had often defied Byzantium scorned to acknowledge the noblemen of Champagne. The local magnate, Joannes Chamaretos, could boast for a time that he kept his own lands in Lakonia, but he, too, had to take refuge at the Epeirote Court at Arta[49]. Finally, the two Messenian ports of Modon[89] and Koron were claimed by Venice, which, with her usual astuteness, had secured those valuable stations on the way to Egypt in the deed of partition by which the conquerors of the empire had divided the spoils among themselves at Constantinople. Not without reason did Pope Innocent III, whose letters are full of allusions to the Frankish organisation of Greece, style Guillaume de Champlitte “Prince of all Achaia.”

Champlitte now attempted to provide for the internal government of his principality by the application of the feudal system, which, even before the Frankish conquest, had crept into many parts of the Levant. The Chronicle of the Morea, whose author revels in legal details, gives an account of the manner in which “the isle of Greece” was organised by its new masters. A commission, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five Greek archontes, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, drew up a species of Domesday-book for the new state. In accordance with the time-honoured feudal custom, twelve baronies were created and bestowed upon prominent members of the Frankish force, who were bound to be at the prince’s beck and call with their retainers in time of need; and the castles of these warrior barons were purposely erected in strong positions, whence they could command important passes or overcome troublesome neighbours. Even to-day the traveller may see the fine fortress above the town of Patras which Guillaume Aleman, one of the feudatories, constructed out of the Archbishop’s palace; the castle of Karytaina, the Toledo of Greece, still reminds us of the time when Hugues de Bruyères held the dalesmen of Skorta, ancestors of M. Delyannes, in check; and, far to the South, the war-cry of Jean de Neuilly, hereditary Marshal of Achaia, Passe avant, lingers in the name of Passavâ, the stronghold which once inspired respect in the men of Maina, who boast that they spring from Spartan mothers. Seven ecclesiastical peers, the Latin Archbishop of Patras at their head, and the three military orders of St John, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights also received fiefs; and, while Geoffroy de Villehardouin was invested with Kalamata and Kyparissia, fertile Elis became the princely domain.

But Guillaume de Champlitte did not long enjoy his Achaian dignity. If he was a prince in Greece he was still a French subject; and the death of his brother made it necessary for him to do homage in person for his fief in France. On the way he died; and the cunning Villehardouin, by an ingenious stratagem, contrived to become master of the country. It had been declared that a claimant must take possession of Achaia within a year and a day after the date of the last vacancy; and Geoffroy contrived to have Champlitte’s heir detained in[90] Venice and left behind at Corfù till the fatal date had almost passed. A little skilful manœuvring from one place to another in the Morea filled up the rest of the time, so that, when young Robert de Champlitte at last met Geoffrey in full court at Lacedæmonia, the mediæval town which had risen near the Eurotas, the year and a day had already elapsed. The court decided in favour of Geoffrey, anxious, no doubt, that their ruler should be a statesman of experience and not a young man fresh from France. Robert gave no further trouble, and Geoffrey remained for the rest of his days “Lord of Achaia.” By his tact and cleverness he had contrived to win the regard both of the Frank barons and of the Greek population, whose religion and ancient customs he had sworn to respect. He was thus enabled to subdue the three outstanding fortresses which had once been the domain of Sgouros, while he settled all claims that the Venetians might have upon the Morea by allowing them to keep Modon and Koron, granting them a separate quarter in every town in his principality, and doing homage to them for the whole peninsula on the island of Sapienza. He crowned his career by marrying his son to the daughter of the Latin Emperor Peter of Courtenay, from whose family the Earls of Devon are descended.

Under his son and successor, Geoffrey II, the Frank principality prospered exceedingly. The Venetian historian, Marino Sanudo, who derived much of his information from his relative, Marco II Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, has given us a vivid picture of life at the Peloponnesian court under the rule of the second of the Villehardouins. A just prince, Geoffrey II used to send his friends from time to time to the baronial castles of the Morea to see how the barons treated their vassals. At his own court he kept “eighty knights with golden spurs”; and “knights came to the Morea from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne, to follow him. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts, others again because of crimes which they had committed[50].” In fact, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the Morea had become for the younger sons of the French chivalry much what the British colonies were to adventurers and ne’er-do-weels fifty years ago. It was a place where the French knights would find their own language spoken—we are specially told what good French was spoken in Greece in the Frankish period—and could scarcely fail to obtain congenial employment from a prince of their own race.

One difficulty, however, had soon arisen in the Frank principality. The Latin clergy, who had had their full share of the spoils, declined to take any part in the defence of the country. Geoffrey, with all[91] the energy of his race, opposed a stout resistance to these clerical pretensions, and confiscated the ecclesiastical fiefs, spending the proceeds upon the erection of the great castle of Clermont or Chlomoutsi above the busy port of Glarentza, the imposing ruins of which are still a land-mark for miles around. When he had finished the castle Geoffroy appealed to the Pope, placing before the Holy Father the very practical argument that, if the principality, through lack of defenders, were recaptured by the Greeks, the loss would fall just as much on the Roman Church as on the prince, while the fault would be entirely with the former. The Pope was sufficiently shrewd to see that Geoffroy was right; the dispute was settled amicably; and both the prince and the Latin clergy subscribed generously for the preservation of the moribund Latin empire, which exercised a nominal suzerainty over the principality of Achaia.

Geoffroy’s brother and successor, the warlike Guillaume de Villehardouin, saw the Frank state in the Morea reach its zenith, and by his rashness contributed to its decline. Born in Greece, and speaking Greek, as the Chronicle of the Morea expressly tells us, the third of the Villehardouins began by completing the conquest of what was his native land. It was he who laid siege to the rock of Monemvasia for three long years, till at last, when the garrison had been reduced to eat mice and cats, the three archontes advanced along the narrow causeway which gives the place its name[51], and surrendered on terms which the prince wisely granted. It was he, too, who built the noble castle of Mistra on the site of the Homeric Messe, now abandoned to tortoises and sheep, but for two centuries a great name in the history of Greece. To a ruler so vigorous and so determined even the weird Tzakones, that strange tribe, perhaps Slavs but far more probably Dorians, which still lingers on and cherishes its curious language around Leonidi, yielded obedience; while the men of Maina, hemmed in by two new castles, ceased to trouble.

For the first and last time in its history the whole Peloponnese owned the sway of a Frank prince, except where, at Modon and Koron, Venice kept “its right eye,” as it called those places, fixed on the East. So powerful a sovereign as St Louis of France wished that he had some of Guillaume’s knights to aid him in his Egyptian war; and from seven hundred to one thousand horsemen always attended the chivalrous Prince of Achaia. His court at La Crémonie, the French version of Lacedæmonia, was “more brilliant than that of many a king”; and this brilliance was not merely on the surface. “Merchants,” says[92] Sanudo, “went up and down without money, and lodged in the house of the bailies; and on their simple note of hand people gave them money[52].” But Guillaume’s ambition and his love of fighting for fighting’s sake involved the principality in disaster. Not content with beginning the first fratricidal war between the Frank rulers of the East by attacking Guy de la Roche, Lord of Athens, he espoused the cause of his father-in-law, the Greek Despot of Epeiros, then engaged in another brotherly struggle with the Greek Emperor of Nice. On the field of Pelagonia in Macedonia the Franks were routed; and the Prince of Achaia, easily recognised by his prominent teeth, was dragged from under a heap of straw, where he was lying, and carried off a prisoner to the court of the Emperor Michael VIII.

Guillaume’s captivity was the cause of endless evils for the principality; for Michael, who in 1261, by the recapture of Constantinople, had put an end to the short-lived Latin empire and restored there the throne of the Greeks, was resolved to regain a footing in the Morea and to make use of his distinguished captive for that purpose. He accordingly demanded, as the price of the prince’s freedom, the three strong fortresses of Mistra, Monemvasia, and Maina. The matter was referred to a ladies’ parliament held at Nikli, near the site of the ancient Tegea, for so severe had been the losses of the Frank chivalry that the noble dames of the Morea had to take the places of their husbands. We can well understand that, with a tribunal so composed, sentiment and the ties of affection would have more influence than the raison d’état. Yet Guillaume’s old opponent, Guy de la Roche, now Duke of Athens and bailie of Achaia during the prince’s captivity, laid before the parliament the argument that it was better that one man should die for the people than that the rest of the Franks should lose the Morea[53]. At the same time, to show that he bore no malice, he chivalrously offered to go to prison in place of the prince. But the ladies of the Morea thought otherwise. It was decided to give up the three castles; and two of the fair châtelaines were sent as hostages to Constantinople.

Thus, in 1262, the Byzantine Government regained a foothold in the Morea; a Byzantine province was created, with Mistra as its capital, and entrusted at first to a general of distinction annually appointed, and ultimately conferred as an appanage for life upon the Emperor’s second son. The native Greeks of the whole peninsula thus had a rallying-point in the Byzantine province, and the suspicion of[93] the Franks that the surrender of the three fortresses “might prove to be their ruin[54],” turned out to be only too well-founded. As for the Franks who were left in the Byzantine portion of the Morea, their fate is obscure. Probably, as Dr Schmitt thinks, some emigrated to the gradually dwindling Frankish principality, while others became merged in the mass of Greeks around them. In all ages the Hellenes, like the Americans of to-day, have shown the most marvellous capacity for absorbing the various races which have come within their borders. A yet further element of evil omen for the country was introduced in consequence of this partial restoration of the Byzantine power. As might have been foreseen, the easy morality of that age speedily absolved the prince from his solemn oaths to the Emperor, and he was scarcely released when a fresh war broke out between them. It was then, for the first time, that we hear of Turks in the Morea—men who had been sent there as mercenaries by the Emperor Michael. Careless whom they served, so long as they were paid regularly, these Oriental soldiers of fortune deserted to the prince; and those who cared to settle in the country received lands and wives, whose offspring were still living, when the Chronicle of the Morea was written (p. 372), at two places in the peninsula.

Unhappily for the principality, as the chronicler remarks, Guillaume de Villehardouin left no male heir; and nothing more strongly justifies the Salic law than the history of the Franks in the Morea, where it was not applied. Anxious to take what precautions he could against the disruption of his dominions after his death, the last of the Villehardouin princes married his elder daughter Isabelle to the second son of Charles of Anjou, the most powerful sovereign in the south of Europe at that time, who, in addition to his other titles, had received from the last Latin Emperor of the East, then a fugitive at Viterbo, the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, hitherto held by the Emperor. This close connection with the great house of Anjou, to which the kingdom of the Two Sicilies then belonged, seemed to provide Achaia with the strongest possible support. The support, too, was near at hand; for communication between Italy and Glarentza, the chief port of the Morea, was, as we know from the novels of Boccaccio, not infrequent; and we hear of Frankish nobles from Achaia making pilgrimages to the two great Apulian sanctuaries of St Nicholas of Bari and Monte Santangelo. But, when Guillaume de Villehardouin died in 1278 and was laid beside his brother and father in the family mausoleum at Andravida (where excavations, made in 1890, failed to[94] find their remains)[55], his daughter Isabelle was still a minor, though already a widow.

The government of the principality accordingly fell into the hands of bailies appointed by the suzerain at Naples. Sometimes the bailie was a man who knew the country, like Nicholas St Omer, whose name is still perpetuated by the St Omer tower at Thebes and the Santameri mountains not far from Patras; sometimes he was a foreigner, who knew little of the country, and, in the words which the Chronicle (p. 544) puts into the mouths of two Frankish nobles, “tyrannised over the poor, wronged the rich, and sought his own profit.” The complainants warned Charles II of Anjou, who was now their suzerain, that he was going the right way to “lose the principality”; and the King of Naples took their advice. He bestowed the hand of the widowed Isabelle upon a young Flemish nobleman, Florenz of Hainault, who was then at his court, and who thus became Prince of the Morea. Florenz wisely made peace with the Byzantine province, so that “all became rich, both Franks and Greeks,” and the land recovered from the effects of war and maladministration. But the Flemings, who had crowded over to Greece at the news of their countryman’s good fortune, were less scrupulous than their prince and provoked reprisals from the Greeks, from whom they sought to wring money. On the other hand, it would seem that the natives of the Byzantine province were able to secure good treatment from the Emperor, for there is preserved in that interesting little collection, the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, a golden bull of Andronikos II, dated 1293, concerning the privileges of the sacred rock of Monemvasia. When the modern Greeks come to think more highly of their mediæval history, they should regard that rugged crag with reverence. For two centuries it was the guardian of their municipal and national liberties.

Florenz of Hainault lived too short a time for the welfare of the Morea; and Isabelle, once more a widow, was married again in Rome (whither she had gone for the first papal jubilee of 1300) to a prince of the doughty house of Savoy, which thus became concerned with the affairs of Greece. Philip of Savoy was at the time in possession of Piedmont; and, as might have been expected, Piedmontese methods of government were not adapted to the latitude of Achaia. He was a man fond of spending, and an adept at extorting, money. The microscopic Dr Hopf has unearthed from the archives at Turin the bill—a fairly extensive one—for his wedding-breakfast; and the magnificent tournament which he organised on the Isthmus of Corinth, and in which[95] all the Frankish rulers of Greece took part, occupied a thousand knights for more than twenty days. “He had learned money-making at home,” it was said, when the extravagant prince from Piedmont let it be understood that he expected presents from his vassals, and imposed taxes on the privileged inhabitants of Skorta. But the days of the Savoyard in Achaia were numbered. The house of Anjou, suzerains of the principality, had never looked with favour on his marriage with Isabelle; an excuse was found for deposing him in favour of another Philip, of Taranto, son of the King of Naples. To make matters smoother, Isabelle and her husband received, as some compensation for relinquishing all claims to the Morea, a small strip of territory on the shores of the Fucine lake. They both left Greece for ever. Isabelle died in Holland; and Philip of Savoy sleeps in the family vault at Pinerolo, near Turin, leaving to his posterity by a second marriage the empty title of “Prince of Achaia.”

The house of Villehardouin was not yet extinct. Isabelle had a daughter, Matilda of Hainault, whose husband, Louis of Burgundy, was permitted, by the tortuous policy of the Neapolitan Angevins, to govern the principality. But a rival claimant now appeared in the field in the person of Fernando of Majorca, one of the most adventurous personages of those adventurous times, who is well known to us from the quaint Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. Fernando had already had his full share of the vicissitudes of life. He had been at one time head of the Catalan Grand Company, which had just won the Duchy of Athens on the swampy meadows of the Bœotian Kephissos, and he had sat a prisoner in the castle of Thebes, the famous Kadmeia, whose walls were painted with the exploits of the crusaders in the Holy Land. He had married the daughter of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s younger child, the Lady of Akova, and he claimed Achaia in the name of his dead wife’s infant son. Such was the violence of the age that both the rivals perished in the struggle, Fernando on the scaffold, and Louis of Burgundy by a poison administered to him by one of the petty potentates of Greece. Even more miserable was the end of the unhappy Matilda. Invited by the unscrupulous King of Naples to his court, she was informed that she must marry his brother, John of Gravina. With the true spirit of a Villehardouin, the Princess refused; and even the Pope himself, whose authority was invoked, could not make her yield. She had already, she said, married again, and must decline to commit bigamy. This gave the King of Naples the opportunity he sought. He declared that, by marrying without her suzerain’s consent, she had forfeited her principality, which he bestowed upon[96] his brother. The helpless Princess was thrown into the Castel dell’ Uovo at Naples, and was afterwards allowed to die a lingering death in that island-prison, the last of her race. So ended the dynasty of the Villehardouins.

Grievous, indeed, was the situation of the Franks in Greece at this moment. Though little more than a hundred years had elapsed since the conquest, the families of the conquerors were almost extinct. The terrible blow dealt at the Frank chivalry by the rude Catalans, almost on the very battlefield of Chaironeia, was as fatal to Frankish, as was the victory of Philip of Macedon to free, Greece. Of the barons who had taken part in that contest, where many Achaian nobles had stood by the side of the headstrong Athenian duke, only four survived. Moreover, the Frank aristocracy, as Finlay has pointed out, committed racial suicide by constituting themselves an exclusive class. Intermarriages with the Greeks took place, it is true; and a motley race, known as Gasmoûloi[56], the offspring of these unions, of whom the author of the Chronicle was perhaps a member, fell into the usual place of half-castes in the East. But Muntaner expressly says that the nobles of Achaia usually took their wives from France. Meanwhile new men had taken possession of some of the old baronies—Flemings, Neapolitans, and even Florentines, one of whom, Nicholas Acciajuoli, whose splendid tomb is to be seen in the Certosa near Florence, laid on the rocks of Akrocorinth the foundations of a power which, a generation later, made the bankers of Tuscany dukes of Athens. The Greeks, had they been united, might have recovered the whole peninsula amidst this state of confusion. But the sketch which the imperial historian, John Cantacuzene, has left us of the archontes of the Morea shows that they were quite as much divided among themselves as the turbulent Frank vassals of the shadowy Prince of Achaia. “Neither good nor evil fortune,” he wrote, “nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual hatred, which not only endures all their lives, but is transmitted after death as a heritage to their children[57].”

Cantacuzene, however, took a step which ultimately led to the recapture of the Morea, when he abolished the system of sending a subordinate Byzantine official to Mistra, and appointed his second son, Manuel, with the title of Despot, as governor of the Byzantine province for life. The Despot of Mistra at once made his presence felt. He drove off the Turkish corsairs, who had begun to infest the deep bays[97] and jagged coast-line of the peninsula, levied ship-money for its defence against pirates, and, when his Greek subjects objected to be taxed for their own benefit, crushed rebellion by means of his Albanian bodyguard. Now, for the first time, we hear of that remarkable race, whose origin is as baffling to ethnologists as is their future to diplomatists, in the history of the Morea, where hereafter they were destined to play so distinguished a part. It is to the policy of Manuel Cantacuzene, who rewarded his faithful Albanians with lands in the south-west and centre of the country, that modern Greece owes the services of that valiant race, which fought so vigorously for her independence and its own in the last century. Manuel’s example was followed by other Despots; and ere long ten thousand Albanians were colonising the devastated and deserted lands of the Peloponnese.

Meanwhile the barren honour of Prince of Achaia had passed from one absentee to another. John of Gravina, who had been installed in the room of the last unhappy Villehardouin princess, grew disgusted with the sorry task of trying to restore order, and transferred his rights to Catherine of Valois, widow of his brother, Philip of Taranto; her son Robert, who was both suzerain and sovereign of the principality, was a mere phantom ruler whom the Achaian barons treated with contempt. After his death they offered the empty title of princess to Queen Joanna I of Naples on condition that she did not interfere with their fiefs and their feuds. Then a new set of conquerors descended upon the distracted country, and began the last chapter of Frankish rule in Achaia.

The great exploit of the Catalans in carving out for themselves a duchy bearing the august name of Athens had struck the imagination of Southern Europe. Towards the close of the fourteenth century a similar, but less famous band of freebooters, the Navarrese Company, repeated in Achaia what the Catalans, seventy years earlier, had achieved in Attica and Bœotia. Conquering nominally in the name of Jacques de Baux, a scion of the house of Taranto, but really for their own hands, the soldiers of Navarre rapidly occupied one place after another. Androusa, in Messenia, at that time the capital of the Frankish principality, fell before them; and at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, then called Zonklon, they made such a mark that the spot was believed by Hopf to have derived its name of Navarino from the castle which they held there. In 1386 their captain, Pedro Bordo de San Superan, styled himself Vicar of the principality, a title which developed into that of prince.

Meanwhile another Western Power, and that the most cunning and persistent, had taken advantage of these troublous times to gain[98] a footing in the Peloponnese. Venice, true to her cautious commercial policy, had long been content with the two Messenian stations of Modon and Koron, and had even refused a tempting offer of some desperate barons to hand over to her the whole of Achaia. During the almost constant disturbances which had distracted the rest of the peninsula since the death of Guillaume de Villehardouin, the two Venetian ports had enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity. The high tariffs which the Frankish princes had erected round their own havens had driven trade to these Venetian harbours, so conveniently situated for trade with the great Venetian island of Crete as well. The documents which Sathas has published from the Venetian archives are full of allusions to these two now almost forgotten places. But at last, towards the end of the fourteenth century, Venice resolved on expansion. She accordingly bought Argos and Nauplia, the old fiefs which the first French Lord of Athens had received from the first of the Villehardouins, and which lingered on in the hands of the representatives of the fallen Athenian duke. A little later Lepanto, the old Naupaktos, gave the Venetians a post on the Corinthian Gulf.

As the Byzantine Empire dwindled before the incursions of the Turks, the Greek province of Mistra assumed more importance in the eyes of the statesmen at Constantinople. In 1415 the Emperor Manuel II, with an energy which modern sovereigns of Greece would do well to imitate, resolved to see for himself how matters stood, and arrived in the Morea. He at once set to work to re-erect the six-mile rampart, or “Hexamilion,” across the Isthmus, which had been fortified by Xerxes, Valerian, Justinian, and, in recent times, by the last Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaiologos. Manuel’s wall followed the course of Justinian’s; and, in the incredibly short space of twenty-five days, forced labourers, working under the imperial eye, had erected a rampart strengthened by no less than 153 towers.

But the Emperor saw that it was necessary to reform the Morea from within as well as to fortify it without. We have from the pen of a Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, who has written a Dialogue of the Dead in the manner of Lucian, a curious, if somewhat highly-coloured account of the Moreotes as they were, or at any rate seemed to him to be, at this time[58]. In the Peloponnese, he tells us, are “Lacedæmonians, Italians, Peloponnesians (Greeks), Slavonians, Illyrians (Albanians), Egyptians (gypsies), and Jews, and among them are not a few half-castes.” He says that the Lakonians, who “are now called Tzakones,” have “become barbarians” in their language, of which he gives some[99] specimens. He goes on to make the shrewd remark, true to-day of all Eastern countries where the Oriental assumes a veneer of Western civilisation, that “each race takes the worst features of the others,” the Greeks assimilating the turbulence of the Franks, and the Franks the cunning of the Greeks. So insecure was life and property that arms were worn night and day—a practice obsolete in the time of Thucydides. Of the Moreote archontes he has nothing good to say; they are “men who ever delight in battles and disturbances, who are for ever breathing murder, who are full of deceit and craft, barbarous and pig-headed, unstable and perjured, faithless to both Emperor and Despots.” Yet a Venetian report—and the Venetians were keen observers—sent to the government a few years later, depicts the Morea as a valuable asset. It contained, writes the Venetian commissioner, 150 strong castles; the soil is rich in minerals; and it produces silk, honey, wax, corn, raisins, and poultry.

Even in the midst of alarms an eminent philosopher—to the surprise of the elegant Byzantines, it is true—had fixed his seat at Mistra. George Gemistos Plethon believed that he had found in Plato a cure for the evils of the Morea. Centuries before the late Mr Henry George, he advocated a single tax. An advanced fiscal reformer, he suggested a high tariff for all articles which could be produced at home; a paper strategist, he had a scheme which he submitted, together with his other proposals, to the Emperor, for creating a standing army; an anti-clerical, he urged that the monks should work for their living, or discharge public functions without pay. The philosopher, in tendering this advice to the Emperor, modestly offered his own services for the purpose of carrying it out. Manuel II was a practical statesman, who knew that he was living, as Cicero would have said, “non in Platonis republica, sed in fæce Lycurgi.” The offer was rejected.

At last the long threatened Turkish peril, temporarily delayed by the career of Timour and the great Turkish defeat at Angora, was at hand. The famous Ottoman commander, Evrenos Beg, had already twice entered the peninsula, once as the ally of the Navarrese prince against the Greek Despot, once as the foe of both. In 1423 a still greater captain, Turakhan, easily scaled the Hexamilion, leaving behind him at Gardiki, as a memorial of his invasion, a pyramid of eight hundred Albanian skulls. But, by the irony of history, just before Greeks and Franks alike succumbed to the all-conquering Turks, the dream of the Byzantine court was at last realised, and the Frank principality ceased to exist.

The Greek portion of the Morea was at this time in the hands of[100] the three brothers of the Emperor John VI Palaiologos—Theodore II, Thomas, and Constantine—the third of whom was destined to die on the walls of Constantinople as last Emperor of the East. Politic marriages and force of arms soon extinguished the phantom of Frankish rule; and the Genoese baron, Centurione Zaccaria, nephew of Bordo de San Superan, who had succeeded his uncle as last Prince of Achaia, was glad to purchase peace by giving his daughter’s hand to Thomas Palaiologos with the remaining fragments of the once famous principality, except the family barony and the princely title, as her dowry. Thus, when Centurione died in 1432, save for the six Venetian stations, the whole peninsula was once more Greek. Unhappily, the union between the three brothers ended with the disappearance of the common enemy. Both Theodore and Constantine were ambitious of the imperial diadem; and, while the former was pressing his claims at Constantinople, the latter was besieging Mistra, having first sent the historian Phrantzes, his confidential agent in these dubious transactions, to obtain the Sultan’s consent. Assisted by his brother Thomas and a force of Frank mercenaries, Constantine was only induced to keep the peace by the intervention of the Emperor; till, in 1443, Theodore removed this source of jealousy by carrying out his long-cherished scheme of retiring from public life. He accordingly handed over the government of Mistra to Constantine and received in exchange the city of Selymbria on the Sea of Marmora, where he afterwards died of the plague.

The Morea was now partitioned between Constantine, who took possession of the eastern portion, embracing Lakonia, Argolis, Corinth, and the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf as far as Patras, and Thomas, who governed the western part. With all his faults Constantine was a man of far greater energy and patriotism than the rest of his family, and he lost no time in developing a national policy. His first act was to restore the Hexamilion; his next, to attempt the recovery of the Athenian duchy from the Acciajuoli family for the Greek cause, which he personified. Nine years earlier, on the death of Duke Antonio, he had sent Phrantzes to negotiate for the cession of Athens and Thebes. Foiled on that occasion, he now invaded the duchy and forced the weak Duke Nerio II to do homage and pay tribute to him. The Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs of Thessaly rose in his favour; the Serbs promised to aid him in defending the Isthmus against the Turks; it seemed for the moment as if there were at last some hope of a Christian revival in the Near East. But the battle of Varna soon put an end to these dreams. Murad II, accompanied by the Duke of Athens, set out in 1446, at the head of a large army, for the Isthmus. The two Despots[101] had assembled a considerable force behind the ramparts of the Hexamilion, which seemed so imposing to the Sultan that he remonstrated with his old military counsellor, Turakhan, for having advised him to attack such apparently impregnable lines so late in the season. But the veteran, who knew his Greeks and had taken the Hexamilion twenty-three years before, replied that its defenders would not long resist a determined attack. A Greek officer, who had been sent by Constantine to reconnoitre the Turkish position, came back so terrified at the strength of the enemy that he urged his master to retreat at once to the mountains of the Morea. The Despot ordered his arrest as a disciplinary measure, but he was so greatly struck by what he had heard that he sent the Athenian Chalkokondyles, father of the historian, to offer terms of peace to the Sultan. Murad scornfully rejected the proposals, arrested the envoy, and demanded, as the price of his friendship, the destruction of the Hexamilion and the payment of tribute. This was too much for the high-spirited Despot, and the conflict began.

For three whole days the excellent Turkish artillery played upon the walls of the rampart. Then a general assault was ordered, and, after a brave defence by the two Despots, a young Serbian janissary climbed to the top of the wall and planted the Turkish flag there in full view of the rival hosts. The towers on either side of him were soon taken by his comrades, the gates were forced in, and the Turks streamed through them into the peninsula. The Greeks fled; the two Despots among them; Akrocorinth surrendered, and a band of 300, who had thought of “making a new Thermopylæ” at Kenchreæ, were soon forced to lay down their arms. Together with 600 other captives, they were beheaded by the Sultan’s orders. Then the Turkish army was divided into two sections; one, under old Turakhan, penetrated into the interior; the other, commanded by the Sultan in person, followed the coast of the Corinthian Gulf, burning the mediæval town which had arisen on the ruins of Sikyon. Aigion shared the same fate; but most of the inhabitants of Patras had escaped over the Gulf before Murad arrived there. The old Frankish citadel defied all the efforts of the besiegers, for the besieged knew that they had nothing to hope from surrender. A breach was made in the walls, but the defenders poured boiling resin on to the heads of the janissaries and worked at the rampart till the breach was made good. The season was by this time very far advanced, so the Sultan and his lieutenant withdrew to Thebes, dragging with them 60,000 captives, who were sold as slaves. The Despots were glad to obtain peace and a qualified independence by[102] paying a capitation tax, and by sending their envoys to do homage to the Sultan in his headquarters at Thebes. The Greeks ascribed their misfortunes to their Albanian and Frankish mercenaries, the former of whom had begun to feel their power, while the latter had espoused the cause of Centurione’s illegitimate son at the moment when the Despots were engaged in the defence of the country.

On the death of the Emperor in 1448 the Despot Constantine succeeded to the imperial title; and it is a picturesque fact that the last Emperor of Constantinople was crowned at Mistra, where his wife still lies buried, near that ancient Sparta which had given so many heroes to Hellas. His previous government was bestowed on his youngest brother Demetrios, with the exception of Patras, which was added to the province of Thomas. The new partition took place in Constantinople, where the two brothers solemnly swore before God and their aged mother to love one another and to rule the Morea in perfect unanimity. But no sooner had they arrived at their respective capitals of Mistra and Patras than they proceeded to break their oaths. Thomas, the more enterprising of the two, attacked his brother; Demetrios, destitute of patriotism, called in the aid of the Turks, who readily appeared under the leadership of Turakhan, made Thomas disgorge most of what he had seized, and on the way destroyed what remained of the Hexamilion. The object of this was soon obvious. As soon as the new Sultan, Mohammed II, was ready to attack Constantinople, he ordered Turakhan to keep the two Palaiologoi busy in the Morea, so that they might not send assistance to their brother the Emperor. The old Pasha once again marched into the peninsula; but he found greater resistance than he had expected on the Isthmus. He and his two sons, Achmet and Omar, then spread their forces over the country, plundering and burning as they went, till the certainty of Constantinople’s fall rendered their presence in the Morea no longer necessary. But as Achmet was retiring through the Pass of Dervenaki, that death-trap of armies, between Argos and Corinth, the Greeks fell upon him, routed his men and took him prisoner. Demetrios, either from gratitude for Turakhan’s recent services to him, or from fear of the old warrior’s revenge, released his captive without ransom. It was the last ray of light before the darkness of four centuries descended upon Greece.

The news that Constantinople had fallen and that the Emperor had been slain came like a thunderbolt upon his wretched brothers, who naturally expected that they would be the next victims. But Mohammed was not in a hurry; he knew that he could annihilate them when he[103] chose; meanwhile he was content to accept an annual tribute of 12,000 ducats. The folly of the greedy Byzantine officials, who held the chief posts at the petty courts of Patras and Mistra, had prepared, however, a new danger for the Despots. The Albanian colonists had multiplied while the Greek population had diminished; and the recent Turkish devastations had increased the extent of waste land where they could pasture their sheep. Fired by the great exploits of their countryman, Skanderbeg, in Albania, they were seized by one of those rare yearnings for independence which meet us only occasionally in Albanian history. The official mind seized this untoward moment to demand a higher tax from the Albanian lands. The reply of the shepherds was a general insurrection in which 30,000 Albanians followed the lead of their chieftain, Peter Boua, “the lame.” Their object was to expel the Greeks from the peninsula; but this, of course, did not prevent other Greeks, dissatisfied, for reasons of their own, with the rule of the Despots, from throwing in their lot with the Albanians. A Cantacuzene gained the support of the insurgents for his claims on Mistra by taking an Albanian name; the bastard son of Centurione emerged from prison and was proclaimed as Prince of Achaia. Both Mistra and Patras were besieged; and it soon became clear that nothing but Turkish intervention could save the Morea from becoming an Albanian principality. Accordingly, the aid of the invincible Turakhan was again solicited; and, as Mohammed believed in the policy—long followed in Macedonia by his successors—of keeping the Christian races as evenly balanced as possible, the Turkish general was sent to suppress the revolt without utterly destroying the revolted. Turakhan carried out his instructions with consummate skill. He soon put down the insurgents, but allowed them to retain their stolen cattle and the waste lands which they had occupied, on payment of a fixed rent. He then turned to the two Despots and gave them the excellent advice to live as brothers, to be lenient to their subjects, and to be vigilant in the prevention of disturbances. Needless to say, his advice was not taken.

The power of the Palaiologoi was at an end; and the Greek archontes and Albanian chiefs did not hesitate to put themselves in direct communication with the Sultan when they wanted the confirmation of their privileges. But the Despots might, perhaps, have preserved the forms of authority for the rest of their lives had it not been for the rashness of Thomas, who seemed to be incapable of learning by experience that he only existed on sufferance. In 1457, emboldened by the successes of Skanderbeg, he refused to pay his tribute. Mohammed II was not the man to submit to an insult of that sort from a petty[104] prince whom he could crush whenever he chose. In the spring of the following year the great Sultan appeared at the Isthmus; but this time the noble fortress of Akrocorinth held out against him. Leaving a force behind him to blockade it, he advanced into the interior of the peninsula, accompanied by the self-styled Albanian leader in the late revolt, Cantacuzene, whose influence he found useful in treating with the Arnauts. The Greeks, whom he took, were despatched as colonists to Constantinople; the Albanians, who had broken their parole, were punished by the breaking of their wrists and ankles—a horrible scene long commemorated by the Turkish name of “Tokmak Hissari,” or “the castle of the ankles.” Mouchli, at that time one of the chief towns in the Morea, near the classic ruins of Mantinea, offered considerable resistance; but lack of water forced the defenders to yield, and then the Sultan returned to Corinth. His powerful cannon soon wrecked the bakehouse and the magazines of the citadel; provisions fell short; and the fact was betrayed by the archbishop to the besiegers. At last the place surrendered, and its gallant commander was deputed by Mohammed to bear his terms of peace to Thomas. The latter was ordered to cede the country as far south as Mouchli, and as far west as Patras; this district was then united with the Pashalik of Thessaly, the governor of the whole province being Turakhan’s son Omar, who remained with 10,000 soldiers in the Morea. The other Despot, Demetrios, was commanded to send his daughter to the Sultan’s harem.

Thomas at once complied with his conqueror’s demands; but his ambition soon revived when Mohammed had gone. Fresh victories of Skanderbeg suggested to him the flattering idea that a Palaiologos could do more than a mere Albanian. Divisions among the Turkish officers in his old dominions increased his confidence—a quality in which Greeks are not usually lacking. Early in 1459 he raised the standard of revolt; but, at the same time, committed the folly of attacking his brother’s possessions. Phrantzes, who, after having been sold as a slave when Constantinople fell, had obtained his freedom and had entered the service of Thomas, has stigmatised in forcible language the wickedness of those evil counsellors who had advised his master to embark on a civil war and to “eat his oaths as if they were vegetables.” Most of Thomas’ successes were at the expense of his brother, for, of all the places lately annexed by the Turks, Kalavryta alone was recovered. But the Albanians did far more harm to the country than either the Greeks or the Turkish garrison by plundering both sides with absolute impartiality and deserting from Thomas to Demetrios, or from Demetrios to Thomas, on the slightest provocation. Meanwhile[105] the Turks attacked Thomas at Leondari, at the invitation of his brother; and the defeat which he sustained induced the miserable Despot to go through the form of reconciliation with Demetrios, under the auspices of Holy Church. This display of brotherly love had the usual sequel—a new fratricidal war; but Mohammed II had now made up his mind to put an end to the Palaiologoi, and marched straight to Mistra. Demetrios soon surrendered, and humbly appeared in the presence of his master. The Sultan insisted upon the prompt performance of his former command, that the Despot’s daughter should enter the seraglio, and told him that Mistra could no longer be his. He therefore ordered him to bid his subjects surrender all their cities and fortresses—an order which was at once executed, except at Monemvasia. That splendid citadel, which had so long defied the Franks at the zenith of their power, and boasted of the special protection of Providence, now scorned to surrender to the infidel. The daughter of Demetrios, who had been sent thither for safety, was, indeed, handed over to the Turkish envoys, and Demetrios himself was conducted to Constantinople; but the Monemvasiotes proclaimed Thomas as their liege lord, and he shortly afterwards presented Monemvasia to the Pope, who appointed a governor.

Having thus wiped the province of Demetrios from the map, Mohammed turned his arms against Thomas. Wherever a city resisted, its defenders were punished without mercy and in violation of the most solemn pledges. The Albanian chiefs who had defied the Sultan at Kastritza were sawn asunder; the Albanian captain of Kalavryta was flayed alive; Gardiki was once more the scene of a terrible massacre, ten times worse than that which had disgraced Turakhan thirty-seven years before. These acts of cruelty excited very different feelings in the population. Some, especially the Albanians, were inspired to fight with the courage of despair; others preferred slavery to an heroic death. From the neighbourhood of Navarino alone 10,000 persons were dragged away to colonise Constantinople; and a third of the Greeks of Greveno, which had dared to resist, were carried off as slaves. The castles of Glarentza and Santameri were surrendered by the descendants of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s Turks, who experienced, like the Albanians, the faithless conduct of their conquerors. Meanwhile Thomas had fled to Navarino, and, on the day when the Sultan reached that place, set sail with his wife and family from a neighbouring harbour for Corfù. There the faithful Phrantzes joined him and wrote his history of these events—the swan-song of free Greece.

Another Palaiologos, however, Graitzas by name, showed a heroism[106] of which the Despot was incapable. This man, the last defender of his country, held out in the castle of Salmenikon between Patras and Aigion till the following year, and, when the town was taken, still defied all the efforts of the Turks, who allowed him to withdraw, with all the honours of war, into Venetian territory at Lepanto. In the autumn of 1460 Mohammed left the Morea, after having appointed Zagan Pasha as military governor, with orders to install the new Turkish authorities and to make arrangements for the collection of the capitation tax and of the tribute of children. Thus the Morea fell under Turkish rule, which thenceforward continued for an almost unbroken period of three hundred and fifty years. Save at Monemvasia, where the papal flag still waved, and at Nauplia, Argos, Thermisi, Koron, Modon, and Navarino, where Venice still retained her colonies, there was none to dispute the Sultan’s sway.

The fate of the Palaiologoi deserves a brief notice. Demetrios lived ten years at Ænos in Thrace in the enjoyment of the pension which Mohammed allowed him, and died a monk at Adrianople in 1470. His daughter, whom the Sultan never married after all, had predeceased him. Thomas proceeded to Rome with the head of St Andrew from Patras as a present for the Pope, who received the precious relic with much ceremony at the spot near the Ponte Molle, where the little chapel of St Andrew now commemorates the event, and assigned to its bearer a pension of 300 ducats a month, to which the cardinals added 200 more, and Venice a smaller sum. He died at Rome in 1465, leaving two sons and two daughters. One of the latter died in a convent on the island of Santa Maura; the other married, first a Caracciolo of Naples and then the Grand Duke Ivan III of Russia, by whom she had a daughter, afterwards the wife of Alexander Jagellon of Poland. With this daughter the female line became extinct. Of Thomas’ two sons, the elder, Andrew, married a woman off the streets of Rome, ceded all his rights, first to Charles VIII of France, and then to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and died in 1502 without issue. The younger son, Manuel, escaped from papal tutelage to the court of Mohammed II, who gave him an establishment and allowed him a daily sum for its maintenance. He died a Christian; but of his two sons (the elder of whom died young), the younger became a Mussulman, took the name of Mohammed, and is last heard of in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. Though the family would thus appear to have long been extinct, a Cornish antiquary announced in 1815 that the church of Landulph contained a monument to one of Thomas’ descendants. A few years ago a lady residing in London considered herself[107] to be the heiress of the Palaiologoi and aspired to play a part in the Eastern question[59]. But neither of these claims is genealogically sound; for there is no historical proof of the existence of the supposed third son of Thomas, mentioned in the Landulph inscription. But, after all, the world has not lost much by the extinction of this race, nor would the future of Constantinople or Greece be affected by its revival.

APPENDIX
THE NAME OF NAVARINO

Ever since Hopf published his history of mediæval Greece writers on that subject have followed his opinion that the name of Navarino was derived from the Navarrese Company, which entered the Morea in 1381 to support the claims of Jacques de Baux, titular emperor of Constantinople and prince of Achaia, and which established its headquarters at the classic Pylos. Hopf adduces no evidence in support of this derivation, which he thrice repeats[60], except that of the French traveller De Caumont, who saw at Pylos in 1418 ung chasteau hault sur une montaigne que se nomme chasteau Navarres[61]. But his opinion, mainly formed in order to controvert the anti-Hellenic theory of Fallmerayer, has been followed, also without proof, by Hertzberg[62], Tozer[63], and more tentatively by Paparregopoulos[64]. The name of Navarino, however, seems to have existed long before the Navarrese[108] Company ever set foot in Greece. Nearly a century earlier a golden bull[65] of the Emperor Andronikos II, dated 1293, confirmed the possessions of the church of Monemvasia, among which it specially mentions τὴν Πύλον, τὸν καλούμενον Ἀβαρῖνον. A little before the date of this imperial document (1287-1289) Nicholas II de Saint-Omer, lord of half Thebes, was bailie of the principality of Achaia for Charles II of Naples, and the Greek Chronicle of the Morea[66] tells us that ἔχτισεν τὸ κάστρον τοῦ Ἀβαρίνου. Now Hopf himself thought that the French version of the Chronicle, Le Livre de la Conqueste[67] (in which the above passage runs ferma le chastel de port de Junch), was the original of the four editions which we possess. It is generally agreed that the French version was written between 1333 and 1341; but it is by no means certain that the French is the original and the Greek a translation; rather would it appear that the Greek was the original, in which case it was composed in the early part of the fourteenth century, for the one passage[68] which refers to an event as late as 1388 is regarded as an interpolation by the latest editor of the Chronicle, Dr Schmitt. Even the most recent of all the four versions—the Aragonese—was written, as it expressly says[69], no later than 1393. Therefore we have every reason for regarding the mention of the name Ἀβαρῖνος in the Greek Chronicle as a second proof that it was in common use long before the time of the Navarrese[70].

There are several other passages in which the name occurs, the date of which cannot, however, be fixed with certainty. In the Synekdemos of Hierokles[71] we have three times the phrase Πύλος, ἡ πατρὶς Νέστορος, νῦν δὲ καλεῖται Ἀβαρῖνος. Now Hierokles wrote before 535, but all these three passages occur in the lists of towns which have changed their names, and these three lists must belong, as Krumbacher points out, to a much later period than the main body of the work. The scholiast to Ptolemy[72] also makes an annotation Πύλος ὀ καὶ Ἀβαρῖνος, and in the Latin manuscripts of that passage the rendering is Pylus, qui et Abarmus (sic).

The alteration of Abarinos into Navarino follows, of course, the usual Greek habit of prefixing to the mediæval name the last letter[109] of the accusative of the article. Thus εἰς τὸν Ἀβαρῖνον becomes Ναβαρῖνον, just as εἰς τὴν Πόλιν becomes Stambûl, εἰς τὰς Ἀθῆνας Satines or Sathines, εἰς τὰς Θῆβας Estives. The conclusion seems to be that Fallmerayer was right after all when he derived the name of Navarino from a settlement of Avars on the site of the ancient Pylos[73]. The settlement of the Navarrese Company there was merely a coincidence.

It may be added that Abarinus also occurs in a document[74] of Charles I of Naples, dated 1280, as the name of a place in Apulia, not apparently Bari.

Since I wrote the above note on this subject I have found two other passages which confirm the view that the name of Navarino existed before the Navarrese Company entered Greece. They occur in the Commemoriali[75], where we find Venice complaining to Robert, prince of Achaia, and to the bailie of Achaia and Lepanto that the crew of a Genoese ship had started from Navarrino vecchio and had plundered some Venetian subjects. The dates of these two documents are 1355 and 1356. The late Professor Krumbacher, in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift (XIV. 675), agreed that Hopf’s derivation had been disproved by my article, but thought that the name of Navarino comes not from the Avars, but from the Slavonic javorina, “a wood of maples.”

AUTHORITIES

2. Le Livre de la Conqueste. In Recherches historiques sur la Principauté française de Morée. Tome II. By J. A. Buchon. Paris, 1845. New Edn. by J. Longnon. Paris, 1911.

3. Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους (History of the Greek Nation). By K. Paparregopoulos. 4th Edn. Athens, 1903.

4. Geschichte Griechenlands vom Beginn des Mittelalters. Von K. Hopf. In Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie. Bände 85, 86. Leipzig, 1867.

5. Chroniques Gréco-Romanes inédites ou peu connues. Published by Charles Hopf. Berlin, 1873.

6. Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter. Von F. Gregorovius. 3rd Edn. Stuttgart, 1889.

7. La Conquête de Constantinople, par Geoffroy de Villehardouin. By Émile Bouchet. Paris, 1891.

4. THE DUKES OF ATHENS

Nations, like individuals, sometimes have the romance of their lives in middle age—a romance unknown, perhaps, to the outside world until, long years afterwards, some forgotten bundle of letters throws a flash of rosy light upon a period hitherto regarded as uneventful and commonplace. So is it with the history of Athens under the Frankish domination, which Finlay first described in his great work. But since his day numerous documents have been published, and still more are in course of publication, which complete the picture of mediæval Athens as he drew it in a few master-strokes. Barcelona and Palermo have been ransacked for information; the Venetian archives have yielded a rich harvest; Milan has contributed her share; and a curious collection of Athenian legends has been made by an industrious and patriotic Greek. We know now, as we never knew before, the strange story of the classic city under her French, her Catalan, and her Florentine masters; and it is high time that the results of these researches should be laid before the British public. The present paper deals with the first two of these three periods.

The history of Frankish Athens begins with the Fourth Crusade. By the deed of partition, which divided up the Byzantine Empire among the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, the crusading army, whose chief was Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat, had received “the district of Athens with the territory of Megara[76]”; and both Attica and Bœotia were included in that short-lived realm of Salonika, of which he assumed the title of king. Among the trusty followers who accompanied Boniface in his triumphal progress across his new dominions was Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle the serious dispute between him and the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between his daughter and the Emperor Baldwin I’s brother and successor. This was the man upon whom the King of Salonika, in 1205, bestowed the most famous city of the ancient world. Thus, in the words of an astonished chronicler from the West, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans[77].”

The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had succeeded by an extraordinary stroke of[111] fortune to the past glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself “Sire d’Athènes” or “Dominus Athenarum,” which his Greek subjects magnified into the “Great Lord” (Μέγας Κύρ or Μέγας Κύρης), and Dante, in the Purgatorio, transferred by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to Othon de la Roche on the part of the Greeks, nor was such likely; for the eminent man, Michael Akominatos, who was then Metropolitan of Athens, was fully aware that the Akropolis could not long resist a Western army. Later Venetian writers, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story that the Athenians sent an embassy offering their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated, “not without bloodshed, by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche[78].” If so, it was the sole effort which the Greeks of Attica made during the whole century of French domination.

Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small standard of classical Greece. The Burgundian state of Athens embraced Attica, Bœotia, Megaris, and the ancient Opuntian Lokris to the north; while to the south of the isthmus the “Great Lord’s” deputies governed the important strongholds of Argos and Nauplia, conferred upon him, in 1212, by Prince Geoffroy I of Achaia as the reward of his assistance in capturing them, and thenceforth held by Othon and his successors for a century as fiefs of the Principality. The Italian Marquess of Boudonitza on the north, the Lord of Salona on the west, were the neighbours, and the latter subsequently the vassal, of the ruler of Athens, his bulwarks against the expanding power of the Greek despots of Epeiros. Thus situated, mediæval Athens had at least four ports—Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of Corinth, where Othon’s relatives landed when they arrived from France; the harbour of Atalante opposite Eubœa; the beautiful bay of Nauplia; and the famous Piræus, known in the Frankish times by the name of Porto Leone from the huge lion, now in front of the Arsenal at Venice, which then guarded the entrance to the haven of Themistokles. It is strange, in these circumstances, that the Burgundian rulers of Athens made little or no attempt to create a navy, especially as Latin pirates infested the coast of Attica, and a sail down the Corinthian Gulf was described as “a voyage to Acheron[79].”

Guiltless of a classical education, and unmoved by the genius of the place, Othon abstained from seeking a model for the constitution of his[112] new state in the laws of Solon. Like the other Frankish princes of the Levant, he adopted the “Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania,” a code of usages based on the famous “Assizes of Jerusalem.” But the feudal society which was thus installed in Attica was very different from that which existed in the Principality of Achaia or in the Duchy of the Archipelago. The “Great Lord” of Athens had, at the most, only one exalted noble, the head of the famous Flemish house of St Omer, near his throne. It is obvious, from the silence of all the authorities, that the Burgundians who settled in Othon’s Greek dominions were men of inferior social position to himself, a fact further demonstrated by the comparative lack in Attica and Bœotia of those baronial castles so common in the Peloponnese.

In one respect the Court of Athens, under Othon de la Roche, must have resembled the Court of the late King George, namely, that there was no one, except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on equal terms. But, as in Georgian, so in Frankish Athens, the family of the sovereign was numerous enough to form a society of its own. Not only did Othon marry a Burgundian heiress, by whom he had two sons, but the news of his astounding good fortune attracted to the new El Dorado in Greece various members of his clan from their home in Burgundy. They doubtless received their share of the good things which had fallen to their lucky relative; a favourite nephew, Guy, divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes; a more distant relative became commander of the castle of Athens. Both places became the residences of Latin archbishops; and in the room of Michael Akominatos, in the magnificent church of “Our Lady of Athens,” as the Parthenon was now called, a Frenchman named Bérard, perhaps Othon’s chaplain, inaugurated the long series of the Catholic prelates of that ancient see. The last Greek Metropolitan retired sorrowfully from his plundered cathedral to the island of Keos, whence he could still see the shores of his beloved Attica; and for well-nigh two centuries his titular successors never once visited their confiscated diocese. The Greek priests who remained behind performed their services in the church near the Roman market, which was converted into a mosque at the time of the Turkish conquest, and has now been degraded to a military bakery; while Innocent III assigned to the Catholic archbishop the ancient jurisdiction of the Orthodox Metropolitan over his eleven suffragans, and confirmed to the Church of Athens its possessions at Phyle and Marathon—places still called by their classical names.

But the “Othniel” of Athens, to whom the Pope had made a punning allusion, was, like the other Frankish rulers of his time, a sore trial to the Holy See. He forbade his subjects to give or bequeath their possessions to the Church, levied dues from the clergy, and showed no desire to pay tithes or compel his people to pay them. A “concordat” between Church and State was at last drawn up in 1210, at a Parliament convened by the Latin Emperor Henry in the valley of Ravenika, near Lamia, and attended by Othon and all the chief feudal lords of continental Greece. By this it was agreed that the clergy of both dominations should pay the old Byzantine land-tax to the temporal authorities, but that, in return, all churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical property, should be entrusted to the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople free of all feudal services.

Othon was more loyal to the Empire than to the Papacy. When the Lombard nobles of Salonika, on the death of Boniface, tried to shake off the feudal tie which bound that kingdom to the Latin Emperor, he stood by the latter, even though his loyalty cost him the temporary loss of his capital of Thebes. He was rewarded by a visit which the Emperor Henry paid him at Athens, where no Imperial traveller had set foot since Basil “the Bulgar-slayer,” two centuries earlier, had offered up prayer and thanksgivings in the greatest of all cathedrals. Like Basil, Henry also prayed “in the Minster of Athens, which men call Our Lady,” and received from his host “every honour in his power[81].” Only once again did an emperor of Constantinople bow down in the Parthenon; and then it was not as a conqueror but as a fugitive that he came.

The “Great Lord” was not fired with the romance of reigning over the city of Perikles and Plato. When old age crept on, he felt, like many another baron of the conquest, that he would like to spend the evening of his days in his native land; and in 1225 he departed for Burgundy with his wife and sons, leaving his nephew, Guy, to succeed him in Greece. Under the wise rule of his successor, the Athenian state prospered exceedingly. Thebes, where Guy and his connections, the great family of St Omer, resided, had recovered much of its fame as the seat of the silk manufactory. Jews and Genoese both possessed colonies there; and the shrewd Ligurian traders negotiated a commercial treaty with the[114] new ruler which allowed them to have their own consul, their own court of justice, and their own buildings both there and at Athens.

The Greeks too profited by the enlightened policy of their sovereign. One Greek monk at this time made the road to the monastery of St John the Hunter on the slopes of Hymettos, to which the still standing column on the way to Marathon alludes; another built one of the two churches at the quaint little monastery of Our Lady of the Glen, not far from the fort of Phyle. For thirty years Athens enjoyed profound peace, till a fratricidal war between Guillaume de Villehardouin, the ambitious Prince of Achaia, and the great barons of Eubœa involved Guy in their quarrel. The prince summoned Guy, his vassal for Argos and Nauplia, to assist him against his foes; Guy, though bound not only by this feudal tie but by his marriage to one of William’s nieces, refused his aid, and did all he could to help the enemies of the prince. The latter replied by invading the dominions of his nephew. Forcing the Kakè Skála, that narrow and ill-famed road which leads along the rocky coast of the Saronic Gulf towards Megara, he met Guy’s army at the pass of Mount Karydi, “the walnut mountain,” on the way to Thebes. There Frankish Athens and Frankish Sparta first met face to face; the Sire of Athens was routed and fled to Thebes, where he obtained peace by a promise to appear before the High Court of Achaia and perform any penalty which it might inflict upon him for having borne arms against the Prince.

The High Court met at Nikli near Tegea; and the Sire of Athens, escorted by all his chivalry, made a brave show before the assembled barons. They were so much impressed by the spectacle that they declared they could not judge so great a man, and referred the decision to St Louis of France, the natural protector of the French nobles of Greece. The chivalrous monarch propounded the question to the parlement at Paris, which decided that Guy was technically guilty, but that the trouble and cost of his long journey to France was ample punishment for his offence. Louis IX, anxious to show him some mark of royal favour, conferred upon him, at his special request, the title of Duke of Athens, for which, he told the king, there was an ancient precedent. The ducal style borne by Guy and his successors has become famous in literature as well as in history. Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare bestowed it upon Theseus, and the Catalan chronicler, Muntaner, upon Menelaos.

Meanwhile the wheel of fortune had avenged the Duke of Athens. His victorious enemy, involved in a quarrel between the rival Greek states of Nice and Epeiros, had been taken prisoner by the Greek Emperor; and the flower of the Achaian chivalry was either dead or[115] languishing in the dungeons of Lampsakos. In these circumstances the survivors offered to Guy the regency of Achaia—a post which he triumphantly accepted. But he had not been long in Greece when another blow descended upon the Franks. The Latin Empire of Constantinople fell; and the Emperor Baldwin II, a landless exile, was glad to accept the hospitality of the Theban Kadmeia and the Castle of Athens. Thus, on that venerable rock, was played the last pitiful scene in the brief Imperial drama of the Latin Orient[82].

Fired by the reconquest of Constantinople, Michael VIII now meditated the recovery of the Peloponnese, and demanded the cession of the three strongest castles in the peninsula as the price of his prisoner’s freedom. It was Guy’s duty, as regent of Achaia, to convene the High Court of the Principality to consider this momentous question. The parliament, almost exclusively composed of ladies—for all the men of mark had been slain or were in prison—decided, against Guy’s better judgment, in favour of accepting the Emperor’s terms; and Guy, whose position was one of great delicacy, finally yielded. Not long afterwards, the first Duke of Athens died, conscious of having heaped coals of fire upon the head of his enemy, and proud of leaving to his elder son, John, a state more prosperous than any other in Greece.

The second Duke, less fortunate than his father, was involved in the wars against the Greek Emperor, which occupied so much of that period. The restless scion of the house of Angelos, who had carved out for himself a principality in the ancient realm of Achilles in Phthiotis, and reigned over Wallachs and Greeks at Neopatras, or La Patre, beneath the rocky walls of Mount Œta, fled as a suppliant to the Theban Court and offered the duke the hand of his daughter Helene if he would only assist him against the Palaiologoi. The duke, gouty and an invalid, declined matrimony, but promised his aid. At the head of a picked body of Athenian knights he easily routed the vastly superior numbers of the Imperial army, which he contemptuously summed up in a phrase, borrowed from Herodotos, as “many people, but few men.” As his reward he obtained for his younger brother William the fair Helene as a bride; and her dowry, which included the important town of Lamia, extended the influence of the Athenian duchy as far north as Thessaly. But John of Athens was destined to experience, like William of Achaia, the most varied changes of fortune. Wounded in a fight with the Greeks and their Catalan allies outside the walls of Negroponte, he fell from his horse and was carried off a prisoner to Constantinople. Michael VIII did not, however, treat the Duke of Athens as he had treated the Prince of[116] Achaia. He made no demand for Athenian territory, but contented himself with a ransom of some £13,500. Policy, rather than generosity, was the cause of this apparent inconsistency. Fears of an attack by Charles of Anjou, alarm at the restless ambition of his prisoner’s kinsman, the Duke of Neopatras, and suspicion of the orthodox clerical party in his own capital, which regarded him as a schismatic because of his overtures to Rome, convinced him that the policy of 1262 would not suit the altered conditions of 1279. He even offered his daughter in marriage to his prisoner, but the latter refused the Imperial alliance. A year later John died, and William his brother reigned in his stead.

During the seven years of his reign William de la Roche was the leading figure in Frankish Greece. Acknowledging the suzerainty of the Angevin kings of Naples, who had become overlords of Achaia by the treaty of Viterbo, he was appointed their viceroy in that principality, and in that capacity built the castle of Dematra, the site of which may be perhaps found at Kastri, between Tripolitsa and Sparta. Possessed of ample means, he spent his money liberally for the defence of Frankish Greece, alike in the Peloponnese and in Eubœa; and great was the grief of all men when his valiant career was cut short. Now, for the first time since the conquest, Athens was governed by a Greek, for Guy’s mother, Helene Angela of Neopatras, who has given her title to K. Rhanghaves’ drama, The Duchess of Athens, acted as regent for her infant son, Guy, until a second marriage with her late husband’s brother-in-law, Hugh de Brienne, provided him with a more powerful guardian. The family of Brienne was one of the most famous of that day. First heard of in Champagne during the reign of Hugh Capet, it had, in the thirteenth century, won an Imperial diadem at Constantinople, a royal crown at Jerusalem, and a count’s coronet at Lecce and at Jaffa; ere long it was destined to provide the last French Duke of Athens.

The Burgundian duchy of Athens had now reached its zenith; and the ceremony of Guy II’s coming of age, which has been described for us in the picturesque Catalan chronicle of Muntaner, affords a striking proof of the splendour of the ducal Court at Thebes. The young duke had invited all the great men of his duchy; he had let it be known, too, throughout the Greek Empire and the Despotat of Epeiros and his mother’s home of Thessaly, that whosoever came should receive gifts and favours from his hands, “for he was one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a king, and eke one of the richest.” When all the guests had assembled, Archbishop Nicholas of Thebes celebrated mass in the Theban minster; and then all eyes were fixed upon the Duke, to see whom he would ask to confer upon him the order of knighthood—“a[117] duty which the King of France, or the Emperor himself, would have thought it a pleasure and an honour to perform.” What was the surprise of the brilliant throng when Guy, instead of calling upon such great nobles as Thomas of Salona or Othon of St Omer, co-owner with himself of Thebes, called to his side a young Eubœan knight, Boniface of Verona, lord of but a single castle, which he had sold the better to equip himself and his retinue. Yet no one made a braver show at the Theban Court; he always wore the richest clothes, and on the day of the ceremony none was more elegantly dressed than he, though every one had attired himself and his jongleurs in the fairest apparel. This was the man whom the young duke bade dub him a knight, and upon whom, as a reward for this service, he bestowed the hand of a fair damsel of Eubœa, Agnes de Cicon, Lady of the classic island of Ægina and of the great Eubœan castle of Karystos or Castel Rosso, still a picturesque ruin. The duke gave him also thirteen castles on the mainland and the famous island of Salamis—sufficient to bring him in a revenue of 50,000 sols.

Prosperous indeed must have been the state whose ruler could afford such splendid generosity. Worthy too of such a sovereign was the castle in which he dwelt—the work of the great Theban baron, Nicholas II de St Omer, who had built it out of the vast wealth of his wife, Marie of Antioch. The castle of St Omer, which was described as “the finest baronial mansion in all Romania[83],” contained sufficient rooms for an emperor and his court; and its walls were decorated with frescoes illustrating the conquest of the Holy Land by the Franks, in which the ancestors of its founder had borne a prominent part. Alas! one stumpy tower, still bearing the name of Santameri, is all that now remains of this noble residence of the Athenian dukes and the Theban barons.

French influence now spread from Thebes over the great plain of Thessaly to the slopes of Olympos. The Duke of Neopatras died, leaving his nephew of Athens guardian of his infant son and regent of his dominions, threatened alike by the Greek Emperor, Andronikos II, and by the able and ambitious Lady of Epeiros. At Lamia, the fortress which had been part of his mother’s dowry, Guy received the homage of the Thessalian baronage, and appointed as his viceroy Antoine le Flamenc, a Fleming who had become lord of the Bœotian Karditza (where a Greek inscription on the church of St George still commemorates him as its “most pious” founder), and who is described as “the wisest man in all the duchy.” The Greek nobles of Thessaly learnt the French language;[118] coins with Latin inscriptions were issued in the name of Guy’s young ward from the mint of Neopatras[84]; and the condition of Thessaly was accurately depicted in that curious story the Romance of Achilles, in which the Greek hero marries a French damsel and the introduction of French customs is allegorically represented by cutting the child’s hair in Frankish fashion[85].

Wherever there was knightly work to be done, the gallant Duke of Athens was foremost; none was more impetuous than he at the great tournament held on the Isthmus of Corinth in 1305, at which the whole chivalry of Frankish Greece was present. He needs must challenge Master Bouchart, one of the best jousters of the West, to single combat with the lance; and their horses met with such force that the ducal charger fell and rolled its rider in the dust. His Theban castle rang with the songs of minstrels; festival after festival followed at his Court; and this prosperity was not merely on the surface. Now for the first time we find Attica supplying Eubœa with corn, while the gift of silken garments to Pope Boniface VIII is a proof of the continued manufacture of silk at Thebes. But the duke’s health was undermined by an incurable malady; he had no heirs of his body; and, when he died in 1308, there was already looming on the frontiers of Greece that Grand Company of Catalan soldiers of fortune whom the weakness of the Emperor, Andronikos II, had invited from the stricken fields of Sicily to be the terror and the scourge of the Levant. The last duke of the house of la Roche was laid to rest in the noble Byzantine abbey of Daphni or Dalfinet (as the Franks called it), on the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis, which Othon had bestowed upon the Cistercians a century before. Even to-day there may be seen in the courtyard a sarcophagus, with a cross, two snakes, and two lilies carved upon it, which the French scholar Buchon (La Grèce continentale) believed to have been the tomb of “the good duke,” Guy II.

The succession to the “delectable duchy” of Athens—for such, indeed, it was in the early years of the fourteenth century—was not seriously disputed. There were only two claimants, both first cousins of the late duke—Eschive, Lady of Beyrout, and Walter de Brienne, Count of Lecce, a true scion of that adventurous family, who had been a “knight of death” in the Angevin cause in Sicily, and had fought like the lion on his banner at the fatal battle of Gagliano. The rival claims having been referred to the High Court of Achaia, of which the Duke of Athens was, in Angevin times, a peer, the barons decided, as was[119] natural, in favour of the gallant and powerful Count of Lecce, more fitted than a lonely widow to govern a military state. Unfortunately, Duke Walter of Athens was as rash as he was brave; prison and defeat in Sicily had not taught him to respect the infantry of Cataluña. Speaking their language and knowing their ways, he thought that he might use them for his own ends and then dismiss them when they had served his purpose.

In the spring of 1309 the Catalan Grand Company threatened by starvation in Macedonia, marched through the vale of Tempe into the granary of Greece, whence, a year later, they descended upon Lamia. The Duke of Neopatras had now come of age, and had not only emancipated himself from Athenian tutelage, but had formed a triple alliance with the Greek Emperor and the Greek Despot of Epeiros in order to prevent the ultimate annexation of his country by his French neighbours. In these circumstances the new Duke of Athens bethought himself of employing the wandering Catalans against the allies. Thanks to the good offices of Roger Deslaur, a knight of Roussillon who was in his employ, he engaged them at the same high rate of payment which they had received from Andronikos II. The Catalans at once showed that they were well worth the money, for by the end of a six months’ campaign they had captured more than thirty castles for their employer. Thereupon his three adversaries hastened to make peace with him on his own terms.

Walter now rashly resolved to rid himself of the expensive mercenaries for whom he had no further use. He first selected 500 men from their ranks, gave them their pay and lands on which to settle, and then abruptly bade the others begone, although at the time he still owed them four months’ wages. They naturally declined to obey this summary order, and prepared to conquer or die; for retreat was impossible, and there was no other land where they could seek their fortune. Walter, too, assembled all available troops against the common enemies of Frankish Greece—for as such the savage Catalans were regarded. Never had a Latin army made such a brave show as that which was drawn up under his command in the spring of 1311 on the great Bœotian plain, almost on the self-same spot where, more than sixteen centuries before, Philip of Macedon had won that “dishonest victory” which destroyed the freedom of classic Greece, and where, in the time of Sulla, her Roman masters had thrice met the Pontic troops of Mithridates. All the great feudatories of Greece rallied to his call. There came Alberto Pallavicini, Marquess of Boudonitza, who kept the pass of Thermopylæ; Thomas de Stromoncourt of Salona, who ruled over the slopes of Parnassos, and[120] whose noble castle still preserves the memory of its mediæval lords; Boniface of Verona, the favourite of the late Duke of Athens; George Ghisi, one of the three great barons of Eubœa; and Jean de Maisy, another powerful magnate of that famous island. From Achaia, and from the scattered duchy of the Archipelago, contingents arrived to do battle against the desperate mercenaries of Cataluña. Already Walter dreamed of not merely routing the company, but of planting his lion banner on the ramparts of Byzantium.

But the Catalans were better strategists than the impetuous Duke of Athens. They knew that the strength of the Franks lay in the rush of their splendid cavalry, and they laid their plans accordingly. The marshy soil of the Copaic basin afforded them an excellent defence against a charge of horsemen; and they carefully prepared the ground by ploughing it up, digging a trench round it, and then irrigating the whole area by means of canals from the river Kephissos. By the middle of March, when the two armies met face to face, a treacherous covering of green grass concealed the quaking bog from the gaze of the Frankish leaders.

As if he had some presentiment of his coming death, Walter made his will—a curious document still preserved[86]—and then, on March 15, took up his stand on the hill called the Thourion, still surmounted by a mediæval tower, to survey the field. Before the battle began, the 500 favoured Catalans whom he had retained came to him and told him that they would rather die than fight against their old comrades. The duke bade them do as they pleased; and their defection added a welcome and experienced contingent to the enemy’s forces. When they had gone, the duke, impatient for the fray, placed himself at the head of 200 French knights with golden spurs and charged with a shout across the plain. But, when they reached the fatal spot where the grass was greenest, their horses, heavily weighted with their coats of mail, plunged all unsuspecting into the treacherous morass. Some rolled over with their armoured riders in the mire; others, stuck fast in the stiff bog, stood still, in the picturesque phrase of the Byzantine historian, “like equestrian statues,” powerless to move. The shouts of “Aragon! Aragon!” from the Catalans increased the panic of the horses; showers of arrows hailed upon the helpless Franks; and the Turkish auxiliaries of the Catalans rushed forward and completed the deadly work. So great was the slaughter that only four Frankish nobles are known to have survived that fatal day—Boniface of Verona, Roger Deslaur, the eldest son of[121] the Duke of Naxos, and Jean de Maisy of Eubœa[87]. At one blow the Catalans had destroyed the noble chivalry of Frankish Greece; and the men, whose forefathers had marched with Boniface of Montferrat into Greece a century earlier, lay dead in the fatal Bœotian swamp. Among them was the Duke of Athens, whose head, severed by a Catalan knife, was borne, long afterwards, on a funeral galley to Brindisi and buried in the church of Santa Croce in his Italian county of Lecce.

The Athenian duchy, “the pleasaunce of the Latins,” as Villani[88] quaintly calls it, now lay at the mercy of the Grand Company; for the Greeks made no resistance to their new masters, and in fact looked upon the annihilation of the Franks as a welcome relief. We would fain believe the story of the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea, that the heroic widow of the fallen duke, a worthy daughter of a Constable of France, defended the Akropolis, where she had taken refuge with her little son Walter, till she saw that there was no hope of succour. But the Byzantine historian, Nikephoros Gregoras, expressly says that Athens fell without a struggle, as Thebes had already fallen. Argos and Nauplia alone held aloft the banner of the Frankish dukes. Thus the Catalans were able, without opposition, to parcel out among themselves the towns and castles of the duchy; the widows of the slain became the wives of the slayers; each soldier received a consort according to his services; and many a rough warrior thus found himself the husband of some noble dame in whose veins flowed the bluest blood of France, and “whose washhand-basin,” in the phrase of Muntaner, “he was not worthy to bear.”

After nine years’ wandering these vagabonds settled down in the promised land, which the most extraordinary fate had bestowed upon them. But they lacked a leader of sufficient social position to preside over their changed destinies. Finding no such man in their own ranks, they offered the post to one of their four noble prisoners, Boniface of Verona, whom Muntaner, his guest at Negroponte, has described as “the wisest and most courteous nobleman that was ever born.” Both of these qualities made him disinclined to accept an offer which would have rendered him an object of suspicion to Venice, his neighbour in Eubœa, and of loathing to the whole Frankish world. On his refusal the Catalans turned to Roger Deslaur, whom neither ties of blood nor scruples of conscience prevented from becoming their leader. As his reward he received the castle of Salona together with the widow of its fallen lord.

But the victors of the Kephissos soon recognised that they needed some more powerful head than a simple knight of Roussillon, if they were to hold the duchy against the jealous enemies whom their meteoric success had alarmed and excited. Their choice naturally fell upon King Frederick II of Sicily, the master whom they had served in that island ten years earlier, and who had already shown that he was not unwilling to profit by their achievements. Accordingly, in 1312, they invited him to send them one of his children. He gave them as their duke his second son Manfred, in whose name—as the Duke was still too young to come himself—he sent, as governor of Athens, Beranger Estañol, a knight of Ampurias. On his arrival Deslaur laid down his office, and we hear of him no more.

The Catalan duchy of Athens was now organised as a state, which, though dependent in name on a Sicilian duke, really enjoyed a large measure of independence. The duke nominated the two chief officials, the vicar-general and the marshal, of whom the former, appointed during good pleasure, was the political, the latter the military, governor of the duchy. The marshal was always chosen from the ranks of the Company; and the office was for half a century hereditary in the family of De Novelles. Each city and district had its own local governor, called veguer, castellano, or capitán, whose term of office was fixed at three years, and who was nominated by the duke, by the vicar-general, or by the local representatives from among the citizens of the community. The principal towns and villages were represented by persons known as sindici, and possessed municipal officials and councils, which did not hesitate to present petitions, signed with the seal of St George by the chancellor, to the duke whenever they desired the redress of grievances. On one occasion we find the communities actually electing the vicar-general; and the dukes frequently wrote to them about affairs of state. One of their principal subsequent demands was that official posts should be bestowed upon residents in the duchy, not upon Sicilians.

The feudal system continued to exist, but with far less brilliance than under the Burgundian dukes. The Catalan conquerors were of common origin; and, even after seventy years of residence, the roll of noble families in the whole duchy contained only some sixteen names. The Company particularly objected to the bestowal of strong fortresses, such as Livadia, upon private individuals, preferring that they should be administered by the government officials. The “Customs of Barcelona” now supplanted the feudal “Assizes of Romania”; the Catalan idiom of Muntaner took the place of the elegant French which had been spoken by the Frankish rulers of Greece. Even to their Greek subjects the[123] Spanish dukes wrote in “the Catalan dialect,” the employment of which, as we are expressly told, was “according to the custom and usage of the city of Athens.” Alike by Catalans and French, the Greeks were treated as an inferior race, excluded, as a general rule, from all civic rights, forbidden to intermarry with the conquerors, and still deprived of their higher ecclesiastical functionaries. But there were some notable exceptions to these harsh disqualifications. The people of Livadia, for services rendered to the Company, early received the full franchise of the Conquistadors; towards the end of the Catalan domination we find Greeks holding such important posts as those of castellano of Salona, chancellor of Athens, and notary of Livadia; a count of Salona and a marshal married Greek ladies; and their wives were allowed to retain their own faith.

Under the rule of Estañol the Catalans not only held their ground in Attica and Bœotia, but increased the terror of their name among all their neighbours. In vain the Pope appealed to King James II of Aragon to drive them out of Attica; in vain he described the late Duke Walter as a “true athlete of Christ and faithful boxer of the Church”; the king’s politic reply was to the effect that the Catalans, if they were cruel, were also Catholics, who would prove a valuable bulwark of Romanism against the schismatic Greeks of Byzantium[89]. The appointment of King Frederick II’s natural son, Don Alfonso Fadrique (or Frederick), as “President of the fortunate army of Franks in the Duchy of Athens” yet further strengthened the position of the Company. The new vicar-general was a man of much energy and force of character; and during his thirteen years’ administration the Catalan state attained its zenith. Practically independent of Sicilian influence—for the nominal Duke Manfred died in the year of Fadrique’s appointment, and his younger brother William was likewise a minor—he acquired a stronger hold upon Attica, and at the same time a pretext for intervention in the affairs of Eubœa, by his marriage with Marulla, the heiress of Boniface of Verona, “one of the fairest Christians in the world, the best woman and the wisest that ever was in that land,” as Muntaner, who knew her, enthusiastically describes her. With her Fadrique received back, as her dowry, the thirteen castles which Guy II of Athens had bestowed upon her father on that memorable day at Thebes.

The growing power of the Catalans under this daring leader, who had marched across “the black bridge” of Negroponte and had occupied two of the most important castles of the island, so greatly alarmed the Venetians that they persuaded King Frederick II of Sicily to curb the[124] restless ambition of his bastard son, lest a European coalition should be formed against the disturber of Greece. Above all else, the Republic was anxious that a Catalan navy should not be formed at the Piræus; and it was therefore stipulated, in 1319, that a plank was to be taken out of the hull of each of the Catalan vessels then lying in “the sea of Athens,” and that the ships’ tackle was to be taken up to “the Castle of Athens” and there deposited[90]. Thus shut out from naval enterprise, Fadrique now extended his dominions by land. The last Duke of Neopatras had died in 1318, and the best part of his duchy soon fell into the hands of the Catalans of Athens, who might claim that they represented the Burgundian dukes, and were therefore entitled to some voice in the government of a land which Guy II had once administered. At Neopatras, the seat of the extinct Greek dynasty of the Angeloi, Fadrique made his second capital, styling himself “Vicar-General of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras.” Thenceforth the Sicilian dukes of Athens assumed the double title which figures on their coins and in their documents; and, long after the Catalan duchies had passed away, the Kings of Aragon continued to bear it. This conquest made the Company master of practically all continental Greece; even the Venetian Marquess of Boudonitza paid an annual tribute of four horses to the Catalan vicar-general[91]. Still, however, the faithful family of Foucherolles held the two great fortresses of Argos and Nauplia for the exiled house of Brienne.

Young Walter had now grown up to man’s estate, and it seemed to him that the time had come to strike a blow for the recovery of his Athenian heritage. The Angevins of Naples supported him in their own interest as well as his; Pope John XXII bade the Archbishops of Patras and Corinth preach a crusade against the “schismatics, sons of perdition, and pupils of iniquity” who had seized his patrimony; but the subtle Venetians, who could have contributed more than Angevin aid or papal thunder to the success of his expedition, had just renewed their truce with the Catalans. From that moment his attempt was bound to fail.

Walter was, like his father, a rash general, while his opponents had not forgotten the art of strategy, to which they owed their success. At first the brilliant band of French knights and Tuscan men-at-arms which crossed over with him to Epeiros in 1331 carried all before it. But, when he arrived in the Catalan duchy, he found that the enemy was much too cautious to give his fine cavalry a chance of displaying its prowess on the plains of Bœotia. While the Catalans remained behind the walls of their fortresses, the invaders wasted their energies on the open country. Ere[125] long Walter’s small stock of money ran out, and his chances diminished with it. The Greeks rendered him no assistance. It is true that a correspondent of the historian Nikephoros Gregoras wrote that they were “suffering under extreme slavery,” and had “exchanged their ancient happiness for boorish ways,” while Guillaume Adam said that they were “worse than serfs”; but either their sufferings were insufficient to make them desire a change of masters, or their boorishness was such that it made them indifferent to the advantages of French culture. Early in the following year Walter took ship for Italy, never to return. Summoned by the Florentines to command their forces, he became tyrant of their city, whence he was expelled amidst universal rejoicings eleven years later. His name and arms may still be seen in the Bargello of Florence. Thirteen years afterwards he fell fighting, as Constable of France, against the English at the battle of Poitiers. His sister Isabelle, wife of Walter d’Enghien, succeeded to his estates and his pretensions; some of her descendants continued to bear, till 1381, the empty title of Duke of Athens, while the last fragments of the French duchy—the castles of Nauplia and Argos—remained in the possession of others of her line till, in 1388, they were purchased by Venice.

One irreparable loss was inflicted upon Greece by this expedition. In order to prevent the castle of St Omer at Thebes from falling into his hands, the Catalans destroyed that noble monument of Frankish rule. Loudly does the Chronicle of the Morea lament over the loss of a building more closely associated than any other with the past glories of the De la Roche. At the time of its destruction it belonged to Bartolommeo Ghisi, Great Constable of Achaia, one of the three great barons of Eubœa, son-in-law of Fadrique, and a man of literary and historic tastes, for the French version of the Chronicle, Le Livre de la Conqueste, was originally found in his Theban castle[92]. Had Fadrique still been head of the Company at the time, he would probably have saved his kinsman’s home; but for some unexplained reason he was no longer vicar-general, though he was still in Greece. Possibly, as he paid a visit to Sicily about this time, he may have been accused at the Sicilian Court of aiming at independent sovereignty in the duchies—an accusation to which his too successful career may have lent some colour. Though he never resumed the leadership of the Catalans he passed the rest of his life in Greece, where one of his sons was Count of Salona, and another became, later on, vicar-general of the duchies.

Soon after Walter’s futile expedition the Papacy made its peace with the “sons of perdition,” who came to be regarded as a possible defence[126] against the growing Turkish peril. Unfortunately, when the Catalans became respectable members of Christendom, they ceased to be formidable. Occasionally the old Adam broke out, as when the Count of Salona plied the trade of a pirate with the aid of the “unspeakable” Turk. But their Thessalian conquests were slipping away from the luxurious and drunken progeny of the hardy warriors who had smitten the Franks in the marshes of the Kephissos. Meanwhile, in distant Sicily, the shadowy Dukes of Athens and Neopatras came and went without ever seeing their Greek duchies. Duke William died in 1338; and his successors, John and Frederick of Randazzo, the picturesque town on the slopes of Etna, both succumbed to the plague a few years later—mere names in the history of Athens. But in 1355 the new Duke of Athens became also King of Sicily, under the title of Frederick III; and thus the two duchies, which had hitherto been the appanage of younger members of the royal family, were united with the Sicilian crown in the person of its holder.

Thenceforth, as is natural, the archives of Palermo contain far more frequent allusions to the duchies of Athens and Neopatras, whose inhabitants petition their royal duke for redress of grievances and for the appointment of suitable officials. But it is evident from the tenour of these documents that the Catalan state was rapidly declining. In addition to the Turkish peril and the menaces of the Venetians of Negroponte, the once united soldiers of fortune were divided into factions, which paralysed the central authority, and were aggravated by the prolonged absence of the vicar-general in Sicily. One party wished to place the duchies under the protection of Genoa, the natural enemy of Venice, while two bitter rivals, Roger de Lluria and Pedro de Pou, or Petrus de Puteo, the chief justice, an unjust judge and a grasping and ambitious official, both claimed the title of vicar of the absent vicar-general. Pou’s tyranny became so odious to Catalans and Greeks alike that the former rose against him and slew him and his chief adherents. The experiment of allowing the vicar-general as well as the duke to remain an absentee had thus proved to be a failure; Lluria, as the strongest man on the spot, was rewarded with the office of vicar-general as the sole means of keeping the duchies intact. So vulnerable did the Catalan state appear that the representatives of Walter of Brienne, the Baron of Argos and the Count of Conversano, renewed the attempt of their predecessor and, if we may believe the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea, actually occupied for a time the city of Athens.

The fast approaching Turkish danger ought to have united all the Latin states of the Levant against the common foe, to whom they all eventually succumbed. An attempt at union was made by Pope Gregory XI,[127] at the instance of the Archbishop of Neopatras; and a congress of the Christian rulers of the East was convened by him to meet at Thebes in 1373. We can well imagine how the ancient city, the capital of the Athenian duchy, was enlivened by the arrival of these more or less eminent persons, or their envoys; how the Archbishops of Neopatras and Naxos preached a new crusade against the infidel in the church of Our Lady; how every one applauded their excellent advice; and how personal jealousies marred the results of that, as of every subsequent congress on the Eastern question. Scarcely had the delegates separated, when Nerio Acciajuoli, Baron of Corinth, the boldest and astutest of them all, a worthy scion of that great Florentine family of bankers established for a generation in the principality of Achaia showed his appreciation of the value of unity by seizing Megara as the first step on the way to Athens. It is an interesting proof of the popularity of Catalan rule among those Greeks, at any rate, who held office under the Company, that one of the warmest defenders of Megara was a Greek notary, Demetrios Rendi, who afterwards rose to a position of importance at Athens. Such was the weakness of the once terrible Catalan state that the upstart Florentine’s attack remained unavenged. The fall of Catalan rule was now only a question of time.

The death of the royal Duke of Athens and Neopatras, Frederick III, in 1377, yet further injured his Greek duchies. The duke had bequeathed them to his young daughter Maria; but the succession was disputed by King Pedro IV of Aragon, brother-in-law of Frederick III, who appealed to the principle of the Salic law as laid down by that monarch’s predecessor, Frederick II. The Catalans of Attica were naturally disinclined to accept the government of a young girl at so critical a moment, when the Turk was at their gates. All the three archbishops and the principal barons and knights at once declared for the King of Aragon; but there was a minority in favour of Maria, headed by the Venetian Marquess of Boudonitza, who was eager to shake off the bond of vassalage to the vicar-general. The burgesses, anxious for security, supported the Aragonese party. At this moment, however, a third competitor appeared in the duchies in the shape of the Navarrese Company, which sought to repeat the exploits of the Catalans seventy years before. The researches of the learned historian of the Catalans and Navarrese, Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch, have thrown a flood of light upon this portion of the Athenian annals, and have explained much that was hitherto obscure. Employed originally by King Charles II of Navarre in his struggle with Charles V of France, the Navarrese mercenaries had found their occupation gone when those two rival sovereigns made peace in 1366. After[128] many vicissitudes they found congenial service, fourteen years later, under the banner of Jacques de Baux, Prince of Achaia and the last titular Emperor of Constantinople, who thought the moment had come to recover his ancestors’ dominions.

Accordingly, early in 1380, they directed their steps towards Attica, under the command of Mahiot de Coquerel, chamberlain of the King of Navarre, and Pedro de Superan, surnamed Bordo, or the bastard[93]. These experienced leaders found valuable assistance in the chiefs of the Sicilian party; in the knights of St John who sallied forth from the Morea to pillage the distracted duchy; in the Count of Conversano, who seems to have now made a second attempt to regain his ancestors’ heritage; and in the mutual jealousies of Thebes and Athens, fomented by the characteristic desire of the Athenians to be independent of Theban supremacy. In Bœotia, one place after another fell before the adventurers from Navarre; the noble castle of Livadia, which still preserves the memory of its Catalan masters, was betrayed by a Greek from Durazzo; and the capital was surrendered by two Spanish traitors. But the fortress of Salona defied their assaults; and the Akropolis, thanks to the bravery of its governor, Romeo de Bellarbe, and to the loyalty of the ever useful notary, Demetrios Rendi, baffled the machinations of a little band of malcontents. These severe checks broke the force of the soldiers of Navarre; their appearance in Greece had alarmed all the petty potentates of the Morea and the islands; and they withdrew to Bœotia, whence, some two years later, they were finally dislodged. Thence they proceeded to the Morea, where they carved out a principality, nominally for Jacques de Baux, really for themselves.

The people of Athens and Salona, whose loyalty to the crown of Aragon had saved the duchies, were well aware of the value of their services, and were resolved to have their reward. Both communities accordingly presented petitions to King Pedro; and these capitulations, drawn up in the Catalan language, have fortunately been preserved in the archives of Barcelona. Both the Athenian capitulations and those of Salona are largely concerned with personal questions—requests that this or that faithful person should receive privileges, lands, and honours, especially his Majesty’s most loyal subject, the Greek, Demetrios Rendi. From the date of the Frankish conquest no member of the conquered race had ever risen to such eminence as this serviceable clerk, who now obtained broad acres, goods, and serfs in both Attica and Bœotia. But[129] there were some clauses in the Athenian petition of a more general character. The Athenians begged the central authorities at Thebes for a continuance of their recently won independence, and for permission to bequeath their property and serfs to the Catholic Church. Both these prayers met with a blank refusal. King Pedro told the petitioners that he intended to treat the duchies as an indivisible whole, and that home-rule for Athens was quite out of the question. He also reminded them that the Catalans were only a small garrison in Greece, and that, if holy Church became possessed of their property, there would be no one left to defend the country. He also observed that there was no hardship in this, for the law of Athens was also that of his kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia. The soundness of his Majesty’s statesmanship was obvious in the peculiar conditions of the Catalan state; but this demand shows the influence of the Church, an influence rarely found in the history of Frankish Greece.

Of all the dukes who had held sway over Athens, Pedro IV was the first to express himself in enthusiastic terms about the Akropolis. The poetic monarch—himself a troubadour and a chronicler—described that sacred rock in eloquent language as “the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such as all the kings of Christendom together would imitate in vain.” He had doubtless heard from the lips of Bishop Boyl of Megara, who was chaplain in the chapel of St Bartholomew in the governor’s palace on the Akropolis, a description of the ancient buildings, then almost uninjured, which the bishop knew so well. Yet he considered twelve men-at-arms sufficient defence for the brightest jewel in his crown.

Pedro now did his best to repair the ravages of the civil war; he ordered a general amnesty for all the inhabitants of the duchies, and showered rewards on faithful cities and individuals. Livadia, always a privileged town in the Catalan period, not only received a confirmation of its rights, but became the seat of the Order of St George in Greece, an honour due to the fact that the head of the saint was then preserved there. Most important of all for the future history of Greece, the king granted exemption from taxes for two years to all Albanians who would come and settle in the depleted duchies. This was the beginning of that Albanian colonisation of Attica of which so many traces remain in the population and the topography of the present day.

But the Albanian colonists came too late to save the Catalan domination. From the heights of Akrocorinth and from the twin hills of Megara, Nerio Acciajuoli, the Florentine upstart, had been attentively watching the rapid dissolution of the Catalan power. He saw a land weakened by[130] civil war and foreign invasion; he knew that the titular duke was an absentee, engrossed with more important affairs; he found the ducal viceroys summoned away to Spain or Sicily, while the old families of the conquest were almost as extinct as the French whom they had displaced. He was a man of action, without scruples, without fear, and he resolved to strike. Hiring a galley from the Venetian arsenal at Candia, under pretext of sweeping Turkish corsairs from the two seas, he assembled a large force of cavalry, and sought an excuse for intervention. The pride of a noble dame was the occasion of the fall of Athens. Nerio asked the Dowager Countess of Salona to give her daughter’s hand to his brother-in-law, Pietro Saraceno, scion of a Sienese family long settled in Eubœa. The Countess, in whose veins flowed the Imperial blood of the Cantacuzenes, scornfully rejected the offer of the Florentine tradesman, and affianced her daughter to a Serbian princeling of Thessaly. Franks and Greeks at Salona were alike indignant at this alliance with a Slav; Nerio’s horsemen invaded the county and the rest of the duchy, while his galley went straight for the Piræus. In the absence of a guiding hand—for the vicar-general was away in Spain—the Catalans made no serious resistance; only the Akropolis and a few other castles held out. In vain the King of Aragon despatched Pedro de Pau to take the command; that gallant officer, the last Catalan governor of the noblest fortress in Europe, defended the “Castle of Athens” for more than a twelvemonth, till, on May 2, 1388, it too surrendered to the Florentine. In vain, on April 22, as a last resource, it had been offered to the Countess of Salona, if she could save it[94]. The new King of Aragon in vain promised the Sindici of Athens to visit “so famous a portion of his realm,” and announced that he was sending a fleet to “confound his enemies.” We know not whether the fleet ever arrived; if it did, it was unsuccessful. The sovereigns of Aragon might gratify their vanity by appointing a titular vicar-general, or even a duke, of the duchies whose names they still included in their titles; once, indeed, the news of an expedition aroused alarm at Athens. But it proved to be merely the usual tall talk of the Catalans; the flag of Aragon never waved again from the ramparts of the Akropolis; the duchy passed to the Acciajuoli.

The Catalan Grand Company disappeared from the face of Attica as rapidly as rain from its light soil. Like their Burgundian predecessors, these soldiers of fortune conquered but struck no root in the land. Some took ship for Sicily; some, like Ballester, the last Catalan Archbishop of Athens, are heard of in Cataluña; while others, among them the two branches of the Fadrique family, lingered on for a time,[131] the one at Salona, the other at Ægina, where we find their connections, the Catalan family of Caopena, ruling till 1451—a fact which explains the boast of a much later Catalan writer, Peña y Farel, that his countrymen maintained their “ancient splendour” in Greece till the middle of the fifteenth century. Thither the Catalans conveyed the head of St George, and thence it was removed to the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, when the Venetians succeeded the Caopena as masters of Ægina. Even to-day a noble family in Zante bears the name of Katalianos; and in the island of Santorin are three families of Spanish origin—those of Da Corogna, De Cigalla, and Delenda, to which last the recent Catholic Archbishop of Athens belonged. Besides the castles of Salona, Livadia, and Lamia, and the row of towers between Livadia and Thebes, the Catalans have left a memorial of their stay in Greece in the curious fresco of the Virgin and Child, now in the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, which came from the church of the Prophet Elias near the gate of the Agora. Unlike their predecessors, they minted no coins; unlike them, they had no ducal court in their midst to stimulate luxury and refinement. Yet even in the Athens of the Catalans there was some culture. A diligent Athenian priest copied medical works; and we hear of the libraries belonging to the Catholic bishops of Salona and Megara.

The Greeks long remembered with terror the Catalan domination. A Greek girl, in a mediæval ballad, prays that her seducer may “fall into the hands of the Catalans”; even a generation ago the name of Catalan was used as a term of reproach in Attica and in Eubœa, in Akarnania, Messenia, Lakonia, and at Tripolitsa. Yet, as we have seen, the Greeks did not raise a finger to assist a French restoration when they had the chance, while there are several instances of Greeks rendering valuable aid to the Catalans against the men of Navarre. Harsher they may have been than the French, but they probably gained their bad name before they settled down in Attica, and became more staid and more tolerant as they became respectable. In our own time they have found admirers and apologists among their own countrymen, who are justly proud of the fact that the most famous city in the world was for two generations governed by the sons of Cataluña. And in the history of Athens, where nothing can lack interest, they, too, are entitled to a place.

AUTHORITIES

1. I Libri Commemoriali. Vols. I-VI. Ed. by R. Predelli. Venice: Reale Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria, 1876-1903.

2. Libro de las Fechos et Conquistas del Principado de la Morea. Ed. by A. Morel-Fatio. Geneva, 1885.

3. La Espedición y Dominación de los Catalanes en Oriente; Los Navarros en Grecia. By D. Antonio Rubió y Lluch. Barcelona, 1887.

4. Sul Dominio dei Ducati di Atene e Neopatria dei Re di Sicilia. By F. Guardione. Palermo, 1895.

6. Οἱ Καταλάνοι ἐν τῇ Ἄνατολῇ (The Catalans in the East). By E. I. Stamatiades. Athens, 1869.

7. Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum. Ed. G. M. Thomas and R. Predelli. Venice, 1880-1899.

10. Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (Documents relating to the Mediæval History of Athens). Ed. Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1906.

APPENDIX
THE FRANKISH INSCRIPTION AT KARDITZA

To students of Frankish Greece the church at Karditza in Bœotia is one of the most interesting in the country, because it contains an inscription referring to an important Frankish personage, Antoine le Flamenc, and dating from the fatal year 1311, which witnessed the overthrow of the Frankish Duchy of Athens in the swamps of the Bœotian Kephissos. Buchon had twice[95] published this inscription; but, as I was anxious to know in what condition it was and to have an exact facsimile of it, I asked Mr D. Steel, the manager of the Lake Copais Company, to have a fresh copy taken. Mr Steel kindly sent his Greek draughtsman to copy the inscription, and at the same time visited the church and took the photographs now published (Plate I, Figs. 1 and 2). Subsequently, in 1912, I visited the church with him and saw the inscription, which is painted on the plaster of the wall. Mr Steel informed me that, when he first saw the church about 1880, “the extension of the west end,” clearly visible in the photographs, “had not yet been made, while at that end there existed a sort of verandah set on pieces of ancient columns.”

On comparing the present copy (Text-fig. 1) with Buchon’s versions, it will be noticed that not only are there several differences of spelling, but that the French scholar omitted one important addition to the year[133] at the end of the inscription—the indiction, which is rightly given as the 9th. This is a further proof that the date of the inscription is 1311, which corresponds with both the year 6819 and the 9th indiction. As the battle of the Kephissos was fought on March 15th of that year, and as Antoine le Flamenc is known to have survived the terrible carnage of that day, we may surmise, as I have elsewhere suggested, that the work commemorated in the inscription was “in pursuance of a vow made before he went into action.”

Antoine le Flamenc, whose ancestors had settled in the Holy Land, is several times mentioned during the first decade of the fourteenth century. The Livre de la Conqueste[96] states that Guy II, Duke of Athens, appointed him his “bailie and lieutenant” in Thessaly in 1303, and describes him as un des plus sages hommes de Romanie and le plus sage dou duchame. The same passage alludes also to Jean le Flamenc, his son, as receiving a post in Thessaly. Doubtless their experience of the Wallachs, who then, as now, wandered as winter approached from the Thessalian to the Bœotian Karditza, would specially commend these two distinguished men for such duties. Two years later we find Antoine as one of the witnesses of a deed[97] regarding the property of the Duchess of Athens, just come of age at Thebes, in her father’s land of Hainault. On April 2nd, 1309, both Antoine and Jean were present at the engagement of the then widowed Duchess with Charles of Taranto at Thebes[98]. On the 23rd of a certain month (? September) of 1308, a Venetian document[99] alludes to the intention of Fiammengo Antonio, together with Guy II, Rocaforte, and Bonifacio da Verona, to tentar l’impresa di Negroponte—in other words, to make an attempt upon that Venetian colony. On August 11th, 1309,[134] another Venetian letter, this time addressed to Egregio militi Antonio Fiammengo, informs us that he had rented the property of Pietro Correr, an absent canon of Thebes, and bids him not to consign the rents to any but the rightful person. A second letter of the same day, addressed to the bailie and councillors of Negroponte, mentions him again in connection with this affair[100]. Finally, the list of Greek dignitaries, with whom the Republic was in correspondence, originally drawn up before the battle of the Kephissos and then corrected in 1313, mentions Ser Antonius Flamengo miles[101]. As his name is not followed by the word decessit or mortuus, added to those who had fallen in the battle, he was one of the very few survivors.

To these certain facts Hopf[102] added the assumption, based on no evidence, that he was the “Frank settled in the East,” whom Isabella, Marchioness of Boudonitza, married, and who, in 1286, disputed the succession to that castle with her cousin.

ΑΝΗΓΕΡΘΗ Ο ΘΥΙΩΣ ΚΕ ΠΝΣΕΠΤΟΣ
ΝΑΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΙΠΟΥ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΜ.Τ
ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΥ ΔΗΑ ΣΙΝΕΡΓΙΑΣ ΚΕ
ΠΟΘΟΥ ΠΟΛΛΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΘΕΩΣΕΒΕΣΤΑΤΟΥ
ΚΑΒΑΛΑΡΙ ΜΙΣΕΡ ΑΝΤΟΝΙ
ΛΕ ΦΛΑΜΑ
ΟΔΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΗΛΙΦΕΝ ΠΟΛΩΝ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΩΝ
ΟΔΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΕΥΡΕΝ ΗΣΤΟΡΗΑ ΑΥΤΑ
ΠΑΡΑ ΓΕΡΜΑΝΟΥ ΙΕΡΟΜΟΝΑΧΟΥ
ΚΕ ΚΑΘΕΓΟΥΜΕΝΟΥ
ΚΑΙ ΝΙΚΟΔΕΜΟΥ ΙΕΡΟΜΟΝΑΧΟΥ
ΤΟΝ ΑΥΤΑΔΕΛΦΩΝ ΤΟΥΣ
ΑΝΑΚΕΝΕΣΑΝΤΑΣ ΤΟΝ
ΗΚΟΝ ΤΟΥΤΟΝ.
+ ΕΤΙ. ϛωΙΘ. +

5. FLORENTINE ATHENS

The history of mediæval Athens is full of surprises. A Burgundian nobleman founding a dynasty in the ancient home of heroes and philosophers; a roving band of mercenaries from the westernmost peninsula of Europe destroying in a single day the brilliant French civilisation of a century; a Florentine upstart, armed with the modern weapons of finance, receiving the keys of the Akropolis from a gallant and chivalrous soldier of Spain—such are the tableaux which inaugurate the three epochs of her Frankish annals. In an earlier paper in the Quarterly Review (January 1907) we dealt with the French and the Catalan periods; we now propose to trace the third and last phase of Latin rule over the most famous of Greek cities.

When, in the spring of 1388, Nerio Acciajuoli found himself master of “the Castle of Setines,” as the Franks called the Akropolis, his first care was to conciliate the Greeks, who formed by far the largest part of his subjects, and who may have aided him to conquer the Athenian duchy. For the first time since the day, nearly two centuries before, when Akominatos had fled from his beloved cathedral to exile at Keos, a Greek Metropolitan of Athens was allowed to reside in his see, not, indeed, on the sacred rock itself, but beneath the shadow of the Areopagos. We may be sure that this remarkable concession was prompted, not by sentiment, but by policy, though the policy was perhaps mistaken. The Greek hierarchy has in all ages been distinguished for its political character; and the presence of a high Greek ecclesiastic at Athens at once provided his fellow-countrymen with a national leader against the rulers, whom they distrusted as foreigners and he hated as schismatics. He was ready to call in the aid of the Turks against his fellow-Christians, just as in modern Macedonia a Greek bishop abhorred the followers of the Bulgarian Exarch far more than those of the Prophet. Thus early in Florentine Athens were sown the seeds of the Turkish domination; thus, in the words of the Holy Synod, “the Athenian Church seemed to have recovered its ancient happiness such as it had enjoyed before the barbarian conquest[103].”

Nor was it the Church alone which profited by the change of dynasty. Greek for the first time became the official language of the Government; Nerio and his accomplished daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, used it in their public documents; the Countess, the most masterful woman of the Latin Orient, proudly signed herself, in the cinnabar ink of[136] Byzantium, “Empress of the Romans”; even Florentines settled at Athens assumed the Greek translation of their surnames. Thus, a branch of the famous Medici family was transplanted to Athens, became completely Hellenised under the name of Iatros, and has left behind it a progeny which scarcely conceals, beneath that of Iatropoulos, its connection with the mediæval rulers of Florence. There is even evidence that the “elders” of the Greek community were allowed a share in the municipal government of Florentine, no less than in that of Turkish, Athens.

Hitherto the career of Nerio Acciajuoli had been one of unbroken success. His star had guided him from Florence to Akrocorinth, and from Akrocorinth to the Akropolis; his two daughters, one famed as the most beautiful, the other as the most talented woman of her time, were married to the chief Greek and to the leading Latin potentate of Greece—to Theodore Palaiologos, Despot of Mistra, and to Carlo Tocco, the Neapolitan noble who ruled over the County Palatine of Cephalonia. These alliances seemed to guard him against every foe. He was now destined, however, to experience one of those sudden turns of fortune which were peculiarly characteristic of Frankish Greece. He was desirous of rounding off his dominions by the acquisition of the castles of Nauplia and Argos, which had been appendages of the French Duchy of Athens, but which, during the Catalan period, had remained loyal to the family of Brienne and to its heirs, the house of Enghien. In 1388, Marie d’Enghien, the Lady of Argos, left a young and helpless widow, had transferred her Argive estates to Venice, which thus began its long domination over the ancient kingdom of Agamemnon. But, before the Venetian commissioner had had time to take possession, Nerio had instigated his son-in-law, the Despot of Mistra, to seize Argos by a coup de main. For this act of treachery he paid dearly. It was not merely that the indignant Republic broke off all commercial relations between her colonies and Athens, but she also availed herself of the Navarrese Company, which was now established in the Morea, as the fitting instrument of her revenge. The Navarrese commander accordingly invited Nerio to a personal conference on the question of Argos; and the shrewd Florentine, with a childlike simplicity remarkable in one who had lived so many years in the Levant, accepted the invitation, and deliberately placed himself in the power of his enemies. The opportunity was too good to be lost; the law of nations was mere waste-paper to the men of Navarre; Nerio was arrested and imprisoned in a Peloponnesian prison. At once the whole Acciajuoli clan set to work to obtain the release of their distinguished relative; the Archbishop of Florence[137] implored the intervention of the Pope; the Florentine Government offered the most liberal terms to Venice; a message was despatched to Amedeo of Savoy; most efficacious of all, the aid of Genoa was invoked on behalf of one whose daughter was a Genoese citizen. Nerio was released; but his ransom was disastrous to Athens. In order to raise the requisite amount, he stripped the silver plates off the doors of the Parthenon and seized the gold, silver and precious stones which the piety of many generations had given to that venerable cathedral.

Nerio was once more free, but he was not long allowed to remain undisturbed in his palace on the Akropolis. The Sicilian royal family now revived its claims to the Athenian duchy, and even nominated a phantom vicar-general[104]; and, what was far more serious, the Turks, under the redoubtable Evrenos Beg, descended upon Attica. The overthrow of the Serbian Empire on the fatal field of Kossovo had now removed the last barrier between Greece and her future masters; and Bayezid, “the Thunderbolt,” fell upon that unprotected land. The blow struck Nerio’s neighbour, the Dowager Countess of Salona, the proud dame who had so scornfully rejected his suit nine years before. Ecclesiastical treachery and corruption sealed the fate of that ancient fief of the Stromoncourts, the Deslaurs, and the Fadriques, amid tragic surroundings, which a modern Greek drama has endeavoured to depict[105]. The Dowager Countess had allowed her paramour, a priest, to govern in her name; and this petty tyrant had abused his power to wring money from the shepherds of Parnassos and to debauch the damsels of Delphi by his demoniacal incantations in the classic home of the supernatural. At last he cast his eyes on the fair daughter and full money-bags of the Greek bishop; deprived of his child and fearing for his gold, the bishop roused his flock against the monster and begged the Sultan to occupy a land so well adapted for his Majesty’s favourite pastimes of hunting and riding as is the plain at the foot of Parnassos. The Turks accepted the invitation; the priest shut himself up in the noble castle, slew the bishop’s daughter, and prepared to fight. But there was treachery among the garrison; a man of Salona murdered the tyrant and offered his head to the Sultan; and the Dowager Countess and her daughter in vain endeavoured to appease the conqueror with gifts. Bayezid sent the young Countess to his harem; her mother he handed over to the insults of his soldiery, her land he assigned to one of his lieutenants. Her memory still clings to the “pomegranate” cliff (ροιά) at Salona, whence,[138] according to the local legend, repeated to the author on the spot, “the princess” was thrown.

Nerio feared for his own dominions, whence the Greek Metropolitan had fled—so it was alleged—to the Turkish camp, and had promised the infidels the treasures of the Athenian Church in return for their aid. For the moment, however, the offer of tribute saved the Athenian duchy; but its ruler hastened to implore the aid of the Pope and of King Ladislaus of Naples against the enemies of Christendom, and at the same time sought formal recognition of his usurpation from that monarch, at whose predecessors’ court the fortunes of his family had originated, and who still pretended to be the suzerain of Achaia, and therefore of its theoretical dependency, Athens. Ladislaus, nothing loth, in 1394 rewarded the self-seeking Florentine for having recovered the Duchy of Athens “from certain of His Majesty’s rivals,” with the title of duke, with remainder—as Nerio had no legitimate sons—to his brother Donato and the latter’s heirs. Cardinal Angelo Acciajuoli, another brother, was to invest the new duke with a golden ring; and it was expressly provided that Athens should cease to be a vassal state of Achaia, but should thenceforth own no overlord save the King of Naples. The news that one of their clan had obtained the glorious title of Duke of Athens filled the Acciajuoli with pride—such was the fascination which the name of that city exercised in Italy. Boccaccio, half a century before, had familiarised his countrymen with a title which Walter of Brienne, the tyrant of Florence, had borne as of right, and which, as applied to Nerio Acciajuoli, was no empty flourish of the herald’s college.

The first Florentine Duke of Athens did not, however, long survive the realisation of his ambition. On September 25 of the same year he died, laden with honours, the type of a successful statesman. But, as he lay on his sick-bed at Corinth, the dying man seems to have perceived that he had founded his fortunes on the sand. Pope and King might give him honours and promises; they could not render effective aid against the Turks. It was under the shadow of this coming danger that Nerio drew up his remarkable will.

His first care was for the Parthenon, Our Lady of Athens, in which he directed that his body should be laid to rest. He ordered its doors to be replated with silver, its stolen treasures to be bought up and restored to it; he provided that, besides the twelve canons of the cathedral, there should be twenty priests to say masses for the repose of his soul; and he bequeathed to the Athenian minster, for their support and for the maintenance of its noble fabric, the city of Athens, with its dependencies, and all the brood-mares of his valuable stud. Seldom has a church[139] received such a remarkable endowment; the Cathedral of Monaco, built out of the earnings of a gaming-table, is perhaps the closest parallel to the Parthenon maintained by the profits of a stud-farm. Nerio made his favourite daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, his principal heiress; to her he bequeathed his castles of Megara, Sikyon, and Corinth, while to his natural son, Antonio, he left the government of Thebes, Livadia, and all beyond it. To the bastard’s mother, Maria Rendi, daughter of the ever-serviceable Greek notary who had been so prominent in the last years of the Catalan domination, and had retained his position under the new dynasty, her lover granted the full franchise, with the right to retain all her property, including, perhaps, the spot between Athens and the Piræus which still preserves the name of her family. Finally, he recommended his land to the care of the Venetian Republic, which he begged to protect his heiress and to carry out his dispositions for the benefit of Our Lady of Athens.

Donato Acciajuoli made no claim to succeed his brother in the Duchy of Athens. He was Gonfaloniere of Florence and Senator of Rome; and he preferred those safe and dignified positions in Italy to the glamour of a ducal coronet in Greece, in spite of the natural desire of the family that one of their name should continue to take his title from Athens[106]. But it was obvious that a conflict would arise between the sons-in-law of the late duke, for Nerio had practically disinherited his elder daughter in favour of her younger but abler sister. Carlo Tocco of Cephalonia at once demanded the places bequeathed to his wife, occupied Megara and Corinth, and imprisoned the terrified executors in his island till they had signed a document stating that he had carried out the terms of his father-in-law’s will. Theodore Palaiologos, who contended that Corinth had always been intended to be his after Nerio’s death, besieged it with a large force, till Tocco, calling in a still larger Turkish army, drove his brother-in-law from the Isthmus[107].

Meanwhile, the Greeks of Athens had followed the same fatal policy of invoking the common enemy as arbiter of their affairs. It was not to be expected that the Greek race, which had of late recovered its national consciousness, and which had ever remained deeply attached to its religion, would quietly acquiesce in the extraordinary arrangement by which the city of Athens was made the property of the Catholic cathedral. The professional jealousy and the odium theologicum of the two great ecclesiastics, Makarios, the Greek Metropolitan, and Ludovico da Prato, the Latin archbishop, envenomed the feelings of the people.[140] The Greek divine summoned Timourtash, the Turkish commander, to rid Athens of the filioque clause; and his strange ally occupied the lower town. The castle, however, was bravely defended by Matteo de Montona, one of the late duke’s executors, who despatched a messenger in hot haste to the Venetian colony of Negroponte, offering to hand over Athens to the Republic if the governor would promise in her name to respect the ancient franchises and customs of the Athenians. The bailie of Negroponte agreed, subject to the approval of the home Government, and sent a force which dispersed the Turks, and, at the close of 1394, for the first time in history, hoisted the lion-banner of the Evangelist on the ancient castle of Athens.

The Republic decided, after mature consideration, to accept the offer of the Athenian commander. No sentimental argument, no classical memories, weighed with the sternly practical statesmen of the lagoons. The romantic King of Aragon had waxed enthusiastic over the glories of the Akropolis; and sixty years later the greatest of Turkish Sultans contemplated his conquest with admiration. But the sole reason which decided the Venetian Government to annex Athens was its proximity to the Venetian colonies, and the consequent danger which might ensue to them if it fell into Turkish or other hands. Thus Venice took over the Akropolis in 1395, not because it was a priceless monument, but because it was a strong fortress; she saved the Athenians, not, as Cæsar had done, for the sake of their ancestors, but for that of her own colonies, “the pupil of her eye.” From the financial point of view, indeed, Athens could not have been a valuable asset. The Venetians confessed that they did not know what its revenues and expenses were; and, pending a detailed report from their governor, they ordered that only eight priests should serve “in the Church of St Mary of Athens”—an act of economy due to the fact that some of Nerio’s famous brood-mares had been stolen and the endowment of the cathedral consequently diminished. On such accidents did the maintenance of the Parthenon depend in the Middle Ages.

We are fortunately in a better position than was the Venetian Government to judge of the contemporary state of Athens. At the very time when its fate was under discussion an Italian notary spent two days in that city; and his diary is the first account which any traveller has left us, from personal observation, of its condition during the Frankish period[108]. “The city,” he says, “which nestles at the foot of the castle hill, contains about a thousand hearths” but not a single inn, so that, like[141] the archæologist in some country towns of modern Greece, he had to seek the hospitality of the clergy. He describes “the great hall” of the castle (the Propylaia), with its thirteen columns, and tells how the churchwardens personally conducted him over “the Church of St Mary,” which had sixty columns without and eighty within. On one of the latter he was shown the cross made by Dionysios the Areopagite at the moment of the earthquake which attended our Lord’s passion; four others, which surrounded the high altar, were of jasper and supported a dome, while the doors came—so he was told—from Troy. The pious Capuan was then taken to see the relics of the Athenian cathedral—the figure of the Virgin painted by St Luke, the head of St Makarios, a bone of St Denys of France, an arm of St Justin, and a copy of the Gospels written by the hand of St Elena—relics which the wife of King Pedro IV of Aragon had in vain begged the last Catalan archbishop to send her fifteen years before[109].

He saw, too, in a cleft of the wall, the light which never fails, and outside, beyond the castle ramparts, the two pillars of the choragic monument of Thrasyllos, between which there used to be “a certain idol” in an iron-bound niche, gifted with the strange power of drowning hostile ships as soon as they appeared on the horizon—an allusion to the story of the Gorgon’s head, mentioned by Pausanias, which we find in later mediæval accounts of Athens. In the city below he noticed numbers of fallen columns and fragments of marble; he alludes to the Stadion; and he visited the “house of Hadrian,” as the temple of Olympian Zeus was popularly called. He completed his round by a pilgrimage to the so-called “Study of Aristotle, whence scholars drank to obtain wisdom”—the aqueduct, whose marble beams, commemorating the completion of Hadrian’s work by Antoninus Pius, were then to be seen at the foot of Lykabettos, and, after serving in Turkish times as the lintel of the Boubounistra gate, now lie, half buried by vegetation, in the palace garden. But the fear of the prowling Turks and the feud between Nerio’s two sons-in-law rendered travelling in Attica difficult; the notary traversed the Sacred Way in fear of his life, and was not sorry to find himself in the castle of Corinth, though the houses in that city were few and mean, and the total population did not exceed fifty families.

The Venetian Government next arranged for the future administration of its new colony. The governor of Athens was styled podestà and captain, and was appointed for the usual term of two years at an annual salary of £70, out of which he had to keep a notary, an assistant, four[142] servants, two grooms, and four horses. Four months elapsed before a noble was found ambitious of residing in Athens on these terms, and of facing the difficult situation there. Attica was so poor that he had to ask his Government for a loan; the Turkish corsairs infested the coast; the Greek Metropolitan, though now under lock and key at Venice, still found means of communicating with his former allies. Turkish writers even boast—and a recently published document confirms their statement—that their army captured “the city of the sages” in 1397; and an Athenian dirge represented Athens mourning the enslavement of the husbandmen of her suburb of Sepolia, who will no longer be able to till the fields of Patesia.

The Turkish invaders came and went; but another and more obstinate enemy ever watched the little Venetian garrison on the Akropolis. The bastard Antonio Acciajuoli fretted within the walls of his Theban domain, and was resolved to conquer Athens, as his father had done before him. In vain did Venice, alarmed by the reports of her successive governors, raise the numbers of the garrison to fifty-six men; in vain did she order money to be spent on the defences of the castle; in vain did she attempt to pacify the discontented Athenians, who naturally preferred the rule of an Acciajuoli who was half a Greek to that of a Venetian noble. By the middle of 1402 Antonio was master of the lower city; it seemed that, unless relief came at once, he would plant his banner on the Akropolis. The Senate, at this news, ordered the bailie of Negroponte to offer a reward for the body of the bold bastard, alive or dead, to lay Thebes in ashes, and to save the castle of Athens. That obedient official set out at the head of six thousand men to execute the second of these injunctions, only to fall into an ambush which his cunning enemy had laid in the pass of Anephorites. Venice, now alarmed for the safety of her most valuable colony far more than for that of Athens, hastily sent commissioners to make peace. But Antonio calmly continued the siege of the Akropolis, till at last, seventeen months after his first appearance before the city, when the garrison had eaten the last horse, and had been reduced to devour the plants which grew on the castle rock, its gallant defenders, Vitturi and Montona, surrendered with the honours of war. The half-caste adventurer had beaten the great Republic.

Venice attempted to recover by diplomacy what she had lost by arms. She possessed in Pietro Zeno, the baron of Andros, a diplomatist of unrivalled experience in the tortuous politics of the Levant. Both he and Antonio were well aware that the fate of Athens depended upon the Sultan; and to his Court they both repaired, armed with those pecuniary arguments which have usually proved convincing to Turkish ministers.[143] The diplomatic duel was lengthy; but at last the Venetian gained one of those paper victories so dear to ambassadors and so worthless to practical men. The Sultan promised to see that Athens was restored to the Republic, but he took no steps to perform his promise; while Antonio, backed by the Acciajuoli influence in Italy, by the Pope, and the King of Naples, held his ground. Venice wisely resigned herself to the loss of a colony which it would have been expensive to recover. To save appearances, Antonio was induced to become her vassal for “the land, castle, and place of Athens, in modern times called Sythines[110],” sending every year, in token of his homage, a silk pallium from the Theban manufactories to the church of St Mark—a condition which he was most remiss in fulfilling.

The reign of Antonio Acciajuoli—the longest in the history of Athens save that of the recent King of the Hellenes—was a period of prosperity and comparative tranquillity for that city. While all around him principalities and powers were shaken to their foundations; while that ancient warden of the northern March of Athens, the Marquisate of Boudonitza, was swept away for ever; while Turkish armies invaded the Morea, and annexed the Albanian capital to the Sultan’s empire; while the principality of Achaia disappeared from the map in the throes of a tardy Greek revival, the statesmanlike ruler of Athens skilfully guided the policy of his duchy. At times even his experienced diplomacy failed to avert the horrors of a Turkish raid; on one occasion he was forced to join, as a Turkish vassal, in an invasion of the Morea. But, as a rule, the dreaded Mussulmans spared this half-Oriental, who was a past-master in the art of managing the Sultan’s ministers. From the former masters of Athens, the Catalans and the Venetians, he had nothing to fear. Once, indeed, he received news that Alfonso V of Aragon, who never forgot to sign himself “Duke of Athens and Neopatras,” intended to put one of his Catalan subjects into possession of those duchies. But Venice reassured him with a shrewd remark that the Catalans usually made much ado about nothing. On her part the Republic was friendly to the man who had supplanted her. She gave Antonio permission, in case of danger, to send the valuable Acciajuoli stud—for, like his father, he was a good judge of horse-flesh—to the island of Eubœa; and she ordered her bailie to “observe the ancient commercial treaties between the duchy and the island, which he would find in the chancery of Negroponte.” But when he sought to lay the foundations of a navy, and strove to prevent the fruitful island of Ægina, then the property of the Catalan family of Caopena, from falling into the hands of Venice, he met[144] with a severe rebuff. To the Florentine Duke of Athens Ægina, as a Venetian colony, might well seem, as it had seemed to Aristotle, the “eyesore of the Piræus.”

With his family’s old home, Florence, Antonio maintained the closest relations. In 1422 a Florentine ambassador arrived in Athens with instructions to confer the freedom of the great Tuscan Commonwealth upon the Duke; to inform him that Florence, having now, by the destruction of Pisa and the purchase of Leghorn, become a maritime power, intended to embark in the Levant trade; and to ask him, therefore, for the benefit of the most-favoured-nation clause. Antonio gladly made all Florentine ships free of his harbours, and reduced the usual customs dues in favour of all Florentine merchants throughout his dominions. Visitors from Tuscany, when they landed at Riva d’Ostia, on the Gulf of Corinth, must, indeed, have felt themselves in the land of a friendly prince, though his Court on the Akropolis presented a curious mixture of the Greek and the Florentine elements. Half a Greek himself, Antonio chose both his wives from that race—the first the beautiful daughter of a Greek priest, to whom he had lost his heart in the mazes of a wedding-dance at Thebes; the second an heiress of the great Messenian family of Melissenos, whose bees and bells are not the least picturesque escutcheon in the heraldry of mediæval Greece. As he had no children, numbers of the Acciajuoli clan came to Athens with an eye to the ducal coronet, which had conferred such lustre upon the steel-workers and bankers of Brescia and Florence. One cousin settled down at the castle of Sykaminon, near Oropos, which had belonged to the Knights of the Hospital, and served his kinsman as an ambassador; another became bishop of Cephalonia, the island of that great lady, the Countess Francesca, whom Froissart describes as a mediæval Penelope, whose maids of honour made silken coverings so fine that there was none like them, and whose splendid hospitality delighted the French nobles on their way home from a Turkish prison after the battle of Nikopolis. Two other Acciajuoli were archbishops of Thebes; and towards the close of Antonio’s long reign a second generation of the family had grown up in Greece. With such names as Acciajuoli, Medici, Pitti, and Machiavelli at the Athenian Court, Attica had, indeed, become a Florentine colony.

Antonio and his Florentine relatives must have led a merry life in their delectable duchy. In the family correspondence we find allusions to hawking and partridge shooting; and the ducal stable provided good mounts for the young Italians who scoured the plains of Attica and Bœotia in quest of game. The cultured Florentines were delighted with Athens and the Akropolis. “You have never seen,” wrote Nicolò[145] Machiavelli to one of his cousins, “a fairer land nor yet a fairer fortress than this.” It was there, in the venerable Propylaia, that Antonio had fixed his ducal residence. No great alterations were required to convert the classic work of Mnesikles into a Florentine palace. All that the Acciajuoli seem to have done was to cut the two vestibules in two so as to make four rooms, to fill up the spaces between the pillars with walls—removed so recently as 1835—and to add a second storey, the joist-sockets of which are still visible, to both that building and the Pinakotheke, which either then, or in the Turkish times, was crowned with battlements.

To the Florentine dukes is also usually ascribed the construction of the square “Frankish tower,” which stood opposite the Temple of Nike Apteros till it was pulled down in 1874 by one of those acts of pedantic barbarism which considers one period of history alone worthy of study, instead of regarding every historical monument as a precious landmark in the evolution of a nation. We can well believe that the Florentine watchman from the projecting turret daily swept sea and land in all directions, save where the massive cathedral of Our Lady shut out part of Hymettos from his view; and at night the beacon-fire kindled on the summit warned Akrocorinth of the approach of Turkish horsemen or rakish-looking galleys. Nor did the Italians limit their activity as builders to the castle-crag alone. Chalkokondyles expressly says that Antonio’s long and peaceful administration enabled him to beautify the city. There is evidence that the dukes possessed a beautiful villa at the spring of Kallirrhoe, and that close by they were wont to pray in the church of St Mary’s-on-the-rock, once a temple of Triptolemos. More than two centuries later a French ambassador heard mass in this church; and one of his companions found the lion rampant and the three lilies of the Florentine bankers, which visitors to the famous Certosa know so well, still guarding—auspicium melioris ævi—the entrance of the Turkish bazaar[111].

Of literary culture there are some few traces in Florentine Athens. It was in Antonio’s reign that Athens gave birth to her last historian, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, the Herodotos of mediæval Greece, who told the story of the new Persian invasion, and to his brother Demetrios, who did so much to diffuse Greek learning in Italy. Another of Antonio’s subjects is known to scholars as a copyist of manuscripts at Siena; and it is obvious that the two Italian Courts of Athens and Joannina were regarded as places where professional men might find openings. A young Italian writes from Arezzo to ask if either Antonio Acciajuoli or Carlo[146] Tocco could give him a chair of jurisprudence, logic, medicine, or natural or moral philosophy[112]. Unfortunately, we are not told whether the modest request of this universal genius was granted or not.

Thus, for a long period, the Athenian duchy enjoyed peace and prosperity, broken only by a terrible visitation of the plague and further diminished by emigration—that scourge of modern Greece. But the modern Greeks have not the twin institutions, serfdom and slavery, on which mediæval society rested. Even the enlightened Countess of Cephalonia presented a young female slave to one of her cousins, with full power to sell or otherwise dispose of her as he pleased. Antonio did all in his power to retain the useful Albanians, who had entered his dominions in large numbers after the capture of the Despotat of Epeiros by Carlo Tocco in 1418, and thus rendered a service to Attica, the results of which are felt to this present hour. It is to the wise policy of her last Aragonese and her second Florentine duke that that Albanian colonisation is due which has given “the thin soil” of Attica numbers of sturdy cultivators, who still speak Albanian as well as Greek, and still preserve in such village names as Spata, Liosia, and Liopesi, the memory of the proud Albanian chieftains of Epeiros. Greek influence, too, grew steadily under a dynasty which was now half Hellenised. The notary and chancellor of the city continued to be a Greek; and a Greek archon was, for the first time since the Frankish conquest, to play a leading part in Athenian politics[113].

When one morning in 1435, after a reign of thirty-two years, Antonio’s attendants found him dead in his bed, a Greek as well as an Italian party disputed the succession. The Italian candidate, young Nerio, eldest son of Franco Acciajuoli, baron of Sykaminon, whom the late Duke had adopted as his heir, occupied the city. But the Duchess Maria Melissene and her kinsman, Chalkokondyles, father of the historian and the leading man of Athens, held the castle. Well aware, however, that the Sultan was the real master of the situation, the Greek archon set out for the Turkish Court to obtain Murad II’s consent to this act of usurpation. The Sultan scornfully rejected the bribes of the Athenian diplomatist, threw him into prison, and sent his redoubtable captain, Tourakhan, to occupy Thebes. Even then the Greek Duchess did not abandon all hope of securing Athens for the national cause. Through the historian Phrantzes she made an arrangement with Constantine Palaiologos, the future Emperor, then one of the Despots of[147] the Morea, and the foremost champion of Hellenism, that he should become Duke of Athens, and that she should receive compensation near her old home in the Peloponnese. This scheme would have united nearly all Greece under the Imperial family; but it was doomed to failure. There was a section of Greeks at Athens hostile to Chalkokondyles—for party spirit has always characterised Greek public life—and this section joined the Florentine party, decoyed the Duchess out of the Akropolis, and proclaimed Nerio II. The marriage of the new Duke with the Dowager Duchess[114] and the banishment of the family of Chalkokondyles secured the internal peace of the distracted city; and the Sultan was well content to allow a Florentine princeling to retain the phantom of power so long as he paid his tribute with regularity.

The weak and effeminate Nerio II was exactly suited for the part of a Turkish puppet. But, like many feeble rulers, the “lord of Athens and Thebes” seems to have made himself unpopular by his arrogance; and a few years after his accession he was deprived of his throne by an intrigue of his brother, Antonio II. He then retired to Florence, the home of his family, where he had property, to play the part of a prince in exile, if exile it could be called. There he must have been living at the time of the famous Council, an echo of whose decisions we hear in distant Athens, where a Greek priest, of rather more learning than most of his cloth, wrote to the Œcumenical Patriarch on the proper form of public prayer for the Pope. A bailie—so we learn from one of his letters[115]—was then administering the duchy, for Antonio had died in 1441; his infant son, Franco, was absent at the Turkish Court; and his subjects had recalled their former lord to the Akropolis. There he was seen, three years later, by the first antiquary who ever set foot in Frankish Athens, Cyriacus of Ancona, the Pausanias of mediæval Greece.

That extraordinary man, like Schliemann, a merchant by profession but an archæologist by inclination, had already once visited Athens. In 1436 he had stayed there for a fortnight as the guest of a certain Antonelli Balduini; but on that occasion he was too much occupied copying inscriptions to seek an audience of the Duke. He, too, like the Capuan notary, went to see “Aristotle’s Study”; he describes the “house” or “palace of Hadrian”; he alludes to the statue of the Gorgon on the south of the Akropolis. But of contemporary Athens, apart from the monuments, he tells us little beyond the facts that it possessed four gates and that it had “new walls”—a statement corroborated by that of another traveller thirty years later, which might indicate the so-called[148] wall of Valerian as the work of the Acciajuoli[116]. Of the inhabitants he says nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an archæologist?

In February 1444 the worthy Cyriacus revisited Athens; and on this occasion, accompanied by the Duke’s cousin and namesake, he went to pay his respects to “Nerio Acciajuoli of Florence, then prince of Athens,” whom he “found on the Akropolis, the lofty castle of the city[117].” Again, however, the archæological overpowered the human interest; and he hastened away from the ducal presence to inspect the Propylaia and the Parthenon. His original drawing of the west front of the latter building has been preserved in a manuscript, which formerly belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, but is now in the Berlin Museum, and is the earliest known pictorial reproduction of that splendid temple[118]. Other Athenian sketches may be seen in the Barberini manuscript of 1465, now at the Vatican, which contains the diagrams of San Gallo; and it seems that the eminent architect, who took the explanatory text almost verbatim from the note-books of Cyriacus, also copied the latter’s drawings.

The travels of the antiquary of Ancona in Greece demonstrate an interesting fact, which has too often been ignored, that the Latin rulers of the Levant were sometimes men of culture and taste. Crusino Sommaripa, the baron of Paros, took a pride in showing his visitor some marble statues which he had had excavated, and allowed him to send a marble head and leg to his friend Giustiniani-Banca, of Chios, a connoisseur of art who composed Italian verses in his “Homeric” villa. So deeply was Cyriacus moved by Crusino’s culture and kindness that he too burst out into an Italian poem, of which happily only one line has been published. Dorino Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos, aided him in his investigation of that island; the Venetian governor of Tenos escorted him in his state-galley to inspect the antiquities of Delos; and Carlo Tocco II, whom he quaintly describes as “King of the Epeirotes,” gave him every facility for visiting the ruins of Dodona, and was graciously pleased to cast his royal eye over the manuscript account of the antiquary’s journey[119]. Another of the Tocchi is known to have employed a Greek priest to copy for him the works of Origen and[149] Chrysostom; and in the remote Peloponnesian town of Kalavryta Cyriacus met a kindred soul, who possessed a large library from which he lent the wandering archæologist a copy of Herodotos. Thus, on the eve of the Turkish conquest, Greece was by no means so devoid of culture as has sometimes been too hastily assumed. It is clear, on the contrary, that her Frankish princes were by no means indifferent to their surroundings, and that the more enlightened of her own sons were conscious of her great past.

The very year of the antiquary’s second visit to Athens witnessed the last attempt of a patriotic and ambitious Greek to recover all Greece for his race. The future Emperor Constantine was now Despot of Mistra, the mediæval Sparta; and he thought that the moment had at last come for renewing the plan for the annexation of the Athenian duchy which had failed nine years before. The Turks, hard pressed by the Hungarians and Poles, defeated by “the white knight of Wallachia” at Nish, defied by Skanderbeg in the mountains of Albania, and threatened by the appearance of a Venetian fleet in the Ægean, could no longer protect their creature at Athens. Ere long the last Constantine entered the gates of Thebes and forced Nerio II to pay him tribute. The Court of Naples heard that he had actually occupied Athens; and Alfonso V of Aragon, who had never forgotten that he was still titular Duke of Athens and Neopatras, wrote at once to Constantine demanding the restitution of the two duchies to himself, and sent the Marquess of Gerace to receive them from the conqueror’s hands. Scarcely, however, had the letter been despatched when the fatal news of the great Turkish victory at Varna reached the writer. We hear nothing more of Gerace’s mission, for all recognised that the fate of Athens now depended upon the will of the victorious Sultan. To Murad II the shadowy claims of the house of Aragon and the efforts of the house of Palaiologos were alike indifferent.

Nerio’s attitude at this crisis was pitiful in the extreme. The Turks punished him for having given way to Constantine. Constantine again threatened him for his obsequiousness in promising to renew his tribute to the Turks. But the Sultan, true to the traditional Turkish policy of supporting the weaker of two rival Christian nationalities, forced the Greek Despot to evacuate the Florentine duchy. Nerio had the petty satisfaction of accompanying his lord and master to the Isthmus and of witnessing the capture of the famous Six-mile Rampart, in which the Greeks had vainly trusted, by the Serbian janissaries. Five years later, in 1451, a Venetian despatch gives us a last and characteristic glimpse of the wretched Nerio, when the Venetian envoy to the new Sultan,[150] Mohammed II, is instructed to ask that potentate if he will compel his vassal, “the lord of Sithines and Stives,” to settle the pecuniary claims of two Venetians[120].

Nerio’s death was followed by one of those tragedies in which the women of Frankish Greece were so often protagonists, and of which a modern dramatist might well avail himself. After the death of his first wife, Nerio II had married a passionate Venetian beauty, Chiara Zorzi, or Giorgio, one of the daughters of the baron of Karystos, or Castel Rosso, in the south of Eubœa, who sprang from the former Marquesses of Boudonitza. The Duchess Chiara bore him a son, Francesco, who was unfortunately still a minor at the time of his father’s death. The child’s mother possessed herself of the regency and persuaded the Porte, by the usual methods, to sanction her usurpation. Soon afterwards, however, there visited Athens on some commercial errand a young Venetian noble, Bartolommeo Contarini, whose father had been governor of the Venetian colony of Nauplia. The Duchess fell in love with her charming visitor, and bade him aspire to her hand and land. Contarini replied that alas! he had left a wife behind him in his palace on the lagoons. To the Lady of the Akropolis, a figure who might have stepped from a play of Æschylus, the Venetian wife was no obstacle. It was the age of great crimes. Contarini realised that Athens was worth a murder, poisoned his spouse, and returned to enjoy the embraces and the authority of the Duchess.

But the Athenians soon grew tired of this Venetian domination. They complained to Mohammed II; the great Sultan demanded explanations; and Contarini was forced to appear with his stepson, whose guardian he pretended to be, at the Turkish Court. There he found a dangerous rival in the person of Franco Acciajuoli, only son of the late Duke Antonio II and cousin of Francesco, a special favourite of Mohammed and a willing candidate for the Athenian throne. When the Sultan heard the tragic story of Chiara’s passion, he ordered the deposition of both herself and her husband, and bade the Athenians accept Franco as their lord. Young Francesco was never heard of again. But the tragedy was not yet over. Franco had no sooner assumed the government of Athens than he ordered the arrest of his aunt Chiara, threw her into the dungeons of Megara, and there had her mysteriously murdered. A picturesque legend current three centuries later at Athens makes Franco throttle her with his own hands as she knelt invoking the aid of the Virgin, and then cut off her head with his sword[121]; so deep[151] was the impression which her fate made upon the popular imagination.

The legend tells us how her husband, “the Admiral,” had come with many ships to the Piræus to rescue her, but arrived too late. Unable to save, he resolved to avenge her, and laid the grim facts before the Sultan. Mohammed II, indignant at the conduct of his protégé, but not sorry, perhaps, of a pretext for destroying the remnants of Frankish rule at Athens, ordered Omar, son of Tourakhan, the governor of Thessaly, to march against the city. The lower town offered no resistance, for its modern walls had but a narrow circumference, and its population and resources were scanty. Nature herself seemed to fight against the Athenians. On May 29, the third anniversary of the capture of Constantinople, a comet appeared in the sky; a dire famine followed, so that the people were reduced to eat roots and grass. On June 4, 1456, the town fell into the hands of the Turks[122]. But the Akropolis, which was reputed impregnable, long held out. In vain the Constable of Athens and some of the citizens offered the castle to Venice through one of the Zorzi family; the Republic ordered the bailie of Negroponte to keep the offer open, but took no steps to save the most famous fortress in Christendom; in vain he summoned one Latin prince after another to his aid. From the presence of an Athenian ambassador at the Neapolitan Court[123] we may infer that Alfonso V of Aragon, the titular “Duke of Athens,” was among their number. The papal fleet, which was despatched to the Ægean, did not even put into the Piræus. Meanwhile Omar, after a vain attempt to seduce the garrison from its allegiance, reminded Franco that sooner or later he must restore Athens to the Sultan who gave it. “Now, therefore,” added the Turkish commander, “if thou wilt surrender the Akropolis, His Majesty offers thee the land of Bœotia, with the city of Thebes, and will allow thee to take away the wealth of the Akropolis and thine own property.” Franco only waited till Mohammed had confirmed the offer of his subordinate, and then quitted the castle of Athens, with his wife and his three sons, for ever. At the same time the last Catholic archbishop, Nicolò Protimo of Eubœa, left the cathedral of Our Lady. It was not till 1875 that a Latin prelate again resided at Athens.

The great Sultan, so his Greek biographer, Kritoboulos, tells us, was filled with a desire to see the city of the philosophers. Mohammed knew[152] Greek, and had heard and read much about the wisdom and marvellous works of the ancient Athenians; we may surmise that Cyriacus of Ancona had told him of the Athenian monuments when he was employed as reader to his Majesty during the siege of Constantinople[124]. This strange “Philhellene”—for so Kritoboulos audaciously describes the conqueror of Hellas—longed to visit the places where the heroes and sages of classic Athens had walked and talked, and at the same time to examine, with a statesman’s eye, the position of the city and the condition of its harbours. In the autumn of 1458, on his return from punishing the Greek Despots of the Morea, he had an opportunity of achieving his wish. When he arrived at the gates (if we may believe a much later tradition[125]), the Abbot of Kaisariane, the monastery which still nestles in one of the folds of Hymettos, handed him the keys of the city. There is nothing improbable in the story, for the Greek Metropolitan, Isidore, had fled to the Venetian Island of Tenos; and the abbot may therefore have been the most important Greek dignitary left at Athens. The Sultan devoted four days to visiting his new possession, “of all the cities in his Empire the dearest to him,” as the Athenian Chalkokondyles proudly says. But of all that he saw he admired most the Akropolis, whose ancient and recent buildings he examined “with the eyes of a scholar, a Philhellene, and a great sovereign.” Like Pedro IV of Aragon before him, he was proud to possess such a jewel, and in his enthusiasm he exclaimed, “How much, indeed, do we not owe to Omar, the son of Tourakhan!”

The conquered Athenians were once again saved by their ancestors. Like his Roman prototype, Mohammed II treated them humanely, granted all their petitions, and gave them many and various privileges. So late as the seventeenth century there were Athenians who could show patents of fiscal exemption, issued to their forebears by the conqueror. If, however, the Greek clergy had hoped that the great cathedral would be restored to the Orthodox church, they were disappointed. The Parthenon, by a third transformation, was converted into a mosque; and soon, from the tapering minaret which rose above it, the muezzin summoned the faithful to the Ismaïdi, or “house of prayer.” A like fate befell the church which had served as the Orthodox cathedral during the Frankish domination, but which received, in honour of the Sultan’s visit, the name of Fethijeh Jamisi, or “Mosque of the Conqueror,” and which still preserves, amid the squalid surroundings of the military bakery, the traces of its former purpose.

The anonymous treatise on “The Theatres and Schools of Athens,”[153] which was probably composed by some Greek at this moment, perhaps to serve as a guide-book for the distinguished visitor, gives us a last glimpse of Frankish Athens. The choragic monument of Lysikrates was still known as “the lantern of Demosthenes”; the Tower of the Winds was supposed to be “the School of Sokrates”; the gate of Athena Archegetis was transformed in common parlance into “the palace of Themistokles”; the Odeion of Perikles was called “the School of Aristophanes”; and that of Herodes Atticus was divided into “the palaces of Kleonides and Miltiades.” The spots where once had stood the houses of Thucydides, Solon, and Alkmaion were well known to the omniscient local antiquary, who unhesitatingly converts the Temple of Wingless Victory into “a small school of musicians, founded by Pythagoras.”

On the fifth day after his arrival the heir of these great men left Athens for Thebes, the abode of his vassal Franco, who must have heaved a sigh of relief when his terrible visitor, after a minute examination of Bœotia, set out for Macedonia. For two years longer he managed to retain his Theban dominions, from which he received a revenue as large as that which he had formerly enjoyed, till, in 1460, Mohammed, after finally destroying the two Greek principalities of the Morea, revisited Athens. There the Sultan heard a rumour that some Athenians had conspired to restore their Florentine lord. This decided Franco’s fate. At the moment he was serving, as the man of the Turk, with a regiment of Bœotian cavalry in Mohammed’s camp. His suzerain ordered him to join in an attack which he meditated upon the surviving fragments of the ancient county of Cephalonia, the domain of the Tocchi. Franco shrank from fighting against his fellow-countryman; and a curious letter has recently been published[126] in which, for this very reason, he offered his services as a condottiere to Francesco Sforza of Milan for the sum of 10,000 ducats a year. But he was forced to obey; he did his pitiable task, and repaired to the headquarters of Zagan Pasha, the governor of the Morea, unconscious that the latter had orders to kill him. The Pasha invited him to his tent, where he detained him in conversation till nightfall; but, as the unsuspecting Frank was on his way back to his own pavilion, the governor’s guards seized and strangled him. Such was the sorry end of the last “Lord of Thebes.” Mohammed annexed all Bœotia, and thus obliterated the last trace of the Duchy of Athens.

Franco’s three sons were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, where one of them showed military and administrative ability of so high an[154] order as to win the favour of his sovereign. Their mother, a Greek of noble lineage and famed for her beauty, became the cause of a terrible tragedy which convulsed alike Court and Church. Amoiroutses, the former minister and betrayer of the Greek Empire of Trebizond, fell desperately in love with the fair widow, to whom he addressed impassioned verses, and swore, though he was already married, to wed her or die. The Œcumenical Patriarch forbade the banns, and lost his beard and his office rather than yield to the Sultan. But swift retribution fell upon the bigamist, for he dropped down dead, a dice-box in his hand.

Though the Acciajuoli dynasty had thus fallen for ever, members of that great family still remained in Greece. An Acciajuoli was made civil governor of the old Venetian colony of Koron, in Messenia, when the Spaniards conquered it from the Turks in 1532. When they abandoned it, he was captured by pirates but eventually ransomed, only to die in poverty at Naples, where his race had first risen to eminence. At the beginning of the last century the French traveller, Pouqueville, was shown at Athens a donkey-driver named Neri, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Florentine Dukes; and the modern historian of Christian Athens, Neroutsos, used to contend that his family was descended from Nerozzo Pitti, lord of Sykaminon and uncle of the last Duke of Athens. In Florence the family became extinct only so recently as 1834; and the Certosa and the Lung’ Arno Acciajuoli still preserve its memory there. In a Florentine gallery are two coloured portraits of the Dukes of Athens, which would seem to be those of Nerio I and the bastard Antonio I. In that case the Florentine Dukes of Athens are the only Frankish rulers of Greece, except the Palatine Counts of Cephalonia, whose likeness has been preserved to posterity[127].

Thus ended the strange connection between Florence and Athens. A titular Duke of Athens had become tyrant of the Florentines, a Florentine merchant had become Duke of Athens; but the age when French and Italian adventurers could find an El Dorado on the poetic soil of Greece was over. The dull uniformity of Turkish rule spread over the land, save where the Dukes of the Archipelago and the Venetian colonies still remained the sole guardians of Western culture, the only rays of light in the once brilliant Latin Orient.

AUTHORITIES

1. Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (Documents relating to the Mediæval History of Athens). Ed. Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1906.

2. Briefe aus der “Corrispondenza Acciajoli” in der Laurenziana zu Florenz. By Ferdinand Gregorovius. Munich, 1890.

3. Nicolai de Marthono liber peregrinationis ad loca sancta. In La Revue de l’Orient Latin, vol. III. Paris, 1895.

4. Μνημεῖα τῆς Ἱστορίας τῶν Ἀθηναίων (Memorials of the History of the Athenians). By Demetrios Gr. Kampouroglos. 2nd Edn. Athens, 1891-92.

5. Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηναίων (History of the Athenians). By D. Gr. Kampouroglos. Athens, 1889-96.

6. Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ἐπὶ Τουρκοκρατίας (History of Athens under the Turks). By Th. N. Philadelpheus. Athens, 1902.

7. Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας (Memorials of Greek History). Edited by C. N. Sathas. Paris, 1880-90.

8. Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων (Greek Remembrancer). New Series. Vols. I-III. Ed. by Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1904-17.

9. Nouvelles Recherches historiques sur la principauté française de Morée. By Buchon. Two vols. Paris, 1843.

10. La politica Orientale di Alfonso di Aragona. By F. Cerone. In Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane. Vols. XXVII-XXVIII. Naples, 1902-3.

APPENDIX
NOTES ON ATHENS UNDER THE FRANKS

Within the last sixteen years a great deal of new material has been published on the subject of Frankish Athens. The late Professor Lampros[128] not only translated into Greek the Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter of Gregorovius, but added some most valuable notes, and more than a whole volume of documents, some of which had never seen the light before, while others were known only in the summaries or extracts of Hopf, Gregorovius, or Signor Predelli. He also issued a review, the Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, devoted to mediæval Greek history, of which thirteen volumes have appeared. The French have gone on printing the Regesta of the thirteenth-century popes, which contain occasional allusions to Greek affairs. Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch, the Catalan scholar, has issued a valuable pamphlet, Catalunya a Grecia[129], besides contributing a mass of documents from the archives at Palermo[156] to the collection of Professor Lampros; and the essay on the “Eastern Policy of Alfonso of Aragon,” published by Signor Cerone in the Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane[130], contains many hitherto unknown documents dealing with the last two decades of Greek history before the Turkish conquest. I propose in the present article to point out the most important additions to our knowledge of Athens under her western masters which have thus been obtained. Of the condition of the Parthenon—“Our Lady of Athens”—on the eve of the Frankish conquest we have some interesting evidence. We learn from an iambic poem of Michael Akominatos, the Greek Metropolitan of Athens, that he “beautified the church, presented new vessels and furniture for its use, increased the number of the clergy, and added to the estates” of the great cathedral, as well as to the “flocks and herds” which belonged to it. Every year a great festival attracted the Greeks from far and near to the shrine of the “Virgin of Athens[131].”

As was only to be expected, very little fresh light has been thrown on the Burgundian period. We learn however, from a Greek manuscript in the Vatican library, how Leon Sgouros, the archon of Nauplia, who long held out at Akrocorinth against the Frankish conquerors, met his end. Rather than be taken captive “he mounted his horse and leapt from Akrocorinth, so that not a single bone in his body was left unbroken[132].” We find too, in a letter from Honorius III to Othon de la Roche, dated February 12, 1225, the last allusion to the presence of the Megaskyr in his Athenian dominions before his return to France; and we hear of two members of his family, William and Nicholas, both canons of Athens. The former had gravem in litteratura defectum, or else he would have been made archbishop of Athens; the latter is probably the same person whose name has been found on the stoa of Hadrian[133].

The Catalan period receives much more illustration. We know at last the exact date at which it ended, for a letter of Jacopo da Prato (probably a relative of the Ludovico da Prato who was the first Florentine archbishop of Athens), dated Patras, May 9, 1388, announces that Nerio Acciajuoli ebe adi 2 di questo lo chastello di Settino[134]. Thus Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch[135] was right in his surmise that Don Pedro de Pau, who is mentioned as erroneously reported dead in a letter of John I of Aragon,[157] dated November 16, 1387, held out in the Akropolis down to 1388. The Catalan scholar had shown that the brave commander of “the Castle of Athens” had sent an envoy to John I, who received him “in the lesser palace of Barcelona” on March 18, 1387, and who promised the sindici of Athens on April 26 to pay a speedy visit to his distant duchy[136]. Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch also writes to me that Hopf was mistaken in translating Petrus de Puteo of the Sicilian documents—the official whose high-handed proceedings led to a revolution at Thebes in which he, his wife, and his chief followers lost their lives—as Peter de Puig[137]. His name should really be Peter de Pou, and it is obvious from the documents that Hopf’s chronology of his career is also wrong. He is mentioned in a document of August 3, 1366, as already dead[138]; we learn that his official title was “vicar of the duchies”—that is to say, deputy for Matteo de Moncada, the absent vicar-general—and he is spoken of as “having presided in the duchies as vicar-general,” and as “having presided in the office of the vicariate[139].” We find too that the castle of Zeitoun or Lamia (turrim Griffinam) belonged to him[140]. Roger de Lluria, who was at this time marshal of the duchies[141], is already officially styled as vicar-general[142] on August 3, 1366, though the formal commission removing Matteo de Moncada and appointing Roger de Lluria in his place was not made out till May 14 of the following year[143]. The new vicar-general held till his death, which must have taken place before March 31, 1370, when his successor was appointed[144], the two great offices[145], and, I think, the facts above stated enable us to explain the reason why no more marshals were appointed after that date. The office of marshal had been hereditary in the family of De Novelles, and Gregorovius[146] pointed out that Ermengol de Novelles did not (as Hopf imagined) hold it till his death, but that Roger de Lluria was marshal before that event. I should suppose that Ermengol had been deprived of the office as a punishment for his rebellion against his sovereign[147]; that the conflict between Lluria and Pou proved that there was no room in the narrow court of Thebes for two such exalted officials as a vicar and a marshal; and, as Lluria, when he became vicar, combined the two offices in his person, it was thought a happy solution of the difficulty.

Professor Lampros has published three documents[148] from the Vatican[158] archives which refer to a mysterious scheme for the marriage of a Sicilian duchess of Athens. The documents have no date, except the day of the month, and in one case of the week, and one of them is partly in cypher. But I think that I have succeeded in fixing the exact date of the first to January 4, 1369, because in 1368, December 22 was on a Friday. This suits all the historical facts mentioned. The bishop of Cambrai, to whom the second letter is addressed, must be Robert of Geneva (afterwards the anti-pope Clement VII), who occupied that see from October 11, 1368, to June 6, 1371. The dominus Anghia, whose death has so much disturbed the diocese, is Sohier d’Enghien, who was beheaded in 1367; the comes Litii is his brother Jean, count of Lecce, and the latter’s nephew, whose marriage “with the young niece of the king of Sicily, daughter of a former Catalan duke of Athens,” is considered suitable, is Gautier III, titular duke of Athens, who had inherited the claims of the Brienne family. The lady whose marriage is the object of all these negotiations must therefore have been one of the two daughters of John, Marquis of Randazzo and Duke of Athens and Neopatras, who died in 1348, and whose youngest child, Constance, may therefore have been xx annorum et ultra at this period, and is known to have been single. She was the niece of King Peter II and cousin of Frederick III of Sicily, one of whose sisters is described as too old for the titular duke, which would of course have been the case in 1369. The allusions to Philip II of Taranto as still living also fix the date as before the close of 1373, when he died. Moreover Archbishop Simon of Thebes is known to have been in Sicily in 1367, and may have remained there longer. What was apparently an insuperable chronological obstacle, the allusion to obitum domini regis Franciæ, disappeared when I examined the original document in the Vatican library and found that the last two words were regie fameie, that is, familiæ. Possibly the allusion may be to Pedro the Cruel of Castile, who was slain in 1369. The letters then disclose a matrimonial alliance which would have reconciled the Athenian claims of the house of Enghien with the ducal dominion over Catalan Athens exercised by Frederick III of Sicily.

Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch has published two letters[149] of “the queen of Aragon,” wife of Pedro IV (not, as assumed by K. Konstantinides, Maria, queen of Sicily and duchess of Athens), from the former of which, dated 1379 and addressed to Archbishop Ballester of Athens, we glean some curious information about the relics which the cathedral of Santa Maria de Setines (the Parthenon) then contained, and of which the Italian[159] traveller Nicolò da Martoni made out a list sixteen years later[150]. The Catalan scholar has shown too that some years after the Florentine conquest of Athens a certain Bertranet, un dels majors capitans del ducat d’Atenes, recovered a place where was the head of St George, that is to say, Livadia[151]. The personage mentioned is Bertranet Mota, whose name occurs in the treaty with the Navarrese in 1390, as a witness to another document in the same year, in the list of fiefs in 1391, in Nerio Acciajuoli’s will, and in a letter of the bishop of Argos in 1394. He was a friend of Nerio’s bastard, Antonio; he had obviously helped the latter to recover Livadia from the Turks in 1393, and we are thus able to reconcile Chalkokondyles, who says that Bayezid had already annexed Livadia, with the clause in Nerio’s will leaving the important fortress to Antonio[152]. More interesting still, as showing the tenacity with which the kings of Aragon clung to the shadow of their rule over Athens, is the letter of Alfonso V to the despot Constantine Palaiologos (afterwards the last emperor of Constantinople), dated November 27, 1444, in which the king says that he has heard that Constantine has occupied Athens, and therefore requests him to hand over the two duchies of Athens and Neopatras to the Marquess of Gerace, his emissary[153].

Lastly, to our knowledge of the Florentine period Professor Lampros has contributed three letters[154] of the Athenian priest and copyist Kalophrenas, which show that the attempts of the council of Florence for the union of the eastern and western churches found an echo in Florentine Athens. Professor Lampros was puzzled to explain the allusion to τοῦ ἀφεντὸς τοῦ μπαὴλου in one of the letters. He thinks it alludes to the Venetian bailie at Chalkis, who however had no jurisdiction at Athens at that period. If however, as he supposes, the correspondence dates from 1441 the phrase presents no difficulty. In that year Antonio II Acciajuoli had died, leaving an infant son, Franco, then absent at the Turkish court, and Nerio II, the former duke, returned to Athens. We may therefore suppose that “the prince’s baily” was the official who governed Athens till Nerio II came back. Professor Lampros has also published a letter[155] of Franco, the last duke of Athens, to Francesco Sforza of Milan, dated 1460, from Thebes, which Mohammed II had allowed him to retain after the capture of Athens in 1456. In this letter,[160] written not long before his murder, Franco offers his services as a condottiere to the duke of Milan. This was not his only negotiation with western potentates, for only a few days before the loss of Athens an ambassador of his was at the Neapolitan court[156].

One mistake has escaped the notice of Professor Lampros, as of his predecessors. The date of the second visit of Cyriacus of Ancona to Athens, when he found Nerio II on the Akropolis, must have been 1444 and not 1447, because the antiquary’s letter from Chios is dated Kyriaceo die iv. Kal. Ap. Now, March 29 fell on a Sunday in 1444, and we know from another letter of Cyriacus to the emperor John VI, written before June 1444, that he left Chalkis for Chios on v. Kal. Mart. of that year.

THE TURKISH CAPTURE OF ATHENS

The authorities differ as to the exact date of the capture of Athens by the Turks. A contemporary note in Manuscript No. 103 of the Liturgical Section of the National Library at Athens, quoted by Kampouroglos[157], fixes it at “May 4, 1456, Friday”; but in that year June 4, not May 4, was a Friday, which agrees with the date of June 1456, given by Phrantzes[158], the Chronicon Breve[159], and the Historia Patriarchica[160]. But the best evidence in favour of June is the following document of 1458, to which allusion was made by Gaddi[161] in the seventeenth century, but which has never been published. I owe the copy to the courtesy of the Director of the “Archivio di Stato” at Florence.

The petitioners in the document are all well known. Nerozzo Pitti and his wife Laudamia owned the castle of Sykaminon, near Oropos, which had belonged to her father, Franco Acciajuoli[164]. She was the aunt of the last two dukes of Athens. Pitti also possessed the island of Panaia, or Canaia, the ancient Pyrrha, opposite the mouth of the Maliac Gulf, and his “dignified tenure” of those two places is praised by Baphius in his treatise De Felicitate Urbis Florentiæ[165], a century later. According to the contemporary chronicler, Benedetto Dei[166], the Athenian Pitti were compelled to become Mohammedans when Bœotia was annexed; but the late historian Neroutsos used to maintain his descent from Nerozzo.

6. THE DUCHY OF NAXOS

Of all the strange and romantic creations of the Middle Ages none is so curious as the capture of the poetic “Isles of Greece” by a handful of Venetian adventurers, and their organisation as a Latin Duchy for upwards of three centuries. Even to-day the traces of the ducal times may be found in many of the Cyclades, where Latin families, descendants of the conquerors, still preserve the high-sounding names and the Catholic religion of their Italian ancestors, in the midst of ruined palaces and castles, built by the mediæval lords of the Archipelago out of ancient Hellenic temples. But of the Duchy of Naxos little is generally known. Its picturesque history, upon which Finlay touched rather slightly in his great work, has since then been thoroughly explored by a laborious German, the late Dr Hopf; but that lynx-eyed student of archives had no literary gifts; he could not write, he could only read, and his researches lie buried in a ponderous encyclopædia. So this delightful[162] Duchy, whose whole story is one long romance, still awaits the hand of a novelist to make it live again.

The origin of this fantastic State of the blue Ægean is to be found in the overthrow of the Greek Empire at the time of the Fourth Crusade. By the partition treaty made between the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, Venice received the Cyclades among other acquisitions. But the Venetian Government, with its usual commercial astuteness, soon came to the conclusion that the conquest of those islands would too severely tax the resources of the State. It was therefore decided to leave the task of occupying them to private citizens, who would plant Venetian colonies in the Ægean, and live on friendly terms with the Republic. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that generation, and it so happened that at that very moment the Venetian colony at Constantinople contained the very man for such an undertaking. The old Doge, Dandolo, had taken with him on the crusade his nephew, Marco Sanudo, a bold warrior and a skilful diplomatist, who had signalised himself by negotiating the sale of Crete to the Republic, and was then filling the post of judge in what we should now call the Consular Court at Constantinople. On hearing the decision of his Government, Sanudo quitted the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, to whom he promised rich fiefs in the El Dorado of the Ægean, equipped eight galleys at his own cost, and sailed with them to carve out a Duchy for himself in the islands of the Archipelago. Seventeen islands speedily submitted, and at one spot alone did he meet with any real resistance. Naxos has always been the pearl of the Ægean: poets have placed there the beautiful myth of Ariadne and Dionysos; Herodotos describes it as “excelling the other islands in prosperity[167]”; even to-day, when so many of the Cyclades are barren rocks, the orange and lemon groves of Naxos entitle it, far more than Zante, to the proud name of “flower of the Levant.” This was the island which now opposed the Venetian filibuster, as centuries before it had opposed the Persians. A body of Genoese pirates had occupied the Byzantine castle before Sanudo’s arrival; but that shrewd leader, who knew the value of rashness in an emergency, burnt his galleys, and then bade his companions conquer or die. The castle surrendered after a five weeks’ siege, so that by 1207 Sanudo had conquered a duchy which existed for 359 years. His duchy included, besides Naxos, where he fixed his capital, the famous marble island of Paros; Kimolos, celebrated for its fuller’s earth; Melos, whose sad fortunes furnished Thucydides with one of the most curious passages in his history; and Syra, destined at a much[163] later date to be the most important of all the Cyclades. True to his promise, Sanudo divided some of his conquests among his companions; thus, Andros and the volcanic island of Santorin became sub-fiefs of the Duchy. Sanudo himself did homage, not to Venice, but to the Emperor Henry of Romania, who formally bestowed upon him “the Duchy of the Dodekannesos,” or Archipelago, on the freest possible tenure. Having thus arranged the constitution of his little State, he proceeded to restore the ancient city; to build himself a castle, which commanded his capital and which is now in ruins; to erect a Catholic cathedral, on which, in spite of its restoration in the seventeenth century, his arms may still be seen; to improve the harbour by the construction of a mole; and to fortify the town with solid masonry, of which one fragment stands to-day, a monument, like the Santameri tower at Thebes, of Frank rule in Greece.

As we might expect from so shrewd a statesman, the founder of this island-duchy was fully sensible of the advantages to be derived from having the Greeks on his side. Instead of treating them as serfs and schismatics, he allowed all those who did not intrigue against him with the Greek potentates at Trebizond, Nice, or Arta, to retain their property. He guaranteed the free exercise of their religion, nor did he allow the Catholic archbishop, sent him by the Pope, to persecute the Orthodox clergy or their flocks. The former imperial domains were confiscated, in order to provide and maintain a new fleet, so necessary to the existence of islands menaced by pirates. That Marco I was a powerful and wealthy ruler is proved not only by his buildings, but also by the value set upon his aid. When the Cretans had risen, as they so often did, against the Venetians, the Governor sent in hot haste to Naxos for Marco’s assistance. The Duke was still a citizen of the Republic; but the Governor knew his man, and stimulated his patriotism by the offer of lands in Crete. Marco lost no time in appearing upon the scene, defeated the insurgents, and claimed his reward. The Governor was also a Venetian, and not over-desirous of parting with his lands now that the danger seemed to be over. But Marco knew his Greeks by this time, and readily entered into a plot with a Cretan chief for the conquest of the island. Candia was speedily his, while the Governor had to escape in woman’s clothes to the fortress of Temenos. But, just as he seemed likely to annex Crete to his Duchy, Venetian reinforcements arrived. Unable to carry out his design, he yet succeeded by his diplomacy in securing an amnesty and pecuniary compensation, with which he retired to his island domain. But the failure of his Cretan adventure did not in the least damp his ardour. With only eight ships he boldly attacked[164] the squadron of the Emperor of Nice, nearly four times as numerous. Captured and carried as a prisoner to the Nicene Court, he so greatly impressed the Emperor by his courage and manly beauty that the latter ordered his release, and gave him one of the princesses of the imperial house in marriage. In short, his career was that of a typical Venetian adventurer, brave, hard-headed, selfish, and unscrupulous; in fact, just the sort of man to found a dynasty in a part of the world where cleverness counts for more than heroic simplicity of character.

During the long and peaceful reign of his son Angelo, little occurred to disturb the progress of the Duchy. But its external relations underwent a change at this time, in consequence of the transference of the suzerainty over it from the weak Emperor of Romania to the powerful Prince of Achaia, Geoffroy II, as a reward for Geoffroy’s assistance in defending the Latin Empire against the Greeks. Angelo, too, equipped three galleys for the defence of Constantinople, and, after its fall, sent a handsome present to the exiled Emperor. Like his father, he was summoned to aid the Venetian Governor of Crete against the native insurgents, but on the approach of the Nicene fleet he cautiously withdrew. His son, Marco II, who succeeded him in 1262, found himself face to face with a more difficult situation than that which had prevailed in the times of his father and grandfather. The Greeks had recovered ground not only at Constantinople, but in the south-east of the Morea, and their successes were repeated on a smaller scale in the Archipelago. Licario, the Byzantine admiral, captured many of the Ægean islands, some of which remained thenceforth part of the imperial dominions. Besides the Sanudi, the dynasty of the Ghisi, lords of Tenos and Mykonos, alone managed to hold its own against the Greek invasion; yet even the Ghisi suffered considerably from the attacks of the redoubtable admiral. One member of that family was fond of applying to himself the Ovidian line, “I am too big a man to be harmed by fortune,” and his subjects on the island of Skopelos, which has lately been notorious as the place of exile of Royalist politicians, used to boast that, even if the whole realm of Romania fell, they would escape destruction. But Licario, who knew that Skopelos lacked water, invested it during a hot summer, forced it to capitulate, and sent the haughty Ghisi in chains to Constantinople. Marco II had to quell an insurrection of the Greeks at Melos, who thought that the time had come for shaking off the Latin yoke. Educated at the court of Guillaume de Villehardouin, Marco had imbibed the resolute methods of that energetic prince, and he soon showed that he did not intend to relax his hold on what his grandfather had seized. Aided by a body of Frank fugitives[165] from Constantinople, he reduced the rebels to submission, and pardoned all of them with the exception of a Greek priest whom he suspected of being the cause of the revolt. This man he is said to have ordered to be bound hand and foot, and then thrown into the harbour of Melos.

Towards the orthodox clergy Marco II was, if we may believe the Jesuit historian of the Duchy, by no means so tolerant as his two predecessors[168]. There was, it seems, in the island of Naxos an altar dedicated to St Pachys, a portly man of God, who was believed by the devout Naxiotes to have the power of making their children fat. In the East fatness is still regarded as a mark of comeliness, and in the thirteenth century St Pachys was a very popular personage, whose altar was visited by loving mothers, and whose hierophants lived upon the credulity of the faithful. Marco II regarded this institution as a gross superstition. Had he been a wise statesman, he would have tolerated it all the same, and allowed the matrons of Naxos to shove their offspring through the hollow altar of the fat saint, so long as no harm ensued to his State. But Marco II was not wise; he smashed the altar, and thereby so irritated his Orthodox subjects that he had to build a fortress to keep them in order. But the Greeks were not the only foes who menaced the Duchy at this period. The Archipelago had again become the happy hunting-ground of pirates of all nationalities—Greek corsairs from the impregnable rock of Monemvasia or from the islands of Santorin and Keos, Latins like Roger de Lluria, the famous Sicilian admiral, who preyed on their fellow-religionists, mongrels who combined the vices of both their parents. The first place among the pirates of the time belonged to the Genoese, the natural rivals of the Venetians in the Levant, and on that account popular with the Greek islanders. No sooner was a Genoese galley spied in the offing than the peasants would hurry down with provisions to the beach, just as the Calabrian peasants have been known to give food to notorious brigands. The result of these visitations on the smaller islands may be easily imagined: thus the inhabitants of Amorgos emigrated in a body to Naxos from fear of the corsairs; yet, in spite of the harm inflicted by Licario and the pirates, we are told that the fertile plain of Drymalia, in the interior of Naxos, “then contained twelve large villages, a number of farm buildings, country houses and towers, with about 10,000 inhabitants.” Sometimes the remote consequences of the pirates’ raids were worse than the raids themselves. Thus, on one of these expeditions, some corsairs carried off a valuable ass belonging to one of the Ghisi. The ass, marked with its master’s initials, was bought by Marco II’s son, Guglielmo, who lived at Syra.[166] The purchaser was under no illusions as to the ownership of the ass, but was perfectly aware that he was buying stolen goods. Seeing this, Ghisi invaded Syra, laid the island waste, and besieged Sanudo in his castle. But the fate of the ass had aroused wide sympathies. Marco II had taken the oath of fealty to Charles of Anjou, as suzerain of Achaia, after the death of his liege lord, Guillaume de Villehardouin, and it chanced that the Angevin admiral was cruising in the Archipelago at the time of the rape of the ass. Feudal law compelled him to assist the son of his master’s vassal; a lady’s prayers conquered any hesitation that he might have felt; so he set sail for Syra, where he soon forced Ghisi to raise the siege. The great ass case was then submitted to the decision of the Venetian bailie in Eubœa, who restored the peace of the Levant, but only after “more than 30,000 heavy soldi” had been expended for the sake of the ass!

After the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks, the policy of Venice towards the dukes underwent a change. As we have seen, neither the founder of the Duchy nor his son and grandson were vassals of the Republic, though they were all three Venetian citizens. But the Venetian Government, alarmed at the commercial privileges accorded to its great rivals, the Genoese, by the Byzantine Emperor, now sought to obtain a stronger military and commercial position in the Archipelago, and, if possible, to acquire direct authority over the Duchy. An excuse for the attempt was offered by the affairs of Andros. That island had been bestowed by Marco I as a sub-fief of Naxos upon Marino Dandolo. Marco II resumed immediate possession of it after the death of Dandolo’s widow, and refused to grant her half of the island to her son by a second marriage, Nicolò Quirini, on the plausible plea that he arrived to do homage after the term allowed by the feudal law had expired. But Quirini was a Venetian bailie, and accordingly appealed to Venice for justice. The Doge summoned Marco II to make defence before the Senate; but Marco replied that Venice was not his suzerain, that the ducal Court at Naxos, and not the Senate at Venice, was the proper tribunal to try the case, and that he would be happy to afford the claimant all proper facilities for pleading his cause if he would appear there. The question then dropped; Marco remained in possession of Andros, while the Republic waited for a more favourable opportunity of advancing its political interests in the Archipelago.

This opportunity was not long in coming. Towards the end of the thirteenth century a violent war broke out between Venice and her Genoese rivals, supported by the Byzantine Emperor. While the Genoese tried to undermine Venetian power in Crete, Venice let loose a new swarm[167] of privateers on the islands of the Ægean, which Licario had recovered for the Byzantines. Then for the first time we meet with the word armatoloí, so famous in the later history of Greece, applied originally to the outfitters, or armatores, of privateers. The dispossessed Venetian lords were thus enabled to reconquer many of the possessions which they had then lost; Amorgos, the birthplace of Simonides, was restored to the Ghisi, Santorin and Therasia to the Barozzi, but only on condition that they recognised the suzerainty of the Republic. This arrangement was contested by the Duke of the Archipelago, on the ground that those islands had originally been sub-fiefs of his ancestors’ dominions. Guglielmo Sanudo, the purchaser of the ass, had now succeeded to the Duchy, and, as might have been inferred from that story, was not likely to be over-scrupulous in his methods. As one of the Barozzi declined to do him homage, he had him arrested by corsairs on the high seas, and threw him into the ducal dungeon at Naxos. This was more than Venice could stand, for this scion of the Barozzi had been Venetian governor of Candia. An ultimatum was therefore despatched to the Duke, bidding him send his captive to Eubœa within eight days, under pain of being treated as a pirate. This message had the desired effect. Guglielmo let his prisoner go, and it was seen that the name of Venice was more powerful than before in the Archipelago. But neither Venice nor the Duke could prevent the increasing desolation of the islands. The Catalans had now appeared in the Levant; in 1303 they ravaged Keos; after their establishment in the Duchy of Athens they organised a raid on Melos, from which, like the Athenians of old, they carried off numbers of the inhabitants as slaves. A Spaniard from Coruña, Januli da Corogna, occupied Siphnos, and two of the leading families in Santorin to-day are of Catalan origin. A member of one of them, Dr De Cigalla, or Dekigallas, as he is called in Greek, is a voluminous author, and a great authority on the eruptions of that volcanic island. Turkish squadrons completed the work of destruction; we hear of a new exodus from Amorgos in consequence of their depredations, but this time the frightened islanders preferred to seek refuge under the Venetian banner in Crete rather than in Naxos. The latter island was, indeed, no longer so secure as it had been. True, Duke Guglielmo had welcomed the establishment of the warlike knights of St John at Rhodes, and had helped them to conquer that stronghold, in the hope that they would be able to ward off the Turks from his dominions. Venice, too, had come to see that her wisest policy was to strengthen the Naxiote Duchy, and furnished both the next Dukes, Nicolò I and Giovanni I, with arms for its protection. But, all the same, in 1344 the dreaded Turks effected a landing on Naxos,[168] occupied the capital, and dragged away 6000 of the islanders to captivity. This misfortune increased the panic of the peasants throughout the Archipelago. They fled in greater numbers than ever to Crete, so that Giovanni complained at Venice of the depopulation of his islands, and asked for leave to bring back the emigrants. Even the fine island of Andros, which had formerly produced more wheat and barley than it could consume, was now forced to import grain from Eubœa, while many of the proprietors in other parts of the Ægean had to procure labour from the Morea. In fact, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, such security as existed in the Levant was due solely to the presence of the Venetian fleet in Cretan and Eubœan waters, and to a policy such as that which conferred upon the historian, Andrea Dandolo, the islet of Gaidaronisi, to the south of Crete, on condition that he should fortify its harbour against the assaults of pirates. Naturally, at such a time, it was the manifest advantage of the Naxiote Dukes to tighten the alliance with Venice. Accordingly we find Giovanni I preparing to assist the Venetians in their war with the Genoese, when the latter suddenly swooped down upon his capital and carried him off as a prisoner to Genoa.

In 1361, a few years after his release, Giovanni I died, leaving an only daughter, Fiorenza, as Duchess of the Archipelago. It was the first time that this romantic State had been governed by a woman, and, needless to say, there was no lack of competitors for the hand of the rich and beautiful young widow. During her father’s lifetime Fiorenza had married one of the Eubœan family of Dalle Carceri, which is often mentioned in mediæval Greek history, and she had a son by this union, who afterwards succeeded her in the Duchy. Over her second marriage there now raged a diplomatic battle, which was waged by Venice with all the unscrupulousness shown by that astute Republic whenever its supremacy was at stake. The first of this mediæval Penelope’s suitors was a Genoese, one of the merchant adventurers, or maonesi, who held the rich island of Chios much as a modern chartered company holds parts of Africa under the suzerainty of the home Government. To his candidature Venice was, of course, strongly opposed, as it would have been fatal to Venetian interests to have this citizen of Genoa installed at Naxos. Fiorenza was therefore warned not to bestow her hand upon an enemy of the Republic, when so many eligible husbands could be found at Venice or in the Venetian colonies of Eubœa and Crete. At the same time, the Venetian bailie of Eubœa was instructed to hinder by fair means or foul the Genoese marriage. Fiorenza meekly expressed her willingness to marry a person approved by Venice, but soon afterwards[169] showed a desire to accept the suit of Nerio Acciajuoli, the subsequent Duke of Athens. This alliance the Republic vetoed with the same emphasis as the former one; but Nerio was an influential man, who had powerful connections in the kingdom of Naples, and was therefore able to obtain the consent of Robert of Taranto, at that time suzerain of the Duchy. That Robert was Fiorenza’s suzerain could not be denied; but Venice replied that she was also a daughter of the Republic, that her ancestors had won the Duchy under its auspices, had been protected by its fleets, and owed their existence to its resources. What, it was added, have the Angevins of Naples done, or what can they do, for Naxos? Simultaneous orders were sent to the commander of the Venetian fleet in Greek waters to oppose, by force if necessary, the landing of Nerio in that island. The Venetian agents in the Levant had, however, no need of further instructions. They knew what was expected of them, and were confident that their action, if successful, would not be disowned. Fiorenza was kidnapped, placed on board a Venetian galley, and quietly conveyed to Crete. There she was treated with every mark of respect, but was at the same time plainly informed that if she wished ever to see her beloved Naxos again she must marry her cousin Nicolò Sanudo “Spezzabanda,” the candidate of the Republic and son of a large proprietor in Eubœa. The daring of this young man, to which he owed his nickname of “Spezzabanda,” “the disperser of a host,” may have impressed the susceptible Duchess no less than the difficulties of her position. At any rate she consented to marry him, the wedding was solemnised at Venice, the Republic pledged itself to protect the Duchy against all its enemies, and granted to Santorin, which had been reconquered by Duke Nicolò I, the privilege of exporting cotton and corn to the Venetian lagoons. Venice had won all along the line, and when the much-wooed Duchess died, “Spezzabanda” acted as regent for his stepson, Nicolò II dalle Carceri. He showed his gratitude to his Venetian patrons by assisting in suppressing the great Cretan insurrection of this period. He also defended Eubœa against the Catalans of Athens, showing himself ready to fight for the rights of young Nicolò whenever occasion offered.

Nicolò II was the last and worst of the Sanudi Dukes. From his father he had inherited two-thirds of Eubœa, which interested him more than his own Duchy, but at the same time involved him in disputes with Venice. Chafing at the tutelage of the Republic, he selected the moment when Venice was once more engaged in war with Genoa, to negotiate with the Navarrese company of mercenaries then in Central Greece for its aid in the conquest of the whole island of Eubœa. This attempt[170] failed, and, so far from increasing his dominions, Nicolò diminished them in other directions. We have seen how Andros had been reunited with Naxos by Marco II. The new Duke now bestowed it as a sub-fief upon his half-sister, Maria Sanudo, thus severing its direct connection with his Duchy. Nor was he more cautious in his internal policy. He aroused the strongest resentment among his subjects, Greeks and Franks alike, by his extortion, and they found a ready leader in a young Italian who had lately become connected by marriage with the Sanudo family. This man, Francesco Crispo—a name which suggested to biographers of the late Italian Prime Minister a possible relationship—was a Lombard who had emigrated to Eubœa and had then obtained the lordship of Melos by his union with the daughter of Giovanni I’s brother Marco, who had received that island as a sub-fief of Naxos, and under whom it had greatly prospered. Crispo chanced to be in Naxos at the time when the complaints of the people were loudest, and he aspired to the fame, or at any rate the profits, of a tyrannicide. During one of the ducal hunting parties he contrived the murder of the Duke, and was at once accepted by the populace as his successor. Thus, in 1383, fell the dynasty of the Sanudi, by the hand of a Lombard adventurer, after 176 years of power.

Times had greatly changed since the conquest of the Archipelago, nor was a usurper like Crispo in a position to dispense with the protection of Venice. He therefore begged the Republic to recognise him as the rightful Duke, which the astute Venetians saw no difficulty in doing. He further strengthened the bond of union by bestowing the hand of his daughter upon the rich Venetian, Pietro Zeno, who played a considerable part in the tortuous diplomacy of the age. Crispo did not hesitate to rob Maria Sanudo of Andros in order to confer it upon his son-in-law, and it was not for many years, and then only after wearisome litigation, that it reverted to her son. She was obliged to content herself with the islands of Paros and Antiparos, and to marry one of the Veronese family of Sommaripa, which now appears for the first time in Greek history, but which came into the possession of Andros towards the middle of the fifteenth century, and still flourishes at Naxos. Sure of Venetian support, Crispo indulged in piratical expeditions as far as the Syrian coast, while he swept other and less distinguished pirates from the sea. His son-in-law seconded his efforts against the Turks; yet, in spite of their united attempts, they left their possessions in a deplorable state. Andros had been so severely visited by the Turkish corsairs that it contained only 2000 inhabitants, and had to be repopulated by Albanian immigrants, who are still very numerous there; Ios, almost[171] denuded of its population, was replenished by a number of families from the Morea. Although the next Duke, Giacomo I, was known as “The Pacific,” and paid tribute to the Sultan on condition that no Turkish ships should visit his islands, he was constantly menaced by Bayezid I. In his distress, like the Emperor Manuel, he turned to Henry IV of England, whom he visited in London in 1404. Henry was not able to assist him, though he had at one time intended to lead an army “as far as to the sepulchre of Christ”; but, when Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1418, he was conveyed back to Venice on one of Pietro Zeno’s galleys. This was, so far as we have been able to discover, the only connection between England and the Duchy. In the same year Giacomo died at Ferrara, on his way to see the Pope, the natural protector of the Latins in the Levant.

During the greater part of the fifteenth century the history of the Archipelago presents a monotonous series of family feuds and Turkish aggression. The subdivision of the islands, in order to provide appanages for the younger members of some petty reigning dynasty, was a source of weakness, which recalls the mediæval annals of Germany, nor did there arise among the Dukes of this period a strong man like the founder of the Duchy. One of them was advised by Venice to make the best terms that he could with the Sultan, though complaints were made that he had failed to warn the Venetian bailie of Eubœa of the approaching Turkish fleet, by means of beacon-fires—an incident which takes us back to the Agamemnon of Æschylus. The fall of Constantinople, followed by the capture of Lesbos and Eubœa by the Turks, greatly alarmed the Dukes, who drew closer than ever to the Venetian Republic, and were usually included in all the Venetian treaties. Other misfortunes greatly injured the islands. The Genoese plundered Naxos and Andros, and the volcanic island of Santorin was the scene of a great eruption in 1457, which threw up a new islet in the port. A few years later, Santorin had suffered so much from one cause or another that it contained no more than 300 inhabitants. An earthquake followed this eruption, further increasing the misery of the Archipelago. But this was the age of numerous religious foundations, some of them still in existence, such as the church of Sant’ Antonio at Naxos, which was bestowed upon the Knights of St John, as their arms on its walls remind the traveller. It was about this time too that Cyriacus of Ancona, after copying inscriptions at Athens, visited Andros and other islands of the Ægean. The island rulers not only received him courteously, but ordered excavations to be made for his benefit—a proof of culture which should be set against their wanton destruction of ancient buildings, in order to[172] provide materials for their own palaces—a practice of which the tower at Paros is so striking an example. When we remember that each petty lord considered it necessary to be well lodged, the extent of these ravages may be easily imagined.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century the condition of the islanders had become intolerable, and matters came to a climax under the rule of Giovanni III. That despotic Duke incurred the displeasure not only of the Sultan, but also of his own subjects. The former complained that he had fallen into arrears with his tribute—for the Dukes had long had to purchase independence by the payment of bakshîsh—and that he harboured corsairs, who plundered the Asian coast. The latter grumbled at the heavy taxes which the Duke pocketed without doing anything for the protection of his people. The Archbishop of Naxos made himself the mouthpiece of popular discontent, and wrote to Venice, in the name of the people of Naxos and Paros, offering to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Republic. Venice replied, authorising him to point out to the Duke and to Sommaripa, the lord of Paros, the utter hopelessness of their present position, and to offer them an assured income for the rest of their lives if they would cede their islands to a Venetian commissioner. But the negotiations failed; the Naxiotes, driven to despair, took the law into their own hands, and in 1494 murdered their Duke. The Archbishop then proceeded to Venice, and persuaded the Senate to take over the Duchy, at least till the late Duke’s son, Francesco, came of age. During the next six years Venetian Commissioners administered the islands, which were, however, loyally handed over to Francesco III at the end of that time. The new Duke proved unfortunately to be a homicidal maniac, who killed his wife and tried to kill his heir. As a consequence he was removed to Crete and a second brief Venetian occupation lasted during the rest of his successor’s minority[169]. The long reign of his son, Giovanni IV, who, soon after his accession, was captured by Turkish pirates while on a hunting party, lasted till 1564 and witnessed the loss of many of the Ægean islands. That great sovereign, Suleyman the Magnificent, now sat upon the Turkish throne, and his celebrated admiral, Khaireddîn Barbarossa, spread fire and sword through many a Christian village. In 1537 the classic island of Ægina, still under Venetian domination, was visited by this terrible scourge, who massacred all the adult male population, and took away 6000 women and children as slaves. So complete was the destruction of the Æginetans that, when a French admiral touched at the island soon afterwards, he found it devoid of inhabitants. There, as[173] usual, an Albanian immigration replenished, at least to some extent, the devastated sites, but Ægina was long in recovering some small measure of its former prosperity. Thence Barbarossa sailed to Naxos, whence he carried off an immense booty, compelling the Duke to purchase his further independence—if such it could be called—by a tribute of 5000 ducats, and submitting him to the ignominy of seeing the furniture of his own palace sent on board the Admiral’s flagship under his very eyes. The horrible scenes of those days would seem to have impressed themselves deeply upon the mind of the wretched Duke, who gave vent to his feelings in a bitter letter of complaint to the Pope and other Christian princes. This curious document urged them to “apply their ears and lift up their eyes, and attend with their minds while their own interests were still safe,” and reminded them of the evils caused by discord in the councils of Christendom. The Duke emphasised his admirable truisms, which might have been addressed to the Concert of Europe at any time during the last fifty years, by a well-worn tag from Sallust—Sallustius Crispus, “the author of our race.” But neither his platitudes nor his allusion to his distinguished ancestry, which he might have had some difficulty in proving, availed him. The Turks went on in their career of conquest. Paros was annexed, Andros was forced to pay tribute, the Venetians lost Skiathos and Skopelos, and by the shameful treaty of 1540 forfeited the prestige which they had so long wielded in the Levant.

The Duchy of Naxos had long existed by the grace of the Venetian Republic, and, now that Venice had been crippled, its days were numbered. The capture of Chios in 1566 was the signal for its dissolution. As soon as the news arrived in Naxos and Andros that the Turks had put an end to the rule of the joint-stock company of the Giustiniani in that fertile island, the Greeks of the Duchy complained to the Sultan of the exactions to which they were subjected by their Frank lords. There was some justification for their grievances, for Giacomo IV, the last of the Frank Dukes, was a notorious debauchee; and the conduct of the Catholic clergy, by the admission of a Jesuit historian, had become a public scandal. But the main motive of the petitioners seems to have been that intense hatred of Catholicism which characterised the Orthodox Greeks during the whole period of the Frank rule in the Levant, and which, as we saw under Austrian rule in Bosnia, has not yet wholly disappeared. Giacomo was fully aware of the delicacy of his position, and he resolved to convince the Turkish Government, as force was out of the question, by the only other argument which it understands. He collected a large sum of money, and went to Constantinople[174] to reply to his accusers. But he found the ground already undermined by the artifices of the Œcumenical Patriarch, who had warmly espoused the cause of the Orthodox Naxiotes, and was in the confidence of the Turkish authorities. Giacomo had no sooner landed than he was clapped into prison, where he languished for five months, while the renegade, Pialì Pasha, quietly occupied Naxos and its dependencies and drove the Sommaripa out of Andros. But the Greeks of the Duchy soon discovered that they had made an indifferent bargain. One of the most important banking houses of the period was that of the Nasi, which had business in France, the Low Countries, and Italy, and lent money to kings and princes. The manager of the Antwerp branch was an astute Portuguese Jew, who at one time called himself João Miquez and posed as a Christian, and then reverted to Judaism and styled himself Joseph Nasi. A marriage with a wealthy cousin made him richer than before; he migrated to the Turkish dominions, where Jews were very popular with the Sultans, and became a prime favourite of Selim II. This was the man on whom that sovereign now bestowed the Duchy; and thus, by a prosaic freak of fortune, the lovely island of classical myth and mediæval romance became the property of a Jewish banker. Nasi, as a Jew, knew that he would be loathed by the Greeks, so he never visited his orthodox Duchy, but appointed a Spaniard named Coronello to act as his agent, and to screw as much money as possible out of the inhabitants. In this he was very successful.

As soon as Giacomo IV was released he set out for the west to procure the aid of the Pope and Venice for the recovery of his dominions, even pledging himself in that event to do homage to the Republic for them. But, in spite of the great victory of Lepanto, the Turks remained in undisturbed possession of the Duchy, except for a brief restoration of Giacomo’s authority by Venice in 1571. On the accession of Murad III Giacomo had hopes of obtaining his further restoration through the good offices of the new Sultan’s mother, a native of Paros, belonging to the distinguished Venetian family of Baffo. But though she promised her aid, and he went to plead his cause in person at Constantinople, the Sultan was inexorable. The last of the Dukes died in the Turkish capital in 1576, and was buried in the Latin church there. Three years later Joseph Nasi died also, whereupon the Duchy was placed under the direct administration of the Porte.

But though Naxos and all the important islands had been annexed by the Turks, there still remained a few fragments of the Latin rule in the Levant. The seven islands of Siphnos, Thermia, Kimolos, Polinos, Pholegandros, Gyaros, and Sikinos were retained by the Gozzadini[175] family on payment of a tribute until 1617, while Venice still preserved Tenos as a station[170] in the Levant for a whole century more. Everywhere else in the Ægean the crescent floated from the battlements of the castles and palaces where for three and a half centuries the Latin nobles had practised the arts of war.

The occupation of the Greek islands by the Latins was unnatural, and, like most unnatural things, it was destined not to endure. But this strange meeting of two deeply interesting races in the classic seats of Greek lyric poetry can scarcely fail to strike the imagination. And to-day, when Italy is once more showing a desire to play a rôle in the near East, when Italians have officered the Cretan police, when Italian troops have occupied thirteen islands in the lower Ægean since 1912, including the old Quirini fief of Stampalia, when the Aldobrandini’s thirteenth century possession of Adalia is being revived, and the statesmen of Rome are looking wistfully across the Adriatic, it is curious to go back to the times when Venetian and Lombard families held sway among the islands of the Ægean, and the Latin galleys, flying the pennons of those petty princes, glided in and out of the harbours of that classic sea. Even in her middle age Greece had her romance, and no fitter place could have been chosen for it than “the wave-beat shore of Naxos.”

APPENDIX
THE MAD DUKE OF NAXOS

Subsequent historians of the Duchy of Naxos have accepted without question Hopf’s[171] chronology and brief description of the reign of Francesco III Crispo, who was formally proclaimed duke, after a brief Venetian protectorate, in October 1500. According to the German scholar, who is followed by Count Mas Latrie[172], Francesco III “quietly governed” his island domain down to 1518, the only incident in his career being his capture by Turkish corsairs while hunting in 1517. His wife, according to the same authorities, had already predeceased him, having died “before 1501.” But a perusal of Sanuto’s Diarii shows that all these statements are wrong. Francesco III, so far from “quietly governing” his subjects, was a homicidal maniac, who murdered his wife in 1510 and died in the following year.

We first hear of the duke’s madness in 1509, when he and his brother-in-law,[176] Antonio Loredano, were on board the ducal galley, then engaged in the Venetian service at Trieste. The duke was put in custody at San Michele di Murano, but was subsequently released and allowed to return to Naxos[173]. There, as we learn from two separate accounts, one sent to the Venetian authorities in Crete by the community of Naxos, the other sent to Venice by Antonio da Pesaro, Venetian governor of Andros, the duke had a return of the malady[174]. On August 15, 1510, he was more than usually affectionate to his wife, Taddea Loredano, to whom he had been married fourteen years, and who is described by one of the Venetian ambassadors as “a lady of wisdom and great talent[175].” Having inveigled the duchess to his side “by songs, kisses, and caresses,” he seized his sword and tried to slay her. The terrified woman fled, just as she was, in her nightdress, out of the ducal palace, and took refuge in the house of her aunt, Lucrezia Loredano, Lady of Nio. Thither, in the night of Saturday, August 17, her husband pursued her; he burst open the doors, and entered the bedroom, where he found the Lady of Nio and her daughter-in-law, to whom he gave three severe blows each. Meanwhile, on hearing the noise, the duchess had hidden under a wash-tub; a slave betrayed her hiding-place, and the duke struck her over the head with his sword. In the attempt to parry the blow, she seized the blade in her hands, and fell fainting on the ground, where her miserable assailant gave her a thrust in the stomach. She lived the rest of the night and the next day, while the duke fled to his garden, whence he was induced by the citizens to return to the palace. There, as he sat at meat with his son Giovanni, he heard from one of the servants that the people wished to depose him and put Giovanni in his place. In a paroxysm of rage, he seized a knife to kill his son; but his arm was held, and the lad saved himself by leaping from the balcony. The duke tried to escape to Rhodes, but he was seized, after a struggle in which he was wounded, and sent to Santorin. His son Giovanni IV was proclaimed duke, and as he could not have been more than eleven years old—his birth is spoken of as imminent[176] in May 1499—a governor of the duchy was elected in the person of Jacomo Dezia, whom we may identify with Giacomo I Gozzadini, baron of the island of Zia, who is mentioned as being present in the ducal palace at Naxos, in a document[177] of 1500, whose family had a mansion there, and who had already been governor in 1507. From Santorin, Francesco III was removed on a Venetian ship to Candia, where, as we learn from letters of August 15, 1511, he died of fever[178].

Meanwhile, on October 18, 1510, it had been proposed at Venice that the mad duke’s brother-in-law, Antonio Loredano, should be sent as governor to Naxos, with a salary of 400 ducats a year, payable out of the revenues, just as Venetian governors had been sent there during the minority of Francesco III. Loredano sailed on January 16, 1511, for his post, where he remained for four and a half years[179]. Naxos, in his time, cannot have been a gloomy exile, for we hear of the “balls and festivals with the accompaniment of very polished female society” which greeted the Venetian ambassador[180]. We do not learn who governed the duchy between July 1515, when Loredano returned to Venice, and the coming of age of Duke Giovanni IV, which seems to have been in May 1517. On May 6 of that year he wrote a letter to the Cretan government, signed Joannes Crispus dux Egeo Pelagi, which Sanuto has preserved[181]; and in the same summer il ducha di Nixia, domino Zuan Crespo, was captured by corsairs while hunting, and subsequently ransomed[182]—an adventure which Hopf, as we have seen, wrongly ascribed to Francesco III.

7. CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)

Of all the Levantine possessions acquired by Venice as the result of the Fourth Crusade, by far the most important was the great island of Crete, which she obtained in August, 1204, from Boniface of Montferrat to whom it had been given 15 months earlier by Alexios IV, at the cost of 1000 marks of silver. At that time the population of the island, which in antiquity is supposed to have been a million, was probably about 500,000 or 600,000[183]. Lying on the way to Egypt and Syria, it was an excellent stopping-place for the Venetian merchantmen, and the immense sums of money expended upon its defence prove the value which the shrewd statesmen of the lagoons set upon it. Whether its retention was really worth the enormous loss of blood and treasure which it involved may perhaps be doubted, though in our own days the Concert of Europe has thought fit to spend about thrice the value of the island in the process of freeing it from the Turk. What distinguishes the mediæval history of Crete from that of the other Frank possessions in the Near East is the almost constant insubordination of the Cretan population. While in the Duchy of Athens we scarcely hear of any[178] restlessness on the part of the Greeks, while in the Principality of Achaia they gave comparatively little trouble, while in the Archipelago they seldom murmured against their Dukes—in Crete, on the other hand, one insurrection followed another in rapid succession, and the first 160 years of Venetian rule are little else than a record of insurrections. The masters of the island explained this by the convenient theory, applied in our own time to the Irish, that the Cretans had a double dose of original sin, and the famous verse of Epimenides, to which the New Testament has given undying reputation, must have been often in the mouths of Venetian statesmen. But there were other and more natural reasons for the stubborn resistance of the islanders. After the reconquest of Crete by Nikephoros Phokas, the Byzantine Government had sent thither many members of distinguished military families, and their descendants, the archontes of the island at the time of the Venetian invasion, furnished the leaders for these perennial revolts[184]. Moreover, the topography of Crete is admirably suited for guerilla warfare; the combination of an insular with a highland spirit constitutes a double gage of independence, and what the Venetians regarded as a vice the modern Greeks reckon as a virtue.

Even before the Venetians had had time to take possession of the island, their great rivals, the Genoese, had established a colony there, so that it was clear from the outset that Venice was not the only Latin Power desirous of obtaining Crete. The first landing of the Venetians was effected at Spinalonga, where a small colony was founded. But, before the rest of the island could be annexed, a Genoese citizen, Enrico Pescatore, Count of Malta, one of the most daring seamen of his age, had set foot in Crete in 1206 at the instigation of Genoa, and invited the Cretans to join his standard. He easily made himself master of the island, over which he endeavoured to strengthen his hold by the restoration or construction of fourteen fortresses, still remaining, although in ruins. A larger force was then despatched from Venice, which drove out the Maltese adventurer, who appealed to the Pope as a faithful servant of the Church, and continued to trouble the conquerors for some years more[185]. In 1207 Tiepolo had been appointed the first Venetian Governor, or Duke, as he was styled, of Crete; but it was not till the armistice with Genoa in 1212 that the first comprehensive attempt at colonisation was made, and the organisation of a Cretan Government was undertaken. According to the feudal principles then in vogue,[179] which a century earlier had been adopted for the colonisation of the Holy Land, the island was divided into 132 knights’ fiefs (a number subsequently raised to 200, and then to 230) and 48 sergeants’ or foot soldiers’ fiefs, and volunteers were invited to take them. The former class of lands was bestowed on Venetian nobles, the latter on ordinary citizens; but in both cases the fiefs became the permanent property of the holders, who could dispose of them by will or sale, provided that they bequeathed or sold them to Venetians. The nobles received houses in Candia, the Venetian capital (which now gave its name to the whole island), as well as pasture for their cattle, the State reserving to itself the direct ownership of the strip of coast in which Candia lay, the fort of Temenos and its precincts, and any gold or silver mines that might hereafter be discovered. The division of the island into six parts, or sestieri, was modelled, like the whole scheme of administration, on the arrangements of the city of Venice, where the sestieri still survive. So close was the analogy between the colonial and the metropolitan divisions that the colonists of each sestiere in Crete sprang from the same sestiere at Venice—a system which stimulated local feeling. At the head of each sestiere an official known as a capitano was placed, while the government of the colony was carried on by a greater and a lesser Council of the colonists, by two Councillors representing the Doge, and by the Duke, who usually held office for two years. The first batch of colonists was composed of twenty-six citizens and ninety-four nobles of the Republic, the latter drawn from some of the best Venetian families. But it is curious that, while we still find descendants of Venetian houses in the Cyclades and at Corfù, scarcely a trace of them remains in Crete[186]. As for ecclesiastical matters, always of such paramount importance in the Levant, the existing system was adopted by the newcomers. Candia remained an archbishopric, under which the ten bishoprics of the island were placed; but the churches, with two temporary exceptions, were occupied by the Latin clergy, and that body was required, no less than the laity, to contribute its quota of taxation towards the defence of the capital[187]. Although we hear once or twice of a Greek bishop in Crete, the usual practice was to allow no orthodox ecclesiastic above the rank of a protopapâs to reside at Candia, while Greek priests had to seek consecration from the bishops of the nearest Venetian colonies. But, as the Venetian colonists in course of time became Hellenised and embraced the Orthodox faith, the original organisation of the Latin church was[180] found to be too large, so that, at the time of the Turkish conquest, the Latin Archbishop of Candia with his four suffragans represented Roman Catholicism in the island, and outside the four principal towns there was scarcely a Catholic to be found.

The division of the island into fiefs naturally caused much bad blood among the natives, who objected to this appropriation of their lands. In 1212, the same year which witnessed the arrival of the colonists, an insurrection broke out under the leadership of the powerful family of the Hagiostephanitai. The rising soon assumed such serious proportions that Tiepolo called in the aid of Duke Marco I of Naxos, whose duplicity in this connection was narrated in a previous essay. In addition to these internal troubles, the Genoese and Alamanno Costa, Count of Syracuse, an old comrade of the Count of Malta again became active; but the Venetians wisely purchased the acquiescence of the Genoese in the existing state of things by valuable concessions, the chief of which was the recognition of Genoa’s former privileges of trade with the Empire of Romania, and imprisoned Costa in an iron cage. From that moment, save for two brief raids in 1266 and 1293, Genoa abandoned the idea of contesting her rival’s possession of Crete. In the same year, however, only five years after the first rising, a fresh Cretan insurrection, due to the high-handed action of the Venetian officials, caused the proud Republic of St Mark to admit the necessity of conceding something to the islanders. The ringleaders received a number of knights’ fiefs, and became Venetian vassals. But a further distribution of lands in the parts of the island hitherto unconfiscated kindled a new revolt. The rebels, seeing the growth of the Empire of Nice, offered their country to the Emperor Vatatzes if he would come and deliver them, while the Duke summoned the reigning sovereign of Naxos to his aid. The latter withdrew on the approach of the Nicene admiral, who managed to land a contingent in the island. Long after the admiral’s departure these men held their own in the mountains, and it was eight years before the Venetians succeeded in suppressing the rising. On the death of Vatatzes, the Cretans seemed to have lost hope of external assistance, and no further attempt was made to throw off the Venetian yoke till after the fall of the Latin Empire of Romania. Meanwhile, in 1252, a fresh scheme of colonisation was carried out; ninety more knights’ fiefs were granted in the west of the island, and the town of Canea, the present capital, was founded, on or near the site of the ancient Cydonia[188]; one half of the new[181] city was reserved to Venice, and the other half became the property of the colonists.

After the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks, the value of the island became greater than ever to the Venetians. Three years after that event we find the Doge Zeno writing to Pope Urban IV that “the whole strength of the Empire” lay in Crete, while at the same time the revival of the Greek cause, both on the Bosporos and in the Morea, led to an attack upon it by the Byzantine forces. But Venice had less difficulty in coming to terms with the Emperor than in managing her unruly subjects. In 1268 the Venetian colonists rose under leaders who bore the honoured names of Venier and Gradenigo, demanding complete separation from the mother country. The harsh policy of the Republic towards her colonies was an excuse for this outbreak; but no further attempt of the kind was made for another hundred years, when the descendants of the Venier and the Gradenigo of 1268 headed a far more serious rebellion. Another Greek rising now followed, this time organised by the brothers Chortatzai, but the Venetians had now succeeded in winning over a party among the Cretans, including Alexios Kallerges, the richest of all the archontes. This man used all his local influence on the side of the Government; yet even so the rebellion continued for several years, and at times threatened to gain the upper hand. One Venetian Governor was lured into the mountains, surprised, and slain; another was driven behind the walls of Candia, and only saved from capture by the fidelity of the Greek inhabitants of that district. At last adequate reinforcements arrived, the Chortatzai were banished from the island, and the castle of Selino was erected to overawe the rebels in their part of the country. Peace then reigned for a few years, and the conciliatory policy of the next Governor earned for him the title of “the good” Duke from the Cretan subjects of the Republic.

But the calm was soon disturbed by a fresh outbreak. In 1283 the same Alexios Kallerges who had been so valuable an auxiliary of Venice in the last rising inaugurated a rebellion which, arising out of the curtailment of his own family privileges, spread to the whole island and lasted for sixteen years. The home Government made the mistake of under-estimating the importance of this movement, which it neglected to suppress at the outset by the despatch of large bodies of men. As usual, the insurgents operated in the mountains, whence the Venetians were unable to dislodge them, while the Genoese laid Canea in ashes in 1293, and tried to establish relations with the insurrectionary chief. But Kallerges was not disposed to exchange the rule of one Italian State for that of another, and, as he saw at last that he could not shake off the[182] Venetian yoke single-handed, he came to terms with the Governor. His patriotic refusal of the Genoese offers had excited the admiration of the Venetians, who were ready to make concessions to one whom Genoa could not seduce. He was allowed to keep the fiefs which the Angeloi had granted in the Byzantine days to his family, he was created a knight, and his heirs received permission to intermarry with Venetians—a practice absolutely prohibited as a rule in Venetian colonies. It is pleasant to be able to record that both parties to this treaty kept their word. Kallerges on his death-bed bade his four sons remain true to Venice; one of his grandsons fought in her cause, and his descendants were rewarded with the title of patricians—at that time a rare distinction. These frequent insurrections, combined with the horrors of plague and famine, do not seem to have permanently injured the resources of the island, nor were the ravages of corsairs, fitted out by the Catalans of Attica in the early part of the fourteenth century, felt much beyond the coast. At any rate, in 1320 such was the prosperity of the colony that the Governor was able to remit a large surplus to Venice after defraying the costs of administration. But the harsh policy of the Republic gradually alienated the colonists as well as the natives. A demand for ship-money caused a fresh rebellion of the Greeks in 1333, in which one of the Kallergai fought for, and another of them against, the Venetian Government. Eight years later a member of that famous Cretan family, forgetting the patriotic conduct of his great ancestor, entered into negotiations with the Turks; but he was invited to a parley by the Venetian Governor, who had him arrested as a traitor and thrown in a sack into the sea. This act of cruelty and treachery had the effect of embittering and prolonging the Cretan resistance, so that the Venetians soon held nothing in the island except the capital and a few castles. At last the arrival of overwhelming reinforcements forced the rebel leader, Michael Psaromelingos, to bid his servant kill him, and the rebellion was over. The death of this chieftain has formed the subject of a modern Greek drama, for the Greeks of the mainland have always admired, and sometimes imitated, the desperate valour of their Cretan brethren. On the Venetians this revolt made so great an impression that the Duke was ordered to admit no Cretan into the Great Council of the island without the special permission of the Doge—an order due as much to the fears of the home Government as to the jealousy of the colonists.

But the most significant feature of this insurrection was the apathy of the Venetian vassals in contributing their quota of horses and men for the defence of the island. Somewhat earlier, the knights had been compelled, in spite of their vigorous protests, to pay the sum which, by[183] the terms of their feudal tenure, they were supposed to expend upon their armed followers, direct to the Exchequer, which took care to see that the money was properly applied. Many of the poorer among them now found themselves unable to provide the amounts which the Government required, and so became heavily indebted to the Treasury. It was the opinion of Venetian statesmen that Crete should be self-supporting, but it at last became necessary to grant a little grace to the impoverished debtors, some of whom had shown signs of coquetting with the Turks. Thus the discontented Venetian colonists, who had been born and trained for the most part in an island which exercises a strong attraction on even foreign residents, found that they had more grievances in common with the Greeks than bonds of union with the city of their ancestors. More than a century and a half had elapsed since the first great batch of colonists had left the lagoons for the great Greek island. Redress had been stubbornly refused, and it only needed a spark to set the whole colony ablaze.

In 1362 a new Duke, Leonardo Dandolo, arrived at Candia with orders from the Venetian Senate to demand from the knights a contribution towards the repair of the harbour there. The knights contended that, as the harbour would benefit trade, which was the interest of the Republic, while their income was exclusively derived from agriculture, the expense should be borne by the home Government. As the Senate persisted, the whole body of knights rose under the command of two young members of the order, Tito Venier, Lord of Cerigo—the island which afterwards formed part of the Septinsular Republic—and Tito Gradenigo, entered the Duke’s palace, and put him and his Councillors in irons. Having arrested all the Venetian merchants whom they could find, the rebels then proclaimed the independence of Crete—how often since then has it not been announced!—appointed Marco Gradenigo, Tito’s uncle, Duke, and elected four Councillors from their own ranks. In order to obtain the support of the Greeks they declared that the Roman Catholic ritual had ceased to exist throughout the island, and announced their own acceptance of the Orthodox faith. In token of the new order of things the Venetian insignia were torn down from all the public buildings, and St Mark made way for Titus, the patron saint and first bishop of Crete[189]. The theological argument was more than the Greeks could resist, and the descendants of Catholic Venetians and Orthodox archontes made common cause against Popery and the tax-collector.

When the news reached Venice, it excited the utmost consternation. But, as no sufficient forces were available, the Republic resolved to try[184] what persuasion could effect. A trusty Greek from the Venetian colony of Modon was sent to treat with the Greeks, while five commissioners proceeded to negotiate with the revolutionary Government at Candia. The commissioners were courteously heard; but when it was found that they were empowered to offer nothing but an amnesty, and that only on condition of prompt submission to the Republic, they were plainly told that the liberty recently won by arms should never be sacrificed to the commands of the Venetian Senate. Nothing remained but to draw the sword, and the home Government had prudently availed itself of the negotiations to begin its preparations, both diplomatic and naval. All the Powers friendly to Venice, the Pope, the Emperor Charles IV, the King of France, and the Queen of Naples, even Genoa herself, forbade their subjects to trade with the island, and the Pope, alarmed at the apostasy of the colonists, addressed a pastoral to the recalcitrant Cretans. But neither papal arguments nor an international boycott could bend the stubborn minds of the insurgents. It was not till the arrival of the Venetian fleet and army, the latter under the command of Luchino dal Verme, the friend of Petrarch, who had warned him, with the inevitable allusions to the classic poets and to St Paul, of the “untruthfulness,” “craft,” and “deceit” of the Cretans, that the movement was crushed.

The armament was of considerable size. Italy had been ransacked for soldiers, the Duchy of the Archipelago and Eubœa for ships, and Nicolò “Spezzabanda,” the regent of Naxos, hastened to assist his Venetian patrons. Candia speedily fell, and then the commissioners who accompanied the military and naval forces proceeded to mete out punishment to the chief insurgents without mercy. Marco Gradenigo and two others were beheaded on the platform of the castle, where their corpses were ordered to remain, under penalty of the loss of a hand to any one who tried to remove them. The same bloody and brief assizes were held in Canea and Rethymno; the most guilty were executed, the less conspicuous were banished. Tito Venier was captured by Venetian ships on the high sea, and paid for his treasonable acts with his head; his accomplice, Tito Gradenigo, managed to escape to Rhodes, but died in exile. The property of the conspirators was confiscated by the State.

Great was the joy at Venice when it was known that the insurrection had been suppressed. Three days were given up to thanksgivings and festivities, at which Petrarch was present, and of which he has left an account. Foreign powers congratulated the Republic on its success, while in Crete itself the new Duke ordered the celebration of May 10[185] in each year-the anniversary of the capitulation of Candia—as a public holiday. But the peace, or perhaps we should say desolation, of the island was soon disturbed. Some of the banished colonists combined with three brothers of the redoubtable family of the Kallergai, who proclaimed the Byzantine Emperor sovereign of Crete. This time the Venetian Government sent troops at once to Candia, but hunger proved a more effective weapon than the sword. The inhabitants of Lasithi, where the insurgents had their headquarters, surrendered the ringleaders rather than starve. Then followed a fresh series of savage sentences, for the Republic considered that no mercy should be shown to such constant rebels. While the chiefs were sent to the block, the whole plateau of Lasithi was converted into a desert, the peasants were carried off and their cottages pulled down, and the loss of a foot and the confiscation of his cattle were pronounced to be the penalty of any farmer or herdsman who should dare to sow corn there or to use the spot for pasture. This cruel and ridiculous order was obeyed to the letter; for nearly a century one of the most fertile districts of Crete was allowed to remain in a state of nature, till at last in 1463 the urgent requirements of the Venetian fleet compelled the Senate to consent to the recultivation of Lasithi. But as soon as the temporary exigencies of the public service had been satisfied, Lasithi fell once more under the ban, until towards the end of the fifteenth century the plain was placed under the immediate supervision of the Duke and his Councillors. It would be hard to discover any more suicidal policy than this, which crippled the resources of the colony in order to gratify a feeling of revenge. But it has ever been the misfortune of Crete that the folly of her rulers has done everything possible to counteract her natural advantages.

A long period of peace now ensued, a peace born not of prosperous contentment but of hopeless exhaustion. The first act of the Republic was to substitute for the original oath of fealty, exacted from the colonists at the time of the first great settlement in 1212, a much stricter formula of obedience. The next was to put up to auction the vacant fiefs of the executed and banished knights at Venice, for it had been resolved that none of those estates should be acquired by members of the Greek aristocracy. The bidding was not very brisk, for Crete had a bad character on the Venetian exchange, so that, some years later, on the destruction of the castle of Tenedos, the Republic transported the whole population to Candia. There they settled outside the capital in a suburb which, from their old home, received the name of Le Tenedee[190].

We hear little about Crete during the first half of the fifteenth[186] century, which was so critical a time for the Franks of the mainland. The principal grievance of the colonists at that period seems to have been the arrogance of the Jews, against whom they twice petitioned the Government. It was a Jew, however, who, together with a priest, betrayed to the Duke the plot which had been concocted by a leading Greek of Rethymno in 1453 for the murder of all the Venetian officials on one day, the incarceration of all other foreigners, and the proclamation of a Greek prince as sovereign of the island. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in that year, followed as it was by the flight of many Greek families to Crete, induced the Venetians to take more stringent precautions against the intrigues of their Cretan subjects. An order was issued empowering the Duke to make away with any suspected Cretans without trial or public inquiry of any kind. We are reminded by this horrible ordinance of the secret commission for the slaughter of dangerous Helots which had been one of the laws of Lycurgus. Nothing could better show the insecurity of Venetian rule, even after two centuries and a half had passed since the conquest. Another incident, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, shows how savage was the punishment meted out to the insurgents, with the approval of the authorities. At that period the Cretans of Selmo, Sphakia, and the Rhiza, not far from the latter place united their forces against their Venetian masters under the leadership of the Pateropouloi clan. The three insurgent districts were formed into an independent Republic, of which a leading Greek was chosen Rector. The Venetians of Canea, under the pretext of a wedding feast at the villa of one of their countrymen at the charming village of Alikianou, lured the Rector and some fifty of his friends to that place, seized the guests after the banquet, and hanged or shot him, his son, and many others in cold blood. The remainder of the rebels were rigorously proscribed, and a pardon was granted to those alone who produced at Canea the gory head of a father, a brother, a cousin, or a nephew[191]. Nor were the foes of Venice only those of her own household. The Turkish peril, which had manifested itself in sporadic raids before the fall of Constantinople, became more pressing after the loss of the Morea. Appeals were made by the inhabitants for reinforcements and arms, and at last, when the capture of Eubœa by the Turks had deprived them of that valuable station, the Venetians turned their thoughts to the protection of Crete, and resolved to restore the walls of Candia. Those who saw, like the author, those magnificent fortifications before the sea-gate was destroyed by the British troops in 1898, can estimate the strength of the town in the later Venetian period.[187] Unfortunately, those ramparts, which afterwards kept the Turks at bay for twenty-four years, could not prevent the dreaded Barbarossa’s ravages on other parts of the coast. In 1538 that great captain appeared with the whole Turkish fleet—then a very different affair from the wretched hulks of 1898 which were a terror only to their crews—landed at Suda Bay, laid all the adjacent country waste, and nearly captured Canea. Thirty years later, this raid was repeated with even greater success, for Rethymno was destroyed, and soon the loss of Cyprus deprived Crete of a bulwark which had hitherto divided the attention of the advancing Turk. Venice was, at length, thoroughly alarmed for the safety of her great possession, and she took the resolve of introducing drastic reforms into the island. With this object an experienced statesman, Giacomo Foscarini, was sent to Crete in 1574 as special commissioner, with full powers to inquire into, and redress, the grievances of the islanders. Foscarini, well aware that his task would be no easy one, endeavoured to excuse himself on private grounds; but his patriotism prevailed over all other considerations, and he set out for Crete with the intention of increasing the resources of the island and at the same time protecting the inhabitants against the oppression of those placed over them. In accordance with this policy, he issued, as soon as he had landed, a proclamation, urging all who had grievances against any Venetian official to come without fear, either openly or in secret, before him, in the certainty of obtaining justice and redress. He then proceeded to study the condition of the country, and it is fortunate that the results of his investigation have been preserved in an official report, which throws a flood of light on the state of Crete during the latter half of the sixteenth century[192].

At the time of Foscarini’s visit the island was divided up into 479 fiefs, 394 of which belonged to Venetians, who were no longer subdivided into the two original classes of knights and sergeants, or foot soldiers, but were all collectively known as knights. Of the remaining fiefs, thirty-five belonged to native Cretan families, twenty-five to the Latin Church, and twenty-five to the Venetian Government. None of these last three classes paid taxes or yielded service of any sort to the Republic, though a rent was derived from such of the State domains as were let. As might be guessed from the frequent repetition of Cretan insurrections, the condition of the native Cretan aristocracy was one of the most serious problems in the island. When Venice had adopted, somewhat reluctantly, the plan of bestowing fiefs on the Greek leaders, twelve prominent Cretan families had been selected, whose descendants, styled archontópouloi,[188] or archontoromaîoi, formed a privileged class without obligations of any sort. As time went on, the numbers of these families had increased, till, shortly before Foscarini’s visit, they comprised at least 400 souls. But, as the number of the fiefs at their disposal remained the same, a series of subdivisions became necessary, and this led to those continual quarrels, which were the inevitable result of the feudal system all over Greece. A hard and fast line was soon drawn between the richer “sons of the archontes,” who lived a life of idleness and luxury in the towns, and the poorer members of the clan, who sank into the position of peasants on their bit of land, without, however, losing their privileges and their pride of descent. The latter quality involved them in perpetual feuds with rival families equally aristocratic and equally penniless, and the celebrated district of Sphakia, in particular, had even then acquired the evil notoriety for turbulent independence which it preserved down to the end of the nineteenth century. Shortly before Foscarini appeared on the scene, a Venetian commissioner had paid a visit to that spot for the express purpose of chastising the local family of the Pateroi, whose hereditary feud with the family of the Papadopouloi of Rethymno had become a public scandal. Both the parties, the latter of whom still has a representative in an illustrious family resident at Venice, were of common stock, for both were branches of the ancient Cretan clan of the Skordiloi. But they hated one another with all the bitterness of near relatives; revenge was the most precious heritage of their race; the bloody garment of each victim was treasured up by his family, every member of which wore mourning till his murder had been wiped out in blood; and thus, as in Albania to-day, and in Corsica in the days of Mérimée, there was no end to the chain of assassinations. On this occasion the Sphakiotes, who could well maintain the classic reputation of the Cretan bowmen, were completely crushed by the heavily armed troops of Venice. Their homes were burned to the ground, those who resisted were slain; those who were captured were sent into exile at Corfù, where they mostly died of cruel treatment or home-sickness, the home-sickness which every true Cretan feels for his mountains. The survivors of the clan were forbidden to rebuild their dwellings or to approach within many miles of their beloved Sphakia. The inhospitable valleys and rough uplands became their refuge, and winter and lack of food had been steadily diminishing their numbers when Foscarini arrived at Sphakia to see for himself how things were in that notorious district.

Sphakia lies on the south coast of the island, almost exactly opposite the Bay of Suda on the north. Foscarini describes it as consisting of[189] “a very weak tower,” occupied by a Venetian garrison of eleven men, and a small hamlet built in terraces on the hills. The wildness of the scenery was in keeping, he says, with the wildness of the inhabitants, whose bravery, splendid physique, and agility in climbing the rocks he warmly praises. Their appearance suggested to him a comparison with “the wild Irish,” and they have certainly vied with the latter in the trouble which they have given to successive Governments. Their long hair and beards, their huge boots and vast skirts, the dagger, sword, bow and arrows, which every Sphakiote constantly carried, and the unpleasant odour of goats, which was derived from their habit of sleeping in caves among their herds, and which clung to their persons, struck the observant Venetian in a more or less agreeable manner. Yet he remarked that, if they were let alone and not agitated by family feuds, they were a mild and gentle race, and the peasant spokesman of the clan seemed to him one of nature’s noblemen. With this man Foscarini came to terms, promising the Pateroi a free pardon, their return to their homes, and the restoration of their villages, on condition that they should furnish men for the Venetian galleys, send a deputation twice a year to Canea, and work once annually on the fortifications of that town. The Sphakiotes loyally kept these conditions during the stay of Foscarini in the island, their district became a model of law and order, while their rivals, the Papadopouloi, were frightened into obedience by the threats of the energetic commissioner. He further organised all the native clans in companies for service in the militia under chiefs, or capitani, chosen by him from out of their midst and paid by the local government. This local militia was entrusted with the policing of the island, on the sound principle that a former brigand makes the best policeman. Disobedience or negligence was punished by degradation from the privileged class of free archontópouloi, and thus the military qualities of the Cretans were diverted into a useful channel, and a strong motive provided for their loyalty. Similarly since the union with Greece the Cretans have become excellent constables.

The next problem was that of the Venetian knights. It had been the original intention of the Republic that none of their fiefs should pass into Greek hands. But as time went on many of the colonists had secretly sold their estates to the natives, and had gone back to Venice to spend the proceeds of the sale in luxurious idleness. When Foscarini arrived, he found that many even of those Venetians who remained in Crete had become Greek in dress, manners, and speech. More than sixty years earlier we hear complaints of the lack of Catholic priests and of the consequent indifference of the colonists to the religion of their forefathers,[190] so that we are not surprised to hear Foscarini deploring the numerous conversions of the Venetians in the country districts to the Orthodox faith through the want of Latin churches. In the town of Candia, where the nobles were better off, they still remained strict Catholics, and this difference of religion marked them off from the Orthodox people; but their wives had adopted Oriental habits, and lived in the seclusion which we associate with the daily life of women in the East. In Canea, which was a more progressive place than the capital, things were a little more hopeful, but even there education was almost entirely neglected. In the country, owing to the subdivision of fiefs, many of the smaller Venetian proprietors had sunk to the condition of peasants, retaining neither the language nor the chivalrous habits of their ancestors, but only the sonorous names of the great Venetian houses whence they sprang. All the old martial exercises, on which the Republic had relied for the defence of the island, had long fallen into abeyance. Few of the knights could afford to keep horses; few could ride them. When they were summoned on parade at Candia, they were wont to stick some of their labourers on horseback, clad in their own armour, to the scandal of the Government and the amusement of the spectators, who would pelt these improvised horsemen with bad oranges or stones. Another abuse arose from the possession of one estate by several persons, who each contributed a part of the horse’s equipment which the estate was expected to furnish. Thus the net result of the feudal arrangements in Crete at this period was an impoverished nobility and an utterly inadequate system of defence.

Foscarini set to work to remedy these evils with great courage. He proceeded to restore the old feudal military service, with such alterations as the times required. He announced that neglect of this public duty would be punished by confiscation of the vassal’s fief; he abolished the combination of several persons for the equipment of one horse, but ordered that the small proprietors should each provide one of the cheap but hardy little Cretan steeds, leaving the wealthier knights to furnish costlier animals. By this means he created a chivalrous spirit among the younger nobles, who began to take pride in their horses, and 1200 horsemen were at the disposal of the State before he left the island. He next turned his attention to the remedy of another abuse—the excessive growth of the native Cretan aristocracy owing to the issue of patents of nobility by corrupt officials. Still worse was the reckless bestowal of privileges, such as exemptions from personal service on the galleys and from labour on the fortifications, upon Cretans of humble origin, or even upon whole communities. The latter practice was specially objectionable,[191] because the privileged communities exercised a magnetic attraction upon the peasants of other districts, who flocked into them, leaving the less favoured parts of the island almost depopulated. Quite apart from this cause, the diminution of the population, which at the time of the Venetian conquest was about half a million, but had sunk to 271,489 shortly before Foscarini’s arrival, was sufficiently serious. It is obvious that in ancient times, Crete with its “ninety cities” must have supported a large number of inhabitants; but the plagues, famines, and earthquakes of the sixteenth century had lessened the population, already diminished by Turkish raids and internal insurrections. In 1524 no fewer than 24,000 persons died of the plague, and the Jews alone were an increasing body. Against them Foscarini was particularly severe; he regarded the fair Jewesses of Candia as the chief cause of the moral laxity of the young nobles; he absolutely forbade Christians to accept service in Jewish families; and nowhere was his departure so welcome as in the Ghetto of Candia. The peasants, on the other hand, regarded him as a benefactor; for their lot, whether they were mere serfs or whether they tilled the land on condition of paying a certain proportion of the produce, was by no means enviable. The serfs, or pároikoi, were mostly the descendants of the Arabs who had been enslaved by Nikephoros Phokas, and who could be sold at the will of their masters. The free peasants were overburdened with compulsory work by the Government, as well as by the demands of their lords. In neither case was Foscarini sure that he had been able to confer any permanent benefit upon them. At least, he had followed the maxim of an experienced Venetian, that the Cretans were not to be managed by threats and punishments.

He concluded his mission by strengthening the two harbours of Suda and Spinalonga, by increasing the numbers and pay of the garrison, by improving the Cretan fleet and the mercantile marine, and by restoring equilibrium to the budget. The Levantine possessions of Venice cost her at this period more than they brought in, and it was the desire of the Republic that Crete, should, at any rate, be made to pay expenses. With this object, Foscarini regulated the currency, raised the tariff in such a way that the increased duties fell on the foreign consumer, saw that they were honestly collected, and endeavoured to make the island more productive. But in all his reforms the commissioner met with stubborn resistance from the vested interests of the Venetian officials and the fanaticism of the Orthodox clergy, always the bitterest foes of Venice in the Levant. In dealing with the latter, Foscarini saw that strong measures were necessary; he persuaded his Government to banish the[192] worst agitators, and to allow the others to remain only on condition that they behaved well. Then, after more than four years of labour, he returned to Venice, where he was thanked by the Doge for his eminent services. He had been, indeed, as his monument in the Carmelite church there says, “Dictator of the island of Candia”; but even his heroic policy did “but skin and film the ulcerous place.” Not ten years after his departure we find another Venetian authority, Giulio de Garzoni, writing of the tyranny of the knights and officials, the misery of the natives, the disorder of the administration, and the continued agitation of the Greek clergy among the peasantry. So desperate had the latter become that there were many who preferred even the yoke of the Sultan to that of the Catholic Republic[193]. The population of the island, which Foscarini had estimated at 219,000, had sunk in this short space of time to about 176,000. Numbers of Cretans had emigrated to Constantinople since Foscarini left, where they formed a large portion of the men employed in the Turkish arsenal, and where the information which they gave to the Turks about the weakness of the Cretan garrison and forts filled the Venetian representatives with alarm. Yet Venice seemed powerless to do more for the oppressed islanders; indeed, she inclined rather to the Machiavellian policy of Fra Paolo Sarpi, who advised her to treat the Cretans like wild beasts, upon whom humanity would be only thrown away, and to govern the island by maintaining constant enmity between the barbarised colonists and the native barbarians. “Bread and the stick, that is all that you ought to give them.” Such a policy could only prevail so long as Venice was strong enough to defend the colony, or wise enough to keep at peace with the Sultan.

The latter policy prevailed for nearly three-quarters of a century after the peace between Venice and the Porte in 1573, and during that period we hear little of Crete. The quaint traveller Lithgow[194], who visited it in the first decade of the seventeenth century, alludes to a descent of the Turks upon Rethymno in 1597, when that town was again sacked and burned; and he remarks, as Plato had done in The Laws, that he never saw a Cretan come out of his house unarmed. He found a Venetian garrison of 12,000 men in the island, and reiterates the preference of the Cretans for Turkish rule, on the ground that they would have “more liberty and less taxes.” But while he was disappointed to find no more than four cities in an island which in Homer’s day had contained ninety, he tells us that Canea had “ninety-seven palaces,” and he waxes eloquent over the great fertility of the country near Suda.[193] It is curious to find, nearly three centuries ago, that Suda bay was eagerly coveted by a foreign potentate, the King of Spain, of whose designs the astute Venetians were fully aware, and whose overtures they steadily declined.

The time had now arrived when the Cretans were to realise their desires, and exchange the Venetian for the Turkish rule. The Ottoman sultans had long meditated the conquest of the island, and two recent events had infuriated Ibrahim I against the Venetians. The Near East was at that time cursed with a severe outbreak of piracy, in which there was little to choose between Christians and Mussulmans. While the Venetians had chased some Barbary corsairs into the Turkish harbour of Valona, on the coast of Albania, and had injured a minaret with their shots, they had allowed a Maltese squadron, which had captured the nurse of the Sultan’s son, to sail into a Cretan harbour with its booty. The fury of the Sultan, whose affection for his son’s nurse was well known, was not appeased by the apologies of the Venetian representative. Great preparations were made for an expedition against Crete, and Ibrahim constantly went down to the arsenals to urge on the workmen. All over the Turkish empire the word went forth to make ready. The forests of the Morea were felled to furnish palisades, the naval stores of Chalkis were emptied to supply provisions for the troops. All the time the Grand Vizier kept assuring the Venetian bailie that these gigantic efforts were directed not against the Republic, but against the knights of Malta. In vain the Mufti protested against this act of deception, and pleaded that, if war there must be against Venice, at least it might be open. The Capitan-Pasha and the war party silenced any religious scruples of the Sultan, and the Mufti was told to mind his own business. As soon as the truth dawned upon the Venetians they lost no time in preparing to meet the Turks. Andrea Cornaro, the new Governor of Crete, hastily strengthened the fortifications of Candia and of the island at the mouth of Suda bay, while the home Government sent messages for aid to every friendly State, from Spain to Persia, with but little result. The Great Powers were then at each other’s throats; France was quarrelling with Spain, Germany was still in the throes of the Thirty Years’ War, England was engaged in the struggle between King and Parliament, and it was thought that the English wine trade would benefit by the Turkish conquest of Crete. Besides, the downfall of the Levantine commerce of Venice was regarded with equanimity by our Turkey merchants, and the Venetians accused us of selling munitions of war to the infidel. It was remarked, too, that Venice, of all States, was the least entitled to expect Christendom to arm in her defence, for no[194] other Government had been so ready to sacrifice Christian interests in the Levant when it suited her purpose. Only the Pope and a few minor States promised assistance.

In 1645 the Turkish fleet sailed with sealed orders for the famous bay of Navarino. Then the command was given to arrest all Venetian subjects, including the Republic’s representative at Constantinople, and the Turkish commander, a Dalmatian renegade, set sail for Crete. Landing without opposition to the west of Canea, he proceeded to besiege that town, whose small but heroic garrison held out for two months before capitulating. The principal churches were at once converted into mosques; but the losses of the Turks during the siege, and the liberal terms which their commander had felt bound to offer to the besieged, cost him his head. At Venice great was the consternation at the loss of Canea; enormous pecuniary sacrifices were demanded of the citizens, and titles of nobility were sold in order to raise funds for carrying on the war. Meanwhile, an attempt to create a diversion by an attack upon Patras only served to exasperate the Turks, who became masters of Rethymno in 1646, and in the spring of 1648 began that memorable siege of Candia which was destined to last for more than twenty years. Even though Venice sued for peace, and offered to the Sultan Parga and Tenos[195], as well as a tribute, in return for the restoration of Canea and Rethymno, the Turks remained obdurate, and were resolved at all costs to have the island, “even though the war should go on for a hundred years.” And indeed it seemed likely to be prolonged indefinitely. The substitution of Mohammed IV for Ibrahim I as Sultan, and the consequent confusion at the Turkish capital, made it difficult for the Turks to carry on the struggle with the vigour which they had shown at the outset. The Venetian fleet waited at the entrance of the Dardanelles to attack Turkish convoys on their way to Crete, while the Ottoman provision-stores at Volo and Megara were burned. But these successes outside of the island delayed, without preventing, the progress of the Turkish arms. In fact, the Venetian forays in the Archipelago, notably at Paros and Melos, had the effect of embittering the Greeks against them, and, as a Cretan poet wrote, the islanders had to suffer, whichever side they took. In Crete itself, an ambitious Greek priest persuaded the Porte to have him appointed Metropolitan of the island, and to allow him to name seven suffragans. The Cretan militia refused to fight, and even the warlike Sphakiotes, under the leadership of a Kallerges, did little beyond cutting off a few Turkish stragglers. At last they yielded to the Turks,[195] whose humane treatment of the Greek peasants throughout the island, combined with the unpopularity of the Latin rule, frustrated the attempt to provoke a general rising of the Cretans against the invaders. Nor was a small French force, which Cardinal Mazarin at last sent to aid the Venetians, more successful. Both sides were, in fact, equally hampered and equally unable to obtain a decisive victory; the Venetian fleet at the islet of Standia, and the Turkish army in the fortress of New Candia, which it had erected, kept watching one another, while year after year the wearisome war dragged on. Then, in 1666, a new element was introduced into the conflict. The Grand Vizier, Ahmed Köprili, landed in Crete, resolved to risk his head upon the success of his attempt to take Candia[196].

For two years and a half Köprili patiently besieged the town, with an immense expenditure of ammunition and a great loss of life. Worse and worse grew the condition of the garrison, which was commanded by the brave Francesco Morosini, who was destined later on to inflict such tremendous blows upon the Turks in the Morea. A ray of hope illumined the doomed fortress when, in June 1669, a force of 8000 French soldiers under the Duc de Navailles, and fifty French vessels under the Duc de Beaufort, arrived in the harbour, sent by Louis XIV, at the urgent prayer of Pope Clement IX, to save this bulwark of Catholicism. But these French auxiliaries met with no success. Four days after their arrival, the Duc de Beaufort fell in a sally outside the walls[197]. His colleague, the Duc de Navailles, soon lost heart, and sailed away to France, leaving the garrison to its fate. His departure was the turning-point in the siege. The houses were riddled with shots, the churches were in ruins, the streets were strewn with splinters of bombs and bullets, every day diminished the number of the defenders, and sickness was raging in the town. Then Morosini saw that it was useless to go on fighting. He summoned a council of war, and proposed that the garrison should capitulate. A few desperate men opposed his proposition, saying that they would rather blow up the place and die, as they had fought, like heroes among its ruins. But Morosini’s opinion prevailed, the white flag was hoisted on the ramparts, and two plenipotentiaries—one of them an Englishman, Colonel Thomas Anand—were appointed to settle the terms of capitulation with the Grand Vizier, who was represented at the conference by a Greek, Panagiotes Nikouses, the first of his race who became Grand Dragoman of the Porte[198]. Köprili insisted upon the[196] complete cession of Crete, with the exception of the three fortresses of Suda, Spinalonga, and Grabusa, with the small islands near them; but he showed his appreciation of the heroic defence of Candia by allowing the garrison to march out with all the honours of war. On September 27 the keys of the town were handed to him on a silver dish, and on the same day, the whole population, except six persons, left the place. There, at least, the Greeks preferred exile to Turkish rule, and one of Köprili’s first acts was to induce fresh inhabitants to come to the deserted town by the promise of exemption from taxes for several years.

The cost of this siege, one of the longest in history, “Troy’s rival,” as Byron called it[199], had been enormous. The Venetians, it was calculated, had lost 30,985 men, and the Turks 118,754, and the Republic had spent 4,253,000 ducats upon the defence of this one city. Some idea of the miseries inflicted by this long war of a quarter of a century may be formed from the fact that the population of Crete, which had risen to about 260,000 before it began, was estimated by the English traveller Randolph, eighteen years after the Turkish conquest, at only 80,000, of whom 30,000 were Turks. Even before the siege it had been said that Crete cost far more than it was worth, and from the pecuniary standpoint the loss of the island was a blessing in disguise. But a cession of territory cannot be measured by means of a balance-sheet. The prestige of the Republic had been shattered, her greatest possession in the Levant had been torn from her, and once more the disunion of the Western Powers had been the Turk’s opportunity. Both the parties to the treaty were accused of having concluded an unworthy peace. Every successful Turkish commander has enemies at home, who seek to undermine his influence; but Köprili was strong enough to keep his place. Morosini, less fortunate, was, indeed, acquitted of the charges of bribery and malversation brought against him, but he was not employed again for many years, until he was called upon to take a noble revenge for the loss of Candia.

Venice did not retain her three remaining Cretan fortresses indefinitely. Grabusa was betrayed by its venal commander to the Turks in 1691; Suda and Spinalonga were captured in 1715 during the Turco-Venetian War, and the Treaty of Passarovitz confirmed their annexation to Turkey[200].

So, after 465 years, the Venetian domination came to an end. From the Roman times to the present day no government has lasted so long in that restless island; and the winged lion on many a building, the old[197] galley arches on the left of the port of Candia, and the chain of Venetian fortresses, of which Prof. Gerola has given a detailed description in his great work, Venetian Monuments in the island of Crete, remind us of the bygone rule of the great republic. But the traveller will inquire in vain for the descendants of those Venetian colonists whose names have been preserved in the archives at Venice. Rather than remain in Crete, most of them emigrated to Corfù or to the Ægean islands, or else returned to Venice—reluctantly, we may be sure, for Crete has ever exercised a strange fascination on all who have dwelt there. Now that Crete is once more emancipated from the Turk, it is possible to compare the Venetian and the Ottoman rule, and even Greeks themselves, no lovers of the Latins in the Levant, have done justice to the merits of the Republic of St Mark. The yoke of Venice was at times heavy, and her hand was relentless in crushing out rebellion. But a Greek writer of eminence has admitted that the Venetian administration in Crete was not exceptionally cruel, if judged by the low standard of humanity in that period[201]. Some persons, on the strength of certain striking instances of ferocious punishment inflicted on those who had taken part in the Cretan risings[202], have pronounced the Venetians to have been worse than the Turks. But in our own day the Germans, who boast of their superior education, have exterminated the inhabitants of a South Sea island as vengeance for the murder of one missionary and have incited the Turks to massacre the Armenians. It should be reckoned to the credit of Venice that she, at least, did not attack the religion, or attempt to proscribe the language, of her Greek subjects, but sternly repelled the proselytising zeal of the Papacy, so that the Orthodox Church gained more followers than it lost. The permission accorded in Crete to mixed marriages tended to make the children of the Venetian colonists good Cretans and luke-warm Catholics, where they did not go over to the Orthodox creed. The Greeks were given a share in the administration, trade was encouraged, and many of the natives amassed large fortunes. At no time in the history of the island was the export of wine so considerable as during the Venetian occupation. So great was the wine trade between Crete and England that Henry VIII appointed in 1522 a certain merchant of Lucca, resident in the island, as first English Consul there—the beginning of our consular service. Various travellers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allude to this traffic, and Ben Jonson, in his play of The Fox, talks of “rich Candian wine” as a special vintage. In return, we sent woollens to the islanders, till the French managed to supplant us[203]. Nor was learning neglected[198] under the Venetians. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries produced many Cretans of distinction, among them Pope Alexander V. One became a famous engineer, two others gained renown as printers at Venice and Rome; a great Cretan artist, Domenicos Theotokopoulos, obtained undying fame at Madrid under the name of “El Greco”; one Cretan author edited the Moral Treatises of Plutarch; another, Joannes Bergikios, wrote a history of his native island in Italian. We have two poems in Greek by the Cretans Bouniales and Skleros upon the war of Candia[204]. It was a Cretan of Venetian origin, Vincenzo Comaro, who wrote the romance of Erotokritos, which was “the most popular reading of the Levant from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century,” and in which Herakles, “king of Athens,” his lovely daughter Aretousa, and her lover Erotokritos are the principal figures, amidst a crowd of princelets obviously modelled on the Frankish dukes and marquesses of mediæval Greece. Other novelists were produced by the island, but when Crete fell all the lettered Cretans left, and with their departure the romantic spirit in literature, which they had imbibed from the West, ceased[205]. A Greek school had been founded at Candia in 1550, and many young Cretans went to Italy for purposes of study[206]. Markos Mousouros, the Cretan scholar, was buried in Sta Maria della Pace in Rome in 1517; another Cretan, Skouphos, published his Rhetoric at Venice in 1681. Compared with the present day, when the island has just emerged from the deadening effect of 229 years of Turkish rule, its civilisation was materially more advanced in Venetian times. The Venetians made roads, bridges, and aqueducts; the Turks created nothing, and allowed the former means of communication to decay. Yet, as we have seen, Venice was never popular with the Cretans, and the reason is perfectly obvious to those who have observed the Greek character. Be the material advantages of foreign domination never so great, the Greek resents being governed by those of another race and creed, especially if that creed be Roman Catholicism. The history of the Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate, of Cyprus under the existing arrangement, of the Morea under the Venetians, of Athens and of Naxos under the Latin dukes, all point the same moral. The patriotic Greek would rather be free than prosperous, and most Greeks, though sharp men of business, are warm patriots. That is the lesson of Venetian rule in Crete—a lesson which Europe, after the agony of a century of insurrections, at last took to heart by granting the Cretans autonomy—now become union with Greece.

8. THE IONIAN ISLANDS UNDER VENETIAN RULE

On their way from Venice to Constantinople the soldiers of the fourth crusade cast anchor at Corfù, which (as modern Corfiote historians think) had lately been recovered from the Genoese pirate Vetrano by the Byzantine government, and was at that time, in the language of the chronicler Villehardouin, “very rich and plenteous.” In the deed of partition the Ionian islands were assigned to the Venetians; but they did not find Corfù by any means an easy conquest. The natives, combining with their old master, Vetrano, ousted the Venetian garrison, and it was not till he had been defeated in a naval battle and hanged with a number of his Corfiote supporters that the Republic was able to occupy the island. Even then the Venetian government, finding it impossible to administer directly all the vast territories which had suddenly come into its possession, granted the island in fiefs to ten Venetian citizens on condition that they should garrison it and should pay an annual rent to the Republic. The rights of the Greek church were to be respected, and the taxes of the loyal islanders were not to be raised[207]. But this first Venetian domination of Corfù was of brief duration. When Michael I Angelos founded the Despotat of Epeiros the attraction of a neighbouring Greek state proved too much for the Corfiotes, who threw off the Latin yoke and willingly became his subjects. A memorial of his rule may still be seen in the splendidly situated castle of Sant’ Angelo, whose ruins rise high above the waters of the Ionian Sea not far from the beautiful monastery of Palaiokastrizza[208].

Corfù prospered greatly under the Despots of Epeiros. They took good care to ratify and extend the privileges of the church, to grant exemptions from taxation to the priests, and to reduce the burdens of the laity to the smallest possible figure. In this they showed their wisdom, for the church became their warmest ally, and a Corfiote divine was one of the most vigorous advocates of his patron in the ecclesiastical and political feud between the rival Greek empires of Nice and Salonika. But after little more than half a century of Orthodox rule the island passed into the possession of the Catholic Angevins. Michael II of Epeiros, yielding to the exigencies of politics, had given his daughter in marriage to the ill-starred Manfred of Sicily, to whom she brought Corfù as a part of her dowry. Upon the death of Manfred at the battle of Benevento the powerful Sicilian admiral Chinardo, who had governed it for his master, occupied the island until he was murdered by the inhabitants at the[200] instigation of Michael. The crime did not, however, profit the crafty Despot. The national party in Corfù endeavoured, indeed, to restore the island to the rule of the Angeloi; but Chinardo’s soldiers, under the leadership of a baron named Aleman, successfully resisted the agitation. As the defeat of Manfred had led to the establishment of Charles of Anjou as king of Naples and Sicily, and as they were a small foreign garrison in the midst of a hostile population, they thought it best to accept that powerful prince as lord of the island. By the treaty of Viterbo the fugitive Latin emperor, Baldwin II, ceded to Charles any rights over it which he might possess, and thus in 1267 the Angevins came into possession of Corfù, though Aleman was allowed to retain the fortresses of the place until his death[209]. For more than five centuries the Latin race and the Catholic religion predominated there.

The Angevin rule, as might have been anticipated from its origin, was especially intolerant of the Orthodox faith. Charles owed his crown to the Pope, and was anxious to repay the obligation by propagating Catholicism among his Orthodox subjects. The Venetians, as we saw, had enjoined the tolerance of the Greek church during their brief period of domination, so that now for the first time the islanders learnt what religious persecution meant. The Metropolitan of Corfù, whose office had been so greatly exalted by the Despots of Epeiros, was deposed, and in his room a less dignified ecclesiastic, called “chief priest” (μέγας πρωτοπαπᾶς), was substituted. The title of “Archbishop of Corfù” was now usurped by a Latin priest, and the principal churches were seized by the Catholic clergy[210]. In the time of the Angevins too the Jews, who still flourish there almost alone in Greece, made their first appearance in any numbers in Corfù, and first found protectors there; but the injunctions of successive sovereigns, bidding the people treat them well, would seem to show that this protection was seldom efficacious[211]. The government of the island was also reorganised. An official was appointed to act as viceroy with the title of captain, and the country was divided into four bailiwicks. Many new fiefs were assigned, while some that already existed were transferred to Italians and Provençals.

The Sicilian Vespers, which drove the house of Anjou from Sicily and handed that kingdom over to the rival house of Aragon, indirectly[201] affected the fortunes of Corfù. The Corfiotes did not, indeed, imitate the Sicilians and massacre the French; but their connexion with the Angevins now exposed them to attack from the Aragonese fleets. Thus the famous Roger de Lluria burnt the royal castle and levied blackmail upon the inhabitants. Another Roger, the terrible Catalan leader, De Flor, ravaged the fertile island in one of his expeditions; yet, in spite of these incursions, we find the condition of Corfù half a century later to have been far superior to that of the neighbouring lands. The fact that the diligent research of the local historians has brought to light so little information about the Angevin period in itself proves that, in that generally troubled time, Corfù enjoyed tranquillity. Beyond the names of its sovereigns, Charles II of Naples, Philip I, Robert, and Philip II of Taranto, Catherine of Valois and Marie de Bourbon, we know little about the island from the time when Charles II, reserving to himself the overlordship, transferred it as a fief in 1294 to his fourth son, the first of those princes, down to the death of Philip II in 1373. It then experienced the evils of a disputed succession, and, as it espoused the cause of Queen Joanna I of Naples, it was attacked by the Navarrese mercenaries, who were in the pay of the rival candidate, Jacques de Baux, and who afterwards played so important a part in the Morea. When Joanna lost her crown and life at the hands of Charles III of Durazzo, the latter obtained Corfù, and, with the usual kindness of usurpers insecure on their thrones, he confirmed the fiscal privileges which the Angeloi had granted to the Corfiotes in the previous century[212]. But after his violent death four years later, in 1386, the decline of the Angevin dynasty and the unsettled condition of the east of Europe caused the islanders to turn their eyes in the direction of the only power which could protect them.

Venice indeed had never forgotten her brief possession of Corfù: she had long been scheming how to recover so desirable a naval station, and her consul encouraged the Venetian party in the island. There was also a Genoese faction there, but its attempt to hold the old castle failed, and on May 28, 1386, the Corfiotes hoisted the standard of St Mark. Six envoys—one of them, it is worth noting, a Jewish representative of the considerable Hebrew community—were appointed to offer the island to the Republic upon certain conditions, the chief of which were the confirmation of the privileges granted by the Angevins, a declaration that Venice would never dispose of the place to any other power, and a promise to maintain the existing system of fiefs. On June 9 a second document was drawn up, reiterating the desire of the islanders, “or the greater and saner part of them,” to put themselves under the shelter[202] of the Republic. Since the death of Charles III, they said, “the island has been destitute of all protection, while it has been coveted by jealous neighbours on every side and almost besieged by Arabs and Turks.” Wherefore, “considering the tempest of the times and the instability of human affairs,” they had resolved to elect Miani, the Venetian admiral, captain of the island, and he had entered the city without the least disturbance. The castle of Sant’ Angelo held out for a time in the name of Ladislaus, king of Naples; but the transfer of the island was effected practically without bloodshed. On its side the Venetian government readily agreed to the terms of the six Corfiote envoys, but thought it prudent to purchase the acquiescence of the king of Naples in this transaction. Accordingly in 1402 the sum of 30,000 gold ducats was paid to him for the island, and the Venetian title was thus made doubly sure[213]. For 411 years the lion of St Mark held unbroken possession of Corfù.

Meanwhile the fate of the other Ionian islands had been somewhat different, and they only gradually passed beneath the Venetian sway. Paxo, the baronial fief of the successive families of Malerba, Sant’ Ippolito and Altavilla, was, indeed, joined politically with Corfù, from which it is so short a distance, but Cephalonia, Zante, and Ithake had fallen about the time of the Latin conquest of Constantinople into the hands of a roving crusader or pirate—the terms were then identical—named Majo, or Matthew, a member of the great Orsini clan and son-in-law of the Sicilian Admiral Margaritone, who styled himself count palatine of the islands, though he recognised the supremacy of Venice. Stricken with pangs of conscience for his sins, he atoned for them by placing his possessions under the protection of the Pope, who made short work of the Orthodox bishops and put the islands under a single Latin ecclesiastic. Majo did fealty to Geoffroy I de Villehardouin of Achaia, and the islands were thenceforth reckoned as a vassal state of that principality. Historians have narrated the horrible crimes of the descendants of Count Majo in describing the stormy history of Epeiros, and so terrible was the condition of the islands when John of Gravina set out to claim the principality of Achaia that he had no difficulty in occupying them as dependencies of that state. A few years later, in 1333, an arrangement was made by which they were united with Achaia and Corfù under the Angevin sceptre. But Robert of Taranto subsequently separated them in 1357 from the latter island by conferring them upon Leonardo Tocco of Benevento, who also became in 1362 duke of Santa Maura, an island whose history during the thirteenth and part of the fourteenth centuries[203] is buried in the deepest obscurity. It appears to have belonged to the Despots of Epeiros down to a little before the year 1300, when it is mentioned as a part of the county of Cephalonia. Captured by young Walter of Brienne in his expedition to Greece in 1331, it was by him bestowed on the Venetian family of Zorzi in 1355.

The Turks took the four islands of Cephalonia, Ithake, Zante, and Santa Maura from the Tocchi in 1479, and the attempt of Antonio Tocco to recover his brother’s dominions ended in his murder at the hands of the Ionians. By arrangement with the Sultan the Venetians, who had expelled Antonio’s forces, handed Cephalonia over to the Turks in 1485, but kept Zante, which thus, from 1482 onwards, was governed by them, on payment of an annual tribute of 500 ducats to the Turkish treasury[214]. This tribute ceased in 1699, when the treaty of Carlovitz formally ceded the island, free of payment, to the Republic. The Venetians invited colonists to emigrate thither, in order to fill up the gaps in the population; for the Turks had carried off many of the inhabitants to Constantinople, for the purpose of breeding mulatto slaves for the seraglio by intermarriage with negroes. As there were many homeless exiles at the time, in consequence of the Turkish conquests in the Levant, there was no lack of response to this invitation, and Zante soon became a flourishing community. Its wealth was further increased, in the sixteenth century, by the introduction of the currant from the neighbourhood of Corinth, so that at that period it merited its poetic title of “the flower of the Levant.” Cephalonia did not long remain in Turkish hands. After two futile attempts to take it the Venetians succeeded, in 1500, with the aid of the famous Spanish commander, Gonsalvo de Cordoba, in capturing the island, and at the peace of 1502-3 the Republic was finally confirmed in its possession, which was never afterwards disturbed. Ithake seems to have followed the fate of its larger neighbour. Santa Maura[215], however, though taken two years after Cephalonia, was almost at once restored to the Turks, and did not become Venetian till its capture by Morosini in 1684, which was ratified by the treaty of Carlovitz fifteen years later. It had long been a thorn in the side of the Venetians, as it was, under the Turkish[204] rule, a dangerous nest of pirates, against whom the Corfiotes more than once fitted out punitive expeditions. When Santa Maura was reluctantly given back to the Sultan in 1503, part of the population emigrated to Ithake, then almost desolate[216], and at the same time Cephalonia received an influx of Greeks from the Venetian possessions on the mainland which the Turks had just taken. Kythera, or Cerigo, which is not geographically an Ionian island at all, and is no longer connected with the other six, was the property of the great Venetian family of Venier, which traced its name and origin from Venus, the goddess of Kythera, from 1207, with certain interruptions and modifications, down to the fall of the Republic. These Venetian Marquesses of Cerigo were ousted by the Greeks under Licario after the restoration of Byzantine rule in the South of the Peloponnese in 1262. The Emperor bestowed the island upon Paul Monoyannes, a member of one of the three great Monemvasiote families, but in 1309 intermarriage between the children of the Greek and Latin lords restored it to the Venieri, who divided it up into twenty-four shares. But the participation of the Venieri in the Cretan insurrection of 1363 led to the transformation of their island into a Venetian colony. Thirty years later, however, thirteen out of the twenty-four shares were restored to them, while the Venetian Governor was dependent upon the Cretan administration, so long as Crete remained Venetian, and upon the Government of the Morea during the Venetian occupation in the early part of the eighteenth century. After the peace of Passarovitz he became the subordinate of the provveditore generale del Levante at Corfù, and the former “eye of Crete” was thenceforth treated as one of the seven Ionian Islands for the remainder of the Venetian rule.

Besides the seven islands Venice also acquired, at different periods after her occupation of Corfù, several dependencies on the mainland opposite. Of these, owing to its dramatic history in the days of the British protectorate, the most interesting was Parga, first taken in 1401[217]. As the landing-place for the famous rock of Suli, with which in a famous line Byron has connected it, it was a place of some importance, and was fortified by the Venetians as an outpost against the Turks. But the Republic ultimately found that it cost more than it was worth, and several times in vain urged the inhabitants to emigrate over the narrow channel to Anti-Paxo, or to settle in Corfù. But then, as in 1819, the Pargians showed a touching, if inconvenient, attachment to their ancient home, perhaps not unmixed with the desire to continue the[205] lucrative traffic of selling the munitions of war, sent from Venice for their own defence, to the neighbouring Turks. Butrinto, opposite the northern end of Corfù, had voluntarily surrendered to the Venetians soon after their final occupation of that island, and, like Parga, was fortified with works, of which the remains may still be seen. During the Venetian rule of the Ionian Islands Butrinto, well known to sportsmen for its duck-shooting, and to scholars for the allusion in the Æneid[218], was several times captured and recaptured. The fisheries in the lakes there, which had once been the property of Cicero’s friend Atticus, were of considerable value to the Venetians[219], as they are still to the present proprietors; and the place became definitely assured to the Republic in 1718, at which date Vonitza inside, and Prevesa at the entrance of, the Ambrakian Gulf, the latter a stronghold of corsairs and an important military position which resisted the Greek bombardment during the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, were also confirmed to Venice. The value set by the Venetians upon these continental dependencies may be judged from the fact that they were called “the eyes and ears of the Republic on the mainland.”

The administration of the islands during the Venetian period was modelled on that of the Republic. In Corfù, the first occupied and most important of the seven, the chief Venetian functionary was known as the bailie, who was subsequently assisted by two noble Venetian councillors, and by a third official, called provveditore e capitano, who was in command of the garrison and resided in the fortress. The strong castle of Sant’ Angelo, on the west coast, which was never taken though often besieged, was entrusted to a special officer. But the power of the bailie was soon overshadowed by that of the commander of the fleet, which was soon stationed at Corfù, and for which the arsenal at Govino, of which large and imposing ruins still remain, was built. This naval authority was the provveditore generale del Levante; he was usually appointed for three years, and exercised very important functions at the time when Venice was still a first-class eastern power. Strict orders were issued to all these officials that they should respect the rights of the natives, and spies, known as “inquisitors over the affairs of the Levant,” were sent from time to time to the islands for the purpose of checking the Venetian administration and of ascertaining the grievances of the governed, who had also the privilege, which they often exercised, of sending special missions to Venice to lay their complaints before the home government.[206] Ionian historians, after due deduction is made for the strong Venetian bias of the privileged class from which they sprang, are agreed that redress was almost invariably granted, though the abuses of which the natives complained were apt to grow up again. Thus when, in the early part of the seventeenth century, the Corfiotes sent envoys to point out the excesses committed by the sailors of the fleet the Venetian government forbade the men to land on the island[220]. Not long afterwards we find the “inquisitors” ordering the removal of all statues and epitaphs erected to the Venetian officials at Corfù, in order to prevent this slavish practice, which had descended to the Greeks from the Roman days[221]. And somewhat later the exactions of the Venetian officials were stopped. A large share in the local administration was granted to the inhabitants, or rather to those of noble birth, for Corfiote society was divided into the three classes of nobles, burghers, and manual labourers. At first the so-called national council was a much more democratic body, including many foreigners and local tradesmen. But the latter and their children were gradually excluded from it, the entrance of the former was restricted, and in 1440 the functions of the national council were strictly limited to the annual election of a smaller body, the communal, or city, council—a body composed at the outset of seventy, and, half a century later, of 150 members, a total which was maintained till the last years of Venetian rule, when the numbers were reduced to sixty. For the purposes of this annual election the members of the national council met in a quaint old house, decorated with pictures of Nausikaa welcoming Odysseus, and of other scenes from the early history of Corcyra, and situated between the old fortress and the town. This interesting memorial of Venetian rule has long since been swept away.

The council of 150, which thus became the governing body of the island, was composed of Greeks as well as Latins, and formed a close oligarchy. Once only, during the crisis of the Candian war, it was resolved to add to it those citizens who would pay a certain sum towards the expenses of that costly struggle[222]. It had the right of electing every year certain officials, called syndics (σύνδικοι), at first four in number—two Greeks and two Latins—and at a later period, when the numbers of the Latins had declined, only three. These syndics were required to be more than thirty-eight (at another period thirty-five) years of age, and were regarded as the special representatives of the community of Corfù. Those who felt themselves wronged looked to them for redress, and, in accordance with the economic heresies of that age, they regulated prices[207] in the markets—a curious interference with the usual Levantine practice of bargaining. The council of 150 also elected three judges, of whom one must always be a Latin; but these officials possessed no more than a consultative vote, and the real decision of cases rested with the bailie and his two councillors. No local offices—and there were many in Venetian days—were held for more than a year; most of them were purely honorary, and all were in the gift of the council of 150. One of the most important was that of trierarch, or captain of the Corfiote war galleys, an official whom the Venetians wisely allowed these experienced seamen, worthy descendants of the seafaring Phaiakians of the Odyssey, to elect. Two campaigns entitled a Corfiote officer to the rank of captain in the Republican fleet, and it would have been well if the British had followed in this respect the example of their predecessors[223], and thus opened a naval career to the Ionians. The Corfiote nobles also commanded the town militia, composed of about 500 artisans, and called “apprentices,” or scolari, who received immunity from taxation in lieu of pay and exercised on Sundays alone. Each village provided a certain number of rural police. In imitation of the similar record at Venice a Golden Book was established, containing the names of the Corfiote nobles. When the latter were much diminished in numbers by the first great siege of the island by the Turks in 1537 new families were added to the list from the burgher class, and Marmora gives the names of 112 noble families existing at the time when he wrote his history, in 1672[224]. The Golden Book was burned as the symbol of hated class distinction in the first enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and fraternity after the French republicans took possession of Corfù.

The Venetians had found the feudal system already in existence when they took over the island, where it had been introduced in Byzantine days, and they had promised to maintain it. We are told by Marmora that there were twenty-four baronies there in former times, and later on the total seems to have been a dozen. In the last century of Venetian rule there were fifteen[225]. Occasionally the Venetians created a new fief, such as that of the gipsies, to reward public services. The Ἀθίγγανοι, or gipsies, who were about 100 in number, were subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the baron, upon whom their fief had been bestowed, “an office,” as Marmora says, “of not a little gain and of very great honour.” They had their own military commander, and every year on May 1 they marched under his leadership to the sound of drums and fifes, bearing[208] aloft their baron’s standard and carrying a maypole, decked with flowers, to the square in front of the house where the great man lived. There they set up their pole and sang a curious song in honour of their lord[226], who provided them with refreshment and on the morrow received from them their dues. Every feudatory was compelled to keep one horse for the defence of the island, and was expected to appear with it on May Day on parade. The peasants were worse off under this feudal system than their fellows on the mainland under Turkish rule. They had no political rights whatever; they were practically serfs, and were summed up in the capitulations at the time of the Venetian occupation together with “the other movable and immovable goods” of their lords[227]. A decision of the year 1641 that no one should vote in the council who had not a house in the city must also have tended to produce absenteeism, still one of the evils of Corfù, where at the present day only four landed proprietors live on their estates. A distaste for country life, always a marked feature of Greek society, may thus have been increased, and the concentration of all the nobles and men of position in the town, which is now ascribed at Corfù to the lucrative posts and gaieties of the capital during the British protectorate, would seem to have begun much earlier. Occasionally we hear of a peasants’ rising against their oppressors. Thus in 1652 a movement of the kind had to be put down by force; but the Venetian government, engaged at the time in the Candian war, did not think it desirable to punish the insurgents. Somewhat earlier a democratic agitation for granting a share in the local administration was vetoed by the Republic. Marmora remarks in his time that “the peasants are never contented; they rise against their lords on the smallest provocation[228].” Yet, until the last century of her rule, Venice had little trouble with the inhabitants. She kept the nobles in good humour by granting them political privileges, titles, and the entrance to the Venetian navy, and, so long as the Turk was a danger, she was compelled, from motives of prudence, to pay a due regard to their wishes. As for the other two classes of the population they hardly entered into the calculations of Venetian statesmen.

No foreign government can govern Greeks if it is harsh to the national church and clergy, and the shrewd Venetians, as might have been anticipated, were much less bigoted than the Angevins. While, on the one hand, they gave, as Catholics, precedence to the Catholic Church, they never forgot that the interests of the Republic were of more importance than those of the Papacy. Accordingly, in the Ionian islands[209] no less than in Crete, they studiously prevented any encroachments on the part of either the Œcumenical Patriarch or the Pope. Their ecclesiastical policy is well expressed in an official decree, “that the Greeks should have liberty to preach and teach the holy word, provided only that they say nothing about the republic or against the Latin religion[229].” Mixed marriages were allowed; and, as the children usually became Orthodox, it is not surprising to learn that twenty years before the close of the Venetian occupation there were only two noble Latin families in Corfù which still adhered to the Catholic faith, while at Cephalonia Catholicism was almost exclusively confined to the garrison[230]. The Venetians retained, however, the externals of the Angevin system. The head of the Orthodox Church in Corfù was still called “chief priest” (μέγας πρωτοπαπᾶς), while the coveted title of Archbishop was reserved for the chief of the Catholic clergy. The “chief priest” was elected by the assembled urban clergy and 30 nobles, and held office for five years, at the end of which he sank into the ranks of the ordinary popes, from whom he was then only distinguished by his crimson sash. Merit had, as a rule, less to do with his election than his relationship to a noble family and the amount of the pecuniary arguments which he applied to the pockets of the electors, and for which he recouped himself by his gains while in office. In each of the four bailiwicks into which Corfù was then divided, and in the island of Paxo, there was a πρωτοπαπᾶς, under the jurisdiction of the “chief priest,” who was dependent upon no other ecclesiastical authority than that of the Œcumenical Patriarch, with whom, however, he was only allowed to correspond through the medium of the Venetian bailie at Constantinople. Two liberal Popes, Leo X and Paul III, expressly forbade any interference with the religious services of the Greeks on the part of the Latin Archbishop; and upon the introduction of the Gregorian calendar it was specially stipulated by Venice[231] that in the Ionian islands Latins as well as Greeks should continue to use the old method of reckoning, in order to avoid the confusion of two Easters and two Christmasses in one and the same community. When we consider how strong, even to-day, is the opposition of the Orthodox Church to the new style, we can understand how gratifying this special exemption must have been to the Greeks of that period.

From these causes there was less bitterness than in most other places between the adherents of the two churches. The Catholics took part in the religious processions of the Orthodox. When the body of St Spiridion was carried round the town the Venetian authorities and many of the[210] garrison paid their respects to the sacred relics; twenty-one guns were fired from the Old Fortress, and the ships in the harbour saluted; and the enlightened Catholic Archbishop, Quirini, author of a work on the antiquities of Corfù, actually went in full state to the Greek church of St Spiridion on the festival of that saint[232]. The Orthodox clergy reciprocated these attentions by meeting the Catholics in the church of St Arsenios, a tenth-century bishop and first Metropolitan of Corfù, where the discordant chanting of Greeks and Latins represented their theological concord, and by praying for the Pope and the Latin Archbishop at the annual banquet at the latter’s palace. They were ready, also, to excommunicate refractory villages at the bidding of the government, and this practice, which filled the superstitious people with terror, was one of the greatest social abuses of Corfù. It was put into force against individuals on the least provocation, and we are told that the same priest was quite willing to provide a counter-excommunication for a consideration[233].

The position of the Corfiote Jews, though far less favourable than that of the Orthodox, was much better than that of the Hebrew colonies in other parts of the Venetian dominions. In the very first days of the Venetian occupation an order was issued to the officials of the Republic, bidding them behave well to the Jewish community and to put no heavier burdens upon them than upon the rest of the islanders. Many of the Venetian governors found it convenient to borrow not only money, but furniture, plate, and liveries from them. That they increased—owing to the Jewish immigration from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and from Naples and Calabria half a century later—in numbers under the Venetians may be inferred from Marmora’s statement that in 1665 there were about 500 Jewish houses in Corfù, and the historian, who shared to the full the natural dislike for the Hebrew race which is so characteristic of the Greeks and so cordially reciprocated by the Jews, naïvely remarks that the Corfiote Jews would be rich if they were let alone[234]. A century later they had monopolised all the trade as middlemen, and the landed proprietors were in their debt. They paid none of the usual taxes levied on Jewish banks at Venice, and when, by the decree of 1572, the Jews were banished from Venetian territory, a special exemption was granted to those of Corfù. They were allowed to practise there as advocates, with permission to defend Christians no less than members of their own race. They had their own council and elected their own officials, and a law of 1614 prohibits the practice of digging up their dead bodies, under pain of hanging. At the same time they had to submit to some degrading[211] restrictions. They were compelled to wear a yellow mark on the breast, or a yellow hat, as a badge of servitude, and an ordinance of 1532 naïvely remarks that this was “a substitute for the custom of stoning, which does so much injury to the houses.” True, a money payment to the treasury secured a dispensation from the necessity of wearing these stigmas; but there was no exception to the rule which enjoined upon all Jews residence in a separate part of the city, where they were divided into two groups, each with its own synagogue. Even to-day the Jewish quarter in the town of Corfù is known as the Hebraïká. Absurd tales were current about them. Travellers were told that one of them was a lineal descendant of Judas, and it was rumoured that a young Jewish girl was about to give birth to a Messiah. They were not allowed to possess real property or to take land or villas on lease, with the exception of one house for the personal use of the lessee. But the effect of this enactment was nullified by means of mortgages; and if a Jew wanted to invest money in houses he had no difficulty in finding a Christian who would purchase or rent them with borrowed Jewish capital. They were expected to offer a copy of the law of Moses to a new Latin Archbishop, who sometimes delighted the Corfiotes by lecturing them on their shortcomings, and sometimes, like Quirini, was tolerant of their creed. Finally, they were forbidden to indulge in public processions—an injunction perhaps quite as much in their own interest as in that of the public peace[235].

The Venetian government did practically nothing for education during the four centuries of its rule in the Ionian islands. No public schools were founded, for, as Count Viaro Capodistria informed the British parliament much later, the Venetian senate never allowed such institutions to be established in the Ionian islands[236]. The administration was content to pay a few teachers of Greek and Italian in Corfù and one in each of the other islands. There was also some private instruction to be had, and the promising young men of the best families, eager to be doctors or lawyers, were sent to complete their education at the university of Padua. But the attainment of a degree at that seat of learning was not arduous, for by a special privilege the Ionians could take their degree without examination. And the Ionian student after his return soon forgot what he had learned, retaining only the varnish of culture. There were exceptions, however, to this low standard. It was a Corfiote who[212] founded at Venice, in 1626, the Greek school, called Flangineion, after the name of its founder, Flangines, which did so much for the improvement of Greek education[237]; while it was a Cephalonian, Nikodemos Metaxas, who about the same time set up the first Greek printing press in Constantinople, which he had purchased in England[238]. But even in the latest Venetian period there were few facilities for attaining knowledge in Corfù. We are told that at that time reading and writing—the highest attainments of the average Greek pope—could be picked up in one of the monasteries, and Latin in the school of some Catholic priest, but that there were no other opportunities of mental cultivation there. The historian Mario Pieri, himself a native of Corfù, remarks that towards the close of the eighteenth century, when he was a boy, there were no public schools, no library, no printing press, and no regular bookseller in the island, and the only literature that could be bought there consisted of a grammar and a Latin dictionary, displayed in the shop of a chemist[239]. No wonder that the Corfiotes were easier to manage in those days than in the more enlightened British times, when newspapers abounded and some of the best pens in southern Europe were ready to lampoon the British protectorate.

Yet, even under the Venetians, that love of literature which has always characterised the Greeks did not become wholly extinct. Jacobo Triboles, a Corfiote resident at Venice, published in the sixteenth century in his native dialect a poem, the subject of which was taken from Boccaccio, called the History of the King of Scotland and the Queen of England. Another literary Corfiote, author of a Lament for the Fall of Greece, was Antonios Eparchos, a versatile genius, at once poet, Hellenist, and soldier, upon whom the fief of the gipsies was conferred for his services[240]. Several other Corfiote bards sang of the Venetian victories, while, in 1672, Andrea Marmora, a member of a noble family still extant in Corfù, published in Italian the first history of his country from the earliest times to the loss of Crete by the Venetians. Subsequent writers have criticised Marmora’s effusive style, his tendency to invent details, his intense desire to glorify the most serene Republic[241]. But his work is quaintly written and he thoroughly reflects the feelings of his class and[213] era. In 1725 Quirini, whom we have already mentioned as Latin Archbishop of Corfù, issued the first edition of a Latin treatise on the antiquities of his see, which was followed, thirteen years later, by a second and enlarged edition. In 1656 an academy of thirty members, known as the Assicurati, was founded at Corfù[242], and only succumbed amid the dangers of the Turkish siege of 1716. A second literary society was started about the same time, and a third saw the light in 1732. Of the other islands Cephalonia produced in the seventeenth century a priest of great oratorical gifts in the person of Elias Meniates. In short, the Frankish influence, which had practically no literary result on the mainland, was much more felt in the intellectual development of the Ionians. But this progress was gained at the expense of the Greek language, which, under the Venetians, became solely the tongue of the peasants. Even to-day Greek is almost the only language understood in the country districts of Corfù, while Italian is readily spoken in the town. In the Venetian times the Venetian dialect was the conversational medium of good society, and the young Corfiote, fresh from his easy-won laurels at Padua, looked down with contempt upon the noblest and most enduring of all languages. Yet it will never be forgotten in Corfù that in the resurrection and regeneration of Greek two Corfiotes of the eighteenth century, Eugenios Boulgaris and Nikephoros Theotokes, played a leading part. The former in particular was the pioneer of Greek as it is written to-day, the forerunner of the more celebrated Koraes, and he dared to write, to the disgust of the clergy, in a language which the people could understand. But, as his best work was done at Joannina, then the chief educational centre of the Greek race, it concerns the general history of Greece under the Turks rather than that of the seven islands[243].

Ionian commerce was hampered by the selfish colonial policy then prevalent in Europe, which aimed at concentrating all colonial trade in the metropolis, through which the exports of the islands had to pass. This naturally led to a vast amount of smuggling, even now rampant in the Greek Archipelago, in which the British gained an unenviable pre-eminence and for which they sometimes paid with their lives. The oil trade, the staple industry of Corfù, was, however, greatly fostered by the grant of 360 drachmai for every plantation of 100 olive trees, and we find that, in the last half-century of the Venetian rule, there were nearly two millions of these trees in that island, which exported 60,000 barrels of oil every second year. The taxes consisted of a tithe of the oil, the[214] crops, and the agricultural produce, and a money payment on the wine, a “chimney tax” on each house, and an export duty of 15 per cent. on the oil, 9 per cent. on the salt, and 4 per cent. on other articles. There was also an import duty of 6 per cent. on Venetian and of 8 per cent. on foreign, goods. The revenue of Zante was so greatly benefited by the introduction of the currant industry that it increased more than forty-fold in the space of thirty years during the sixteenth century, and a hundred years later the traveller Spon said it deserved the name of the “island of gold” and called it “a terrestrial paradise.” But the wholesale conversion of corn fields into currant plots caused such alarm that the local authorities applied to Venice for permission to root up the currant bushes by force. The Republic replied by allowing the currants to remain, but at the same time levying a tax upon them, the proceeds of which were devoted to the purchase and storage of bread stuffs. The currant industry of that island was injured by further duties, and was thus placed at a disadvantage as compared with the lightly taxed currants of the Morea. But in the eighteenth century such numbers of English ships came to Zante to load currants that the place had an English consul, two English offices, and an English cemetery, while our countrymen were very popular there[244]. One of the English families, attracted thither by the currant trade, that of Sergeant, still flourishes there. These public granaries were also instituted at Corfù, which continued, however, to suffer severely from famines. At the time when Zante was so prosperous Corfù was less productive, and we accordingly hear that the Venetians obtained permission from the Pope to levy a tithe on the goods of the Catholic clergy, in order to defray the costs of maintenance. The salt pans of Levkimo, at the south of the island, formed a government monopoly, and the importation of foreign salt was punished by banishment[245]. In order, perhaps, to counteract the excessive usury of the Corfiote Jews, the government established an official pawnshop[246], where money was lent at a moderate rate of interest—6 per cent.

The administration of the other six islands was on similar lines to that of Corfù. The nearest of them, Paxo, with its dependency, Anti-Paxo, was treated as part of that island, and, as we have seen, the Corfiote “chief priest” had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over it, just as nowadays the Greek Archbishop of Corfù is also styled “of the Paxoi.” In 1513, however, Paxo, together with the taxes which it paid, was sold by the Venetians to the heirs of a Corfiote noble, who[215] treated its inhabitants so badly that many of them fled to Turkish territory. At last the provveditore generale del Levante, under whose province the affairs of these islands came, interfered, fixed the taxes of Paxos at a certain sum, and appointed a native with a title of capitano to govern it as the representative of the provveditore e capitano at Corfù. Zante was administered during the first half-century of Venetian rule by a single provveditore; but when the population had considerably increased the Zantiotes, like the Cephalonians, had need of further officials—two councillors and a secretary, all Venetian nobles—who assisted the provveditore, and, like him, were appointed for two years. In both Cephalonia and Zante there were a general council, composed of the nobles, and a smaller council, whose numbers were finally fixed in Zante at 150. The character of these two islands, separated by such a narrow channel of sea, was, however, widely different. Zante was much more aristocratic in its ideas, though the feudal system, against which the popular rising of 1628 was directed, prevailed in both islands alike, where it had been introduced by the Latin counts, Zante having twelve fiefs and Cephalonia six[247]. But Cephalonia, owing to its purer Hellenic population, was actuated by the democratic sentiments engrained in the Greek character. The meetings of the Cephalonian council were remarkable for their turbulence, of which the authorities frequently complained, and a retiring governor of that island drew up a report to the home government in 1754 in which he described in vivid colours the tendency of the strong to tyrannise over the weak, which he had found common to all classes, and which caused annoyance to the government and frequent disturbances of the public peace[248]. British officials had in turn a similar experience, and Mr Gladstone discovered that the vendetta was not extinct in the wild mountainous regions of Cephalonia when he visited the Ionian islands on his celebrated mission. Venice fostered the quarrels between the various parties at Argostoli, and governed the unruly Cephalonians by means of their own divisions. In Zante the number of the noble families, at first indefinite, was finally fixed at ninety-three; and if any became extinct the vacancy was filled by the ennoblement of a family of burghers. Once a year the provveditore generale del Levante paid a visit of inspection to these islands; his arrival was the greatest event of the whole calendar, and etiquette prescribed the forms to be observed on his landing. He was expected to kiss first the cross presented to him by the Latin bishop, and then the copy of[216] the Gospels offered to him by the spiritual head of the Orthodox community.

Leonardo Tocco had restored the Greek episcopal throne in Cephalonia, and in the Venetian times, promoted to the rank of an archbishopric, it continued to exist with jurisdiction over the Greeks at Zante and Ithake, which was often disputed by the “chief priest” (πρωτοπαπᾶς) of Zante, where a Latin bishop also resided. This dispute was at last settled by a decree of the senate that the Cephalonian clergy should retain the right to elect their prelate on condition of choosing a Zantiote on every third vacancy[249]. In Zante, as in Corfù, the Jews were a considerable factor; at the close of the Venetian rule they numbered about 2000, and lived in a separate quarter of the city, walled in and guarded; and the island was remarkable for the violent anti-Semitic riots of 1712[250], arising out of the usual fiction of the slaughtered Christian child, which found their counterpart at Corfù in our own time. But the greatest evil in these less important islands was that their provveditori, being chosen from the poorer Venetian aristocracy, the so-called barnabotti, and receiving small salaries, made up for their lack of means by corruption, just as the Turkish officials do now. The efforts of the home government to check the abuse of bribery, by forbidding its officials to receive presents, were not always successful. The discontent of the lesser islands found vent in the embassies which they had the right to send to Venice, and we occasionally hear of their provveditori being detected in taking bribes. More rarely the provveditore generale himself was degraded from his high office for malversation. Accordingly the most recent Greek historian of the fiscal administration of the islands under the Venetians, considers that it was fortunate for them to have been taken, and lost, by Venice when they were[251].

Anything which concerns the supposed home of Odysseus must necessarily be of interest, and fortunately we have some facts about the government of Ithake at this period. We first hear of a Venetian governor there in 1504, when the island had been repeopled by emigrants from Santa Maura, and this official was assisted by two local magnates, called “elders of the people” (δημογέροντες). In 1536 a life governor was appointed, and upon his death, in 1563, a noble from Cephalonia, appointed by the council of that island, was sent to[217] administer it with the two “elders,” subject to the approval of the provveditore generale, who visited Ithake every March. The Ithakans twice successfully complained to Venice of their Cephalonian governors, who were accused of extortion and of improper interference in local affairs. Accordingly in 1697 the office was abolished, and thenceforth the two Ithakan “elders” held sway alone, while every year the principal men of the island met to elect the local officials. Small as it is, Ithake formed one feudal barony[252], of which the Galati were the holders, and its population at the close of the Venetian period was estimated at about 7000.

Santa Maura was more democratic in its constitution than most of the islands; for when Morosini took it from the Turks he permitted the inhabitants to decide how they would be governed. Accordingly the general council came in course of time to be largely composed of peasants; but when, towards the close of the eighteenth century, the Venetian government sent a special commissioner to reform the constitutions of the seven islands he created a second and smaller council of fifty at Santa Maura, to which the election of the local officials was transferred. Venice was represented there by two provveditori, one of whom had jurisdiction over the continental dependencies of Prevesa and Vonitza, subject, however, to the supreme authority of the commander of the fleet at Corfù[253]. Parga and Butrinto were entrusted to two officers sent from the seat of the Ionian government; the former had its own council, its own local officials, and paid neither taxes nor duties. All its inhabitants were soldiers, and many of them pirates, and they were known to imprison a Venetian governor, just as the Albanians of our time besieged a Turkish vali, till they could get redress[254].

Finally the distant island of Kythera was administered by a Venetian noble sent thither every two years. While it was a dependency of Crete Kythera fell into a very bad state; its chief men indulged in constant dissensions; the government was arbitrary, the garrison exacting. In 1572 an attempt was made to remedy these evils by the establishment of a council of thirty members, elected on a property qualification, with the power of electing the local authorities. A Golden Book was started, and the natives were granted the usual privilege of appeal to the Venetian government, either in Crete or at the capital. All the islands shared with Corfù the right of electing the captains of their own galleys, and they on more than one occasion rendered valuable services to the Republic at sea.

There had been, as we have noticed, a Genoese party at Corfù when the fate of the island lay in the balance, and the commercial rivals of Venice did not abandon all hope of obtaining so desirable a possession until some time after the establishment of the Venetian protectorate. Twice, in 1403 and again in 1432, they attacked Corfù, but on both occasions without success. The first time they tried to capture the impregnable castle of Sant’ Angelo, which was courageously defended by a Corfiote noble. The second attempt was more serious. The invaders effected a landing, and had already ravaged the fertile island, when a sudden sally of the townsfolk and the garrison checked their further advance. Many of the Genoese were taken prisoners, while those who succeeded in escaping to their vessels were pursued and severely handled by the Venetian fleet. The further attempts of Genoese privateers to waylay merchantmen on their passage between Corfù and Venice were frustrated, and soon the islanders had nothing to fear from these Christian enemies of their protectors.

Although the Turks were rapidly gaining ground on the mainland, they were repulsed in the attack which they made upon Corfù in 1431, and did not renew the attempt for another century. Meanwhile, after the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent collapse of the Christian states of Greece, Corfù became the refuge of many distinguished exiles. Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, and the historian Phrantzes fled thither; the latter wrote his history at Corfù at the instance of some noble Corfiotes, and lies buried in the church of Sts Jason and Sosipater, where Caterina Zaccaria, wife of Thomas Palaiologos, also rests. About the same time the island obtained a relic which had the greatest influence upon its religious life. Among the treasures of Constantinople at the moment of the capture were the bodies of St Theodora, the imperial consort of the iconoclast emperor Theophilos, and St Spiridion, the latter a Cypriote bishop who took a prominent part at the council of Nice and whose remains had been transferred to Constantinople when the Saracens took Cyprus. A certain priest, Kalochairetes by name, now brought the bodies of the two saints to Corfù, where they arrived in 1456. Upon the priest’s death his two eldest sons became proprietors of the male saint’s remains, and his youngest son received those of the female, which he bestowed upon the community. The body of St Spiridion ultimately passed to the distinguished family of Boulgaris, to which it still belongs, and is preserved in the church of the saint, just as the body of St Theodora reposes in the metropolitical church. Four times a year the body of St Spiridion is carried in procession, in commemoration of his alleged services in having[219] twice delivered the island from plague, once from famine, and once from the Turks. His name is the most widespread in Corfù, and the number of boys called “Spiro” is legion[255].

During the operations against the Turks at this period the Corfiotes distinguished themselves by their active co-operation with their protectors. We find them fighting twice at Parga and twice at Butrinto; we hear of their prowess at the Isthmus of Corinth and beneath the walls of Patras in 1463, when Venice, alarmed for the safety of her Peloponnesian stations, called the Greeks to arms; and they assisted even in the purely Italian wars of the Republic. It seems, indeed, as if, at that period, the words of Marmora were no mere servile phrase: “Corfù was ever studying the means of keeping herself a loyal subject of the Venetians[256].” At last, after rather more than a century of almost complete freedom from attack, the island was destined to undergo the first of the two great Turkish sieges which were the principal events in its annals during the Venetian occupation. In 1537 war broke out between the Republic and Suleyman the Magnificent, at that time engaged in an attack upon the Neapolitan dominions of Charles V. During the transport of troops and material of war across the channel of Otranto the Turkish and Venetian fleets came into hostile collision, and though Venice was ready to make amends for the mistakes of her officials the Sultan resolved to punish them for the insults to his flag. He was at Valona, on the Albanian coast, at the time, and, removing his camp to Butrinto, despatched a force of 25,000 men, under the command of the redoubtable Barbarossa, the most celebrated captain in the Turkish service, to take possession of the island. The Turks landed at Govino, destroyed the village of Potamo, and marched upon the capital, which at that time had no other defences than the old fort. That stronghold and the castle of Sant’ Angelo were soon the only two points in the island not in the power of the invaders. A vigorous cannonade was maintained by Barbarossa from the site of the present town and from the islet of Vido, but the garrison of 4000 men, half Italians and half Corfiotes, under the command of Jacopo di Novello, kept up a brisk reply. The Greeks, it was said, could not have fought better had they been fighting for the national cause, and they made immense sacrifices in their determination never to yield. In order to economise food they turned out of the fortress the women, old men, and children, who went[220] to the Turkish lines to beg for bread. The Turkish commander, hoping to work on the feelings of the garrison, refused; so the miserable creatures, repudiated alike by the besieged and besiegers, wandered about distractedly between the two armies, striving to regain admission to the fortress by showing their ancient wounds gained in the Venetian service, and at last, when their efforts proved unavailing, lying down in the ditches to die. Their sufferings contributed largely towards the victory of the defenders, for while provisions held out in the fortress they began to fail in the camp.

Sickness broke out among the half-starved Turks, and, after a stay of only thirteen days in the island, they re-embarked. But in that short time they had wrought enormous damage. They had ravaged the fair island with fire and sword, and they carried away more than 20,000 captives[257]. The population was so greatly reduced by this wholesale deportation that nearly forty years afterwards the whole island contained only some 17,500 inhabitants, and rather more than a century after this siege a census showed that the total was not more than 50,000—a much smaller number than in classical days, when it is estimated to have been 100,000. In 1761 it had declined to 44,333; at the end of the Venetian occupation it was put down at 48,000; a century later, in 1896, it was 90,872[258]. At the census of 1907 it was 94,451. Butrinto and Paxo, less able to defend themselves than Corfù, fell into the hands of the Turks, who plundered several of the other Ionian islands. Great was the joy of Venice at the news that the invaders had abandoned Corfù, and public thanksgivings were offered up for the preservation of the island, even in the desolate condition in which the Turks had left it. A Corfiote, named Noukios, secretary of an Ambassador of Charles V and author of three books of travels, the second of which, relating to England, has been translated into English, wrote, with tears in his eyes, a graphic account of this terrible visitation.

One result of this invasion was the tardy but systematic fortification of the town of Corfù, at the repeated request of the Corfiote council, which sent several embassies to Venice with that object. More than 2000 houses were pulled down in the suburb of San Rocco to make room for the walls, for which the old classical city, Palaiopolis, as it is still called, provided materials, and Venice spent a large sum on the erection of new bastions. Two plans are in existence showing the fortifications of the[221] citadel and of the town about this period[259], and some parts of the present Fortezza Vecchia date from the years which followed this first Turkish siege. The still existing Fortezza Nuova was built between 1577 and 1588, when the new works were completed. Another result of the Turco-Venetian war was the grant of lands at Corfù to the Greek soldiers, or stradioti, who had formed the Venetian garrisons of Monemvasia and Nauplia, and for whom provision had to be made when, in 1540, the Republic ceded these two last of her Peloponnesian possessions to the sultan. The present suburb of Stratia still preserves the name of these soldiers. The loss of the Venetian stations in the Morea and the subsequent capture of Cyprus by the Turks naturally increased the numbers of the Greeks in Corfù.

Shortly before the battle of Lepanto the Turks raided Kythera, Zante, and Cephalonia, and again landed in Corfù. But the memory of their previous failure and the fact that the garrison was prepared for resistance deterred them from undertaking a fresh siege. They accordingly contented themselves with plundering the defenceless villages, but this time did not carry off their booty with impunity. Their ships were routed; as they were departing many of them sank, and in Marmora’s time the sunken wrecks could still be seen when the sea was calm[260]. In the battle of Lepanto 1500 Corfiote seamen took part on the Christian side, and four ships were contributed by the island and commanded by natives. One of these Corfiote captains was captured during the engagement and skinned alive, his skin being then fastened as a trophy to the rigging of one of the Turkish vessels. Another, Cristofalo Condocalli, captured the Turkish admiral’s ship, which was long preserved in the arsenal at Venice, and he received as his reward a grant of land near Butrinto, together with the then rare title of cavaliere. The criticisms which Finlay, after his wont, has passed upon the Greeks at Lepanto, and which do not agree with the testimony of a contemporary Venetian historian, certainly do not affect the conduct of the Ionians[261]. A little later, when the Turks again descended upon Corfù, they were easily repulsed, and the long peace which then ensued between Venice and the Porte put an end to these anxieties. Both the Corfiotes and the local militia of Zante did service about this time under the banner of St Mark in Crete; but the fearful losses of the Zantiotes, of whom eighty only out of 800 returned home alive from the Cretan mountains, made the peasants reluctant to serve again.

There are few facts to relate of the Ionian islands during the peaceful period between the battle of Lepanto and the war of Candia. At Corfù the peace was utilised for the erection of new buildings; the church of St Spiridion was finished, and the body of the saint transferred to it[262]. But the town did not strike the Venetian traveller Pietro della Valle, who visited it early in the seventeenth century, as a desirable residence. Both there and at Zante he thought the buildings were more like huts than houses, and he considered the latter island barren and no longer deserving of its classical epithet of “woody[263].” It was about this time that the Venetians introduced the practice of tournaments, which were held on the esplanade, and at which the Corfiote nobles showed considerable skill. Rather later the island was visited by the plague, which was stayed, according to the local belief, through the agency of their patron saint, who had on a previous occasion saved his good Corfiotes from famine by inspiring the captains of some corn ships to steer straight for their port. The first two of the four annual processions were the token of the people’s gratitude for these services[264].

When the Candian war broke out further fortifications were built at Corfù as a precautionary measure; but during the whole length of the struggle the Turks came no nearer than Parga and Butrinto. The Corfiotes were thus free to assist the Venetians, instead of requiring their aid. Accordingly the Corfiote militia was sent to Crete, and horses and money were given to the Venetian authorities for the conflict, while one Corfiote force successfully held Parga against the enemy, and another recaptured Butrinto. In fact the smallness of the population at the census of that period was attributed to the large number of men serving on the galleys or in the forts out of the island. When Crete was lost Corfù naturally became of increased importance to the republic, and in the successful war between Venice and Turkey, which broke out in 1684, the Ionian islands played a considerable part. They were used as winter quarters for the Venetian troops, and the huge mortars still outside the gate of the Old Fortress at Corfù bear the memorable date of 1684, while a monument of Morosini occupies, but scarcely adorns, the wall of the old theatre. That gallant commander now led a squadron, to which the three chief islands all contributed galleys, against the pirates’ nest of Santa Maura. The countrymen of Odysseus are specially mentioned among the 2000 Ionian auxiliaries, and the warlike bishop of Cephalonia brought a contingent of over 150 monks and priests to the Republic’s[223] standard[265]. Santa Maura fell after a sixteen days’ siege; the capture of Prevesa followed; and though the latter was restored to the Sultan with dismantled fortifications by the treaty of Carlovitz, Santa Maura was never again, save for a few brief months during the next war, a Turkish island. The Venetians did not forget the Ionians, who had co-operated with them so readily. Colonel Floriano, one of the Cephalonian commanders, was granted the two islets of Kalamos and Kastos, off the coast of Akarnania, famous in Homer as the abode of “the pirate Taphians.” Thenceforth their inhabitants were bidden to pay to him and his heirs the tithes hitherto due to the Venetian government. In consequence of this he assumed the curious title of conte della Decima (“count of the Tithe”), still borne by his descendants[266]. No wonder that Venice was popular with an aristocracy to which it gave employment and rewards.

The occupation of the Morea by the Venetians in the early part of the eighteenth century secured the Ionians from disturbance so long as the peace lasted; but when the Turks set about the re-conquest of the peninsula they became involved in that last struggle between Venice and Turkey. In 1715 the Turkish fleet took Kythera, the garrison of which refused to fight, and the Venetians blew up the costly fortifications of Santa Maura and removed the guns and garrison to Corfù, in order that they might not fall into the hands of their foes[267]. Alarmed at the successes of the Turks, but unable in the degenerate condition of the commonwealth to send a capable Venetian to defend the remaining islands, the government, on the recommendation of Prince Eugène, engaged Count John Matthias von der Schulenburg to undertake the defence. A German by birth, and a brother of the duchess of Kendal, mistress of our George I, Count von der Schulenburg did not owe his career, strange as it may seem to us, to social influence or female intrigue. Entering the Polish service, he had compelled the admiration of his opponent, Charles XII of Sweden, and had afterwards fought with distinction under the eyes of the duke of Marlborough at the siege of Tournai and in the battle of Malplaquet. Armed with the rank of field-marshal, he set out for Corfù, where he rapidly put the unfinished fortifications into as good a condition as was possible in the time, and paid a hurried visit to Zante for the same purpose. The approach of the Turks hastened his return, for it was now certain that their objective was Corfù. They had requisitioned the Epeirotes to make a wide road[224] from Thessaly down to the coast opposite that island, traces of which were in existence half a century ago[268]. Along this road Kara Mustapha Pasha marched with 65,000 men, and effected a junction at Butrinto with the Turkish fleet under Janum Khoja. In the narrow strait at the north end of the island, opposite the shrine of the virgin at Kassopo, which had taken the place of the altar of Jupiter Cassius, before which Nero had danced, a division of the Venetian fleet engaged the Turkish ships and cut its way through them into Corfù. But this did not prevent the landing of 33,000 Turks at Govino and Ipso, who encamped along the Potamo and made themselves masters of the suburbs of Mandoukio and Kastrades, on either side of the town. Meanwhile Schulenburg had armed all the inhabitants, including even the Jews, and we are specially told that one of the latter distinguished himself so much as to merit the rank of a captain[269]. But he wrote that he was “in want of every thing,” and his motley garrison of Germans, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks was at no time more than 8000 men. Even women and priests aided in the defence, and one Greek monk, with a huge iron crucifix in his hands, was a conspicuous figure as he charged the besiegers, invoking the vengeance of God upon their heads.

The Turkish commander’s first object was to occupy the two eminences of Mounts Abraham and San Salvatore, which commanded the town, but had been carelessly left without permanent fortifications. A first assault upon these positions was repulsed, but a second was successful, and the Turks now called on Schulenburg to surrender. The arrival of some reinforcements revived the spirits of the besieged, who had now withdrawn from the town into the citadel, while the Turkish artillery played upon the houses and aimed at the campanile of St Spiridion’s church. The New Fortress was the point at which the enemy now directed all their efforts; one of the bastions was actually taken, and a poet has recorded that Muktar, grandfather of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, fought his way into the castle and hung up his sword on the gate[270]; but Schulenburg, at the head of his men, drove out the Turks with enormous loss. He said himself that that day was the most dangerous of his life; but his reckless daring saved Corfù. It was expected that the Turks would renew the assault three days later; but when the fatal morning broke, lo! they were gone. On the evening[225] before, one of those terrific showers of rain to which Corfù is liable about the end of August descended upon the Turkish camp. The storm swept away their baggage into the sea, and the panic-stricken Turks—so the story ran-saw a number of acolytes carrying lighted candles, and an aged bishop, who was identified with St Spiridion, pursuing the infidels staff in hand. The murmurs of the janissaries and the news of a great Turkish defeat on the Danube may have had more to do with the seraskier’s hasty departure than the miraculous intervention of the saint. But the Venetians, with true statesmanship, humoured the popular belief that St Spiridion had protected the Corfiotes and themselves in their hour of need. We can still see hanging in the church of St Spiridion the silver lamp which the senate dedicated to the saint “for having saved Corfù,” and a companion to which was provided by the Corfiote nobles in memory of the safe arrival of the two divisions of the fleet. The islanders still celebrate on August 11 (O.S.), the anniversary of the Turkish rout in 1716, the solemn procession of the saint, which Pisani, the Venetian admiral, instituted in his honour[271].

The siege had lasted for forty-eight days, and the losses on both sides had been very great. The lowest estimate of the Turkish dead and wounded was 8000. Schulenburg put down his own casualties at 1500. Moreover the Turks had left their artillery behind them, and in their own hurried re-embarkation some 900 were drowned. The Venetian fleet, under Pisani, whose indolence was in striking contrast to the energy of Schulenburg, did not succeed in overtaking the foe; but Schulenburg retook Butrinto, to which he attached much importance, and personally superintended the re-fortification of Santa Maura, which another Latin inscription still commemorates. The extraordinary honours paid to him were the measure of Corfù’s value to the Republic. In his favour, as in that of Morosini, an exception was made to the rule forbidding the erection of a statue to a living person. Before the Old Fortress, which he so gallantly defended, there still stands his image. Medals were struck in his honour, and foreign sovereigns wrote to congratulate him. Nor did his services to the Ionians end here. The fear of a fresh attack brought him to Corfù again in the following year. From thence he made a successful attack upon Vonitza and Prevesa, and those places, together with Butrinto, Cerigo, and the islet of Cerigotto, or Antikythera, were finally confirmed to the Republic at the peace of Passarovitz. After the peace he drew up a systematic plan for the defence of the islands, which[226] considerations of expense prevented the Republic from carrying out as fully as he wished. One restoration was imperative—that of the citadel of Corfù, which was blown up by a flash of lightning striking the powder magazine only two years after the great siege. Pisani and 1500 men lost their lives in this accident; several vessels were sunk and much damage done. Under Schulenburg’s directions these works were repaired. At the same time, warned by the experience of the late siege, he strongly fortified Mounts Abraham and San Salvatore and connected them with subterranean passages[272]. To pay for these improvements a tax of one-tenth was imposed upon the wine and oil of the island[273]. Large sums were also spent in the next few years upon the defences of Zante, Santa Maura, and the four continental dependencies of the islands. But the Republic, having lost much of her Levant trade, could no longer keep them up, and Corfù was again damaged by a second explosion in 1789. About the middle of the eighteenth century there was a huge deficit in the Ionian accounts, and the islands became a burden to the declining strength of the Venetian commonwealth. On Corfù in particular she spent twice what she got out of it.

The peace of Passarovitz in 1718, which made the useless island of Cerigo the furthest eastern possession of Venice, practically closed the career of the Republic as an oriental power, and thenceforth of all her vast Levantine possessions the seven islands and their four dependencies alone remained under her flag. The decadence of Turkey preserved them to the Republic rather than any strength of her own, so that for the next seventy-nine years they were unmolested. Yet this immunity from attack by her old enemy caused Venice to neglect the welfare of the Ionian islands, which were always best governed at the moment when she feared to lose them. The class of officials sent from the capital during this last period was very inferior. Poor and badly paid, they sought to make money out of the islanders, and at times defrauded the home government without fear of detection. M. Saint-Sauveur, who resided as French consul in the Ionian islands from 1782 to 1799, has given a grim account of their social and political condition in the last years of Venetian rule; and, after due deduction for his obvious bias against the fallen Republic, there remains a large substratum of truth in his statements. At Zante the cupidity of the Venetian governors reached its height. Nowhere was so little of the local revenue spent in the locality, nowhere were the taxes more oppressive or more numerous; nowhere[227] were the illicit gains of the Venetian officials larger. They were wont to lend money at usurious interest to the peasants, who frequently rose against their foreign and native oppressors—for the nobles and burgesses of that rich island were regarded by the tillers of the soil with intense hatred. Murders were of daily occurrence at Zante; most well-to-do natives had bravi in their pay; there was a graduated tariff for permission to wear weapons; and Saint-Sauveur was once an eye-witness of an unholy compact between a high Venetian official and a Zantiote who was desirous to secure in advance impunity for his intended crime[274]. It is narrated how the wife of a Venetian governor of Zante used to shout with joy “Oil, oil!” as soon as she heard a shot fired, in allusion to the oil warrants, the equivalent of cash, which her husband received for acquitting a murderer. Justice at this period was more than usually halting. The French consul could only remember three or four sentences of death during the whole of his residence in the islands, and when, a little earlier, the crew of a foreign ship was murdered in the channel of Corfù by some islanders under the leadership of a noble, only one scapegoat, and he a peasant, was punished. Pirates were not uncommon, Paxo being one of their favourite haunts. Yet after the peace of Passarovitz Corfù was the centre of the Republic’s naval forces, and it was in the last years of Venetian rule that many of the present buildings were built at Govino, and a road was at last constructed from that point to the town[275].

During the Russo-Turkish war between 1768 and 1774 many Ionians took part in the insurrectionary movement against the Turks on the mainland, in spite of the proclamations of the Venetian government, which was anxious, like the British protectorate fifty years later, to prevent its subjects from a breach of neutrality[276]; but it could not even control its own officials, for a provveditore generale sold the ordnance and provisions stored at Corfù under his charge to the Russians. The sympathy of the Ionians for Orthodox Russia was natural, especially as many Greeks from the Turkish provinces had settled in the islands without having forgotten their homes on the mainland. They took part in the sieges of Patras and Koron, while after the base desertion of the Greeks by the Russians the islands became the refuge of many defeated insurgents. These refugees were, however, delivered up by the Venetians to the Turks, and nothing but a vigorous Russian protest saved from punishment two Ionian nobles who had taken up arms on her side.[228] Russia followed up her protest by appointing Greeks or Albanians as her consuls in the three principal islands[277]; many Cephalonians emigrated to the new Russian province of the Crimea, and Cephalonian merchantmen began to fly her flag. During the next Russo-Turkish war—that between 1787 and 1792—the Ionians fitted out corsairs to aid their friends, and a Russian general was sent to Ithake to direct the operations of the Greeks. Two of the latter, Lampros Katsones of Livadia and the Lokrian Androutsos, father of the better known klepht Odysseus, were specially conspicuous. Lampros styled himself “king of Sparta,” and christened his son Lycurgus. He established himself on the coast of Maina and plundered the ships of all nations—a patriot according to some, a pirate according to others. When a French frigate had put an end to his reign of terror he, like Androutsos, fled to the Ionian islands. The Venetians caused a hue and cry to be raised for his followers, who were saved from the gallows by their Russian patrons; but Androutsos was handed over to the Turks, who left him to languish in prison at Constantinople. Katsones became the hero of a popular poem.

The attacks of pirates from Barbary and Dulcigno upon Prevesa and Cerigo roused the Venetians to the necessity of punishing those marauders, and accordingly Angelo Emo was appointed “extraordinary captain of the ships” and sent to Corfù. After a vigorous attempt at reforming the naval establishment there, which had fallen into a very corrupt state, he chastised the Algerines and Tunisians, to the great relief of the Ionians. The Zantiotes “presented him with a gold sword, and struck a medal in his honour”; in Corfù a mural tablet still recalls his services against the Barbary corsairs, and his name ranks with those of Morosini and Schulenburg in the history of the islands[278].

The long peace of the eighteenth century had marked results upon the social life of the Ionians. It had the bad effect, especially at Corfù, of increasing the desire for luxuries, which the natives could ill afford, but which they obtained at the sacrifice of more solid comfort. Anxious to show their European culture, the better classes relinquished the garb of their ancestors, and the women, who now for the first time emerged from the oriental seclusion in which they had been kept for centuries in most of the islands, deprived themselves of necessaries and neglected their houses in order to make a smart appearance on the esplanade—a practice not yet extinct at Corfù. Yet this partial emancipation of the Ionian ladies, due to the European habits introduced by the increasing[229] number of Venetian officers who had married Corfiote wives, was a distinct benefit to society. Gradually ladies went to the theatre; at first they were screened by a grille from the public gaze, then a mask was considered sufficient protection; finally that too was dropped[279]. The population of the islands and their dependencies in 1795 was put down at 152,722. But Corfù was already in the deplorable state of poverty into which it once more relapsed after the withdrawal of the British. In spite of its splendid climate and its fertile soil the fruitful island of the Phaiakians at the end of the Venetian rule could not nourish its much smaller number of inhabitants for more than four or five months in the year. The fault did not lie with the soil; but few of the proprietors had the capital to make improvements, and few of the peasants had the energy or the necessary incentives to labour. The lack of beasts of burden and of carriageable roads was a great drawback. One governor did at last, in 1794, construct five roads from the town into the country, by means of voluntary subscriptions and a tax on every loaded horse entering the streets[280]. But it was not till the British time that either this or the scarcely less evil of want of water was remedied. The successors of the seafaring subjects of Alkinoös had scarcely any mercantile marine, while the Cephalonians, sons of a less beautiful island, voyaged all over the Levant in search of a livelihood. An attempt to naturalise sugar, indigo, and coffee in a hollow of the Black Mountain was a failure[281]. Zante, less luxurious and naturally richer than either of her two other greater sisters, suffered during the Anglo-French war from the absence of English commerce; and repeated earthquakes, the predecessors of that of 1893, caused much damage there[282]. As might have been expected the Venetian system had not improved the character of the islanders, whose faults were admitted by their severest critics to be due to the moral defects of the government. If the Corfiotes of that day seemed to Saint-Sauveur to be ignorant and superstitious, poor and indolent, they were what Venice had made them. Yet, in spite of all her errors, the Republic had given to the seven islands a degree of civilisation which was lacking in Turkish Greece, and which, improved by our own protectorate, still characterises the Ionians to-day. Corfù and Zante are still, after over fifty years of union with the Hellenic kingdom, in many respects more Italian than Greek. Even to-day the seal of Venice is upon them; not merely does the lion of St Mark still stand out from their fortifications, but in the laws and the customs, in the survival of the Italian language and of Italian titles of nobility here almost alone in Greece, we can trace[230] his long domination. But no Corfiote or Zantiote, for all that, desires to become Italian.

The French Revolution had little immediate influence upon the Ionian islands, though there were some disturbances at Zante, and the citizens of Corfù petitioned Venice against the exclusive privileges of the nobles. Three years before the outbreak in Paris, the most serene Republic had sent a special commissioner to reform the constitution of the islands; but those reforms mainly consisted in reducing the numbers of the councils at Corfù and Santa Maura. Much greater hopes were formed in 1794 on the arrival of Widman, the last provveditore generale whom Venice sent to Corfù. Widman had had a distinguished naval career; his benevolence was well known by report, and the Corfiotes, who had been plundered by his rapacious predecessor, gave him a reception such as had never fallen to the lot of any of their previous Venetian governors[283]. It was fortunate for him that he was so popular, for, after selling his own silver to meet the pressing needs of the administration, he had to appeal to the generosity of the Ionians for funds to carry on the government. He did not appeal in vain; the inhabitants of the three chief islands subscribed money; the four continental dependencies, having no money, offered men, who could not, however, be accepted, as there were no uniforms available; the Jews gave him over £400 and armed a certain number of soldiers at their expense; he was even reduced, as he could get nothing but promises from home, to use up the savings-bank deposits in the public service. In the apology which he published two years after the loss of the islands he gave a black picture of the state of the fortifications, which contained scarcely enough powder for a single man-of-war. Under the circumstances his sole consolation was the perusal of St Augustin. Such was the condition of the Ionian defences when the French troops entered Venice in 1797[284].

Venice was preparing to send commissioners with powers to establish a democratic form of government at Corfù, when Bonaparte, fearing lest Russia should occupy the islands, ordered General Gentili to go thither at once, bidding him introduce some telling classical allusions in his proclamation to the islanders. In the guise of an ally of Venice, with Venetian forces mixed among his own, and flying the lion banner of St Mark at his mast-head, Gentili sailed into Corfù on July 11. He informed Widman that he had come to protect the islands, and asked that room might be found within the fortress for their new protectors;[231] he told the people in a trilingual proclamation that the French Republic, in alliance with the Venetians, would free this fragment of ancient Hellas, and revive the glories and the virtues of classic times. Catching the classical spirit of the general’s proclamation, the head of the Orthodox church met him as he landed and presented him with a copy of the Odyssey. The islanders received the French as saviours. Gentili occupied the citadel, and Bonaparte wrote from Milan that they hoped “to regain, under the protection of the great French nation, the sciences, arts, and commerce which they had lost through oligarchical tyranny.”

9. MONEMVASIA
MONEMVASIA DURING THE FRANKISH PERIOD (1204-1540)

There are few places in Greece which possess the combined charms of natural beauty and of historic association to the same extent as Monemvasia. The great rock which rises out of the sea near the ancient Epidauros Limera is not only one of the most picturesque sites of the Peloponnese, but has a splendid record of heroic independence, which entitles it to a high place in the list of the world’s fortresses (Plate II, Figs. 1, 2). Monemvasia’s importance is, however, wholly mediæval; and its history has hitherto never been written; for the painstaking brochure of the patriotic Monemvasiote ex-deputy and ex-Minister K. Papamichalopoulos[285], was composed before modern research rendered it possible to draw upon the original authorities at Venice and elsewhere. In the present chapter I have endeavoured to state briefly what, in the present state of Greek mediæval studies, is known about this interesting city during the Frankish period.

At the time of the Frankish Conquest of the rest of Greece, Monemvasia was already a place of considerable importance. Even if we reject the statement of the fifteenth century historian, Phrantzes[286], himself a native of the place, that the Emperor Maurice had raised it to the rank of the 34th Metropolitan see—a statement contradicted by an ecclesiastical document of 1397—we know at least that it was even then the seat of a Greek bishopric, whose holder remained a suffragan of Corinth[287] till the Latins captured the latter city in 1210. The Comneni had confirmed the liberties of a community so favourably situated, and the local[232] aristocracy of Monemvasia enjoyed the privilege of self-government. Thanks to the public spirit of its inhabitants, the wisdom of the local magnates, and the strength of its natural defences, which made it in the Middle Ages the Gibraltar of Greece, it had repelled the attack of the Normans from Sicily in the middle of the twelfth century. Fifty years later it was a busy sea-port town, whose ships were seen at the Piræus by Michael Akominatos, the last Metropolitan of Athens before the Conquest, and whose great artistic treasure, the famous picture of Our Lord being “dragged,” which has given its name to the Ἑλκόμενος church, attracted the covetousness of the Emperor Isaac II[288].

As might have been expected from its position and history, Monemvasia was the last spot in the Peloponnese to acknowledge the Frankish supremacy. Geoffroy I Villehardouin had contented himself perforce with sending a body of troops to raid the country as far as the causeway, or μόνη ἔμβασις, which leads to the great rock-fortress and from which its name is derived[289]; and his son Geoffroy II seems to have meditated the conquest of the place[290]; but it was reserved for the third of the Villehardouins, soldierly Prince William, to hoist the croix ancrée of his family over the “sacred rock” of Hellenism, which was in uninterrupted communication by sea with the successor of Byzantium, the Greek Emperor of Nice[291], and was therefore a constant source of annoyance to the Franks of the Peloponnese. The Prince, after elaborate preparations, began the siege not long after his accession in 1246. He summoned to his aid the great vassals of the Principality—Guy I of Athens, who owed him allegiance for Nauplia and Argos; the three barons of Eubœa; Angelo Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, with the other lords of the Cyclades, and the veteran Count Palatine of Cephalonia, Matteo Orsini, ruler of the island-realm of Odysseus[292]. But the Prince of Achaia saw that without the naval assistance of Venice, which had taken care that his principality should not become a sea-power, he could never capture the place. He accordingly obtained the aid of four Venetian galleys, and then proceeded to invest the great rock-fortress by land and water. For three long years the garrison held out, “like a nightingale in its cage,” as the Chronicler quaintly says—and the simile is most appropriate, for the place abounds with those songsters—till all supplies were exhausted, and they had eaten the very cats and mice. Even then, however, they only surrendered on condition that they should be excused from all[233] feudal services, except at sea, and should even in that case be paid. True to the conciliatory policy of his family, William wisely granted their terms, and then the three archontes of Monemvasia, Mamonas, Daimonoyannes, and Sophianos, advanced along the narrow causeway to his camp and offered him the keys of their town. The conqueror received them with the respect of one brave man for another, loaded them with costly gifts, and gave them fiefs at Vatika near Cape Malea. A Frankish garrison was installed in the coveted fortress; and a Latin bishop, Oddo of Verdun, at last occupied the episcopal palace there, which had been his (on paper) ever since Innocent III[293] had organised the Latin see of Monemvasia as one of the suffragans of Corinth.

The Frankish occupation lasted, however, barely fourteen years, and has left no marks on the picturesque town. Buchon, indeed, who spied the Villehardouin arms on the Gorgoepekoos church at Athens, thought that he had discovered the famous croix ancrée on one of the churches[294]. He apparently meant the Ἑλκόμενος church, which the late Sir T. Wyse called and Murray’s Handbook still calls St Peter’s—a name not now known in Monemvasia, but derived perhaps from an inscription to a certain Dominus Petrus, whose remains “lie in peace” hard by. One church in the town, “Our Lady of the Myrtle,” bears, it is true, a cross with anchored work below, and four stars above the door. But this church, as I was informed and as the name implies, was founded by people from Cerigo, whose patron saint is the Παναγία Μυρτιδιώτισσα (Plate III, Fig. 1). The capture of the town by the Franks is, however, still remembered at Monemvasia, and local tradition points out the place on the mainland where Villehardouin left his cavalry. One pathetic event occurred at the rock during the brief Frankish period—the visit of the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, in 1261, on his way from his lost capital to Italy[295]. In the following year Monemvasia was one of the castles ceded to his successor, the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, as the ransom of Prince William of Achaia, captured by the Greeks three years earlier after the fatal battle of Pelagonia.

The mediæval importance of Monemvasia really dates from this retrocession to the Byzantine Emperor in 1262, when a Byzantine province was established in the south-east of the Morea. It not only became the seat of an Imperial governor, or κεφαλή, but it was the landing-place where the Imperial troops were disembarked for operations against the Franks, the port where the Tzakones and the Gasmoûloi,[234] or half-castes, of the Peloponnese enlisted for service in the Greek navy. During the war which began in 1263 between Michael VIII and his late captive, we accordingly frequently find it mentioned; it was thither that the Genoese transports in the Imperial service conveyed the Greek troops; it was thither, too, that the news of the first breach of the peace was carried post-haste, and thence communicated to Constantinople; it was there that the Imperial generals took up their headquarters at the outset of the campaign; and it was upon the Monemvasiotes that the combatants, when they were reconciled, agreed to lay the blame for the war[296]. Under the shadow of the Greek flag, Monemvasia became, too, one of the most dangerous lairs of corsairs in the Levant. The great local families did not disdain to enter the profession, and we read of both the Daimonoyannai and the Mamonades in the report of the Venetian judges, who drew up a long statement in 1278 of the depredations caused by pirates to Venetian commerce in the Levant. On one occasion the citizens looked calmly on while a flagrant act of piracy was being committed in their harbour, which, as the port of shipment for Malmsey wine, attracted corsairs who were also connoisseurs[297]. Moreover, the Greek occupation of so important a position was fatal to the Venetian lords of the neighbouring islands, no less than to Venetian trade in the Ægean. The chief sufferers were the two Marquesses of Cerigo and Cerigotto, members of the great families of Venier and Viaro, who had occupied those islands after the Fourth Crusade. It would appear from a confused passage of the Italian Memoir on Cerigo, that the islanders, impatient at the treatment which they received from their Latin lord, the descendant, as he boasted, of the island-goddess Venus herself, sent a deputation to invoke the aid of the Greek governor of the new Byzantine province in the Morea[298]. At any rate, the famous cruise of Licario, the upstart Italian of Negroponte who went over to the Greeks, temporarily ended the rule of the Venetian Marquesses. A governor was sent to Cerigo from Monemvasia; but ere long Michael VIII conferred that island upon the eminent Monemvasiote archon, Paul Monoyannes, who is described in a Venetian document as being in 1275 “the vassal of the Emperor and captain of Cerigo.” Monoyannes fortified the island, where his tomb was discovered during the British protectorate, and it remained in the possession of his family till 1309, when intermarriage between the children of its Greek and Latin lords restored Cerigo to the Venieri[299].

The Byzantine Emperors naturally rewarded a community so useful to them as that of Monemvasia. Michael VIII granted its citizens valuable fiscal exemptions; his pious son and successor, Andronikos II not only confirmed their privileges and possessions, but founded the church of the Divine Wisdom which still stands in the castle. The adjoining cloister has fallen in ruins; the Turks after 1540 converted the church, like the more famous Santa Sophia of Constantinople, into a mosque, the mihrab of which may still be traced, and smashed all the heads of the saints which once adorned the church—an edifice reckoned as ancient even in the days of the Venetian occupation, when a Monemvasiote family had the jus patronatus over it (Plate III, Fig. 2). But a fine Byzantine plaque over the door—two peacocks and two lambs—still preserves the memory of the Byzantine connexion. Of Andronikos II we have, too, another Monemvasiote memorial—the Golden Bull of 1293, by which he gave to the Metropolitan the title of “Exarch of all the Peloponnese,” with jurisdiction over eight bishoprics, some, it is true, still in partibus infidelium, as well as the titular Metropolitan throne of Side, and confirmed all the rights and property of his diocese, which was raised to be the tenth of the Empire and extended, at any rate on paper, right across the peninsula to “Pylos, which is called Avarinos”—a convincing proof of the error made by Hopf in supposing that the name of Navarino arose from the Navarrese company a century later. The Emperor lauds in this interesting document, which bears his portrait and is still preserved in the National Library and (in a copy) in the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, the convenience and safe situation of the town, the number of its inhabitants, their affluence and their technical skill, their seafaring qualities, and their devotion to his throne and person. His grandson and namesake, Andronikos III, in 1332 granted them freedom from market-dues at the Peloponnesian fairs[300]. But a city so prosperous was sure to attract the covetous glances of enemies. Accordingly, in 1292, Roger de Lluria, the famous admiral of King James of Aragon, on the excuse that the Emperor had failed to pay the subsidy promised by his father to the late King Peter, descended upon Monemvasia, and sacked the lower town without a blow. The archontes and the people took refuge in the impregnable citadel, leaving[236] their property and their Metropolitan in the power of the enemy[301]. Ten years later, another Roger, Roger de Flor, the leader of the Catalan Grand Company, put into Monemvasia on his way to the East on that memorable expedition which was destined to ruin “the pleasaunce of the Latins” in the Levant. On this occasion the Catalans were naturally on their good behaviour. Monemvasia belonged to their new employer, the Emperor Andronikos; it had been stipulated that they should receive the first instalment of their pay there; and Muntaner[302] tells us that the Imperial authorities gave them a courteous reception and provided them with refreshments, including probably a few barrels of the famous Malmsey.

Monemvasia fortunately escaped the results of the Catalan expedition, which proved so fatal to the Duchy of Athens and profoundly affected the North and West of the Morea. Indeed, in the early part of the fourteenth century the corsairs of the great rock seemed to have actually seized the classic island of Salamis under the eyes of the Catalan rulers of Athens, whose naval forces in the Saronic Gulf had been purposely crippled by the jealous Venetian Government. At any rate we find Salamis, which had previously belonged to Bonifacio da Verona, the baron of Karystos in Eubœa, and had passed with the hand of his daughter and heiress to Alfonso Fadrique, the head of the terrible Catalan Company in Attica, now paying tribute to the Byzantine governor of Monemvasia[303]. When, however, towards the end of the fourteenth century, the Greeks began to recover most of the Peloponnese, the city which had been so valuable to them in the earlier days of the reconquest of the Morea had to compete with formidable rivals. In 1397, when Theodore I Palaiologos obtained, after a desperate struggle, the great fortress of Corinth, which had been his wife’s dowry from her father, Nerio Acciajuoli, his first act was to restore the Metropolitan see of that ancient city, and the first demand of the restored Metropolitan was for the restitution to him by his brother of Monemvasia of the two suffragan bishoprics of Zemenos and Maina, which had been given to the latter’s predecessor after the Latin conquest of Corinth[304]. This demand was granted, and we are not surprised to hear that the Monemvasiotes were disaffected to the Despot, under whom such a slight had been cast upon their Church. The Moreote archontes at this period were intensely[237] independent of the Despot of Mistra, even though the latter was the brother of the Emperor. The most unruly of them all was Paul Mamonas of Monemvasia, who belonged to the great local family which had been to the fore in the days of Villehardouin. This man held the office of “Grand-Duke” or Lord High Admiral in the Byzantine hierarchy of officials and claimed the hereditary right to rule as an independent princelet over his native city, of which his father had been Imperial governor. When Theodore asserted his authority, and expelled the haughty archon, the latter did not hesitate to arraign him before the supreme authority of those degenerate days—the Sultan Bayezid I who ordered his immediate restoration by Turkish troops—a humiliation alike for the Greek Despot and for the sacred city of Hellenism[305]. Theodore had, indeed, at one time thought of bestowing so unruly a community upon a Venetian of tried merit; and, in 1419, after the death of Paul’s son, the Republic was supposed by Hopf to have come into possession of the coveted rock and its surroundings—then a valuable commercial asset because of the Malmsey which was still produced there[306]. But the three documents, upon which he relies for this statement, merely show that Venetian merchants were engaged in the wine-trade at Monemvasia.

It was at this period that Monemvasia produced two men of letters, George Phrantzes and the Monk Isidore. To the latter we owe a series of letters, one of which, addressed to the Emperor Manuel II on the occasion of his famous visit to the Morea in 1415, describes his pacification of Maina and his abolition of the barbarous custom of cutting off the fingers and toes of the slain, which the Mainates had inherited from the Greeks of Æschylus and Sophocles. He also alludes to the Greek inscriptions which he saw at Vitylo[307]. Of Phrantzes, the historian of the Turkish conquest, the secretary and confidant of the Palaiologoi, the clever if somewhat unscrupulous diplomatist, who, after a busy life, lies buried in the quiet church of Sts Jason and Sosipater at Corfù, it is needless to speak. In the opinion of the writer, Phrantzes should hold a high place in Byzantine history. His style is clear and simple, compared with that of his contemporary Chalkokondyles, the ornate Herodotus of the new Persian Conquest; he knew men and things; he was no mere theologian or rhetorician, but a man of affairs; and he wrote with a naïveté, which is as amusing as it is surprising in one of his profession. Monemvasia may be proud of having produced such a man,[238] who has placed in his history a glowing account of his birthplace. We hear too in 1540 of a certain George, called “Count of Corinth” but a native of Monemvasia, who had a fine library, and among the many Peloponnesian calligraphists, the so-called “Murmures,” found later on in Italy, there were some Monemvasiotes[308].

We next find Monemvasia in the possession of the Despot Theodore II Palaiologos[309], who ratified its ancient privileges. All the Despot’s subjects, whether freemen or serfs, were permitted to enter or leave this important city without let or hindrance, except only the dangerous denizens of Tzakonia and Vatika, whose character had not altered in the two hundred years which had elapsed since the time of Villehardouin. The citizens, their beasts, and their ships were exempt from forced labour; and, at their special request, the Despot confirmed the local custom, by which all the property of a Monemvasiote who died without relatives was devoted to the repair of the castle; while, if he had only distant relatives, one-third of his estate was reserved for that purpose (Plate V, Fig. 1). This system of death duties (τὸ ἀβιωτίκιον, as it was called) was continued by Theodore’s brother and successor, Demetrios, by whom Monemvasia was described as “one of the most useful cities under my rule[310].” Such, indeed, he found it to be, when, in 1458, Mohammed II made his first punitive expedition into the Morea. On the approach of the great Sultan, the Despot fled to the rock of Monemvasia. It was the ardent desire of the Conqueror to capture that famous fortress, “the strongest of all cities that we know,” as the contemporary Athenian historian, Chalkokondyles[311], called it. But his advisers represented to him the difficult nature of the country which he would have to traverse, so he prudently desisted from the enterprise. Two years later, when Mohammed II visited the Morea a second time and finally destroyed Greek rule in that peninsula, Monemvasia again held out successfully. After sheltering Demetrios against an attack from his treacherous brother Thomas, the town gave refuge to the wife and daughter of the former. Demetrios had, however, promised to give his daughter in marriage to the great Sultan; and Isa, son of the Pasha of Üsküb, and Matthew Asan, the Despot’s brother-in-law, were accordingly sent to demand the surrender of the city and of the two princesses, whom it contained. The Monemvasiotes did, indeed, hand over the two Imperial ladies to the envoys of the Sultan and the Despot; but, relying on their immense natural defences, animated by the sturdy spirit of independence[239] which had so long distinguished them, and inspired by the example of their governor, Manuel Palaiologos, they bade them tell Mohammed not to lay sacrilegious hands on a city which God had meant to be invincible. The Sultan is reported to have admired their courage, and wisely refrained from attacking the impregnable fortress of mediæval Hellenism. As Demetrios was the prisoner of the Sultan, the Governor proclaimed Thomas as his liege-lord; but the latter, a fugitive from Greece, was incapable of maintaining his sovereignty and tried to exchange it with the Sultan for another sea-side place[312]. A passing Catalan corsair, one Lope de Baldaja, was then invited to occupy the rock; but the liberty-loving inhabitants soon drove out the petty tyrant whom they had summoned to their aid, and, with the consent of Thomas, placed their city under the protection of his patron, the Pope. Pius II gladly appointed both spiritual and temporal governors of the fortress which had so long been the stronghold of Orthodoxy, and of that nationalism with which Orthodoxy was identical[313].

But the papal flag did not wave long over Monemvasia. The Orthodox Greeks soon grew tired of forming part of the Pope’s temporal dominion, and preferred the rule of Venice, the strongest maritime power interested in the Levant, whose governors were well known to be “first Venetians and then Catholics.” The outbreak of the Turco-Venetian War of 1463, and the appearance of a Venetian fleet in the Ægean, gave the citizens their opportunity. The Pope, as Phrantzes informs us, had no wish to give up the place; but he was far away, his representative was feeble, the flag of Venice was for the moment triumphant in Greek waters, and accordingly in 1463 or 1464, the inhabitants admitted a Venetian garrison. On September 21, 1464, the Senate made provision for the government of this new dependency. A Podestà was to be elected for two years at an annual salary of 500 gold ducats, this salary to be paid every three months out of the revenues of the newly-conquered island of Lemnos. Six months later, it was decreed that in case there was no money available for the purpose at Lemnos, the Podestà should receive his salary from the Cretan treasury[314]. From that time to 1540 Monemvasia remained a Venetian colony. Once, indeed, a plot was organised[240] in the ancient city of the Palaiologoi for the purpose of wresting the place from the claws of the Lion of St Mark. Andrew Palaiologos, the still more degenerate son of the degenerate Thomas, had, in 1494, transferred all his Imperial rights and claims to King Charles VIII of France, then engaged in his expedition to Naples, in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio at Rome. In accordance with this futile arrangement his partisans at Monemvasia, where the Imperial name of Palaiologos was still popular, schemed to deliver the city to his French ally[315]. But the plans of Charles VIII, and with them the plot at Monemvasia, came to nought. Venice remained mistress of the Virgin fortress.

Down to the peace of 1502-3, Monemvasia seems to have been fairly prosperous under Venetian rule. By the Turco-Venetian treaty of 1479 she had been allowed to retain the dependency of Vatika[316] in the neighbourhood of Cape Malea, which had been captured from the Turks in 1463, and where her citizens had long possessed property. But the territories of Monemvasia were terribly restricted after the next Turco-Venetian war: she had then lost her outlying castles of Rampano and Vatika, from which the ecclesiastical authorities derived much of their dues; and we find the inhabitants petitioning the Republic for the redress of their grievances, and pointing out that this last delimitation of their frontiers had deprived them of the lands which they had been wont to sow. The rock itself produced nothing, and accordingly all their supplies of corn had now to be imported through the Turkish possessions[317]. As for the famous vintage, which had been the delight of Western connoisseurs, it was no longer produced at Malvasia, for the Turks did not cultivate the vineyards which were now in their hands, and most of the so-called “Malmsey,” nihil de Malfasia habens sed nomen, as worthy Father Faber says, had for some time come from Crete or Modon[318], till the latter place, too, became Turkish. But, in spite of these losses, Monemvasia still remained what she had been for centuries—an impregnable fortress, the Gibraltar of Greece. The Venetians renewed the system, which had prevailed under the Despots of the Morea, of devoting one of the local imposts to the repair of the walls; the Venetian Podestà, who lived, like the military governor, up in the castle, seems to have been a popular official; and the Republic had wisely confirmed the special privileges granted by the Byzantine Emperors to the Church and[241] community of this favoured city (Plate IV). Both a Greek Metropolitan and a Latin Archbishop continued to take their titles from Monemvasia, and the most famous of these prelates was the eminent Greek scholar, Markos Mousouros. It is interesting to note that in 1521 Pope Leo X had a scheme for founding an academy for the study of the Greek language out of the revenues of whichever of these sees first fell vacant, as Arsenios Apostoles, at that time Metropolitan, was a learned Greek and a Uniate, and in both capacities, a prime favourite of the classically cultured Pontiff. In 1524, however, despite the thunders of the Œcumenical Patriarch, the Greek and the Italian prelates agreed among themselves that the former should retain the see of Monemvasia and that the latter should take a Cretan diocese[319]. The connection between “the great Greek island” and this rocky peninsula was now close. The Greek priests of Crete, who had formerly gone to the Venetian colonies of Modon and Coron for consecration, after the loss of those colonies in 1500 came to Monemvasia; the Cretan exchequer continued to contribute to the expenses of the latter; and judicial appeals from the Podestà of Malmsey lay to the colonial authorities at Candia, instead of being remitted to Venice; for, as a Monemvasiote deputation once plaintively said, the expenses of the long journey had been defrayed by pawning the chalices of the churches. Even now Monemvasia is remote from the world; in those Venetian days she was seldom visited, not only because of her situation, but because of the fear which ships’ captains had of her inhabitants[320].

The humiliating peace of 1540, which closed the Turco-Venetian war of 1537, closed also the history of Venice in the Morea till the brief revival at the close of the seventeenth century. This shameful treaty cost the Republic her two last possessions on the mainland of Greece—Nauplia and Monemvasia, both still uncaptured and the latter scarcely assailed by the Turkish forces[321]. Admiral Mocenigo was sent to break as best he could to her loyal subjects the sad news that the Republic had abandoned their homes to the Turks. The Venetian envoy, if we may believe the speech which Paruta puts into his mouth, repeated to the weeping people the ancient adage, ubi bene, ibi patria, and pointed out to them that they would be better off in a new abode less exposed than their native cities had been to the Turkish peril. In November a Venetian fleet arrived in the beautiful bay of Nauplia and off the sacred rock of[242] Monemvasia to remove the soldiers, the artillery, and all the inhabitants who wished to live under Venetian rule. Then the banner of the Evangelist was lowered, the keys of the two last Venetian fortresses in the Morea were handed to Kassim Pasha, and the receipts for their transfer were sent to Venice[322].

The inhabitants of the two cities had been loyal to Venice, and Venice was loyal to them. The first idea of transporting the Monemvasiotes to the rocky island of Cerigo—then partly a Venetian colony and partly under the rule of the great Venetian family of Venier, which boasted its descent from Venus, the fabled goddess of Kythera—was abandoned, in deference to the eloquent protests of the Metropolitan, and lands were assigned to the exiles in the more fertile colonies of the Republic. A commission of five nobles was appointed to consider the claims, and provide for the settlement, of the stradioti, or light horsemen from Nauplia and Monemvasia, who had fought like heroes against the Turks; and this commission sat for several years, for the claimants were numerous and not all genuine[323]. Some, like the ancient local family of Daimonoyannes, formerly lords of Cerigo, received lands in Crete[324], where various members of the Athenian branch of the great Florentine family of the Medici, which had been settled for two hundred years at Nauplia, also found a home. Scions of the clan of Mamonas went to Zante and Crete, and are found later on at Corinth, Nauplia, Athens and Corfù. Others were removed to Corfù, where they soon formed an integral part of the Corfiote population and where the name of these stradioti is still preserved in a locality of the island; while others again were transplanted[243] to Cephalonia, Cyprus, or Dalmatia. Not a few of them were soon, however, smitten with home-sickness; they sold their new lands and returned to be Turkish subjects at Nauplia and Monemvasia[325].

The Venetian fortifications; the old Venetian pictures on the eikonostasis of the Ἑλκόμενος church; the quaint Italian chimneys, and the well-head up in the castle, which bears the winged lion of St Mark, two private coats of arms, the date MDXIV and the initials S R upon it, the latter those of Sebastiano Renier, Podestà from 1510 to 1512 (to whom the first coat belongs, while the second is that of Antonio Garzoni, Podestà in 1526 and again in 1538, when he was the last Podestà before the Turkish conquest), still speak to us of this first Venetian occupation, when the ancient Byzantine city, after the brief vicissitudes of French and Papal government, found shelter for nearly eighty years beneath the flag of the Evangelist (Plate V, Fig. 2 and Text-fig. 2).

APPENDIX
TWO VENETIAN DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE ACQUISITION OF MONEMVASIA IN 1464

I.—Regina fol. 52.

II.—Regina fol. 56.

THREE VENETIAN DOCUMENTS RELATING TO THE WINE-TRADE AT MONEMVASIA

10. THE MARQUISATE OF BOUDONITZA (1204-1414)

Of all the feudal lordships, founded in Northern Greece at the time of the Frankish Conquest, the most important and the most enduring was the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Like the Venieri and the Viari in the two islands of Cerigo and Cerigotto at the extreme south, the lords of Boudonitza were Marquesses in the literal sense of the term—wardens of the Greek Marches—and they maintained their responsible position on the outskirts of the Duchy of Athens until after the establishment of the Turks in Thessaly. Apart, too, from its historic importance, the Marquisate of Boudonitza possesses the romantic glamour which is shed over a famous classical site by the chivalry of the middle ages. What stranger accident could there have been than that which made two noble Italian families the successive guardians of the historic pass which is for ever associated with the death of Leonidas!

Among the adventurers who accompanied Boniface of Montferrat, the new King of Salonika, on his march into Greece in the autumn of 1204, was Guido Pallavicini, the youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma who had gone to the East because at home every common man could hale him before the courts[326]. This was the vigorous personality who, in the eyes of his conquering chief, seemed peculiarly suited to watch over the pass of Thermopylæ, whence the Greek archon, Leon Sgouros, had fled at the mere sight of the Latins in their coats of mail. Accordingly, he invested him with the fief of Boudonitza, and ere long, on the Hellenic substructures of Pharygæ, rose the imposing fortress of the Italian Marquesses.

The site was admirably chosen, and is, indeed, one of the finest in Greece. The village of Boudonitza, Bodonitza, or Mendenitza, as it is now[246] called, lies at a distance of three and a half hours on horseback from the baths of Thermopylæ and nearly an hour and a half from the top of the pass which leads across the mountains to Dadi at the foot of Parnassos. The castle, which is visible for more than an hour as we approach from Thermopylæ, stands on a hill which bars the valley and occupies a truly commanding position (Plate VI, Figs. 1 and 2). The Warden of the Marches, in the Frankish times, could watch from its battlements the blue Maliac Gulf with the even then important town of Stylida, the landing-place for Zetounion, or Lamia; his eye could traverse the channel up to, and beyond, the entrance to the Gulf of Almiro, as the Gulf of Volo was then called; in the distance he could descry two of the Northern Sporades—Skiathos and Skopelos—at first in the hands of the friendly Ghisi, then reconquered by the hostile Byzantine forces. The northernmost of the three Lombard baronies of Eubœa with the bright streak which marks the baths of Ædepsos, and the little island of Panaia, or Canaia, between Eubœa and the mainland, which was one of the last remnants of Italian rule in this part of Greece, lay outstretched before him; and no pirate craft could come up the Atalante channel without his knowledge. Landwards, the view is bounded by vast masses of mountains, but the danger was not yet from that quarter, while a rocky gorge, the bed of a dry torrent, isolates one side of the castle. Such was the site where, for more than two centuries, the Marquesses of Boudonitza watched, as advanced sentinels, first of “new France” and then of Christendom.

The extent of the Marquisate cannot be exactly defined. In the early years after the Conquest we find the first Marquess part-owner of Lamia[327]; his territory extended down to the sea, upon which later on his successors had considerable commercial transactions, and the harbour from which they obtained their supplies would seem to have been simply called the skala of Boudonitza. In 1332 Adam, the Archbishop of Antivari, alludes to the “castle and port of Boudonice (sic), through which we shall have in abundance grain of all kinds from Wallachia” (i.e. Thessaly, the “Great Wallachia” of the Byzantine historians and of the “Chronicle of the Morea”)[328]. The Pallavicini’s southern frontier marched with the Athenian seigneurie; but their feudal relations were not with Athens, but with Achaia. Whether or no we accept the story of the “Chronicle of the Morea,” that Boniface of Montferrat conferred the suzerainty of Boudonitza upon Guillaume de Champlitte, or the more probable story of the elder Sanudo, that the Emperor Baldwin II[247] gave it to Geoffroy II de Villehardouin[329], it is certain that later on the Marquess was one of the twelve peers of Achaia[330], and in 1278 Charles I of Naples, in his capacity of Prince of Achaia, accordingly notified the appointment of a bailie of the principality to the Marchioness of that day[331]. It was only during the Catalan period that the Marquess came to be reckoned as a feudatory of Athens[332]. Within his dominions was situated a Roman Catholic episcopal see—that of Thermopylæ, dependent upon the metropolitan see of Athens. At first the bishop resided at the town which bore that name; on its destruction, however, during those troublous times, the bishop and canons built an oratory at Boudonitza. Even there, however, the pirates penetrated and killed the bishop, whereupon in 1209 the then occupant of the see, the third of the series, begged Innocent III to allow him to move to the abbey of “Communio”—perhaps a monastery founded by one of the Comneni—within the same district[333]. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, the bishop was commonly known by the title of “Boudonitza,” because he resided there, and his see was then one of the four within the confines of the Athenian Duchy[334].

Guido, first Marquess of Boudonitza, the “Marchesopoulo,” as his Greek subjects called him, played a very important part in both the political and ecclesiastical history of his time—just the part which we should have expected from a man of his lawless disposition. The “Chronicle” above quoted represents him as present at the siege of Corinth. He and his brother, whose name may have been Rubino, were among the leaders of the Lombard rebellion against the Latin Emperor Henry in 1209; he obstinately refused to attend the first Parliament of Ravenika in May of that year; and, leaving his castle undefended, he retreated with the still recalcitrant rebels behind the stronger walls of the Kadmeia at Thebes. This incident procured for Boudonitza the honour of its only Imperial visit; for the Emperor Henry lay there one evening—a certain Wednesday—on his way to Thebes, and thence rode, as the present writer has ridden, through the closure, or pass, which leads over the mountains and down to Dadi and the Bœotian plain—then, as now, the shortest route from Boudonitza to the Bœotian capital[335], and[248] at that time the site of a church of our Lady, Sta Maria de Clusurio, the property of the abbot and canons of the Lord’s Temple. Like most of his fellow-nobles, the Marquess was not over-respectful of the rights and property of the Church to which he belonged. If he granted the strong position of Lamia to the Templars, he secularised property belonging to his bishop and displayed a marked unwillingness to pay tithes. We find him, however, with his fellows, signing the concordat which was drawn up to regulate the relations between Church and State at the second Parliament of Ravenika in May, 1210[336].

As one of the leading nobles of the Latin kingdom of Salonika, Guido continued to be associated with its fortunes. In 1221 we find him acting as bailie for the Regent Margaret during the minority of the young King Demetrius, in whose name he ratified a convention with the clergy respecting the property of the Church[337]. His territory became the refuge of the Catholic Archbishop of Larissa, upon whom the bishopric of Thermopylæ was temporarily conferred by Honorius III, when the Greeks of Epeiros drove him from his see. And when the ephemeral kingdom had fallen before them, the same Pope, in 1224, ordered Geoffroy II de Villehardouin of Achaia, Othon de la Roche of Athens, and the three Lombard barons of Eubœa to aid in defending the castle of Boudonitza, and rejoiced that 1300 hyperperi had been subscribed by the prelates and clergy for its defence, so that it could be held by “G. lord of the aforesaid castle,” till the arrival of the Marquess William of Montferrat[338]. Guido was still living on May 2, 1237, when he made his will. Soon after that date he probably died; Hopf[339] states in his genealogy, without citing any authority, that he was killed by the Greeks. He had survived most of his fellow-Crusaders; and, in consequence of the Greek reconquest of Thessaly, his Marquisate was now, with the doubtful exception of Larissa, the northernmost of the Frankish fiefs, the veritable “March” of Latin Hellas.

Guido had married a Burgundian lady named Sibylle, possibly a daughter of the house of Cicon, lately established in Greece, and therefore a cousin of Guy de la Roche of Athens. By her he had two daughters and a son, Ubertino, who succeeded him as second Marquess. Despite the feudal tie which should have bound him to the Prince of Achaia, and which he boldly repudiated, Ubertino assisted his cousin, the “Great Lord” of Athens, in the fratricidal war between those prominent Frankish rulers, which culminated in the defeat of the[249] Athenians at the battle of Karydi in 1258, where the Marquess was present, and whence he accompanied Guy de la Roche in his retreat to Thebes. In the following year, however, he obeyed the summons of the Prince of Achaia to take part in the fatal campaign in aid of the Despot Michael II of Epeiros against the Greek Emperor of Nice, which ended on the plain of Pelagonia; and in 1263, when the Prince, after his return from his Greek prison, made war against the Greeks of the newly established Byzantine province in the Morea, the Marquess of Boudonitza was once more summoned to his aid[340]. The revival of Greek power in Eubœa at this period, and the frequent acts of piracy in the Atalante channel were of considerable detriment to the people of Boudonitza, whose food supplies were at times intercepted by the corsairs[341]. But the Marquess Ubertino profited by the will of his sister Mabilia, who had married Azzo VII d’Este of Ferrara, and bequeathed to her brother in 1264 her property near Parma[342].

After the death of Ubertino, the Marquisate, like so many Frankish baronies, fell into the hands of a woman. The new Marchioness of Boudonitza was his second sister, Isabella, who is included in the above-mentioned circular note, addressed to all the great magnates of Achaia by Charles I of Anjou, the new Prince, and notifying to them the appointment of Galeran d’Ivry as the Angevin vicar-general in the principality. On that occasion, the absence of the Marchioness was one of the reasons alleged by Archbishop Benedict of Patras, in the name of those present at Glarentza, for the refusal of homage to the new bailie[343]. So important was the position of the Marquisate as one of the twelve peerages of Achaia.

The Marchioness Isabella died without children; and, accordingly, in 1286, a disputed succession arose between her husband, a Frank settled in the East, and the nearest male representative of the Pallavicini family, her cousin Tommaso, grandson of the first Marquess’s brother, Rubino. The dispute was referred to Guillaume de la Roche, Duke of Athens, in his capacity of bailie of Achaia, before the feudal court of which a question relating to Boudonitza would legally come. Tommaso, however, settled the matter by seizing the castle, and not only maintained himself there, but transmitted the Marquisate to his son, Alberto[344].

The fifth Marquess is mentioned as among those summoned by Philip of Savoy, Prince of Achaia, to the famous Parliament and tournament on the Isthmus of Corinth in the spring of 1305, and as having been one of the magnates who obeyed the call of Philip’s namesake and successor, Philip of Taranto, in 1307[345]. Four years later he fell, at the great battle of the Kephissos, fighting against the Catalans beneath the lion banner of Walter of Brienne[346], who by his will a few days before had bequeathed 100 hyperperi to the church of Boudonitza[347].

The Marquisate, alone of the Frankish territories north of the Isthmus, escaped conquest by the Catalans, though, as at Athens, a widow and her child were alone left to defend it. Alberto had married a rich Eubœan heiress, Maria dalle Carceri, a scion of the Lombard family which had come from Verona at the time of the Conquest. By this marriage he had become a hexarch, or owner of one-sixth of that great island, and is so officially described in the Venetian list of Greek rulers. Upon his death, in accordance with the rules of succession laid down in the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania, the Marquisate was divided in equal shares between his widow and his infant daughter, Guglielma. Maria did not, however, long remain unconsoled; indeed, political considerations counselled an immediate marriage with some one powerful enough to protect her own and her child’s interests from the Catalans of Athens. Hitherto the Wardens of the Northern March had only needed to think of the Greek enemies in front, for all the territory behind them, where Boudonitza was most easily assailable, had been in the hands of Frenchmen and friends. More fortunate than most of the high-born dames of Frankish Greece, the widowed Marchioness had avoided the fate of accepting one of her husband’s conquerors as his successor. Being thus free to choose, she selected as her spouse Andrea Cornaro, a Venetian of good family, a great personage in Crete, and Baron of Skarpanto. Cornaro thus, in 1312, received, by virtue of his marriage, his wife’s moiety of Boudonitza[348], while her daughter conferred the remaining half, by her subsequent union with Bartolommeo Zaccaria, upon a member of that famous Genoese race, which already owned Chios and was about to establish a dynasty in the Morea[349].

Cornaro now came to reside in Eubœa, where self-interest as well as patriotism led him to oppose the claims of Alfonso Fadrique, the new viceroy of the Catalan Duchy of Athens. His opposition and the natural[251] ambition of Fadrique brought down, however, upon the Marquisate the horrors of a Catalan invasion, and it was perhaps on this occasion that Bartolommeo Zaccaria was carried off as a captive and sent to a Sicilian prison, whence he was only released at the intervention of Pope John XXII. It was fortunate for the inhabitants of Boudonitza that Venice included Cornaro in the truce which she made with the Catalans in 1319[350]. Four years later he followed his wife to the grave, and her daughter was thenceforth sole Marchioness.

Guglielma Pallavicini was a true descendant of the first Marquess. Of all the rulers of Boudonitza, with his exception, she was the most self-willed, and she might be included in that by no means small number of strong-minded, unscrupulous, and passionate women, whom Frankish Greece produced and whom classic Greece might have envied as subjects for her tragic stage. On the death of her Genoese husband, she considered that both the proximity of Boudonitza to the Venetian colony of Negroponte and her long-standing claims to the castle of Larmena in that island required that she should marry a Venetian, especially as the decision of her claim and even her right to reside in the island depended upon the Venetian bailie. Accordingly, she begged the Republic to give her one of its nobles as her consort, and promised dutifully to accept whomsoever the Senate might choose. The choice fell upon Nicolò Giorgio, or Zorzi, to give him the Venetian form of the name, who belonged to a distinguished family which had given a Doge to the Republic and had recently assisted young Walter of Brienne in his abortive campaign to recover his father’s lost duchy from the Catalans. A Venetian galley escorted him in 1335 to the haven of Boudonitza, and a Marquess, the founder of a new line, once more ruled over the castle of the Pallavicini[351].

At first there was no cause to regret the alliance. If the Catalans, now established at Neopatras and Lamia, within a few hours of Boudonitza, occupied several villages of the adjacent Marquisate, despite the recommendations of Venice, Nicolò I came to terms with them, probably by agreeing to pay that annual tribute of four fully equipped horses to the Vicar-General of the Duchy of Athens, which we find constituting the feudal bond between that state and Boudonitza in the time of his son[352]. He espoused, too, the Eubœan claims of his wife; but Venice, which had an eye upon the strong castle of Larmena, diplomatically referred the legal question to the bailie of Achaia, of which[252] both Eubœa and Boudonitza were technically still reckoned as dependencies. The bailie, in the name of the suzeraine Princess of Achaia, Catherine of Valois, decided against Guglielma, and the purchase of Larmena by Venice ended her hopes. Furious at her disappointment, the Marchioness accused her Venetian husband of cowardice and of bias towards his native city, while more domestic reasons increased her indignation. Her consort was a widower, while she had had a daughter by her first marriage, and she suspected him of favouring his own offspring at the expense of her child, Marulla, in whose name she had deposited a large sum of money at the Venetian bank in Negroponte. To complete the family tragedy played within the walls of Boudonitza there was only now lacking a sinister ally of the angry wife. He, too, was forthcoming in the person of Manfredo Pallavicini, the relative, business adviser, and perhaps paramour, of the Marchioness. As one of the old conqueror’s stock, he doubtless regarded the Venetian husband as an interloper who had first obtained the family honours and then betrayed his trust. At last a crisis arrived. Pallavicini insulted the Marquess, his feudal superior; the latter threw him into prison, whereupon the prisoner attempted the life of his lord. As a peer of Achaia, the Marquess enjoyed the right of inflicting capital punishment. He now exercised it; Pallavicini was executed, and the assembled burgesses of Boudonitza, if we may believe the Venetian version, approved the act, saying that it was better that a vassal should die rather than inflict an injury on his lord.

The sequel showed, however, that Guglielma was not appeased. She might have given assent with her lips to what the burgesses had said. But she worked upon their feelings of devotion to her family, which had ruled so long over them; they rose against the foreign Marquess at their Lady’s instigation; and Nicolò was forced to flee across to Negroponte, leaving his little son Francesco and all his property behind him. Thence he proceeded to Venice, and laid his case before the Senate. That body warmly espoused his cause, and ordered the Marchioness to receive him back to his former honourable position, or to deliver up his property. In the event of her refusal, the bailie of Negroponte was instructed to break off all communications between Boudonitza and that island and to sequestrate her daughter’s money still lying in the Eubœan bank. In order to isolate her still further, letters were to be sent to the Catalans of Athens, requesting them not to interfere between husband and wife. As the Marchioness remained obdurate, Venice made a last effort for an amicable settlement, begging the Catalan leaders, Queen Joanna I of Naples, as the head of the house of Anjou, to which the principality of[253] Achaia belonged, and the Dauphin Humbert II of Vienne, then commanding the papal fleet against the Turks, to use their influence on behalf of her citizen. When this failed, the bailie carried out his instructions, confiscated the funds deposited in the bank, and paid Nicolò out of them the value of his property. Neither the loss of her daughter’s money nor the spiritual weapons of Pope Clement VI could move the obstinate Lady of Boudonitza, and in her local bishop, Nitardus of Thermopylæ, she could easily find an adviser who dissuaded her from forgiveness[353]. So Nicolò never returned to Boudonitza; he served the Republic as envoy to the Serbian Tsar, Dushan, and as one of the Doge’s Councillors, and died at Venice in 1354. After his death, the Marchioness at once admitted their only son, Francesco, the “Marchesotto,” as he was called, now a youth of seventeen, to rule with her, and, as the Catalans were once more threatening her land, made overtures to the Republic. The latter, glad to know that a Venetian citizen was once more ruling as Marquess at Boudonitza, included him and his mother in its treaties with Athens, and when Guglielma died, in 1358, after a long and varied career, her son received back the confiscated property of his late half-sister[354].

The peaceful reign of Francesco was a great contrast to the stormy career of his mother. His Catalan neighbours, divided by the jealousies of rival chiefs, had no longer the energy for fresh conquests. The establishment of a Serbian kingdom in Thessaly only affected the Marquess in so far as it enabled him to bestow his daughter’s hand upon a Serbian princelet[355]. The Turkish peril, which was destined to swallow up the Marquisate in the next generation, was, however, already threatening Catalans, Serbs, and Italians alike, and accordingly Francesco Giorgio was one of the magnates of Greece whom Pope Gregory XI invited to the Congress on the Eastern question, which was summoned to meet at Thebes[356] on October 1, 1373. But when the Athenian duchy, of which he was a tributary, was distracted by a disputed succession between Maria, Queen of Sicily, and Pedro IV of Aragon, the Venetian Marquess, chafing at his vassalage and thinking that the moment was favourable for severing his connexion with the Catalans, declared for the Queen. He was, in fact, the most important member of the minority which was in her favour, for we are told that “he had a very fine estate,” and we know[254] that he had enriched himself by mercantile ventures. Accordingly he assisted the Navarrese Company in its attack upon the duchy, so that Pedro IV wrote in 1381 to the Venetian bailie of Negroponte, begging him to prevent his fellow-countryman at Boudonitza from helping the King’s enemies. As the Marquess had property in the island, he had given hostages to fortune. The victory of the Aragonese party closed the incident, and the generous policy of the victors was doubtless extended to him. But in 1388 the final overthrow of the Catalan rule by Nerio Acciajuoli made the Marquisate independent of the Duchy of Athens[357]. In feudal lists—such as that of 1391—the Marquess continued to figure as one of the temporal peers of Achaia[358], but his real position was that of a “citizen and friend” of Venice, to whom he now looked for help in trouble.

Francesco may have lived to see this realisation of his hopes, for he seems to have died about 1388, leaving the Marquisate to his elder son, Giacomo, under the regency of his widow Euphrosyne, a daughter of the famous insular family of Sommaripa, which still survives in the Cyclades[359]. But the young Marquess soon found that he had only exchanged his tribute to the Catalan Vicar-General for a tribute to the Sultan. We are not told the exact moment at which Bayezid I imposed this payment, but there can be little doubt that Boudonitza first became tributary to the Turks in the campaign of 1393-4, when “the Thunderbolt” fell upon Northern Greece, when the Marquess’s Serbian brother-in-law was driven from Pharsala and Domoko, when Lamia and Neopatras were surrendered, when the county of Salona, founded at the same time as Boudonitza, ceased to exist. On the way to Salona, the Sultan’s army must have passed within four hours of Boudonitza, and we surmise that it was spared, either because the season was so late—Salona fell in February, 1394—or because the castle was so strong, or because its lord was a Venetian. This respite was prolonged by the fall of Bayezid at Angora and the fratricidal struggle between his sons, while the Marquess was careful to have himself included in the treaties of 1403, 1408, and 1409 between the Sultan Suleyman and Venice; a special clause in the first of these instruments released him from all obligations except that which he had incurred towards the Sultan’s father Bayezid[360]. Still, even in Suleyman’s time, such was his sense of insecurity, that he obtained leave from Venice to send his peasants and cattle over to the strong castle of Karystos in Eubœa, of which his brother Nicolò had become[255] the lessee[361]. He figured, too, in the treaty of 1405, which the Republic concluded with Antonio I Acciajuoli, the new ruler of Athens, and might thus consider himself as safe from attack on the south[362]. Indeed, he was anxious to enlarge his responsibilities, for he was one of those who bid for the two Venetian islands of Tenos and Mykonos, when they were put up to auction in the following year. In this offer, however, he failed[363].

The death of Suleyman and the accession of his brother Musa in 1410 sealed the fate of the Marquess. Early in the spring a very large Turkish army appeared before the old castle. Boudonitza was strong, and its Marquess a resolute man, so that for a long time the siege was in vain. “Giacomo,” says the Venetian document composed by his son, “preferred, like the high-minded and true Christian that he was, to die rather than surrender the place.” But there was treachery within the castle walls; betrayed by one of his servants, the Marquess fell, like another Leonidas, bravely defending the mediæval Thermopylæ against the new Persian invasion. Even then, his sons, “following in their father’s footsteps,” held the castle some time longer in the hope that Venice would remember her distant children in their distress. The Senate did, indeed, order the Captain of the Gulf to make inquiries whether Boudonitza still resisted and in that case to send succour to its gallant defenders—the cautious Government added—“with as little expense as possible.” But before the watchmen on the keep could descry the Captain sailing up the Atalante channel, all was over; both food and ammunition had given out and the Zorzi were constrained to surrender, on condition that their lives and property were spared. The Turks broke their promises, deprived their prisoners of their goods, expelled them from the home of their ancestors, and dragged young Nicolò to the Sultan’s Court at Adrianople[364].

Considerable confusion prevails in this last act of the history of Boudonitza, owing to the fact that the two leading personages, the brother and eldest son of the late Marquess, bore the same name of Nicolò. Hopf has accordingly adopted two different versions in his three accounts of these events. On a review of the documentary evidence, it would seem that the brother, the Baron of Karystos, was not at Boudonitza during the siege, and that, on the capture of his nephew, he proclaimed himself Marquess. Venice recognised his title, and instructed her envoy to Musa to include him in her treaty with the Sultan and to[256] procure at the same time the release of the late Marquess’s son. Accordingly, in the peace of 1411, Musa promised, for love of Venice and seeing that he passed as a Venetian, to harass him no more, on condition that he paid the tribute established. Not only so, but the Marquess’s ships and merchandise were allowed to enter the Turkish dominions on payment of a fixed duty[365]. Thus temporarily restored, the Marquisate remained in the possession of the uncle, from whom the nephew, even after his release, either could not, or cared not to claim it. He withdrew to Venice, and, many years later, received as the reward of his father’s heroic defence of Boudonitza, the post of châtelain of Pteleon, near the mouth of the Gulf of Volo, the last Venetian outpost on the mainland of North-Eastern Greece—a position which he held for eight years[366].

Meanwhile, his uncle, the Marquess, had lost all but his barren title. Though the Turks had evacuated Boudonitza, and the castle had been repaired, he felt so insecure that he sent his bishop as an emissary to Venice, begging for aid in the event of a fresh Turkish invasion and for permission to transport back to Boudonitza the serfs whom he had sent across to Karystos a few years before[367]. His fears proved to be well founded. In vain the Republic gave orders that he should be included in her treaty with the new Sultan, Mohammed I. On June 20, 1414, a large Turkish army attacked and took the castle, and with it many prisoners, the Marquess, so it would seem, among them—for in the following year we find his wife, an adopted daughter of the Duke of Athens, appealing to Venice to obtain his release from his Turkish dungeon[368]. He recovered his freedom, but not his Marquisate. In the treaty of 1416, Boudonitza was, indeed, actually assigned to him in return for the usual tribute; but nine years later we find Venice still vainly endeavouring to obtain its restitution[369]. He continued, however, to hold the title of Marquess of Boudonitza with the castle of Karystos, which descended to his son, the “Marchesotto,” and his son’s son[370], till the Turkish conquest of Eubœa in 1470 put an end to Venetian rule over that great island. Thence the last titular Marquess of Boudonitza, after governing Lepanto, retired to Venice, whence the Zorzi came and where they are still largely represented.

Of the castle, where for two hundred years Pallavicini and Zorzi held sway, much has survived the two Turkish sieges and the silent ravages of five centuries. Originally there must have been a triple enclosure, for several square towers of the third and lowest wall are still standing in the village and outside it. Of the second enceinte the most noticeable fragment is a large tower in ruins, while the innermost wall is strengthened by three more. In the centre of this last enclosure are the imposing remains of the large square donjon (Plate VII, Fig. 1), and adjoining this is the most interesting feature of the castle—the great Hellenic gateway (Plate VII, Fig. 2), which connects one portion of this enclosure with the other, and which Buchon has described so inaccurately[371]. It is not “composed of six stones,” but of three huge blocks, nor do “the two upper stones meet at an acute angle”; a single horizontal block forms the top. Buchon omits to mention the Byzantine decoration in brick above this gateway. Of the brick conduit which he mentions I could find no trace, but the two cisterns remain. The large building near them is presumably the Frankish church of which he speaks; but the window which he found there no longer exists. Possibly, when the new church in the village was erected, the builders took materials from the chapel in the castle for its construction. At any rate, that very modern and commonplace edifice contains several fragments of ancient work. Thus, the stone threshold of the west door bears three large roses, while on the doorway itself are two stars; and the north door is profusely decorated with a rose, two curious creatures like griffins, two circles containing triangles, and a leaf; above this door is a cross, each arm of which forms a smaller cross. As usually happens in the Frankish castles of Greece—with the exception of Geraki—there are no coats of arms at Boudonitza, unless this composite cross is an allusion to the “three crosses,” said to have been originally borne by one branch of the Pallavicini. The “mediæval seal” in the possession of a local family dates from the reign of Otho! But there exists a genuine seal of the monastery of the Holy Virgin of Boudonitza, ascribed by M. Schlumberger[372] to the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. The Marquesses have left behind them neither their portraits—like the Palatine Counts of Cephalonia of the second dynasty—nor any coins—like the French barons of Salona, to whom they bear the nearest resemblance. One of their line, however, the Marquess Alberto, figures in K. Rhanghaves’s play, The Duchess of Athens, and their castle and their ofttimes stormy lives fill not the least picturesque page of that romance which French and Italian adventurers wrote with their swords in the classic sites of Hellas.

APPENDIX

I
1335 DIE XVI JANUARIJ.

Capta. Quod vir nobilis Ser Nicolaus Georgio, cum sua familia et levibus arnesiis possit ire cum galeis nostris unionis. Et committatur Capitaneo, quod eum conducat Nigropontum, et si poterit eum facere deponi ad Bondenizam, sine sinistro armate faciat inde sicut ei videbitur.—Omnes de parte.

II
1345 DIE 21 JULIJ.

Capta. Cum dominacio ducalis ex debito teneatur suos cives in eorum iuribus et honoribus cum justicia conservare et dominus Nicolaus Georgio, Marchio Bondanicie, sit iniuriatus ut scitis, et Marchionatu suo per eius uxorem indebite molestatus, et dignum sit, subvenire eidem in eo quod cum honore dominacionis comode fieri potest, ideo visa et examinata petitione ipsius marchionis, et matura et diligenti deliberatione prehabita, consulunt concorditer viri nobiles, domini, Benedictus de Molino et Pangracius Justiniano; quod committatur consiliario ituro Nigropontum, quod postquam illuc applicuerit vadat ad dominam Marchisanam, uxorem dicti domini Nicolay pro ambaxatore, exponendo eidem, quomodo iam diu ipsam ad dominacionem misit suos procuratores et ambaxatores petens sibi per dominacionem de uno nobilium suorum pro marito provideri, et volens dominacio suis beneplacitis complacere, consensit quod ipse dominus Nicolaus carus civis suus ad eam iret, quem ipsa domina receptando, ostendit id habere multum ad bonum. Et quoniam ob hoc semper Ducale Dominium promtum et favorabilem se exhibuit ad omnia que suam et suorum securitatem respicerent et augumentum, treuguas quamplurimas confirmando et opportuna alia faciendo. Sed cum nuperrime per relacionem ipsius domini Nicolay viri sui ad ducalis magnificentie audienciam sit deductus de morte cuiusdam Pallavesini inopinatus casus occursus qui mortuus fuit in culpa sua, sicut postmodum extitit manifestum, quia dum ipse Marchio coram omnibus burgensibus congregatis, de velle et consensu dicte domine exponeret rei geste seriem, ab ipsis habuit in responsum quod ipse Palavesin dignam penam luerat propter foliam suam, et melius erat, quod ipse, qui vaxallus erat mortuus fuisset quam dicto suo domino iniuriam aliquam intulisset, quod ecciam ipsa domina in presencia dictorum burgensium ratificavit. Unde consideratis predictis vellit amore dominij, ipsum dominum Nicolaum honori pristino restituere, quod si fecerit, quamquam sit iustum et honestum nobis plurimum complacebit, et erimus suis comodis stricius obligati. Verum si dicta domina dubitaret de recipiendo ipsum dicat et exponat ambaxator prefatus, quod firmiter dominacio hanc rem super se assumpsit et taliter imposuit civi suo quod minime poterit dubitare. Que omnia si dicta domina acetabit bene quidem, si vero non contentaretur et ipsum recipere non vellet, procuret habere et obtinere omnia bona dicti Marchionis que secum scripta portet antedictus ambaxator et si ipsa ea bona dare neglexerit, dicat quod bona sua et suorum ubicumque intromitti faciemus, et protestetur cum notario, quem secum teneatur ducere, quod[259] tantam iniuriam, quam dominacio suam propriam reputat, non poterit sustinere, sed providebit de remediis opportunis sicuti honori suo et indenitati sui civis viderit convenire, firmiter tenens quod sicut semper dominacio ad sui conservacionem et suorum exhibuit se promtam favorabilem et benignam, sic in omnibus reperiet ipsam mutatam, agravando factum cum hijs et alijs verbis, ut viderit convenire. Et rediens Nigropontum omnia, que gexerit, fecerit et habuerit, studeat velociter dominacioni per suas literas denotare. Verum si dictus consiliarius iturus tardaret ire ad regimen suum, quod baiullus et consiliarij Nigropontis determinent quis consiliariorum de inde ad complendum predicta ire debebit.

Et scribatur baiullo et consiliarijs Nigropontis, quod si habebunt post redditum dicti ambaxatoris, quod ipsa domina stet dura nec vellit ipsum dominum Nicolaum recipere, quod possint si eis videbitur facere et ordinare quod homines Bondanicie non veniant Nigropontum et quod homines Nigropontis non vadant Bondaniciam.

Item prefati baiullus et consiliarij sequestracionem factam de aliqua pecunie quantitate que pecunia est damiselle Marulle filie dicte domine firmam tenere debeant, donec predicta fuerint reformata, pacificata vel diffinita, vel donec aliud sibi mandaretur de hinc.

Et scribantur litere illis de la compagna, quas dominus bayullus et consiliarij presentent vel presentari fatiant, cum eis videbitur, rogando dictos de compagna, quod cum alique discordie venerint inter virum nobilem dominum Nicolam Georgio et eius uxorem Marchisanam se in aliquo facto dicte domine intromittere non vellint quod posset civi nostro contrariare ad veniendum ad suam intentionem.

III
1345 DIE V AUGUSTI.

Capta. Quod respondeatur domine Marchisane Bondinicie ad suas litteras substinendo ius civis nostri Nicolai Georgio, cum illis verbis que videbuntur sequendo id quod captum fuit pridie in hoc consilio in favorem civis nostri.

IV
1346 DIE XXIV JANUARIJ.

Capta. Quod scribatur nostro Baiulo et Consiliariis Nigropontis quod Ser Moretus Gradonico consiliarius, vel alius sicut videbitur Baiulo et Consiliariis, in nostrum ambaxatorem ire debeat ad dominam Marchionissam Bondenicie, et sibi exponat pro parte nostra quod attenta honesta et rationabili requisitione nostra quam sibi fieri fecimus per virum Nobilem Johannem Justiniano nostrum consiliarium Nigroponti, quem ad eam propterea in nostrum ambaxatorem transmisimus super reformatione scandali orti inter ipsam et virum nobilem Nicolaum Georgio eius virum in reconciliatione ipsius cum dicto viro suo: Et intellecta responsione quam super premissis fecit nostro ambaxatori predicto gravamur et turbamur sicut merito possumus et debemus, de modo quem ipsam servavit et servat erga dictum virum suum. Nam sibi plene poterat et debebat sufficere[260] remissio et reconciliatio cum [eo?] facta coram nobis per dictum eius virum, secundum nostrum mandatum, et nuncio suo in nostra presencia constituto de omni offensa et iniuria sibi facta, et debebat esse certa quod quicquid idem Marchio in nostra presencia et ex nostro mandato promittebat effectualiter observasse. Et quod volentes quod bona dispositio dicti viri sui et paciencia nostra de tanta iniuria facta civi nostro sibi plenius innotescat deliberavimus iterate ad eam mittere ipsum in nostrum ambaxatorem ad requirendum et rogandum ipsam quod debeat reconciliare cum dicto viro suo et eum recipere ad honorem et statum in quo erat antequam inde recederet, nam quamvis hoc sit sibi debitum et conveniat pro honore et bono suo, tamen erit gratissimum menti nostre et ad conservacionem ipsius marchionisse et suorum avidius nos disponet et circa hoc alia dicat que pro bono facto viderit opportuna.

Si vero dicta marchionissa id facere recusaret nec vellet condescendere nostre intentioni et requisitioni predicte, dictus Ser Moretus assignet terminum dicte Marchionisse unius mensis infra quem debeat complevisse cum effectu nostram requisitionem premissam. Et sibi expresse dicat, quod elapso dicto termino nulla alia requisitione sibi facta, cum non intendamus dicto civi nostro in tanto suo iure deficere, faciemus intromitti personas et bona suorum et sua ubicumque in forcio nostro poterunt reperire. Et ultra hoc providebimus in dicto facto de omnibus favoribus et remediis, que pro bono et conservacione dicti civis nostri videbimus opportuna. Et si propter premissa dicta Marchionissa ipsum recipere et reintegrare voluerit bene quidem sin autem scribatur dicto baiulo et consiliariis quod elapso termino dicti mensis et ipsa marchionissa premissa facere recusante mittant ad nos per cambium sine aliquo periculo yperpera octomillia quinquaginta vel circa que sunt apud Thomam Lippomanum et Nicolaum de Gandulfo, qua pecunia Venecias veniente disponetur et providebiter de ipsa sicut dominationi videbitur esse iustum.

Capta. Item quod scribatur domino Delphino Vihennensi et illis de Compagna in favorem dicti civis nostri et recommendando ei iura et iusticiam ipsius in illa forma et cum illis verbis que dominacioni pro bono facti utilia et necessaria videbuntur.

V
1348 DIE XI FEBRUARIJ PRIME INDICTIONIS.

Capta. Quod possint scribi littere domino Pape et aliquibus Cardinalibus in recommendacione iuris domini Nicolai Georgio marchionis Bondinicie nostri civis in forma inferius anotata.

Sanctissime pater pro civibus meis contra Deum et iusticiam aggravatis, Sanctitati Vestre supplicationes meas porrigo cum reverentia speciali: Unde cum nobilis vir Nicolaus Georgio Marchio Bondinicie honorabilis civis meus, iam duodecim annis matrimonii iura contraserit cum domina Marchionissa Bondinicie predicte et cum ea affectione maritali permanserit habens ex ea filium legiptimum, qui est annorum undecim, ipsa domina Marchionissa in preiudicium anime sue, Dei timore postposito ipsum virum suum recusat recipere et castrum Bondinicie et alia bona spectantia eidem suo viro tenet[261] iniuste et indebite occupata in grave damnum civis mei predicti et Dei iniuriam manifestam precipientis, ut quos Deus coniunxit homo non separet: Unde Sanctitati Vestre humiliter supplico quatenus Clementie Vestre placeat dictum civem meum habere in suo iure favorabiliter commendatum, ut dicta domina eum tanquam virum legiptimum recipiat et affectione maritali pertractet sicut iura Dei precipiunt, atque volunt, et salus animarum etiam id exposcit. Cum ipse civis meus sit paratus ex sua parte ipsam dominam pro uxore legiptima tractare pacifice et habere.

Note.—The “Misti” are cited throughout from the originals at Venice; I have corrected the dates to the modern style.

11. ITHAKE UNDER THE FRANKS

In works descriptive of Greece it is customary to find the statement that the island of Odysseus was “completely forgotten in the middle ages,” and even so learned a mediæval scholar as the late Antonios Meliarakes, whose loss is a severe blow to Greek historical geography, asserts this proposition in his admirable political and geographical work on the prefecture of Cephalonia[373]. But there are a considerable number of allusions to Ithake during the Frankish period, and it is possible, at least in outline, to make out the fortunes of the famous island under its western lords.

The usual name for Ithake in Italian documents is Val di Compare, the earliest use of which, so far as I can ascertain, occurs in the Genoese historian Caffaro’s Liberatio Orientis, written in the first half of the twelfth century[374]. According to K. Bergotes of Cephalonia this name was given to the island by an Italian captain, who was driven to anchor there one stormy night. Seeing a light shining through the darkness, he landed, and found that it proceeded from a hut in which a child had lately been born. At the request of the parents he accepted the office of godfather, or κουμπάρος at the child’s christening, and named the valley where the hut lay Val di Compare, to commemorate the event. Whether this derivation be correct or not, the name stuck to the island for several centuries, though we shall also find the classical Ithake still surviving contemporaneously with it. The neighbouring islands of Zante and Cephalonia were severed from the Byzantine empire in 1185, at the time of the invasion of Greece by the Normans of Sicily, and were occupied by their admiral, Margaritone of Brindisi. Ithake is not specially mentioned as included among his conquests, but its connection with the[262] other two islands under the rule of his immediate successors makes it very probable. Six years later, in the graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, Fale (Valle) de Compar is said to have had a specially evil reputation for piracy, and the channel between it and Cephalonia is described as a favourite lair of those robbers[375]. After Margaritone’s death he was succeeded by a Count Maio, or Matthew, a member of the great Roman family of Orsini, who seems to have been born in Apulia—according to one account he came from Monopoli—and who at the time of the fourth crusade was lord of Cephalonia, Zante, and Theachi, el qual se clamado agora Val de Compare[376], under the suzerainty of the king of Sicily. Although the two larger of those islands had fallen to the share of Venice by the partition treaty he and his descendants continued in possession of them and of Ithake, though he thought it wise, in 1209, to acknowledge the overlordship of the Republic. A Venetian document of 1320, alluding to this transaction, specially mentions Val di Compare as one of the islands, for which he then did homage[377]. In 1236 the count recognised as his suzerain Prince Geoffroy II of Achaia, and he and his successors were henceforth reckoned among the twelve peers of that principality, in whose history they played an important part[378].

The next mention of Ithake occurs in a Greek document of 1264, in which Count Matthew’s son and successor, “the most high and mighty Richard, palatine count and lord of Cephalonia, Zakynthos, and Ithake,” confirms the possessions of the Latin bishopric of Cephalonia[379]. Here Ithake is called by its classical name, which was not confined to Greeks, for we find it used in a Venetian document of 1278, where the island is again mentioned as the scene of piracies[380]. Later on, in 1294, a document in the Angevin archives at Naples mentions the promise of Count Richard to bestow “the castle of Koronos”—a name still given to part of the island of Cephalonia—“or the island of Ithake” (sive vellent castrum Corony de dominio suo, sive vellent insulam Ythace) upon his son John I, on the occasion of the latter’s marriage with the daughter of Nikephoros I, despot of Epeiros[381]. Richard, in spite of the repeated remonstrances of Charles II of Naples, who, in virtue of the[263] treaty of Viterbo, was suzerain of Achaia, and accordingly of Cephalonia, failed to carry out this promise. We next hear of Val di Compare in the above-mentioned Venetian document of 1320, in which Count John I’s son, Nicholas, who had two years earlier murdered his nephew, the last Despot of Epeiros of the house of the Angeloi, and had made himself Despot, is reminded that his ancestor Matthew had done homage, as he was now offering to do, for the three islands of Cephalonia, Zante, and Val di Compare to the Venetian republic.

Although not mentioned by name Ithake doubtless followed the fortunes of Cephalonia and Zante when those islands were conquered from the Orsini by John of Gravina, prince of Achaia, in 1324. The “county of Cephalonia,” of which the island of Odysseus had long formed a part, was thus under the direct authority of the Angevins, and was transferred by John of Gravina, together with the principality of Achaia, to Robert of Taranto in 1333, after which date the same Angevin officials held office in both Achaia and the insular county till Robert bestowed the latter in 1357 upon his friend Leonardo Tocco, a Neapolitan courtier, whose family came from Benevento. In an ecclesiastical document[382] of 1389 the Greek bishop of Methone, writing about the archbishopric of Levkas, mentions “the duchess Franka (Francesca), lady of Levkas, Ithake, Zante and Cephalonia,” the allusion being to the daughter of Nerio I Acciajuoli of Athens, who had in the previous year married Carlo I Tocco, count of Cephalonia and duke of Levkadia. A little earlier, in a Piedmontese document[383] of 1387, we find Amedeo of Savoy, one of the claimants to the principality of Achaia, rewarding the zeal of one of his Greek supporters, Joannes Laskaris Kalopheros, with Cephalonia, Zante, Val di Compare, and other places as hereditary possessions—a gift which was, of course, never carried out, as the islands were not Amedeo’s to bestow. Spandugino[384] specially mentions “Itaca,” or “Val di Compare,” as being part of the insular dominions of the Tocchi, and Carlo II Tocco is described in documents of 1430 and 1433, and by the annalist Stefano Magno, as comes palatinus Cephaloniæ, Ithacæ, et Jacinti—a designation repeated in a document of 1458 after his death[385]. We find an allusion to it under both its classical and its mediæval name in the Liber Insularum of Buondelmonti[386], written in 1422, and the latter also occurs in a Venetian document of[264] 1430, where Val di Compare[387] is stated to belong to Carlo II. Six years later the archæologist Cyriacus of Ancona, visiting the “king of the Epeirotes,” as he calls that prince, mentions Itaci (sic) insulæ as opposite the mainland[388]. After Leonardo III lost practically all his continental possessions to the Turks in 1449 he still retained the islands, Ithake among them, under the protection of Venice, of which both he and his father were honorary citizens, and under the nominal suzerainty of the kings of Naples. From a document of 1558 we learn that it was in his time that the family of Galates—the only Ithakan family which enjoyed the privileges of nobility in the Venetian period, and which is still extant in the island—first received exemptions[389]. It was he too who revived the Orthodox see of Cephalonia and bestowed it, together with spiritual jurisdiction over Ithake, upon Gerasimos Loverdo[390].

When Mohammed II sent Achmet Pasha to conquer all that remained of Leonardo’s dominions in 1479 we are told by Stefano Magno[391] that the Turkish commander “ravaged also the island of Itacha (sic), called Valle di Compare, which belonged to the said lord,” whom he also styles “palatine count of Cephalonia, Itaca (sic) and Zakynthos.” Loredano, the Venetian admiral, thereupon sent some galleys to Ithake and rescued seven or eight persons—an act of which the pasha complained. This devastation of the island will account for the fact that, in 1504, the Venetian government, which then owned Cephalonia and Zante, took steps for repopulating “an island named Val di Compare, situated opposite Cephalonia, at present uninhabited, but reported to have been formerly fertile and fruitful.” Accordingly lands were offered to settlers, free from all taxes for five years, at the end of which time the colonists were to pay to the Treasury of Cephalonia the same dues as the inhabitants of that island[392]. Thenceforth down to 1797 Ithake remained beneath the sway of the Venetian republic. The offer of the senate seems to have been successful; among those who accepted it were the family of Boua Grivas, of Albanian origin, connected with the clan of Boua, which had formerly ruled over Arta and Lepanto and had played a part in the Albanian revolts of 1454 and 1463 in the Morea, that of Petalas, and that of Karavias, which in modern times produced a local historian of Ithake[393]. In 1548 Antonio Calbo, the retiring provveditore of Cephalonia,[265] reported to the Venetian government, that “under the jurisdiction of Cephalonia there is another island, named Thiachi, very mountainous and barren, in which there are different harbours and especially a harbour called Vathi; in the island of Thiachi are three hamlets, in three places, inhabited by about sixty families, who are in great fear of corsairs, because they have no fortress in which to take refuge[394].” The three hamlets mentioned in this report are doubtless those of Paleochora, Anoe, and Exoe, which are regarded as the oldest in the island.

The former counts of Ithake were till lately the only Latin rulers of Greece who still existed in prosperous circumstances. But in the seventeenth century they took the title of “prince of Achaia”—to which they were not entitled, although the counts of Cephalonia had once been peers of Achaia and Leonardo II and Carlo I had for a short time occupied Glarentza. The modern representative of the family was Carlo, Duke of Regina[395], who succeeded his cousin Francesco Tocco in 1894. But he is now dead and his only son was killed in a motor accident.

12. THE LAST VENETIAN ISLANDS IN THE ÆGEAN

It has hitherto been asserted by historians of the Latin Orient that, after the capture of the Cyclades by the Turks in the sixteenth century, the two Venetian islands of Tenos and Mykonos remained in the possession of the Republic down to 1715. As to Tenos, this statement is unimpeachable; as to Mykonos, despite the assertions of Hopf[396] and Hertzberg[397], who quote no authorities for the fact, all the evidence goes to show that it ceased to belong to Venice in the sixteenth century.

The two islands, the only members of the Cyclades group under the direct rule of the Venetian government, were bequeathed to the Republic by George III Ghisi, their ancestral lord, upon whose death in 1390 they passed into its hands. The islanders implored Venice not to dispose of them; and, though there were not failing applicants for them among the Venetian princelets of the Levant, she listened to the petition of the inhabitants. At first an official from Negroponte was sent as an annual governor; then, in 1407, Venetian nobles who would accept the governorship of Tenos and Mykonos, with which Le Sdiles, or Delos, was joined,[266] for a term of four years, paying a certain sum out of the revenues to Venice and keeping the balance for themselves, were invited to send in their names. One of them was appointed, still under the authority of the bailie of Negroponte[398]; and this system continued down to 1430, when a rector was sent out from Venice for two years, and the two islands were thenceforth governed directly by an official of the Republic.

Mykonos remained united with Tenos under the flag of St Mark till the first great raid of the Turkish fleet in the Cyclades under Khaireddîn Barbarossa in 1537. Neither Andrea Morosini nor Paruta, nor yet Hajji Kalifeh, mentions its fate in their accounts of that fatal cruise; but Andrea Cornaro in his Historia di Candia[399] relates that, after taking the two islands of Thermia and Zia, Barbarossa went to Mykonos, many of whose inhabitants escaped to Tenos, while the others became his captives. After the Turkish admiral’s departure the fugitives returned; but in the same year one of Barbarossa’s lieutenants, a corsair named Granvali, with eighteen ships, paid a second visit to Mykonos and carried off many of them. Accordingly the shameful treaty[400] between Venice and the Sultan, concluded in 1540, in both versions mentions Mykonos among the islands ceded to the Sultan, while Tenos was expressly retained. How, in the face of this, Hopf can have asserted that Mykonos still remained Venetian it is difficult to understand. Nor is this all. In a document of 1545 the Republic orders her ambassador at Constantinople to obtain the restoration of the island[401]; in 1548 a certain Zuan Zorzo Muazzo, of Tenos, begs, and receives, from the Venetian government another fief in compensation for that which he had lost in Mykonos[402]. A petition from the inhabitants of Tenos to Venice in 1550 mentions the lack of ships “at the present time when Mykonos has been lost[403].” We have, too, the statement of Sauger[404], who becomes more trustworthy as he approaches his own time, that Duke Giovanni IV Crispo, of Naxos, bestowed the island of Mykonos (apparently in 1541) upon his daughter on her marriage with Giovanfrancesco Sommaripa, lord of Andros. There is nothing improbable in this. The Turks acquiesced at the same time in the action of the duke in turning the Premarini family out of their part of Zia, and bestowing that also upon his son-in-law; they may have had no objection to his dealing in the same manner with the devastated[267] island of Mykonos. At any rate the latter was no longer Venetian. The long and elaborate reports[405] of the Venetian commissioners, who visited Tenos in 1563 and 1584, make no mention whatever of Mykonos, except that in the latter document we hear of a Grimani as Catholic bishop of Tenos and of the sister island; nor does Foscarini allude to it in his report on Cerigo and Tenos in 1577. More conclusive still, while the style of the Venetian governor is “rector of Tenos and Mykonos” down to 1593, from that date onwards the governor is officially described as “rector of Tenos” alone[406]. Hopf[407] is, therefore, wrong in giving us a long list of rettori di Tinos e Myconos from 1407 to 1717. It seems probable that the latter island ceased to belong to Venice in 1537, but that the rector of Tenos continued to bear the name of Mykonos also, as a mere form, for rather more than half a century longer. Possibly it may have belonged to the Sommaripa of Andros from 1541 to 1566, when that dynasty was dethroned.

These conclusions are confirmed by the travellers and geographers who wrote about the Levant between that date and the loss of Tenos. Porcacchi[408], in 1572, mentions Mykonos, without saying to whom it belonged. One of the Argyroi, barons of Santorin, who, in 1581, gave Crusius the information about the Cyclades which he embodied in his Turco-Græcia[409], had nothing to say about Mykonos, except that it contained one castle and some hamlets, while he specially mentioned that Tenos and Cerigo were “under Venice.” Botero[410], in 1605, giving a full list of the Venetian possessions in the Levant, includes the Ionian Islands and Tenos alone. Neither the French ambassador, Louis des Hayes[411], who visited Greece in 1630, nor the sieur du Loir[412], who sailed with him, is more explicit, though both describe Crete, Cerigo, and Tenos as the sole Venetian islands in the Ægean. Thévenot[413], in 1656, and Boschini[414], ten years later, tell us that Mykonos was “almost depopulated” because of corsairs, but are likewise silent as to its ownership. Baudrand, in his Geographia[415], remarked, however, that it had been sub dominio Turcarum à sæculo et ultra, cum antea Venetis pareret, an account which appears to me to coincide with the real facts. But both Spon[416] and Wheler[417] censured the geographer for his statement that it had been Venetian, so completely had the Venetian tradition[268] faded at the time of their visit in 1675. At that period, as they inform us, the Sultan’s galleys never failed to come there every year to collect the capitation tax, and the governor of the island was a Greek sent by the Turks from Constantinople. Both travellers surmised, however, that the island might perhaps have changed hands during the Candian war, when it was neglected. Their surmise is rendered probable by the remark of Sebastiani[418], who visited it in 1666, during that long struggle. For he says that it was then ecclesiastically under the jurisdiction of the Catholic bishop of Tenos, who had begged the Venetian admiral, Comaro, to give his deputy in Mykonos the old Venetian church of San Marco for the use of the twenty Latin inhabitants. Randolph[419] confirms their story of its subjection to the Sultan, for he tells of a visit paid to the island by the Capitan Pasha in 1680. Piacenza[420] reiterates their criticism of Baudrand, and mentions that the atlases of the Mediterranean erroneously described it as insula altera hoc in tractu maritimo Reipublicæ Venetæ obsequium præstans, whereas it was really “under the Turkish yoke.” Dapper[421] takes the same view. After mentioning that Tenos “is the last Venetian island in this quarter of the Levant” he adds that “there are authors who allege that Mykonos is in subjection to Venice.” Finally, in 1700, Tournefort[422] found the island dependent on the Capitan Pasha, to whom it paid the capitation tax, while in the last war it had been subject to the bey of Kos. Although, he says, it was conquered by Barbarossa, the Venetian governor of Tenos still continues to style himself provveditore of Mykonos also. But throughout the period of the Candian war and right down to the end of the Venetian occupation of Tenos the governor of the latter is always called simply Rettor a Tine in the official registers[423]. If further refutation were needed of Hopf’s statement that Mykonos was captured from the Venetians in 1715, it may be added that Ferrari[424], the contemporary authority for the surrender of Tenos, never mentions it, nor does it figure in the peace of Passarovitz.

13. SALONIKA

Salonika, “the Athens of Mediæval Hellenism” and second to Athens alone in contemporary Greece, has been by turns a Macedonian provincial city, a free town under Roman domination, a Greek[269] community second only to Constantinople, the capital of a short-lived Latin kingdom and of a brief Greek empire to which it gave its name, a Venetian colony, and a Turkish town[425]. There, in 1876, the murder of the consuls was one of the phases of the Eastern crisis; there, in 1908, the Young Turkish movement was born; there, in 1913, King George of Greece was assassinated; and there in 1916 M. Venizelos established his Provisional Government, in the city which served as a base for the Allies in their Macedonian campaign.

Nor has Salonika’s contribution to literature been inconsiderable. The historian Petros Patrikios in the sixth century; the essayist Demetrios Kydones, who wrote a “monody over those who fell in Salonika” in 1346, during the civil war between John Cantacuzene and John V Palaiologos; John Kameniates and John the Reader, the historians respectively of the Saracen and the Turkish sieges, and Theodore Gazes, who contributed to spread Greek teaching in the West, were natives of the place. Plotinos and John, hagiographers of the seventh century; Leo, the famous mathematician of the ninth; Niketas, who composed dialogues in favour of the union of the churches; Eustathios, the Homeric commentator, historian of the Norman siege and panegyrist of St Demetrios; Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, the ecclesiastical historian; Gregorios Palamas, Neilos, and Nicholas Kabasilas, the polemical theologians of the fourteenth century; and Symeon, the liturgical writer, who died just before the final Turkish capture of the city, were among those who occupied this important metropolitan see; while the rhetoricians, Nikephoros Choumnos and the grammarian Thomas Magistros, addressed to the Thessalonians missives on the blessings of justice and unity in the fourteenth century. And precedents for the exile of Abdul Hamid II at Salonika may be found in the banishment thither of Licinius, the rival of Constantine, of Anastasios II in 716, and of Theodore Studita during the Iconoclast controversy.

Salonika has no very ancient history. It did not exist till after the death of Alexander the Great, when Kassander, who became king of Macedon, founded it in 315 B.C., and gave to it the name of his wife, Thessalonike, who was half-sister of the famous Macedonian conqueror, just as he bestowed his own upon another town, from which the westernmost of the three prongs of the peninsula of Chalkidike still retains the name of Kassandra. When the Romans conquered and organized Macedonia, Thessalonika became the capital of that province, remaining, however, a free city with its own magistrates, the πολιτάρχαι, to whom St Paul and Silas were denounced on their memorable visit. It is a proof of the technical accuracy of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, that this precise word occurs as the name of the local magistracy in the inscription formerly on the Vardar gate, but now in the British Museum. The description in the Acts further shows that the present large Jewish colony of Salonika, which is mostly composed of Spanish Jews, descendants of the fugitives from the persecutions of the end of the fifteenth century, had already a counterpart in the first. We may infer that Salonika was a prosperous town, and its importance in the Roman period is shown by the fact that Cicero, who was not fond of discomfort, selected it in 58 B.C. as his place of exile, and that Piso found it worth plundering during his governorship. But the sojourn of the Roman orator left a less durable mark upon the history of Salonika than that of the Apostle. It was not merely that two of his comrades, Aristarchos and Secundus, were Thessalonian converts, but mediæval Greek writers lay special stress upon the piety of what was called par excellence “the Orthodox City”—probably for its conservative attitude in the Iconoclast controversy. Salonika furnished many names to the list of martyrs, and one of them, St Demetrios, a Thessalonian doctor put to death in 306 by order of Galerius[426] became the patron of his native city, which he is believed to have saved again and again from its foes. The most binding Thessalonian oath was by his name[427]; his tomb, from which a holy oil perpetually exuded, the source of many miraculous cures, is in the beautiful building, now once more a church, which is called after him; it was on his day, October 26 (O.S.), that in 1912 Salonika capitulated to the Greek troops, and there were peasant soldiers at the battle of Sarantaporon who firmly believed that they had seen him fighting against the Turks for the restoration of his church and city to his own people[428], just as their ancestors had beheld him, sword in hand, defending[271] its walls against the Slavs. The story of his miracles forms a voluminous literature, and on the walls of his church his grateful people represented all the warlike episodes in which he had saved them from their foes. Some of these mosaics have survived the conversion of the church into the Kassimié mosque, and the great fire of August 18, 1917, and among them is a portrait of the saint between a bishop and a local magnate. Nor was St Demetrios the only Thessalonian saint. The city also cherished the tomb of St Theodora of Ægina, who had died at Salonika in the ninth century. Its walls contain the name of Pope Hormisdas.

Like Constantinople, Salonika was devoted to the sports of the hippodrome; and, in 390, the imprisonment of a favourite charioteer on the eve of a race, in which he was to have taken part, provoked an insurrection, punished by a massacre. Theodosius I, then on his way to Milan, ordered the Gothic garrison to wreak vengeance upon the inhabitants; the next great race-meeting was selected, when the citizens had come together to witness their favourite pastime, and 15,000 persons were butchered in the hippodrome. St Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, refused to allow the Emperor to enter the cathedral, and made him repent for eight months his barbarous treatment of a city where he had celebrated his wedding. Of Roman Salonika there still exists a memorial in the arch of Galerius, with its sculptures representing the Emperor’s Asiatic victories; a second arch, the Vardar gate, was sacrificed fifty years ago to build the quay; while a Corinthian colonnade, with eight Karyatides, known to the Jews as Las Incantadas, a part of the Forum, was removed by Napoleon III to France. The pulpit, from which St Paul was believed to have spoken, and which used to stand outside the church of St George, was removed—so I was informed when last at Salonika—by a German in the time of Abdul Hamid.

Salonika had been chiefly important in Roman times, because the Via Egnatia which ran from Durazzo, “the tavern of the Adriatic” (as Catullus calls it), passed through its “Golden” and “Kassandreotic” gates. But in Byzantine days its value was increased owing to its geographical position. As long as the Exarchate of Ravenna existed, it lay on the main artery uniting Constantinople with the Byzantine province in Northern Italy, and it was an outpost against the Slavonic tribes, which had entered the Balkan peninsula, where they have ever since remained, but which, despite many attempts, have never taken Salonika. Of these invaders the most formidable, and the most persistent, were the Bulgarians, whose first war with their natural enemies, the Greeks, was waged for the possession of Salonika, because of the heavy customs dues which they had to pay there, and who, more than[272] a thousand years later, still covet that great Macedonian port, the birthplace of the Slavonic apostles, the brothers Constantine (or Cyril) and Methodios.

The influence of these two natives of Salonika, partly historical and partly legendary, has not only spread over the Slavonic parts of the Balkan peninsula, but forms in the church of San Clemente a link between the Balkans and Rome. The brothers were intended by nature to supplement one another: Constantine was a recluse and an accomplished linguist, Methodios a man of the world and an experienced administrator. Both brothers converted the Slavs of Moravia to Christianity, and it was long believed that a terrifying picture of the Last Judgement from the hand of Methodios had such an effect upon the mind of Boris, the Bulgarian prince, that he embraced the Christian creed. The real fact is, that Boris changed his religion (like his namesake in our own day) for political reasons, as a condition of obtaining peace from the Byzantine Emperor, Michael III, in 864, taking in baptism the name of his imperial sponsor. Tradition likewise attributes to Cyril the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet, which still bears his name and is that of the Russians, Serbs, and Bulgars. But Professor Bury[429], the latest writer on this question, considers that the alphabet invented by Cyril for the use of the Bulgarian and Moravian converts was not the so-called Cyrillic (which is practically the Greek alphabet with the addition of a few letters, and would, therefore, be likely to offend the Slav national feeling), but the much more complicated Glagolitic, which still lingers on in the Slavonic part of Istria, on the Croatian coast, and in Northern Dalmatia. In this language, accordingly, his translation of the Gospels and his brother’s version of the Old Testament were composed, and old Slavonic literature began with these two Thessalonians, whose names form to-day the programme of Bulgarian, just as Dante Alighieri is of Italian expansion. On another mission, to Cherson on the Black Sea, Cyril is said to have discovered the relics of St Clement, who had suffered martyrdom there by being tied to an anchor and flung into the waves. He brought them to Rome, where the frescoes in San Clemente before Monsignor Wilpert’s researches were believed to represent the Slavonic apostles, Cyril before Michael III, and the transference of his remains to that church from the Vatican—for he died in Rome in 869.

Thus sentimental and commercial reasons impelled the Bulgarians to attack Salonika. Both the great Bulgarian Tsars of the tenth century, Symeon and Samuel, strove to obtain it, and during the forty years for which the famous Greek Emperor Basil, “the Bulgar-Slayer,” contended[273] against Samuel for the mastery of Macedonia, Salonika was the headquarters, and the shrine of its patron-saint the inspiration, of the Greeks, as Ochrida was the capital of the Bulgars. We learn from the historian Kedrenos that there was at the time a party which favoured the Bulgarians in some of the Greek cities[430]; but in 1014 the Emperor, like the King of the Hellenes in 1913, and in the same defile, called by the Byzantine historian “Kleidion” (or “the key”)—which has been identified with the gorge of the Struma, not far from the notorious fort Roupel—utterly routed his rival, and took, like King Constantine, the title of “Bulgar-Slayer.” Samuel escaped, only to die of shock at the spectacle of the 15,000 blinded Bulgarian captives, each hundred guided by a one-eyed centurion, whom the victor sent back to their Tsar. Basil celebrated his triumph in the holy of holies of Hellenism, the majestic Parthenon, then the church of Our Lady of Athens, where frescoes executed at his orders still recall his visit and victory over the Bulgarians. Thus the destruction of the first Bulgarian empire was organised at Salonika and celebrated at Athens, just like the defeat of the same enemies 900 years later. But even after the fall of the Bulgarian empire we find a Bulgarian leader besieging Salonika for six days, and only repulsed by the personal intervention of St Demetrios[431], whom the terrified Bulgarian prisoners declared that they had seen on horseback leading the Greeks and breathing fire against the besiegers.

But Salonika was no longer a virgin fortress. An enemy even more formidable than the Bulgarians had captured it, the Saracens, who from 823 to 961 were masters of Crete. Of this, the first of the three conquests of Salonika, we have a description by a priest who was a native of the city and an eye-witness of its capture, John Kameniates, as well as a sermon by the patriarch Nicholas[432]. The “first city of the Macedonians” was indeed a goodly prize for the Saracen corsairs, whose base was “the great Greek island.” Civic patriotism inspired the Thessalonian priest with a charming picture of his home at the moment of this piratical raid, in 904. He praises the natural outer harbour, formed by the projecting elbow of the Ἔμβολον (the “Black Cape,” or Karaburun, of the Turks)[433]; the security of the inner port, protected by an artificial mole; the great city climbing up the hill behind it; the vineyards and hospitable monasteries, whose inmates (unlike their modern successors) take no thought of politics; the two lakes (now St Basil and Beshik), with their ample supply of fish, which stretch almost across the neck of the[274] Chalkidic peninsula; and to the west the great Macedonian plain (treeless then, as now), but watered by the Axios (the modern Vardar) and lesser streams. In times of peace Salonika was the débouché of the Slavonic hinterland; the mart and stopping-place of the cosmopolitan crowd of merchants who travelled along the great highway from West to East that still intersected it; in short, both land and sea conspired to enrich it. Unfortunately, it was almost undefended on the sea side, for no one had ever contemplated any other danger than that from the Slavs of the country, and the population was untrained for war, but more versed in the learning of the schools and in the beautifully melodious hymns of the splendid Thessalonian ritual.

On Sunday, July 29, fifty-four Saracen ships were sighted off Karaburun under the command of Leo, a renegade, who on that account was all the more anxious to display his animosity to his former co-religionists. He at once detected the weak point of the defences—the low sea-wall, which had not been put into a state of proper repair[434],—and ordered his men to scale them. This attempt failed, nor was a second, to burn the “Roma” and the “Kassandreotic” gates on the east—the latter destroyed in 1873—more serviceable. The admiral then fastened his ships together by twos, and on each pair constructed wooden towers, which overtopped the sea-wall. He then steered them to where the water was deep right up to the base of the fortifications, and began to fire with his brazen tubes. The sea-wall was abandoned by its terrified defenders, and an Ethiopian climbing on to the top to see if their flight were merely a ruse, when once he had assured himself that it was genuine, summoned his comrades to follow him. A terrible massacre ensued; some of the inhabitants occupied the Akropolis, then known as “St David’s,” but now called “the Seven Towers,” whence a few Slavs escaped into the country; others fled to the two western gates, “the Golden” and “the Litaian”—the “New gate” of the Turks, destroyed in 1911—where the besiegers butchered them as they were jammed together in the gateways. Our author with his father, uncle, and two brothers took refuge in a bastion of the walls opposite the church of St Andrew. When the Ethiopians approached, he threw himself at the feet of their captain, offering to reveal to him the hidden treasure of the family, if the lives of himself and his relatives were spared. The captain agreed, but the author did not escape two wounds from another band of pillagers, and witnessed the massacre of some 300 of his fellow-citizens in the church of St George. And, if his life had been spared, he was still a captive; 800 prisoners, besides a crew of 200, were herded in the ship[275] which transported him to Crete, and he has described in vivid language the horrors of that passage in the blazing days of August without air or water. Over and above those who perished during the voyage, which lasted a fortnight for fear of the Greek fleet, 22,000 captives were landed to be sold as slaves. Even then his troubles were not over. A hurricane sprang up on the voyage from Crete to Tripoli, and the narrative closes as the author is anxiously awaiting at Tarsus the hour of his liberation. A curious illustration in a manuscript of Skylitzes remains, like his story, to remind us of this siege.

Salonika recovered from the ravages of the Saracens, who later in the tenth century were driven out of Crete, and the collapse of the Bulgarians in the eleventh enabled her to develop her trade. Three churches, of St Elias, of the Virgin, and of St Panteleemon, date from this period, to which belong the extant seals of Constantine Diogenes, Basil II’s lieutenant, and of the Metropolitans Paul and Leo[435]. The Byzantine satire, Timarion[436], which was composed in the twelfth century, gives an interesting account of the fair of St Demetrios, to which came not only Greeks from all parts of the Hellenic world, but also Slavs from the Danubian lands, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Celts from beyond the Alps. It is curious that this list omits the Jews, now such an important element at Salonika, for they are mentioned in the seventh century, and Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the city about the time that Timarion was written, found 500 there[437]. As for Italians, we hear of Venetians and Pisans obtaining trading-rights, and having their own quarter and the distinctive name of Βουργιέσιοι[438].

Not long after the brilliant scene described by the Byzantine satirist a terrible misfortune befell Salonika—its capture by the Normans of Sicily. The usurper, Andronikos I, then sat on the throne, and Alexios, a nephew of the late Emperor Manuel I, fled to the court of William II of Sicily, and implored his assistance. William consented, and despatched an army to Salonika by way of Durazzo, and a fleet round the Peloponnese. On August 6, 1185, the land force began the siege, of which the Archbishop Eustathios, the commentator on Homer, was an eye-witness and historian. Salonika was commanded by David Comnenos, who bore a great Byzantine name, but was—by the accordant testimony of another contemporary, Niketas, who describes him as “more craven than a deer,” and of the archbishop, who calls him “little better than a traitor”—a lazy, cowardly, and incompetent officer, who, in order to prevent his supersession by some one more capable, sent a series of[276] lying bulletins to the capital, that all was well. The walls were in good repair, except (as in 904) at the harbour, but the reservoir in the castle leaked; and many of the most capable inhabitants had been allowed to escape. Still the remainder, and not least the women, who completely put to shame the effeminate commander on his pacific mule, showed bravery and patriotism, while the archbishop specially mentions the courage of some Serbians in the garrison[439]. There were, however, traitors in the city and neighbourhood—Jews and Armenians, and on August 24 the city fell. The conduct of the learned archbishop at this crisis was in marked contrast with that of the miserable commander. Eustathios acted like a true pastor of his flock. The invaders found him calmly awaiting them in his palace, whence, seizing him by his venerable beard, they dragged him to the hippodrome, and thence, through lines of corpses, to the arsenal. There he was put on board the ship of a pirate, who demanded 4000 gold pieces as his ransom. As the archbishop pleaded poverty, he was next day escorted to the presence of Alexios himself, and thence to Counts Aldoin and Richard of Acerra, by whom he was at last restored to his palace, where he took refuge in a tiny bathroom in the garden.

Meanwhile, the Normans had shown no respect for the churches of the city. They danced upon the altars; they used the sacred ointment which flowed from the tomb of St Demetrios as boot-polish; they interrupted the singing by their obscene melodies and imitated the nasal intonation of the eastern priesthood by barking like dogs. But it is best to pass over the revolting details of the sack, for which the only excuse was the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople three years earlier. Eustathios, by his influence with Count Aldoin, was able to mitigate some of the tortures of his flock; he describes the miserable plight of these poor wretches, robbed of their houses and almost stark naked, and the strange appearance which they presented (like the Messina refugees after the earthquake of 1908) in their improvised hats and clothes. More than 7000 of them had perished in the assault, but the archbishop notes with satisfaction that the Normans lost some 3000 from their excessive indulgence in pork and new wine. Vengeance, too, soon befell them. A Greek army under Alexios Branas defeated them on the Struma, and in November they evacuated Salonika[440]. But their treatment of Salonika embittered the hatred between Latins and Greeks, and prepared the way for the Fourth Crusade.

Barely twenty years after the Norman capture, Salonika became the[277] capital of a Latin kingdom. Boniface, marquess of Montferrat, was the leader of the crusaders who, with the help of the Venetians, overthrew the Greek empire in 1204, and partitioned it into Latin states. Of these the most important after the Latin empire, of which Constantinople became the capital, was the so-called Latin kingdom of Salonika, of which Boniface was appointed king, and which, nominally dependent upon the Latin Emperor, embraced Macedonia, Thessaly, and much of continental Greece, including Athens. Of all the artificial creations of the Fourth Crusade, which should be a warning to those who believe that nations can be partitioned permanently at congresses of diplomatists, the Latin kingdom of Salonika was the first to fall. From the outset its existence was undermined by jealousy between its king and the Latin Emperor, whose suzerainty he and his proud Lombard nobles were loath to acknowledge. For this reason Boniface, whose wife, Margaret of Hungary, was widow of the Greek Emperor, Isaac II, endeavoured to cultivate his Greek subjects. But, in 1207, he was killed by the Bulgarians, who would have taken Salonika, had not a traitor (or, as the pious believed, St Demetrios) slain their tsar.

Boniface’s son, although born in the country and named after Salonika’s patron-saint (whose church was, however, the property of the chapter of the Holy Sepulchre while a Latin archbishop occupied the see), was then barely two years old. His mother was regent, but the real power was wielded by her bailie, the ambitious count of Biandrate, whose policy was to separate the kingdom from the Latin empire and draw it closer to the Italian marquisate. His quarrels with the Emperor Henry were viewed with joy by the Greeks; and, after his retirement, and in the absence of the young king in Italy, the kingdom was easily occupied, in 1223, by Theodore Angelos[441], the vigorous ruler of Epeiros, where, as at Nice, the city of the famous council, Hellenism, temporarily exiled from its natural capital, had found a refuge. The Greek conqueror exchanged the more modest title of “Despot of Epeiros” for that of “Emperor of Salonika,” while the exiled monarch and his successors continued to amuse themselves by styling themselves titular kings of Salonika for another century. But the separate Greek empire of Salonika was destined to live but little longer than the Latin kingdom. The first Greek Emperor, by one of those sudden reverses of fortune so characteristic of Balkan politics in all ages, fell into the hands of the Bulgarians; and, after having been reduced to the lesser dignity of a Despotat, the empire which he had founded was finally annexed, in 1246, to the[278] stronger and rival Greek empire of Nice, which, in 1261, likewise absorbed the Latin empire of Constantinople. No coins of the Latin kingdom exist; but we have a seal of Boniface, with a representation of the city walls upon it. Of the Greek empire of Salonika there are silver and bronze pieces, bearing the figure of the city’s patron-saint; while a tower contains an inscription to “Manuel the Despot,” identified by Monsignor Duchesne[442] with Manuel Angelos (1230-40), the Emperor Theodore’s brother and successor, but locally ascribed to a Manuel Palaiologos, perhaps the subsequent Emperor Manuel II, Despot and governor of Salonika in 1369-70.

Salonika, restored to the Byzantine empire, enjoyed special privileges, second only to those of the capital. Together with the region around it, it was considered as an appanage of one of the Emperor’s sons (e.g. John VII, nephew, and Andronikos, son of Manuel II). It was sometimes governed by the Empresses, two of them Italians, Jolanda of Montferrat, wife of Andronikos II, a descendant of the first king of Salonika, and Anne of Savoy, wife of Andronikos III, who was commemorated in an inscription over the gate of the castle, which she repaired in 1355. The court frequently resided there: we find Andronikos III coming to be healed by the saint, and the beauteous Jolanda, when she quarrelled with her husband, retired to Salonika and scandalised Thessalonian society with her accounts of her domestic life. As in our own day, Salonika was the favourite seat of opposition to the imperial authority. During the civil wars of the fourteenth century, such as those between the elder and the younger Andronikos and between John V Palaiologos and John Cantacuzene, it supported the candidate opposed to Constantinople, so that we may find precedents in its mediæval history for its selection as the headquarters of the Young Turkish movement. It enjoyed a full measure of autonomy, had its own “senate,” elected its own officials, was defended by its own civic guard, and administered by its own municipal customs. It even sent its own envoys abroad to discuss commercial questions. Its annual fair on the festival of St Demetrios still attracted traders from all the Levant to the level space between the walls and the Vardar. Jews, Slavs, and Armenians, as well as Greeks, crowded its bazaars; scholars from outside frequented its high schools, and Demetrios Kydones[443] compared it with Athens at its best.

The fourteenth century was, indeed, the golden age of Salonika in[279] art and letters. The erection of the churches of the Twelve Apostles and St Catherine continued the tradition of the much earlier churches of St George, St Sophia, and St Demetrios. The clergy followed in the footsteps of the learned Eustathios, and the beauty, wit, and reading of a Thessalonian lady, Eudokia Palaiologina, turned the head of a son of Andronikos II, when governor of Salonika, “that garden of the Muses and the Graces,” as one of the literary archbishops of the fourteenth century called it. The intellectual activity of the place led to intense theological discussion, and at this period the “Orthodox” city par excellence was agitated by the heresy of the “Hesychasts,” or Quietists, who believed that complete repose would enable them to see a divine light flickering round their empty stomachs, while the so-called “Zealots,” or friends of the people, with the cross as their banner, practised in Salonika the doctrines of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade in mediæval England. The exploitation of the poor by the rich and the tax-collectors, and the example of the recent revolution at Genoa, caused this republican movement, which led to the massacre of the nobles in 1346 by hurling them from the castle walls into the midst of an armed mob below. The “Zealots,” like the Iconoclast Emperors, have suffered from the fact that they have been described by their enemies, and notably by Cantacuzene[444], to whose aristocratic party they were opposed. Yet even an archbishop publicly advocated so drastic a measure as the suppression of some of the monasteries, in order to provide funds for the better defence of the city; nor was there anything very alarming in their preference for direct taxation. Thus, Salonika was from 1342 to 1349, under their auspices, practically an independent republic, till they succumbed to the allied forces of the aristocracy and the monks.

Salonika, indeed, continued to have urgent need of its walls, which still remain, save where the Turks completely dismantled them on the sea side in 1866, a fine example of Byzantine fortification. Andronikos II strengthened them by the erection of a tower, which still bears his initials, in the dividing wall between the Akropolis and the rest of the city. Thanks to them it escaped pillage by the Catalan Grand Company at a time when they sheltered two Byzantine Empresses. Even during the greatest expansion of the Serbian empire under Stephen Dushan, Salonika alone remained a Greek islet in a Serbian Macedonia. But a far more serious foe than either Catalan or Serb was now at hand. The Turks entered Europe shortly after the middle of the fourteenth century,[280] and advanced rapidly in the direction of Salonika. At least twice[445] before the end of that century—in 1387 and from 1391 to 1403, when Suleyman handed it back—they occupied it, and at last the inhabitants came to the conclusion that, in the weak condition of the Greek empire, their sole chance of safety was to place themselves under the protection of a great maritime power. Accordingly, in 1423, pressed by famine and by continual Turkish attacks, the Greek notables sent a deputation to Venice offering their city to the republic, whether their sickly Despot Andronikos, son of the Emperor Manuel II, consented or no. The Venetians, we are told, “received the offer with gladness, and promised to protect, and nourish, and prosper the city and to transform it into a second Venice.” The Despot, whose claims were settled by a solatium of 50,000 ducats, made way for a Venetian duke and a captain; for seven years Salonika was a Venetian colony[446].

The bargain proved unsatisfactory alike to the Venetians and the Greeks. Their brief occupation of Salonika cost the republic 700,000 ducats—for, in 1426, in addition to the cost of administration and repairs to the walls, she agreed to pay a tribute to the Sultan. Nor was it popular with the natives, especially the notables, many of whom the government found it desirable to deport to the other Venetian colonies of Negroponte and Crete, or even to Venice itself, on the plea that there was not food for them at Salonika. Others left voluntarily for Constantinople to escape the “unbearable horrors” and the Venetian slavery. The Turkish peril was ever present, and when envoys solicited peace from the Sultan Murad II, he replied: “The city is my inheritance, and my grandfather Bayezid took it from the Greeks by his own right hand. So, if the Greeks were now its masters, they might reasonably accuse me of injustice. But ye being Latins and from Italy, what have ye to do with this part of the world? Go, if you like; if not, I am coming quickly.” And in 1430 he came.

Two misfortunes preceded the fall of Salonika—the death of the beloved metropolitan, and an earthquake. There was only one man to defend every two or three bastions, and the Venetians, distrusting the inhabitants, placed a band of brigands between themselves and the Greeks, so that, even if the latter had desired to accept the liberal offers which Murad made them, they dared not do so. Chalkokondyles hints[281] at treachery, and a versifying chronicler[447] makes the monks of the present Tsaoush-Monastir near the citadel urge the Sultan to cut the conduits from the mountain, which supplied the city with water, and ascribes to their treason their subsequent privileges. But even the wives of the Greek notables joined in the defence, until a move of the Venetian garrison towards the harbour led the Greeks to believe that they would be left to their fate. On March 29, the fourth day of the siege, a soldier scaled the walls at the place near the castle known as “The Triangle,” and threw down the head of a Venetian as a sign that he was holding his ground. The defenders fled to the Samareia tower[448] on the beach—perhaps the famous “White Tower,” or “the Tower of Blood” as it was called a century ago, which still stands there and which some attribute to the Venetian period, or at least to Venetian workmen—only to find it shut against them by the Venetians, who managed to escape by sea.

In accordance with his promise, Murad allowed his men to sack the city, and great damage was inflicted on the churches in the search for treasure buried beneath the altars. The tomb of St Demetrios was ravaged, because of its rich ornaments and to obtain the healing ointment for which it was famous, while the relics of St Theodora were scattered, and with difficulty collected again. Seeing, however, the wonderful situation of Salonika, the Sultan ordered the sack to cease, and began to restore the houses to their owners, contenting himself with converting only two of the churches, those of the Virgin and of St John Baptist, into mosques. It is pleasant to note that George Brankovich, the Despot of Serbia and one of the richest princes of that day, ransomed many prisoners. Two or three years afterwards, however, the Sultan adopted severer measures towards the captured city. He took all the churches except four (including that of St Demetrios, which, as the tomb of Spantounes shows, was not converted into a mosque till after 1481), built a bath out of the materials of some of the others, and transported the Turks of Yenidjé-Vardar to Salonika, which thus for 482 years became a Turkish city. Chalkokondyles[449] was not far wrong when he described its fall as “the greatest disaster that had yet befallen the Greeks.”

When, on St Demetrios’ day, 1912, the victorious Greeks recovered Salonika, all those churches, sixteen in number, which had existed before the Turkish conquest were reconverted into Christian edifices;[282] and when I was there in 1914, it was curious to see the two dates, 1430 and 1912, the former in black, the latter in gold, on the eikonostasis of the Divine Wisdom, the church which was perhaps founded before the more famous St Sophia of Constantinople. Almost the last acts of the Young Turks before they surrendered Salonika were to destroy not only the “Gate of Anna Palaiologina,” but also the “New Gate,” which bore the inscription recording the Turkish capture.

I. THE ZACCARIA OF PHOCÆA AND CHIOS (1275-1329)

Genoa played a much less important part than Venice in the history of Greece. Unlike her great rival on the lagoons, she had no Byzantine traditions which attracted her towards the Near East, and it is not, therefore, surprising to find her appearing last of all the Italian Republics in the Levant. But, though she took no part in the Fourth Crusade, her sons, the Zaccaria and the Gattilusj, later on became petty sovereigns in the Ægean; the long administration of Chios by the Genoese society of the Giustiniani is one of the earliest examples of the government of a colonial dependency by a Chartered Company, and it was Genoa who gave to the principality of Achaia its last ruler in the person of Centurione Zaccaria.

The earliest relations between Genoa and Byzantium are to be found in the treaty between the two in 1155; but it was not till a century later that the Ligurian Republic seriously entered into the field of Eastern politics. After the establishment of the Latin states in Greece, the Genoese, excluded from all share of the spoil, endeavoured to embarrass their more fortunate Venetian rivals by secretly urging on their countryman, the pirate Vetrano, against Corfù, and by instigating the bold Ligurian, Enrico Pescatore, against Crete—enterprises, however, which had no permanent effect. But the famous treaty of Nymphæum, concluded between the Emperor Michael VIII and the Republic of Genoa in 1261, first gave the latter a locus standi in the Levant. Never did a Latin Community make a better bargain with a Greek ruler, for all the advantages were on the side of Genoa. The Emperor gave her establishments and the right to keep consuls at Anæa, in Chios, and in Lesbos, both of which important islands had been assigned to the Latin Empire by the deed of partition, but had been recaptured by Michael’s predecessor Vatatzes in 1225[450]. He also granted her the city of Smyrna, promised free trade to Genoese merchants in all the ports of his dominions, and pledged himself to exclude the enemies of the Ligurian Commonwealth, in other words, the Venetians, from the Black Sea and all his harbours. All that he asked in return for these magnificent[284] concessions was an undertaking that Genoa would arm a squadron of fifty ships at his expense, if he asked for it. It was expressly stipulated that this armament should not be employed against Prince William of Achaia. Genoa performed her part of the bargain by sending a small fleet to aid the Emperor in the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins; but it arrived too late to be of any use. Still, Michael VIII took the will for the deed; he needed Genoese aid for his war against Venice; so he sent an embassy to ask for more galleys. The Genoese, heedless of papal thunders against this “unholy alliance,” responded by raising a loan for the affairs of the Levant[451]; and it was their fleet, allied with the Greeks, which sustained the defeat off the islet of Spetsopoulo, or Sette Pozzi, as the Italians called it[452], at the mouth of the Gulf of Nauplia in 1263. But the Emperor soon found that his new allies were a source of danger rather than of strength; he banished the Genoese of Constantinople to Eregli on the Sea of Marmara, and made his peace with their Venetian rivals. In vain Genoa sent Benedetto Zaccaria to induce him to revoke his decree of expulsion; some years seem to have elapsed before he allowed the Genoese to return to Galata, and it was not till 1275 that the formal ratification of the treaty of Nymphæum marked his complete return to his old policy[453], and that Manuele and Benedetto Zaccaria became the recipients of his bounty.

The Zaccaria were at this time one of the leading families of Genoa, whither they had emigrated from the little Ligurian town of Gavi some two centuries earlier. The grandfather of Manuele and Benedetto, who derived his territorial designation of “de Castro,” from the district of Sta Maria di Castello, in which he resided, had held civic office in 1202; their father Fulcho had been one of the signatories of the treaty of Nymphæum[454]. Three years before that event Benedetto had been captured by the Venetians in a battle off Tyre. Three years after it, he was sent as Genoese ambassador to Michael VIII and, though his mission was unsuccessful, the Emperor had the opportunity of appreciating his business-like qualities[455]. Early in 1275, the year when Genoa had returned to favour at the Imperial Court, the two brothers started from their native city upon the voyage to Constantinople, which was destined to bring them fame and fortune—to Manuele, the elder, the[285] grant of the alum-mines of Phocæa at the north of the Gulf of Smyrna, to Benedetto the hand of the Emperor’s sister[456]. Phocæa at that time consisted of a single town, situated to the west of the alum-mountains; but, later on, the encroachments of the Turks led its Latin lords to build on the sea-shore at the foot of the mountain a small fortress sufficient to shelter about fifty workmen, which, with the aid of their Greek neighbours, grew into the town of New Phocæa, or Foglia Nuova, as the Italians called it. The annual rent, which Manuele paid to the Emperor, was covered many times over by the profits of the mines. Alum was indispensable for dyeing, and Western ships homeward-bound were therefore accustomed to take a cargo of this useful product at Phocæa[457]. The only serious competition with the trade was that of the alum which came from the coasts of the Black Sea, and which was exported to Europe in Genoese bottoms. A man of business first and a patriot afterwards, Manuele persuaded the Emperor to ensure him a monopoly of the market by prohibiting this branch of the Euxine trade—a protective measure, which led to difficulties with Genoa. He was still actively engaged in business operations at Phocæa in 1287, but is described as dead in the spring of the following year[458], after which date the alum-mines of Phocæa passed to his still more adventurous brother, Benedetto.

While Manuele had been accumulating riches at Phocæa, Benedetto had gained the reputation of being one of the most daring seamen, as well as one of the ablest negotiators, of his time. He was instrumental, as agent of Michael VIII, in stirring up the Sicilian Vespers and so frustrating the threatened attack of Charles I of Anjou upon the Greek Empire, and later in that year we find him proposing the marriage of Michael’s son and the King of Aragon’s daughter[459]. In the following years he was Genoese Admiral in the Pisan War, and led an expedition to Tunis; in 1288 he was sent to Tripoli with full powers to transact all the business of the Republic beyond the seas. After negotiating with both the claimants to the last of the Crusaders’ Syrian states, he performed the more useful action of conveying the people of Tripoli to Cyprus, when, in the following year, that once famous city fell before the Sultan[286] of Egypt. In Cyprus he concluded with King Henry II a treaty, which gave so little satisfaction to the home government, that it was speedily cancelled. More successful was the commercial convention which he made with Leo III of Armenia, followed by a further agreement with that monarch’s successor, Hethum II. But his rashness in capturing an Egyptian ship compelled the Republic to disown him, and in 1291 he sought employment under a new master, Sancho IV of Castile, as whose Admiral he defeated the Saracens off the coast of Morocco[460]. From Spain he betook himself to the court of Philip IV of France, to whom, with characteristic audacity, he submitted in 1296 a plan for the invasion of England[461]. During his absence in the West, however, war broke out between the Genoese and the Venetians, whose Admiral, Ruggiero Morosini, took Phocæa and seized the huge cauldrons which were used for the preparation of the alum[462]. But upon his return he speedily repaired the walls of the city, and ere long the alum-mines yielded more than ever. Nor was this his only source of revenue, for under his brother and himself Phocæa had become a name of terror to the Latin pirates of the Levant, upon whom the famous Tartarin of the Zaccaria ceaselessly preyed, and who lost their lives, or at least their eyes, if they fell into the hands of the redoubtable Genoese captains[463]. The sums thus gained Benedetto devoted in part to his favourite project for the recovery of the Holy Land, for which he actually equipped several vessels with the aid of the ladies of his native city—a pious act that won them the praise of Pope Boniface VIII, who described him as his “old, familiar friend[464].” This new crusade, indeed, came to nought, but such was the renown which he and his brother had acquired, that the Turks, by this time masters of the Asian coast, and occupants of the short-lived Genoese colony of Smyrna, were deterred from attacking Phocæa, not because of its natural strength but because of the warlike qualities of its Italian garrison. Conscious of their own valour and of the weakness of the Emperor Andronikos II, the Genoese colonists did not hesitate to ask him to entrust them with the defence of the neighbouring islands, if he were unable to defend that portion of his Empire himself. They only[287] stipulated that they should be allowed to defray the cost out of the local revenues, which would thus be expended on the spot, instead of being transmitted to Constantinople. Benedetto had good reason for making this offer; for Chios and Lesbos, once the seats of flourishing Genoese factories under the rule of the Greek Emperor and his father, had both suffered severely from the feeble policy of the central government and the attacks of corsairs. Twice, in 1292 and 1303, the troops first of Roger de Lluria and then of Roger de Flor had ravaged Mytilene and devastated the famous mastic-gardens of Chios—the only place in the world where that product was to be found, while a Turkish raid completed the destruction of that beautiful island[465].

Andronikos received Benedetto’s proposal with favour, but as he delayed giving a definite decision, the energetic Genoese, like the man of action that he was, occupied Chios in 1304 on his own account. The Emperor, too much engaged with the Turkish peril to undertake the expulsion of this desperate intruder, wisely recognised accomplished facts, and agreed to let him have the island for ten years as a fief of the Empire, free of all tribute, on condition that he flew the Byzantine standard from the walls and promised to restore his conquest to his suzerain at the expiration of the lease[466]. Thus, in the fashion of Oriental diplomacy, both parties were satisfied: the Italian had gained the substance of power, while the Greek retained the shadow, and might salve his dignity with the reflexion that the real ruler of Chios hoisted his colours, owed him allegiance, and was a near kinsman of his own by marriage.

This first Genoese occupation of Chios lasted only a quarter of a century; but even in that short time, under the firm and able rule of the Zaccaria, it recovered its former prosperity. Benedetto refortified the capital, restored the fallen buildings, heightened the walls, and deepened the ditch—significant proofs of his intention to stay. Entrusting Phocæa to the care of his nephew Tedisio, or Ticino, as his deputy, he devoted his attention to the revival of Chios, which at his death, in 1307, he bequeathed to his son, Paleologo, first-cousin of the reigning Emperor, while he left Phocæa to his half-brother, Nicolino, like himself a naval commander in the Genoese service. This division of the family possessions led to difficulties. Nicolino arrived at Phocæa and demanded a full statement of account from his late brother’s manager, Tedisio;[288] the latter consented, but the uncle and the nephew did not agree about the figures, and Nicolino withdrew, threatening to return with a larger force, to turn Tedisio out of his post, convey him to Genoa, and appoint another governor, Andriolo Cattaneo della Volta, a connexion of the family by marriage, in his place. Nicolino’s son privately warned his cousin of his father’s intentions, and advised him to quit Phocæa while there was still time. At this moment the Catalan Grand Company was at Gallipoli, and there Tedisio presented himself, begging the chronicler Muntaner to enroll him in its ranks. The Catalan, moved by his aristocratic antecedents and personal courage, consented, and soon the fugitive ex-governor, by glowing accounts of the riches of Phocæa, induced his new comrades to aid him in capturing the place from his successor. The Catalans were always ready for plunder, and the alum-city was said to contain “the richest treasures of the world.” Accordingly, a flotilla was equipped, which arrived off Phocæa on the night of Easter 1307. Before daybreak next morning, the assailants had scaled the walls of the castle; then they sacked the city, whose population of more than 3000 Greeks was employed in the alum-manufactory. The booty was immense, and not the least precious portion of it was a piece of the true Cross, encased in gold and studded with priceless jewels. This relic, said to have been brought by St John the Evangelist to Ephesus, captured by the Turks when they took that place, and pawned by them at Phocæa, fell to the lot of Muntaner[467]. This famous “Cross of the Zaccaria” would seem to have been restored to that family, and we may conjecture that it was presented to the cathedral of Genoa, where it now is, by the bastard son of the last Prince of the Morea[468], when, in 1459, he begged the city of his ancestors to recommend him to the generosity of Pius II. Emboldened by this success, Tedisio, with the aid of the Catalans, conquered the island of Thasos from the Greeks and received his friend Muntaner and the Infant Ferdinand of Majorca in its castle with splendid hospitality. Six years later, however, the Byzantine forces recovered this island, whence the Zaccaria preyed upon Venetian merchantmen[469], and it was not for more than a century that a Genoese lord once again held his court in the fortress of Tedisio Zaccaria.

Meanwhile, Paleologo, in Chios, had continued the enlightened policy of his father, and reaped his reward in the renewed productiveness of[289] the mastic-plantations. In 1314, when the ten years’ lease of the island expired, the strong fortifications, which his father had erected, and his near relationship to the Emperor procured him a renewal for five more years on the same terms[470]. He did not, however, long enjoy this further tenure, for in the same year he died, apparently without progeny. As his uncle, Nicolino, the lord of Phocæa and the next heir, was by this time also dead, the latter’s sons, Martino and Benedetto II, succeeded their cousin as joint-rulers of Chios, while Phocæa passed beneath the direct control of Nicolino’s former governor, Andriolo Cattaneo, always, of course, subject to the confirmation of the Emperor.

The two brothers, who had thus succeeded to Chios, possessed all the vigorous qualities of their race. One contemporary writer after another praises their services to Christendom, and describes the terror with which they filled the Turks. The Infidels, we are told, were afraid to approach within twelve miles of Chios, because of the Zaccaria, who always kept a thousand foot-soldiers, a hundred horsemen, and a couple of galleys ready for every emergency. Had it not been for the valour of the Genoese lords of Chios “neither man, nor woman, nor dog, nor cat, nor any live animal could have remained in any of the neighbouring islands.” Not only were the brothers “the shield of defence of the Christians,” but they did all they could to stop the infamous traffic in slaves, carried on by their fellow-countrymen, the Genoese of Alexandria, whose vessels passed Chios on the way from the Black Sea ports. Pope John XXII, who had already allowed Martino to export mastic to Alexandria in return for his services, was therefore urged to give the Zaccaria the maritime police of the Archipelago, so that this branch of the slave-trade might be completely cut off[471]. Sanudo[472], with his accurate knowledge of the Ægean, remarked that the islands could not have resisted the Turks so long, had it not been for the Genoese rulers of Chios, Duke Nicolò I of Naxos, and the Holy House of the Hospital, established since 1309 in Rhodes, and estimated that the Zaccaria could furnish a galley for the recovery of the Holy Land. Martino was specially renowned for his exploits against the Turks. No man, it was said, had ever done braver deeds at sea than this defender of the Christians and implacable foe of the Paynim. In one year alone he captured 18 Turkish pirate ships, and at the end of his[290] reign he had slain or taken more than 10,000 Turks[473]. The increased importance of Chios at this period is evidenced by the coins, which the two brothers minted for their use, sometimes with the diplomatic legend, “servants of the Emperor[474].” Benedetto II was, however, eclipsed by the greater glories of Martino. By marriage the latter became baron of Damala and by purchase[475] lord of Chalandritza in the Peloponnese, and thus laid the foundations of his family’s fortunes in the principality of Achaia. He was thereby brought into close relations with the official hierarchy of the Latin Orient, from which the Zaccaria, as Genoese traders, had hitherto been excluded. Accordingly, in 1325, Philip I of Taranto, who, in virtue of his marriage with Catherine of Valois, was titular Latin Emperor of Constantinople, bestowed upon him the islands of Lesbos, Samos, Kos, and Chios, which Baldwin II had reserved for himself and his successors in the treaty of Viterbo in 1267,—a reservation repeated in 1294—together with those of Ikaria, Tenedos, Œnoussa, and Marmara, and the high-sounding title of “King and Despot of Asia Minor,” in return for his promise to furnish 500 horsemen and six galleys a year whenever the “Emperor” came into his own[476]. The practical benefits of this magnificent diploma were small—for Martino already ruled in Chios, with which Samos and Kos seem to have been united under the sway of the Zaccaria, while the other places mentioned belonged either to the Greeks or the Turks, over whom the phantom Latin Emperor had no power whatever. Indeed, this investiture by the titular ruler of Constantinople must have annoyed its actual sovereign, who had not, however, dared to refuse the renewal of the lease of Chios, when it again expired in 1319.

But Martino had given hostages to fortune by his connexion with the Morea. His son, Bartolommeo, was captured by the Catalans of Athens in one of their campaigns, sent off to the custody of their patron, Frederick II of Sicily, and only released at the request of Pope John XXII in 1318. As the husband of the young Marchioness of Boudonitza, he was mixed up also in the politics of Eubœa and the mainland opposite, while he is mentioned as joining the other members of his family in their attacks upon the Turks.

For a time Martino managed to preserve good relations with the Greek Empire. In 1324, the lease of Chios was again renewed, and in 1327 Venice instructed her officials in the Levant to negotiate a league with him, the Greek Emperor, and the Knights against the common peril[477]. But by this time the dual system of government in the island had broken down: Martino’s great successes had led him to desire the sole management of Chios, and he had accordingly ousted his brother from all share in the government and struck coins for the island with his own name alone, as he did for his barony of Damala[478]. His riches had become such as to arouse the suspicions of the Imperial Government that he would not long be content to admit himself “the servant of the Emperor”; the public dues of the island amounted to 120,000 gold pieces a year, while the Turks paid an annual tribute to its dreaded ruler, in order to escape his attacks. It happened that, in 1328, when the quinquennial lease had only another year to run and the usual negotiations for its renewal should have begun, that Andronikos III, a warlike and energetic prince, mounted the throne of Constantinople, and this conjunction of circumstances seemed to the national party in Chios peculiarly favourable to its reconquest. Accordingly, the leading Greek of the island, Leon Kalothetos, who was an intimate friend of the new sovereign’s Prime Minister, John Cantacuzene, sought an interview with the latter’s mother, whom he interested in his plans. She procured him an audience of the Emperor and of her son, and they both encouraged him with presents and promises to support the expedition which they were ready to undertake. An excuse for hostilities was easily found in the new fortress which Martino was then engaged in constructing without the consent of his suzerain. An ultimatum was therefore sent to him ordering him to desist from his building operations, and to come in person to Constantinople, if he wished to renew his lease. Martino, as might have been expected from his character, treated the ultimatum with contempt, and only hastened on his building. Benedetto, however, took the opportunity to lodge a complaint against his brother before the Emperor, claiming 60,000 gold pieces, the present annual amount of his half-share in the island, which he had inherited but of which the grasping Martino had deprived him.

In the early autumn of 1329, Andronikos assembled a magnificent fleet of 105 vessels, including four galleys furnished by Duke Nicolò I[292] of Naxos, with the ostensible object of attacking the Turks but with the real intention of subduing the Genoese lord of Chios. Even at this eleventh hour the Emperor would have been willing to leave him in possession of the rest of the island, merely placing an Imperial garrison in the new castle and insisting upon the regular payment of Benedetto’s annuity. Martino, however, was in no mood for negotiations. He sank the three galleys which he had in the harbour, forbade his Greek subjects to wear arms under pain of death, and shut himself up with 800 men behind the walls, from which there floated defiantly the flag of the Zaccaria, instead of the customary Imperial standard. But, when he saw that his brother had handed over a neighbouring fort to the Emperor, and that no reliance could be placed upon his Greek subjects, he sent messengers begging for peace. Andronikos repulsed them, saying that the time for compromise was over, whereupon Martino surrendered. The Chians clamoured for his execution; but Cantacuzene saved his life, and he was conveyed a prisoner to Constantinople, while his wife Jacqueline de la Roche, a connexion of the former ducal house of Athens, was allowed to go free with her family and all that they could carry. Martino’s adherents were given their choice of leaving the island with their property, or of entering the Imperial service, and the majority chose the latter alternative. The nationalist leaders were rewarded for their devotion by gifts and honours; the people were relieved from their oppressive public burdens. To Benedetto the Emperor offered the governorship of Chios with half the net revenues of the island as his salary—a generous offer which the Genoese rejected with scorn, asserting that nothing short of absolute sovereignty over it would satisfy him. If that were refused, he only asked for three galleys to carry him and his property to Galata. Andronikos treated him with remarkable forbearance, in order that public opinion might not accuse an Emperor of having been guilty of meanness, and, on the proposal of Cantacuzene, convened an assembly of Greeks and of the Latins who were then in the island—Genoese and Venetian traders, the Duke of Naxos, the recently appointed Roman Catholic bishop of Chios and some other Frères Prêcheurs who had arrived—in order that there might be impartial witnesses of his generosity. Even those of Benedetto’s own race and creed regarded his obstinate refusal of the Imperial offer with disapprobation; nor would he even accept a palace and the rank of Senator at Constantinople with 20,000 gold pieces a year out of the revenues of Chios; nothing but his three galleys could he be persuaded to take. His object was soon apparent. Upon his arrival at Galata, he chartered eight Genoese galleys, which he found lying there, and set out to reconquer[293] Chios—a task which he considered likely to be easy, as the Imperial fleet had by that time dispersed. The Chians, however, repulsed his men with considerable loss, the survivors weighed anchor on the morrow, and Benedetto II succumbed barely a week later to an attack of apoplexy, brought on by his rage and disappointment[479].

Martino, after eight years in captivity, was released by the intervention of Pope Benedict XII and Philip VI of France in 1337, and treated with favour by the Emperor, who “gave him a command in the army and other castles,” as some compensation for his losses[480]. In 1343, Clement VI appointed him captain of the four papal galleys which formed part of the crusade for the capture of the former Genoese colony of Smyrna from Omar Beg of Aïdin, the self-styled “Prince of the Morea[481]”—a post for which his special experience and local knowledge were a particular recommendation in the eyes of the Pope. Martino desired, however, to avail himself of this opportunity to reconquer Chios from the Greeks, and invited the Knights and the Cypriote detachment to join him in this venture, to which his friend, the Archbishop of Thebes, endeavoured to force the latter by threats of excommunication. The Pope saw, however, that this repetition on a smaller scale of the selfish policy of the Fourth Crusade would have the effect of alienating his Greek allies, and ordered the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople to forbid the attack[482]. Martino lived to see Smyrna taken in December, 1344, but on January 17, 1345, the rashness of the Patriarch, who insisted on holding mass in the old Metropolitan Church against the advice of the naval authorities, cost him his life. Omar assaulted the cathedral while service was still going on, Martino was slain, and his head presented to that redoubtable chieftain[483]. When, in the following year, the Genoese retook Chios, and founded their second long domination over it, his descendants did not profit by the conquest. But his second son, Centurione, retained his baronies in the Morea, of which the latter’s grandson and namesake was the last reigning Prince.

After the restoration of Greek rule in Chios and the appointment of Kalothetos as Imperial viceroy, Andronikos III had proceeded to[294] Phocæa. By this time the Genoese had abandoned the old city and had strongly fortified themselves in the new town, purchasing further security for their commercial operations by the payment of an annual tribute of 15,000 pieces of silver and a personal present of 10,000 more to Saru-Khan, the Turkish ruler of the district. The Emperor, having placated this personage with the usual Oriental arguments, set out for Foglia Nuova. Andriolo Cattaneo chanced to be absent at Genoa on business, and the Genoese garrison of 52 knights and 400 foot-soldiers was under the command of his uncle, Arrigo Tartaro. The latter wisely averted annexation by doing homage to the Emperor, and handed the keys of the newly constructed castle to his Varangian guard. After spending two nights in the fortress, in order to show that it was his, Andronikos magnanimously renewed the grant of the place to Andriolo during good pleasure. But Domenico Cattaneo, who succeeded his father not long afterwards with the assent of the Emperor, lost, in his attempt to obtain more, what he already had.

Cattaneo, not content with the riches of Foglia Nuova, coveted the island of Lesbos, which had belonged for just over a century to the Greeks, and it seemed in 1333 as if an opportunity of seizing it had arisen. The increasing power of the Turks, who had by that time taken Nicæa and Brusa and greatly hindered Greek and Latin trade alike in the Ægean, led to a coalition against them; but, before attacking the common enemy, the Knights, Nicolò I of Naxos, and Cattaneo made a treacherous descent upon Lesbos, and seized the capital of the island. The crafty Genoese, supported by a number of galleys from his native city, managed, however, to outwit his weaker allies, and ousted them from all share in the conquered town, whither he transferred his residence from Foglia Nuova. Andronikos, after punishing the Genoese of Pera for this act of treachery on the part of their countrymen, set out to recover Lesbos. The slowness of the Emperor’s movements, however, enabled Cattaneo to strengthen the garrison, and Andronikos, leaving one of his officers to besiege Lesbos, proceeded to invest Foglia with the aid of Saru-Khan, whose son with other young Turks had been captured and kept as a hostage by the Genoese garrison. The place, however, continued for long to resist the attacks of the allies, till at last Cattaneo’s lieutenant prevailed upon them to raise the siege by restoring the prisoners to their parents and pledging himself to obtain the surrender of the city of Mytilene, which still held out, and which the Emperor, fearing troubles at home, had no time to take. Cattaneo, indeed, repudiated this part of the arrangement, and bribery was needed to seduce the Latin mercenaries and thus leave him unsupported. From Lesbos[295] he retired to Foglia, which the Emperor had consented to allow him to keep on the old terms; but four years later, while he was absent on a hunting party, the Greek inhabitants overpowered the small Italian garrison and proclaimed Andronikos III[484]. Thus ended the first Genoese occupation of Phocæa and Lesbos—the harbinger of the much longer and more durable colonisation a few years later. Two gold coins, modelled on the Venetian ducats, of which the first of them is the earliest known counterfeit, have survived to preserve the memory of Andriolo and Domenico Cattaneo, and to testify to the riches of the Foglie under their rule[485].

APPENDIX

DIGEST OF GENOESE DOCUMENTS

GENOESE COLONIES IN GREEK LANDS

I. Lords of Phocæa (Foglia).

II. Lords of Chios, Samos and Ikaria.

III. Lords of Lesbos.

IV. Lords of Thasos.

V. Lords of Lemnos.

VI. Lords of Samothrace.

VII. Lords of Imbros.

VIII. Lords of Ænos.

IX. Smyrna.

X. Famagosta.

2. THE GENOESE IN CHIOS (1346-1566)

Of the Latin states which existed in Greek lands between the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, there were four principal forms. Those states were either independent kingdoms, such as Cyprus; feudal principalities, of which that of Achaia is the best example; military outposts, like Rhodes; or colonies directly governed by the mother-country, of which Crete was the most conspicuous. But the Genoese administration of Chios differed from all the other Latin creations in the Levant. It was what we should call in modern parlance a Chartered Company, which on a smaller scale anticipated the career of the East India and the British South Africa Companies in our own history.

The origins of the Latin colonization of Greece are usually to be found in places and circumstances where we should least expect to find them. The incident which led to this Genoese occupation of the most fertile island of the Ægean is to be sought in the history of the smallest of European principalities—that of Monaco, which in the first half of the fourteenth century already belonged to the noble Genoese family of Grimaldi, which still reigns over it. At that time the rock of Monaco and the picturesque village of Roquebrune (between Monte Carlo and Mentone) sheltered a number of Genoese nobles, fugitives from their native city, where one of those revolutions common in the mediæval republics of Italy had placed the popular party in power. The proximity[299] and the preparations of these exiles were a menace to Genoa, but the resources of the republican treasury were too much exhausted to equip a fleet against them at the cost of the state. Accordingly, an appeal was made to the patriotism of private citizens, whose expenses were to be ultimately refunded, and in the meanwhile guaranteed by the possession of any conquered territory. In response to this appeal, twenty-six of the people and three nobles of the popular party equipped that number of galleys, which were placed under the command of Simone Vignoso, himself one of the twenty-nine privateers. On April 24, 1346, the fleet set sail; and, at its approach, the outlawed nobles fled to Marseilles, whence many of them entered the French army and died four months later fighting at Crécy against our King Edward III.

The immediate object for which the fleet had been fitted out had been thus accomplished. But it seemed to Vignoso a pity that it should not be employed, and the Near East offered a tempting field for its activities. The condition of south-eastern Europe in 1346 might perhaps be paralleled with its situation in later times. An ancient empire, which Gladstone described as “more wonderful than anything done by the Romans,” enthroned on the Bosporos with one brief interval for ten centuries, was obviously crumbling away, and its ultimate dissolution was only a question of time. A lad of fourteen, John V Palaiologos, sat on the throne of the Cæsars, while a woman and a foreigner, the Empress-mother Anne of Savoy, governed in his name. Against her and her son the too-powerful Grand Domestic (or, as we should say, prime minister), John Cantacuzene, whom posterity remembers rather as an historian than as an Emperor, had raised the standard of revolt. In Asia Minor Byzantium retained nothing but the suburb of Scutari, Philadelphia, and the two towns of Phocæa. Independent emirs ruled the south and centre, the Ottomans the north, whence in seven years they were to cross into Europe, in eight more to transfer their capital to Adrianople. Already the European provinces of Byzantium were cut short by the frontier of the Bulgarian Empire and still more by the rapid advance of Serbia, then the most powerful state in the Balkan peninsula. Seventeen days before Vignoso sailed for the East, the great Serbian conqueror and lawgiver, Stephen Dushan, one of the most remarkable figures in mediæval history, was crowned at Skoplje “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks” and had proposed to Genoa’s rival, Venice, an alliance for the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Greece proper, with the exception of the Byzantine province in the Morea, was parcelled out between Latin rulers, while Byzantium had no fleet to protect her outlying territories. Under these circumstances a commercial Italian republic might not[300] unnaturally seek to peg out claims in the midst of the general confusion in the East, where only two years before Smyrna, formerly a Genoese colony, had been recaptured from the Turks.

Vignoso’s first intention was to protect the Genoese settlements on the Black Sea against the attacks of the Tartars; but information received at Negroponte, where he touched on the way, led him to change his plans. There he found a fleet of Venetian and Rhodian galleys, under the Dauphin of Vienne, preparing to occupy Chios as a naval base for operations against the Turks in Asia Minor. Vignoso and his associates were offered large sums for their co-operation, but their patriotism rejected the idea of handing over to the rival republic an island which had belonged to the Genoese family of Zaccaria from 1304 to 1329, and which as recently as seventeen years earlier had been recovered by the Greeks. They made all sail for Chios, and offered to assist the islanders against a Venetian attack, if they would hoist the Genoese flag and admit a small Genoese garrison. The scornful refusal of the garrison was followed by the landing of the Genoese; four days sufficed to take the rest of the island; but the citadel made such a spirited resistance that three months passed before food gave out and on September 12 the capitulation was signed. The governor, Kalojanni Cybo, himself of Genoese extraction, and a member of the well-known Ligurian family which afterwards produced Pope Innocent VIII, made excellent terms for himself and his relatives, while the Greeks were to enjoy their former religious liberties and endowments, their property, and their privileges. A Genoese governor was to be appointed to administer the island according to the laws of the Republic, and 200 houses in the citadel were assigned at once for the use of the Genoese garrison. Vignoso proved by his example that he meant to keep these promises. He ordered his own son to be flogged publicly for stealing grapes from a vineyard belonging to one of the natives, and bequeathed a sum of money for providing poor Chiote girls with dowries as compensation for any damage that he might have inflicted upon the islanders.

Vignoso completed the conquest of Chios by the annexation of Old and New Phocæa, or Foglia Vecchia and Nuova, as the Italians called them, almost the last Byzantine possessions on the coast of Asia Minor, and celebrated for their valuable alum-mines, whence English ships used to obtain materials for dyeing, and of the neighbouring islands of Psara, or Santa Panagia, Samos, Ikaria, and the Œnoussai[486]. All these places[301] had belonged to the former Genoese lords of Chios, with whose fortunes they were now reunited. The two Foglie, with the exception of a brief Byzantine restoration, remained in Genoese hands till they were conquered by the Turks in 1455; Foglia Vecchia, after about 1402, being administered by the Gattilusj of Lesbos, Foglia Nuova being leased to a member of the maona for life or a term of years. Samos and Psara were abandoned in 1475 from fear of corsairs, and their inhabitants removed to Chios, whilst the harbourless Ikaria, where pirates could not land, was in 1362 granted to the Genoese family of Arangio, which held it with the title of Count until 1481. In that year it was ceded for greater security to the knights of Rhodes, and remained united with that island till it too was conquered by the Turks in 1522. Vignoso desired to add the rich island of Lesbos and the strategic island of Tenedos, which, as we have been lately reminded, commands the mouth of the Dardanelles, to his acquisitions. But his crews had had enough of fighting, and were so mutinous that he returned to Genoa[487].

The Genoese exchequer was unable to repay to Vignoso and his partners their expenses, amounting to 203,000 Genoese pounds (£79,170 of our money) or 7000 for each of the twenty-nine galleys, the Genoese pound being then, according to Desimoni, worth 9 lire 75 centesimi. Accordingly, by an arrangement made on February 26, 1347, it was agreed that the Republic should liquidate this liability within twenty years and thereupon become the direct owner of the conquered places, which in the meanwhile were to be governed—and the civil and criminal administration conducted—in her name. The collection of taxes, however, and the monopoly of the mastic, which was the chief product of the island, were granted to the twenty-nine associates in the company, or mahona, as it was called. The origin of this word is uncertain. In modern Italian maona means a “lighter”; but those vessels of Turkish invention are not mentioned before 1500. On the other hand, we read of a maona, or madona (as it is there written), in connexion with a Genoese expedition to Ceuta in a document of 1236, and it has, therefore, been suggested that maona is a Ligurian contraction of Madonna, and that such trading companies were under the protection of Our Lady, whose image was to be seen on the palace of the Giustiniani at Genoa. At any rate, the name was applied to other Genoese companies, to the[302] Old and New maona of Cyprus, founded in 1374 and 1403, and to the maona of Corsica, founded in 1378. Other derivations are from the Greek word μονάς (“unit”), the Genoese mobba (“union”), and the Arabic me-unet (“subsidy”)[488].

This convention with the maonesi[489] was to be valid only as long as the popular party remained in power at Genoa. The Republic was to be represented in Chios by a podestà, selected annually out of a list of twenty Genoese democrats submitted in February by the Doge and his council to the maonesi; from these twenty the maonesi were to choose four, and one of these four was then appointed podestà by the Doge and council. Should the first list of twenty be rejected by the maonesi, a second list was to be prepared by the home government. The podestà was to swear to govern according to the regulations of Genoa and the convention concluded by Vignoso with the Greeks. Twice a year he went on circuit through the island to hear the complaints of the natives, and no maonese was allowed to accompany him on those journeys. Another officer of the Republic was the castellano, or commander of the castle of Chios, likewise chosen annually, from a list of six names, submitted to the Duke and his council by the maonesi. This officer was bound to find security to the amount of 3000 Genoese pounds (£1170) for his important charge. A podestà and castellano for Foglia Nuova and the castellano of Foglia Vecchia, who had the powers of a podestà, were appointed in the same way. These officials were responsible for their misdeeds to a board of examiners, and the podestà was assisted by six, afterwards twelve, councillors called gubernatores, elected by the maonesi or other nominees, in everything except his judicial work, where their co-operation was at his discretion. Salaries were not high; those of the podestà of Chios and Foglia Nuova were only 1250 (or £560) and 600 hypérpera (or £268 16s.) respectively; those of the three castellani ranged from 400 to 500 (or £179 4s. to £224). Out of these sums they had to keep and clothe a considerable retinue. Local officials called generically rettori, but familiarly known as codespótæ (“joint lords”) or protogérontes (“chief elders”) in the eight northern, and as logariastaí (or “calculators”) in the four southern or mastic districts of Chios, were appointed by the podestà.

The podestà had the right of coining money, provided that his coins[303] bore the effigy of the Doge of Genoa and the inscription “Dux Ianuensium Conradus Rex” in memory of Conrad III, King of the Romans, who in 1138 had conceded to the Republic the privilege of a mint on condition that her coins always bore his name[490]. This condition was not, however, always observed in the Chiote mint. The maonesi between 1382 and 1415 coined base imitations of the Venetian zecchini, a practice likewise adopted by Francesco I Gattilusio of Lesbos, and by Stephen Urosh II of Servia, and which procured for the latter a place among the evil kings in the Paradiso[491] of Dante. From 1415 the name and figure of St Laurence, the patron saint of the cathedral at Genoa, and the initial or name of the Doge began to appear on the Chiote coins; during the Milanese domination of Genoa two Dukes of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti and Galeazzo Maria Sforza, figured on the currency of the island, and two issued during the French protectorate of Genoa (1458-61) actually bear the kneeling figure of Charles VII[492]. Finally, from 1483 small pieces bear the initials of the podestà. The financial affairs of the company were entrusted to two officials known as massarj, who were obliged to send in annual accounts to the Genoese Audit Office. Lastly, Chios was to be a free port for Genoese ships, which were to stop a day there on the voyage to Greece or between Greece and Syria, but no Genoese outlaws were to be harboured there. Thus, while the nominal suzerainty was vested in the home government, the real usufruct belonged to the company, especially as the former was never able to clear off its liabilities to the latter.

The members of the maona soon began to tire of their bargain and to sell their shares. Vignoso died, most of his partners resided at Genoa, and only eleven years after the constitution of the original company the island was in the possession of eight associates, of whom one alone, Lanfranco Drizzacorne, had been a member of the old maona. These persons, being mainly absentees, had farmed out the revenues to another company, formed in 1349 for the extraction of mastic, and consisting of twelve individuals under the direction of Pasquale Forneto and Giovanni Oliverio. Difficulties arose between the eight partners and their lessees; the Republic intervened, and, by the good offices of the Doge of Genoa, Simone Boccanegra, a fresh arrangement[493] was made on March 8, 1362. The island was farmed out for twelve years to the twelve persons above mentioned or their heirs, who collectively formed an “inn” (or albergo), and, abandoning their family names, called themselves both collectively[304] and individually the Giustiniani—a name assumed three years earlier by the members of the old maona, and perhaps derived from the palace where their office was. One of the twelve partners, Gabriele Adorno, alone declined to merge that illustrious name in a common designation. The members of this new maona were to enjoy the revenues of the island in equal shares; but the Republic reserved to herself the right of purchasing Chios before February 26, 1367, the date fixed by the previous arrangement for the liquidation of her original debt of 203,000 Genoese pounds; if that date were allowed to pass without such payment, the Republic could not exercise the right of purchase for three years more; if no payment were made by February 26, 1374, that right would be forfeited altogether. No member of the new company could sell his twelfth or any fraction of it (for each twelfth was divided into three parts called caratti grossi and each of these three was subsequently subdivided into eight shares, making 288 caratti piccoli in all) to any of his partners, but, with the consent of the Doge, he might substitute a fresh partner in his place, provided always that the number of the partners remained twelve and that they belonged to the popular party at Genoa. The number was not, however, strictly maintained. Thus, while at first the partners were twelve, viz. Nicolò de Caneto, Giovanni Campi, Francesco Arangio, Nicolò di S. Teodoro, Gabriele Adorno, Paolo Banca, Tommaso Longo, Andriolo Campi, Raffaelle di Forneto, Lucchino Negro, Pietro Oliverio, and Francesco Garibaldi, there was soon added a thirteenth in the person of Pietro di S. Teodoro, whose share, however, only consisted of two caratti grossi, or sixteen caratti piccoli, that is to say, two-thirds of the share of each of the other members. In the very next year some of the partners retired to Genoa, selling their shares, and thus two entire twelfths came into the possession of the same individual, Pietro Recanelli, who had succeeded Vignoso as the leading spirit of the company. Later on, the shares became subdivided to such an extent that at the date of the Turkish conquest more than 600 persons held fractions of them. The shareholders were entitled not only to their dividends but also to a proportionate share of the local offices, of which two or three were attached to each share, but no shareholder could hold the more important for two consecutive years.

When the term for the purchase of the island by the Genoese Republic drew near, her treasury, exhausted by the war arising out of her quarrels with the Venetians in Cyprus, was unable to liquidate its debt to the company of 203,000 Genoese pounds, at that time (owing to the change in the value of the pound) equivalent to 152,250. Anxious not to forfeit her right of purchase, the Republic paid to the company[305] collectively this sum, which she had first borrowed from the chief members of it in their individual capacity as bankers. By this financial juggle she became possessed of Chios; but, in order to pay the interest on her new loan, she let the island for twenty years more to the maonesi, who were to deduct from its revenues the amount of the interest and remit the balance, calculated at 2000 gold florins, to the Genoese exchequer. Seven years’ balance was to be paid in advance. But such was the financial distress of Genoa that the government in 1380 was obliged to mortgage this annual balance to the bank of St George for 100,000 Genoese pounds. The company then came to the aid of the mother-country, and voluntarily offered to furnish a loan of 25,000 Genoese pounds. In return, the Republic, by a convention of June 28, 1385, renewed the lease of Chios, which would otherwise have expired in 1394, till 1418. Five years before the latter date it was again renewed, in return for a fresh loan of 18,000 Genoese pounds, till 1447; again, in 1436, in consideration of a further loan of 25,000, it was prolonged till 1476, when it was extended to 1507 and then till 1509. Then, at last, the Republic not only resolved to pay off the maonesi, but even raised the money for the purpose; but the shareholders protested that 152,250 Genoese pounds were no longer sufficient in view of the altered value of the pound (then worth only 3 lire 73 c.) and the large sums which they had advanced. Payment was accordingly postponed till 1513, when it was decided to leave the island in the hands of the Giustiniani till 1542, with some modifications of their charter. In 1528, however, it was finally agreed to lease Chios to them in perpetuity, in return for an annual rent of 2500 Genoese pounds. At that time most of the shareholders were enrolled in the Golden Book of Genoa.

Such were the arrangements between the company and the mother-country, arrangements which worked so well that in 220 years there was only one revolt against her, when Marshal Boucicault occupied Genoa for the King of France. Considering their contract thereby annulled, the Giustiniani deposed the podestà and on December 21, 1408, proclaimed their independence. Venice allowed them to buy provisions and arms; but in June, 1409, a Genoese force under Corrado Doria forced them to yield[494]. Let us now look at their relations with foreign powers. Of these, three were at one time or another a menace to their existence—the Greek Empire, Venice, and the Turks. Both Anne of Savoy[495] and Cantacuzene demanded the restoration of Chios from the Republic,[306] which replied that no official orders had been given for its capture and the government could assume no responsibility for the acts of a private company, nor could it dislodge the latter without great expense; at some future date, however, when circumstances were more favourable, it would undoubtedly be possible to restore it to the Emperor. The latter was not satisfied with this reply, but bade the Genoese envoys, who were sent to pacify him, fix a definite date for the evacuation of Chios. It was then agreed between him and the Republic that the maonesi should retain the city of Chios, and enjoy its revenues, for ten years, on condition that they paid an annual tribute of 12,000 gold pieces to the Emperor, hoisted his flag, mentioned his name in their public prayers, and received their metropolitan from the church of Constantinople. The rest of the island, including the other forts, was to belong to the Emperor, and to be governed by an Imperial official, who was to decide all disputes between the Greeks, while those between a Greek and a Latin were to be referred to the two Byzantine and Genoese authorities sitting together. At the end of the ten years, calculated from Cantacuzene’s occupation of Constantinople, the Genoese were to evacuate Chios altogether. Vignoso and his co-partners, however, declined to be bound by an arrangement made between the Emperor and the Republic, whereupon Cybo attempted to restore Greek rule, and perished in the attempt. The two Foglie were, however, temporarily reoccupied[496], but the Greek peril ceased when the Emperor John V Palaiologos in 1363 granted Chios to Pietro Recanelli and his colleagues in return for an annual payment of 500 hypérpera (or £224)[497]. Eight years earlier the position of the maona had been strengthened by the same Emperor’s gift of Lesbos as his sister’s dowry to another Genoese, Francesco Gattilusio, whose family, as time went on, ruled also over Thasos, Lemnos, Samothrace, Imbros, and the town of Ænos on the mainland, in 1913 the Turkish frontier in Europe. In 1440 John VI renewed the charter of 1363.

Venice was a more obstinate rival. The war which broke out between the two Republics in 1350 involved Chios, for a defeated Genoese squadron took refuge there. But Vignoso, with his usual energy, fitted out a flotilla, sailed to Negroponte, captured the castle of Karystos, ravaged Keos, and hung the keys of Chalkis as a trophy over the castle-gate of Chios—a humiliation avenged by the despatch of a Venetian squadron which carried off many of the islanders[498]. During the struggle[307] of the two Italian commonwealths for the possession of Tenedos (granted to Genoa by Andronikos IV in 1376), Foglia Vecchia was attacked and the suburbs of Chios laid in ashes. For a time the common danger from the Turks united the Venetians and the Genoese company; but in 1431-2 a Venetian fleet bombarded the town. The captain of the Venetian foot-soldiers, who bore the appropriate name of Scaramuccia, was killed while laying a mine, and the admiral, Mocenigo, contented himself with ravaging the mastic-gardens. On his return home he was condemned to ten months’ imprisonment in the Pozzi, while his Genoese rival, Spinola, carried off the keys of Karystos to adorn the castle of Chios, where they were still visible in the sixteenth century[499].

There remained the most serious of all enemies—the Turks. Murad I, who died in 1389, had already levied tribute from Chios[500]; Mohammed I in 1415 fixed this sum at 4000 gold ducats, while the lessee of Foglia Nuova paid 20,000 out of the profits of the alum mines. By this system of Danegeld the maonesi kept on fairly good terms with the Turks till the capture of Constantinople. The active part taken in its defence by one of the Giustiniani, whose name will ever be connected with that of the heroic Constantine XI, exasperated Mohammed II against Chios, whither the chalices and furniture from the Genoese churches of Pera were removed, and many of the survivors fled for safety. An increase of the tribute to 6000 ducats was accepted[501]. But in 1455 the Turks sent two fleets to Chios under the pretext of collecting a debt for alum, alleged to have been supplied to the maona by Francesco Drapperio, former lessee of Foglia Nuova, and then established at Pera[502]. These expeditions cost the company Foglia Nuova, but it gained a further respite by the payment of a lump sum of 30,000 gold pieces and the increase of the annual tribute to 10,000 ducats. In vain it appealed to Genoa and to the Pope; in vain on April 7, 1456, the Republic wrote to our King Henry VI[503], then struggling against the Yorkists, for assistance, reminding him that there had been few wars against the infidels in which the most Christian Kings of England had not borne a great part of the toils and dangers. The extinction of the Lesbian principality of the Gattilusj in 1462, the taking of Caffa in 1475, the capture of the Venetian colony of Negroponte by the Turks in 1479, were signs of what was in store for Chios, now completely isolated. The maonesi in vain wrote to Genoa, threatening to abandon the island, if help were not forthcoming, and[308] offered to cede it to her altogether. “We cannot put our hands,” so ran their letter, “on 100 ducats; we owe 10,000. The Genoese mercenaries sent us were very bad. Send us none from the district between Rapallo and Voltri, for they quarrel daily, steal by day and night, and pay too much attention to the Greek ladies,” whose charms were the theme of every visitor to the island[504]. The only means of maintaining independence was to pay tribute punctually and to propitiate any persons who might be influential at the Porte, notably the French ambassadors, two of whom visited Chios in 1537 and 1550. Finally, in 1558 Genoa disavowed all connexion with the island, and instructed her representative at Constantinople to repudiate her sovereignty over it[505].

Then came the final catastrophe. The company was no longer able to provide the annual tribute, which had risen to 14,000 gold pieces, and to give the usual presents, valued at 2000 ducats, of scarlet cloth to the Turkish viziers, “a race of men full of rapacity and avarice,” as De Thou called them. It was accused of having betrayed the Turkish plans against Malta to the knights and thus helping to stultify the siege of that island in 1565; while the fugitive slaves who found refuge in Chios were a constant source of difficulties. One of them was the property of the grand vizier; the podestà, Vincenzo Giustiniani, called upon either to give him up or pay compensation, confided the latter to an emissary, who absconded with the money. Thereupon Pialì Pasha, a Hungarian renegade in the Turkish service, appeared off Chios with a fleet of from 80 to 300 sail on Easter Monday, April 15, 1566. The pasha told the Chiotes that he would not land, as he did not wish to disturb the Easter ceremonies. Next day he entered the harbour and demanded the tribute. After having landed and studied the strategic position, he invited the podestà and the twelve “governors” on board to confer with him, and clapped them into irons. On April 17, as an inscription[506] in the chief mosque, then a church, still tells us, he took the town, and the flag of St George with the red cross gave way to the crescent almost without resistance.

The fall of Genoese rule was ennobled by the heroism of the bishop, Timoteo Giustiniani, who bade a renegade kill him rather than profane the mass, and by the martyrdom of eighteen boys, who died rather than embrace Islâm—a scene depicted by Carlone in the chapel of the Ducal[309] Palace at Genoa[507]. The other boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, while the leading maonesi were exiled to Caffa, whence some of them, thanks to the intervention of the French ambassador, returned to Chios or Genoa[508]. In vain they demanded from the home government compensation for the loss of their island. As late as 1805 their descendants were still trying to recover a sum of money, deposited with the bank of St George, and in 1815 the bank ceased to exist and with it the last faint hope of repayment. There were, however, some lucky exceptions to these misfortunes. Thus Vincenzo Negri Giustiniani, who was a child of two at the date of the Turkish conquest, came to Rome, was created by Pope Paul V in 1605 first marquess of Bassano, and in 1610 built the Palazzo Giustiniani, now the seat of the Italian Freemasons and of the Prussian Historical Institute. Professor Kehr, the director of that body, informs me, however, that there is no trace there of the Chiote inscription of 1522, which is said to have been removed thither[509]. On the other hand, although the Turks destroyed many churches, Chios still abounds with Latin monuments[510], in which the arms of the Giustiniani—a castle of three towers, surmounted after 1413 by the imperial eagle granted by the Emperor Sigismund[511]—are conspicuous. It may be of interest to mention that when in 1912, an Italian attack upon Chios was contemplated, orders were issued to spare the historical monuments of Chios. That island, however, with the exception of a brief Venetian occupation in 1694-5, remained Turkish till November 24, 1912, when a Greek force landed and on the following day easily captured the capital, which thus, for the first time since 1346, passed from under foreign domination.

We may now ask ourselves whether the rule of the company was successful. Financially, it certainly was. Even in its latter days, when heavy loans had been contracted with the bank of St George and the Turkish tribute was 14,000 gold ducats, a dividend of 2000 ducats was paid on each of the thirteen original shares; while in its best times the small caratto, originally worth some 30 Genoese pounds, was quoted at 4930. Chios during the middle ages was one of the most frequented marts of the Levant, while the alum of Foglia Nuova (which, as long as that factory remained Genoese, covered the annual rent to Genoa) and[310] the mastic of the island (in which a part of the Turkish tribute was paid) were two valuable sources of revenue. The production of mastic was carefully organised. The company leased to each hamlet a certain area of plantation, and the lessees once a year handed in a certain weight of mastic in proportion to the number of the trees. If it were a good year and the yield were greater, they received a fixed price per pound for the excess quantity delivered; but if they failed to deliver the stipulated amount, they had to pay twice that sum[512]. In order to keep up prices in years of over-production, all the mastic over a certain amount was either warehoused or burned. Special officials divided the net profit accruing from its sale among the shareholders; no private person might sell it to foreigners; and thefts or smuggling of the precious gum, if committed on a small scale, cost the delinquent an ear, his nose, or both; if on a large scale, brought him to the gallows. Another curious source of revenue was the tax on widows[513]. The latter must have had ample opportunities of avoiding the penalty, for the courtesy and beauty of the Chiote ladies was the theme of every traveller. Indeed, one impressionable Frenchman[514] proclaimed Chios to be “the most agreeable residence” with which he was acquainted, while another visitor[515] declared their natural charm, the elegance of their attire, and the attraction of their gestures and conversation to be such “that they might rather be judged to be nymphs or goddesses than mortal women or maids.” He then, greatly daring, attempts a detailed description of their costume, upon which I shall not venture. Nor were amusements lacking. The inhabitants were musical; they were wont to dance by the Skaramangkou torrent; the chief religious feasts were kept in state; and Cyriacus of Ancona[516] was a witness of the festivities which accompanied the carnival in what Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti[517], another traveller of the fifteenth century, called the first island of the Archipelago.

There was more intellectual life at Chios than in some of the Latin settlements in the Levant; indeed, the two Genoese colonies of Chios and Lesbos stood higher in that respect than most of the Venetian factories. The list of authors during the period of the maona is considerable. Among them we may specially notice Leonardo Giustiniani, archbishop of Lesbos, but a native of Chios, and author of a curious treatise,[311] De vera nobilitate, intended as a reply to the book De nobilitate of the celebrated scholar, Poggio Bracciolini. But the chief value of the literary divine for us at the present day is the graphic account which he has left us in two letters, addressed respectively to Popes Nicholas V and Pius II, of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and of Lesbos in 1462—accounts of the greatest historical interest, because their author was an eyewitness of what he described. In Gerolamo Garibaldi Giustiniani, born in Chios in 1544, the island found an historian, who wrote in French a work entitled La Description et Histoire de l’Isle de Scios, ou Chios; Vincenzo Banca Giustiniani, another Latin Chiote, edited the works of St Thomas Aquinas; while Alessandro Rocca Giustiniani translated portions of Aristotle and Hippocrates. But the most curious local literary figure of the period was Andriolo Banca Giustiniani (1385-1456), who sang in Italian verse the Venetian siege of Chios[518] of 1431. The poet was a man of taste and had the means to satisfy it; he constructed near the so-called “School of Homer” (who, according to Thucydides, was a native of Chios) an “Homeric villa” in a forest of pines near a crystal well, where he was visited by the well-known antiquary and traveller, Cyriacus of Ancona, his frequent correspondent[519]. This elegant Chiote accumulated a library of 2000 manuscripts, and for him Ambrogio Traversari of Florence translated into Latin the treatise on the Immortality of the Soul by the fifth-century philosopher, Æneas of Gaza. His son, in 1474, entertained at his villa a greater even than the archæologist of Ancona, then, however, only a modest ship’s captain, the future discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus. The culture, however, of the Giustiniani seems to have been mainly Latin—a fact explained by their practice of sending their sons to be educated at Genoa, Pavia, Padua, or Bologna; and it was from Italy that they summoned the architects to build their palaces “of divers kinds of marbles, with great porticoes and magnificent galleries,” and their villas, of which there were more than 100 in the last century of their rule. It was only just before the Turkish conquest that they thought of founding a university[520].

But we must also look at the picture from another point of view—that of the governed. The judgment of Finlay that the rule of the company was “the least oppressive government in the Levant” seems by the light of later research to need qualification. If we are to take as our standard the happiness of the people as a whole, then of all the Latin[312] establishments in the Levant Lesbos comes first. But for that there were special reasons. The first Gattilusio came to Lesbos not as a foreign conqueror, but as brother-in-law of the Greek Emperor; he soon spoke the language of his subjects; his successors wrote in Greek, and as time went on the family became hellenized. But a company is apt to be deficient on the human side; and this would seem to have been the weak point of the maona. Quite early in its career a conspiracy of the Greeks was discovered, which led to the permanent expulsion of the metropolitan and the substitution in his place of a vicar, called Δίκαιος (or “the Just”), elected by the company and confirmed by the patriarch. Moreover, the dominant church, whose bishops were usually Pallavicini or Giustiniani, was partly supported by tithes, which the members of the other creed had also to pay, and which they paid so reluctantly that in 1480 the bishop was glad to abandon all claims to tithe and all the church property to the company[521] in return for a fixed stipend. Moreover, we are told that certain Latins seized property belonging to Νέα Μονή, “one of the most beautiful churches of the Archipelago,” as it was called[522]. To these ecclesiastical disadvantages was added social inferiority. The native nobles, or archontes, sixty in number, although their privileges had been guaranteed at the conquest and although instructions were subsequently given to see that that pledge was respected, ranked not only below the Giustiniani, who formed the apex of the social scale, but below the Genoese bourgeoisie also, from which they suffered most. They lived apart in the old town (much as the Catholics still do at Syra); and if they sold their property and left the island, they forfeited to the company one-quarter of the proceeds of such sale.

Worse still was the position of the Greek peasantry, who were practically serfs, forbidden to emigrate without permission and passports. Liable to perform military service even out of the island, they had to undertake in time of peace various forced labours, of which the lightest was to act as beaters once a year for their masters during the partridge season. So many of them sought to escape from Chios that a local shibboleth was invented for their identification, and they were obliged to pronounce the word fragela (a sort of white bread), which became frangela in the mouth of a native. Still, the Greeks were consulted at least formally before a new tax was imposed; a Greek noble[313] sat in the commercial court and on the commission of public works, and during the administration of Marshal Boucicault in 1409 and down to 1417 four out of the six councillors who assisted the podestà were Greeks. In later times when there was a Turkish element in the population—for after 1484 the Turks paid no dues—the company provided the salary of the Turkish kâdi. Cases were tried in a palace known as the Δικαιότατο (“Most Just”), and a “column of justice” hard by served for the punishment of the guilty. A great hardship was the cost of appeals to the ducal council in Genoa—the counterpart of our judicial committee of the privy council. Worst treated of all classes were the Jews, forced to wear a yellow bonnet, to live in their ghetto, which was hermetically closed at Easter, to present a white banner with the red cross of St George to the podestà once a year, and to make sport for the Genoese at religious festivals[523]. Such, briefly, was the Genoese administration of Chios—an episode which may serve to remind us how very modern in some ways were the methods of Italian mediæval commonwealths.

3. THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)

The Genoese occupation of Chios, Lesbos, and Phocæa by the families of Zaccaria and Cattaneo was not forgotten in the counting-houses of the Ligurian Republic. In 1346, two years after the capture of Smyrna, Chios once more passed under Genoese control, the two Foglie followed suit, and in 1355 the strife between John Cantacuzene and John V Palaiologos for the throne of Byzantium enabled a daring Genoese, Francesco Gattilusio, to found a dynasty in Lesbos, which gradually extended its branches to the islands of the Thracian sea and to the city of Ænos on the opposite mainland, and which lasted in the original seat for more than a century.

Disappointed in a previous attempt to recover his rights, the young Emperor John V was at this time living in retirement on the island of Tenedos, then a portion of the Greek Empire and from its position at the mouth of the Dardanelles both an excellent post of observation and a good base for a descent upon Constantinople. During his sojourn there, a couple of Genoese galleys arrived, commanded by Francesco Gattilusio, a wealthy freebooter, who had sailed from his native city[314] to carve out for himself, amidst the confusion of the Orient, a petty principality in the Thracian Chersonese, as others of his compatriots had twice done in Chios, as the Venetian nobles had done in the Archipelago 150 years earlier. The Emperor found in this chance visitor an instrument to effect his own restoration; the two men came to terms, and John V promised, that if Gattilusio would help him to recover his throne, he would bestow upon him the hand of his sister Maria—an honour similar to that conferred by Michael VIII upon Benedetto Zaccaria.

The family of Gattilusio, which thus entered the charmed circle of Byzantine royalty, had already for two centuries occupied a prominent position at Genoa. One of the name is mentioned as a member of the Great Council in 1157; a second is found holding civic office in 1212 and 1214; and two others were signatories of the treaty of Nymphæum. Luchetto, grandfather of the first lord of Lesbos, was both a troubadour and a man of affairs, who went as envoy to Pope Boniface VIII to negotiate peace between his native city and Venice, served as podestà of Bologna, Milan, Savona, and Cremona; and founded in 1295 the family church of San Giacomo at Sestri Ponente in memory of his father—a foundation which remained in the possession of the Gattilusj till 1483, and of which the Lesbian branch continued to be patron. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the family seems to have turned its attention to the Levant trade, for a Gattilusio was among the Genoese who had sustained damage from the subjects of the Greek Emperor at that period, and by 1341 another member of the clan was a resident at Pera. In that year Oberto Gattilusio was one of the Genoese ambassadors, who concluded the treaty between the Republic and the Regent Anne of Savoy at Constantinople, and ten years later the same personage was sent on an important mission to all the Genoese commercial settlements in the East. The future ruler of Lesbos was this man’s nephew[524].

The Genoese of Galata had good reasons to be dissatisfied with the commercial and naval policy of Cantacuzene, and it was no less their interest than that of their ambitious fellow-countryman to see John V replaced on the throne of his ancestors. They accordingly entered into negotiations with him at Tenedos, and thus Gattilusio could rely upon the co-operation of his compatriots at the capital. On a dark and windy night in the late autumn of 1354 he arrived with the young Emperor off the “postern of the Pathfinding Virgin,” where his Ligurian mother-wit[315] at once suggested a device for obtaining admittance. He had on board a number of oil-jars, which he had brought full from Italy—for he combined business with politics—but which were by this time empty. These he ordered the sailors to hurl against the walls one at a time, until the noise awoke the sleeping sentinels. To the summons of the latter voices shouted from the galleys, that they were merchantmen with a cargo of oil, that one of their ships had been wrecked, and that they were willing to share the remains of the cargo with anyone who would help them in their present distress. At this appeal to their love of gain the guards opened the gate, whereupon some 500 of the conspirators entered, slew the sentries on the adjoining tower, and were speedily reinforced by the rest of the ships’ crews and marines. Francesco, who was throughout the soul of the undertaking, mounted a tower in which he placed the young Emperor with a strong guard of Italians and Greeks, and then ran along the wall with a body of soldiers, shouting aloud: “long live the Emperor John Palaiologos!” When dawn broke and the populace realised that their young sovereign was within the walls, their demonstrations convinced Cantacuzene that resistance would be sanguinary, even if successful. He therefore relinquished the diadem which he could not retain, and retired into a monastery, while John V, accompanied by Francesco and the rest of the Italians, marched in triumph into the palace. The restored Emperor was as good as his word; he bestowed the hand of his sister upon his benefactor, and gave to Francesco as her dowry the island of Lesbos. On July 17, 1355, Francesco I began his reign[525].

Connected by marriage with the Greek Imperial house, the Genoese lord of Lesbos seems to have met with no resistance from his Greek subjects, who would naturally regard him not so much in the light of an alien conqueror as in that of a lawful ruler by the grace of the Emperor. He soon learnt to speak their language[526], and continued to assist his Greek brother-in-law with advice and personal service. At the moment of his accession, the Greek Empire was menaced by the Turks, who had lately crossed over into Europe, and occupied Gallipoli, and by Matthew Cantacuzene, the eldest son of the deposed Emperor. In the very next year the capture of the Sultan Orkhan’s son, Halil,[316] by Greek pirates from Foglia Vecchia, at that time a Byzantine fief, enabled John V to divide these two enemies by promising to obtain the release of the Sultan’s son. The promise proved, indeed, to be hard of fulfilment, for John Kalothetos, the Greek governor of Foglia Vecchia, resisted the joint attacks of the Emperor and a Turkish chief, whom John V had summoned to aid him, until he received a large ransom and a high-sounding title. It was during these operations, in the spring of 1357, that the Emperor, on the advice of Francesco Gattilusio, treacherously invited his Turkish ally to visit him on an islet off Foglia and then arrested him[527]. Such reliance, indeed, did John place in his brother-in-law, whose interests coincided with his own, that, when Matthew Cantacuzene was captured by the Serbs and handed over to the Emperor, the latter sent the children of his rival to Lesbos, and even meditated sending thither Matthew himself, because he knew that they would be in safe keeping[528]. In 1366, when the Bulgarian Tsar, John Shishman, had treacherously arrested John V, and the Greeks of Byzantium, hard pressed by the Turks, sought the help of the chivalrous Conte verde, Amedeo VI of Savoy, Francesco Gattilusio was present with one of his nephews at the siege and capture of Gallipoli from the Ottomans and assisted at the taking of Mesembria from the Bulgarians[529]. But fear of Murad I made him refuse to see or speak to his wife’s nephew, Manuel, when the latter, after plotting against the Sultan, sought refuge in Lesbos[530].

Meanwhile, as a Genoese, he naturally had difficulties with the Venetians. Thus, we find him capturing[531] in the Ægean a Venetian colonist from Negroponte, and quite early in his reign he imitated the bad example of his predecessor, Domenico Cattaneo, and coined gold pieces in exact counterfeit of the Venetian ducat, although of different weight. This was so serious an offence, that the Venetian Government made a formal complaint at Genoa, and in 1357 the Doge of his native city wrote to Francesco[532] bidding him discontinue this dishonest practice, which augured badly for the future of his administration, and would entail severe penalties upon him, if he insisted in its continuance. Francesco felt himself strong enough to go on his way, heedless of the ducal thunders alike of Genoa and of Venice, and coins of himself and of at least four out of his five successors have been preserved. The great war, which broke out between the two Republics in 1377 on account of[317] the cession of Tenedos by the usurper Andronikos to Genoa and its seizure by Venice, must have placed Francesco in a difficult position. He was, it is true, a Genoese but he was also brother-in-law of John V, whom Andronikos had deposed and who had promised the disputed island, which he and Francesco knew so well, to Venice. Accordingly, when the treaty of Turin imposed upon Venice the surrender of Tenedos to Amedeo VI of Savoy, who was to raze the castle to the ground at the cost of Genoa, yet the islanders none the less swore that they would retain their independence. Muazzo, the Venetian governor, excused his action in refusing to give up the island by pleading Francesco’s intrigues. An agent of the Lesbian lord, he wrote, one Raffaele of Quarto, had stirred up the inhabitants, some 4000 in number, to resist the cession, by spreading a rumour that, if Tenedos fell into Genoese hands, the Venetian colonists would all be forced to turn Jews or emigrate[533]. When, however, Venice found herself reluctantly compelled to force her recalcitrant officer to carry out the provisions of the treaty, Francesco helped to victual the Venetian fleet, and Tenedos was reduced to be the desert that it long remained.

While such were his relations with the Byzantine Empire and the rival Republics of the West, the Papacy regarded Francesco as one of the factors in the Union of the Churches and thereby as a champion of Christendom against the Turks. When Innocent VI in 1356, despatched St Peter Thomas and another bishop to compass the Union of the Old and the New Rome, he recommended his two envoys to the lord of Lesbos. Thirteen years later, Francesco accompanied his brother-in-law, the Emperor John V, to Rome, and signed as one of the witnesses of that formal confession of the Catholic faith, which the sorely-pressed sovereign made on October 18, 1369, in the palace of the Holy Ghost before Urban V[534]. He was one of the potentates summoned by Gregory XI in 1372 to attend the Congress[535] of Thebes on October 1, 1373, to consider the Turkish peril—a peril which at that time specially menaced his island—and in the following year the Pope recommended Smyrna to his care, and sent two theologians to convince him, a strenuous fighter against the Turks, and defender of Christendom beyond the seas, that the Union of the Churches would be a better defence against them than[318] armed force[536]. The Popes might well have thought that no one could be a better instrument of their favourite plan than this Catholic brother-in-law of the Greek Emperor. But the astute Genoese was too wise to compel his Greek subjects to accept his creed. Throughout his reign, besides a Roman Catholic Archbishop, there was a Greek Metropolitan of Mytilene, and under his successor the Metropolitan throne of Methymna was also occupied[537]. The Armenian colony, settled in Lesbos, preferred, however, to seek shelter in Kos under the Knights of St John rather than remain as his subjects, without proper protection from a hostile raid[538].

The success of their kinsman encouraged other members of the Gattilusio clan to seek a comfortable seigneurie in the Levant. The barony of Ænos, at the mouth of the Maritza, had been assigned in the partition of the Byzantine Empire to the Crusaders, and, although reconquered by the Greeks, the exiled Latin Emperor Baldwin II had been pleased to consider it as still his to bestow, together with the titular kingdom of Salonika, upon Hugues, Duke of Burgundy, in 1266. Besieged by Bulgarians and Tartars in 1265, and invaded by the Catalans in 1308, it had been governed in the middle of the fourteenth century by Nikephoros II Angelos, the dethroned Despot of Epeiros, the son-in-law and nominee of John Cantacuzene. When, however, Cantacuzene fell, the Despot thought it more prudent to surrender the city to John V, who thus, in 1356, became its master. We do not know the precise time or manner of its transference to the Gattilusio family. A later Byzantine historian[539], however, states that the inhabitants, dissatisfied with the Imperial governor, called in a member of the reigning family of Lesbos, who was able to maintain his position owing to the domestic quarrels in the Imperial family, and by payment of an annual tribute to the Sultan, when the Turks became masters of Thrace and Macedonia. Whether the ancient barony became a Genoese possession by the will of the natives or by grant of the Emperor, one fact is certain, that in June, 1384, it was in the possession of Francesco’s brother, Nicolò[540]. Some six weeks later, a great upheaval of nature, prophesied, it was afterwards said, by a Lesbian monk, made the new lord of Ænos regent of his brother’s island also.

The violent end of the first Gattilusio who reigned in Lesbos was[319] long remembered in the island. On August 6, 1384, a terrible earthquake buried him beneath the ruins of the castle which he had built, as an inscription proudly informs us[541], some eleven years before. After a long and painful search, his mutilated body was found and laid to rest in a coffin, which he had already prepared, in the church of St John Baptist, which he had founded. By his side were laid the mangled bodies of two of his sons, Andronico and Domenico, who, with his wife, had also perished in the disaster. A third son, named Jacopo, escaped, however, by a miracle. At the time of the shock, he was sleeping by the side of his brothers in a tower of the castle; next day, however, he was discovered by a good woman in a vineyard near the Windmills at the foot of the fortress. The woman hastened to tell the good news to the chief men of the town, who came and fetched the young survivor. The boy took the oath on the Gospels as lord of Lesbos before the people and the nobles, and, as he was still a minor, his uncle, Nicolò Gattilusio, lord of Ænos, who hastened over to Lesbos on the news of the catastrophe, shared authority with him. In order to perpetuate the name of the popular founder of the dynasty, Jacopo on his accession took the name of Francesco II[542].

The joint government of uncle and nephew lasted for three years, when a dispute arose between them, and Nicolò returned to the direction of his Thracian barony. In November, 1388, Francesco II joined the league of the Knights of Rhodes, Jacques I of Cyprus, the Genoese Chartered Company of Chios, and the Commune of Pera against the designs of the Sultan Murad I. His popularity with his Perote compatriots was such, that, on the occasion of a visit to Constantinople in 1392, they gave him a banquet; but four years later they complained that he had not performed his treaty obligations, made in 1388, against the Turks. In the summer of 1396, Pera was besieged by the forces of Bayezid I, and although Francesco was actually in the port of Constantinople at the time, and his galley was stationed in the Golden Horn near “the Huntsman’s Gate” in the modern district of Aivan Serai the Commune thought it necessary to draw up a formal protest against his inaction and execute it on the stem of his ship. He replied by offering to aid his fellow-Genoese, if they would make a sortie, and his galley subsequently assisted the Venetians in relieving the capital[543]. After[320] the disastrous defeat of the Christians at the battle of Nikopolis later in the same year, both he and Nicolò of Ænos rendered signal services to the Sultan’s noble French prisoners, and Lesbos emerged into prominence throughout the French-speaking world. Thither came the Duke of Burgundy’s chamberlain, Guillaume de l’Aigle, on his preliminary mission to mollify the heart of Bayezid, with whom Francesco had such influence that he was able to obtain leave for his sick cousin, Enguerrand VII de Coucy, to remain behind at Brusa, when the rest of the captives were dragged farther up country by the Sultan[544]. The humane feelings of the lord of Lesbos were doubtless further moved by the fact that de Coucy was, through his mother, an Austrian princess, connected with the reigning family of Constantinople, from which he was himself descended, and by the recent establishment of a French protectorate over Genoa.

Accordingly, he offered bail for his suffering relative, and when Marshal Boucicault, another of the prisoners, was set free to raise the amount necessary for their ransom, Francesco and other rich merchants of Lesbos advanced him the preliminary sum of 30,000 francs. Nicolò of Ænos willingly lent 2000 ducats more, and sent the prisoners a present of fish, bread and sugar, while his wife added a goodly supply of linen, for which they expressed their deep gratitude[545]. Of the total ransom, fixed at 200,000 ducats, Francesco and Nicolò, anxious to please the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, respectively made themselves liable for 110,000 and 40,000, which the prisoners promised to repay as soon as possible. Half of these two sums was actually paid, and the lord of Ænos further furnished on account of the Comte de Nevers 10,000 ducats to a son of Bayezid and another Turk, who had guarded that nobleman on the day of his capture. Some years later the two Gattilusj of Lesbos and Ænos sent in a claim for what they had advanced and for sundry expenses amounting in all to 108,500 ducats. Another member of the family lent 5075 ducats, and[321] during his stay in Lesbos the Comte de Nevers negotiated another loan from his host for 2500 more[546]. These sums show the wealth and credit of these merchant princes.

When the ransom had been settled, the three French and Burgundian envoys who had been treating with Bayezid, embarked for Lesbos, escorted by Francesco and Nicolò and accompanied by one of the ransomed prisoners, who took with him to Burgundy a natural son of Francesco, destined to become the grandfather of Giuliano Gattilusio, the terrible corsair of the next century[547]. The rest of the prisoners followed early in July, and remained for six weeks the guests of Francesco and his lady, a noble dame of gentle breeding and European accomplishments, acquired at the court of Marie de Bourbon, titular Empress of Constantinople and Princess of Achaia, in whose society she had been educated. Feeling herself highly honoured at the presence of the Comte de Nevers and his companions in the castle of Lesbos, she clothed them with fine linen and cloth of Damascus, according to the fashion of the Levant, not forgetting to replenish the wardrobe of their retainers, while her husband and his uncle rendered them every honour and assisted them in their necessity. The visit terminated in the middle of August, when two galleys, equipped by the Knights of Rhodes, transported them to that island, their next stage on the homeward voyage. Their generous host stood on the shore till the Rhodian galleys had sunk beneath the horizon[548]. A few hours earlier he had obtained the signature of a treaty which might confer a solid advantage upon his own family and give an illusory hope of future glory to his departing guests. His daughter Eugenia had just married John Palaiologos, Despot of Selymbria, the Emperor Manuel II’s nephew and rival. Through the agency of Francesco this potentate ceded his claims to the Empire to King Charles VI of France in return for a French castle and a perpetual annuity of 25,000 gold ducats[549]. Thus in Lesbos, on the morrow of Nikopolis, the French could dream of re-establishing the long extinct Latin Empire of Romania!

Francesco had not seen the last of the French prisoners. In the summer of 1399, Boucicault, sent by Charles VI to assist Manuel II in defending Constantinople from the Turks, arrived at Lesbos, which he[322] had last visited two years before. Francesco received him with outward signs of joy, but told him that he had already informed the Turks of this new expedition, as he was bound to do by the treaties which he had with them. The position of the Lesbian lord was, indeed, of no small difficulty. It was his interest to stand well with Bayezid, while his son-in-law, John Palaiologos, who spent much of his time in the island, had received, as the son of Manuel’s elder brother, Turkish assistance in his blockade of the Imperial city. The diplomatic Levantine did not, however, wish to offend his powerful guest; he therefore offered to accompany him, and ordered a galley to be made ready to join the expedition. But the information which he had supplied to Bayezid had put the Turks upon their guard. A raid in Asia Minor was Boucicault’s sole military success; but he achieved, probably thanks to the influence of Francesco, the reconciliation of Manuel with his nephew, whom the French Marshal fetched from Selymbria to Constantinople. Manuel then departed with Boucicault to seek aid at the courts of Europe, while John acted as his viceroy on the Bosporos and received, in the presence of the Marshal, the promise of Salonika as his future residence[550]. Thus, during the absence of Manuel, Francesco’s daughter Eugenia sat upon the Byzantine throne as the consort of the Emperor’s representative, while her sister Helene married Stephen Lazarevich, Despot of Serbia, who had made her acquaintance during a visit to Lesbos on his return from the stricken field of Angora[551]. Francesco was at that time holding Foglia Vecchia on a lease from the maona of Chios, and his tact and presents saved the place in that crisis from the covetous hands of the victorious Timour and his grandson[552].

When Manuel returned to Constantinople in 1403, he refused to carry out his promised gift of Salonika. Before the battle of Angora had decided the fate of Bayezid, and the issue between the Turks and the Mongols was still uncertain, John Palaiologos had agreed—it was said—to surrender Constantinople and become a tributary of the Sultan, in the event of a Turkish victory. This was Manuel’s, excuse for refusing to allow his nephew to reside at Salonika and for banishing him to Lemnos. John thereupon appealed to his father-in-law for assistance, and Francesco, early in 1403, sailed with five vessels to attack Salonika. Hearing that Boucicault, then French governor of Genoa, whose interest in Lesbos had just been evinced by the despatch of an embassy thither,[323] was once more in the Levant on a punitive expedition against King Janus of Cyprus, who had besieged the Genoese colony of Famagosta, Francesco despatched a vessel to meet the Marshal, reminding him that he had been a witness of the Emperor’s promise and begging him to aid in taking Salonika[553]. Boucicault did not accede to this request; on the contrary, two vessels from Lesbos and two from Ænos went to assist him in his operations against the King of Cyprus, and remained with him till shortly before he reached the Venetian colony of Modon on his homeward voyage. Manuel ended by bestowing Salonika upon John Palaiologos, but the attacks made by Boucicault upon Venetian trade in the Levant and the consequent hostilities cost Nicolò Gattilusio, owing to his Genoese origin, the loss of 3000 ducats in gold, seized by the Venetians at Modon[554].

In October of this eventful year of Boucicault’s cruise, there arrived at Lesbos a mission, sent by Enrique III of Castile to Timour, the victor of Angora, whose court was then at Samarkand. The narrative of the Castilian ambassador, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, gives us an interesting account of the island under the second Gattilusio. He found the town “built on a high hill near the sea,” and “surrounded by a wall with many towers,” outside of which was “a large suburb.” Besides the capital, Lesbos contained “several villages and castles,” while the neighbourhood of the city was well-cultivated and abounded in gardens and vineyards. At one time—probably before the earthquake—“very large houses and churches” had stood near the town, and at one end of the city were “the ruins of great palaces, and in the middle of the ruins about 40 blocks of white marble.” The local tradition was, that “on the top of these blocks there was once a platform, where those of the city met in council.” During the five days of their stay the envoys made the acquaintance of John Palaiologos, who was then residing in his wife’s old home, and heard the tragic story of the late lord’s death, of his successor’s marvellous preservation and of the recent expedition against Salonika[555]. Thus, in the reign of Francesco II, Lesbos was frequently visited by important personages from the West, and was their last stopping-place in Latin lands on their way to Constantinople or to Asia. Descended from the famous houses of Byzantium and Savoy, and connected with that of Austria, the lord of Mytilene and lessee of Foglia Vecchia was regarded by Western visitors as “a great baron”; Eastern potentates sought the hands of his daughters in marriage, and when one[324] of them married the heir of the powerful Giovanni de’ Grimaldi[556], governor of Nice and usurper of Monaco, the dowry of 5000 gold ducats which she brought from Lesbos was considered a large sum on the Riviera. Although born in the Levant, he still kept up the family connexion with his paternal city. Both he and his uncle had financial transactions with Genoa[557], and Francesco was patron of the family church of San Giacomo at Sestri Ponente[558]. At the same time, while Latin archbishops held the see of Mytilene, his relations with the dignitaries of the Orthodox church were excellent. The Œcumenical Patriarch addressed him as “well-beloved nephew of the Emperor,” and his uncle Nicolò as the “Emperor’s kinsman by marriage[559], the most noble, glorious, and prudent archon of Ænos,” whose consent was sought for the appointment of a Metropolitan to that long vacant see[560]. With Venice the Gattilusj, as befitted Genoese, at times had difficulties. In 1398 corsairs, sallying forth from their dominions, did much damage to the Cretans who sailed under the Venetian flag; but the Republic none the less allowed the wax of Lesbos to be exported at certain seasons for sale in her dominions[561].

After an eventful reign of 20 years, Francesco II died, if we may believe an anonymous Greek chronologist[562], on October 26, 1404. His end was strangely similar to that of his father. On a journey through the island, while passing the night in one of the lofty towers then common in the Archipelago, he was stung by a scorpion. Alarmed at his cries, his attendants and nobles climbed up into his room in such numbers that the floor collapsed and he was killed on the spot leaving three sons, Jacopo, Palamede and Dorino, of whom the eldest Jacopo became his successor[563]. The heir was, however, still a minor, and accordingly once again Nicolò came and acted as regent. His friendly policy as regent and his support of her subjects in the Levant on more than one occasion called forth the warm praise of Venice; but his[325] fortification of Tenedos provoked an indignant protest[564]. Moreover the Greeks of Lesbos can scarcely have been edified by the appointment of rival Latin bishops—the result of the schism in the Western Church—which occurred during his regency[565]. In the spring of 1409 he died[566], and Jacopo, then of age, assumed the government of Lesbos, while Francesco’s younger son, Palamede[567], succeeded his uncle and guardian at Ænos. Nicolò’s fame long lingered in the Levant. Kritoboulos[568] half a century later ascribed to him the achievements of Francesco I, the founder of the dynasty, whose wisdom, and education, whose courage and physical gifts he extols, whom all Syria and Egypt feared and propitiated with annual blackmail, for his numerous navy ravaged their coasts and even the Libyan littoral.

Jacopo’s policy was to favour Genoese interests where they conflicted with Venetian, but to co-operate with the two rival Republics when they showed signs of uniting against his dreaded neighbours, the Turks. Thus, he aided Centurione Zaccaria, the Genoese Prince of Achaia, in his campaign against the Tocchi of Cephalonia and Zante, who were thereby compelled to invoke the protection of Venice; while the Venetians threatened to sequestrate all Lesbian merchandise in Crete, unless he gave satisfaction for the seizure of a Cretan merchantman[569]. Venetian and Genoese subjects, however, suffered alike from the reprisals provoked by the attack of two Lesbian galleys upon the Saracens of Damietta; and Jacopo had a counter grievance in the illegal levy of toll upon his people by the Genoese of Chios[570]. Towards the Turks he was, from his position, obliged to be deferential, except when he saw prospect of common action against them. If the Knights of Rhodes complained that he had sheltered the Turks, and so saved them from destruction at the hands of those zealous champions of Christendom[571], he was ready, in 1415, to join the latter, the Genoese of Chios, and the Venetian Republic in an anti-Turkish league; while he did homage to Mohammed I and aided first that Sultan and then Murad II in the suppression of Djouneïd of Aïdin, when fortune smiled upon them[572]. In[326] 1426, the threatened declaration of war by Venice upon Genoa, then under Milanese domination, caused him some embarrassment; but the Genoese Government bade him[573] not to be afraid of Venetian threats. Not long after this, probably in 1428, Jacopo died[574]. An anonymous Greek informs us that he had married Bonne, “the fair daughter of the lord of Nice near Marseilles” but this statement would appear to be due to a confusion with the marriage of his sister with Pietro de’ Grimaldi, for Bonne, the offspring of that union espoused Louis Cossa, lord of Berre, unless the Bonne mentioned was the daughter of Amedeo VIII of Savoy, in whose dominions Nice was then included[575]. In 1421, however, Valentina D’Oria is described as “lady of Mytilene[576].” At any rate, it seems probable that he left no issue, for his successor, Dorino I, is described in a Genoese document and by a traveller of this period as “brother” of Palamede, lord of Ænos[577], and therefore of Jacopo. Dorino, whose name was derived from the famous Genoese house of D’Oria, allied by marriage with many Gattilusj, had already had experience of ruling for several years over Foglia Vecchia as his appanage—a fact still commemorated by his coins and an inscription there[578], which describes him as its “lord” in 1423-4. This former possession of the Zaccaria is first mentioned as administered by the Gattilusj in 1402, and remained united with the Lesbian branch of the family till 1455.

Meanwhile, Ænos had prospered under the rule of Palamede. Six inscriptions, still extant there, proclaim the activity of the masons during the early years of his long reign—the erection of the churches of the Chrysopege and of St Nicholas by two private citizens and the completion of three other public works[579]. But Palamede not only embellished his domain; he also extended it. The neighbouring island of Samothrace, a Greek possession since the reconquest of Constantinople from the Latins, now owned his sway—for in 1433, when Bertrandon de[327] la Brocquière[580] visited Ænos, he wrote that Samothrace also belonged to its lord. In that island, then known as Mandrachi and celebrated for its honey and its goats, Palamede erected on March 26, 1431, and extended in 1433, a new fortress for the protection of its numerous population, as two inscriptions in its walls, one in Greek, one in Latin[581] still remind us. The Genoese lord, we are told, was interested in the past history of his dominions; he “loved greatly to hear learned discussions,” and to him a contemporary scholar, John Kanaboutzes, applied the saying of Plato about philosophers and kings. To his desire to know what Dionysios of Halikarnassos had written about Samothrace we owe the brief commentary on that author, compiled at his command by that writer, a native of Foglia[582], whose family was connected with Ænos[583]—one of several instances, where Italian rulers of Greece showed a consciousness of that country’s great past. Like his brother Jacopo, Palamede was inclined to support the Genoese Prince of Achaia, and the Venetian admiral was ordered to remonstrate with him, should occasion require[584].

Although more than seventy years had by this time elapsed since Francesco I had left Genoa for the Levant, the connexion between the distant Republic and his descendants in the East was never closer than now. In 1428, and again in 1444, the Genoese Government, although it forbade the circulation of Lesbian ducats in Genoa and district, and repudiated responsibility for the harm done by the Gattilusj to the subjects of the Sultan of Egypt, specially consulted “the lords of Mytilene, Ænos and Foglia Vecchia” whether they desired to be included or no in the treaties of peace, which it had just concluded with King Alfonso V of Aragon. “The many services rendered to us and to the community of Genoa by you and your ancestors”—so runs one of these interesting despatches—“make us realise that in all treaties involving peace or war we ought to consider your honour and advancement. For your welfare, your misfortunes, are equally ours.” Dorino I replied that he wished to be so included, and his agents accordingly ratified the peace at Genoa on his behalf in 1429. When, two years later, Genoa was drawn into the war between her Milanese masters and Venice, the Archbishop of Milan, who was at that time the governor of Genoa,[328] notified Dorino of the outbreak of hostilities, following the precedent set in the case of his father and grandfather, warned that “most distinguished of our citizens” to put his island in a state of defence and begged him to aid any Genoese colony that might require assistance[585]. So much importance was attached at Milan to his support, that Francesco Sforza, the Duke, accredited Benedetto Folco of Forlì to the Lesbian court, in order to urge Dorino against Venice[586]. At the same time, the Genoese Government, “remembering that in all its past victories the galleys of the Gattilusj had borne their part,” invited the lord of Lesbos to co-operate with Ceba, the Genoese commander who was to be despatched for the relief of Chios from the Venetians, and requested him to send a galley to that island. Dorino replied in a loyal strain, whereupon the Genoese Government thanked him for this display of fidelity, traditional in his family, and again urged him to equip his galley for the defence of Chios. Two other despatches, following in rapid succession, begged him to inform the Chians of the speedy arrival of the Genoese fleet and to see that his own galley was in Chian waters by the middle of May. Dorino was as good as his word, and gave orders that a Lesbian galley should join the expedition; but before the latter arrived, the Venetians had raised the siege. As a reward for his services, the commander of the Genoese fleet and the governors of Pera and Chios were instructed to provide for the safety of his little state, and the home government invited him to rely upon its unshakable affection in time of need. Influential Genoese marriages stimulated this feeling. Dorino had married a D’Oria; Palamede’s daughter Caterina now married another; while her sisters, Ginevra and Costanza, respectively espoused Ludovico and Gian Galeazzo de Campo-fregoso, relatives of the then reigning Doge, and the former soon to be Doge himself. Thus Lesbian interests were well represented at Genoa. In return, Genoa frequently requested Dorino to see that justice was done to her subjects in his dominions, even to the detriment of his own family[587].

Genoa found Dorino no less useful as a diplomatist than as an ally, for the lord of Lesbos and Foglia Vecchia had married his daughter Maria to Alexander, second son of Alexios IV, Emperor of Trebizond, in whose dominions the Genoese, owing to their Black Sea colonies, had important commercial interests, latterly greatly injured by the[329] pro-Venetian policy of that sovereign. According to the Trapezuntine practice, Alexios had raised his eldest son John IV to the Imperial dignity in his own lifetime; but his unfilial heir conspired against him, was driven into exile, and replaced by his next brother Alexander. John IV was, however, as favourable to the Genoese as his father to the Venetians, and was restored with the assistance of a Genoese of Caffa. Alexios IV was murdered in 1429; but John IV was not allowed to reign undisturbed. His brother Alexander fled to Constantinople, where his sister was wife of the Emperor John VI, and contracted a marriage with Dorino’s daughter, in order that he might secure his support, and through him, that of Genoa, against the Emperor of Trebizond. When the Spanish traveller, Pero Tafur, visited Lesbos at this time he found Alexander there engaged in levying a fleet for his restoration. This did not, however, suit Genoese policy, and accordingly the Doge of Genoa requested Dorino in 1438 to act as peacemaker between the two brothers and to invite his son-in-law to reside at Constantinople or in Lesbos on an annuity chargeable on the revenues of Trebizond[588]. Another matrimonial alliance brought Dorino’s family into renewed relations with the Palaiologoi. In 1440, an old link between the two families had been snapped by the death of Eugenia Gattilusio, widow of the Emperor John VI’s cousin and namesake[589]—an event which was doubtless the occasion when the castle of Kokkinos on the coast of Lemnos, which had been her widow’s portion, passed into the hands of Dorino[590]. On July 27 of the following year, however, the Emperor’s brother, the Despot Constantine, afterwards the last Christian ruler of Byzantium, married Dorino’s daughter Caterina, a marriage arranged by the historian Phrantzes. This union did not last long; after a brief honeymoon in Lesbos, Constantine left his bride in her father’s care, and set out, accompanied by a Lesbian galley, for the Morea, nor did he see her again till his return in the following July. At Lesbos he took her on board his ship; but, when he reached Lemnos on his way to Constantinople, he had to take refuge behind the walls of Kokkinos from the attacks of a Turkish fleet. The Turks in vain besieged the castle of the Gattilusj for 27 days, and the strain and anxiety of the siege caused the death of his wife, which occurred at Palaiokastro in August. There[330] the ill-fated second consort of the last hero of the Byzantine Empire was laid to rest[591].

Meanwhile, besides the acquisition of Kokkinos, thus courageously saved by his heroic son-in-law, Dorino had received from the Greek Empire the island of Thasos, which more than a century before had belonged to the Genoese family of Zaccaria. Indeed, if we may accept the two allusions to the Gattilusj in the Greek version of Bondelmonti[592] as the work of that traveller, Thasos, which was Byzantine in September, 1414, had been given to Jacopo as a fief before 1420. At any rate, a Thasian inscription of April 1, 1434, now preserved in the wall of the church of St Athanasios at Kastro, informs us that a tower was built there by Oberto de’ Grimaldi[593] a member of the well-known Ligurian family who is mentioned elsewhere[594] as a captain in the service of Dorino. Ten years later, the archæologist, Cyriacus of Ancona, upon visiting Thasos, found that Dorino had recently bestowed the island upon his son, Francesco III, who was still under the control of a preceptor, Francesco Pedemontano.

The indefatigable antiquary may have paid an earlier visit to Lesbos in 1431, but the accounts which he has left of the Gattilusj, their dominions, and the neighbouring islands of the Thracian Sea range from 1444 to 1447. In Lesbos he was well received by Dorino, who promised to aid him in exploring the whole island. He had, indeed, arrived at a fortunate moment, for the rumour of a threatened Turkish invasion had ceased, so that the lord of Lesbos had leisure for archæology, and his visitor could examine “the remains of the temple of Diana,” and “the baths of Jove,” whose name was carved in the midst of them[595]. With Dorino’s captain, Oberto de’ Grimaldi, he sailed to Foglia Vecchia, where the Gattilusj had a factory, as at Lesbos, for the production of alum, and made the acquaintance of “the Master Kanaboutzes,” probably the author of the commentary on Dionysios, who could tell him all about the Foglie, of which he was a native[596]. In Thasos, the third domain of the elder branch of the Gattilusj, he spent Christmas day, and composed a long Latin inscription as well as an[331] Italian poem in honour of young Francesco. The enthusiastic guest prayed that the beginning of his host’s rule over Thasos might be of as good omen as “the yule log thrown on the fire in the turreted castle”; that the yoke of the barbarian Turks might be removed from Thrace, that the former dependencies of the island there might return to his sway, and that Francesco’s patron saint, St John the Evangelist, might protect this “native offspring of the Palaiologoi, this pride of the most noble Gatalusian race.” “What Thasian nymph,” he asks, “could have deprived Lesbos of her Francesco?” The attraction was the lordship of an island, which had been described by Bondelmonti as well-peopled, very fertile and containing three fair towns. Francesco had, indeed, begun well by restoring the principal city, thus earning a dedicatory inscription by the Thasian citizens and colonists, and by erecting at the entrance of the harbour some fine marble statues, which an ancient inscription showed to have represented the members of the Thasian council. At this time the island could boast of six other towns beside its “marble city,” whose walls attracted the admiration of the traveller. Under the guidance of Carlo de’ Grimaldi and “the learned Giovanni of Novara,” he inspected the numerous ancient tombs outside, the large amphitheatre with no less than 20 rows then standing intact, and the akropolis of the city[597].

The worthy Cyriacus was no less hospitably received by the junior branch of the Gattilusj. At Ænos he met Palamede with his two sons Giorgio and Dorino II, and was delighted to find there an old friend in the person of Cristoforo Dentuto, envoy extraordinary of Genoa in the Levant. Accompanied by “the prince of Ænos and Samothrace” as he calls Palamede, and by Francesco Calvi, the latter’s secretary, he was taken to see “the great tomb of Polydoros, son of Priam,” some five stadia beyond the walls, admired the sculptured figures of fauns and animals there, and copied an ancient Greek inscription from the marble base of a statue that stood before “the prince’s court.” Letters of introduction from Palamede and Francesco of Thasos secured for him a warm reception at the monastery of Hagia Laura on Mount Athos[598]. At Samothrace, Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, Palamede’s prefect of the island, personally conducted the antiquary to the old city, where he saw “ancient walls and the remains of a marble temple of Neptune”[332] (known to modern archæologists as “the Dorian marble temple”), “fragments of huge columns, epistylia and bases, and doorposts, adorned with the crowned heads of bulls and other figures”—now identified with the remains of a round building built by Arsinöe, daughter of Ptolemy Soter. Thence he went to “the new castle, founded by Palamede” some thirteen years before, and built to protect his new town of “Capsulum.” Close to the tower he saw to his delight “several ancient marbles, with dances of Nymphs sculptured and inscriptions in Latin and Greek”—the two reliefs of dancing Nymphs now in the Louvre[599]. From his accounts of the neighbouring islands, we learn that Imbros, where his guide was a noble and learned Imbriote, Hermodoros Michael Kritoboulos, the historian, in 1444 was still Byzantine, and “governed for the Emperor John Palaiologos” by that same noble, Manuel Asan, of whom inscriptions have been found there, and who had lately restored two-thirds of the akropolis[600]. We find, too, that in 1447 Theodore Branas was Byzantine governor of Lemnos, where the Gattilusj as yet held only the castle of Kokkinos[601].

The visit of the antiquary of Ancona to the Gattilusj was the calm before the storm, which was so soon to burst upon them. Even while Cyriacus was their guest, the fatal battle of Varna made Murad II master of the Near East. For a few years, indeed, the Gattilusj went on marrying and giving in marriage, as if the end of their rule were not at hand. In 1444, Dorino’s daughter Ginevra married Giacomo II Crispo, Duke of the Archipelago[602]; five years later the lord of Lesbos sent the Archbishop of Mytilene, at that time the celebrated Leonardo of Chios, to Rome to obtain from the Pope a dispensation for the marriage of his eldest surviving son, Domenico, and a daughter of Palamede. As the two young people were first-cousins, Ludovico de Campo-fregoso, Palamede’s son-in-law and at that time Doge of Genoa, begged the Pope not to grant the dispensation, and as an example of the iniquity of such an alliance he instanced the case of Dorino’s firstborn (presumably Francesco III of Thasos), who had married another daughter of Palamede and had died less than six months[333] afterwards. The Pope refused his consent, and the marriage did not take place[603].

Hitherto the Gattilusj, partly by tribute paid ever since the reign of Murad I[604], partly by tact, had managed to keep the Turks at a distance. On one occasion, when Constantinople had been threatened, the Pope had offered to pay the expenses of the Lesbian galley, if Dorino would agree to sent it thither; but the Genoese Government, while transmitting his Holiness’ offer and praising the services of the Gattilusj to Christendom, recognised their natural unwillingness to offend the Sultan and advised Dorino, if he did send aid, to pretend that he was merely protecting Genoese interests at Pera. The Greek Emperor was able to raise a loan, if he received no actual assistance, at Ænos[605]; but in 1450, at last, Lesbos was attacked. Murad despatched a large fleet under Baltaoghli, the first in the list of Turkish admirals, against the island, and his men carried off more than 3000 souls, slaughtered many cattle, destroyed the flourishing city of Kallone, and inflicted damage to the amount of more than 150,000 ducats. It was probably on this occasion that the lady of Lesbos, Orietta d’Oria, performed the prodigy of valour that won her a niche in the literary Pantheon of her native city besides the men of her father’s house. At the time of the invasion, she seems to have been in the town of Molivos, the ancient Methymna, whose inhabitants, exhausted from lack of food, were on the point of surrendering, when she appeared among them in full armour, and led them to victory against the astonished Turks. Thereupon Dorino was able to secure by a timely present and the increase of his tribute to 2000 gold pieces a renewal of the peace which he protested that he had never broken. He was, however, under no illusions as to the durability of this truce. He wrote to Genoa, asking for assistance, reminding the Republic that he was of Genoese origin and that he had often aided her to the best of his power with men, ships, and money. Unless, therefore, she could protect him, he would be reluctantly compelled to look elsewhere for help. At the same time, after the fashion of the Christian princes of the Levant on the eve of the Turkish conquest, he announced his intention of sending an expedition to obtain his rights from the Emperor John IV of Trebizond, who had also maltreated the Genoese of Caffa, and begged the Republic to receive and revictual his galleys in her Black Sea ports. This last request was granted[606].

The Turkish conquest of Constantinople, although it sounded the death-knell of the Latin states in the Levant, was of momentary benefit to the Gattilusj. They had been close relatives and good friends of the Greek Imperial family, and one of them, a certain Laudisio, had distinguished himself in the defence of the city[607]; but, when all was over, they hastened to profit by its fall. The two islands of Lemnos and Imbros, from their position near the mouth of the Dardanelles, have always possessed great strategic importance. Under the Latin Empire, Lemnos had been the fief of the Lord High Admiral, who bore the title of Grand-duke; under the Palaiologoi it had been either the appanage of an Imperial prince, or had been entrusted to the government of some great noble. So greatly was it coveted, that Alfonso V of Aragon had made it the price of his aid for the relief of Constantinople[608], while during the siege Constantine had promised it to Giustiniani, if the Turks were repulsed[609]. When the news of the disaster reached these islands, the Byzantine authorities fled on board Italian ships, while many of the inhabitants sought refuge in Chios or in the Venetian colonies. There was, however, one leading personage in Imbros, who was resolved to remain and make terms with the victors. This was Kritoboulos, the future historian of Mohammed II, who bribed the Turkish Admiral, Hamza, not to attack the islands and through his mediation managed to send representatives of the Greek church and the local nobility with a present to the Sultan’s court at Adrianople, begging him to allow them to be administered as before. It chanced that at this moment envoys of the Gattilusj were at Adrianople, for on the fall of Constantinople both Dorino and Palamede had hastened to placate and congratulate the terrible Sultan, and to crave the grant of Lemnos and Imbros. Dorino, although he was still lord of Lesbos in name and continued to sign state documents, had been bed-ridden since 1449, and his eldest surviving son, Domenico, governed as regent. Domenico and one of Palamede’s councillors were supported by the two emissaries of Kritoboulos, and the Sultan was pleased to confer Lemnos upon the lord of Lesbos, Imbros upon him of Ænos. At the same time Mohammed ordered the former to pay an annual tribute of 3000 gold pieces for Lesbos and 2325 for Lemnos; that of Imbros was assessed at 1200 gold pieces. Thus, by the irony of fate, only nine years before its annihilation, the dominion[335] of the Gattilusj reached its greatest extent. Indeed, there was a party in Skyros also which advocated annexation to Lesbos, but there the majority wisely preferred the nearer and more powerful lion of St Mark, which waved over Eubœa[610].

The Gattilusj were now well aware that they only existed on sufferance, and they were more careful than ever not to offend their master. Domenico paid more than one visit of obeisance to the Turkish court; and when, in June, 1455, the Turkish admiral, on his way to Rhodes, anchored off Lesbos, the historian Doukas[611], the prince’s secretary, was sent on board with a handsome present of garments of silk and of woven wool six in number, 6000 pieces of silver, 20 oxen, 50 sheep, more than 800 measures of wine, 2 bushels of biscuit and one of bread, more than 1000 lbs. of cheese, and fruit without measure, as well as gifts in proportion to their rank for the members of the admiral’s staff. Under these circumstances, it was no wonder that Hamza treated the lord of Lesbos “like a brother,” and refrained from entering the harbour, for fear of alarming the islanders.

Scarcely had the Turkish fleet left, when, on June 30, 1455, Dorino I died, leaving his dominion of Lesbos, Foglia Vecchia, Thasos, and Lemnos to his eldest surviving son, Domenico, for whom the younger, Nicolò, acted as governor in the last-named island. Before a month had passed, the fleet hove in sight of Mytilene on its homeward voyage, and was invited to anchor in the harbour, where the serviceable Doukas again visited the admiral, whom he kept in good humour by a sumptuous banquet and sped on his way with a sigh of relief on the morrow. But the historian had before him a more delicate mission—that of paying the annual tribute for Lesbos and Lemnos to Mohammed II. Starting from Lesbos on August 1, he found the Sultan at Adrianople, kissed hands in token of homage and remained seated in his presence, till His Majesty’s morning meal was over. When, however, he went to hand the money to the Sultan’s ministers next day, they ingeniously asked him after the health of his master. The historian replied that he was well and sent his greeting, whereupon the Ottomans answered, that they meant the old prince. Doukas explained that Dorino had been dead 40 days, and that his successor had already been practically prince for six years, during which time he had once or twice come in person to do homage and congratulate the Great Turk. The ministers thereupon cut short the conversation with the remark that no one had the right to assume the title of lord of Lesbos (borne till his death by Dorino),[336] until he had come and received his principality from the hands of his Most Mighty suzerain. “Go therefore,” they said, “and return with thy master; for if he come not, he knows what the future has in store for him.” The terrified envoy hastened back to Lesbos, and set out with Domenico and several leading men of both races in the island to do homage to Mohammed. The Sultan had, however, meanwhile changed his headquarters, for the plague was then ravaging Thrace, and it was not till the Lesbian deputation reached the Bulgarian village of Zlatica that they came up with him. After the usual bakshîsh to the influential Pashas, Mahmûd and Said Achmet, they were admitted to the presence, and Domenico humbly kissed the hand of his suzerain. But on the morrow a message was conveyed to Domenico, that the Sultan wished to have the island of Thasos. Argument was useless, and the island, which had belonged for some 20, or perhaps even 35, years to the Gattilusj, was ceded to Mohammed. This sacrifice only whetted the appetite of the Sultan; on the morrow a second message announced that the tribute for Lesbos would be doubled. At this Domenico plucked up courage to reply, that, if the Sultan wished to take the whole of Lesbos, it was in his power to do so; but that to pay twice the previous tribute was beyond its present ruler’s resources. At the same time, he begged the Sultan’s ministers to intervene on his behalf. They represented the facts to their master, and the latter agreed to a compromise, by which Lesbos should thenceforth pay 4000 gold pieces, instead of 3000. Then, at last they decked Domenico with a gold-embroidered robe and his companions with silken garments; the Lesbians signed the oath of allegiance and set out on their homeward journey, “thanking God, who had delivered them out of the hands of the monster.”

But the year was not destined to close without further losses to the Gattilusj. While the deputation was still at Philippopolis, a second Turkish fleet, under Junis, set out to attack the Genoese colony of Chios. Off the Troad a storm arose, in which several of the Turkish vessels perished, while the rest of the fleet, except the flagship, took refuge in the harbour of Mytilene, where Nicolò was then representing his absent brother. It had been one of the treaty obligations of the lords of Lesbos, ever since they had been vassals of the Sultan, to warn the Turks who inhabited the opposite mainland between the mouth of the Kaïkos and the town of Assos, of the approach of Catalan corsairs, and the Gattilusj were bound to pay compensation for any loss caused by negligence in performing this service. Now it chanced that the scout, employed on this business, sailed into the harbour while the Turks were there, followed by the missing Turkish flagship. The admiral, a very different[337] man from his predecessor, requited Nicolò Gattilusio’s generous hospitality by demanding that this vessel with all on board should be given up to him as a prize, including the wife of a very distinguished member of the Chian Chartered Company, Paride Giustiniani Longo, with all her jewelry. The lady in question was none other than Domenico’s mother-in-law, whom he had invited to Lesbos to keep his wife company while he was away—for Domenico’s love for his wife was proverbial, and it is narrated of him that he could never bear to be out of her sight and even shared her bed when she was afflicted with leprosy. Nicolò protested that the vessel was his brother’s and that the wealthy Chian dame had not been on board but had already been long in the island. At this, the Turkish commander complained to the Sultan, and sailed for Foglia Nuova, of which Paride Longo was then governor for the Chian Company. Arrived there, he summoned the governor and the chief men of the place to appear before him. Such was their alarm, that even before his summons arrived they had started to meet him, only to hear the Sultan’s written orders that they should all be imprisoned and their city levelled with the ground, unless they surrendered the fort. The citizens, without attempting to argue or reply, at once admitted the Turks; the Genoese merchants were plundered and led on board; the names of all the citizens were taken down, about a hundred of their children carried off, and a Turkish guard placed in the fort. Thus on October 31, 1455, fell the Genoese colony of Foglia Nuova, the old possession of the Zaccaria and of the Cattaneo families, and then for a century a dependency of the maona of Chios.

When Domenico returned home and learnt from his brother what had occurred, he sent Doukas to plead the case at Constantinople. The Lesbian envoy’s arguments and appeals to justice were, however, all in vain; Mohammed gave Domenico the alternative of paying 10,000 gold pieces or of war; and, when Doukas resisted this monstrous ultimatum, secretly despatched one of his servants to take Foglia Vecchia, which had been held by the Gattilusj of Lesbos ever since 1402 at least. This, their sole possession on the Asian main, was seized on December 24, 1455. As soon as the Sultan received the news of its capture, he ordered Doukas to be sent away free and declared the question settled. Well might Domenico, after this experience, write urgently to Genoa for succour[612].

It was now the turn of the younger branch of the Gattilusj. Palamede[338] of Ænos had died in 1455; and, as his elder son Giorgio had predeceased him[613] in 1449, he had bequeathed his dominions to his second son, Dorino II, and to Giorgio’s widow and her children. While Giorgio was still alive, his father had given him all his estates, except his Lesbian property, which was the share of Dorino II, and even after Giorgio’s death, his widow and family had a preference in the old lord’s will, as representing the first-born. No sooner, however, was Palamede dead than Dorino, defying the dictates alike of justice and prudence, seized the whole of the estate. In vain Giorgio’s widow and his own advisers implored him not to drive her to appeal to the judgment-seat of the Sultan, his suzerain. Finding her arguments useless, she begged her uncle to lay her case before Mohammed, and that undiplomatic envoy, anxious to punish Dorino even at the price of annexation to Turkey, depicted the usurper as a faithless vassal, who was conspiring with the Italians, collecting arms, hiring soldiers, and preparing to increase the garrisons of Ænos and the two islands with the object of proclaiming his complete independence. His advocacy found a willing hearer, for Mohammed coveted Ænos because of its favourable situation, on the estuary of the Maritza, then navigable for a considerable distance, opposite the islands, of which it was the natural mart, and in close proximity to the lake of Jala Göl. Thanks to these natural advantages, to the river and lake fisheries, and above all to its valuable salt-beds, which supplied all Thrace and Macedonia, Ænos was then a very rich city, from which Palamede had received 300,000 pieces of silver. It was true, that two-thirds of the proceeds of the salt-beds and of the other revenues were already handed over to the Sultan; but it was suggested by the people of the neighbouring towns of Ipsala and Feredchik that the Gattilusj did not administer the salt-works honestly, while they gave refuge at Ænos to fugitive Turkish slaves.

Mohammed resolved to act at once. Despite the terrible Balkan winter, which made havoc with his troops, he left Constantinople on January 24, 1456, and marched against Ænos, while Junis with the fleet menaced it from the sea. Dorino was absent in Samothrace, whither he had gone to spend the winter in Palamede’s castle; and his subjects, thus left to themselves, made no attempt at resistance. They sent a deputation of leading citizens to the Sultan’s headquarters at Ipsala, and surrendered the city on condition that no harm was done to its inhabitants. Mohammed received them kindly, granted some of their requests, and sent Mahmûd Pasha back with them to take over the town. On the next day he came in person, carried off all the silver,[339] gold and other valuables, which he found in Dorino’s palace and plundered the houses of that prince’s absent suite. Then, after a three days’ stay, during which he organised the future administration of the place and appointed a certain Murad as its governor, he marched away, taking 150 children, the flower of the youth of Ænos, with him, and entrusting Junis with the annexation of Samothrace and Imbros, the maritime dependencies of that city.

The Turkish admiral, on his arrival at Imbros, summoned Kritoboulos the historian, whose personality and opinions were already well-known at the Turkish court, and made him governor in the room of Dorino’s representative, at that time apparently Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, whom he carried off on board. Meanwhile, a vessel had been despatched to Samothrace to fetch Dorino. But the latter, mistrusting the admiral, as he well might, preferred to throw himself upon the mercy of the Sultan. He therefore manned his yacht, crossed over to Ænos, and thence proceeded to Adrianople. Mohammed received him, and promised to restore to him his islands; but the malicious admiral, indignant at what he considered a slight upon himself, persuaded his sovereign to give Dorino instead some place on the mainland, on the ground that the islanders would not tolerate him and that he would be less able to plot at a distance from the sea. The Sultan thereupon changed his mind, and granted to the dethroned prince the district of Zichna in Macedonia. Dorino did not, however, long remain there; after slaying the Turkish officials, who were his guard of honour, he fled to Lesbos, and thence to Naxos, where he married his cousin, Elisabetta Crispo, daughter of the late Duke, Giacomo II, and settled down at the ducal court[614].

The Turkish annexation of Samothrace and Imbros and the appointment of a native governor had an immediate effect upon the neighbouring island of Lemnos. The Lemnians had had little more than two years of Gattilusian Government, and the experience had been unfortunate, for Domenico had entrusted their island to his brother Nicolò, against whose tyrannical conduct they made secret complaint to the Sultan, begging him to send one of his servants to rule over them. Mohammed gladly consented, and ordered Junis’ successor, Ismael, to sail for Lemnos, and install the amiable Hamza as governor. Before the Turks arrived, Domenico despatched a small force under Giovanni[340] Fontana and Spineta Colomboto with orders to induce the Lemnians by promises to return to their allegiance, and failing that to escort his brother, then encamped behind the walls of Palaiokastro, back to Lesbos. His emissaries, however, disobeying his orders, resorted to force, with the result that the islanders routed them with considerable loss, and those who escaped had to content themselves with conveying Nicolò home. When the Turkish admiral arrived, he commended the Lemnians, landed the new governor and returned, in May, 1456, with the Lesbian prisoners on board, to the Dardanelles. The news of what had occurred so infuriated Mohammed against Domenico, that when in August Doukas came with the annual tribute and begged for their release, he commanded their heads to be cut off, and only repented when they had actually mounted the scaffold, ordering that they should be sold, instead of being beheaded[615].

Of the seven possessions of the Gattilusj Lesbos now alone remained; and Genoa, which a few months earlier had been mainly concerned lest rebellious citizens of the friendly Republic of Ancona should find shelter in Domenico’s ports, now sent a ship with arms and 200 men to his aid, purchased cannon and powder on his behalf, and appealed to Pope Calixtus III and to Kings Alfonso V of Portugal and Henry VI of England to join in a crusade against the enemy which threatened him. Meanwhile, the Pope organised a fund for the redemption of the captives of the two Foglie[616], plans were laid for the reconquest of the places lost, and a certain George Dromokaïtes, a noble Greek of Lemnos, offered to deliver that island and Imbros to Venice[617]. In the autumn of 1456 a papal fleet under the command of Cardinal Scarampi, the Patriarch of Aquileia, appeared in the Ægean; and, after vain attempts to make Domenico refuse to pay his tribute and fight, annexed Lemnos without opposition, thanks to the influence of George Diplovatatzes[618], the Greek archon of Kastro, occupied Samothrace, and took Thasos after an assault upon the harbour fort. Imbros was, however, saved by the diplomacy of Kritoboulos, its governor, who bribed and flattered the Cardinal’s lieutenant, a certain “Count,” whom we may identify with the Count of Anguillara. Garrisons were left in the three conquered islands, and the papal commander appointed governors in the name of the Holy Father—for these former possessions of the Gattilusj were not[341] restored to their lawful owners, but retained by the Holy See. Both the Venetians and the Catalans in vain begged the Pope to give them the three islands; but, in 1459, Pius II offered to consign them to the Bank of St George, which then managed the Genoese colonies, on condition that it would hold them as his vicar. The papal offer was, however, unanimously declined, from fear of offending the Sultan, who might then attack the Black Sea colonies, and from considerations of expense. Besides, Genoa could scarcely have accepted Lemnos, Thasos and Samothrace without a breach of good faith towards her own children[619].

The indignation which Mohammed felt at the capture of the Thracian islands, he vented upon Domenico. Although Doukas, the person most likely to know, expressly tells us that the lord of Lesbos had continued to pay his tribute, and he had certainly not profited by the losses of his suzerain, nevertheless the Sultan accused him of being entirely responsible for what had occurred and the Turcophil Kritoboulos insinuates that he and his brother Nicolò, now resident in Lesbos, refused to send the usual tribute and harboured corsairs who preyed upon the opposite coast and plundered Turkish merchantmen. Domenico was, however, himself a sufferer from these raids, and had begged the Pope to excommunicate the pirates who had injured his subjects. But Mohammed was doubtless glad of an excuse for attacking Lesbos, and in August, 1457, sent Ismael, his admiral, with a large fleet against it. Ismael landed at Molivos, the scene of a former Turkish defeat; and, after ravaging all the countryside, besieged the castle. Such was the terror, inspired by the Turks, that a detachment of the papal fleet, which had been sent under a certain “Sergius,” perhaps Raymond de Siscar, to the relief of Lesbos, at once weighed anchor for Chios. But the garrison of Molivos resisted with such courage, that the Turkish commander was forced to retire on August 9 with much loss, after venting his rage on the defenceless portions of the island. As soon as he had gone, the papal lieutenant returned, only to be greeted with reproaches by the justly indignant Gattilusj. The Pope, indeed, described Lesbos as “Our island” and calmly stated that he had only allowed its lord to retain it on condition that he recognised the authority of the Holy See. But Domenico wrote to the “Office of Mytilene”—a body which then existed in Genoa for the promotion of trade with[342] Lesbos—stating frankly that he could hold out no longer unless Genoa helped him, and threatening, that, in case of her refusal, he must perforce submit to some other rule. Meanwhile, he sent envoys to the Sultan to pay his tribute and obtain peace. The Bank of St George assured him that it would not desert him, and decided to appoint a committee of four shareholders in the Chian Chartered Company and two other Chians, who should raise 300 soldiers for the defence of Lesbos at the Bank’s expense. A new duty on merchandise exported to Chios was to defray the equipment of these men; their pay was to be provided by Domenico, if possible; or, if he could not find the ready money, he was to mortgage his property as security. Genoa was none too generous to her outpost in the Levant; she calculated her Lesbian policy by the maxims of the counting-house[620].

Domenico did not, however, live to fall by the hands of the Turks. He had a more sinister enemy in his own household. So long as Nicolò had been able to gratify his love of power at the expense of the unhappy Lemnians, he was harmless to his brother; but, when his intractable disposition had estranged the sympathies of the governed and caused the loss of that island, the two brothers were both restricted to Lesbos, the sole fragment of the Gattilusian dominions that remained. Nicolò was quarrelsome and ambitious; he chafed at the inferior position which he occupied, and resolved to usurp Domenico’s place. Accordingly, with the assistance of his cousin, Luchino, and a Genoese named Baptista (possibly the Baptista Gattilusio, who is described as a very influential person at Lesbos 14 years earlier[621]), he deposed his elder brother towards the end of 1458, and threw him into prison, on the pretext that he was plotting to surrender the island to the Turks. Soon afterwards the usurper strangled his prisoner, having, according to one account, first cut off his arms so that he could no longer embrace the faithful wife who still clung to him[622]. Her father demanded from the murderer repayment of the sums which Domenico had received as her dowry and of those which he had subsequently borrowed; and the Doge of Genoa threatened the lord of Lesbos with the forcible intervention of the Republic unless he liquidated these debts[623]. The fate of the widow is unknown; more fortunate, however, in one respect than[343] other ill-fated heroines of Frankish Greece, she has given her name to the only modern poem, based upon the mediæval history of Sappho’s island, while her bust by Mino da Fiesole is in the National Museum at Florence[624].

The fratricide’s position was, indeed, unenviable. The papal fleet had returned to Italy upon the death of Calixtus III in the summer of 1458, leaving the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes as vicar of the three Thracian islands, and the new Pope, Pius II, was too busy with the internal politics of that country to provide for their defence, which the Bank of St George did not think it prudent to undertake, but contented himself with founding a new Order of the Knights of St Mary of Bethlehem with its seat at Lemnos[625]. Thus inadequately defended by the Italians and terrified at the possible advent of the Turkish fleet, the islanders had no option but to submit to the Sultan. Lemnos set the example. In the winter of 1458-9, Kritoboulos, ever ready to do the work of the Turk, entered into secret negotiations with the Lemnian leaders for the surrender of their island. The Greeks were nothing loth, for they found the papal yoke irksome, as it must naturally have been to “schismatics,” and above all they feared the vengeance of Mohammed. The Imbriote diplomatist thereupon wrote to Demetrios Palaiologos, the Despot of Mistra, suggesting that this was the moment to crave Lemnos and Imbros from the Sultan, which the Despot had already coveted as a peaceful retreat, and offering to drive the Italians out of the former island. Demetrios at once sent Matthew Asan, his brother-in-law, whose family was, as we saw, connected with Imbros, to ask Mohammed for the two islands. The Sultan consented, on condition that Demetrios paid 3000 gold pieces as tribute for them, and it then devolved upon Kritoboulos to carry out his mission. Evading the Italian guard-ships, he landed in Lemnos; his confederates at Kastro opened the gates of that fortress; the townsfolk of Kokkinos shut up the small Italian garrison in the public offices, till it surrendered unconditionally, whereupon Kritoboulos told them that they could go or stay as they pleased, and sent their Calabrian commander with presents to Eubœa. The fort of Palaiokastro, the strongest in the island, alike by its natural position and its triple wall of huge stones, contained provisions for a year and was commanded by a young and resolute soldier, named Michele. When Michele received a summons to surrender, his sole reply was a sword, drawn in blood, and an invitation to Kritoboulos[344] to come and take the castle by force, if he were a man. He could not, however, trust the Greeks in the town below, whose vines and fields Kritoboulos was careful to respect; and, when he saw the superior forces drawn up against him, he begged for three months’ grace, till he had time to communicate with the Grand Master at Rhodes, the papal vicar of the islands. Later on, he surrendered Palaiokastro for 1000 gold pieces, and in 1460, after the Turkish conquest of the Morea, Lemnos and Imbros were bestowed by the Sultan upon the dispossessed Despot, Demetrios.

The other two islands shared the fate of Lemnos. In the autumn of 1459, Zaganos, Ismael’s successor in the command of the Turkish fleet, captured both Thasos and Samothrace, cutting to pieces the Catalan garrison placed by Scarampi in the former, and removing Thasians and Samothracians alike to recolonise Constantinople. In the following year the Sultan bestowed these two islands also, together with Ænos, upon Demetrios Palaiologos, who thus became the heir of the Gattilusj in Thrace and the four maritime dependencies[626]. In vain, Pius II urged Rhyndakenos, the former prefect of the Gattilusj, to release Samothrace from its captivity. In vain, he gave Turkish Imbros to Alexander Asan[627].

About the time that Lemnos fell, the learned Leonardo of Chios, who had held the Archiepiscopal see of Lesbos since 1444 and was on very intimate terms with the reigning family, was sent to ask the aid of Christendom for that sole remaining island. The Genoese Government early in 1459 appealed to the Christian Powers and more especially to Charles VII of France, whose viceroy, the Duke of Calabria, was then administering Genoa, reminding them of the recent attack of the Turks upon Lesbos, of the exiguous resources of its lord, and of the impossibility in which the exhausted Genoese now found themselves of supporting him without external assistance, as they had done before, against another and more serious invasion. The fall of Lesbos, it was added, might encourage the Sultan to direct his arms against Italy. Unfortunately this appeal met with no response. Indeed, one of the Christian Powers, England, was at that moment greatly incensed with the Gattilusj, owing to the piracies of Giuliano, a celebrated corsair of that family, whose depredations on the merchants of Bristol had caused the arrest of all the Genoese in the country and the confiscation of their goods. Accordingly, the Genoese Government, which had been glad to[345] make use of him as a cousin, when it seemed convenient, now repudiated him as a Greek and an alien. The proceedings of this illegitimate descendant of Francesco II formed the subject of letters to Henry VI, to the Chancellor and the Privy Seal, to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, to John Viscount Beaumont, the Great Chamberlain, and Humphry Duke of Buckingham. Indeed, it was owing to Giuliano Gattilusio, that “the office of English affairs” was founded at Genoa[628].

The new lord of Lesbos, as one Christian state after another fell, became more urgent in his requests for help, for he knew that even the payment of tribute would not save him. In 1460 he begged that the former practice might be revived of having a board of four commissioners in Chios, who could send 300 men to the relief of Lesbos, whenever the Sultan was preparing to attack it. It was decided to re-constitute this board, but not to impose any new duty for defraying the expense, and a certain number of men from Camogli on the Riviera di Levante were hired for the defence of Lesbos. Towards the close of 1461, he wrote imploring the Republic not to forget him in his distress. But, although the French had then been expelled from Genoa, and Lodovico de Campo-fregoso, husband of Nicolò’s first-cousin, Ginevra Gattilusio, was once more Doge, all the reply that he received was fair words, a futile assertion that in the season of 1462 the Turk would be occupied by land rather than at sea, and a promise to promote a good understanding between Lesbos and the Chartered Company of Chios, which was apt to forget the common danger in the private quarrels of its members—an allusion to the still outstanding dispute between Nicolò and Paride Longo. Weakened by faction at home, divided by rival interests abroad, the Genoese allowed Lesbos to succumb[629].

Mohammed’s conquest of Serbia, Greece, and Trebizond and his campaign in Wallachia had given Nicolò a brief respite, which he had wisely employed in strengthening the fortifications of his island-capital by deepening the moats and heightening the ramparts. To this may be referred his Latin inscription[630] in the castle, dated 1460. But on September 1, 1462, the long-threatened Turkish fleet hove in sight under the command of Mahmûd Pasha, himself a Greek, while the Sultan at the head of the land forces advanced across the plain of Troy, the sight of which is said to have inspired him with the belief that he was the chosen avenger of the Trojans upon the descendants of their conquerors.[346] Mohammed had no difficulty in finding plausible excuses for his invasion of Lesbos. The island had become a receptacle of Catalan pirates, who issued thence to ravage the Turkish coast and returned thither to divide their prisoners, assigning a goodly proportion to their patron. A reluctance to pay his tribute and a secret understanding with the Italians formed further accusations against him, and Mohammed chose to regard himself as the instrument of the Almighty for the punishment of the Lesbian fratricide.

The great Turkish fleet, variously estimated at 67, 110, 125, 150, and even 200 sail, cast anchor in the old harbour of St George, whither Nicolò’s envoys went to enquire the justification of this attack upon an island, whose lords had paid, ever since the death of Dorino I seven years before, an annual tribute of 7000 gold ducats of Venice. Mahmûd replied, that his master wanted the castle and island of Mytilene—a demand repeated by the Sultan himself, when he crossed over from the mainland, with the addition that he would grant Nicolò a sufficient estate elsewhere. Nicolò replied, that he could not yield, except to force, whereupon Mohammed allowed himself to be persuaded by Mahmûd to return to the opposite coast, lest the Venetian fleet, then at Chios, to which Nicolò had appealed for help, should arrive and shut him up in the island. Thereupon the Greek renegade began the siege of the capital, whose walls contained more than 20,000 non-combatants, men, women and children, and were garrisoned by over 5000 soldiers, including 70 knights of Rhodes and 110 Catalan mercenaries from Chios.

After four days’ skirmishing, which resulted in a number of the Latins being cut off from the city and cut up by the Turks, the besiegers landed six large cannon, whose shot weighed more than 700 lbs. apiece, and planted them in favourable positions for bombarding the city—three at the soap works only a stone’s throw from the walls, one at St Nicholas’, another at St Bonne’s[631] near the place of public execution, and the sixth in the suburbs opposite a barbican tower, defended by a monk and a knight of Rhodes. Protected by a barrier of large stones from the fire of the besieged, the Turkish batteries did great execution. The tower of the Virgin and the adjacent walls were pounded till they were nothing but a mass of ruins; the cannon of St Nicholas’ riddled the tower of the harbour, built long before by a Gallego named Pedro de Laranda, so that no one durst defend it, and it fell on the eighth day into the hands of the Turks, whose red flags floated from its riven battlements. The besiegers then concentrated their efforts on the lower castle,[347] called Melanoudion, and commanded by Luchino Gattilusio, who had helped Nicolò to the throne, and whose neglect caused the loss of this important position. It was proposed by the wiser members of his staff to set fire to the lower castle, as they had already burnt to the water’s edge their ships in the harbour, rather than that it should be taken by the Turks and used as a base for attacking the upper citadel. But Luchino boasted that he could hold the fort, and actually held it for five days, although the Turks once climbed the walls and carried off in triumph an Aragonese flag which had been planted there by the Catalan corsairs. At last a force of 20,000 men carried Melanoudion by storm, drove the defenders “like locusts” into the upper castle, and destroyed all that they found. Terrified and breathless, with his naked sword in his hand, Luchino rushed into the midst of the Italians, who had taken refuge in the upper castle, and his narrative struck them with such terror that they resolved to surrender. According to one account, Luchino and the commander of the city had intentionally made further resistance impossible by betraying to Mahmûd the weak points of the defences, and by then urging Nicolò to yield and to save their heads and property. The panic was increased by one huge mortar, whose heavy projectiles destroyed houses and the women inside and drove the terrified defenders from the walls to take shelter from a similar fate. Heavy sums had to be offered, to induce men to repair the breaches; while many, in their despair, flew to drink, and broke into the vast stores of wine and provisions, which, if the garrison had been properly led, would have enabled Mytilene to resist a whole year’s siege. But, though well provided with food and engines of war, the place lacked a brave and experienced soldier, who would have inspired the garrison with enthusiasm. Another council was held, and two envoys were sent to inform Mahmûd, that the inhabitants were ready to become his master’s vassals, if their heads and remaining property were guaranteed. The Turkish commander drew up a memorandum of the terms in writing, and swore by his girded sword and his sovereign’s head that no harm should befall them. The Sultan, on hearing the news, re-crossed to Lesbos, and a janissary was ordered to conduct Nicolò to his presence. Thither the last Latin lord of Lesbos proceeded with two horsemen, kissed the feet of his new master and tearfully handed to Mohammed the keys of the city, which the Gattilusj had held for well-nigh eleven decades. At the same time he pleaded that he had never violated his oaths, never harboured Turkish slaves, but had at once restored them to their owners; and, if he had perforce received pirates to save his own land from their ravages, he had never furnished them with the means of injuring that of the Turks. It was,[348] he added, the fault of his subjects that he had not accepted the Sultan’s generous offer at once, and “I now,” he concluded with tears, “surrender the city and island, begging that my lord may reward me for my good disposition in the past towards him.” Mohammed censured him for his past ingratitude, but promised that it should not be remembered against him. Forthwith a subashi and two men took possession of the upper castle, whence the Frankish garrison was removed but no one else was allowed to issue. The conquerors celebrated their success by a Bacchanalian orgie and by burning the still standing houses of Melanoudion, while the Sultan, setting on one side the chief men among the Franks, bade saw asunder with exquisite cruelty some 300 of the others as pirates in one of the suburbs. Thus, it was said, he had literally carried out their conditions, that their heads should be spared.

The other fortresses in the island—Molivos (or Augerinos), the castle of the two SS. Theodores, and Eresos—now surrendered; for the wretched Nicolò, by the Sultan’s commands, sent a notary with instructions under his own seal, ordering his officers to open their gates. The countryfolk were left undisturbed, but any suspects found there were removed; and later on, one or two of these places were destroyed, and their inhabitants transported, like those of the Foglie, to Constantinople. On the second day after the occupation of the capital, a herald summoned all the citizens to file past the Sultan’s pavilion one by one. On September 17 the sorrowful procession took place; three clerks noted down the names of each, of the most pleasing maidens and the children several hundreds were picked out, and the rest of the population was divided into three classes—the worthless were left behind in the city, others were sold by public auction on the beach, and others again driven on board ship like so many sheep, to await slavery and fill the gaps at Constantinople. But of the 10,000 and more who were shipped from Lesbos a part perished on the overcrowded ships; and with brutal, if business-like precision, all disputes as to the ownership of these human cattle were obviated by cutting off the right ear of each corpse, before it was flung into the deep, and removing the victim’s name from the list. Some 200 janissaries and 300 infantry were left to garrison the city under Ali Bestami, a man of great courage and learning.

The fleet, bearing Nicolò, Luchino, the Archbishop Leonardo, and the rest of the captives, reached Constantinople on October 16, where some of them received houses, or sites in one quarter of the city. The two Gattilusj, however, were soon afterwards imprisoned in the “tower of the French.” Mohammed disliked Nicolò for what he had done in the past, and the chronique scandaleuse of the capital attributed his[349] feelings to the fact that a lad attached to the Turkish court had fled to Lesbos, abandoned Islâm, and become the favourite of Nicolò. After the fall of Lesbos, this youth was sent as a present to the Sultan, and recognised by his comrades, who told their master and thus rekindled his indignation. The two prisoners, to save their lives and regain their freedom, offered to abjure Christianity, and were duly circumcised, gorgeously apparelled by the Sultan, and set free. But their liberty did not last long; they were again imprisoned, and executed, Nicolò being strangled with a bow-string, as he had strangled his own brother. His lovely sister Maria, widow of the Emperor Alexander of Trebizond, whom Mohammed had previously captured in Kolchis, entered the seraglio; her only son became one of the Conqueror’s favourite pages.

Thus ended the rule of the Gattilusj in Lesbos. Had Nicolò been bolder, had Genoa given more help, had Venice not played the part of a spectator, the island might have been saved, or at least its capture postponed. At the time of the siege, Vettor Capello was at Chios, and, in answer to Nicolò’s appeal, actually set out with 29 galleys towards Lesbos; but, although he could have burnt the Turkish fleet in the absence of its crews, he durst not disobey his instructions, which were to avoid giving any offence to the Sultan. Even after the capture of Mytilene, when the people of the castle of the two SS. Theodores begged him to accept them as Venetian subjects, he refused. Later on, when war broke out with Turkey, Venice repented her inaction, and tried in vain to make reparation for it. Even Genoa took the “calamity of Mytilene” with philosophy[632].

Christendom did not, however, abandon all hope of recovering what the Gattilusj had lost. The learned Archbishop of Lesbos, a second time the prisoner of the Turks, wrote to Pius II, as he had written to Nicholas V after the capture of Constantinople, a letter describing the sufferings of his flock and begging the Pope to make peace in Italy and war upon “the Cerberus” of the East. Pius responded by planning a new crusade, and the Genoese suggested that its first stage should be the recapture of Lesbos[633]. The Pope’s death ended his plans; but early in 1464 a[350] Venetian fleet under Luigi Loredano occupied Lemnos with the assistance of a Moreote pirate, who bore the great name of Comnenos. This man had descended upon the island some time before with two galleys, had captured it from the officials who were governing it for Demetrios Palaiologos, and had established his authority over the citadel and the old city of Lemnos. But the pirate saw that he was not strong enough to hold his conquest single-handed, and therefore transferred it to the maritime Republic, which thence easily extended her sway over the rest of the island. Venice retained Lemnos for 15 years, and five Venetian nobles successively administered, with the title of “Rector,” this distant outpost[634]. In April of the same year Orsato Giustiniano, Loredano’s successor, laid siege to Mytilene, but, after six weeks spent before the walls and two battles, in which the Venetians sustained heavy losses, on the approach of the Turkish fleet withdrew to Eubœa with all the Christian islanders whom he could convey, only returning to SS. Theodores to remove a second cargo. Giustiniano died of grief at his failure, and the Turkish sway over Lesbos, despite three subsequent attempts, had never been broken till the Greek fleet took the island on November 22, 1912[635].

Two years later Vettor Capello obtained Imbros, Thasos, and Samothrace for Venice[636], and Bernardo Natale was sent as Rector to the last-named island. Imbros was, however, retaken by the Turks in 1470, owing to the unpopularity and incapacity of that official[637]. Lemnos resisted more than one Turkish attack; in view of its importance as a station for the fleet, Venice sent 200 stradioti to settle there, restored the walls of Kokkinos, and strengthened the fortifications of Palaiokastro, while Mohammed made its cession a condition of peace. At last this island, then inhabited by 6000 souls, or twice the population of Imbros, after having won romantic fame by the exploits of its heroic defender, the virgin Marulla, was ceded to Turkey by the peace[638] of 1479. At the same time, Samothrace with its 200 islanders, and Thasos,[351] neither of them mentioned since their capture in 1466, were probably surrendered, and the whole of the Gattilusj’s former realm was thus irrevocably Turkish till 1912, with the exception of the Venetian occupation of Lemnos in 1656/7, and of the Russian occupation of part of that island in 1770—for Ænos, although laid in ashes by Nicolò da Canale in 1468, had not been occupied by the Venetians, and Foglia Vecchia had repulsed his attack[639].

Even after this apparently final Turkish conquest, one member of the family continued to cherish the remote hope that one day his ancestral dominions might be reconquered. Dorino II of Ænos was still alive at Genoa, and in 1488, as the sole representative of both branches of the Gattilusj—for Nicolò II had left no children—granted to his brother-in-law, Marco d’Oria, all his rights to their possessions in the Levant. It was agreed, that, should Lesbos be recovered—as was hoped, by the aid of the King of France—Dorino should nevertheless have his father’s former estates in that island, unless Ænos, Foglia Vecchia, Thasos and Samothrace were also recovered, in which case he should be entitled to Ænos, Thasos and Samothrace alone and have no claim to the Lesbian property[640]. Dorino II died childless, the last legitimate male of his race; but the pirate Giuliano, whose depredations continued to vex the Genoese Government[641], had progeny. Among his descendants were perhaps the Hector Gattilusio[642] whom we find receiving a small pension from Pope Innocent VIII, and the Stefano Gattilusio[643], who was bishop of Melos in 1563. Other Gattilusj occur at Naxos in the seventeenth century, and the name is reported to exist still not only there but at Smyrna and Athens[644], although the family is extinct at Genoa. Nine years ago a London lady claimed the Byzantine Empire as a descendant of the Palaiologoi through the Gattilusj. The family church at Sestri Ponente[645] was ceded by Dorino II to two other persons in 1483.

The rule of the Gattilusj has been described by a modern Greek writer as more favourable to his fellow-countrymen than that of other Frankish rulers. Chalkokondyles[646] praises the excellence of their administration, and one alone of them, the fratricide Nicolò, seems to have been unpopular. Hellenized by intermarriage with the Imperial houses of Byzantium and Trebizond, and proud to quarter the arms of the[352] Palaiologoi with their own, they spoke Greek in the first generation, and thus early came to understand the feelings of their subjects, who scarcely regarded them as foreigners, certainly not as foreign conquerors. Two extant Greek letters of Dorino I and Domenico attest their familiarity with the language of their people. Moreover, they were not so much feudal lords as prosperous merchant princes, whose wealth is attested not only by the sums lent by Francesco II and Nicolò I, but by the extensive coinage of the Lesbian line. Coins of at least five of the lords of Mytilene are extant, while Dorino I, whose appanage was Foglia Vecchia before he succeeded to Lesbos, struck money for that emporium also[647]. Yet these Genoese nobles took an interest alike in history, literature, and archæology. Kanaboutzes wrote his commentary on Dionysios for Palamede; in 1446, the year of Cyriacus’ visit, Leonardo of Chios, the most famous of Lesbian divines, who owed his appointment to the patronage of Maria Gattilusio and was selected to accompany the papal legate, Cardinal Isidore, to Constantinople[648], wrote at the bidding of Dorino I’s brother, Luchino, his Treatise concerning true nobility against Poggio. This quaint tract took the form of a Platonic dialogue with Luchino in the presence of the Duke of the Archipelago, and gives us a pretty picture of Lesbian society at the time. “The prince,” we read, “protects religion; his senate is wise, his soldiers distinguished, and he lives in splendid state among his lovely halls, his gardens, his fish-ponds, and his groves.” The drama, if we may argue from the presence of an actor named Theodoricus, was patronised by Dorino[649]. Life in Lesbos must therefore have been pleasant, if it had not been lived on the edge of the Turkish volcano. But even in the last years of the Gattilusj the numbers of the Latins cannot have been large, for Calixtus III united the Archiepiscopal see of Methymna with that of Mytilene, and in 1456 the revenues which Leonardo derived from both together did not exceed 150 gold florins[650].

The Genoese sway over Lesbos and the Thracian islands has gone the way of all Latin rule in the Levant, of which it was so favourable a specimen. A few inscriptions, a few coats of arms, here and there a ruined fortress, still remind the now emancipated Greeks of their last Italian rulers.

Gattilusj.

II.

III.

IV.

VI.

VII.

Genealogical Tree:

From the second half of the fifteenth down to the close of the seventeenth century, a large portion of what now forms the kingdom of Greece formed an integral part of the Turkish Empire, and from the second part of the sixteenth century some of the Ionian Islands and a few of the Cyclades were alone exempt from the common lot of Hellas. Thus, for the first time since the Frank conquest, a dead level of uniformity, broken only by the privileges of certain communities, prevailed in place of the feudal principalities, whose fortunes occupied the annals of the previous two centuries and more. Greece, so often divided against herself, had found unity in the death of her independence; and the victorious Turks, like the conquering Romans, had obliterated the divisions and the liberties of the Greek States at the same moment. Once more the whole Greek world, with few exceptions, depended upon a foreign ruler, whose capital was at Constantinople, and whose officials, like those of the Byzantine Emperors, administered the affairs of his Greek subjects. There is, however, a considerable difference between the two periods into which the Turkish government of Greece was divided. During the first period, down to the Venetian conquest of the Morea, towards the close of the seventeenth century, Turkey was a flourishing and conquering Power—a danger to Europe, and a strong State. During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice.

The political organisation of Greece under the Turks was indeed comparatively simple. Before the conquest of the Ægean Islands all their Greek dominions were comprised within the jurisdiction of the beglerbeg (“lord of lords”) of Rumili, who resided at Sofia[651], and were divided into seven sandjaks, so called from the “flag” which was the[356] emblem of each large territorial sub-division, and which recalled the essentially military character of all Turkish arrangements. These seven sandjaks, after the year 1470, when the capture of Eubœa rounded off the Greek conquests of Mohammed II, were Salonika, Negroponte, Trikkala, Lepanto, Karlili, Joannina, and the Morea. Negroponte included not only the island of Eubœa, but also Bœotia, and Attica. Its capital was Chalkis, and Athens, Thebes and Livadia, were among its principal cities. Karlili comprehended Ætolia and Akarnania, as well as Prevesa, and derived its name from Carlo II Tocco, whose dominions there had fallen to the Turks. The capital of the Morea fluctuated between Corinth, Leondari, and Mistra, down to 1540, when the capture of Nauplia from the Venetians made that place the residence of the Turkish Pasha. In 1574, when the conclusion of the war of Cyprus had practically extinguished Latin rule in the Levant, a different arrangement obtained. Salonika, Trikkala, Joannina, Patras and Mistra formed five sandjaks under the beglerbeg of Rumili; while the capitan pasha, in his capacity of beglerbeg “of the sea,” ruled over the seven insular sandjaks of Lemnos, Lesbos, Rhodes, Chios, the former Duchy of Naxos (except a few islands bestowed on the favourite Sultana), Santa Maura (with Prevesa), and Negroponte, besides the three maritime sandjaks of Nauplia, Lepanto and Kavalla. And, after the conquest of Crete, three more sandjaks, named from Candia, Rethymno, and Canea, were carved out of “the great Greek island[652].”

Each sandjak was in turn sub-divided into a number of cazas, or sub-districts, of which there were twenty-three in the Morea. It is now supposed that from 1470 to about 1610, Athens was the chief place of a caza of the sandjak of Negroponte. Just as each sandjak was governed by a Pasha or sandjak-beg, so each caza was administered by a lesser magnate known as a voivode or subashi, who was assisted by a judge, or cadi.

True to the Turkish feuded system, which had been organised in Thessaly at the end of the fourteenth century, and extended to Akarnania and Ætolia on the fall of the Tocchi, Mohammed II distributed Central Greece and the Morea in fiefs to his veteran warriors. These fiefs were of two sorts: the larger fief, known as a zaimet, entailed upon the holder the obligation to provide fifteen horsemen; the smaller, called a timar, involved the equipment of only two[653]. The standard of the sandjak-beg formed the rallying point of all these feudal chiefs and their horsemen in case of need. About the middle of the seventeenth century the whole[357] area of the present Greek kingdom on the mainland, including Negroponte but without Macedonia and Thrace, was portioned out into 267 zaimets and 1625 timars, so that they would represent a force of 7255 horsemen.

Crete, after its conquest, was similarly parcelled out into seventeen zaimets and 2550 timars, which would produce 5355 cavalry. At first the timariot system was not in the nature of an hereditary aristocracy. The timars were originally life-rents only, conferred for services rendered to the Sultan upon veteran warriors, who might be called upon to appear with their retainers at the call of their liege lord. In the golden age of Turkish administration—if such a phrase can be applied to any Turkish institution—the son of timariot was entrusted with a large fief such as his sire had held only after he had proved his capacity as the holder of a small one. But, like all political systems, the Turkish began by making capacity the sole test of office, and ended by making office the reward of favourites. Gradually the beglerbeg was allowed to bestow these fiefs, which had formerly been in the Sultan’s gift, and that official naturally rewarded his own creatures, just as a British Prime Minister, allowed by weak or preoccupied monarchs to dispense patronage at his will, bestows the honours of the peerage and the baronetage upon subservient, or perhaps recalcitrant, supporters. Thus, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was the custom of Romania that, if a holder of a zaimet or timar died in the wars, his fief was divided into as many portions as he had sons, unless the rent was no more than 3000 aspers, in which case the whole went to the eldest son. But if the holder died in his bed, his lands fell to the beglerbeg, who could bestow them upon the dead man’s heirs, give them to any of his own servants, or sell them, as he pleased[654].

The Turks did not interfere with the Greek municipal system, which had existed for centuries before the Ottoman conquest. As far back as the Byzantine times we find that the Hellenic communities employed representatives, not necessarily drawn from their own members, at the Imperial Court at Constantinople. Thus, in the eleventh century, Michael Psellos represented the Ægean Islands at the capital[655]; but, in some cases, instead of having a permanent representative, whose functions may be compared with those of the agents-general of our self-governing colonies, a local deputation occasionally visited Constantinople to lay its grievances before the central authorities. In the Venetian island of Tenos a similar practice prevailed; there a committee was[358] selected from among the primates to watch over the administration of the Venetian officials. The Turks, like the Romans, were quite willing that their Greek subjects should continue to enjoy local self-government. Accordingly, they allowed the communes to promote commerce and found schools, while Greek naturally continued to be the official language of the communal authorities. There was no hard and fast rule for their election, and no stereotyped title by which they were known all over Greece. But, generally speaking, every town and even every hamlet had its own Greek officials, elected by the Christian inhabitants, or by some portion of them, in a more or less indirect fashion, and variously styled “elders of the parish,” “elders,” archontes, “primates,” or, in Turkish, khodja-bashis. Thus, at a late period of the Ottoman domination, in the island of Psara the whole community met annually for the election of forty electors, who in turn elected four “elders of the parish”; at the same period, in the island of Spetsai, the five “primates” were elected annually by the ships’ captains and the well-to-do citizens; while Hydra, during a large part of the eighteenth century, was administered by its priests, with whom two laymen were associated. The Morea had certain special municipal privileges. It was permitted to send two or three “primates” to Constantinople, who were able to mitigate the exactions of the Turkish Pashas by the influence which they acquired during their stay there. Moreover, each province of the peninsula used to send two prominent Greeks once or twice a year to the seat of the Pasha to confer with him upon the affairs of the Morea. Sometimes, both there and in Thessaly, municipal office descended as a heritage from father to son, and too often the feuds, which continued to distinguish the Moreote archontes, descended, with their dignities, to their descendants. Their duties were to administer the local affairs of their communities, to act as arbitrators in civil cases, to levy local rates, to manage the local treasury, and to act as protectors and advisers of the oppressed. Sometimes they carried out this last duty without flinching, sometimes, however, their conduct earned them the name of “a kind of Christian Turks[656].”

Both the law of Islâm and the laws of human nature forbade the wholesale conversion of the conquered to the faith of the conquerors. But Mohammed II, who spoke Greek and knew the Greeks well, recognised, like the wise statesman that he was, the possibility of managing his Christian subjects through the medium of their own Church. The Turks were a foreign garrison in a hostile country, and in the middle of the fifteenth century it was quite possible that some[359] Catholic power might undertake a new crusade for the deliverance of the East. The bitter hatred of the Eastern for the Western Church provided the astute Sultan with a powerful incentive for the toleration and even patronage of the Orthodox religion. He saw that, if he favoured the one branch of Christendom, he would prevent its union with the other, and he made a most politic selection of an instrument for the accomplishment of his plan. One of the strongest opponents of the union had been Georgios Scholarios, a man of great influence with the Orthodox and of equal unpopularity with the Catholics. As soon as Constantinople had fallen, the Sultan caused diligent search to be made for this uncompromising champion of Orthodoxy, and about the end of the same year gave orders for his election as Œcumenical Patriarch, according to the time-honoured forms which the Byzantine Empire had recognised for centuries. Gennadios II, as the new Patriarch was styled, was invited to a banquet by the Sultan, who showed him the greatest attention, and accompanied him as far as the courtyard of the palace, where he assisted him to mount his horse. A berat of the Sultan determined the position, powers, and privileges of Gennadios and his successors. The Œcumenical Patriarch was declared to be “untaxable and irremovable,” and the document, of which only a summary has come down to us in the history of Phrantzes[657], is said to have prohibited the conversion of Christian churches into mosques. The loss of the original berat is of less importance because subsequent rescripts modified these notable concessions, while in practice the privileges of the Patriarch came to be far less respected than in theory. To him was assigned the supreme administration of all churches and monasteries, the right of deposing archbishops and bishops, and the highest criminal jurisdiction over all the clergy. He decided all matrimonial questions, and other suits, in which the parties, being both Christians, preferred his judgment to that of the Turkish courts. He could levy dues for the needs of the Church on laity and clergy alike, and it was provided that existing ecclesiastical property should be respected, and that no Christian should be forced to embrace Islâm. But in these respects, as well as with regard to the fiscal exemption and irremovability of the Patriarch, the ecclesiastical history of the Greeks under the Turks shows us a gradual falling off from the original intentions of Mohammed II. A later berat laid it down that the Patriarch could be deposed for one of three reasons—oppression of his flock, transgression of the ecclesiastical law, and treason towards his sovereign—elastic terms, capable of a wide interpretation. Mohammed II himself deposed the Patriarch Joseph I, for[360] refusing to sanction the marriage of the widow of the last Duke of Athens with George Amoiroutses, the traitor who had been accused of handing over Trebizond to the Turks, and who had a wife still living. From the Turkish conquest to the present day 69 Patriarchs have been deposed, several more than once, 20 were thus removed in the seventeenth century, and the Sultans at times inflicted punishments on the Patriarchs, which recall the horrible mutilations of Byzantine times. From the moment of the conquest, Christian churches, beginning with St Sophia, were converted into mosques, and the seat of the Patriarchate, fixed by Mohammed II at the Church of the Holy Apostles, was successively moved, as church after church became a sacred place of Islâm, till it reached, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, its present home in the Phanar. All over Greece the same process went on, wherever the Mussulmans were numerous, and we have seen at Salonika, Livadia and Larissa buildings which have served first as churches and then as mosques. Certain dues, too, were fixed, which the Patriarch was expected to pay; and soon bakshîsh, the bane of Turkey, began to affect Patriarchal elections. This introduction of simony into the Greek Church was due to the intrigues of the Greeks themselves. After the fall of the empire of Trebizond in 1461 many of the Trapezuntine grandees sought careers at Constantinople. Among other posts they coveted that of the Patriarch, and as early as 1467 they conspired with that object against Markos II, the fourth successor of Gennadios[658]. They succeeded in securing his deposition and the election of one of their own party by promising that he would pay an annual sum of one thousand gold pieces and forego the allowance which his four predecessors had received from the government. The evil, thus soon introduced, spread apace. Two years later, an offer of double the sum paid by the Patriarch ensured his removal in favour of a wealthier candidate. Then the annual payment was raised to three thousand gold pieces, and large sums came to be spent in bribes to courtiers, eunuchs, janissaries and the female favourites of the Sultans, the money being ultimately raised out of the clergy and laity. Thus, the history of the Patriarchate resembles that of the mediæval Papacy in that the same means were employed to ensure an election. After the Reformation, Jesuits and Protestants, each anxious to have at the head of the Greek Church a man favourable to themselves, joined in the bidding, and between the years 1623 and 1700 there were about fifty Patriarchal elections, most of them won by bribery. The debts of the Patriarchate became enormous, as a consequence of this almost[361] constant expenditure, and the necessity thus imposed upon the Patriarch of selling all the chief ecclesiastical offices in his gift was one of the main causes which made the Greek Church so unpopular in many parts of Turkey, where the population belonged to another race than the Hellenic. The history of Roumania abounds with examples of the exactions of Greek bishops, who sought to make the wretched people make up to them what they had spent on the purchase of their sees.

Another cause tended, in course of time, to make the Turkish Government less careful of the Patriarch’s privileges and dignities. He had been regarded by Mohammed II as a bulwark against the Catholic powers; but, a century after the fall of Constantinople, Rome, distracted by the Protestant secession, had become far less dangerous, and Venice had lost her last possessions in the Morea, while in the seventeenth century Spain was no longer an enemy to be feared. Moreover, France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” and the patroness of the Jesuits, had become the ally of Turkey, and supported her protégés, who first appeared at Constantinople in 1609, against the Œcumenical Patriarch. Thus, finding himself in little danger from a disunited Europe and an impotent Papacy, the Sultan could afford to modify his attitude towards the head of the Greek Church. After 1657, the Patriarch ceased to be installed by the Sultan in person, who was thenceforth represented by the Grand Vizier, and further restrictions were soon placed upon the honours paid to him. Still, the Œcumenical Patriarch enjoyed, throughout the Turkish domination, a great ecclesiastical and political position, such as some of his predecessors had not held under the Byzantine Empire, such as his successors have never held since the Church in Greece became autocephalous, and the Bulgarian Church became independent. In the Turkish days, he was the spiritual, and in many respects the political, head, not only of the Greek subjects of the Sultan, but of all the Orthodox Christians within his dominions, Bulgarians, Serbs[659], Albanians, and Armenians of the Orthodox rite, who, as well as Greeks, were all collectively described as Romaîoi—for in those days religion and not race was the mark by which Ottoman subjects were distinguished. Moreover, he was not only the accredited representative of the Orthodox with the Porte, but he was also the ecclesiastical superior of all the Orthodox communities in the Venetian dominions, and he was therefore permitted to correspond with all those foreign powers which had subjects of that religion. Thus, so long as Venice was a Levantine State, she had[362] continual relations with the Patriarch, and the Venetian bailie at Constantinople conducted diplomatic business with him, no less than with the Turkish government. Mohammed II, in the treaty which he concluded with Venice in the year after the capture of Constantinople, specially provided for the preservation to the Patriarch of all the revenues which his predecessors had received from the Orthodox. We frequently find the Patriarchs intervening with the Venetians on behalf of the Orthodox inhabitants of the Venetian colonies, sometimes urging the claims of the Greeks of Koron, Modon and Crete, sometimes successfully deprecating the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in the Venetian possessions, and in one case rebuking the Orthodox Cretans for their persecution of the Jews. Nothing more clearly proves the peculiar position of the Patriarch as the head of an imperium in imperio, than the fact that the Turkish government conducted its business with him through the medium of the Reis-effendi, or Minister for foreign affairs. Not without reason did men address so powerful a personage as “master” and even “king.” We might, indeed, compare his situation with that of the Pope since 1870. Like the Pope, he had no territory, but his ecclesiastical sway ranged over and beyond the dominions of the sovereign, in whose capital his seat was fixed. Like the Pope, he negotiated with diplomatists, corresponded with foreign governments, and combined, or identified, politics and religion. And, like the Pope, he at times intrigued against the monarch who had ensured him the secure exercise of his privileges within his dominions.

Although the Koran forbade the forcible conversion of the Christians, there were various causes which swelled the ranks of Islâm. The Turks, being but a small body of men compared with the great numbers of the Christians, early saw that they could neither preserve nor extend their conquests without the aid of the latter. Accordingly, just as some Christian rulers of the East had enlisted young Turks to fight their battles, so the Sultan Orchan, more than a century before the capture of Constantinople, founded the terrible institution of the Janissaries, a corps entirely recruited from that time till the middle of the sixteenth century from Christian children who embraced the faith of the sovereign. At the outset the numbers of these children were not less than one thousand a year, and they were taken at the tender age of six or seven years at the most; but later on, perhaps in the reign of Mohammed II, a regular levy of children was ordered to be made throughout all the subject provinces of Turkey, with a few favoured exceptions. This tribute of Christian children, or παιδομάζωμα, as the Greeks called it, was subsequently erected into a complete system, and became one of[363] the greatest engines of conversion. Every five years, or even oftener, for the tribute came at last to be levied annually, an officer of the Janissaries would descend with a clerk upon each district, and demand from the head man of the place a list of all the Christian families. Every Christian father was compelled to make a declaration of the number of his sons and to present them for inspection. At first, only one boy out of every five and only one out of every family were taken. Then no proportion was observed, but the government took as many children as it wanted, always selecting the strongest, and not even sparing the only son of a family. The age, too, was raised to ten, fifteen, and even more years. We can easily imagine the misery inflicted upon the unhappy parents by a system which recalled the fabled tribute paid by the Athenians to the Minotaur. We are told by an eye-witness that mothers sometimes prayed God to strike their sons dead in order to save them from enlistment. Others, in order to evade the law, would marry their children at nine years of age; but the authorities soon disregarded these infantile unions, and marriage was no excuse in the eyes of an arbitrary official. There were only two ways of avoiding the payment of this hideous blood-tax—bribery or flight into one of the Venetian colonies, and the latter means of escape became more difficult when Venice lost her last possessions on the mainland. It might have been thought that this tax would have been more likely to cause a rising. Yet in the long list of insurrections against the Turks we can recall one only, that of 1565, which is specially ascribed to this reason, and that was an Albanian and not a Greek agitation[660]. Moreover, as time went on, and the Janissaries became more pampered and more powerful, it was esteemed by many a blessing rather than a curse that their sons should serve in the corps. The Venetian bailie at Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century expressly says that the tribute of children had by that time come to be regarded as a special favour enjoyed by the Christians, who were thus able to provide their sons with an easy and comfortable profession! We even hear of Mussulman parents so anxious to share in this singular privilege that they lent their children to the Christians so that they might be enrolled as such among the Janissaries. But the loss to Hellenism and to Christianity through the tribute of children was enormous. If we remember that for two centuries the Janissaries were exclusively recruited from the Christians, and that the latter were chiefly to be found in European Turkey, and if we take into consideration that the tribute children were not only the strongest members of their respective families, but were also prohibited by the[364] original constitution of the corps from marrying, for the Janissaries, like the Zulu army of Cetewayo, were a celibate body, we may form some idea of what a drain the παιδομάζωμα was upon the actual and possible resources of Eastern Christianity. A modern Greek historian[661] estimates at about a million the number of Christian children taken to serve in the corps during the first two centuries of its existence. At last, however, it fell into disuse, and in the seventeenth century ceased to exist. A variety of causes contributed to the decline of an institution which had so greatly strengthened the Turkish army at the expense of the Christian population. From the time when the Janissaries were allowed to marry, they naturally desired to have their own children taken into the corps, while others obtained admission to its privileges by bribery. On the other hand, the Sultans came to regard the Janissaries as dangerous to themselves, much as the Roman Emperors had found the Prætorians to be, and were thus less anxious to have the corps recruited. The number of conversions to Islâm had also narrowed the area of enlistment from among the Christians; and Rycaut, writing shortly after the custom had fallen into disuse, mentions the corruption of the officers and the carelessness in their discipline as the cause of its decay. Accordingly we last hear of the tribute being levied in 1676, though an isolated case is mentioned as late as 1703[662].

Besides the tribute of Christian children, there was a further reason for the conversion of the Greeks in the honours offered to those who apostatised. When the Turks found themselves masters of a great European Empire, they had neither the financial nor the diplomatic skill requisite for conducting it. The Turkish method of keeping accounts was cumbrous, the Turkish language is extremely difficult to write, and the Turks resembled the British in their absolute ignorance of foreign tongues, while treaties and diplomatic correspondence continued to be composed in Greek. But empires are not won by linguists but by men of character, who are easily able to find subtle intellects to do their office work for them. The precise qualities which the Turks lacked the Greeks possessed, and Mohammed II saw at once how useful the versatile talents of his new subjects would be in the administration of his dominions. But there was this difficulty, that nearly all the best educated Greeks had fled abroad after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, and it was owing to this reason that, during the two first centuries of the Turkish rule, the Greeks did not, as a rule, rise higher in the Turkish service than a clerkship in[365] the Treasury or the Foreign Office. There was, however, even at that period, one notable exception, the office of Grand Vizier. Of the five Grand Viziers of Mohammed II, two were Greeks, the former of whom, Mahmûd Pasha, was the first Christian to hold that great position. Under Bayezid II we find two more Greeks as Grand Viziers. Suleyman the Magnificent gave that post to two others, and later on one Grand Vizier was the son of a Greek priest; while the terrible Barbarossa, the scourge of the Christians at sea, was of Greek origin. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Venetian bailie at Constantinople could write that the great places in the Sultan’s service usually fell to the Christians, and the Turks complained that the children of the poor rayah were put over their heads.

But for a long time these mundane advantages could only be obtained by apostasy, and thus the lukewarm Christian had strong incentives to turn Mussulman. But in Greece there were fewer conversions than among the Slavs of Bosnia and the Herzegovina; and when, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the Turkish Government relaxed the strictness of its policy, and abolished religious tests for certain important offices of state, the Greeks were able to gratify a laudable ambition without abandoning the religion of their fathers. By that time education had revived among the Greeks of the capital, so that the lack of qualified Hellenes, which had been felt so acutely immediately after the conquest, no longer existed. It was then that, for the first time, a Greek was appointed Grand Dragoman of the Porte in the person of Panagiotes Nikouses, who conducted the negotiations for the surrender of Candia on behalf of the Turks. From the close of that century down to the War of Independence most of his successors in that post were Greeks[663]. Similarly, the position of Dragoman of the Fleet was usually held by a Greek, and the island of Paros has still many monuments of the family of Mavrogenes, two of whose members conducted the naval negotiations of the Capitan Pasha. One of them, Nicholas Mavrogenes, rose from that rank to be Prince of Wallachia; and it is scarcely necessary to remind those who have studied Roumanian history, that in the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century the two thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia were occupied by Greeks, and the two Danubian principalities were regarded as the happy hunting-ground of the Phanariotes of Constantinople. There was even an idea of erecting the Morea into a Christian principality on similar[366] lines; and, though this was never carried out, the Morea was entrusted to a native governor. But the advancement of the Greeks in the Turkish service, though always beneficial to the individuals concerned and sometimes to their employers, was of doubtful value to the Greek national cause. When their private and racial interests clashed, the Greek officials almost always sacrificed the latter, and, indeed, it would have been an Utopian idea to expect the virtues of heroes and saints from the descendants of men who for centuries had been under foreign domination. It is easy for English historians, belonging to a race which has never known what an alien yoke implies, to demand impossible qualities from a down-trodden people, and we are fond of trying foreign nations by an ideal standard—which fortunately we never apply to our own public affairs. But, after all allowances have been made, it must be confessed that some of the worst blows to Hellenism, such as the loss of Eubœa and that of Crete, were dealt by the Greeks themselves, just as the Bosnian, Cretan and Albanian apostates have ever been the bitterest enemies of the Christians, and the warmest supporters of Turkish rule, so long as it permitted them to tyrannise over their own fellow-countrymen. In other words, religion replaced all racial sympathies, and a Mussulman Slav or Cretan was first a Mussulman and then a Slav or Cretan. Even in our own time, at the crisis of the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a Greek was trying to counteract Greek interests in the capacity of Turkish ambassador in London; and the show statesmen of the Porte, whose virtues and culture are always exhibited for the edification of Europe, are invariably Greeks. Samos, too, with its Greek prince, was, till 1912, an interesting survival of the former practice of sending Greeks to rule beyond the Danube in the interest of the Sultan.

On two occasions, under Selim II, in 1514, and in the early days of the Candian war, in 1646, it was actually proposed to exterminate all the Christians of Turkey. But wiser counsels happily prevailed; and towards the close of the seventeenth century, as we saw, the policy of the Turkish government was to preserve, rather than further diminish, the numbers of its Christian taxpayers. By that time fears were felt lest the Christians should continue to dwindle away, and a taxable infidel seemed a more valuable asset than a less remunerative believer in the true faith of Islâm. Accordingly, in 1691, a first serious attempt was made to secure the Christians against exactions by the Nizam-djedid[664], or “new system,” which commanded the provincial governors to levy no other impost than the haratch, or “capitation-tax,” from them.[367] Originally, the only fiscal disadvantages of the Christians, besides the blood-tax of their children, had been this haratch, which was payable by all unbelievers over the age of ten years, except priests, old men, and the blind, the maimed, and the paralytic. A Christian had also to pay on all imports and exports twice the duty levied upon a Mussulman. But, as is still the case in Turkey, the hardships of taxation arose not so much from its legal amount as from its illegal collection. Thus, in 1571, we hear of the incredible extortions suffered by the Christian subjects of the Sultan, who were mostly so deeply sunk in poverty and misery that they scarce durst look a Turk in the face, and who only cultivated their lands sufficiently for their own wants and for the payment of haratch, knowing that the Turks would seize any surplus that was over[665]. However, the Nizam-djedid represented, like the abolition of the tribute of children, a new and humaner policy, which resulted in the diminution of apostasy. From that time onward the Greeks had less temptation to become Mohammedans; the Venetian occupation of the Morea in the early part of the eighteenth century had the double effect of causing many re-conversions to Christianity, and of forcing the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, from fear of comparisons; while, a little later, the Russian claims to a protectorate over the Eastern Christians further checked the movement towards Mohammedanism.

But it was not only in the numbers, but also in the quality of their population, that the Greek provinces of Turkey suffered from the effects of the Turkish conquest. Almost all the men of learning, nearly all the chief families, in short the intellectual and political leaders of the people, went into exile immediately after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Mohammed II did, indeed, address a proclamation in Greek to the principal archontes of the Morea, in which he promised to respect their families and property and make them more prosperous than before[666]; but his promises had little effect in checking the general exodus of the great Moreote families. So universal was their emigration, that only four or five of the Peloponnesian clans, which had played the prominent part during the mediæval period, remained behind, and there were similar wholesale emigrations from continental Greece and Eubœa. As the leading men all went with their relatives and followers, the drain upon the Greek population was as serious a danger to the nation as the emigration of the Peloponnesian peasants to America, which has lately been robbing the land of its cultivators and causing widespread alarm in the Greek press. Most of the exiles went, as was natural, to the[368] Venetian possessions in Greece, which thus became what in earlier times the Despotat of Mistra had been to the Franks—a thorn in the side of the Turkish conqueror. Thus, Michael Ralles, one of the most prominent of Spartan archontes, and the protagonist of the first Turco-Venetian war after the conquest, and the brothers Daimonoyannai, belonging to the great family of that name at Monemvasia, sought homes in the colonies of the Republic in the Morea; thus, too, Graitzas Palaiologos, the last defender of the peninsula, entered the Venetian service. Other Greek leaders accompanied Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, on her marriage with the Grand Duke Ivan of Russia, and the Russian Court soon became another favourite resort of the Peloponnesian magnates who had known her father, and whose descendants were recruited three centuries later by a further band of Greek refugees after the abortive rising in the Morea[667]. Many Greeks, anxious to fight against the foes of their own, or even those of their adopted country, became of their own free will Venetian light horsemen, or Stradioti, just as others were forced to enlist in the ranks of the Turkish Janissaries. The researches of a learned Greek historian have thrown a flood of light upon the constitution and exploits of that remarkable body of soldiers[668]. The name by which they were known is not derived from the Greek word στρατιῶται (“soldiers”) but from the Italian, strada, and signified that those who bore it were “always on the road”—wanderers, who had no fixed abodes. Composed of Greeks and Albanians, the corps was entirely recruited from the Morea, and mainly from Laconia, but the most valiant were the men of Nauplia. Among their leaders we find many historic Moreote names, such as those of Boua and Palaiologos, whose bearers were descendants or relatives of the men who had fought the good fight for the liberty of the Peloponnese. The sixteenth century was the golden age of the Stradioti, who demonstrated all over Europe that Greek valour was not extinct. One of them was even in the service of our Henry VIII, fighting in Scotland and acting as governor of Boulogne, at that time an English fortress. But they had their weaknesses, as well as their good qualities, and their inordinate vanity was the favourite theme of Venetian comedians, just as Plautus had satirised the boastfulness of the Miles Gloriosus for the amusement of the ancient Romans. Tasso has blamed their rapacity in the line:

but other poets have sung of their triumphs. Indeed, there were bards in the ranks of the “wanderers” themselves, and a whole literature of their poems has been published, mostly written in a peculiar dialect resembling that now spoken in Calabria, where many Greek songs are still sung by the descendants of the numerous Epeirote families settled there after the Turkish conquest—the third time that Magna Græcia had received a large Greek population. One of their number, Marullus, of whom it was said that he “first united Apollo to Mars,” wrote Latin alcaics and sapphics, which, if not exactly Horatian, are, at any rate, as good as the ordinary product of the sixth-form intellect. Another, Theodore Spandounis, or Spandugino, more usefully employed his pen in the composition of a work on the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, with the patriotic object of arousing the sympathy of sixteenth-century statesmen for the deliverance of Greece. The Stradioti, were, however, mightier with the javelin and the mace—their characteristic weapons—than with the pen. The long javelin, which they carried on horseback, was a particularly formidable weapon. Shod at both ends with a sharp iron point, it could be used either way with equally deadly effect; and if it failed, the agile horseman could seize the mace which hung at his saddle bow, and bring it down on the skull of an opponent. Unfortunately, the blow was rarely struck for Greece, and the skull was usually that of a Christian, against whom the Stradioti had no personal or national quarrel.

But Greece was deprived of her literary as well as her military men by the Turkish conquest. For almost the first time in her long history, all traces of learning vanished from the home of the Muses. Most of the scholarly Greeks of that age emigrated to Italy, and, just as, in the words of Horace, “Captive Greece led her victors captive,” after her subjugation by the unlettered Romans, so, sixteen centuries later, she once more spread the light of Hellenic studies in the darkest West. Thus, the Athenian, Demetrios Chalkokondyles, became the tutor of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sons at Florence, while the Spartan, George Hermonymos, was the first Greek who publicly taught that language in Paris. Two other Moreotes, Demetrios Ralles, a soldier and scholar, and Isidore, who had distinguished himself alike in theology and in the defence of Constantinople, spent the rest of their lives in Italy, while the historian Phrantzes wrote his history and died in peace at Corfù under the Venetian protection. We owe much of our modern culture to this fifteenth-century dispersion of the learned Greeks; but the gain of Europe was the loss of Greece. It required the lapse of two whole centuries to make up in the least degree the deficiencies in Greek education, which the departure of all these men of light and leading[370] caused; and if they strove to interest European courts and scholars in the fortunes of their abandoned country, that was of small practical advantage compared with the loss which they inflicted upon it. Had they remained in Greece, their influence would soon have made itself felt; they would have obtained posts in the Turkish service, which might have enabled them to improve the condition of their fellow-countrymen, and their example would have prevented the complete spread of ignorance over large parts of Greece during the first two centuries after the conquest.

The flight of these two classes—the archontes and the men of letters—made the provincial landowners, the peasants, and the parish priests, who mostly sprang from the ranks of the latter, the sole representatives of the Greek nation[669]. But, though Hellenism has never suffered such enormous losses as during the Turkish period, owing to conversions to Islâm and emigration to the West, there never was any time in the history of Greece under alien dominion when the Greek race remained so pure as between the Turkish conquest and the War of Independence. There can be no doubt that, after the long era of confusion and disorder which had followed the break-up of the Frankish power in Greece, even the Turkish, or any other strong Government—and at that time Turkey was strong and the Sultans could govern—must have proved a benefit to the great mass of the population. Moreover, from the date of the Turkish conquest the immigrations of the foreign elements, which had occurred so often during the Byzantine and Frankish period, ceased, and for nearly four centuries the Hellenic race was uncontaminated by alien blood. The Franks left behind them few survivors, except in the islands, and there were no Slavonic raids, while the Greeks, who remained true to their faith, never intermarried with the Turks, for a Greek woman who became the wife of a Mussulman was excommunicated. The two religions remained absolutely apart, and, under Turkish rule, for the first time for centuries, perhaps also for the last, there was no racial rivalry between the Christians of the Near East. Union reigned between Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Roumanians; and the doctrine of nationalities, nowadays the keynote of Balkan politics, had no influence under the Turkish system of that period, which treated all Christians of whatever race as the inferiors of all Mussulmans, whether of Turkish, Slavonic, Albanian or Greek extraction.

Education was scanty enough in the Venetian possessions, as we saw in the case of Corfù; but it was much worse in Turkish Greece. For two hundred years after the conquest there was practically nothing done[371] for the instruction of those Greeks who remained under the Turks, and even archbishops could with difficulty write their own names correctly. Larissa in Thessaly was then one of the wealthiest of Greek sees; yet a Greek scholar, who examined the archiepiscopal records during the Turkish period, found them a mass of bad grammar and remarkable spelling. As for literature, though Sathas has compiled a work on the Greek authors of the long period between the capture of Constantinople and the War of Independence, only four of them, with the exception of a few theological writers, came from Greece proper. Two of these four were the brothers Laonikos and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, of Athens, the former of whom wrote his history of the Turks in Italy, while the latter composed his critical editions of Homer, Isokrates and Suidas at Milan, where his monument may be seen in the church of Sta Maria della Passione. The remaining two were born and bred in Nauplia, at that time Venetian. One, Zygomalas, composed a Political History of Constantinople from 1391 to 1578; the other, Malaxos, produced a vernacular version of the Patriarchal History of the same city, where both resided for a great part of their lives. Another historical work, the Chronicle of Dorotheos, Metropolitan of Monemvasia, was written in Moldavia. It originally contained the history of the world from the creation down to the year 1629, but was subsequently extended to 1685, and for two hundred years after its publication was “the only historical text-book used by the Greek people.” At last, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an educational revival began in Greece, which derived its origin from the Flangineion, or Greek school founded by the Corfiote, Flangines, at Venice, in 1626, and still existing. The Hellenic community in that city, largely composed of business men, interested—as the Greek merchants of London, Manchester and Alexandria still are in the intellectual, moral and material welfare of their fatherland, sent out educational missionaries, who spread the gospel of learning in the home of their race. One of these Greeks of Venice, a native of Joannina, founded in 1647, two schools, one in his native town[670], another at Athens, where the Catholic monks also taught the young Athenians about the same period.

It must not be supposed that the Greeks acquiesced patiently in the Turkish domination for more than three centuries. The long rule of the Franks had had the effect of making the natives far more warlike than they had been before the Latin conquest; but the conviction of the overwhelming power of the Turks rendered them reluctant to rise, except when they were sure of foreign aid. During the first few years[372] which followed the capture of Constantinople it seemed, indeed, as if such assistance would be speedily forthcoming. The East expected, and the West meditated, a new crusade against the Infidel. A Greek poet appealed to “French and English, Spaniards and Germans,” to make common cause for the recovery of Constantinople[671]. The many learned Greeks who had been scattered all over western Europe by the loss of that city endeavoured to interest the rulers of Christendom in the fate of their fellow-countrymen. Prominent among these missionaries of Hellenism was the famous Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond, who was twice regarded as a likely candidate for the Papacy, and who travelled across Europe with untiring zeal on behalf of the conquered Greeks. The Popes of that period—men, for the most part, of learning and statesmanlike views—warmly supported the plan, and Pius II set out to Ancona, where the crusaders were to assemble. But his death at that seaport caused the collapse of the proposed expedition, and the crusade, for which such great preparations had been made, ended in a fiasco.

For 80 years after the Turkish conquest Venice continued to keep a foothold in the Morea, and consequently Greece became from time to time the scene of Turco-Venetian wars, for the Sultans naturally desired to round off their Greek territories by the acquisition of the remaining Venetian colonies upon Greek soil. The first of these wars, lasting, more or less continuously, from 1463 to 1479, led to the temporary capture of the lower town of Athens by Vettor Capello in 1466—the second occasion on which that famous city had fallen into Venetian hands. It is characteristic of Turkish toleration, that at that time the heretics, known as the fraticelli della mala opinione, whom in that very year Pope Paul II was persecuting and imprisoning in the castle of Sant’ Angelo[672] and whose church may still be seen on Monte Sant’ Angelo between Poli and Casape in the Roman Campagna, were living quietly at Athens. For more than a century Athens disappeared from the notice of the western world, but a Greek chronicle in the library of Lincoln College, Oxford, informs us that seven severe plagues afflicted the city between 1480 and 1554, and that the aqueduct was begun in 1506. We know, too, of the existence of three Metropolitans of Athens during the first century of Turkish rule, and somewhat later an Athenian became Œcumenical Patriarch. But the honour of having momentarily re-occupied Athens was far outweighed in the minds of the practical Venetians by the definite loss of Argos and Negroponte during this war, while the Greeks had been the[373] chief sufferers whichever side was victorious. The next Turco-Venetian war, which began in 1499 and was closed by the treaty of 1502-3, yet further diminished the colonies of Venice, involving the loss of Lepanto, her last outpost on the mainland north of the Isthmus, and of Modon, Koron and Navarino, in the Morea, where Nauplia and Monemvasia, with the castles depending upon them, alone remained. The thirty years’ peace which followed enabled Greece to recover somewhat from the ravages of the late struggle, while patriotic Greek exiles, like Markos Mousouros and Joannes Laskaris in vain tried to interest the powers in a fresh crusade for their deliverance. Charles V was not the man to liberate Greece for the sake of those ancient heroes and sages, whose names Laskaris invoked in an eloquent speech, and when, in 1532, war broke out between him and the Sultan, he showed more anxiety to damage the Turks than to benefit the Greeks, who paid dearly for the triumphs of the Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria. The re-capture of Koron (like that of Modon by the Knights of St John in the previous year) merely led to its abandonment and the compulsory emigration of its unwilling inhabitants to Sicily and Naples. Then, in 1537, came the Turco-Venetian war, which was destined to cost the Republic Ægina, Mykonos, the Northern Sporades and her last surviving colonies in the Morea. For nearly 150 years after the disastrous peace of 1540 Venice did not own an inch of soil on the mainland of Greece, except the Ionian dependencies of Parga and Butrinto, but of her insular dominions Cyprus, Crete, Tenos and six Ionian islands still remained.

For the next thirty years after the disappearance of the Venetian flag from the Morea, the Greeks were undisturbed by further fighting on the mainland, though learned men continued to make appeals to Europe on their behalf. The fall of the Duchy of Naxos in 1566 and the capture of Chios from the maona, or Chartered Company, of the Giustiniani of Genoa, in the same year yet further diminished the influence of the Latins in the Levant; but it was not till Selim II attacked the (since 1489) Venetian island of Cyprus in 1570, that Greece once more became the theatre of a European war. The first operations of the Venetians were directed against the coast opposite Corfù and against a fort which the Turks had newly constructed to command the Mainate harbour of Porto delle Quaglie, where the Turkish galleys could wait and intercept the Venetian vessels on their way to Cyprus. Thanks to the aid of the Mainates, ever ready for a fight, the Venetian commander was able to capture this strong position. But he found it necessary to blow it up, as he could not retain it, and sailed for the island of Andros, captured by the Turks four years before, whose Greek inhabitants[374] suffered more than the garrison from the excesses of his soldiers[673]. Meanwhile, the Republic had been working hard to form an alliance against the Sultan. At last, in the spring of 1571, a league was concluded at Rome between Pope Pius V, Philip II of Spain, and the Venetians for the destruction of the Ottoman power. It was the thirteenth time that a Holy Alliance had been made with that object; but it seemed as if the efforts of Christendom would finally be crowned with success. A large fleet was collected, under the supreme command of Don John of Austria, bastard son of the Emperor Charles V, while the papal galleys were placed under the charge of Marcantonio Colonna. But more than a month before the Armada had left Sicily for Corfù Cyprus had fallen, and while the allies were discussing their plans the Turkish fleet had ravished the Cretan coast, and carried off more than 6000 souls from Cephalonia. It was not till the morning of October 7 that the two navies met. The Turkish commander had taken up his position off Lepanto; while the Christian ships were stationed off the Echinades islands, outside the Gulf of Corinth. Against the advice of wiser men, Ali, the Turkish admiral, issued from the Gulf in search of the enemy. Suddenly the two fleets came in sight of one another. It was a striking scene; the varied colours of the Ottoman ships lighted up by the brilliant sunshine, which played upon the shining cuirasses of the Christian warriors; the blue waves of a Greek sea, calm and peaceful, where, centuries before, Corinthians and Corcyræans had fought a naval battle. On either side their modern representatives were to be found, 25,000 were serving as sailors in the Ottoman service, and 5000 more were on board the Venetian ships. Several Venetian galleys were actually commanded by Greeks; especially noteworthy were the exploits of the Corfiote Condocalli, who was the most famous of these Greek commanders; among his Greek colleagues were two Cretans, one a member of the historic clan of the Kallergai, whose name is writ large in the stormy history of the great Greek island. The contemporary Venetian historian, Paruta[674], specially awards the palm for courage, discipline, and skill combined to the Greeks, “as being most accustomed to that kind of warfare,” while he places both Italians and Spaniards below them. And another historian, Sagredo, says that “being more experienced in seafaring, they contributed not a little to the victory[675].” The defeat of the Turks was overwhelming; 224 ships taken or destroyed and 30,000 men slain represented their losses, while the allies lost only 15 galleys and 8000 men. Among the dead were the Turkish admiral[375] and many of the scions of the noblest Venetian houses; among the wounded was the author of Don Quixote, who lost, like Æschylos at Marathon, a hand at Lepanto for the cause of Greece. The first impression which the victory caused at Constantinople was one of consternation, and for three days Selim refused to take food. Nor was this dismay without foundation: the Ottoman fleet had been annihilated; the Greeks were in revolt; and a cool-headed French diplomatist considered that the allies could easily have destroyed the Turkish Empire and taken Constantinople. But the discord of the victors and the energy of the Grand Vizier, Mohammed Sokolli, saved the Ottoman dominions. Within eight months after the battle a new Turkish fleet of 250 galleys, fifteen of which were contributed by the wealthy Greek merchant of Constantinople, Michael Cantacuzene, better known from his nickname of Saïtan Oglou, or “the Devil’s son,” left the Dardanelles, and Sokolli, contrasting the capture of Cyprus with the barren victory of Lepanto, could truly say that, if “the Republic had shorn his beard, he had cut off one of her arms.”

The battle of Lepanto has made a great noise in history, and Rome and Venice still preserve many memorials of that victory. But its results were valueless, so far as the Greeks were concerned, and, indeed, it would have been better for them if it had never been fought. They had welcomed with enthusiasm the advent of the allied fleet, which they confidently hoped would free them from the Turkish yoke; and, in the first excitement of the Christian victory, they flew to arms, and begged the victors to support their efforts on land by the presence of the fleet off the coast of the Morea. But, as usual, the Christian commanders differed as to the best means of utilising their success. At the council of war, which was held on board after the battle, one party advocated a naval demonstration off the Peloponnese, and another the capture of Eubœa, while a third proposed the seizure of Santa Maura, which the Venetians alone actually attempted, and a fourth suggested the siege of the two forts on either side of the Corinthian Gulf. In the end, as the season was far advanced, all farther united action was postponed to next year, and the fleet withdrew to Corfù, whence the Spanish and Papal contingents sailed to Italy, leaving the insurgents to themselves[676]. Many Moreotes had crossed over to the little town of Galaxidi, which the visitor to Delphi sees as he approaches the harbour of Itea, and there in a church they solemnly bound themselves, together with the townsfolk and the inhabitants of Salona, to rise against the Turk on the self-same day. “May he, who repents him of his oath or[376] betrays what we have said, never see the face of God,” so runs the picturesque formula of the conspirators in the Chronicle of Galaxidi[677]. “And then,” says the Chronicler, “they all lifted up their hands to the eikons and swore a terrible oath.” But there was at least one traitor in the church at Galaxidi, a man from Aigion, on the opposite shore of the Gulf, who betrayed the dread secret to the Turks. While in the Morea the Ottomans wreaked vengeance on the conspirators and burnt the Archbishop of Patras alive as a fearful example, the ringleaders of the insurrection at Galaxidi, still “relying on the aid of the Franks,” marched with 3000 men against the noble Catalan fortress of Salona, then the residence of a Turkish Bey. On their arrival, however, they found a Turkish force drawn up in order of battle, and no Frankish contingent awaiting them. Disheartened and abandoned, they trusted to the invitation of the crafty Bey, who bade them come and tell him the story of their woes. The Bey received the deputation, eighty in all, with every honour, and listened sympathetically to their tale, bidding them be good subjects and mind their own affairs for the future. But, when the evening was come, he threw them into a dungeon of the castle, where all save one, a priest who escaped by his great personal strength, “died for their country and their faith.” Meanwhile, the Moreotes who had escaped from the Turks, had taken refuge in Maina, where the two brothers Melissenoi, from Epidauros, members of that famous Peloponnesian family, placed themselves at the head of 28,000 men, who continued the struggle for two whole years in that difficult country. Don John, who was still lingering idly at Messina, afraid to return to the East in consequence of the growing dissensions between France and Spain, wrote to one of the heroic brothers, bidding him keep the insurrection going till his arrival[678]. But it was not till August, 1572, that the victor of Lepanto again joined the allies in Greek waters. Even then, he accomplished nothing. For some time the two hostile fleets hovered off the coast of Messenia without an engagement, and attempts upon Navarino and Modon were abandoned. Then, as in the previous year, the allied armada broke up, while the Moreote insurgents withdrew to the most inaccessible mountains, until, abandoning all hope of their emancipation, they once more bowed their necks beneath the Turkish yoke[679]. The two Melissenoi survived and escaped to Naples, where a monument, removed in 1634, was erected to them in the Greek Church of SS. Peter and Paul[680], with an appropriate inscription, like those[377] commemorating two exiles from Koron. Early in 1573 Venice made peace with the Sultan, and the historian Paruta considered that such a course was the wisest that his country could have adopted. The Republic acquiesced in the loss of Cyprus, and gained nothing in return for her efforts and her losses of blood and treasure during the war but the barren laurels of Lepanto. Upon the Turks the lessons of the recent campaign had not been thrown away. In order to check any fresh Greek rising, they fortified the coasts of the Morea, and built a fort at the entrance of the famous haven of Navarino. Nor had the disillusioned Greeks failed to gain a sad experience from their abandonment. Now, for the first time, we find the Venetian representative in Constantinople writing that the Sultan was afraid of the Muscovite, because of the devotion shown by the Eastern Christians towards a ruler of their own faith. As early as 1576 that astute diplomatist remarked that the Greeks were ready to take up arms and place themselves under Russian protection, in order to escape from the Turkish yoke[681]. The shadow of the Russian bear was beginning to wax, while that of the Venetian lion waned.

One result of the battle of Lepanto was to turn the attention of civilised Europe to Greece. Four years after the victory we find Athens “re-discovered” by the curiosity of Martin Kraus—or Crusius, as he styled himself—a professor at Tübingen, who wrote for information about the celebrated city to Theodosios Zygomalas, a Greek born at Nauplia but living at Constantinople. Zygomalas had often visited Athens, which the frequent wars in the Levant, the depredations of corsairs, and the fact that the usual pilgrims’ route to Palestine lay far to the south had so completely isolated from Europe that the densest ignorance prevailed about it in the West. He mentions in his reply the melody of the Athenian songs, which “charmed those who heard them, as though they were the music of sirens,” the salubrity of the air, the excellence of the water, the good memories and euphonious voices of the inhabitants, among whom, as he states elsewhere, there then were “about 160 bishops and priests.” At the same time he remarks of the language then spoken at Athens that “if you heard the Athenians talk your eyes would fill with tears.” Another Greek, Simeon Kabasilas of Arta, informed Kraus that of all the seventy odd dialects of Greece the Attic of that day was the worst. The Greek and “Ishmaelite,” or Turkish, populations lived, he wrote, in separate quarters of the town, which contained “12,000 male inhabitants[682].” We learn too, from a[378] short account of Athens discovered in the National Library at Paris in 1862, and composed in Greek in the sixteenth century[683], that the Tower of the Winds was then a tekkeh of dervishes, and the mosque in the Parthenon was called Ismaïdi.

In spite of the depreciatory remarks on the culture of the sixteenth-century Athenians which Kraus permitted himself to make on the strength of his second-hand investigations, learning was even in that age not quite extinct in its ancient home. It was then that there flourished at Athens an accomplished nun, Philothee Benizelou, afterwards included, for her piety and charitable foundations, among those whom the Greek Church calls “blessed,” and buried in the beautiful little Gorgoepekoos church. But, though she founded the Convent of St Andrew on the site of what is now the chapel of the Metropolitan of Athens, within whose walls she established the first girls’ school of Turkish Athens, she has left a most uncomplimentary description of the Athenians of her day, with whom she had some pecuniary difficulties and upon whom she showers a string of abusive epithets in the best classical style[684]. Two other religious foundations also mark this period—that of the Church of the Archangels in 1577 in the Stoa of Hadrian, where an inscription still commemorates it, and that of the monastery of Pentele, built in the following year by Timotheos, Archbishop of Eubœa, whose skull, set in jewels, may still be seen there. The monks of Pentele had to send 3000 okes of honey every year to the great mosques of Constantinople[685]. We may infer from these facts that the Turkish authority sat lightly upon a town which was allowed the rare privilege of erecting new places of worship. The idea too then current in the West that Athens had been entirely destroyed, and that its site was occupied by a few huts, was obviously as absurd as the sketches of the city in the form of a Flemish or German town which were made in the fifteenth century. A place of “12,000 men” was not to be despised; and, if we may accept the statement of Kabasilas[686], the male population of the Athens of 1578 was twice as large as the whole population of the Athens which Otho made his capital in 1834, and about equal to the entire population estimated by Stuart, Holland, Forbin and Pouqueville in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It has sometimes been supposed, in accordance with the local tradition, that the city was[379] placed, immediately after the Turkish conquest, under the authority of the chief eunuch at Constantinople; but it has now been shown that that arrangement was introduced much later. From the Turkish conquest to the capture of Eubœa from the Venetians in 1470 Athens was the seat of a pasha, and capital of the first of the five sandjaks, or provinces, into which the conqueror divided continental Greece. In that year the seat of the pasha was transferred to Chalkis, which then became the capital of the sandjak of the Euripos, of which Athens sank to be a district, or caza. In this position of dependence the once famous city continued till about the year 1610, being administered by a subordinate of the Eubœan pasha[687], who every year paid it a much-dreaded visit of inspection, which, like most Turkish official visits, was very expensive to the hosts.

From the conclusion of the war of Cyprus in 1573 to the outbreak of the Cretan war in 1645 there was peace between Venice and the Turks, so that Greece ceased for over seventy years to be the battle-ground of those ancient foes. But spasmodic risings still occurred even during that comparatively quiet period. Thus, in 1585, a famous armatolós, Theodore Boua Grivas, raised the standard of revolt in the mountainous districts of Akarnania and Epeiros, at the instigation of the Venetians. His example was followed by two other armatoloí, Drakos and Malamos, who took Arta and marched on Joannina. But this insurrection was speedily suppressed by the superior forces of the Turks, and Grivas, badly wounded, was fain to escape to the Venetian island of Ithake, where he died of his injuries[688]. Somewhat later, in 1611, Dionysios, Archbishop of Trikkala, made a further attempt on Joannina; but he was betrayed by the Jews, then, as ever, on the Turkish side, and flayed alive. His skin, stuffed with straw, was sent to Constantinople. Another Thessalian archbishop, accused of complicity with him, was offered the choice of apostasy or death, and manfully chose the latter, a choice which has given him a place in the martyrology of modern Greece[689].

The greatest disturbance to the pacific development of the country arose, however, from the corsairs, who descended upon its coasts almost without intermission from the date of the Turkish conquest to the latter part of the seventeenth century. The damage inflicted by these pirates,[380] who belonged to the Christian no less than to the Mussulman religion, and who made no distinction between the creeds of their victims, led the Greeks to dwell at a distance from the seaboard, in places that were not easily accessible; and thus the coast acquired that deserted look which it has not wholly lost even now[690]. The worst of these wretches were the Uscocs of Dalmatia, whose inhuman cruelties have rarely been surpassed. Sometimes they would eat the hearts of their victims; sometimes they would chain the crew below the deck, and then leave the captured vessel adrift, and its inmates to die of starvation, on the blue Ionian or the stormy Adriatic sea. In addition to the common pirates there were organised freebooters of higher rank, such as the Knights of Santo Stefano, founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1560, and the Knights of Malta. The former, whose church at Pisa contains on its ceiling a picture of the taking and plunder of “Nicopolis Actiaca” (the modern Prevesa) in 1605, besides many Turkish trophies, were convenient auxiliaries of the Florentine fleet, because their exploits could be disowned by the government if unsuccessful. Towards the close of the sixteenth century the Florentines were able to occupy Chios for a moment; but the Turks soon regained possession of that rich island, and visited the sins of the Tuscans upon the inhabitants whom they had come to deliver. Years afterwards a traveller saw a row of grim skulls on the battlements of the fort, and the descendants of the Genoese settlers, who had hitherto received specially favourable treatment from the Sultan, were so badly treated that they mostly emigrated[691]. In emulation of the Knights of Santo Stefano those of Malta in 1603 sacked Patras, which had been burned by a Spanish squadron only eight years before, and occupied Lepanto, which in the seventeenth century bore the ominous nickname of “Little Algiers,” from the pirates of Algiers and Tripoli who made it their headquarters. When, in 1676, the traveller Spon visited it, he found a number of Moors settled down there with their coal-black progeny[692]. A few years later the Maltese, baffled in an attempt on Navarino, retaliated on Corinth, whence they carried off 500 captives. Finally in 1620 they assailed the famous Frankish castle of Glarentza, in the strong walls of which their bombs opened a breach; but the approach of a considerable Turkish force compelled them to return to their ships, after having attained no other result than that of having injured one of the most interesting mediæval monuments in Greece. Another Frankish stronghold, that of Passavâ,[381] was surprised by the Spaniards when they ravaged Maina in 1601. The co-operation of that restive population with the invaders, whose predatory tastes they shared, led the Porte to adopt strong measures against the Mainates, who in 1614 were, in name at least, reduced to submission and compelled to pay tribute[693]. But though the capitan pasha was thus able to starve Maina into submission he could not protect the Greeks against the pirates, who so long preyed upon their commerce, burnt their villages, debauched their women, and desolated their land. Had Turkey been a strong maritime power, able to sweep piracy from the seas, Greece would have been spared much suffering and would have had less damage to repair.

It was at this time too that the classic land of the arts began to suffer from another form of depredation, that of the cultured collector. To a British nobleman belongs the discredit of this revival of the work of Nero. About 1613 the earl of Arundel was seized with the idea of “transplanting old Greece into England.” With this object he commissioned political agents, merchants, and others, chief among them William Petty, uncle of the well-known political economist, to scour the Levant in quest of statues. His example speedily found imitators, such as the duke of Buckingham, and King Charles I, who charged the English admiral in the Levant, Sir Kenelm Digby, with the duty of collecting works of art for the royal palace. Needless to say the rude sailors who were ordered to remove the precious pieces of marble often mutilated what they could not remove intact. They sawed in two a statue of Apollo at Delos, and they might have anticipated the achievements of Lord Elgin at Athens had not its distance from the sea and the suspicions of the Turkish garrison on the Akropolis saved it from the fate to which the Cyclades were exposed[694].

While the corsairs were devastating Greece a picturesque adventurer, who recalls the abortive scheme of Charles VIII of France, was engaged in planning her deliverance. Charles Gonzaga, duc de Nevers, boasted of his connection with the imperial house of the Palaiologoi through his grandmother, Margaret of Montferrat, a descendant of the Emperor Andronikos Palaiologos the Elder[695]. After having fought against the Turks in Hungary he conceived the romantic idea of claiming the throne of Constantinople, with which object he visited various European courts,[382] and about 1612 entered into negotiations with the Greeks. His schemes received a willing hearing from the restless Mainates, who sent three high ecclesiastics to assure him of their readiness to recognise him as their liege lord if he would send them a body of experienced officers to organise a force of 10,000 Greeks. They even promised to become Roman Catholics, and arranged, on paper, for the division of the Turkish lands among themselves, and for the confiscation of all Jewish property in order to defray the expenses of the expedition. The pretender, on his part, sent three trusty agents to spy out the land and make plans of the Turkish positions; they came back with most hopeful accounts of the enthusiasm of the Mainates, who were only waiting for the favourable moment to raise the two-headed eagle on the walls of Mistra. Neophytos, the bishop of Maina, and Chrysanthos Laskaris, the Metropolitan of Lacedæmon, and namesake of the Manuel Laskaris whose tomb may still be seen in one of the churches at Mistra, addressed him as Constantine Palaiologos, and told him to hasten his coming among his faithful people, who in proof of their submission sent him some falcons.

But the duc de Nevers wasted in diplomacy time which should have been devoted to prompt action. He appealed to Pope Paul V, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the King of Spain, and the Emperor, who were all profuse in promises and some of whom furnished him with ships and money. An attempt was also made to stir up the other Christian nationalities of the East, and a meeting of Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbian leaders was held for the purpose of concerted action, while the two hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia promised their aid. Another adventurer, who styled himself Sultan Zachias and gave out that he was a brother of the Sultan Ahmed I, was admitted as an ally. Finally, in order to give a religious character to the movement, the duke founded and became chief of a body calling itself the “Christian army,” commissions in which were offered to the conspirators, among whom we find the name of a learned Athenian, Leonardos Philaras[696], who was patronised by Richelieu and to whom Milton addressed two letters. A date was fixed for the rising, and four memoranda were addressed to the duke, with full particulars of his future realm of Greece. From these we learn that in 1619 the Peloponnese could furnish him with 15,000 fighting men, while it contained 8000 Turks capable of bearing arms, of whom 800 formed the scanty garrisons of Koron, Modon, Navarino and Nauplia. At that time, we are told, there were 800 Turkish military fiefs in the Morea, and the population of Maina was estimated at 4913 families, spread over 125 villages[383] and hamlets. These statistics are the most valuable result of the agitation.

After several years of correspondence and negotiation the pretender at last managed to equip five vessels for the transport of his crusaders; but a sudden fire, perhaps the work of an incendiary, laid them in ashes, and the jealousy of Spain and Venice prevented any effective political action. The “Christian army” still went on meeting and discussing its plan of campaign, and two more strange adventurers—a Moor who had become a Christian and styled himself “Infant of Fez,” and a Greek who, with even greater ambition, had adopted the title of “prince of Macedonia”—became the principal agents of the duke. At last, however, every one grew weary of his absurd pretensions, and the secession of the Pope from his side finally destroyed his hopes[697].

During the Cretan war between Venice and the Turks two risings were promoted by the Venetians in Greece for the purpose of diverting the attention of their enemies. In 1647 the Venetian admiral, Grimani, after chasing the Turkish fleet to Eubœa and Volo, blockaded it within the harbour of Nauplia. At this the Albanians of the Peloponnese, who were very favourable to the Republic, rose against the Turks, and after having done a considerable amount of damage to Turkish property, escaped punishment by fleeing on board the Venetian squadron. A Greek, more daring but less fortunate, conceived the idea of setting fire to the Turkish vessels as they lay in harbour, but paid for his audacity with his life[698]. In 1659 the Mainates, who had availed themselves of the war to throw off every shadow of subjection to the Sultan, but who plundered Venetian and Turkish ships with equal impartiality, were induced by the great Francesco Morosini to devote their abilities to the plunder of the Morea. At that time piracy was the principal profession of the Mainate population, who sold Christians to Turks and Turks to Christians. Priests and monks, we are told, joined in the business, and the fact that they lived in caves overlooking the sea made them valuable auxiliaries of the pirates, whom they informed of the approach of passing vessels. Some of them even embarked on board the pirate schooners, for the purpose of levying the tithe which was allotted by the pious freebooters to the Church[699]. These schooners sometimes sailed out among[384] the Cyclades, and just as Lepanto was nicknamed “Little Algiers” so Vitylos in Maina was called “Great Algiers.” Well acquainted with the influence of the Church in eastern politics, Morosini worked upon the feelings of the Mainates by taking with him the deposed Œcumenical Patriarch, then living on the island of Siphnos. The pirates of Maina humbly kissed the hand of the eminent ecclesiastic, and 10,000 of them, with 3000 Greeks and Albanians, assisted the Venetian commander in an attack upon Kalamata, which was abandoned by its Mussulman and Christian inhabitants alike to its rapacious assailants. The Cretan poet Bouniales has left a graphic account of their proceedings in his poem on the Cretan war.

But no strategic result accrued from the sack of Kalamata; Morosini sailed off to the Ægean, advising the Mainates to reserve their energies for a more favourable opportunity of conquering the Peloponnese. The auxiliaries of the Venetian commander, pending that event, continued to prey upon Turkish vessels, and even attacked the fleet of the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Köprili, which was then engaged in the siege of Candia. The offer of double the pay of his own soldiers could not bribe the Mainates to desist from their at once patriotic and profitable piracies. Baffled by their refusal, the Grand Vizier ordered Hasân-Babâ, a pirate of renown and accounted the best seaman in the Turkish fleet, to reduce Maina to submission. But the women of Maina sufficed to strike terror into the heart of the bold Hasân. “Tell my husband,” said one of them, “to mind the goat, and hold the child, and I will go and find his weapons and use them better than he.” At the head of the population the women marched down to the shore, and the Turkish captain thought it wiser to remain on board. But in the evening experienced swimmers cut the cables of his ships, two of which were driven upon the rocks of that iron coast and became the prey of the wreckers, while Hasân was glad to escape on his sole surviving vessel.

Unable to subdue the Mainates by force, the Grand Vizier now had recourse to diplomacy. The hereditary blood feud had long been the curse of Maina, and its inhabitants were divided into the hostile factions of the Stephanopouloi and the Iatraioi—the Montagues and Capulets of that rugged land. At that time there was in Maina a certain Liberakes Gerakares, who, after an apprenticeship in the Venetian fleet, had turned his nautical experience to practical use as a pirate. In an interval of his profession he had become engaged to a daughter of the clan of Iatraioi, who boasted of their descent from one of the Florentine Medici, formerly shipwrecked there; but, before the wedding had taken place, a rival, belonging to the opposite clan, eloped with the lady. Smarting[385] under his loss and burning for revenge upon the whole race of the Stephanopouloi, the disappointed lover was accidentally captured by the Turks at sea and carried off to prison. The crafty Köprili saw at once that Liberakes was the very man for his purpose. He not only released him, but provided him with money, and sent him back to Maina in the capacity of his secret agent. Liberakes at once distributed the pasha’s gold among his clansmen and proclaimed civil war against the Stephanopouloi. At the same time the Mainates were told of favours which the Grand Vizier had in store for them—the use of bells and crosses outside their churches, the abolition of the tribute of children, and the remission of half the capitation tax. No Turk, it was added, should live among them.

As soon as Crete had fallen Köprili devoted his attention to the accomplishment of his plan. He peremptorily summoned the Mainates, under penalty of extermination, to submit to his authority, promising them an amnesty and the remission of all arrears of tribute in case of prompt submission. At the same time he despatched 6000 men to Maina, with orders to treat the people well, but to build, under the pretext of protecting trade, three forts in strong positions. As soon, however, as the forts were finished, Liberakes and his men seized some of their most prominent foes, while the Turks preserved an air of complete indifference. After a mock trial the unfortunate Stephanopouloi were sentenced to death as disturbers of the public peace. Those of them who escaped emigrated to Corsica, where their descendants may still be found at Cargèse. More than a century later they furnished to Bonaparte agents for the dissemination of his plans of conquest in Greece. Other Mainates went into exile in Tuscany, where their descendants soon became fused with the Italian population, and in Apulia, while those who remained behind were for the second time placed under Turkish authority. Liberakes, as soon as his deluded countrymen had realised the device of which they had been the victims, became so unpopular that he took to piracy again. A second time captured by the Turks, he was again imprisoned till his captors once more found need for his services[700].

While Candia was the scene of the great struggle between Venice and “the Ottomite,” Athens was once more coming within the ken of Europe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the French showed much activity in the Levant, where they established consuls about that time. In 1630 the French ambassador at Constantinople, Louis des[386] Hayes, had visited Athens[701], of which a brief mention is made in his travels, and in 1645 a very important step towards the “re-discovery” of the famous city was taken. In that year a body of Jesuit missionaries were sent thither, and though they subsequently removed to Negroponte, because that place contained more Franks, they were followed at Athens in 1658 by the Capuchins, whose name will ever be remembered in connection with the topography of that city. In 1669 they bought the choragic monument of Lysikrates, then colloquially known as “the Lantern of Demosthenes,” which henceforth formed part of their convent[702]. Over the entrance they placed the lilies of France, to which the monument still belongs, and by whose care it has twice been restored; but their hospitality was extended to strangers of all races and religions, and it is curious to hear that the Turkish cadi would only sanction this purchase of a national monument on condition that the Capuchins promised not to injure it and to show it to all who wished to see it. The monument itself was converted into a study, where Lord Byron passed many an hour during his visit to Athens in 1811, and where he wrote his famous indictment of Lord Elgin’s vandalism. The chapel of the convent was, till the capture of the city by Morosini, the only Frankish place of worship. But the worthy Capuchins did not confine themselves to religious exercises. About the same time that they purchased the choragic monument they drew up a plan of Athens, which was a great advance on the imaginary representations of that place, which had hitherto been devised to gratify the curiosity of Europe, and which had depicted Athens now as a Flemish and now as a German town. Nor did they keep their information to themselves. They communicated their plan and a quantity of notes to a French literary man, Guillet, who published them in the form of an imaginary journey, supposed to have been undertaken by his brother, La Guilletière. The sources of Guillet’s information render his narrative far more valuable than if he had merely paid a flying visit to Athens; and though he never saw the place about which he wrote he had at his command the best available materials, compiled by men who had lived there. About the same time Babin, a Jesuit who had also lived at Athens, drew up an account of it, which was published by Dr Spon[703], a physician and antiquary of Lyons, who visited Greece in 1675 and 1676 in the company of an Englishman, Sir George Wheler, and subsequently issued a detailed account of his[387] travels, upon which his travelling companion afterwards based an English version. Two other Englishmen, Randolph and Vernon, also travelled in Greece at different times between 1671 and 1679, and have left behind records of their impressions. Besides these unofficial travellers Lord Winchelsea, the British ambassador at Constantinople, paid a visit, of which, however, he published no record, to Athens in 1675, while the previous year had witnessed the tour of his French colleague, the marquis de Nointel, through the Cyclades and Attica, in the company of the painter Jacques Carrey, who drew for him the sculptures of the Parthenon, and of an Italian, Cornelio Magni, who wrote an account of the great man’s journey[704]. Thus we have ample opportunities for judging what was the condition of Athens between the years 1669 and 1676, or shortly before the Venetian siege, while recent researches have greatly elucidated the statements of the travellers.

The population of Athens at that time is estimated by Guillet at between 15,000 and 16,000, of whom only 1000 or 1200 were Mussulmans, and by Spon at between 8000 and 9000, of whom three-quarters were Greeks and the rest Turks. A modern Greek scholar[705], while accepting Spon’s estimate of the proportion between the Greeks and the Mussulmans, puts the total population at the time of the Venetian siege at 20,000, which would better tally with the expression of a Hessian officer, Hombergk, who was among the besiegers, and who wrote home that Athens was “a very big and populous town.” Another German officer, a Hanoverian, named Zehn, even went so far in his journal as to state that Athens had “14,000 houses[706],” which must be an exaggeration. In 1822 there were only 1238. It is clear, however, from all these estimates that Athens was in 1687 a considerable place. Besides the Greeks and Turks there were also a few Franks, some gipsies, and a body of negroes. The negroes were the slaves of the Turks, living in winter at the foot of the Akropolis, in the holes of the rock, in huts, or among the ruins of old houses, and in summer, like the modern Athenians, spending their spare time on the beach at Phaleron. The gipsies were particularly odious to the Greeks as the tools of any Turk who wished to torture them. Among the Franks were the consuls, of whom there were two. At the time of Spon’s visit they were both Frenchmen and both deadly enemies, M. Châtaignier, the representative of France, and M. Giraud, a resident in Athens for the last eighteen years, who acted for England[388] and was the cicerone of all travellers. A little later, in the reign of James II, we were represented by one of our own countrymen, Launcelot Hobson, one of whose servants, a native of Limehouse, together with two other Englishmen, was buried at that time in the Church of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock beneath a tombstone, now in the north wall of the English church, commemorating his great linguistic attainments. Besides the two consuls Spon found no other Franks at Athens, except one Capuchin monk, one soldier, and some servants; a little earlier we hear of a German adventurer as living there[707].

Our authorities differ as to the feelings with which at that period the Athenians regarded the Franks. Guillet, indeed, alludes to the excellent relations between the Greeks and Latins, and points, as a proof of it, to the remarkable fact that young Athenians were sent by their parents to be educated by the Capuchins. The consul Giraud’s wife was also a Greek. Spon, however, speaks of the great aversion of the Greeks to the Franks[708], and this is confirmed by an incident which followed the visit of the marquis de Nointel to Athens in 1674. During his stay the pious ambassador had had mass recited in the ancient temple of Triptolemos, beyond the Ilissos, which, under the title of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock, had served as a chapel of the Frank dukes[709]. After their time it had been converted into a Greek church, but had been allowed to fall into disuse. None the less it was considered by the Orthodox to have been profaned by the masses of the French ambassador[710]. A great number of satirical verses have been also preserved[711], which show that the Frank residents were the butt of every sharp-witted Athenian street boy, and their cleanly habits were especially suspicious to the Orthodox. Besides, as many of the pirates were Franks, the popular logic readily confounded the two, and visited upon the harmless Latin the sins of some of his co-religionists. It was manifest, however, at the time of the Venetian siege that the Athenians preferred the Franks to the Turks, and every traveller from the West praised the hospitality which the Greeks of Athens showed to the foreigner. Spon tells us that there was not a single Jew to be found in the city. Quite apart from the national hatred which they inspired, and still inspire, in the Hellenic breast, how could they outwit the Athenians[712]? Would they not have fared like their fellow countrymen who landed one day on Lesbos, but, on observing the[389] astuteness of the Lesbian hucksters in the market-place, went off by the next ship, saying that this was no place for them? On the other hand a few Wallachs wandered about Athens, some Albanian Mussulmans were employed in guarding the entrances to the town, and in all the villages of Attica the inhabitants were of the Albanian race, as is still largely the case[713]. In Athens itself all the non-Turkish and non-Hellenic population did not amount at that time to more than 500.

A great change had taken place in the government of the city since the early years of the seventeenth century. We last saw Athens forming a district of the sandjak of Euripos, and dependent on the pasha of Eubœa, who was represented there by a lower official. A document in the Bodleian Library[714], dated 1617, gives us, from the pen of a Greek exile in England, an account of the exactions of a rapacious Turkish governor of Athens somewhat earlier. In consequence of this bad treatment the Athenians sent several deputations to Constantinople, and about the year 1610 the efforts of their delegates received strong support from one of those Athenian beauties who have from time to time exercised sway over the rulers of Constantinople. A young girl, named Basilike, who had become the favourite wife of Sultan Ahmed I, had been requested by him to ask some favour for herself. The patriotic Athenian, who had heard in her childhood complaints of the exactions of the pasha of Euripos and his deputy, and perhaps primed by one of the Athenian deputations which may then have been at Constantinople, begged that her native city might be transferred to the kislar-aga, or chief of the black eunuchs in the seraglio. The request was granted, and thenceforth Athens, greatly to its material benefit, depended upon that powerful official[715]. A firman, renewable on the accession of a new sultan, spared the citizens the annual visitation of the pasha of Euripos, who could only descend upon them when the issue of the precious document was delayed. The kislar-aga was represented at Athens by a voivode, or governor, and the other Turkish officials were the disdar-aga, or commander of the garrison in the Akropolis, which shortly before the Venetian war amounted to 300 soldiers; the sardar and the spahilar-aga, who directed the Janissaries and the cavalry; the cadi; and the mufti.

The Athenians enjoyed, however, under this Turkish administration an almost complete system of local self-government. Unlike the[390] democratic Greece of to-day, where there is no aristocracy and where every man considers himself the equal of his fellows, Turkish Athens exhibited sharp class distinctions, which had at least the advantage of furnishing a set of rulers who had the respect of the ruled. Under the Turks the Greek population of the town was divided into four classes—the archontes; the householders, who lived on their property; the shopkeepers, organised, as now, in different guilds; and the cultivators of the lands or gardens in the immediate suburbs, who also included in their ranks those engaged in the important business of bee-keeping[716]. The first of these four classes, into which members of the other three never rose, had originally consisted of twelve families, representing—so the tradition stated—the twelve ancient tribes of the fourth century before Christ. Their number subsequently varied, but about this period amounted to rather more than sixty. Among their names it is interesting to find, though no longer in the very first rank, the family (which still exists at Athens) of the Athenian historian Chalkokondyles, slightly disguised under the form Charkondyles. More important were the Benizeloi, said to be descended from the Acciajuoli, whose Christian names occur frequently in their family, and the Palaiologoi, who boasted, without much genealogical proof, of their connection with the famous Imperial family. Some of the archontes went so far as to use the Byzantine double eagle on their tombs, of which a specimen may still be seen in the monastery of Kaisariane, and all wore a peculiar costume, of which a fur cap was in later Turkish times a distinctive mark. Their flowing locks and long beards gave them the majestic appearance of Greek ecclesiastics, and the great name of Alexander was allowed to be borne by them alone. This Athenian aristocracy is now all but extinct; yet the names of localities round Athens still preserve the memory of these once important families, and in Mount Skaramangka, near Salamis, and in Pikermi, on the road to Marathon, we may trace the property of archontes, who once owned those places, while in modern Athens the names of streets commemorate the three great families of Chalkokondyles, Benizelos and Limponas.

From this class of some sixty families the Christian administrators of Athens were selected. Once a year, on the last Sunday in February, all the citizens who paid taxes assembled outside St Panteleemon, which was in Turkish times the metropolitan church, after a solemn service inside; the principal householders and tradesmen and the heads of the guilds then exchanged their views, and elected from the whole body of archontes the chief officials for the ensuing year, the so-called δημογέροντες,[391] or “elders of the people.” There is some difference of opinion as to their numbers, which have been variously estimated at two, three, four, eight and twenty-four. A recent Greek scholar has, however, shown from the evidence of documents that they were three[717]. After their election had been ratified by the cadi they entered upon the duties of their office, which practically constituted an imperium in imperio. They represented the Greek population before the Turkish authorities, watched over the privileges of the city, looked after the schools and the poor, cared for the widows and the orphans, and decided every Monday, under the presidency of the metropolitan, such differences between the Greeks as the litigants did not prefer to submit to the cadi. Their decision was almost always sought by their fellow Christians, and even in mixed cases, which came before the Turkish judge, they acted as the counsel of the Greek party. They had the first seats everywhere; they were allotted a special place in the churches, and when they passed the people rose to their feet. Each of them received for his trouble 1000 piastres during his year of office, and they were entitled to levy a tax upon salt for the expenses of the community. They sometimes combined the usual vices of slaves with those of tyrants, fawning on the Turkish officials and frowning on the Greek populace. But they often had the courage to impeach the administration of some harsh governor at Constantinople, and, like the rest of the class from which they sprang, they sometimes made sacrifices of blood and treasure for their native city. In addition to these “elders” there were eight other officials of less age and dignity, called “agents,” or ἐπίτροποι, and elected from each of the eight parishes into which Athens was then divided. These persons, who were chosen exclusively from the class of archontes, acted as go-betweens between the latter and the Turkish authorities.

Thus the English traveller Randolph was justified in asserting that “the Greeks live much better here than in any other part of Turkey, with the exception of Scio, being a small commonwealth among themselves[718]”; or, as a modern writer has said of his countrymen, “the Athenians did not always feel the yoke of slavery heavy[719].” The taxes were not oppressive, consisting of the haratch, or capitation tax, which in Spon’s time was at the rate of five instead of four and a half piastres a head, and of a tithe, both of which went to the voivode, who in turn had to pay 30,000 crowns to the chief eunuch. There was also the terrible tribute of children, from which Athens was not exempt, as has sometimes[392] been supposed, for the above-mentioned Lincoln College manuscript, which had belonged to Sir George Wheler and was first published by Professor Lampros, expressly mentions the arrival of the men to take them[720]. But on the whole the condition of the Athenians, owing to the influence of their powerful protector at Constantinople, was very tolerable. When some of the principal Turkish officials of Athens meditated the imposition of a new duty on Athenian merchandise, two local merchants were sent to the then chief eunuch, with the result that they obtained from him the punishment of their oppressors[721]. When the Œcumenical Patriarch ordered the deposition of their metropolitan, the Athenians persuaded the kislar-aga to get the order quashed[722]. We do not know whether they felt with Gibbon that this august patronage “aggravated their shame,” but it certainly “alleviated their servitude.” At times, however, even the long arm of the chief eunuch could not protect them from the vengeance of the enemies whom they had denounced to him. Thus in 1678 the local Turks murdered Michael Limponas, the most prominent citizen of Athens, who had just returned from a successful mission, in which he had complained of their misdeeds at Constantinople. A Cretan poet celebrated his death for his country, and this archon of the seventeenth century may truly be included among the martyrs of Greece[723]. It was noticed that, even in that age, the old Athenian love of liberty had not been extinguished by more than four centuries of Frankish and Turkish rule; the Attic air, it was said, still made those who breathed it intolerant of authority. Babin remarked that the Athenians had “a great opinion of themselves,” and that “if they had their liberty they would be just as they are described by St Paul in the Acts[724].” Athens, he wrote, still possessed persons of courage and virtue, such as the girl who received sixty blows of a knife rather than lose her honour, and the child who died rather than apostatise.

The Athenians were very religious under the Turkish sway, and then, as now, there were frequent pilgrimages to the Holy Land[725]. Sometimes this religious feeling was prone to degenerate into superstition; for example, Greeks and Turks alike believed that various epidemics lay buried beneath the great marble columns of the ruined temples. In short, the Athenian character was much what it might have been[393] expected to be. Industrious, musical, and hospitable, the Greeks of Athens were admitted to be, and the virtue of the Athenian ladies was no less admired than their good looks. But the satirical talents of Aristophanes had descended to the Athenians of the seventeenth century; no one could escape from the barbed arrows of their caustic wit, sometimes poisoned with the spirit of envy; they ridiculed Turks, and Franks, and Wallachs, and their own fellow-countrymen alike, and they delighted in inflicting nicknames which stuck to their unhappy object. Their love of money and astuteness in business may have given rise to the current saying, “From the Jews of Thessalonika, the Turks of Negroponte, and the Greeks of Athens, good Lord, deliver us.” In striking contrast to the proverbial Turks of Eubœa, those resident in Athens were usually amiable[726]. They generally agreed well with their Greek neighbours, whose language they spoke very well. In fact, like the Cretan Mussulmans of to-day, they knew only a few words of Turkish, barely sufficient for their religious devotions, while some of the Greeks were acquainted with the latter language. Sometimes the Turkish residents would aid the Greeks to get rid of an unpopular governor; and, when Easter and Bairam coincided, they would take a fraternal interest in each other’s festivals. The Athenian Moslem drank wine, like his Christian fellow, and his zeal for water and his respect for trees were distinct benefits, the latter of which modern Athens has now lost. There was, however, one notable exception to the general amiability of the Turkish residents. The Greek population of Attica, as distinct from the town, was much oppressed by the Turkish landlords, and despised by the Greek townsfolk. One part of Athens, and that the holy of holies, the venerable Akropolis, was exclusively reserved to the Turks, and no rayah was allowed to enter it, not because of its artistic treasures, but because it was a fortress. Archæological researches there were regarded with grave suspicion[727].

Education was not neglected by the Athenians of the seventeenth century. From 1614 to 1619 and again in 1645 a wayward Athenian genius, named Korydalleus, was teaching philosophy to a small class there. A Greek, resident in Venice, founded a school there in 1647, and in Spon’s time there were three schoolmasters—among them Demetrios Benizelos, who had studied in Venetia—employed in giving lectures in rhetoric and philosophy, while many young Greeks went to the classes of the Capuchins. Babin tells us, however, that Benizelos (whose father, Angelos, and younger brother, Joannes, were also teachers) had “only[394] two or three hearers, everyone being now occupied in amassing a little money.” We hear of a Greek monk who was acquainted with Latin; but Spon could find only three people in Athens who understood ancient Greek[728]. A century earlier, as we saw, correspondents of Kraus had commented on the badness of the Attic Greek of their day. Yet, according to Guillet, it was by this time “the purest and least corrupt idiom in Greece,” and “Athenian phrases and a Nauplian accent” were commended as the perfection of Greek. Externally too Athens was no mere barbarous collection of huts. The houses were of stone, and better built than those of the Morea; and a picture which has been preserved[729] of an archon’s house of the later Turkish period, constructed round a court with trees and a fountain in the middle, shows the influence of Mussulman taste on the Athenian aristocracy. The solid construction of the houses, and the name of “towers” (πύργοι) given to the country villas of the archontes, as in the island of Andros to the present day, were both due to the prevalence of piracy, then the curse of Athens. But the streets were unpaved and narrow—an arrangement better adapted, however, to the fierce heat of an Attic summer than the wide thoroughfares of the modern Greek capital. The town was then divided into eight parishes, or platómata, the name of one of which, Plaka, survives, and contained no fewer than fifty-two churches and five mosques. Among the latter were the Parthenon, or “Mosque of the Castle,” the minaret of which figures conspicuously in the contemporary plans, and the “Mosque of the Conqueror,” now used as the military bakery, which had been converted from a church by Mohammed II[730]. The most important of the former was the metropolitan church, the Καθολικόν, as it was then called, usually identified with the small building which still bears that name, but supposed by Kampouroglos to have been that of St Panteleemon[731]. Although the clergy had less influence at Athens than in some other parts of Greece, the metropolitan, as we have seen, was a personage of political importance; he received at that time 4000 crowns a year, and had under his jurisdiction the five[395] bishops of Salona, Livadia, Boudonitza, Atalante and Skyros. The monastery of Kaisariane, or Syriane, on Hymettos, or “Deli-Dagh” (the “Mad Mountain”), as the Turks called it, still paid only one sequin to the voivode in consideration of the fact that its abbot had presented the keys of Athens to Mohammed II at the time of the conquest[732]. The Catholic archbishopric of Athens had, however, ceased to exist on the death of the last Archbishop in 1483, and the churches and monasteries which had belonged to it in Frankish days had been recovered by the Orthodox Greeks.

Although the Ilissos even then, as now, contained very little water, there were a number of gardens along its banks above the town, with country houses at Ambelokepoi, and the excellent air and its freedom from plague at that period made Athens a healthy residence, where doctors could not make a living[733]. There were still some rich merchants; but the trade of Athens was mainly limited to the agricultural produce of the neighbourhood, to the export of oil, and to a little silk, imported from other parts and woven in private houses. Randolph mentions that, in 1671, an inspector from Constantinople found about 50,000 olive trees in the plain, and some of the olives were esteemed so delicious that they were reserved for the Sultan’s table. The oil was excellent, and was exported every year to Marseilles. Athens also supplied cotton sail-cloth to the Turkish navy[734]. As for the wine, though good, it was voted undrinkable by all the travellers of that period, owing to the resin with which it was impregnated[735]. Honey was still as famous a product of Hymettos as in classic ages, and the monks of Kaisariane were specially renowned for their hives. Trade being thus small, it is not surprising that few Franks resided at Athens. Such as it was, it was entirely in Greek hands.

The monuments of Athens had not then suffered from the havoc so soon to be wrought by the bombs of Morosini. When Des Hayes was there the Parthenon was as entire and as little damaged by the injuries of time as if it had only just been built. The Turks, whatever their faults may have been, had shown great respect for the venerable relics of ancient Athens, which had now been in their power for two centuries. When a piece of the frieze of Phidias fell they carefully placed it inside the Parthenon, the interior of which was at that time entirely whitewashed[736]; the external appearance of that noble temple, as it then was, can be judged from the published drawings of Carrey. The Akropolis[396] was fortified, and occupied by the garrison, whose houses, about 200 in number, covered a portion of its surface, and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus (then called Serpentzes) was joined by a wall with and formed a bulwark of it. The Propylæa served as the residence of the commander, the disdar-aga, whose harem was in the Erechtheion[737], and the Temple of Wingless Victory had been converted into a powder magazine. Unfortunately the Turks had also stored their ammunition in the Propylæa, and in 1656 a curious accident caused it to explode. At that time Isouf Aga, the commander of the Akropolis and a bitter enemy of the Greeks, had vowed that he would destroy the little church of St Demetrios, on the opposite hill. One evening, before going to bed, he ordered two or three pieces of artillery to be put in position to fire on the church in the morning. But in the night a thunderbolt ignited the powder magazine. The Aga and nearly all his family perished by the force of the explosion, and—what was a more serious loss—part of the roof was destroyed. The Greeks ascribed the disaster to the righteous indignation of the saint, whose church was thenceforth, and is still, called St Demetrios the Bombardier[738]. On another occasion, so it was said, when a Turk fired a shot at an eikon of the Virgin in the Parthenon his arm withered, while another Mussulman was reported to have dropped dead in the attempt to open two great cupboards, closed with blocks of marble and let into the walls[739]. For the great Temple of Olympian Zeus the Turks had a becoming regard, and at the solemn season of Bairam they used to meet near its columns to pray. The Areopagos, from the spring of “black water” still to be found there, they called Kara-su. Less scrupulous than the Turks, De Nointel took two workmen about with him on his tour, and carried off several pieces of marble, just as the Jesuits had taken with them to Chalkis some of the marble fragments of Athens to serve as monuments in their cemetery[740].

The Piræus, which had played so great a part in the life of ancient Athens, consisted at that time of only a single house—a magazine for storing goods and levying the duties on them[741]. Its classical name had been lost, and while the Franks called it Porto Leone the Greeks styled it Porto Drako[742], from the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, upon which Harold Hardraada had once scrawled his name, and which attracted the attention of all travellers. The foundations of the famous Long Walls were still visible almost all the way, and on the road to Eleusis there was another fine marble lion, which can be traced in the[397] Capuchins’ plan. The monastery of Daphni had been almost entirely abandoned, owing to the ravages of corsairs, Christians as well as Turks, and the former had driven away all the inhabitants of Eleusis; but the monastery of Phaneromene, in Salamis, had just been restored by Laurentios of Megara in 1670, and a little later, in 1682, the church at Kaisariane was decorated with fresh paintings by a Peloponnesian artist at the expense of the Benizeloi who had fled thither for fear of the plague, and to whom the monastery and the present summer pleasaunce of Kephissia formerly belonged. All along the shore near Phaleron stood towers, where men watched day and night to give the alarm against the pirates. Such was the terror inspired by those marauders that not a single Turk resided at Megara, and there was only one house between that place and Corinth. The Kakè Skála maintained its classic reputation as a haunt of robbers, and descendants of the fabulous brigand Skiron were in the habit of lurking there, so that the Turks were afraid to travel along that precipitous road where the railway now passes above the sea. Akrocorinth, in spite of its ruinous condition, was, however, a sure refuge of the Mussulmans against the corsairs, while Lepanto, on the other hand, was a perfect nest of pirates[743].

Of the Greek provincial towns at that period Chalkis, with a population of about 15,000, was the most important. It was the residence of the capitan pasha and the scene of the Jesuits’ missionary labours. They had established a school there, after their departure from Athens, and the children of the seven or eight Frank families who still resided in the old Venetian town gave them more occupation than they had found at their former abode. The castle was entirely given over to the Turks and Jews, and the traveller Randolph mentions in his day the rich carving of some of the houses, which I have myself seen there. Patras, famous for its citrons, contained some 4000 or 5000 inhabitants, one-third of whom were Jews, and the latter had three synagogues at Lepanto, which had the whole trade of the gulf, though they were less numerous there than at Patras. Corinth was then, like the modern town, a big village with a population of 1500, and it was noted for the numbers of conversions to Islâm which had taken place there. Like Athens, it had no Jews. Nauplia, the residence of the pasha of the Morea, was a large town, but Sparta was “quite forsaken[744].” Delphi, then called Kastri, was the fief of a Turk, and produced cotton and tobacco. The neighbouring town of Salona contained seven mosques and six churches, and at the splendid Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas there were[398] about 150 monks. Thebes was then about the same size as at present, and had no more than 3000 or 4000 inhabitants, while its rival, Livadia, provided all Greece with wool, corn and rice. Somewhat earlier it had furnished sail-cloth for the Ottoman navy[745], and in the Turkish period it enjoyed considerable liberty, being administered by a δημογέρωον, or elder, who, with the assistance of the leading citizens, successfully resisted any intervention from outside in the affairs of his native city[746]. In the Morea, where there were only 30,000 Turks, and nearly all those Greek-speaking, each town was managed by its own Greek elders, who levied the taxes. Spon found there four metropolitans, whose sees were respectively Patras, Nauplia, Corinth and Mistra, and he remarks, as every modern traveller in the country districts of Greece cannot fail to do, on the strict fasts observed by the Orthodox. He found that the sole exception was in the case of those who were subjects of Venice and who had imbibed the laxer ideas of Roman Catholicism; as for the others, they would rather die than dine in Lent[747]. The value of the Peloponnesian trade may be judged from the fact that an English consul, Sir H. Hide, had lately resided at Glarentza and had built a church there[748].

The former duchy of Naxos, then a Turkish sandjak, had been lightly treated by the Turks since their final conquest of the islands. In 1580 Murad III had given the islanders many privileges, permitting them to build churches and monasteries and to use bells, while forbidding the Turks to settle among them, a provision which has done much to keep the Cyclades free from all traces of Mussulman rule. Once a year, and once only, came the capitan pasha to levy the tribute of the islands at Paros; but the tribute was raised by the insular municipalities, whose powers of self-government were not disturbed by the Turkish conquerors. The inhabitants of some islands were, however, bound to send a fixed quantity of their produce to Constantinople every year[749]. These privileges were confirmed by Ibrahim in 1640, and we may form some idea of the state of the Cyclades from the amount of the capitation tax levied upon them at the date of Spon’s tour. Naxos was then assessed at 6000 piastres, out of which the governor had to provide one galley to the Turkish fleet; Andros paid 4500, with which one galley was equipped, while Eubœa paid 100,000 piastres, and the Morea was bound to furnish three vessels[750]. At that time the Venetian island of Tenos was[399] the best cultivated, the most prosperous, and the most densely populated of all the Cyclades, because the banner of St Mark protected it from the Christian corsairs, whose chief rendezvous was at Melos, and who captured, among others, the English traveller Vernon. Tenos then contained twenty-four villages, the inhabitants of which, 20,000 in number, speaking Greek, but almost entirely of the Catholic religion, were exclusively employed in the manufacture of silk. Randolph, who visited this island in 1670, found it to have “ever been a great eyesore to the Turks,” especially during the Candian war, when a certain Giorgio Maria, a Corsican privateer in the Venetian service, had manned his ships with the islanders of Tenos, and had plagued the enemies of the Republic as none had done since Skanderbeg. Tenos had quite recovered from the raid which the Turks had made upon it in 1658; but since the war its inhabitants had thought it prudent to offer the capitan pasha a douceur of 500 dollars, in addition to the regular tithe which they paid to Venice[751]. The only thing on Delos was the colony of rabbits. Mykonos, which Venetian ships still frequented, had not a single Turk, and the chief profession of its inhabitants was piracy, which kept so many of the men engaged at sea that there was an enormous disproportion between the females and the males.

Corsairs were indeed the terror of the Ægean, as was natural now that the Candian war was over and they had no more scope for the legitimate exercise of their talents. Thus in 1673 a Savoyard, the marquis de Fleuri, set out to take Paros, but was captured by the Venetians in pursuance of their pledge, given to the Turks at the late peace, not to tolerate piracy in the Archipelago. Another freebooter, a Provençal, named Hugues Creveliers, who served as the original of Lord Byron’s Corsair, and had roamed about the Levant from boyhood, succeeded in making Paros his headquarters, after a futile attempt upon a Turkish fort in Maina, and scoured the Ægean with a fleet of twenty ships for two whole years, levying blackmail upon Megara and defying capture, till at last he was blown up in his flagship by a servant whom he had offended. Another pirate, a Greek, named Joannes Kapsi, made himself master of Melos in 1677, but was taken and hanged by the Turks in 1680. Nevertheless the lot of the Melians was so hard that a party of them, together with some Samians, emigrated to London, under the guidance of their Archbishop Georgirenes of Melos, author of A Description of the present state of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos, and Mount Athos. It is to this colony that Greek Street owes its name, for the Duke of York, the future King James II, assigned that site to them as a residence,[400] and in Hog Lane, afterwards called Crown Street, Soho, they built a Greek church—the first in London[752]. Even where the privateers did not come the Turks took care to “hinder the islanders from becoming too rich.”

The Latin population of the Cyclades had not diminished, though a century had elapsed since the last of the Latin dukes had fallen; on the contrary, it had increased, in consequence of the emigration thither after the Turkish conquest of Crete. Naxos and Santorin were the chief seats of these Latin survivors, who were sedulously guarded by the Roman Church. Down to the seventeenth century a Latin bishopric was maintained in Andros, and one still exists at Santorin, another at Syra, and a third at Tenos. In 1626 the Jesuits, and nine years later the Capuchins, obtained a convent in Naxos, which was placed under the protection of France; and after the fall of Rhodes the Latin archbishopric was removed to the same island[753], where the Catholics held much property. But this concentration of Catholicism in Naxos had some most unfortunate results, which were happily lacking in the less strenuous atmosphere of Santorin. The Latins of the upper town of Naxos looked down contemptuously upon the Greek inhabitants of the lower city; they refused to intermarry with the Orthodox; and if a Catholic changed his religion for that of the despised Greeks he was sure of persecution by his former co-religionists. In the country, where old feudal usages still prevailed, the Latin nobles oppressed the Greek peasants; while, like truly oriental tyrants, they were as servile to the Turks as they were haughty to the Greeks. Worst of all, their feuds became hereditary, and thus this little island community was plunged in almost endless bloodshed. For example, towards the close of the seventeenth century the leader of the Latin party in Naxos was Francesco Barozzi, whose family had come thither from Crete about the beginning of the same century, and whose surname I have found still preserved in the monuments of the Catholic church in the upper town. Barozzi had married the daughter of the French consul, who was naturally a person of consequence among the Catholics of Naxos. But the lady was one day insulted by Constantine Cocco, a member of a Venetian family which had become thoroughly grecised. Barozzi, furious at the slight, took a terrible vengeance, and not long afterwards Cocco was murdered by his orders, and his body horribly mutilated. Cocco’s relatives thereupon murdered the French consul; the consul’s widow persuaded a Maltese[401] adventurer, Raimond de Modène, who had recently arrived on a frigate belonging to the Knights of St John, and who was in love with her daughter, to bombard the Cocco family with the ship’s cannon in the monastery of Ipsili, where they had taken refuge. At last the vendetta ended as a dramatist would have wished. The daughter of the murdered Cocco, who was only one year old at the time of her father’s assassination, married the son of her father’s murderer. For many years the couple lived happily together, and the wife was the first woman in the Archipelago to wear Frankish dress. But, though the fatal feud was thus appeased, poetic vengeance, in the shape of the Turks, fell upon the assassin’s son. His riches attracted their attention; he was thrown into prison, and died at Naxos a beggar[754].

Such was the condition of Greece when, in 1684, the outbreak of war between Venice and Turkey led to the temporary re-conquest of a large part of the country by the soldiers of the West and the reappearance of the lion of St Mark in the Morea.

In 1684, after the lapse of 144 years, Venice once more began to be a power upon the Greek continent. She had long had grievances against the Porte, such as the non-deliverance of prisoners and the violation of her commercial privileges, while the Porte complained of the raids of the Dalmatian Morlachs. Excuses for war were not, therefore, lacking, and the moment was favourable. Sobieski, the year before, had defeated the Turks before Vienna, and the Republic knew that she would not lack allies. A “Holy League” was formed between the Emperor, Poland, and Venice under the protection of Pope Innocent XI, and the Tsar was specially invited to join. Accordingly, the Republic declared war upon the Sultan, and appointed Francesco Morosini captain-general of her forces.

Morosini, although sixty-six years of age, possessed an experience of Turkish warfare upon Greek soil which compensated for his lack of youth. He had served for twenty-three years in the armies and fleets of his country, and had commanded at Candia till he felt himself compelled to come to terms with the Turks, for which skilful piece of diplomacy he was put upon his trial at home and, although acquitted, left for fifteen years in retirement. Now that his countrymen needed a commander, they bethought them of the man who had been so severely criticised for the loss of Crete.

The Republic at this time still retained a considerable insular dominion in Greek waters—six out of the seven Ionian islands, Tenos, and the three Cretan fortresses of Grabusa, Suda and Spinalonga—but on the Greek mainland only Butrinto and Parga, the two continental dependencies of Corfù. She possessed, therefore, at Corfù, a base of operations, and thither Morosini repaired. The huge mortars on either side of the gate of the “old fortress” still bear the date of his visit—1684. His first objective was the seventh Ionian island of Santa Maura, particularly obnoxious to the Venetians as a nest of corsairs. Warmly supported by Ionian auxiliaries, among whom are mentioned the countrymen of Odysseus, he speedily obtained the surrender of Santa Maura, which carried with it the acquisition of Meganisi, the home of the Homeric Taphians, which was given as a fief to the Cephalonian[404] family of Metaxas, Kalamos, and the other smaller islands lying off the coast of Akarnania, and the submission of the Akarnanian population of Baltos and Xeromeros, as his secretary and historiographer, Locatelli[755], informs us. Mesolonghi, not yet famous in history, was next taken. The surrender of Prevesa, which followed, gave the Venetians the command of the entrance to the Ambrakian Gulf, and completed the first season’s operations. During the winter a treaty[756] with the duke of Brunswick, father of our George I, for the supply of Hanoverian soldiers, was concluded; other small German princelings sold their soldiers at 200 francs a head, and when Morosini took the field in the following summer the so-called Venetian army, in which Swedish, German and French were as well understood as Italian, consisted of 3100 Venetians, Prince Maximilian William of Brunswick and 2400 Hanoverians, 1000 Maltese, 1000 Slavs, 400 Papal and 400 Florentine troops. We may compare it with the composite Austro-Hungarian army of our own time, in which many different races received orders in a language, and fought for a cause, not their own. Morosini also entered into negotiations with two Greek communities noted for their intolerance of Turkish rule—the people of Cheimarra in northern Epeiros, of whom we have heard much of late years, and the Mainates, who presented an address to him. The former defeated a Turkish force that was sent against them, the latter were temporarily checked by the fact that the Turks held their children as hostages for their good behaviour[757]. Morosini succeeded, however, in forcing the Turks to surrender the old Venetian colony of Koron, whence an inscription of its former Venetian governors dated 1463 was sent in triumph to Venice[758], and his success encouraged the Mainates to assist him in besieging the fortresses of Zarnata, Kielapha and Passavâ. All three, together with the port of Vitylos and the town of Kalamata, surrendered or were abandoned by their garrisons, but a historian of Frankish Greece cannot but deplore the destruction of the two famous castles of Kalamata and Passavâ. Morosini visited that romantic spot, and by his orders the strongest parts of the fortifications were destroyed. In the campaign of 1686, Morosini, assisted by the Swedish field-marshal, Otto William von Koenigsmark, as commander of the land forces, was even more successful. Old and New Navarino opened their gates to his soldiers, who found over the gate of the old town a reminiscence of the days when it had been a dependency of[405] the Venetian colony of Modon in the shape of two coats-of-arms, those of Morosini and Malipiero[759], the latter belonging to the governor of 1467 or to his namesake of 1489. Modon thereupon surrendered, and, although Monemvasia, the Gibraltar of the Morea, held out, the season closed with the capture of Nauplia, at that time the Turkish capital of the peninsula and residence of the tax-farmer, who collected the rents paid to the Sultan Valideh, or queen-mother, from that province. The Greek inhabitants expressed joy at returning, after the lapse of 146 years, under Venetian rule, and Father Dambira, a Capuchin, arrived on a mission from the Athenians, offering to pay a ransom, if they might be spared the horrors of a siege. Morosini asked for 40,000 reals annually for the duration of the war; but a second Athenian deputation, headed by the Metropolitan Jacob, and comprising the notables Stamati Gaspari, whose origin was Italian, Michael Demakes, George Dousmanes, and a resident alien named Damestre, succeeded in persuading him to accept 9000. He sailed to the Piræus, collected the first annual instalment and returned to Nauplia. In view of the prominent part played by General Dousmanes during the late war, it is interesting to find a member of his family among the Athenian deputies. It was not, however, of Athenian origin. Dushman in Serbian means “enemy,” and in 1404 the family is described as owning the Albanian district of Pulati, where a village, named Dushmani, still exists[760]. The Turkish government compelled the Œcumenical Patriarch to depose the Metropolitan Jacob for his participation in this mission and his philo-Venetian sentiments. But the Athenians refused to accept his successor, Athanasios, whereupon the patriarch excommunicated them and their favourite metropolitan.

The next year completed the conquest of the Morea, with the exception of Monemvasia. The Turks abandoned Patras; the two castles at either side of the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth and the former Venetian stronghold of Lepanto on the north of it were occupied; the Moslems burnt the lower town of Corinth, where the Venetians found “the great statue of the god Janus, not, however, quite intact, and some architraves of fine stone[761].” No attempt was made to defend the magnificent fortress of Akrocorinth, and Morosini was able to examine undisturbed the old wall across the isthmus and to consider the possibility, realised in 1893, of cutting a canal which should join the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs[762]. The surrender of Castel Tornese, the mint of the mediæval Morea, and of Mistra, the former capital of the[406] Byzantine province, justified his secretary[763] in saying that by August, 1687, Venice was “possessor of all the Morea, except Monemvasia.” His successes had been partly due to the fact that the best Turkish troops were engaged in the war in Hungary, and his losses from disease had been fearful. But such was the joy of his government, that a bronze bust, with the proud title of “Peloponnesiacus,” was erected to him in his lifetime in the Doges’ Palace, where, like the monument to him at Corfù, it still remains to remind the visitor of the Republic’s last attempt to establish herself in the Morea.

But the conquest of the Morea no longer satisfied the usually cautious Venetians. Leaving Monemvasia behind him, Morosini held a council of war at Corinth, in which it was decided that, as it was too late in the season to attack the old Venetian island of Negroponte, Athens should be the next objective, as an Athenian deputation suggested. Morosini himself was opposed to this plan. He pointed out the drawbacks of even a successful attack upon Athens; it would be necessary, he argued, to provision his army entirely from the sea, as the Turkish commander at Thebes could intercept his communications by land; it would be impossible from Athens to protect the entrance to the Morea, as long as the Turks could occupy Megara; while, if it were necessary to abandon Athens, not only would the Greek inhabitants suffer at the hands of the Turks, but the Venetian exchequer would lose the annual contribution which the Athenian notables had promised to pay. His proposal was to keep a considerable force at Corinth, where food was plentiful, and to send the rest of his army into winter quarters at Tripolitsa in the centre of the Morea, where there was plenty of forage and whence the Venetian domination over the peninsula—the main object of the expedition—could be best established upon solid foundations. Events proved Morosini’s forecast to have been accurate. The council, however, decided upon a compromise: the army was to go into three separate winter quarters—at Corinth, Tripolitsa, and Nauplia—but first an attempt was to be made upon Athens, unless that city would pay a ransom of 50,000 to 60,000 reals[764]. No time was lost in carrying out this decision. Most of the fleet under Venier was sent to the channel which separates Negroponte from the mainland, with the object of deluding the Turks into the belief that that island was the aim of Morosini’s forces. Meanwhile Morosini, with 9880 men (including one or two Scottish volunteers) and 870 horses, on September 21, 1687, cast anchor in the Piræus, Porto Leone, as it was then called from the statue of a lion which stood at its mouth. Thither a deputation of Athenian[407] notables, the brothers Peter and Demetrios Gaspari, Spyridon Peroules, the schoolmaster Dr Argyros Benaldes, and others hastened to make submission to Venice[765]. Although Sir Paul Rycaut, as the result of eighteen years’ diplomatic experience in Turkey, wrote in that very year, that “the Greeks have an inclination to the Muscovite beyond any other Christian prince,” there was a special reason for the popularity of Venice at Athens. Many young Athenians had been educated at the Flangineion at Venice, and the recent outrage of the Turks upon the Athenian notable, Limponas, made the Greeks eager to welcome any Christians who would free them from their Moslem rulers.

The Turks were not unprepared for the Venetian invasion. They had taken down the beautiful temple of Nike Apteros and out of its materials raised the walls of the Akropolis and built a battery. Fortunately, although there was a powder magazine underneath it, the venerable stones of this temple received no damage during the siege. When, in 1836, the Bavarian architects reconstructed it, they found not a single block missing (except what Lord Elgin had carried off) nor a bullet-mark upon it[766]. Within the Akropolis, thus strengthened, the Turkish inhabitants of Athens took refuge with their effects and ammunition, hoping that “the castle” would hold out until relief could arrive from Thebes. The Venetians were, therefore, able to occupy lower Athens unmolested. Col. Raugraf von der Pfalz with a body of Slav and Hanoverian troops was stationed in the town; Koenigsmark encamped in the olive-grove near the Sacred Way, along which the Turkish force might be expected to march through the pass of Daphni from Thebes. As the garrison of the Akropolis refused to surrender, it was decided to bombard that sacred rock. Archæologists and historians cannot but be horrified at this act of vandalism. But in our own day we have seen the “cultured” Germans bombarding the cathedral of Rheims, and the “gentlemanly” Austrians dropping grenades close to St Mark’s at Venice, while “military necessities” involved the firing of projectiles over the Parthenon by the Allies in the crisis of December, 1916. The Venetian engineers accordingly placed their batteries on the Mouseion hill, upon which stands the monument of Philopappos, on the Pnyx, and at the foot of the Areopagos, and on September 23 the bombardment began[767].

The officer in charge of the batteries, Mottoni, Count di San Felice, was a notoriously incompetent gunner, as he had already proved at[408] Navarino and Modon, and on this occasion his aim was so high that the bombs flew over the Akropolis and fell into the town beyond it, whose inhabitants claimed compensation for the damage to their houses. A fresh battery of two mortars was accordingly placed on the east and closer to the rock, while the miners attempted to drive a tunnel under the north wall and above the grotto of Aglauros. This attempt was, however, frustrated by the hardness of the rock, the fire of the besieged and the fatal fall of the miner’s captain from a cliff. The bombardment now, however, began to damage the buildings on the Akropolis. On the 25th a bomb exploded a small powder magazine in the Propylæa, and a deserter betrayed to the besiegers the fatal secret that the Turks had put all the rest of their ammunition in the Parthenon, then a mosque. Upon the receipt of this news the gunners concentrated their fire upon the famous temple; and, on the evening of the 26th, a lieutenant from Lüneburg fired a bomb into it. The explosion was so violent that fragments of the building were hurled into the besiegers’ lines, whence cries of joy in various languages rose at the destruction wrought in a moment to a masterpiece that had survived almost intact the vicissitudes of over twenty centuries. But even among the besiegers there were some who mourned the havoc wrought by the German gunner’s too accurate aim. Morosini, in his official report to his government, merely alludes to it as a “fortunate shot,” and his secretary remarks that the “ancient, splendid and marvellous temple of Minerva” was “ruined in some parts”; but a Swedish lady, Anna Akerhjelm[768], who accompanied Countess von Koenigsmark to Greece and was then at Athens, has told in her interesting correspondence “how repugnant it was” to Koenigsmark “to destroy the beautiful temple,” which “can never in this world be replaced.” So much did von Ranke feel this act of vandalism committed by one of his countrymen, that he tried to discredit the diary of the Hessian lieutenant, Sobiewolsky, which mentions the Lüneburg gunner’s fatal shot. For the moment it failed to attain even the practical effect of ending the siege. The Turks, expecting the arrival of their deliverer from Thebes, still held out; but when Koenigsmark went to meet the advancing army and its commander retired without a blow, when the fire, caused by the explosion, had blazed for two days on the Akropolis, where over 300 putrifying corpses, including those of their commander and his son, lay beneath the ruins of the Parthenon, they hoisted the white flag and sent five hostages to ask for a cessation of hostilities. Morosini’s official dispatch informs us that he was inclined[409] to insist upon their unconditional surrender, but that Koenigsmark pointed out the importance of having possession of the Akropolis and the proved difficulty of taking so strong a position by force. Accordingly, he unwillingly granted them five days, at the end of which all the Turks were to evacuate the fortress with only what they could carry on their backs, leaving to the victors their horses, arms, Christian slaves, and Moors. To prevent their joining their comrades at Negroponte, they were to proceed to Smyrna at their own expense on board an English pink, then in the Piræus, three Ragusan, and two French vessels. These terms were settled on the 29th, the lion-banner of St Mark was at once hoisted on the Propylæa, and punctually, on October 4, about 3000 Turks, including 500 soldiers, embarked. More than 300 others remained behind and were baptised Christians. Despite Morosini’s and Koenigsmark’s express orders the exiles were insulted by the officers and soldiers of the auxiliaries on their way down to the Piræus, and some of their women and children, as well as their bundles, were taken from them. Count Tomaso Pompei[769] was appointed governor of “the castle” with a Venetian garrison, while the rest of the Venetians and the auxiliaries were quartered in the town below. Morosini himself was anxious to attack Negroponte at once, while the Turks were still dismayed at the loss of Athens; but Koenigsmark argued that they had not sufficient forces to take that island. As the Morea was visited by a serious epidemic, it was decided to go back upon the plans fixed in the council at Corinth, and to pass the winter at Athens. To ensure communications with the sea, part of the famous Long Walls was sacrificed to build three redoubts on the way down to the Piræus, and a wall and ditch were drawn from Porto Leone to the bay of Phaleron, to serve as an entrenched camp in case of need. During these excavations ancient copper coins, vases, and lamps were discovered.

Athens had, therefore, become for the third, the Akropolis for the second time, Venetian, for Venice had occupied both town and castle from 1394 to 1402 and the town in 1466, and it is interesting to see what impression the famous city made upon the captors. One of Morosini’s officers wrote that he “fell into an extasy” on gazing upon the magnificence of the Parthenon even in its ruin, and his secretary, Locatelli, devotes ten pages to the antiquities of Athens. Both he and two other officers mention some of the classic buildings by the popular names current for centuries—for we find some of them at the time of the Turkish, some even at that of the Frankish conquest. These descriptions, evidently based on the tales of the local guides, allude to the Temple of[410] Olympian Zeus, which then had seventeen columns standing, under the name of the “Palace of Hadrian,” the monument of Philopappos under that of the “Arch of Trajan,” the gate of Athena Archegetis under that of the “Temple of Augustus or Arch of Triumph,” the adjacent Porch of Hadrian under that of the “Temple of Olympian Zeus,” and the Pinakotheke under that of the “Arsenal of Lycurgus.” The Tower of the Winds figures as the “Gymnasium of Sokrates,” the choragic monument of Lysikrates as the “Lantern of Demosthenes.” The marble lion at the Piræus, they tell us, had been “transported there in honour of Leonidas,” while the statue of the tongueless lioness which stood towards the sea, commemorated Leaina, the mistress of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who had bitten out her tongue rather than betray them under torture[770]. These accounts are a curious contribution to the Mirabilia of Athens; but, despite this casual display of popular erudition, the army was not archæologically minded, the Germans less so than the more cultured Venetians. A Hessian ensign[771] wrote home to his mother mainly about food, regretting that the excellent fresh vegetables were over, wishing that he had a cask of German beer instead of a cask of Athenian wine, and telling her that he had drunk her health in “the temple of the celebrated Demosthenes” (the choragic monument of Lysikrates), which the Capuchins had bought eighteen years earlier and in which his colonel was lodged. He added that he had often dined at Corinth in the temple in which St Paul preached, and that Athens produced grapes of the size described in the Old Testament. Nor do we obtain much archæological information from the observant companion of Countess von Koenigsmark. She wrote that her mistress’s bad attack of measles had prevented her from making notes in her journal of the antiquities which she had seen. “Besides,” she added, “there are several descriptions of them,” and she specially alluded to the recent work of Spon and Wheler. As for the archæological knowledge of the Greek inhabitants, she wrote that “you cannot find any of them who know as much about their ancestors as foreigners do[772].” In justice to the Athenians it must be said that Romans are not always specialists upon the Forum, nor Londoners upon the Tower. She found, however, a local doctor to conduct her round the town: he told her that he belonged to the family of Perikles. Those of us who have travelled in Greece have been introduced to other descendants of the great Athenian statesman. The Swedish lady liked Athens. “The town,” she wrote, “is better than any of the others. There are some very pretty houses,[411] Greek as well as Turkish.” She remarked upon the hospitality of the Greeks, who regaled her mistress in their homes upon orangeade, lemonade, fresh almonds, pomegranates, and jams, just as their descendants do still. Our Hessian officer, too, liked the Athenians; “they are very respectable, good people,” he wrote, “only one cannot understand them, because they speak Greek.” The English consul, however, the same Frenchman, Giraud, who had acted as cicerone to Spon, spoke German and Italian, as well as Greek and Turkish, and hobbled about with the distinguished Swedes[773]. Despite his trouble in his feet, he seems to have been still an active man, who sent two dispatches on the Venetian conquest to his ambassador at Constantinople before his French colleague had written a word about it. A Protestant from Lyons, but married to a daughter of the Athenian Palaiologoi, he was closely connected with the town.

Morosini had converted into churches the mosques of every place that he had taken. At Athens he turned two mosques into Catholic churches, in addition to the already existing chapel of the Capuchins, and made his naval chaplain, D. Lorenzo Papaplis, priest of the church of Dionysios the Areopagite[774]. For the use of his Lutheran auxiliaries he founded out of another mosque, that “of the Column,” near the bazaar, the first Protestant place of worship in Greece, which was inaugurated under the name of Holy Trinity on October 19 with a sermon by the minister Beithmann. While to the Venetian commander non-Catholics thus owe the introduction of their liturgy into Hellas, to his conquest of Athens military history is indebted for two views of the Akropolis and a general view of Athens at the moment of the explosion in the Parthenon, all sketched by the Venetian engineer, Verneda, another unofficial view of Athens, a plan of the Akropolis also by Verneda, and a plan of the town designed by him under the direction of Count di San Felice[775]. This last work has been called “the first serious plan of the town of Athens,” but its object was military rather than archæological—to explain to the council of war and the home government the extent and cost of the works necessary for the defence of Athens.

Whether Athens could be defended, that was the question which its conquerors now had to decide. At a council of war, held at the Piræus on December 31, it was pointed out that it was impossible for the small Venetian forces to fortify the town, or even to leave a garrison there to defend its inhabitants, for all the available troops would be needed for[412] the attack upon Negroponte in the spring; while, even if it could be fortified, Athens, situated so far from the sea, could not be revictualled while the Turks were still about. The destruction of Athens was actually mooted, but the council decided to postpone that for the present, and to remove the Greek population, estimated at over 6000, besides the Albanians, into the Morea and grant to them lands in the new Venetian territory there as compensation for the loss of their old homes. A further council, held on January 2, 1688, decided, in view of the spread of the plague from the Morea to continental Greece and some of the islands, to accelerate the departure of the Athenians, so as to remove the army, and in the meanwhile to organise a sanitary administration of the town. The decision to remove the Athenians filled them with dismay; the “elders,” the vecchiardi, as they were styled in Italian, in vain offered to contribute 20,000 reals and to maintain the garrison at their own cost, if they were allowed to remain and men were left to defend “the castle[776].” The plague and Turkish raids continued to harass the Venetians and the auxiliaries, while those mutual recriminations, usual among allies of various nationalities, so greatly disturbed the harmony of the expeditionary force that Morosini formed five companies of Albanians, who might enable him to dispense with his grumbling German troops. Koenigsmark on January 30 made another proposition—to leave a garrison of 300 men on the Akropolis with provisions for sixteen months, but Morosini calculated that this would involve the presence of another hundred servants, and that for all this force a large quantity of biscuit and wine would be needed. But the argument which weighed most with the decisive council of February 12 was the water-supply. The sixteen cisterns of the Akropolis, it was said, held water for only three months, and of these the great cistern under the Parthenon had probably been damaged by the explosion, and the still larger one in the theatre of Dionysos could easily be cut off, and the water-supply of “the castle” thereby reduced to what would suffice for only fifty days. It was, therefore, unanimously decided to leave “the castle” of Athens for the present as it was, with its walls intact, but to remove all the guns and munitions, trusting to Providence for its ultimate re-capture. The council justified its resolve to abandon the place by stating that the only object of attacking Athens had been to push back the enemy from the neighbourhood of the isthmus of Corinth.

Morosini determined, however, to carry off to Venice some memorial of Athens which could vie with the four bronze horses, carried thither after the capture of Constantinople. He ordered the removal from the[413] western pediment of the Parthenon of the statue of Poseidon (whom Morosini thought to be Zeus) and the chariot of Victory (whom the Venetians mistook for Athena); but the recent explosion had disarranged the blocks of marble, so that the workmen no sooner touched them than these beautiful sculptures fell in pieces upon the ground. Morosini, coolly announcing this disaster in a dispatch to the senate, expressed satisfaction that none of the workmen had been injured, and announced his decision to carry off instead a marble lioness without a head; but the head, as he added in a sentence worthy of Mummius, “can be perfectly replaced by another piece.” His secretary, San Gallo, took away, however, the Victory’s head, which Laborde purchased in 1840 from a Venetian antiquary, while other fragments were picked up from the ruins by other Venetian, Danish and Hessian officers. Morosini did not content himself with the headless lioness alone; he carried off the great lion, which had given to the Piræus its mediæval name, and a third lion which had stood near the temple of Theseus, where it was seen by Babin and Spon; a fourth, a lioness, which bears the inscription Anno Corcuræ liberatæ, did not reach Venice till 1716, the year of Schulenburg’s deliverance of Corfù, and, therefore, does not figure in Fanelli’s[777] previous plate of the lions before the arsenal, where they may still be seen. This done, the Venetian forces abandoned Athens on April 4 and five days later the last detachment set sail for Poros. The nett result of the Venetian capture of Athens had been disastrous. It had done irreparable damage to the Parthenon without any permanent military or political gain; it had injured the inhabitants, who had been forced to leave their homes; it had spread disease and discontent among the allies. To set against these disadvantages Venice acquired four marble lions and Morosini the fame of having temporarily held the famous city. To us Verneda’s plans are the only satisfactory result of its siege.

It remains to describe the fate of the exiled Athenians and of the conquerors of Athens. The unhappy natives had left on March 24, and some even earlier. Three boat-loads went to the Venetian island of Zante, others to the Venetian possessions in the Morea, especially to Nauplia, but most (under the leadership of the brothers Gaspari) to Ægina and, like their ancestors at the time of the Persian invasion, to Salamis (“Culuris,” as it was still called), where, as the famous Fragments from the monastery of the Anargyroi (SS. Cosmas and Damian) at Athens inform us[778], they built houses and churches at Ambelaki, while[414] “Attica remained deserted for about three years” except for a few stragglers on the Akropolis and in some towers of the town. This is the passage upon which Fallmerayer based his theory of the desertion of Athens for nearly 400 years from the time of Justinian! The poorest went to Corinth, while the leading families were scattered about the Morea, the Benizeloi at Patras, the Limponai at Koron, Peroules at Nauplia, and Dousmanes at Gastouni in Elis. The last-named received for his services to Venice several grants of land and the title of Cavaliere di San Marco; his family subsequently became counts and migrated to Corfù, where fifty years ago one of them published an Italian account of Gladstone’s famous mission. To other Athenian notables, who had been specially useful to them, the Venetians also gave money or titles—a pension to the ex-metropolitan Jacob as compensation for his punishment by the patriarch, the title of count to the schoolmaster, Benaldes, to another scholarly Athenian, Joannes Macola, the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Justin’s History, to Taronites for his subsequent services at the siege of Nauplia, and to Venizelos Rhoïdes. Indeed, so well were these Athenian refugees treated, that a geographical shibboleth was devised to discriminate between the genuine and the pseudo-exiles from Athens[779]. To the 662 Athenian families which entered the Morea, the Venetian authorities assigned lands, vineyards, olive-trees, houses, shops, and gardens in proportion to the supposed requirements of the four classes into which Athenian society was then divided. An official Venetian report of 1701 praises their industry in trade, but remarks that “not even the common folk among them were inclined to work on the land,” and extols their “subtle intelligence,” adding that they desired to return to Athens, although the town was once more under Turkish rule, while at the same time retaining their Moreote property[780].

Athens was the climax of Morosini’s Greek career. On board his galley at Poros he received the news of his election as doge, but his first ducal enterprise, the siege of Negroponte, not only failed, despite the rising of northern Greece against the Turks, but cost the lives of Koenigsmark by fever and of Peter Gaspari, leader of the Athenian volunteers. This was the last big event of the war. The German auxiliaries left Greece; Morosini, recalled home by fever and the duties of his new office, left to his successor, Cornaro, the task of completing the conquest of the Morea by starving out the impregnable rock of Monemvasia in 1690; meanwhile a military revolution at Constantinople had placed a[415] weak Sultan on the throne and a strong minister, the third of the Kiuprili dynasty, in power. The latter’s first act was to conciliate the Christians, and to appoint a Mainate, Liberakes Gerakares, then a prisoner in the arsenal, as bey of Maina and leader against the Venetians. The “first Christian prince of Greece” had served as a youth in the Venetian fleet; he had then turned pirate, and had during the Cretan war acted as a Turkish instrument in his native land. He now addressed a proclamation to the Athenian exiles in Salamis and Ægina, bidding them return to their homes and telling them that he was authorised by the Sultan to grant them an amnesty, at the same time threatening those who disobeyed his orders with condign punishment at his hands[781]. Under these circumstances they thought it best to come to terms with their former masters. The superstitious among them attributed the plague, the famine, the drought, and the Turkish raids upon their vineyards on the continent opposite Salamis, to the curse of the Œcumenical Patriarch. To him, therefore, they addressed an appeal, drawn up by the schoolmaster, Argyros Benaldes, describing in high-flown language their pitiable condition and imploring with deep humility his forgiveness[782]. The patriarch relented, and, probably owing to his mediation, the Athenian refugees were allowed, in 1690, to return. Several of the principal families, however, remained in voluntary exile, and their property was put up to auction and bought by a group of leading Athenians; many Athenian Greeks stayed at Nauplia till its recapture by the Turks in 1715; nor did all the Athenian Turks, who had gone to Asia Minor, return; in 1705 the town contained only 300 Turkish families. The population was, therefore, smaller and the material prosperity less than before the Venetian conquest. Great damage had been done during the “three years” of exile in Salamis; most of the houses had fallen, the raiders had burned the trees, and to their fires is attributed the blackening of Hadrian’s Porch. In order to facilitate the economic recovery of Athens, the Sultan allowed it to be free from taxes for three years; the fortifications of the Akropolis were repaired, as a pompous Turkish inscription on the old Turkish entrance, dated 1708, long testified, while a small mosque (which collapsed in 1842) was erected within the Parthenon out of the ruins caused by the besiegers’ bomb[783]. Greek education, which had languished at Athens since Benaldes had been appointed schoolmaster at Nauplia and then at Patras, was revived by the opening of a school in 1714, while the appointment of the[416] learned geographer, Meletios, as metropolitan, gave to Athens a patron of culture. But the reinstated exiles fell to intriguing and quarrelling among themselves to such a degree over their metropolitan, that the Patriarch of Jerusalem—for the Holy Sepulchre had many possessions in Attica during the Turkish period and still possesses property near the so-called Anaphiótika at Athens—wrote to them, congratulating them on having so wise and noble a hierarch, and bidding them for the honour of their famous city cast out scandals from their midst[784]. Meletios was specially anxious to keep out of a quarrel between his flock and the representative of the voivode, at that time an absentee, whose exactions provoked an Athenian deputation to Constantinople in 1712, headed by Demetrios Palaiologos, a local notable skilled in Turkish—a rare accomplishment among the Athenian Christians, for most of their Turkish fellow citizens spoke Greek. The chief of the black eunuchs, to whom Athens still belonged, not only deposed his voivode, but, taking from his secretary’s girdle his silver ink-horn, handed it to Palaiologos with the words, “Take this ink-horn and from to-day I appoint thee voivode of Athens.” This was the first and last occasion on which a rayah was made voivode of Athens. The local Turks and the local Christian notables alike were furious at being governed by a Christian, and the former assassinated him in the house of his kinsman, Palaiologos Benizelos[785].

Monemvasia was the last durable acquisition of Venice during the war. In 1691 the island fortress of Grabusa, off the north-western extremity of Crete, was betrayed by two Neapolitan officers in the Venetian service; next year an attempt to take Canea was frustrated by the old Venetian fortifications, once erected against the Turks. Liberakes raided the Morea, but the Moreote Greeks did not rise, as he had led his Turkish patrons to expect, and the fear of being cut off by the disembarkation of a Venetian force at the isthmus made the raiders soon retire. In 1693 Morosini resumed the command, but his only acts were to re-fortify the castle of Ægina, which he had demolished during the Cretan war in 1655, the cost of upkeep being paid, as long as the war lasted, by the Athenians, and to place it and Salamis under Malipiero as governor[786]. This led the Athenians to send him a request for the renewal of Venetian protection and an offer of an annual tribute. His death at Nauplia in 1694 caused the appointment of Zeno, then governor of the Morea, as his successor. Zeno easily accomplished the capture[417] of the rich island of Chios, but in the following year the island was abandoned. The Greek population was more favourable to the Moslems than to the Catholic Venetians, especially as the presence of the Archbishop of Naxos on board the fleet was interpreted as an intention to interfere with the Orthodox Church. Those Catholic Chiotes, on the other hand, who did not emigrate to the Morea, were dismayed at the departure of the Italians, and paid dearly for their brief triumph when the Turks returned. Four were hanged, their religion was prohibited, and their cathedral (whose Archbishop was compensated by the Venetians with the titular see of Corinth) turned into a mosque[787]. This was the last important event of the war in Greece. A series of naval battles was fought in the Ægean; and, even after the Venetians had abandoned the idea of operations north of the Morea, the continental Greeks kept up a guerilla warfare on their own account with the aid of Slavonian troops. Unable to make head against their combined efforts, Liberakes went over to the Venetians, who showed their distrust of the “Bey of Maina” by imprisoning him at Brescia, where he ended his days. In 1699, thanks to English mediation, the war ended with the peace of Carlovitz, by which Venice retained possession of the Morea, Santa Maura, and Ægina, and ceased to pay tribute for Zante, but restored to the Sultan her continental Greek conquests, such as Lepanto. The castles of Prevesa and Rumeli, the classic Antirrhion, were to be demolished, but Venice did not recover Grabusa. Thus the end of this fifteen years’ costly war found her with a Greek dominion consisting of the seven Ionian Islands, Butrinto and Parga in Epeiros, the two Cretan forts of Spinalonga and Suda, Tenos and Ægina, and the “kingdom” of the Morea, the whole of which, in the Middle Ages, had never been hers.

When the Venetians set to work to re-organise the Morea, they found their new conquest devastated and depopulated[788]. Much of the land had gone out of cultivation, for there were not hands enough to till it, and the war and the plague had aggravated the evils engendered by the long period of Turkish rule. As early as 1687 they took the first[418] step to improve the condition of their new colony by sending three commissioners with instructions to make a survey of the country, its mills, fisheries, mines and other resources, and in 1688 sent Cornaro as its first governor, or provveditore generale. He estimated the total population, exclusive of Maina and the district of Corinth, to be only 86,468, as against 200,000, exclusive of garrisons and foreigners, before the war; Michiel, one of the three commissioners, puts it, without Maina, at 97,118, of whom 3577 were Turks converted to Christianity from interested motives, who required careful watching. Out of 2111 villages the war and the plague had laid desolate 656, and Cornaro could not find a living soul between Patras and Kalavryta. Under the Venetian rule the population gradually rose to more than it had been in the Turkish time—to 116,000 in 1692, to 176,844 in 1701, to over 250,000 in 1708. These figures were probably below the mark, owing to the characteristically oriental dislike of the natives to be numbered—a proceeding regarded as the prelude to that accurate taxation which has never been popular in the Near East. The increase was partly due to emigration from the neighbouring Turkish provinces and the Ionian Islands. Besides the Athenians, mostly congregated at Nauplia, there were the Chiote exiles at Modon, Thebans and Lepantines (after the peace), Cretans from Canea and even Bulgarians. Cornaro alone in his two years of office was successful in inducing 6000 emigrants to enter the Morea, where he gave them lands between Patras and Aigion and at Kalavryta, and promised them exemption from taxes. Ere long there was no one in the Morea who had not his house, his mill, and his bit of land—a thing very rare among the Christians of Turkey—and even the Athenians, the flower of the emigrants, were admittedly much better off than they had been at home. Only material welfare does not satisfy the whole nature of man, else ubi bene, ibi patria would have been an easy solution of many Balkan questions.

The population during the Venetian occupation was mixed. The majority was, of course, overwhelmingly Greek, but there was considerable difference between the Greeks of the various districts, as in classical times. The Moreotes did not like “foreigners,” in which designation, like the modern Italian peasants, they included people of their own race from other parts of Greece. The natives of Elis were specially hostile to “strangers,” whereas their neighbours in Achaia, from their commerce with the Ionian Islands, tolerated “foreigners.” The Venetians did not give the Moreotes in general a very good character, but the faults which they attributed to them were not due to a double dose of original sin, but to the effects of long years of Turkish rule. They[419] are described in the Venetian reports as suspicious, lazy, and inclined to speak evil of each other. Suspicion is a common quality of southern nations, and laziness was excusable under the Turkish system, when the industrious man was punished by being heavily mulcted in the fruits of his industry. With the Turkish dress the Greeks retained the Turkish maxims, but it was noticed that the women of Monemvasia had preserved from the previous Venetian occupation the old Venetian dress. The Arkadians were “rustics and truly Arkadian, but full of wiles,” and there was considerable polish at Kalamata. The Cretans were an exception; brought up under Venetian rule for centuries, they were very industrious. The Ionians were restless, but more cultured than the Moreotes, of whom the most civilised were the townsfolk of Mistra, who “dressed and lived with more splendour than the others, boasting to be the remnant of the true Spartan blood.” All the people of the country round Mistra were pure Greeks, but the town contained over 400 Jews, whose descendants Chateaubriand[789] found there in 1806, and whose compatriots’ funeral inscriptions I noticed in the museum there. The Jewish element in the Morea was, however, small—it was a poor country—and the only other Hebrew colonies were at Nauplia and Patras. Truth was not the strong point of the Naupliotes, but they were loyal to Venice, as were from the first the Mainates, who abhorred the very name of the Turks, of whom the other Greeks stood in awe, but had a rooted objection to paying taxes, always went armed, and “professed to observe still the institutes of Lycurgus,” of which the chief was apparently the blood-feud. Besides the Greeks and the Jews, both chiefly occupied with trade, there were the Albanians, mostly agriculturists and specially numerous in the province of Romania, men of fine physique but hating war. Indeed, with the exception of the Mainates and some of the emigrants from Northern Greece, the population was essentially pacific and relied upon its foreign rulers to defend it. It was, however, litigious, and this natural tendency was increased by a “hungry crowd of small lawyers, partly from the Ionian Islands, partly from the Venetian bar,” who became the curse of the Morea.

The Venetians divided the peninsula at first into six provinces and seven fiscal boards, but the number of the provinces was reduced to four, viz. Romania (capital Nauplia), Lakonia (capital Monemvasia), Messenia (capital Navarino Nuovo), and Achaia (capital Patras). Each province had a provveditore for its administration and defence, a judicial official known as rettore, and a treasurer, or camerlengo. There were also provveditori in seven places which were not provincial capitals, viz.[420] Mistra, Kalavryta, Phanari, Gastouni, Koron, Modon and Zarnata. Above them all stood the provveditore generale. None of these officials, as we see from Hopf’s lists[790], held office for more than two or three years, according to the usual Venetian system; but they were not new to the task of governing Greeks. The government was, therefore, experienced, but still wholly in foreign hands, although Morosini allowed a few communities to manage their local affairs, and Maina enjoyed practical independence. This liberal concession was not, however, altogether successful. “Every castle, almost every village, aspired to erect itself into a republic,” wrote one of the governors-general, and these petty communes begged Venice to send them a Venetian noble, in order that they might pose as the equals of the provincial capitals, even offering to pay his salary for the advantage conferred by his presence. Moreover, persons suddenly promoted from the status of Turkish rayah to be local magnates, were not always disposed to treat the Greek peasants upon democratic principles, but rather upon those by which they had been treated themselves. An emancipated slave is apt to be a slave-driver.

One important privilege was granted to the communities from political motives—the election of the Orthodox bishops. Of all the difficulties, which Venice had to face, the greatest was the Œcumenical Patriarch, an official, who, being resident in the Turkish capital, was perforce a Turkish agent, and who, before this reform, had named the nineteen Moreote bishops and the abbots of the stavropégia—monasteries directly dependent upon him. These, in 1701, formed 26 out of the total of 158 (with 1367 monks). The Patriarch’s patronage had, therefore, been considerable, and his influence, even apart from Turkish pressure, was unlikely to be used in favour of a Catholic government. But this was not his only loss. Before the Venetian conquest, one-half of the Epiphany and Easter offerings of the priests and people—3 reals for every priest in the diocese and ¼ real for every household—had gone to the bishop, and one-half to the Patriarch. Morosini reduced these offerings, the philótimo as it was called, by about one-half, at the same time ordering that the whole of it should be given to the local bishop and nothing to the Patriarch. The Patriarch, thus injured in both his powers and his purse, threatened to excommunicate such communes as elected their own bishops. To this the Venetian governor-general, Grimani, retorted by forbidding the entry of the patriarchal exarch into the Morea; but his duties, mainly those of a tax-collector, were quietly undertaken by the Metropolitan of Patras, while the Patriarch became as anxious as the Turks to turn the Venetians out of the country.[421] Unfortunately, these disadvantages of a well-meant reform were not accompanied by corresponding benefits. Simony continued to be rife, and unsuitable persons were often chosen as bishops by the communities. Nor was the Patriarch the only external influence over the Moreote church, for there were some twenty-four metóchia, or “monastic farms” belonging to monasteries in Turkish territory, which not only sent money out of the country to swell the enemy’s revenues, but were centres of political propaganda and smuggling. These difficulties were not peculiar to the Venetians: they likewise faced the Bavarian regency. The Venetian official reports show a consciousness of the policy of conciliation towards the church of the vast mass of the people. For the Catholics, outside the Venetian garrison, were few, except at Nauplia and among the Chiote exiles at Modon. Indeed, the former Archbishop of Chios was the first Catholic Archbishop of the Venetian Morea; and his successor, Mgr. Carlini, whose see was Corinth but who resided at Nauplia, was the only Catholic prelate in the whole kingdom; even as late as 1714 the Morea contained only one Catholic bishop. We find, however, the Greeks sending their children to the friars’ school to learn Italian and the rudiments of Latin, and there was a scheme for founding a college at Tripolitsa. Unfortunately the ministers of religion, as Cornaro epigrammatically wrote, seemed sometimes to be sent to the Morea “rather as a punishment for their own sins than to correct the sins of others.”

Materially, the Venetian administration marked an advance, as the foreign occupation of Turkish territory always does, but trade was handicapped by the selfish colonial policy of Venice. Upon the Morea, “a poor country without industries or manufacture,” the Turks had imposed thirteen taxes, of which five (the haratch, a further local capitation-tax, called spenza, the duty on horses’ shoes, the tax on absentee landlords, and the burden of providing and transporting food for the army at half price) fell upon the Christians alone, while the others (such as the tithe and the taxes on animals) were common to both them and the Turks. Thus, out of a total of 1,699,000 reals, the Christians paid 1,350,300, besides what was illegally extorted from them. The Venetians raised their revenue from tithes of all agricultural produce, taxes on wine, spirits, oil and tobacco, the usual Italian system of a salt monopoly, customs dues, and the Crown lands. Careful management and increased prosperity increased the revenue, only 280,000 reals in 1689, to 500,501 in 1711. The farming of the tithes was entrusted to the communes, but the Mainates refused to pay tithes, consenting, however, to pay, although reluctantly, a fixed tribute called mactù. The salt[422] monopoly was a hardship, because, although the price was low, a peasant living near the chief salt-pans at Thermisi was not allowed to buy his salt on the spot, but had to make a long journey to some distant magazine. Agriculture improved after the peace of Carlovitz and the fortification of Nauplia, when it became clear that Venice intended to stay and security of tenure was thus assured. But the customs dues yielded little, because the Republic forbade the creation of industries likely to compete with those of Venice, and compelled the Moreotes to send every article to that city. English merchants, therefore, found it cheaper to trade with Turkey, and the governors-general in vain pointed out the folly of this commercial policy, which caused the decline of such industries as that of silk at Mistra, until it was revived by the Chiote exiles at Modon. As the foreign garrison could not stomach the resinous wine, and began to import foreign vintages, efforts were made to extend and improve the local vineyards. The currant, which is now successfully cultivated along the Moreote shore of the Corinthian Gulf, had, indeed, been known in the peninsula as far back as the fourteenth century, when it is mentioned by Pegalotti[791]; but it was not till after the Turkish reconquest that it was grown and exported in large quantities for the consumption of northern races. Even with these drawbacks, however, and the burden of having to contribute to the maintenance of Cerigo and Ægina, both united administratively with the Morea since the peace, the peninsula not only paid all the expenses of administration but furnished a substantial balance to the naval defence of the Republic, in which it was directly interested. Land defence was a more difficult question. Of the natives only the Mainates wanted to be soldiers, nor could the Greeks be trusted with arms, while French consuls, anxious to weaken Venice, encouraged French mercenaries, as at Suda and Spinalonga[792], to desert her service.

The fact was that, like Great Britain in the Ionian Islands and Cyprus, and Austria-Hungary in Bosnia and the Herzegovina, Venice had improved the administration, without winning the love of her alien subjects. Foreign domination, even under the most favourable circumstances, never succeeds in satisfying the Balkan races, whose national feelings are keenly developed. The Venetian governors, as their reports show, were well-meaning men, but they were aliens in race and religion to the governed. Even had their administration been perfect, that fact alone would have rendered it unpopular after the first feeling[423] of relief at the expulsion of the Turkish yoke was over. Liberated peoples, especially in the Near East, expect much from their western administrators, while, as we know in Egypt, the evils of the old corrupt rule are soon forgotten. It was so in the Morea. Thus, in 1710, the French traveller, De La Motraye[793], found the Greeks of Modon “praying for their return under Turkish domination, and envying the lot of those Greeks who still lived under it.” This was partly due to the lightness of the Turkish capitation-tax, and they added: “Venetian soldiers are quartered on us, their officers debauch our wives and daughters, their priests speak against our religion and constantly urge us to embrace theirs, which the Turks never did.” Besides, the Greeks had a feeling, justified by the result, that Turkey was stronger than Venice, and therefore desired to be on the winning side, and thus avoid reprisals. Even the rough-and-ready Turkish justice, which was administered with the stick, seemed to one Venetian governor to be more suited to the people than the interminable Venetian procedure, presided over by ignorant young nobles, assisted by venal clerks. Thus the poor suitor fared badly, for the governor-general could not be ubiquitous. Public safety, however, improved; as the local policeman was often a brigand, a local militia was organised by the communes, and a notoriously dangerous pass, like that of Makryplagi, through which the railway now descends to Kalamata, was guarded by the men of the neighbouring villages, who were authorised to levy a small toll from the travellers. Crime diminished, and it rarely became necessary to apply the penalty of death. With the Mainates, in particular, mildness and diplomacy were the only possible methods. Luxury, however, and moral depravation crept into Nauplia, the Venetian capital of the Morea, and the historian, Diedo[794], wrote that “in magnificence and pomp it had no cause to envy the most cultured capitals.” Sternly practical people, the Venetians did nothing for the classical antiquities of the Peloponnese; indeed, Grimani turned the amphitheatre of Corinth into a lazaretto; but the Venetian occupation spread abroad the names of the classic sites, and the various illustrated books upon the Morea and other parts of Greece, which were rapidly turned out from Coronelli’s “workshop,” were at once the result and the cause of the popular curiosity about this once famous land, which had emerged, thanks to Morosini’s victories, from Turkish darkness into the light of day.

As early as 1711 the Venetian government had been warned that Turkey was eager to recover the Morea, the loss of which was severely felt; yet no preparations were made to meet the coming storm, but most[424] of the fortresses were left in a bad condition. Nothing had been done since 1696 to protect the isthmus, and Palamedi at Nauplia alone had been fortified at immense cost with those splendid works which still remain, with an occasional abandoned cannon of 1685 on the “Fig Fort,” a memorial of the Venetian occupation. Each of its bulwarks bore the name of a famous Venetian—Morosini, Sagredo and Grimani—and an inscription over the gate contains the date—1712—of its completion[795]. There were not, however, sufficient men to defend it; indeed, when war was declared the total army in the Morea consisted of only 10,735 men, while the fleet consisted of only eleven galleys and eight armed ships. In 1714, after having defeated Russia and renewed their treaty with Poland, the Turks had their hands free to attack the enemy, against whom their own desire for revenge and French commercial jealousy urged them. The moment seemed favourable, with Russia not yet recovered from her late Turkish war and pledged not to make an alliance with Venice, with the Moreote Greeks “desirous to return” (so the war-party argued) “to their old obedience.” Both sides could rely, it was true, on spiritual help; but the support of Pope Clement XI was less valuable than the threat of the Œcumenical Patriarch to excommunicate all Greeks who fought for the schismatic Republic, which had curtailed his revenues and privileges. An excuse for war was easily found: Venice, it was pretended, had supplied the Montenegrins with arms and money and received their bishop, Danilo I, at Cattaro. In vain the Republic hoped for the Emperor’s mediation, and hastily sent munitions and provisions to the Morea. It was decided to abandon all places except Nauplia, Argos, Monemvasia, Modon, Koron, Kielefa, Zarnata, and the castle of the Morea—the corresponding castle on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf had been re-fortified by Turkey in defiance of the treaty of Carlovitz—and to demolish both Navarinos. It was, however, too late.

The campaign of 1715 was an unbroken series of striking successes for the Turkish army of over 100,000 men and the large fleet. The first blow was the loss of Tenos, a Venetian colony since 1390, whose cowardly commander, Balbi, capitulated at the first summons of the Turkish admiral, subsequently expiating his conduct by imprisonment for life. Its naturally strong fortress of San Nicolo, which Tournefort[796] fifteen years before had found garrisoned by “fourteen ragged soldiers, of whom seven were French deserters,” contained abundant food and ammunition; the Teniotes, so predominantly Catholics, that the place was called “the Pope’s island,” were loyal to Venice and formed an excellent[425] militia, which had repulsed the Turkish admiral, Mezzomorto, in the late war; and this solitary Venetian island had been regarded as “a thorn in the centre of the Turkish empire.” The Turkish army, under Ali Kamurgi, aided by many Greek militia-men from the northern shores of the gulf, crossed the isthmus and besieged Corinth. Minotto, who “held in Corinth’s towers the Doge’s delegated powers,” resisted a five days’ bombardment, although the Greek non-combatants desired to save their property by surrender, before he capitulated on condition that the garrison was transported to Corfù. But an explosion in the fortress, ascribed by Byron in The Siege of Corinth to Minotto himself, but perhaps due to accident, led the Janissaries to massacre the Venetians and Greeks. Minotto was carried off as a slave to Smyrna, where he was ransomed by the wife of the Dutch consul[797]; the Greek prisoners were sold “like cattle.” This frightened the Moreotes into submission and encouraged the Æginetans to invoke the aid of the Turkish admiral, to whom the commander, Bembo, surrendered the island without resistance. The fact that the Turkish general paid for provisions, while the Venetians had commandeered them, enlisted the interests, and therefore the sympathies, of the Moreote peasantry, and excited the surprise of the French interpreter, Brue, who has left a diary of his experiences in this campaign. Nauplia was the next objective of the invaders. The poet Manthos of Joannina, who was there when it fell, expressed the current belief of the Greeks (of whom, however, few could be induced even by high pay, to aid in the defence) that the strongly fortified capital of the Venetian Morea was betrayed by De La Salle (or Sala), a French officer in the Venetian service, who had sent the plans of Palamedi to Negroponte. Over a century later the traitor’s ruined house was pointed out to Emerson, the historian[798]. It had been pulled down and an “anathema” of stones raised on the site, upon which no one dared to build till 1859; it was called “Sala’s threshing-floor” and used for drying clothes. After a brief resistance Palamedi, on which so much had been spent, was stormed, and the storming-party thence entered the town. The captors showed special fury against the Catholics, whose Archbishop, Carlini, was among the slain. The capture of Nauplia so greatly delighted Ahmed III, that he came to see the place, visiting Athens on his way—the first and last time that a Sultan set foot there since Mohammed II—and, according to a legend, presenting the gardens of Phaleron to his body-guard[799]. The garrisons of Modon and[426] the castle of the Morea mutinied, and refused to defend those fortresses; worse still was the “ignominious surrender” of the strong and well-provisioned rock of Monemvasia by its boastful governor, Badoer, without firing a shot, at the first summons of the Turkish admiral, who subsequently admitted that he could not have taken it. Meanwhile the Venetian fleet remained inactive off Sapienza, because, as its admiral pleaded, he did not wish to add a defeat on sea to that on land! The Morea was now lost; even Maina submitted. But the commanders of the two surviving Cretan forts of Suda and Spinalonga were resolute men. Under the circumstances—for Suda’s defences were judged defective, and the French consul at Canea aided the Turkish admiral with his advice and local knowledge[800]—the small garrison did well to hold out till September 25, when it honourably capitulated. Spinalonga then surrendered without a siege, and the last fragment of Venetian rule in Crete was gone. The Sultan was as much pleased at the taking of these two places as at the reconquest of the Morea. Cerigo and Cerigotto next hoisted the white flag, and Venice was so much alarmed for the safety of Corfù, that she blew up the recent fortifications of Santa Maura and temporarily abandoned that island. The Turks occupied Butrinto and threatened Corfù; but the bravery of Schulenburg defended the latter and recovered the former and Santa Maura in 1716, and took Prevesa and Vonitza in 1717. An alliance with the Emperor, alarmed at the effect of the Turkish successes upon his Hungarian subjects, saved Venice from further losses; Great Britain offered her mediation, and the peace of Passarovitz in 1718 gave her back Cerigo and Cerigotto, and allowed her to keep Butrinto, Santa Maura, Prevesa and Vonitza. The nett result of the two wars, in which she had kept and lost the Morea, was that, as against the loss of Tenos and the three Cretan forts, which she held in 1684, she had to set off the possession of Santa Maura and the two places on the Ambrakian gulf in 1718. She had “consolidated” her Levantine dominion: Cerigo was now her farthest possession. But in her case, as in that of Turkey in our own time, “consolidation” meant decline. From that date she ceased to count as a factor in Greek affairs, except in the Ionian Islands and their continental dependencies.

The collapse of her power in the Morea in a hundred and one days proved that Venice was unable to defend the Greeks, whom she had never won over to her rule. But, although she had not gained their love, her administration had not been without some lasting benefits to them. The example of Venice, despite the venality of her judges, forced the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, and agriculture and wine[427] growing were improved. The Venetian occupation of the Morea had the same effect upon the Greeks as the twenty-one years’ Austrian occupation of Serbia from 1718 to 1739 upon the Serbs; it spread a higher degree of material civilisation. But even the most benevolent and most efficient government by foreigners—and a modern Greek historian has attributed both good intentions and efficiency to the Venetians—is bound to fail when national consciousness begins to awaken. After the Venetians went, the Greeks prepared to fight, not to substitute the rule of one foreign power for that of another but for independence, not for Venice, or Turkey, or Russia, but for Greece. The younger generations, which had grown up under Venetian auspices, were manlier and better than those which had only known Turkish rule. If Venice contributed thereby to preparing the way for the war of independence, it was her greatest service to the Greeks.

1. VALONA

The late Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters.

The name αὐλών, “a hollow between hills,” was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form “Valona,” or, as the Venetians often wrote it, “Avalona.” In antiquity there were, however, few allusions to this particular αὐλών, the probable date of its foundation being, therefore, fairly late, although the pitch-mine of Selenitza, three hours to the east, was worked by the Romans in the time of Ovid[801], and Pliny the Elder[802] knew the now famous island of Saseno, to which both Lucan[803] and Silius Italicus[804] allude, as a pirate resort. But there is no mention of Valona till the second half of the second century A.D., when Ptolemy[805] describes it as “a city and harbour.” It subsequently occurs several times in the Antonine, Maritime and Jerusalem Itineraries[806], and in the Synekdemos of Hierokles[807]; whereas Kanina, the little town on the hill above it, which may have been its akropolis, was “built,” according to Leake[808], “upon a Hellenic site,” and identified by Pouqueville[809] with Œneus, the fortress taken by Perseus during the third Macedonian war, and probably destroyed by Æmilius Paullus, which would thus explain its long disappearance from history.

Despite the importance of its position as a port of transit between Rome and Constantinople, Valona is rarely named even by Byzantine historians before the eleventh century. Bishops of Valona, who were at different times suffragans of Durazzo or Ochrida, are mentioned in 458, in 553, and in 519, when the legates sent by Pope Hormisdas to Constantinople were received by the then occupant of the See[810]. It was there that Peter, Justinian’s envoy, met those of Theodatus, the two[430] Roman Senators, Liberius and Opilio, and learnt what had befallen Amalasuntha, the prisoner of Bolsena[811]. Constantine Porphyrogenitus[812] merely enumerates it as one of the cities comprised in the Theme of Dyrrachium. Possibly it was one of the Byzantine harbours between Corfù and the Drin, which escaped temporary absorption in the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon (c. 917). But Kanina was included in that of the other great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel (976-1014), until Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” overthrew that powerful monarch[813], and it is, therefore, probable that Valona too was for a brief space a Bulgarian port. The Sicilian expeditions against Greece in the eleventh and twelfth centuries naturally brought Valona into prominence as a landing-place for troops. Anna Comnena[814] frequently mentions it. Thus, in 1081, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, took and burnt Kanina, Valona, and Jericho, as the ancient harbour of Eurychos (the Porto Raguseo of the Italians) was then called; Robert was nearly shipwrecked in a storm off Cape Glossa, and later on spent two months in the haven of Jericho. When he left Albania in 1082 he bestowed Valona upon Bohemund, and when he made his second and fatal expedition in 1084 it was to Valona that he crossed from Otranto. Trade privileges at Valona (renewed by subsequent Emperors in 1126, 1148 and 1187) formed part of the price which the Emperor Alexios I paid for the assistance of the Venetian fleet in this contest[815]. It was there that the Greek Admiral Kontostephanos watched for Bohemund’s return, and shortly afterwards we find Michael Kekaumenos, Imperial governor of Valona, Jericho and Kanina. In 1149, after the capture of Corfù, Manuel II went to Valona, and encamped there several days before sailing for Sicily to punish King Roger for his attack upon Greece. He landed on the islet of Aeironesion (identified by Pouqueville and Professor Lampros with Saseno); but storms prevented his “punitive expedition,” so he left Valona by land for Pelagonia[816].

The fourth crusade, which led to the dismemberment of the Greek Empire, consequently affected the Adriatic coast. The partition treaty of 1204 assigned to Venice the province of Durazzo, which included Valona, as well as Albania, and in the following year the Venetian podestà at Constantinople formally transferred these possessions to the Republic, which sent Marino Valaresso with the title of “Duke” to[431] govern Durazzo. But meanwhile Michael I Angelos had established in western Greece the independent Hellenic principality known as the Despotat of Epeiros, which included both “Old” and “New” Epeiros (in the latter of which was Valona), extending from Naupaktos to Durazzo, and which he agreed in 1210 to hold as a nominal fief of Venice, from the river Shkumbi, south of Durazzo, to Naupaktos, paying a yearly rent, and promising to grant to the Venetian merchants a special quarter in every town of his dominions, freedom from taxes, and assistance in case of need against the Albanians[817]. Thus Valona for fifty-three years formed an integral part of the Greek Despotat of Epeiros.

The mutual rivalry of the two Greek states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Byzantine Empire—the Empire of Nicæa and the Despotat of Epeiros—suggested to the ill-fated Manfred of Sicily that he might recover the ephemeral conquests of the Sicilian Normans on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. In 1257, while Michael II of Epeiros was at war with the Nicene troops, he occupied Valona, Durazzo, Berat, the Spinarza hills (near the mouth of the Vojussa, or perhaps Svernetsi on the lagoon of Valona), and their appurtenances; and Michael, desirous of securing Manfred as an ally against his Greek rival, made a virtue of necessity by conferring these places together with the hand of his daughter Helen upon the King of Sicily on the occasion of their marriage[818] in 1259. Manfred wisely appointed as governor of his trans-Adriatic possessions a man with experience of the East, Filippo Chinardo, a Cypriote Frank, and his High Admiral. Indeed, when Manfred fell in battle at Benevento, fighting against Charles I of Anjou, in 1266, Chinardo, who married Michael II’s sister-in-law and received Kanina as her dowry, continued to hold his late master’s Epeirote dominions, but later in the same year was assassinated at the instigation of the crafty Despot[819]. The latter had doubtless hoped, now that his son-in-law was no more, to re-occupy the places which had been his daughter’s and his sister-in-law’s dowries. But a new claimant now appeared upon the scene. The fugitive Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, by the treaty of Viterbo in 1267 ceded to Charles I of Anjou “all the land which the Despot Michael gave, handed over and conceded as dowry or by whatsoever title to his daughter Helen, widow of the late Manfred, formerly Prince of Taranto, and which the said Manfred and the late Filippo Chinardo (who acted as Admiral of the said realm) held during[432] their lives[820].” The Sicilian garrisons of Valona, Kanina and Berat held out, however, against both Michael II and Charles I, the latter of whom was for some years too much occupied with Italian affairs to intervene actively beyond the Adriatic. Accordingly, a devoted follower of Chinardo, Giacomo di Balsignano (near Bari), remained independent as castellan of Valona; but in 1269 Charles, having made this man’s brother a prisoner in Italy, declined to release him at the request of Prince William of Achaia, unless Valona were surrendered. Although he actually named one of his own supporters to take Balsignano’s place, that officer held out at Valona for four years more, when he handed over Valona, but was at once re-appointed castellan of both Valona and Kanina by Charles. Thus, in 1273, began the effective rule of the Angevins over Valona. In the following year, the Italian castellan received fiefs in Southern Italy in exchange for Valona and Kanina, and a Frenchman, Henri de Courcelles, was appointed in his stead[821]. Chinardo’s heirs, who had at first been allowed to live on at Valona, were imprisoned at Trani.

The Angevins attached considerable importance to Valona, especially from a military point of view. Frequent mention is made of the castle in the Angevin documents; Greek fire was deposited there, its well is the subject of several inquiries, and it served as a base for Charles I’s designs upon the Greek Empire, which were cut short by the Sicilian Vespers. The chief Angevin officials were a castellan (usually a Frenchman, e.g. Dreux de Vaux), a treasurer, and more rarely a “captain” of the town, who was subordinate to the castellan, who was in his turn under the Captain and Vicar-General of Albania. The garrison sometimes consisted of Saracens from Lucera, and its fidelity could not always be trusted, for a commission was on one occasion sent over to inquire whether it had sold munitions to the Greek enemies of the Angevins. Nor was the harbour, which the Venetians frequented, free from pirates[822]. After the death of the vigorous Despot Michael II, it was not so much from his feeble successor, Nikephoros I of Epeiros, as from the able and energetic Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, that the Angevins had to fear attacks upon Valona, especially after the defeat of their army and the capture of its commander at Berat in 1281. There is no documentary evidence of the presence of any Angevin governor after 1284 at Valona, which, between that date and 1297, when we find a certain “Calemanus”[433] described as “Duke” of the Spinarza district, and, therefore, almost certainly of Valona also, must have been occupied by the Byzantines[823]. Nevertheless, the Angevins continued to regard the Epeirote lands of Manfred and Chinardo as theirs on paper. They are mentioned in the ratification of the treaty of Viterbo by the titular Latin Empress Catherine in 1294, by which they were confirmed to King Charles II, who in the same year transferred them to his son Philip of Taranto[824], then about to marry Thamar, daughter and heiress of the Despot Nikephoros I of Epeiros.

The Byzantines evidently attached considerable importance to Valona and its district, for the successive Byzantine governors were men of family and position: Andronikos Asan Palaiologos, subsequently governor of the Byzantine province in the Morea, who was son of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Asên III, connected with the reigning imperial family, and father-in-law of the future Emperor John Cantacuzene; Constantine Palaiologos, son of Andronikos II; and a Laskaris[825]. Under these exalted personages were minor officials, such as George Ganza, a friend of the Despot Thomas of Epeiros, and his son Nicholas, who successively held the office of Admiral of Valona for over twenty years, while the latter on one occasion grandiloquently styles himself protosevastos et protovestiarius et primus camerlengus of the Emperor; the sevastos Theodore Lykoudas, and Michael Malagaris, prefect of the castle of Kanina[826]. During this second Byzantine period, when Valona was civitas Imperatoris Grecorum (as a document styles it), there was a considerable trade with both Ragusa and Venice, and a colony of resident Venetian merchants there. Occasionally, however, serious quarrels arose between the Ganza family and the Ragusans and Venetians, who demanded satisfaction from the Emperor, and on one occasion Ganza’s son was killed. That there was likewise traffic with the opposite Italian coast is clear from King Robert of Naples’ repeated orders to his subjects to export nothing to a place which belonged to the hostile Byzantine Empire, and to which the Angevins still maintained their claims. For as late as 1328 Philip of Taranto named a certain Raimond de Termes commander of Berat and Valona[827], and death alone prevented him and his brother, John of Gravina, who in 1332 received[434] the kingdom of Albania with the town of Durazzo in exchange for the principality of the Morea, from prosecuting the Angevin claims. The Albanians, however, rose and attacked Berat and Kanina in 1335, but were speedily suppressed by Andronikos III, the first Emperor who had visited Albania since Manuel I[828].

But a more formidable enemy than Angevins or Albanians now threatened Valona. The great Serbian Tsar, Stephen Dushan, was now making Serbia the dominant power of the Balkan peninsula, and the value of the harbour of Valona and the castle of Kanina could scarcely escape the notice of that remarkable man. An entry in a Serbian psalter informs us that the Serbs took Valona and Kanina[829] in the last four months of 1345 or in the early months of 1346, and Serbian they remained till the Turkish conquest. Dushan, like the Byzantines, showed his appreciation of these places by appointing as governor of Valona, Kanina and Berat his brother-in-law, John Comnenos Asên, brother of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Alexander. This Serbian governor, a Bulgar by birth, married Anna Palaiologina, widow of the Despot John II of Epeiros, and mother of the last Despot of Epeiros, Nikephoros II, and became so far Hellenised as to take the name of Comnenos (borne by the Greek Despots of Epeiros, whose successor he pretended to be, and whose title of “Despot” he adopted), and to sign his name in Greek in the two Slav documents which he has bequeathed to us[830]. Although, like his predecessors, he preyed upon Venetian and other shipping at Valona, for which the mighty Serbian Tsar paid compensation, he became a Venetian citizen[831], and was allowed to obtain weapons in Venice for the defence of Cheimarra and its port of Palermo from Sicilian pirates[832]. After the death of Dushan and in the confusion which ensued he embraced the cause of the latter’s half-brother, the Tsar Symeon, who had married his step-daughter, Thomais, against Dushan’s son, and he is last mentioned in 1363, when nearly all the Venetians at Valona died of the plague, and he perhaps with them[833]. Alexander, perhaps his son, followed him as “Lord of Kanina and Valona,” and allied himself with Ragusa[834], of which he became a citizen. The name of Porto Raguseo (Pasha Liman of the Turks), at the mouth of the Dukati[435] valley on the bay of Valona, still preserves the memory of this connection, and was the harbour of the “argosies” of the South Slavonic Republic, whose merchants had their quarters half-way between Valona and Kanina.

In 1371 those places came into the possession of the family of Balsha, of Serbian origin, which a few years earlier had founded a dynasty in what is now Montenegro. Balsha II, who with his two brothers had already taken Antivari and Scutari (“their principal domicile”), killed a certain George, perhaps Alexander’s son—for Alexander is thought to have perished by the side of Vukashin at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—and in a Venetian document of the next year is described as “Lord of Valona.” In consequence of his usurpation the inhabitants of Valona fled for refuge to the islet of Saseno in the bay, and placed themselves under the protection of Venice[835]. Under Balsha II Valona formed part of a considerable principality, for on the death of his last surviving brother, in 1378, the “Lord of Valona and Budua” had become sole ruler of the Zeta—the modern Montenegro—and then, by the capture of Durazzo from Carlo Topia, “Prince of Albania,” assumed the title of “Duke” from that former Venetian duchy. By his marriage with Comita Musachi, he became connected with a powerful Albanian clan[836]; but his ambition caused his death, for Carlo Topia begged the Turks to restore him to Durazzo, while Balsha, like other Christian rulers of his time, instead of concentrating all his forces against the Turkish peril, wasted them in fighting against Tvrtko I, the great King of Bosnia, for the possession of Cattaro. Consequently, when the Turks marched against him, he could raise only a small army to oppose them; he fell in battle on the Vojussa in 1385, and his head was sent as a trophy to the Sultan.

Upon his death his dominions were divided; Valona with Kanina, Saseno, Cheimarra, and “the tower of Pyrgos[837]” alone remained to his widow. Left with only a daughter, Regina, she felt unable to defend all these places from the advancing Turks; so, in 1386, she offered “the castle and town of Valona” to Venice on “certain conditions[838].” The cautious Republic replied that her offer would be accepted, if she would hand over freely “the castle of Kanina with its district and the town of Valona with its district.” This shows that the Venetians, like their[436] recent Italian representatives, realised that Valona required Kanina for its defence, as well as a certain Hinterland. The reply went on to add that, in case she declined to accept this condition, Venice would be content to take over these places, paying her half their rents for her life, while she paid half their expenses. Under those circumstances, she could remain at Valona, or come to Venice, as she chose. But, if she would accept neither proposition, then Venice would be willing to take Kanina and the other places, giving her all the rents for her life, on condition that she paid all the expenses of their maintenance. Nothing came of this negotiation; but in 1389 her envoy agreed to furnish three rowers annually to the captain of the Venetian fleet in recognition of Venetian dominion over the islet of Saseno, which commanded the bay. Thus Venice, like the late Admiral Bettòlo, considered that the occupation of that islet was sufficient. In 1393 Dame Comita Balsha made Venice a second offer of Valona. But, in the meantime, the battle of Kossovo had been fought; the Serbian Empire had fallen, and it was obvious that the Turks had become the most powerful Balkan state. Thus, although Comita was ready to give Venice the men whom she had promised in recognition of Venetian rights over “the towers of Pyrgos and Saseno,” and disposed to cede Valona, her offer was declined with thanks, because “we Venetians prefer our friends to remain in their own dominions and govern them rather than we.” Two years later her envoy, the Bishop of Albania, made a third offer of all the four places which she held: Valona, Kanina, Cheimarra, and the tower of Pyrgos, provision being made for her and her son-in-law that they might go where they liked and live honourably there. This meant in cash 7000 ducats for their lives out of the 9000 which the bishop estimated as the total revenue of the above places. The Venetians ordered their Admiral to inquire into the state of the places and the amount which they produced, before deciding, and ere that Comita died[839].

She was succeeded by her son-in-law, “Marchisa” (or Merksha) Jarkovich, “King of Serbia,” a near relative of her own by blood and a cousin of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. He must, therefore, have been a relative of the latter’s Serbian wife, who was a daughter of Constantine Dragash, Despot of part of Macedonia[840]. He at once, in 1396, offered to cede Valona, Cheimarra, Berat, and the tower of Pyrgos to Venice, but was told that his offer could not be accepted till the Venetians had accurate information about them. He then turned to Ragusa, of which he became an honorary citizen with leave to deposit[437] all his property there for safety. In 1398 he again applied to Venice, because he did not see how he could defend his lands against the Turks. Venice thought it undesirable that they should become Turkish, but decided first to send her Admiral to inquire into their revenues, cost, and condition, expressing a preference for leaving them in their present ruler’s hands. In 1400, as this inquiry had not yet been made, another envoy was sent from Valona to Venice, only to receive the same answer. Upon Merksha’s death, his widow sent yet another envoy to Venice in 1415, with a like result, and was reminded of her late husband’s and her subjects’ debts to the Republic. Then the end came; a document of July 21, 1418, informs us that Valona had fallen into the hands of the Turks[841]. Consequently, lest they should attack the Venetian colony of Corfù or passing Venetian ships, the Venetian bailie, who was about to proceed to Constantinople, was instructed to endeavour to obtain its restitution with that of Kanina and its other appurtenances to Regina Balsha, whose husband had been, like herself, a Venetian citizen. If the Sultan refused, then the bailie was authorised to offer up to 8000 ducats for Regina’s former possessions, and another offer was made in 1424[842]. The Turks, however, retained Valona continuously for 273 years, and, with one brief interval, for 495.

There is little record of its history in the Turkish period. In June, 1436, Cyriacus of Ancona spent two days there, and copied a Greek inscription which he found on a marble base at the Church of Georgios Tropæophoros[843]. In 1466 Venice was alarmed at the repairs executed there by its new masters, which endangered Venetian interests owing to its proximity to the Republic’s colonies in that part of the world—Corfù and its dependencies, in the south, and Durazzo, Alessio, Dulcigno, Antivari, Dagno, Satti, Scutari and Drivasto, in the north—and to the quantity of wood for shipbuilding which it could furnish. Accordingly, the Republic suggested to Skanderbeg to attack it with his own forces, and with Venetian and colonial troops[844]. Nothing came of this suggestion, but in 1472 a Corfiote, John Vlastos, offered to consign Valona and Kanina to Venice on condition of receiving a fixed sum down and an annuity; and the Republic instructed the Governor of Corfù to enter into negotiations with him[845]. This also failed, and Valona, in Turkish hands, became, as had been feared, a base for attack against the Ionian[438] Islands and even Italy. Thence, in 1479, the Turks moved against the remaining possessions of Leonardo III Tocco, Count of Cephalonia; thence, in the following year, they sailed to take Otranto[846]. In 1501, during the Turco-Venetian war, Benedetto Pesaro entered the bay of Valona with a flotilla of light vessels, but a sudden hurricane caused the death by drowning of all his men except those taken prisoners by the Turks[847]. In 1518 the Governor of Valona, a renegade Cheimarriote, succeeded, with the aid of Sinan Pasha, the Turkish Admiral, in compelling Cheimarra to accept Turkish suzerainty by the concession of large privileges. Sinan was so greatly pleased with Valona that he became its governor. In the same year two Turkish subjects attempted from Valona a coup de main upon Corfù, and it was there that the former of the two great Turkish sieges of that island, that of 1537, was decided upon by Suleyman I[848]. In 1570 a further descent was made from Valona, where the Turks had established a cannon-foundry, upon Corfù[849]. In 1638 the attack by the Venetian fleet upon certain Tunisian and Algerian ships off Valona nearly provoked war with Turkey, and led to a temporary prohibition of trade between the inhabitants of that and of other Turkish possessions and Venice[850].

The Turco-Venetian war towards the close of the seventeenth century led at last to the Venetian occupation of Valona, then a place of 150 houses surrounded by a low wall. The motives were the fertility of the district and the desire to expel the Barbary corsairs. Morosini’s successor, Girolamo Cornaro, accompanied by many Greeks, after being delayed two days by a storm off Saseno, landed at Kryoneri, a little to the south of the town, early in September, 1690, where he was joined by 500 Cheimarriotes and Albanians. A Turkish attempt to prevent his landing was repulsed; Kanina, weakly fortified by crumbling walls, was forced to surrender, and its fall had as a natural consequence the capitulation of Valona without a blow. Cornaro, leaving Giovanni Matteo Bembo and Teodoro Cornaro as provveditori of Valona and Kanina, proceeded to attack Durazzo, but was forced by a storm to return to Valona, where, on October 1, he died[851]. Venice intended at first to keep these two acquisitions. Carlo Pisani was ordered to remain at “Uroglia” (Gervolia opposite Corfù) with four galleys for their defence, while the fortifications of Kanina were repaired and cisterns made. But when the Capitan Pasha encamped on the banks of the Vojussa to intimidate the[439] Albanians, many of whom wished to join Venice, the garrisons began to suffer from lack of food and consequent desertions. Thereupon, Domenico Mocenigo, the new Venetian Captain-General, proposed and carried out the demolition of Kanina by mines, and wrote to the home government advocating the destruction of Valona on the ground that its preservation would cripple the campaign in the Morea. A debate upon its fate followed in the Senate. Francesco Foscari urged its retention on account of its geographical position at the mouth of the Adriatic and on a fine bay, well supplied with fresh water from Kryoneri (or “Acqua Fredda”). He alluded to the valuable oak forests in the neighbourhood, whose acorns furnished the substance known by the topical name of valonea to dyers, to the ancient pitch-mines, the salt-pans, and the fisheries. To these material considerations he added the loss of prestige involved in the surrender of a place whose capture had been celebrated with joy by Pope Alexander VIII and announced as an important event to the King of Spain, because it signified the destruction of the corsairs, so long the terror of the Papal and Neapolitan coast of the Adriatic. Besides, “Valona,” he concluded, “opens for us the door into Albania.” To him Michele Foscarini replied, proposing to leave the decision to the naval council, and this proposal was adopted. Mocenigo’s first idea had always been to abandon the place, and his resolve was confirmed by the advance of the Turkish troops under Chalil Pasha; but General Charles Sparre, a Swedish baron, who was sent to execute his orders, found that the rapid approach of the enemy made such an operation too dangerous. The Venetians accordingly burnt the suburb, but prepared to defend the town. But at the outset both Bembo and Sparre were killed by the Turkish artillery fire, and, though the garrison made a successful sortie, the Captain-General repeated his order to blow up Valona. Four cannon and one mortar were left there to deceive the Turks, and on March 13, 1691, after a siege of forty days, they too were removed and Valona evacuated and destroyed. The Turks offered no opposition to the retreating Venetians, and the opinion was freely expressed that the place could have been defended. Thus, after six months, ended the Venetian occupation of Valona[852]. When Pouqueville[853] visited it rather more than a century later, he saw the remains of the two forts blown up by the Venetians, and found that one street with porticoes recalled their former residence. In his time the population was 6000, including a certain number of Jews banished from Ancona by Paul IV. The place was then, as now, very unhealthy in summer, but he foretold a brilliant future for it, if the marshes were once drained.

The Turks neglected Valona, as they neglected all their Albanian possessions. Sinan Pasha had been so good and popular a governor that, although a native of Konieh, he was nicknamed “the Arnaut,” and his descendants long held the appointment as almost a family fief; indeed, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the natives of Valona besieged and cut to pieces a certain Ismail Pasha, who had endeavoured to wrest the governorship of the town from one of Sinan’s descendants[854]. A generation later, however, a sanguinary feud, which broke out between the members of this governing family, led the other notables of Valona to invoke the intervention of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, who had already cast covetous eyes on the place, then ruled by Ibrahim Pasha. But the treacherous “Lion of Joannina” carried off not only Ibrahim but also the notables of Valona to the dungeons of his lake-fortress, where they were subsequently put to death. Ibrahim, however, lingered on, and was forced to address a petition to the Turkish government begging it, in consideration of his age and infirmities, to bestow the governorship of Valona and Berat upon his gaoler’s eldest son, Mouchtar Pasha, who appointed a Naxiote Christian, Damirales, as his representative in the former town. In 1820 the Turkish authorities, resolved to crush the too-powerful satrap of Joannina, easily induced the people of Valona to drive out Mouchtar’s partisans. But the population repeatedly gave the Turks cause for alarm, and in 1828 Rechid Pasha treacherously executed a powerful Bey of Valona, who had come to pay his respects to him at Joannina. Nevertheless the local people continued to resist any obnoxious Turkish authority[855].

During the first Balkan war, on November 28, 1912, Albanian independence was proclaimed at Valona, and an Albanian government formed, of which Ismail Kemal Bey was President[856]. But when an Albanian principality was created in the following year, and Prince William of Wied was chosen as its ruler, Valona recognised Durazzo as the capital. Meanwhile, Italy had intimated that she could not consent to the inclusion of Valona, to which she attached special importance, within the new Greek frontier; and insisted on the islet of Saseno, which had formed part of the Hellenic kingdom since 1864, being ceded to the Albanian principality. Greece complied with this demand, and on July 15, 1914, the Greek garrison abandoned Saseno at the order of the Venizelos Cabinet. When the European war broke out, Italy took the opportunity, on October 30, to occupy Saseno by[441] troops under the command of Admiral Patris, who found it inhabited by twenty-one persons, and re-christened the highest point “Monte Bandiera” from the Italian flag which was hoisted there[857]. She had sent a sanitary mission to Valona itself and, on December 25, occupied that town. Then, as in 1690 and as in the days of Manfred and his successors, Kanina was likewise in Italian hands, while for the first time in its long history Valona has been connected with Great Britain, for the new jetty there was the work of the British Adriatic Mission, sent to rescue the retreating Serbian army. But, by the Tirana agreement of August 3, 1920, Italy renounced Valona (assigned to her by the treaty of London in 1915), and now holds Saseno alone.

RULERS OF VALONA

2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE

The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.

But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and[442] unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.

In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.

The Serbs, like the Bulgars, are not original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, where, at the dawn of history, we find three principal races—the Greeks, the Illyrians (who are perhaps the ancestors of the Albanians), and the Thracians. But a continuous residence of thirteen centuries qualifies the Serbs to be considered a Balkan people. The usually received account of their entry into the peninsula is that given by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his treatise “De Administrando Imperio,” written some three centuries later. He tells us that the Emperor Herakleios (610-41) gave them the territory which was later called “Serblia”—a country bounded in the time of Porphyrogenitus by Croatia on the north, Bulgaria on the south, the river Rashka near Novibazar on the east, and the present[443] Herzegovina on the west. But a chain of historical facts proves that Herakleios merely gave to the Serbs what they had already taken. About a century before his time the Slavs, whose oldest home was in Poland, had begun to cross the Danube, and about 578 had actually appeared before Salonika. Herakleios, occupied with the war against the Persians in the East, could not defend the Western Balkans. So he made a virtue of necessity, just as, in our own day, governments have granted autonomy to lost provinces which they could no longer protect. The Danubian principalities, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Crete, and the Lebanon are examples.

This arrangement suited both parties. The Byzantine Court could keep up a formal suzerainty, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus could point in proof of it to the quite unscientific etymology of the word “Serboi” from the Latin servi, because they had become the “slaves” of the Byzantine Emperor. This national name, which first occurs in the ninth century, when we find Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, describing in 822 the “Sorabi” as “said to occupy a large part of Dalmatia,” is still applied not only to the Balkan Serbs but to those of Saxony, whose language, however, is so different that a Serb of Bautzen cannot understand a Serb of Belgrade. The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the Birds of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” “Thus,” in the words of Finlay[858], “the modern history of the eastern shores of the Adriatic commences with the establishment of the Sclavonian colonies in Dalmatia.” Of the two pre-existing elements in the population, the Romans, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were pushed southward into the country which since the eleventh century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of Ἀρβανῖται the Albanians are first mentioned in 1079.

The history of mediæval Serbia falls naturally into three sections: (1) from the entry of the Serbs into the Balkan peninsula to the close of the twelfth century—a period during which the Byzantine Empire, after finally crushing the Bulgarians, dominated the Near East, and the Serbs, divided into two separate states, played a subordinate but restive part; (2) from the rise of the Nemanja dynasty towards the close of the[444] twelfth century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389—a period which saw Serbia rise to be for a brief space by far the greatest state in the peninsula; (3) the decline, when Danubian Serbia existed at the pleasure of the Turks, till in 1459 she received her death-blow.

During the first of these periods the only serious resistance to the Byzantine hegemony of the Balkan peninsula was offered by the Bulgarians—a Finnish, or, according to others, Tartar tribe, which entered it in 679, and became gradually absorbed in the Slavonic population, which it had conquered. The vanquished imposed their language upon the victors, but the victors, like the Angles in England, imposed their name upon the vanquished. Two powerful Bulgarian monarchs, Krum and the Tsar Symeon, in 813 and 913 threatened the very existence of Constantinople, as did the Tsar Ferdinand in 1913; and Krum was wont to pledge his nobles out of the silver-set skull of the Greek Emperor Nikephoros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the ninth century, when history registers the first of the long series of Serbo-Bulgarian wars, of which we have seen three in our own time. When the Serbs were united, they were able to defeat the Bulgars. But the rivalry of the hereditary princes, whom we find ruling over them at this period, led to the formation of pro-Bulgar and pro-Byzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Prêslav or Constantinople only awaiting the opportunity to be restored by foreign aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon’s death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor and with the latter’s help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the tenth century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diokleia, the country called after the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the[445] Tsar’s daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess; but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn.

The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Σερβικός to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For them, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of “Rassia,” by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title—Hildebrand addressed a letter to “Michael, King of the Slavs”—but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of “Great jupan,” that is, the first among the jupani, or Counts (Serbian jupa = county).

Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium. Kedrenos informs us that “after the death of the Emperor Romanos III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks”; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian “punitive expedition” in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav’s son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of protospathários, or “sword-bearer,” at the Byzantine court, while he assumed[446] at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren “Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.” Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari—the first example but not the last of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient See, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of “Primate of Serbia.” But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as “treating in a friendly fashion” the Crusaders who passed through his territory. Usually, however, the Crusaders had difficulty with the Serbs; and William of Tyre tells how at Nish, then a “fortified town, filled with a valiant and numerous population,” certain “Germans, sons of Belial,” set fire to the mills, thus provoking the retaliation of the natives.

The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country “of difficult access”; and that the Serbs, whose name he also derives from their supposedly original state of servitude, were “an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small.... Sometimes their jupani obey the Emperor: at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests ... to ravage the surrounding countries.” Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature—a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters[859]—dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diokleia, who were gradually ousted by the “Great jupani” of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Prodromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian jupani trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus.

The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the fourteenth century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As[447] has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man—Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history.

The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (modern Montenegro), and the Land of Hum (the “Hill” country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as “Our Lord Nemanja, Great jupan of Rascia.” Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under bans, and then under kings, survived the Serbian monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or Babuni (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of 1915), then rife in the Balkans. At the same time he sent presents to St Peter’s in Rome and St Nicholas’ at Bari.

When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the Wolffbureau, revived the memory of Barbarossa’s presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen’s brother St Sava—the beginning of Serbian historical biography.

Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself as “Great jupan”; but Stephen won for himself the title of “the first-crowned king,” by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of[448] Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of “Rascia” also. To show his connection with the former kings of Diokleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Œcumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as “Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.” Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old sandjak of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.

While Stephen’s successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had “conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.” The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.

We have an interesting description of life at the Serbian court in the time of the next King, Stephen Urosh I[860] (c. 1268), from the Byzantine historian Pachymeres. There was a project for a marriage between a daughter of the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, and a son of Stephen Urosh. First, however, two envoys were sent to report, and the Empress specially charged one of them to let her know what sort of a family it was into which her daughter was about to marry. The pompous Byzantines were horrified to find “the great King,” as he was called, living the simple life in a way which would have disgraced a modest official of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle in an inexpensive gown, and his household eating like a pack of hunters or sheep-stealers. The lack of security for travellers deepened the unfavourable impression of the envoys, and the marriage was broken off. Stephen Urosh II (1281-1321), surnamed Milutin (“the child of grace”), greatly increased the importance of Serbia. We have different pictures of this monarch from his Serbian and his Greek contemporaries. One of the former extols his qualities as a ruler, one[449] of the latter portrays him as anything but an exemplary husband. But these characters are not incompatible, as we know from the case of Henry VIII, whom Stephen Urosh II resembled not only in the number of his wives, but in his opportunist policy. His chief object was to enlarge his dominions at the expense of Byzantium; he occupied Skopje, and established his capital there—the Serbian residence had hitherto fluctuated between Novibazar, Prishtina and Prizren—and so greatly impressed the Emperor Andronikos II with his advance towards Salonika that the latter sacrificed his only daughter, Simonis, to the already thrice-divorced monarch, giving as her dowry the territories which his son-in-law had already taken from him. Simonis, however, when she grew up—she was only a child at the time of her engagement—preferred Constantinople to the society of her husband; and nothing but his threat to come and take her by force induced her to return.

Behind this marriage of convenience there lay the project of uniting the Greek and Serbian dominions under a Serbian sceptre—a project to which the national party was resolutely opposed. At the same time, he not only had—what all Serbian rulers have coveted—an outlet on the sea, but actually occupied for a few years the port of Durazzo, that much-debated spot, which during the Middle Ages was alternatively Angevin, Serbian, Albanian and Venetian, till in 1501 it became Turkish. Nor was this astute ruler only a diplomatist and a politician; he offered the Venetians to keep open and guard the great trade route which traversed his kingdom, and led across Bulgaria to the Black Sea. A munificent founder of churches, his generosity is evidenced in Italy by the silver altar, bearing the date 1319, which he gave to St Nicholas’ at Bari, and on which he described himself as ruling from the Adriatic to the Danube; but his name is better known by the verses of Dante, who has given him a place in the Paradiso among the evil kings for his issue of counterfeit Venetian coin[861]—a common offence in the Levant during the Middle Ages:

A disputed succession soon ended in the enthronement of the late King’s illegitimate son, Stephen Urosh III, known in history by the epithet “Detchanski” from the famous monastery of Detchani which he founded. He had been blinded for conspiring against his father; but on his father’s death he recovered his sight, which perhaps he had never entirely lost. His reign is one of the most dramatic in Serbian history, for it affords an example of those sudden alternations of triumph and[450] disaster characteristic of the Balkans, alike in the Middle Ages and in our own day. On June 28, 1330, he utterly routed the Bulgarians at Velbujd, as Köstendil was then called. Bulgaria became a vassal state of Serbia, which had thus won the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula. Next year, he was dethroned by his son, the famous Stephen Dushan, and strangled in the castle of Zvetchan near Mitrovitza. A contemporary, Guillaume Adam, Archbishop of Antivari, has left a description of Serbia during this period. The palaces of the King and his nobles were of wood, and surrounded by palisades; the only houses of stone were in the Latin coast-towns. Yet “Rassia” was naturally a very rich land, producing plenty of corn, wine and oil; it was well watered; its forests were full of game, while five gold mines and as many of silver were constantly worked.

The reign of Stephen Urosh IV, better known as Stephen Dushan (1331-55), marks the zenith of Serbia. As a conqueror and as a lawgiver, he resembled Napoleon; and his Empire, like that of Napoleon, crumbled to pieces as soon as its creator had disappeared. In the former capacity, he aimed at realising the dream of his grandfather, Stephen Urosh II, of forming a great Serbian Empire on the ruins of Byzantium. The civil war between the young Emperor John V Palaiologos, aided by his Italian mother, Anne of Savoy, and the ambitious John Cantacuzene, whose history is one of the most interesting sources for this period, was Dushan’s opportunity. Both parties in the struggle made bids for his support at the unfortified village of Prishtina, which had been the Serbian capital. His price was nothing less than the whole Byzantine Empire west of Kavalla, or, at least, of Salonika. Anne of Savoy, less patriotic than her rival, offered him what he asked, if he would send her Cantacuzene, then his guest, either alive or dead. But the Council of twenty-four great officers of state, whom the Serbian Kings were wont to consult, acting on the Queen’s advice, repudiated the suggestion of assassinating a suppliant. Dushan allowed the rival Byzantine factions to exhaust themselves; and, while they fought, he occupied one place after another, till all Macedonia, except Salonika, was his.

With little exaggeration he wrote from Serres to the Doge of Venice, which had conferred her citizenship upon him, styling himself “King of Serbia, Diokleia, the land of Hum, the Zeta, Albania and the Maritime region, partner in no small part of the Empire of Bulgaria, and lord of almost all the Empire of Romania.” But for the ruler of so vast a realm the title of King seemed insignificant, especially as his vassal, the ruler of Bulgaria, bore the great name of Tsar. Accordingly, on Easter Sunday 1346, Dushan had himself crowned at Skopje, whither he had transferred[451] his capital, as “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks.” Shortly before, he had raised the Archbishop of Serbia to the dignity of Patriarch with his seat at Petch; and the two Slav Patriarchs, the Bulgarian of Trnovo and the Serbian of Petch, placed the crown upon his head. At the same time, on the analogy of the Western Empire with its “King of the Romans,” he had his son, Stephen Urosh V, proclaimed King. Byzantine emblems and customs were introduced into the brand-new Serbian Empire; the Tsar assumed the tiara and the double-eagle, and wrote to the Doge, proposing an alliance for the conquest of Constantinople. In the papal correspondence with Serbia we read of a Serbian “Sebastocrator,” a “Great Logothete,” a “Cæsar,” and a “Despot”; the governors of important Serbian cities, such as Cattaro and Scutari, were styled “Counts”; those of minor places, like Antivari, “Captains.” Thus it is easy to see why the whole Serbian world was thrilled when, in the first Balkan war of 1912, the Crown Prince Alexander entered Skopje, the coronation-city of Dushan—at the invitation of the Austrian Consul, “to restore order”!

Dushan next extended his Empire to the south by the annexation of Epeiros and Thessaly; and assigned Ætolia and Akarnania to his brother, Symeon Urosh, and Thessaly and Joannina to the “Cæsar” Preliub. His dominions now stretched to the Corinthian Gulf, and he thought that it only remained to annex the independent Serb state of Bosnia, and to capture Constantinople, establishing what a poetic Montenegrin ruler of our day has called an “Empire of the Balkans.” This would have embraced all the races of the variegated peninsula, and perhaps kept the Turks—who, in 1353, had made their first permanent settlement in Europe, by crossing the Dardanelles and occupying the castle of Tzympe—beyond the Bosporus, and the Hungarians beyond the Save. On St Michael’s day, 1355, he assembled his nobles, and asked whether he should lead them against Byzantium or Buda-Pesth. To their answer, that they would follow him, whithersoever he bade them, his reply was “to Constantinople.” But on the way he fell ill of a fever, and at Diavoli, on Dec. 20, he died, aged 48. No Serbian ruler had ever approached so near the Imperial city; had he succeeded, and had another Dushan succeeded him, the Turkish conquest 98 years later might have been averted.

Great as were his conquests, the Serbian Napoleon was no mere soldier. His code of law, the “Zakonik,” like the “Code Napoléon,” has survived the vast but fleeting Empire of its author. Dushan’s law-book is, indeed, largely based on previous legislation, such as the canon law of the Greek Church, the statutes of Budua and other Adriatic coast-towns,[452] and, in the case of trial by jury, on an enactment of Stephen Urosh II. For us, however, its chief value is the light which it throws upon Serbia’s political and social condition in the golden age of the Empire.

Mediæval Serbia resembled neither of the Serb states of our day. It was not, even under Dushan, an autocracy, like Montenegro before 1905, nor yet a democratic monarchy, like the modern Serbian kingdom; but the powers of the monarch were limited by the influence of the great nobles—a class stamped out at the Turkish conquest and never since revived. Society consisted of the Sovereign; the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ranging from the Patriarch to the village priest; the greater and lesser nobles; the peasants, some free, others serfs bound to the soil; slaves, servants for hire; and, at Cattaro and in a few inland places, small communities of burghers. But the magnates were the dominant section; on two occasions even Dushan had to cope with their rebellions, and they formed a privy council of twenty-four, which he consulted before deciding important questions of public policy. Their lands were hereditary; and they enjoyed the privilege of killing their inferiors with comparative impunity, for a graduated tariff (as in Saxon England) regulated the punishment for wilful murder—hanging for that of a priest or monk, burning for parricide, fratricide, or infanticide, the loss of both hands and a fine for that of a noble by a commoner, a simple fine for that of a commoner by a noble. But the law secured to the peasant the fruits of his labour; no village might be laid under contribution by two successive army-corps; but, if the peasant organised or even attended a public meeting, he lost his eyes and was branded on the face, while for theft or arson, the culprit’s village was held collectively responsible. Next to the nobles the Orthodox Church was the most influential class; indeed, the early Archbishops of Serbia were drawn from junior members of the Royal family, and their interests were consequently identical with those of the Crown, of which they were the apologists in literature, like the “official” journals of to-day.

While the great Serbia of Dushan, like the smaller Serbia of our days, was pre-eminently an agricultural state, it possessed the enormous advantage of a coastline, which facilitated trade. Dushan allowed foreign merchants to circulate freely, and showed special favour to those of Ragusa whose argosies (or ragusies) were welcomed in his ports. He allowed a Saxon colony to work the silver-mines of Novo Brdo, and to burn charcoal. His bodyguard was composed of Germans, whose captain, Palmann, obtained great influence with him. He sent missions to foreign countries to obtain information; with Venice, of which he was a citizen, his relations were particularly close—as those of Italians and[453] Serbs ought by nature to be; while foreign ambassadors were favourably impressed with his hospitality by receiving free meals in every village through which they passed. Already—so Nikephoros Gregoras tells us—the Serbs had begun to commemorate the great deeds of their champions in their national ballads, which attained their full development after the fatal battle of Kossovo and have inspired the Serbian soldiers in their three last wars. We hear, too, of architects from Cattaro, which was the Serbian mint in the reigns of Dushan and his son. The Queen of Italy possesses a collection of the coinage of the mediæval Serbian monarchy.

Dushan’s Empire crumbled away at his death. Like that of Napoleon, it had been made too fast to weld together the four races which it contained—Serbs, Greeks, Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs. The creation of a Serbian Patriarchate alienated the Greek Church, just as the creation of a Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 sowed the seeds of disunion between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia. Thus to the four different races there were added four different creeds—the Serbian Patriarchists, the Greek Patriarchists, the Albanian Catholics, and the Bogomile heretics, these last always ready to invoke a foreign invader against domestic persecution, even though that foreigner were a Mussulman. Even this strongest of Serbian monarchs, whose foot every one who entered his presence must kiss and who was “of all men of his time the tallest, and withal terrible to look upon,” as the papal legate called him, was barely equal to the task of checking the great nobles; and it was doubtless distrust of them which led him to surround himself with a foreign guard. The eminent Serbian historian and statesman, the late M. Novakovich, sums up the failure of Dushan to found a permanent state in the judgment: “Everything about his Empire was personal; the Serbian creations were only personal.”

The dying Tsar had made his nobles swear to maintain the rights of his son, Stephen Urosh V, then a boy of nineteen. But the lad’s uncle, Symeon Urosh, the viceroy of Akarnania and Ætolia, disputed the succession; some nobles supported him, while others, availing themselves of the family quarrel, set up as independent princes in their particular satrapies. Symeon made Trikkala the capital of a brief Greco-Serbian Empire; and his son ended as abbot of the famous monastery of Meteoron. After four decades Serbian sway over Thessaly and Epeiros ceased to exist. An inscription at Trikkala and a church at Meteoron are now almost its only memories. Of the independent satraps the most important were the brothers Balsha (by some erroneously connected with the French house of Baux), who established themselves in the Zeta, the[454] present Montenegro, with a seaboard on the Adriatic at Budua and Antivari, and with Scutari as their “principal residence”—“principale eorum domicilium,” as a Latin document of 1369 says. This is the historical basis of the Montenegrin claim to Scutari, where the Balsha family remained till (in 1396) it sold that city to Venice. The rest of Albania was occupied by native chiefs, the most famous of them being Carlo Topia at Durazzo, who boasted his descent from the Angevins—a fact commemorated by the French lilies on his still extant tomb near Elbassan—and from whom Essad Pasha Toptani derived his origin.

Still more famous was Vukashin, guardian and cup-bearer of the young Tsar, who drove his master from the throne in 1366, and assumed the title of king, with the government of the specially Serbian lands and Prizren as his capital. A later legend makes the usurper murder his sovereign during a hunting-party on the plain of Kossovo. But it has now been proved that Stephen Urosh V survived his supposed murderer, who fell by the hand of his own servant, fighting against the Turks at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—the first great blow that Serbia received from her future conqueror. His son, Marko Kraljevich, “the King’s son, Marko,” that great hero of South Slavonic poetry, whose exploits were portrayed by M. Meshtrovich in the Serbian pavilion of the Rome exhibition in 1911, retained Prilip; and it is recorded that, when in 1912 the Serbian army attacked that place, their officers appealed to them in the name of the national hero to liberate his residence from the Turks. Two months after Vukashin Stephen Urosh V died also, and Lazar Grbljanovich, a connection of the Imperial family, ascended the throne of an Empire so diminished that he preferred the style of “Prince” to that of Tsar, which was conferred upon him in the ballads. Serbia was no longer the leading Slav state of the peninsula—for the great Bosnian ruler Stephen Tvrtko I (1353-91) had won the hegemony of the Southern Slavs, and in 1376 had himself crowned on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo as “King of the Serbs, and of Bosnia, and of the coast.” To secure the latter, he founded the present fortress of Castelnuovo at the entrance of the Bocche di Cattaro; and in 1385 Cattaro itself was his.

Meanwhile the nation destined to destroy both the Serbian and the Bosnian Kingdoms was rapidly advancing. The Turks took Nish in 1386, and in 1389 Lazar set out, attended by all his paladins, from his capital of Krushevatz—for the Serbian royal residence had receded within the limits of Danubian Serbia—to do battle with Murad I on the fatal field of Kossovo.

A Serbian ballad tells how on the eve of the battle the prophet[455] Elijah in the guise of a falcon flew with a letter from the Virgin into Lazar’s tent, offering him the choice between the Empire of this world and the Heavenly kingdom, and how he chose the latter. The armies met on St Vitus’ day, June 15 (O.S.), 1389. Seven nationalities composed that of the Christians; at least one Christian vassal helped to swell the smaller forces of the Turks. While Murad was arraying himself for the fight, a noble Serb, Milosh Kobilich[862], presented himself as a deserter and begged to have speech of the Sultan. His request was granted, he entered the royal tent, and stabbed Murad to the heart, paying with his own life for this act, but gaining thereby immortality in Serbian poetry. None the less, the Turks went undismayed into battle. At first, the Bosniaks drove back one Turkish wing; but Bayezid I, the young Sultan, held his own on the other, and threw the Christians into disorder. A rumour of treachery increased their confusion; whether truly or no, it is still the popular tradition that Vuk Brankovich, Lazar’s son-in-law, betrayed the Serbian cause at Kossovo. Lazar was taken prisoner, and slain in the tent where the dying Murad lay, and with him fell the Serbian Empire.

At first Christendom believed that the Turks had been defeated. A Te Deum was sung in Paris to the God of battles; Florence wrote to congratulate the Bosnian king, Tvrtko, on the supposed victory. But Lazar’s widow, Militza, as a ballad beautifully tells the tale, soon learnt the truth in her “white palace” at Krushevatz from the crows that had hovered over the battlefield. The name of Kossovo is remembered throughout the Serbian lands, as if it had been fought but yesterday. Every year the anniversary is kept, in 1916, for the first time in England; and it was the fact that the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose this day of all days to make his entry into Sarajevo, which perhaps contributed to his assassination. Although the battle of Kumanovo in 1912 avenged Kossovo, yet the Montenegrins still wear a black band on their caps in sign of mourning for it; in many a lonely village the minstrel sings to the sound of the gusle the melancholy legend of Kossovo. On the field itself Murad’s heart is still preserved, while the Hungarian Serbs treasure in the monastery of Vrdnik the shroud of Lazar.

A diminished Serbian principality lingered on for another seventy years. Bayezid recognised the late ruler’s eldest son, Stephen Lazarevich, with the title of “Prince” (exchanged in 1404 for that of “Despot,” thenceforth borne by the Serbian princes) on condition that he paid tribute and came every year with a contingent to join the Turkish[456] troops, and gave him the hand of his youngest sister; while Vuk Brankovich received the reward of his treachery by holding the old capital of Prishtina as a vassal of the Sultan. For a time the Turkish defeat at Angora by the Tartars in 1402 enabled the Serbian Despot to play off one Turkish pretender against another, while he purchased domestic peace by making Brankovich’s son George his heir. Thus he could devote himself to organising his country and patronising literature in the person of Constantine “the Philosopher,” who repaid his hospitality by writing his biography. He appointed a species of Cabinet, with which he discussed affairs of state, founded the monastery of Manassia, obtained Belgrade by diplomacy from the Hungarians, fortified it and adorned it with churches. In his time Venice began her colonies in Albania and what is now Montenegro—at Durazzo in 1392, Alessio in 1393, Drivasto and Scutari in 1396, Antivari and Dulcigno in 1421 (the former, however, not definitely till 1444), while in 1420 Cattaro placed herself under the protection of the Lion of St Mark, then master of most of the Dalmatian coast, save where the Ragusan Republic formed an enclave in his territory.

Serbia under George Brankovich, who succeeded as “Despot” in 1427, was thus practically a Danubian principality. The new Despot, a man of sixty years, was an experienced diplomatist; but there are times in the Balkans when force is more valuable than the subtlest diplomacy. A warlike Sultan, in the person of Murad II, sat on the Turkish throne; and he soon showed his intentions by demanding the whole of Serbia, and invading that country. Brankovich had to move his capital from Krushevatz to the bank of the Danube, where at Semendria he built the fine castle with the red brick cross in its walls which is still a memorial of Serbia’s past, while in order to secure himself an eventual refuge in Hungary, he handed over Belgrade to the Hungarian monarch, notwithstanding the protests and tears of its citizens. Brankovich in vain tried to purchase peace by giving his daughter with a regal outfit to the Sultan. Ere long, however, the Sultan, incited by a fanatic who accused him of sinning against Allah by allowing the Serbian unbeliever to bar the way to Hungary and Italy, demanded the surrender of Semendria. Brankovich fled to Hungary, thence to his last maritime possessions of Antivari and Budua, and thence to Ragusa; but the victories of John Hunyady, “the white knight of Wallachia,” induced Murad in 1444 to restore to the Despot the whole of Serbia, on payment of half its annual revenue.

Brankovich by his “enlightened egoism” managed to maintain a precarious autonomy till after the capture of Constantinople (1453).[457] Then, Mohammed II resolved to end what remained of Serbian independence, and to capture the famous silver mines of Novo Brdo, which, as his biographer, Kritoboulos, remarked, had not only largely contributed to the splendour of the Serbian Empire, but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed, the picture which the Imbrian writer draws of Serbia on the eve of the Turkish conquest is almost idyllic, with her “cities many and fair,” her “strong forts on the Danube,” her “productive soil, swine and cattle, and abundant breed of goodly steeds.” But the flower of the Serbian youth had been drafted into the corps of Janissaries to fight against their fellow-Christians, the prince was a man of ninety and a fugitive, while Mohammed, like the Germans of to-day, had marvellous artillery. Still Belgrade, then a Hungarian fortress, resisted, thanks to the skill of Hunyady and the fiery eloquence of the Franciscan Capistrano. But the nonagenarian Despot was wounded in a quarrel with the Hungarian governor, and on Christmas-eve, 1456, died. Of his sons the two elder had been blinded by the late Sultan, so that his third son, Lazar III, succeeded him. His speedy death resulted, at this eleventh hour of Serbian history, in the union of both Serbia and Bosnia by the marriage of one of his daughters with the Bosnian Crown Prince, Stephen Tomashevich—an arrangement which even Dushan, in all his glory, had never achieved. The Bosnian Despot of Serbia took up his abode at Semendria; but the inhabitants, regarding their new master with disfavour, as a Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, opened their gates to the Turks; before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia had become a Turkish pashalik, except Belgrade, which remained a Hungarian fortress till 1521. Four years after the fall of Serbia her last Despot, then King of Bosnia, was beheaded at Jajce, and his kingdom annexed by the Turks. Twenty years after Bosnia, the Duchy of St Sava, the modern Herzegovina, met with the same fate.

Thus the history of mediæval Serbia was closed. But members of the Brankovich family continued to bear the title of Despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of their adherents had followed them, till the extinction of their house two centuries ago; the Serbian Patriarchate, abolished in 1459, but revived by the Turks in 1557, existed till 1767; but from the time of Mohammed II to that of Black George in 1804, when Danubian Serbia rose from her long enslavement, the noblest representatives of the Serbs maintained their freedom in the Republics of Ragusa, “the South Slavonic Athens,” and Poljitza, “the South Slavonic San Marino,” and among the barren rocks of free Montenegro.

AUTHORITIES

1. Geschichte der Serben. Von Constantin Jireček, Erster Band (Bis 1371); Zweiter Band, erste Hälfte (1371-1537). Gotha: Perthes, 1911, 1918.

3. Les problèmes serbes. Par Stojan Novakovich. In Archiv für slavische Philologie, Bände XXXIII.-IV. Berlin, 1912.

4. Listine. By S. Ljubich. In Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.

5. Acta et Diplomata Res Albaniæ mediæ ætatis illustrantia. Ed. L. de Thallóczy, C. Jireček, E. de Sufflay. Vol. I. (344-1343); Vol. II. (1344-1406). Vindobonæ, 1913-18.

APPENDIX
THE FOUNDER OF MONTENEGRO

The parentage of Stephen Crnojevich, the founder of the like-named Montenegrin dynasty, has hitherto rested merely on conjecture. The two oldest writers on South Slavonic history, Orbini[863] and Luccari[864], identified him with Stefano Maramonte, an adventurer from Apulia, who is known from Venetian sources[865] to have been a totally different person. Subsequent writers, such as Ducange[866], Fallmerayer[867], Milakovich[868], and Lenormant[869], have usually adopted without question this identification; while the first native historian of Montenegro, the Vladika Vasilj Petrovich[870], made him the son of a certain John Crnojevich, who was descended from the Serbian royal family of Nemanja. According to these respective theories, he first appeared in Montenegrin history in 1419, 1421 or 1423. Hopf[871], and Count de Mas Latrie[872], who were far nearer the truth, asserted him to have been a son of Raditch Crnoje, who is described as “lord of the Zeta and Budua and of the other parts of Slavonia” in 1392, as “baron of the parts of the Zeta” in 1393, and as having fallen in battle in 1396, after having been a “very powerful man” and an honorary citizen of Venice[873].

The Venetian documents, published by Ljubich, prove beyond all doubt that Stephen Crnojevich was the son of George Jurash, or Jurashevich—a name first mentioned[874] in a Ragusan document of 1403. Three years later George Jurashevich and his brother Alexius dominated the Upper Zeta; in 1420 they were “barons of the Zeta” and were promised the possession of Budua[875]—the very same places that Raditch Crnoje had held. These facts might have suggested that they were his next-of-kin, not, as Hopf[876] and Miklosich[877] supposed, members of a distinct clan. The identity of the two families is proved by a document[878] of 1426, which mentions for the first time Stefaniza fiol del Zorzi Juras, while subsequent documents prove conclusively that this Stefaniza was none other than Stephen Crnojevich. He had three brothers, one “lately dead” in 1443, and in the next year mention is made of the three survivors as Jurassin, Stefanice, et Coicini, fratrum de Zernoievich[879].

The exact relationship of Stephen’s father, George Jurashevich, to Raditch Crnoje can only be surmised. We know however that Raditch had several brothers[880]; if we assume that one was called George, or Jurash, this man’s son would then be called Jurashevich; thus Stephen would be Raditch’s grand-nephew—a degree of relationship which would correspond with his death[881] in 1466, two generations after that of his great-uncle. As the legitimate heirs of Raditch, the Jurashevich naturally reverted to the more distinguished surname of Crnojevich, a name found in that region in 1351, while Crnagora, the Serb name for Montenegro, occurs in a Ragusan document[882] of 1362. There is a tradition[883] that the family came originally from Zajablje in the Herzegovina.

3. BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST[884]

I. The History of Bosnia down to 1180.

The earliest known inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina belonged to that Illyrian stock which peopled the western side of the Balkan peninsula at the close of the fifth century B.C. At that period we find two Illyrian tribes, the Ardiæi and the Autariatæ, in possession of those lands. The former occupied West Bosnia, while the latter extended to the south and gave their name to the river Tara, which forms for some distance the present frontier between Montenegro and the Herzegovina. Few characteristics of these remote tribes have been preserved by the Greek and Roman writers, but we are told that the Ardiæi were noted even among the Illyrians for their drunken habits, and that they were the proprietors of a large body of slaves, who performed all their manual offices for them. Of the Autariatæ we know nothing beyond the fact of their power at that epoch.

But the old Illyrian inhabitants had to acknowledge the superiority of another race. About 380 B.C. the Celts invaded the peninsula, and, by dint of continual pushing, ousted the natives of what is now Serbia, and so became neighbours of the Ardiæi. Their next step was to drive the latter southward into the modern Herzegovina, and to seize their possessions in North Bosnia. Instead of uniting against the Celtic invaders the Illyrian tribes fell to quarrelling among themselves over some salt springs, which were unfortunately situated at the spot where their confines met. This fratricidal struggle had the effect of so weakening both parties that they fell an easy prey to the common foe. The victorious Celts pursued their southward course, and by 335 B.C. both Bosnia and the Herzegovina were in their power, and the Illyrians either exiles or else subject to the Celtic sway. This is the first instance of that fatal tendency to disunion which has throughout been the curse of these beautiful lands. The worst foes of Bosnia and the Herzegovina have been those of their own household.

The Celtic supremacy left few traces behind it. While in the south a powerful Illyrian state was formed, which offered a stubborn resistance to Rome herself, the Celtic and Illyrian inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina remained in the happy condition of having no history. But when the South Illyrian state fell before the Romans, in 167 B.C.,[461] and the legionaries encamped on the river Narenta, upon which the present Herzegovinian capital stands, the people who dwelt to the north felt that the time had come to defend themselves. One of their tribes had already submitted to the Romans, but the others combined in a confederation, which had its seat at Delminium, a fortress near the modern town of Sinj, in Dalmatia, from which the confederates took the common name of Dalmatians. The first struggle lasted for nearly a century, in spite of the capture and destruction of Delminium by Scipio Nasica in 155 B.C., and it was reserved for Caius Cosconius in 78 B.C. to subdue the Dalmatian confederates and bring Bosnia and the Herzegovina for the first time beneath the Roman sway. Those lands were then merged in the Roman province of Illyricum, which stretched from the Adriatic to the western frontier of modern Serbia and from the Save into North Albania. But the spirit of the brave Dalmatians was still unbroken, and they never lost an opportunity of rising against their Roman masters. Aided by their winter climate, they resisted the armies of Cæsar’s most trusted lieutenants, and the Emperor Augustus was twice wounded in his youthful campaign against them. One of their revolts in the early years of the Christian era was, in the words of Suetonius, “the greatest danger which had threatened Rome since the Punic wars.” Under their chiefs Bato and Pines they defied the legions of Tiberius for four long years, and it was only when their last stronghold had fallen, and Bato had been taken captive, that they submitted. Their power as an independent nation was broken for ever, their country was laid waste, and in A.D. 9 finally incorporated with the Roman Empire. North Bosnia became part of the province of Pannonia; the Herzegovina and Bosnia south of a line drawn from Novi through Banjaluka and Doboj to Zvornik, were included in the province of Dalmatia. The Romans divided up the latter in their usual methodical manner into three districts, grouped round three towns, where was the seat of justice, and whither the native chieftains came to confer with the Roman authorities. Thus Salona, near Spalato, once a city half as large as Constantinople, but now a heap of ruins, was made the centre of government for South Bosnia, while the Herzegovina fell within the jurisdiction of Narona, a fortress which has been identified with Vid, near Metkovich.

The Roman domination, which lasted till the close of the fifth century, has left a permanent mark upon the country. The interior, it is true, never attained to such a high degree of civilisation as the more accessible towns on the Dalmatian coast, and no such magnificent building as the palace at Spalato in which Diocletian spent the evening[462] of his days adorned the inland settlements. But the conquerors developed, much as the Austrians have done in our own time, those natural resources which the natives had neglected. Three great Roman roads united Salona and the sea with the principal places up country. One of these highways skirted the beautiful lake Jezero, traversed the now flourishing town of Banjaluka, which derives its modern name, “the Baths of St Luke,” from the ruins of a Roman bath, and ended at Gradishka, on the Save. Another connected Salona with the plain of Sarajevo, even then regarded as the centre of the Bosnian trade, and the valley of the Drina, while a branch penetrated as far as Plevlje, in the sandjak of Novibazar, then a considerable Roman settlement. The third, starting also from Salona, crossed the south of the Herzegovina, where traces of it may still be seen. Then, too, the mineral wealth of Bosnia was first exploited—the gold workings near the source of the river Vrbas and the rich deposits of iron ore in the north-west. The natives, hitherto occupied in fighting or farming, were now forced to work at the gold diggings. Roman authors extolled the Bosnian gold, the “Dalmatian metal” of Statius, of which as much as 50 lbs. were obtained in a single day, and a special functionary presided at Salona over the administration of the Bosnian gold mines. The salt springs of Dolnja Tuzla, now a busy manufacturing town, were another source of wealth, and the numerous coins of the Roman period discovered up and down the country show that a considerable amount of money was in circulation there. Many a Roman colonist must have been buried in Bosnian soil, for numbers of tombstones with Latin inscriptions have been found, and the national museum at Sarajevo is full of Roman cooking utensils, Roman vases, and Roman instruments of all kinds. Most important of all, it was during the Roman period that the first seeds of Christianity were sown in these remote Balkan lands. The exact date of this event, which was to exercise paramount influence for evil as well as good upon the future history of Bosnia, is unknown, but we may safely assume that the Archbishopric of Salona was the seat of the new doctrine, from which it rapidly spread throughout the Dalmatian province. Several bishoprics, which are mentioned as subordinate to the archiepiscopal See of Salona in the sixth century, are to be found in Bosnia, and one in particular, the bishopric of Bistue, lay in the very heart of that country.

But the power of Rome on the further shore of the Adriatic and in the mountains behind it did not long survive the break-up of the Western Empire in 476. Bosnia and the Herzegovina experienced the fate of the provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia, of which they had so long formed[463] a part. Twenty years earlier Marcellinus, a Roman general, had carved out for himself an independent principality in Dalmatia, and his nephew and successor, Julius Nepos, maintained his independence there for a short space after the fall of the Empire. But Odoacer soon made himself master of the old Roman province, and in 493 the Ostrogoths under Theodoric overran the country, and for the next forty years Bosnia and the Herzegovina owned their sway. This change of rulers made little difference in the condition of the people. The Ostrogoths did not interfere with the religious institutions which they found already in existence. Under their government two ecclesiastical councils were held at Salona, and two new bishoprics founded, bringing the total number up to six. Theodoric, like the Romans before him, paid special attention to the mineral wealth of Bosnia, and a letter is extant in which he appoints an overseer of “the Dalmatian iron ore mines.” But in 535 began the twenty years’ war between the Ostrogoths and the Emperor Justinian. These lands at once became the prey of devastating armies, the battle-field of Gothic and Byzantine combatants. In the midst of the general confusion a horde of new invaders appeared, probably at the invitation of the Gothic King, and in 548 we hear of the Slavs for the first time in the history of the country. Further Slavonic detachments followed in the next few years, and before the second half of the sixth century was far advanced there was a considerable Slav population in the western part of the Balkan peninsula. Even when the war had ended with the overthrow of the Gothic realm, and Bosnia and the Herzegovina had fallen under the Byzantine sway, the inroads of the Slavs did not cease. Other savage tribes came too, and the Avars in particular were the terror of the inhabitants. This formidable race, akin to the Huns, whom they rivalled in ferocity, soon reduced the once flourishing province of Dalmatia to a wilderness. During one of their marches through Bosnia they destroyed nearly forty fortified places on the road from the Save to Salona, and finally reduced that prosperous city to the heap of ruins which it has ever since remained, while the citizens formed out of Diocletian’s abandoned palace the town which bears the name of Spalato, or the Palace, to this day. But the Avars were not to have an unchallenged supremacy over the country. In the first half of the seventh century the Emperor Herakleios summoned to his aid two Slavonic tribes, the Croats and Serbs, and offered them the old Illyrian lands as his vassals if they would drive out the Avars. Nothing loth they at once accepted the invitation, and, after a fierce struggle, subdued the barbarians, whose hands had been as heavy upon the Slavonic as upon the Roman settlers. The Croats, who[464] came somewhat earlier than the Serbs, took up their abode in what is still known as Croatia, and in the northern part of Dalmatia, as far as the river Cetina; the Serbs occupied the coast line from that river as far south as the present Albanian town of Durazzo, and inland the whole of modern Serbia (as it was before 1912), Montenegro, Bosnia, the Herzegovina, and the sandjak of Novibazar. From that time onwards these regions have, under various alien dominations, never lost their Slavonic character, and to this day even the Bosniaks who profess the faith of Islâm, no less than their Orthodox brothers, are of Serbian stock.

The history of Bosnia and the Herzegovina from this Slavonic settlement in the first half of the seventh down to the middle of the tenth century is very obscure. We have few facts recorded, and nothing is gained by repeating the names of mythical rulers, whose existence has been disproved by the researches of critical historians. But it is possible to form some general idea of the state of the country during this period of transition. Nominally under the suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire, much in the same sense as modern Bulgaria was till 1908 under that of the Sultan, Bosnia and its neighbouring lands were practically independent and formed a loose agglomeration of small districts, each of which was called by the Slavonic name of jupa and was governed by a headman known as a jupan. The most important of these petty chiefs was awarded the title of great jupan, and the various districts composed a sort of primitive confederation under his auspices. Two of the districts received names which attained considerable importance in subsequent history. The Slavonic settlers in the valley of the Upper Bosna adapted the Latin designation of that river, Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks, and the name of the river was afterwards extended to the whole country, which from that time onwards was known as Bosnia—a term first found in the form “Bosona,” of Constantine Porphyrogenitus[885]. Similarly Mount Hum, above the present town of Mostar, gave its name to the surrounding district, which was called the Land of Hum, or Zahumlje, until in the middle of the fifteenth century it was re-christened the “Land of the Duke,” or the Herzegovina, from the German Herzog. These derivations are much more probable than the alternatives recently offered, according to which Bosnia means the “land of salt” in Albanian, and the Herzegovina means the “land of stones” in Turkish[886].

The Slavs, with the adaptability of many other conquerors, soon accepted the religion which they found already established in these countries. The Serbs, who settled at the mouth of the Narenta, alone[465] adhered to paganism, and erected on the ruins of the old Roman town of Narona a shrine of their god Viddo, from whom the modern village of Vid derives its name. Here heathen rites were celebrated for more than two hundred years, and as late as the beginning of the last century the inhabitants of Vid cherished ancient idols, of which the original significance had long passed away.

The political history of Bosnia was determined for many generations by its geographical position on the boundary line between the Croatian and Serbian settlements. It was here that these two branches of the Slavonic race met, and from the moment when two rival groups were formed under Croatian and Serbian auspices Bosnia became the coveted object of both. That country accordingly submitted to Croatian and Serbian rulers by turns. Early in the tenth century it seems to have acknowledged the sway of Tomislav, first King of the Croats, and was administered as a dependency by an official known as a ban, the Croatian name for a “governor,” which survived to our own day. A little later the Serbian Prince Tchaslav incorporated it in the confederation which he welded together, and defended it against the Magyars, who now make their first appearance in its history. Under a chieftain named Kés these dangerous neighbours had penetrated as far as the upper waters of the river Drina, where the Serbian Prince inflicted a crushing defeat upon them. But, in his zeal to carry the war into the enemy’s country, he perished himself, and with his death his dominions fell asunder, and Bosnia became for a brief period independent. But Kreshimir, King of the Croats, recovered it in 968, and for the next half-century it belonged to the Croatian crown. But about 1019 the Emperor Basil II restored for a time the dormant Byzantine sovereignty over the whole Balkan peninsula. After the bloody campaigns which earned him the title of “the Bulgar-slayer” and ended in the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, he turned his arms against the Serbs and Croats, forcing the latter to receive their crown from Constantinople and reducing Bosnia to more than nominal subjection to his throne.

Meanwhile the Herzegovina, or the “Land of Hum,” as it was then called, had had a considerable history of its own. Early in the tenth century, at the time when the Croatian King Tomislav was extending his authority over Bosnia, we hear of a certain Michael Vishevich, who ruled over the sister land and held his court in the ancient fortress of Blagaj, above the source of the river Buna. Vishevich was evidently a prince of considerable importance. The Pope addressed him as “the most excellent Duke of the people of Hum”; the Byzantine Emperor awarded him the proud titles of “proconsul and Patrician.” The[466] Republic of Ragusa paid him an annual tribute of thirty-six ducats for the vineyards of her citizens which lay within his territory. His fleet, starting from the seaport of Stagno, then the seat of a bishopric as well as an important haven, ravaged the Italian coast opposite, and made the name of “Michael, King of the Slavs,” as a chronicler styles him, a terror to the inhabitants of Apulia. The great Bulgarian Tsar Symeon was his ally, and on two occasions during his struggle with the Byzantine Empire he received aid or advice from him. We find him seconding Tomislav’s proposal for summoning the famous ecclesiastical council which met at Spalato in 925 and prohibited the use of the Slavonic liturgy. In short, nothing of importance occurred in that region during his reign in which he had not his say[887]. But after his death his dominions seem to have been included, like Bosnia, in the Serbian confederation of Tchaslav; and, when that collapsed, they were annexed by the King of Dioklitia, whose realm derived its name from the town of Doclea in what is now Montenegro, and took its origin in the valley of the Zeta, which divides that kingdom in two. About the end of the tenth century however, the powerful Bulgarian Tsar Samuel established his supremacy over the Kingdom of Dioklitia, and the treacherous murder of its King a few years later completed the incorporation of Dioklitia, and consequently of the Herzegovina, in the Bulgarian Empire. But its connexion with Bulgaria was short-lived. When Basil “the Bulgar-slayer” destroyed the sovereignty of the Bulgarian Tsars he added the Herzegovina as well as Bosnia to his own domains. Thus the twin provinces fell at the same moment beneath the Byzantine sway, and from 1019 remained for a space parts of that Empire, governed sometimes by imperial governors, sometimes by native princes acting as imperial viceroys. Bosnia was the first to raise the standard of revolt, and no sooner was the Emperor Basil II dead than it regained its independence under bans of its own, who raised it to an important position among the petty states of that time. The Herzegovina, less fortunate, only exchanged the sovereignty of the Emperor at Constantinople for that of the King of Dioklitia, who in 1050 made himself master of the land. For exactly a century it remained an integral portion of that kingdom, and had therefore no separate history. Even Bosnia succumbed a generation later to the monarchs of Dioklitia, for about 1085 all the three neighbouring lands, Serbia, Bosnia and the Herzegovina, had to accept governors from King Bodin of the Zeta, and thus a great Serb state existed under his sceptre.

But in the early years of the twelfth century a new force made itself felt in South Slavonic lands, a force which even in our own day has till lately exercised a powerful influence over the fortunes of the Balkan peninsula. Since their unsuccessful incursion in the time of Tchaslav the Hungarians had never abandoned their cherished object of gaining a foothold there. But it was not till the union of Croatia in 1102, and of Dalmatia in 1105, with the Hungarian Crown by Koloman, that this object was attained. The Hungarian Kings thus came into close contact with Bosnia, and were not long in extending their authority over that country. So far from meeting with opposition they were regarded by the people as valuable allies in the common struggle against the Byzantine Emperors of the family of the Comnenoi, who aimed at restoring the past glories and dimensions of their realm. Accordingly in 1135 we find an Hungarian King, Béla II, for the first time styling himself “King of Rama”—the name of a river in Bosnia, which Magyar chroniclers applied first to the surrounding district and then to the whole country. From that time onward, whoever the actual possessors of Rama, or Bosnia, might be, it was always included among the titles of the Hungarian monarchs, and, till our own time, the Emperor Francis Joseph in his capacity of King of Hungary called himself also “King of Rama.” In his case the phrase had certainly a more practical significance than it possessed in earlier centuries.

The precise manner in which this close connexion between Hungary and Bosnia was formed is obscure. According to one theory Béla received the country as the dowry of his Serbian wife; according to another the Bosnian magnates, seeing the increasing power of Hungary and the revived pretensions of the Byzantine Emperors, decided to seek the protection of the former against the latter. At any rate a little later Béla assigned Bosnia as a duchy to his second son, Ladislaus, leaving, however, the actual government of that land in the hands of native bans. It is now that we hear the name of one of these rulers for the first time. Hitherto the Bosnian governors have been mere shadowy figures, flitting unrecognised and almost unnoticed across the stage of history. But ban Borich, who now comes into view, is a man of flesh and blood. In the wars between the Emperor Manuel Comnenos and the Hungarians he was the staunch ally of the latter, and when a disputed succession to the Hungarian throne took place he aspired to play the part of a king-maker and supported the claims of Ladislaus, the titular “duke” of Bosnia. But he made the mistake of choosing the losing side and, after being conquered by the troops of the successful candidate, disappeared mysteriously in 1163. Short, however, as was his career, he[468] had extended the eastern borders of Bosnia to the river Drina, and we learn from the contemporary Greek historian Cinnamus[888] that his country was “independent of Serbia and governed in its own fashion.” Three years after his disappearance from the scene Bosnia shared the fate of Croatia and Dalmatia, and fell into the hands of Manuel Comnenos. But upon the death of that powerful Emperor in 1180 the fabric which he had laboriously erected collapsed; the Balkan peoples had nothing more to fear from the Byzantine Empire, and Bosnia under her famous ban Kulin attained to greater freedom and prosperity than she had yet enjoyed. But the same period which witnessed this political and material progress witnessed also the development of that ecclesiastical schism which was one day destined to cause the loss of all freedom and the suspension of all progress by facilitating the Turkish conquest of the land.

II. The Great Bosnian Bans (1180-1376).

Kulin is the first great figure in Bosnian history. By nature a man of peace, he devoted his attention to the organisation of the country, which in his time was a ten days’ journey in circumference, the development of its commerce, and the maintenance of its independence. He allowed foreigners ready access to his dominions, employed two Italian painters and goldsmiths at his court, and gave liberal mining concessions to two shrewd burghers of Ragusa, which during the middle ages was the chief emporium of the inland trade. He concluded in 1189 a treaty of commerce with that city—the earliest known Bosnian document—in which he swore to be its “true friend now and for ever, and to keep true peace and genuine troth” with it all his life. Ragusan merchants were permitted to settle wherever they chose in his territory, and no harm was to be done them by his officials. Agriculture flourished under his rule, and years afterwards, whenever the Bosnian farmer had a particularly prosperous year, he would say to his fellows, “The times of Kulin are coming back again.” Even to-day the people regard him as a favourite of the fairies, and his reign as a golden age, and to “talk of ban Kulin” is a popular expression for one who speaks of the remote past, when the Bosnian plum-trees always groaned with fruit and the yellow corn-fields never ceased to wave in the fertile plains. Kulin’s position was strengthened too by his powerful connections; for his sister was the wife of Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had formed part of the Kingdom of Dioklitia down to 1150, when it was conquered by the Serbian great jupan, Desa. Some twenty years[469] later Stephen Nemanja made his brother Miroslav its prince, and thus was closely connected with Kulin. The latter, like Nemanja in Serbia, threw off all ties of allegiance to the Byzantine Empire on the death of Manuel Comnenos, and at the same time ignored the previous relations which had existed between the Kings of Hungary and the Bosnian bans.

But it was Kulin’s ecclesiastical policy which rendered his reign most memorable in the after history of Bosnia. In the tenth century there had appeared in Bulgaria a priest named “Bogomil,” or the “Beloved of God,” who preached a mystical doctrine, peculiarly attractive to the intellect of a Slavonic race. From the assumption that there existed in the universe a bad as well as a good deity the Bogomiles, as his disciples were called, deduced a complete system of theology, which explained all phenomena to their own satisfaction. But the Bogomiles did not content themselves with metaphysics alone. They descended from the serene atmosphere of abstract reasoning to the questions of ritual and the customs of society. Appropriating to themselves the title of “good Christians,” they regarded the monks as little short of idolators, set at naught the authority of bishops, and defied the thunders of the popes. Their worship was characterised by extreme simplicity and often conducted in the open air, while in their lives they aimed at a plain and primitive ideal. A “perfect” Bogomile, one who belonged to the strictest of the two castes into which they were divided, looked upon marriage as impure and bloodshed as a deadly sin; he despised riches, and owned allegiance to no one save God alone, while he had the quaker’s objection to an oath. No wonder that popes, trembling for their authority, branded them as heretics and pursued them with all the horrors of fire and sword; no wonder that potentates found them sometimes intractable subjects, and sometimes useful allies in a struggle against ecclesiastical pretensions.

The Bogomiles appear to have entered Bosnia about the middle of the twelfth century, and speedily gained a hold upon the country. Kulin at first remained uninfluenced by their teachings. Thus, in 1180, we find the papal legate writing to him in the most courteous terms, and addressing him as the “noble and powerful man, the great ban of Bosnia.” The legate sends him a letter and the Holy Father’s blessing, and begs him to give him in return, as a token of his devotion, “two servants and marten skins.” But Kulin found it politic later on to secede from the Roman Church. For some time past the rival Archbishoprics of Spalato and Ragusa had striven for ecclesiastical supremacy over Bosnia. Béla III, King of Hungary, who had now time to devote to his ambitious schemes against that country, warmly supported the[470] claims of the See of Spalato, to which he had appointed a creature of his own. Kulin was naturally on the side of Ragusa, and was encouraged by his sister, whose late husband, Miroslav, Prince of the Herzegovina, had had a similar contest with the Archbishop of Spalato, and had concluded a treaty with the Ragusans. The Pope took the part of Spalato, and Kulin retorted by defying him, as Miroslav had done before. The latter had probably been a Bogomile for some time before his death; the former now formally abandoned the Roman Church, with his wife, his sister, his whole family, and ten thousand of his subjects. The force of so potent an example was at once felt. The Bogomile or Patarene heresy, as it was called by the Bosniaks of other creeds, now spread apace, not only over Bosnia, but in the neighbouring lands. The two Italian painters, whom we have mentioned as residing at Kulin’s court, carried it to Spalato, where it extended to the other Dalmatian coast towns; and the destruction of Zara by the crusaders in 1202 was regarded by pious chroniclers as a judgment upon that city for its heretical opinions.

King Béla III was not slow to make Kulin’s defection the excuse for posing as defender of the true faith. But his death and the quarrels between his heirs gave Kulin a little breathing space, and it was not till 1200 that he was in actual danger. By that time Béla’s sons, Emerich and Andrew, had established themselves respectively as King of Hungary and Duke of the Herzegovina, and accordingly threatened Bosnia from two sides. Emerich, following his father’s policy, endeavoured to induce the Pope to preach a crusade against the Bosnian heretics, and Innocent III, who then occupied the chair of St Peter, hailed the King of Hungary as overlord of Bosnia, and bade him summon Kulin to recant, or if the latter remained obdurate invade Bosnia and occupy it himself. Thus menaced by a combination of the spiritual and the temporal power, Kulin bowed before the storm. He felt that at all costs Hungarian intervention must be avoided, so he made the rather lame excuse that he had “regarded the Patarenes not as heretics, but as Catholics,” and begged the Pope to send him some safe adviser, who should guide his erring feet into the right way. Innocent, pleased at Kulin’s submission, sent two ecclesiastics to Bosnia to inquire into the religious condition of the country and to bring back its ruler to the true fold. The mission was temporarily successful. Early in the spring of 1203 the ban, his great nobles, and the heads of the Bogomile community met in solemn assembly in the “white plain,” or Bjelopolje, on the river Bosna, confessed their errors, and drew up a formal document embodying their recantation. “We renounce the[471] schism of which we are accused”—so runs the deed—“we promise to have altars and crosses in all our churches, to receive the sacrament seven times a year, to observe the fasts ordained by the church, and to keep the festivals of the saints. Henceforth we will no more call ourselves ‘Christians,’ but ‘brothers,’ so as not to cast a slur upon other Christians.” The oath thus taken was renewed by representatives of the Bogomiles in the presence of the King of Hungary, who bade Kulin observe his promises for the future. The cloud had passed away, but with its disappearance Kulin too disappears from the scene. An inscription, said to be the oldest in the country and ascribed to the year 1203-04, which was found in 1898 at Muhashinovichi, on the river Bosna, refers to a church erected by him to prove the sincerity of his re-conversion, and prays God to grant health to him and his wife, Voyslava. We hear no more of him after 1204; but his memory was not soon forgotten[889]. Two centuries later a Bosnian King desired to have confirmed to him all the “customs, usages, privileges and frontiers, which existed in the time of Kulin,” and the rich Bosnian family of Kulenovich of our own time (whose ancestral castle of Jaskopolje may be seen near Jajce, almost on the spot where, in 1878, the great fight between the Austrians and the insurgents took place) is said to derive its name and lineage from him.

But the recantation of Kulin did not check the growth of the Bogomile heresy. Under his successor, Stephen, the numbers of the sect increased, and the efforts of Pope Honorius III and his legate to preach a crusade against the heretics remained fruitless. The Holy Father might exclaim that “the unbelievers in Bosnia, just as witches in a cave nourish their offspring with their bare breasts, publicly preach their abominable errors, to the great harm of the Lord’s flock”; but even this mixture of metaphors failed to stimulate the flagging zeal of the Hungarian Catholics. Even when the King of Hungary had pacified his rebellious nobles by the golden bull, and was therefore able to turn his attention to Bosnian affairs, the proposed crusade fell flat. The King worked upon the cupidity of the Archbishop of Kalocsa by granting him spiritual authority over Bosnia; but the only result was to stiffen the backs of the recalcitrant Bosniaks. Imitating their neighbours in the Herzegovina, who had lately made a Bogomile their Prince, they deposed the weak-kneed Stephen and put Matthew Ninoslav, a Bogomile by birth and education, in his place. The new ban proved, however, more pliant than his poorer subjects. Alarmed at the threatening attitude[472] of the King of Hungary, he recanted, as Kulin had done before him, and placed his country under the protection of St Peter. But the conversion of their Prince had little effect upon the masses. The monks of the Dominican order might boast that they had converted, if not convinced, Ninoslav, but it was felt that stronger measures must be taken against his people. In 1234 a crusade was at last organised, and for the next five years the Bogomiles of Bosnia experienced all those horrors of fire and sword which their fellows, the Albigenses, had suffered in the south of France. Under different names and in widely different spheres the two bodies of heretics had adopted similar doctrines. Indeed, the Albigenses had looked to the Bogomile “pope,” or primate, of Bosnia for spiritual instruction and advice, and accepted their “vicar” at his hands. But while historians and poets of renown have cast lustre upon the struggles and sufferings of the martyrs of Provence the probably equally heroic resistance of the Bosnian Bogomiles has made little impression upon literature. Yet it is clear that they possessed all the stubborn valour of our own puritans. In spite of the conquest of both Bosnia and the Herzegovina in 1237 by the Hungarian King’s son, Koloman, who received the former country from the King and the Pope as the reward of his labours, in spite of the erection of forts and a Catholic Cathedral to keep the unruly passions and heretical inclinations of the people in order, the spirit of the Bogomiles remained unbroken. Ninoslav, furious at the arbitrary substitution of Koloman for himself, once more appeared as their champion, and the great defeat of the Hungarians by the Tartars in 1241 not only rid him of his rival, Koloman, but freed his land from all fear of Hungarian intervention for some time to come. Even the incursion of the Tartars into Bosnia was a small disadvantage as compared with the benefits which that country had derived from their previous victory over its foes. Ninoslav now felt himself strong enough to assist Spalato in its struggle against the King of Hungary and to offer an alliance to Ragusa against the growing power of the Serbian monarchy. A second crusade in Bosnia in 1246 was not more successful than the first, and the Pope in placing the Bosnian See under the authority of the Archbishop of Kalocsa, expressly gave as his reason “the utter hopelessness of a voluntary conversion of that country to the true faith.” Even the papal permission to use the Slavonic tongue and the Glagolitic characters in the Catholic service did not win over the Bogomiles to Rome. Crusades and concessions had alike failed[890].

Ninoslav passes out of sight in 1250, and the next two generations are, with the exception of the Turkish supremacy, the gloomiest period of Bosnian history. Religious differences and a disputed succession made the country an easy prey to the ambitious designs of the Hungarian monarchs, who, after a brief support of Ninoslav’s relative, the Catholic Prijesda I, in 1254 subdued not only Bosnia but the Herzegovina beneath their sway. While the latter about 1284 fell under Serbian influence the former was split up into two parts. The Upper, or hill-country, Bosnia properly so-called, was allowed to retain native bans—Prijesda I and his sons[891], Prijesda II and Stephen Kotroman, till 1302; Lower Bosnia, i.e. the “salt” district of Soli (the modern Tuzla) with Usora, for the sake of greater security, was at first entrusted to Hungarian magnates, and then combined with a large slice of northern Serbia, known as Matchva, in a compact duchy, which was conferred upon near relatives of the Hungarian King. During this period the history of this distracted land is practically a blank. Beyond the names of its successive rulers we have little handed down to us by the chroniclers. “A sleep as of death,” in the words of a Croatian writer, “had fallen upon the country. The whole national and religious life of Bosnia had perished beneath the cold blasts of the wind from beyond the Save.” Now and again we come upon traces of the old Bogomile spirit and the old zeal of the persecutors. Stephen Dragutin, who had been driven by lameness from the Serbian throne and had become under Hungarian auspices Duke of Matchva and Bosnia in 1284, was specially noted for his “conversion and baptism of many heretics,” and it was in answer to his request that the Franciscans, who have since played such an important part in Bosnian history, settled in the country. But still the Pope complained that “the churches were deserted and the priesthood uprooted.” Meanwhile two powerful families began to make their influence felt, the Croatian clan of Shubich and the race of Kotromanich, whose legendary founder (according to Orbini), a German knight, had entered Bosnia in the Hungarian service and was the ancestor of the Bosnian Kings. We now know, however, from a document of the great Tvrtko[892], quoted by Pope Gregory XI, that Tvrtko’s uncle, Stephen Kotromanich, was grandson of “the great” Prijesda I. The latest authority on the subject[893] accordingly believed the Kotroman family to have sprung from Upper Bosnia and to have been very probably related to Borich and Kulin. The legend of its German, or Gothic, origin arose out of its matrimonial connections with great families of Central Europe.[474] The family of Shubich was at first in the ascendant, and became lords of part and then the whole of the land. In fact Paul Shubich, in 1299, styled himself “lord of Bosnia” and early in the fourteenth century his son, Mladen, ruled, under the title of “ban of the Croats and all Bosnia,” a vast tract of territory extending from the Save to the Narenta and from the Drina to the Adriatic. But in 1322 he fell before a combination of rivals, and young Stephen Kotromanich, who had been his deputy in Bosnia, became independent and united both Upper and Lower Bosnia under his sway[894].

Stephen Kotromanich proved himself to be the ablest ruler whom Bosnia had had since Kulin, and laid the foundations upon which his successor built up the Bosnian kingdom. His reign of over thirty years was marked by a series of successes. He began in 1325 by annexing the Herzegovina, which, as we have seen, had been under Serbian authority for the last two generations, as well as the sea-coast from the river Cetina as far south as the gates of Ragusa. Thus, for the first time in its history, Bosnia had gained an outlet on the sea, and was not entirely dependent upon foreigners for its imports. The Dalmatian coast with its fine harbours is the natural frontage of the country behind, which even under the Austrians touched the sea at only two small points. But in the first half of the fourteenth century Bosnia had gained a considerable coast-line. Kotromanich even coveted the islands as well, and specially Curzola, then under the overlordship of Venice. But here his plans failed, although the Ragusans were ready to lend him ships for the purpose. He rewarded them by confirming all their old trading rights in his country and granting them some territorial concessions near the mouth of the Narenta. He took an active, if somewhat insidious, part in the operations which King Charles Robert of Hungary and his successor, Louis the Great, conducted for the restoration of their authority in Croatia and Dalmatia. Charles Robert, who had bestowed upon Kotromanich a relative of his own wife in marriage, found him a useful ally; but in the war between Louis the Great and the Venetians for the possession of Zara the Bosnian ruler was desirous of standing well with both sides. At the famous siege of Zara in 1345 and the following year he went, at the bidding of Louis, to rescue the town from its Venetian besiegers. But the crafty Venetians knew their man. They gave him a heavy bribe, and offered him a much heavier one if he would persuade Louis to abandon the relief of the beleaguered city. The money was well spent. At a critical moment of the siege, when it had been[475] arranged that the Hungarian and Bosnian army should support the besieged in a sally from the gates, Kotromanich and his Bosniaks hung back and the Venetians won the day. The quaint chronicle of this famous siege expressly ascribes the defeat of the allies to the perfidy of “that child of Belial, Stephen, ban of Bosnia,” and it was largely owing to his subsequent mediation that Zara ultimately surrendered to Venice. But Kotromanich soon found that he required the good offices of Venice himself. While he had been engaged in the west of the Balkan peninsula there had grown up in the east under the mighty auspices of Stephen Dushan the great Serbian Empire, which threatened at one moment to swallow up Constantinople itself. Dushan is the greatest name in the whole history of the peninsula, a name cherished to this day by every patriotic Serb. But just as the restoration of Dushan’s Empire, the daydream of Serbian enthusiasts, jeopardised the existence of Austrian Bosnia, so the conquests of the great Serbian Tsar alarmed the Bosnian ruler of that day. For the first half of his reign Dushan was too much occupied with his eastern conquests and his law reforms to interfere with his western neighbour. But he had not forgotten that the Herzegovina, which Kotromanich had annexed, had once belonged to the Serbian monarchy, and, as soon as he had leisure, he pressed his claims. Both parties accepted the mediation of Venice, and for a time peace was preserved. But in 1349 Kotromanich assumed the offensive, invaded Dushan’s dominions, and penetrated as far south as the beautiful town of Cattaro, at that time part of the Serbian Empire and now at last restored to its natural owners, the Southern Slavs. Dushan retaliated next year by descending upon Bosnia and laying siege to the strong castle of Bobovatz, the residence of many Bosnian rulers. As has usually happened in the history of the country, the persecuted Bogomiles flocked to the standard of the invader, and Bosnia seemed to be at his feet. But the walls of Bobovatz, behind which lay the lovely daughter of the ban, whom Dushan had demanded in marriage for his son, resisted his attacks, and he marched away southward through the Herzegovina to Cattaro. Next year the hostilities ceased, and as a further security Kotromanich found a husband for his daughter in King Louis the Great of Hungary, his old ally.

The internal condition of Bosnia was less fortunate, however, in the hands of Kotromanich than its external relations. The power of the Bogomiles had greatly increased before his accession; they had a complete organisation—a spiritual head called djed, or “grandfather,” with a seat at Janjichi, and twelve “teachers” under him—while there was not a single Catholic bishop living in the country. Moreover the[476] rival orders of Dominicans and Franciscans had begun to fight for the exclusive privilege of applying the tortures of the Inquisition to the Bosnian heretics—a conflict which naturally favoured the growth of that heresy. Under these circumstances Kotromanich began his reign by openly favouring the Bogomiles, who formed the bulk of his armies and were his best bulwark against foreign aggression so long as he was their protector. But in 1340, on the persuasion of the King of Hungary, he committed the political blunder of embracing the Catholic faith and thus making his Bogomile subjects look upon Stephen Dushan as their legitimate champion. The evil results of his ecclesiastical policy were apparent when the great Serbian Tsar invaded his dominions.

Stephen Kotromanich, whose memory is preserved by his seal, the earliest Bosnian coins and seven documents issued in his name[895], died in 1353, and his nephew Tvrtko succeeded him. Tvrtko is the greatest name in Bosnian history, and his long reign of nearly forty years, first as ban and then as first King of Bosnia, marks the zenith of that country’s power. Beginning his career under circumstances of great difficulty, and even driven at one moment from his throne, he lived to make himself King not merely of Bosnia, but of Serbia, Croatia and Dalmatia as well, and to unite beneath his sceptre a vast agglomeration of territory, such as no other Bosnian ruler has ever governed.

The first seventeen years of his reign were spent in a desperate but successful struggle for the mastery of his own house. He was a mere boy at the death of his uncle, and his mother, who acted as regent, was too weak to cope with the disorders of the time. The magnates, many of whom were zealous Bogomiles, were contemptuous of one who was both a child and a Catholic, while they would have welcomed the great Serbian Tsar Dushan, had he found time to repeat his invasion of Bosnia. But the death of that monarch on his way to the siege of Constantinople in 1355 broke up the Serbian Empire for ever and removed all fear of a Serbian occupation of Bosnia. But with the removal of this danger another arose. Louis the Great of Hungary had welcomed the growth and independence of Bosnia so long as the Serbian Empire existed as a menace to his own dominions; but, as soon as that Empire fell, he revived the ambitious designs of his predecessors upon the Bosnian realm. As the son-in-law of the late ban he had some claims to the succession, and accordingly set to work to humiliate Tvrtko and reduce him to a position of dependence upon the Hungarian crown. He compelled him to surrender the Herzegovina, as far as the Narenta, as[477] the dowry of the Hungarian queen, and to take a solemn oath that he would persecute the Bogomiles, that he would support Hungary in war, and that either he or his younger brother Stephen Vuk would always reside at the Hungarian court. In return he allowed him to remain Bosnian ban—a mere puppet without power. But the crafty Louis, in his desire to be absolute master of Bosnia overreached himself. Determined to be doubly sure of his vassal, he incited the Bosnian magnates to revolt against their chief. But those proud nobles, who had never regarded their ban as anything more than the first of their order, had no intention of exchanging his easy sway for the iron hand of the Hungarian King. Louis saw his mistake, and supported Tvrtko against the barons and the Bogomiles. But the rebels would not recognise the authority of one who relied upon Hungarian swords to enforce it. Aided by his brother they deposed and drove out Tvrtko in 1365, and it cost him a desperate struggle to recover his power. Bosnia was given up to all the horrors of civil war, and, to crown all, a terrible conflagration, the like of which had never been seen before, broke out and destroyed everything that came in its way. “At that time,” writes a chronicler, “the highest mountains, with the stones, birds, and beasts upon them, were consumed with fire, so that the hills became plains, where new corn is sown and many a village stands. And in these villages dwell Bogomiles, who boast that God set these mountains ablaze for their sake.” At last Tvrtko prevailed, and in 1370 he was undisputed master of the country and his brother an exile.

Freed from all fear of Louis, whose eyes were turned northward to Poland, and master of his rebellious barons, Tvrtko began to extend his dominions. The decline of the Serbian Empire gave him the opportunity which he sought. Lazar, perhaps the most unfortunate name in Serbian history, governed a remnant of that realm, which was threatened by dissensions from within and the Turks from without. Tvrtko aided him against his domestic rivals and received in return large portions of Serbian territory, including a strip of coast as far as Cattaro and the famous castle and monastery of Mileshevo, in the modern sandjak of Novibazar, where lay the remains of St Sava, the apostle of the Serbs. In virtue of this territory, he considered himself the legitimate successor of the Serbian monarchs, and while Lazar contented himself with the modest title of knez, or “prince,” Tvrtko had himself crowned in 1376 on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo with two diadems, that of Bosnia and that of Serbia. Henceforth he styled himself “Stephen Tvrtko, King of the Serbs and of Bosnia and of the coast.” All his successors retained the Serbian title which he could claim[478] as great-grandson of Stephen Dragutin, and, like the Serbian monarchs, invariably adopted, as Tvrtko had done, the royal name of Stephen. Not a voice was raised against this assumption of kingly power. Ragusa, ever anxious to be on good terms with those in authority, was the first to recognise him as the legal successor of the Serbian sovereigns, and promptly paid him the annual tribute which she had rendered to them on the feast of St Demetrios, as well as a sum for trading privileges in Bosnia. Venice followed suit and addressed him as “King of Serbia,” and the King of Hungary was too busy to protest. Tvrtko proceeded to live up to his new dignities. He moved his residence from Srebrenik to Sutjeska and the strong castle of Bobovatz, the picturesque ruins of which still testify to the past glories of the first Bosnian King. Here Tvrtko organised a court on the Byzantine model, as the rulers of Serbia had done before him. Rough Bosnian barons held courtly offices with high-sounding Greek names, and privileges and honours were distributed from the throne. Hitherto Bosnian coins had been scarce, and Ragusan, Hungarian and Venetian pieces had fulfilled most purposes of trade. But now money, of which excellent specimens still exist, was minted bearing the proud title of “king” instead of that of ban, and displaying a visored helmet surmounted by a crown of fleurs-de-lis with a hop blossom above. Tvrtko took his new office very seriously as a King by the grace of God, animated, as he once wrote, “with the wish to raise up that which is fallen and to restore that which is destroyed[896].”

III. The Kings of Bosnia (1376-1463).

Tvrtko’s first care was to provide himself with an heir to his kingdom, and he chose a Bulgarian princess as his queen, by whom he had a son, afterwards King Stephen Tvrtko II. But, not content with the dignity and the territory which he now possessed, the Bosnian monarch aspired to found a sea power. He had, as we have seen, already gained a long strip of seaboard from the mouth of the Cetina up to the walls of Cattaro. But Ragusa, with its harbour Gravosa, the gem of the whole coast, was not, and never seemed likely to be, his. He accordingly resolved, as he could not capture Ragusa, to found at the entrance of the lovely Bocche di Cattaro a new station, which should become its rival and the outlet of all the inland trade. The picturesque little town of Castelnuovo stands on the spot to-day, a place over which for a brief period in the last century there floated the British flag. Tvrtko next obtained from Venice an Admiral for his future fleet, and ordered galleys to be built there. And, amidst the confusion which followed the death of Louis the Great[479] of Hungary, he obtained from the little Queen Maria, as the price of his friendship, the ancient city of Cattaro, which, after having enjoyed the protection of the Serbian Tsars, had lately acknowledged the Hungarian rule. The finest fiord in Southern Europe was in his hands.

But Tvrtko did not rest here. True to his policy of making profit out of the misfortunes of others, he availed himself of the disturbances which now broke out in Croatia to take the side of the Croats against their Queen and his friend Maria. Croatia was soon in his hands, and the Dalmatian towns began to surrender. Spalato and Traù, unable to obtain help from Hungary, agreed to submit to him by a certain day; but when that day arrived Tvrtko was occupied elsewhere. For on the same day on which Spalato was to have opened its gates, June 15, 1389, the battle of Kossovo was fought, that battle which decided for five centuries the fate of the Balkan peninsula. In that memorable conflict, the name of which will never be forgotten by the Southern Slavs, a Bosnian contingent aided the Serbian army against the Turks. It was not the first time that the Bosniaks had faced their future masters in battle. Two years earlier they had helped Prince Lazar to rout a Turkish force, and they hoped for the same result on the plain of Kossovo. Tvrtko himself was not present at the fight; but his trusty lieutenant Vlatko Hranich inflicted heavy losses on the left wing of the Turkish host, which was commanded by the Sultan’s second son. But, according to the traditional account, when the Serbian traitor Vuk Brankovich rode off the field the faithful Bosniaks gave way. All was lost, and the Turkish supremacy was assured. Tvrtko at first believed that his army had been successful. There is extant a letter in which the city of Florence congratulated him on the glad tidings of victory which he had sent. “Happy the kingdom of Bosnia,” says this document, “to which it was granted to fight so famous a fight, and happiest of all your majesty, for whom, as the victor, the true and eternal glory of the heavenly kingdom is appointed[897].”

Even when he had discovered the terrible truth Tvrtko continued his Dalmatian campaign instead of concentrating all his energies upon the defence of his realm against the Turks. He used the brief respite which they gave his land to press on with his operations in the west. Here he was speedily successful. All the Dalmatian coast towns, except Zara and Ragusa, surrendered to him, as well as the large islands of Brazza, Lesina and Curzola. Overjoyed at their submission, he confirmed the privileges which they had previously enjoyed, and treated them with[480] the utmost consideration. Master of Dalmatia and Croatia in all but the name, he assumed in 1390 the title of King of those countries, just as fourteen years earlier he had proclaimed himself King of Bosnia and Serbia. Tvrtko had now reached the summit of his power. He had achieved the difficult feat of uniting Serbs and Croats under one sceptre; he had made Bosnia the centre of a great kingdom, which possessed a frontage on the Adriatic, from the Quarnero to Cattaro, save for the enclaves of Zara and Ragusa, which embraced the territory inland as far as the river Drina and included part of the modern sandjak of Novibazar, as well as other originally Serbian territories. The beginnings of a sea power had been formed under his auspices, and Dalmatia in union with Bosnia was no longer “a face without a head.” Even now Tvrtko’s ambition was not appeased. He was anxious to conclude a political alliance with Venice and a matrimonial alliance—for his wife had just died—with the great house of Habsburg. But death prevented the accomplishment of his designs. On March 23, 1391, the great Bosnian monarch expired without even being able to secure the succession for his son.

It has been the fortune of each of the various Balkan races to produce some great man, who for a brief space has made himself the foremost figure of the peninsula. Bulgaria can point to her mighty Tsars Symeon and Samuel, Serbia cherishes the memory of Stephen Dushan, the Albanians have found a national hero in Skanderbeg, Bosnia attained her zenith under Tvrtko I. But in each case with the death of the great man the power which he had rapidly acquired as rapidly waned. Tvrtko’s realm was no exception to this rule. Its founder had not lived long enough to weld his conquests into an harmonious whole, to combine Catholic Croats with Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Slavs with the Latin population of the Dalmatian coast towns, Bogomile heretics with zealous partisans of Rome. The old Slavonic law of succession, which did not recognise the custom of primogeniture, added to the difficulties by multiplying candidates; and thus foreign princes found an excuse for intervention and the great barons an excuse for independence. Deprived of his authority, the King was unable to cope with an enemy like the Turk, whose vast hosts were absolutely united in their obedience to the rule of one man, and the Kings of Hungary, instead of assisting their brothers of Bosnia against the common foe, turned their forces against a country which might have been the bulwark of Christendom.

The evil effects of Tvrtko’s death were soon felt. His younger brother, or cousin[898], Stephen Dabisha, who succeeded him, felt himself too[481] feeble to govern so large a kingdom, and in 1393 ceded the newly won lands of Dalmatia and Croatia to King Sigismund of Hungary. The two monarchs met at Djakovo, in Slavonia, and concluded an agreement by which Sigismund recognised Dabisha as King of Bosnia, while Dabisha bequeathed the Bosnian crown after his death to Sigismund. A combination of Bosnian magnates and Croatian rebels, however, refused to accept these terms, and Dabisha himself broke the treaty which he had made. An Hungarian invasion of his Kingdom and the capture of the strong fortress of Dobor, on the lower Bosna, at once reduced him to submission, and a battle before the walls of Knin, in Dalmatia, finally severed the brief connection between that country and the Bosnian throne. To complete Dabisha’s misfortunes, the Turks, who had been in no undue haste to make use of their victory at Kossovo, invaded Bosnia for the first time in 1392, and gave that country a foretaste of what was to come.

On Dabisha’s death in 1395 the all-powerful magnates, disregarding the treaty of Djakovo, made his widow, Helena Gruba, regent for his son. But they retained for themselves all real power, governing their domains as almost independent princes, maintaining their own courts and issuing charters, coining their own money and negotiating on their own account with foreign states, such as the Republics of Venice and Ragusa. One of their number, Hrvoje Vuktchich, towered above his fellows, and his career may be regarded as typical of his troublous times. For the next quarter of a century Bosnian history is little else than the story of his intrigues, and the neighbouring lands of Dalmatia and Croatia felt his heavy hand. Even Sigismund, King of Hungary, and his Neapolitan rival, Ladislaus, were bidding against one another for his support, and at the end of the fourteenth century he was “the most powerful man between the Save and the Adriatic, the pillar of two Kings and Kingdoms.” The shrewd Ragusans wrote to him that “whatsoever thou dost command in Bosnia is done”; the documents of the period style him regulus Bosnensis, or “Bosnian kinglet”; he called himself “the grand voivode of the Bosnian Kingdom and vicar-general of the most gracious sovereigns King Ladislaus and King Ostoja, the excellent lord, the Duke of Spalato.” The three great islands of Brazza, Curzola, and Lesina, and the city of Cattaro owned his overlordship, and his name will always be connected with the lovely town of Jajce, at the confluence of the Pliva and the Vrbas, the most beautiful spot in all Bosnia. Here, above the magnificent waterfall on the hill, for which in olden times the Bosnian bans and the Croatian Kings had striven, Hrvoje bade an Italian architect build him a castle. Whether the town of Jajce,[482] “the egg,” derives its name from the shape of the hill or from the fact that the castle was modelled on the famous Castello dell’ Uovo at Naples, is doubtful. But he is now regarded as the founder of the catacombs, which still bear his arms and were intended to serve as his family vault[899]. For his capital of Spalato he even issued coins, which circulated in Bosnia as freely as the currency of the puppet kings whom he put on the throne. What Warwick the king-maker is in the history of England, what the mayors of the palace are in the history of France, that is Hrvoje in the annals of mediæval Bosnia. An ancient missal has preserved for us the features of this remarkable man, whose gruff voice and rough manners disgusted the courtly nobles of the Hungarian court. But the uncouth Bosniak took a terrible revenge on his gentle critics. When a wit made fun of his big head and deep voice by bellowing at him like an ox, the company laughed at Hrvoje’s discomfiture. But when, a little later, the fortune of war put the jester in his power, Hrvoje had him sewn into the skin of an ox and thrown into the river, with the words, “Thou hast once in human form imitated the bellowing of an ox, now therefore take an ox’s form as well.”

The great Turkish invasion, which took place in 1398 and almost entirely ruined Bosnia, convinced the great nobles that a woman was unfitted to rule. Headed by Hrvoje, they accordingly deposed Helena Gruba, and elected Stephen Ostoja, probably an illegitimate son of Tvrtko, as their King. So long as Ostoja obeyed the dictates of his all-powerful vassal he kept his throne. Under Hrvoje’s guidance he repulsed the attack of King Sigismund of Hungary, who had claimed the overlordship of Bosnia in accordance with the treaty of Djakovo, and endeavoured to recover Dalmatia and Croatia for the Bosnian crown under the pretext of supporting Sigismund’s rival, Ladislaus of Naples. But the latter showed by his coronation at Zara as King of both those lands that he had no intention of allowing them to become Bosnian possessions, as in the days of Tvrtko. Ostoja at this changed his policy, made his peace with Sigismund, and recognised him as his suzerain. But he had forgotten his maker. Hrvoje, aided by the Ragusans, laid siege to the royal castle of Bobovatz, where the crown was preserved, and when Sigismund intervened on behalf of his puppet summoned an “assembly” or “congregation of the Bosnian lords” in 1404 to choose a new King. This great council of nobles, at which the djed, or primate of the Bogomile church, and his suffragans were present, is frequently mentioned at this period, and contained in a rude form the germs of those representative institutions which in our own country sprang from[483] a like origin. Hrvoje easily persuaded the council to depose Ostoja and elect Tvrtko II, the legitimate son of Tvrtko I, in his place. But Sigismund was not so lightly convinced. After a first futile attempt he sought the aid of the Pope in a crusade against “the renegade Arians and Manichæans” and marched into Bosnia in 1408 at the head of a large army. Tvrtko II met him beneath the walls of Dobor, on the same spot where, fourteen years before, another great battle had been fought. Once again the Bosnian forces were defeated. Sigismund took Tvrtko as his prisoner to Buda-Pesth, after beheading 126 captive Bosnian nobles and throwing their bodies into the yellow waters of the Bosna. The victory had decisive results. Hrvoje humbled himself before the King of Hungary, and Ladislaus of Naples sold all his rights to Dalmatia to the Venetians in despair. But the national party in Bosnia was not so easily dismayed. Nothing daunted by the defeat of Tvrtko and the desertion of Hrvoje, they restored Ostoja to the throne. Utter confusion followed. Sigismund dismembered the country, placing Usora and Soli again under Hungarian bans, bestowing the valuable mining district of Srebrenitza upon the Despot of Serbia to be an apple of discord between the two Serb states, and leaving Ostoja the Herzegovina and South Bosnia alone, while even there every one did what was right in his own eyes, and members of the royal family lived by highway robbery. Well might the Ragusans complain that “our people travel among the Turks and other heathen, yet nowhere have they met with so much harm as in Bosnia.” Yet one step lower was Ostoja to fall. Hard pressed by the Hungarians and his released rival Tvrtko, he summoned in 1415 the Turks to his aid, and thus set an example which was ultimately fatal to his country.

Since their great invasion in 1398 the Turks had not molested Bosnia. Their struggle with Timour the Tartar in Asia and the confusion which followed his great victory at Angora had temporarily checked their advance in Europe, and it was not till their reorganisation under Mohammed I that they resumed their plans. They were accordingly free to accept the invitation of Ostoja and Hrvoje, who was now in opposition to the Hungarian court, and aided them to drive out the Hungarian army. The decisive battle was fought near the fortress of Doboj, the picturesque ruins of which command the junction of the rivers Bosna and Spretcha. A stratagem of the Bosniaks, who cried out at a critical moment, “The Magyars are fleeing,” won the day. But they could not rid themselves of their Turkish allies so easily. In the very next year Mohammed appointed his general Isaac governor of the castle of Vrhbosna (“the source of the Bosna”), which stood in the heart[484] of the country, on the site of the present capital of Sarajevo, and even great Bosnian nobles were not ashamed to hold their lands by grace of the Sultan and his governor. Under Ostoja’s son, Stephen Ostojich, who succeeded as King in 1418, the country obtained a brief respite from the Turkish garrison, which quitted Vrhbosna. But three years later the restoration of Tvrtko II, after further years of exile, gave the Sultan another opportunity for intervention. For Tvrtko’s title was disputed by Ostoja’s bastard son, Radivoj, who called in the Turks to his aid, and was seen by the traveller, De la Brocquière[900] as a suppliant of the Sultan at Adrianople in 1433. Tvrtko purchased a temporary peace by the surrender of several towns to them; but the fatal secret had been divulged that the Sultan was the arbiter of Bosnia, and to him two other enemies of the King turned, the Despot of Serbia and Sandalj Hranich, a great Bosnian magnate of the house of Kosatcha, who was all-powerful in the Herzegovina, so that Chalkokondyles calls it “Sandalj’s country[901].” The two partners bought the Bosnian Kingdom from the Sultan for hard cash, and Tvrtko was once more an exile. In 1436 the Turks again occupied Vrhbosna, which from that time became a place of arms, from which they could sally forth and ravage the land, and when Tvrtko returned in the same year it was as a mere tributary of the Sultan Murad II, who received an annual sum of 25,000 ducats from his vassal, and issued charters as the sovereign of the country. Soon Murad overran Serbia, and occupied the former Bosnian towns of Zvornik and Srebrenitza, which the Serbian Despot still held, so that it seemed as if the independence of Bosnia was over. Tvrtko knew not which way to turn. He implored the Venetians, who twenty years before had taken the former Bosnian haven of Cattaro under their protection, and were now masters of nearly all Dalmatia, to take over the government of his Kingdom too. But the crafty Republic declined the dangerous honour with many complimentary phrases. With Ladislaus IV of Hungary he was more fortunate. He did not, indeed, survive to see the fulfilment of the Hungarian King’s promise, for he was murdered by his subjects in 1443. But the help of John Hunyady, the great champion of Christendom, enabled his successor to stave off for another twenty years the final blow which was to annihilate the Bosnian Kingdom.

With Tvrtko II the royal house of Kotromanich was extinct, and the magnates elected Stephen Thomas Ostojich, another bastard son of Ostoja, as their King. Ostojich, whose birth and humble marriage[485] diminished his influence over his proud nobles, came to the conclusion that it would enhance his personal prestige, and at the same time strengthen his Kingdom against the Turks, if he embraced the Roman Catholic faith. His father and all his family had been Bogomiles, like most Bosnian magnates of that time, but Tvrtko II was a Catholic and a great patron of the Franciscans, who had suffered severely from the Turkish inroads. The conversion of Ostojich was full of momentous consequences for his Kingdom; for, although he was personally disinclined to persecute the sect to which he had belonged, and which had practically become the established church of the land, the pressure of his protector Hunyady, the Franciscans, and the Pope soon compelled him to take steps against it. He was convinced that by so doing he would drive the Bogomiles, who formed the vast majority of the people, into the arms of the Turks, and the event justified his fears. But he had little choice, for the erection of Catholic churches did not satisfy the zeal of the Franciscans. Accordingly in 1446 an assembly of prelates and barons met at Konjitza, the beautiful town on the borders of the Herzegovina, through which the traveller now passes on the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar. The document embodying the resolutions of this grand council has been preserved, and bears the name and seal of the King[902]. It provided that the Bogomiles “shall neither build new churches nor restore those that are falling into decay,” and that “the goods of the Catholic Church shall never be taken from it.” No less than 40,000 of the persecuted sect emigrated to the Herzegovina in consequence of this decree, and found there a refuge beneath the sway of the great magnate Stephen Vuktchich, of the house of Kosatcha, who had succeeded his uncle Sandalj in 1435, made himself practically independent of his liege lord of Bosnia and was at the same moment on good terms with the Turks and a strong Bogomile. Thus the old Bosnian realm was practically divided in two; Stephen Vuktchich, by posing as a defender of the national faith, received a considerable accession of subjects, and the Emperor Frederick III bestowed upon him in 1448 the title of Herzog, or Duke, of St Sava, from which his land gradually derived its present name of Herzegovina[903]. But both Bosnia and the sister land were soon to feel the hand of the Turk.

The accession of Mohammed II to the Turkish throne in 1451 was the beginning of a new era for the Balkan peoples. Since the battle of Kossovo the Sultans had been content to allow the Serbs the shadow of independence under Despots of their own, while Bosnia had bought off invasion by a tribute, more or less regularly paid, according to the vicissitudes of the Ottoman power. But the new Sultan resolved to bring the whole peninsula under his immediate sway, and lost no time in putting his plans into execution. The capture of Constantinople startled the whole of Christendom, and the great victory of Hunyady before the walls of Belgrade was small compensation for that hero’s death. There was no one left to champion the cause of the Balkan Christians, who were still occupied with their own miserable jealousies. Bosniaks and Serbs were disputing the possession of the frontier towns, which the Kings of Hungary had long ago made an apple of discord between them, and Duke Stephen of the Herzegovina was invoking the aid of the Turks at the very moment when all religious and racial enmities should have been silenced in the presence of the common foe. But it has been the misfortune of the Balkan peoples to have, like the Bourbons, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing in their centuries of suffering. They have never, save during the Balkan war of 1912-13, learnt the lesson of their mutual jealousies, and have never forgotten their historic aspirations from which those jealousies spring.

The King of Bosnia in this extremity sought aid from the west of Europe. As an obedient son of the Roman Church, he had a right to expect the help of the Pope; as a friend of the Venetians, he felt entitled to the support of the Doge. But he met with little response to his appeals. Venice, selfish as ever, was not anxious to embroil herself in Bosnian affairs, and the Pope contented himself with proclaiming a new crusade, addressing the King as the “warrior of Christ,” and promising him “a glorious victory,” in which no one else seemed desirous to share. Under these circumstances Ostojich had no alternative but to pay the tribute, which he had refused in the first flush of Hunyady’s victory at Belgrade. The one bright speck on the dark horizon was the possibility of the union of Bosnia and Serbia under one ruler by the marriage of Stephen Tomashevich, eldest son of Ostojich, with the eldest daughter of the Serbian Despot[904]. On the latter’s death in 1458, the King of Hungary acknowledged Stephen Tomashevich as Despot of all Serbia as far as the river Morava, and it seemed for the moment as if the ancient jealousies of the two neighbouring States had been finally settled and a new bulwark erected against the Turks. But the aggrandisement of[487] the Bosnian royal family only increased its responsibilities. The important town of Semendria, which the Despot George Brankovich had founded on the Danube years before as a refuge from his enemies, and the two-and-twenty square towers of which still stand out defiant of all the ravages of Turks or Time, was strongly fortified, but its inhabitants regarded their new master, a zealous Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, as a worse foe than the Sultan himself. It is not, therefore, necessary to assume, with Pope Pius II and the King of Hungary, that Bosnian treachery betrayed them. When Mohammed II arrived at their gates they surrendered without a blow. The other Serbian towns followed the example of Semendria, and in 1459 Serbia had ceased to exist as a State and became a Pashalik of the Turkish Empire. It was the turn of Bosnia next. But Ostojich was spared the spectacle of his country’s fall. Two years later he fell in an obscure quarrel in Croatia by the hands of his brother Radivoj and his own son, Stephen Tomashevich, who succeeded to the sorry heritage of the Bosnian throne, of which he was to be the last occupant.

Stephen, son of Thomas, lost no time in seeking the aid of the Pope against the impending storm. “I was baptized as a child,” he said through the mouths of his envoys, “and have learnt to read out of Latin books. I wish, therefore, that thou wouldst send me a crown and holy bishops as a sign that thou wilt not forsake me. I pray thee also to bid the King of Hungary to go with me to the wars, for so alone can Bosnia be saved. For the Turks have built several fortresses in my kingdom and are very friendly to the peasants, to whom they promise freedom; and the limited understanding of the peasant observes not their deceit, for he believes that this freedom will last for ever. And Mohammed’s ambition knows no bounds; after me, he will attack Hungary and the Dalmatian possessions of Venice, and then march by way of Carniola and Istria into Italy, which he means to subdue; even of Rome he ofttimes speaks, and yearns to have it. But I shall be his first victim. My father foretold to thy predecessor and the Venetians the fall of Constantinople, and now I prophesy that if ye help me I shall be saved; but if not, I shall fall, and others with me.” To this eloquent appeal, which so exactly depicted the position of affairs, the Pope replied by sending his legates to the coronation—the first and last instance of a Bosnian King receiving his crown from Rome. The ceremony took place in the lovely citadel of Jajce, Hrvoje’s ancient seat, whither the new King had transferred his residence from Bobovatz for greater security. The splendour of that day and the absolute unanimity of the great nobles in support of their lord cast a final ray of light over the last page of[488] Bosnia’s history as a Kingdom. Tomashevich made peace with all his own and his father’s enemies—with the King of Hungary, with his stepmother, Queen Catherine, and with her father, the proud Duke Stephen Vuktchich of the Herzegovina, now seriously alarmed at the advance of the Turks, who had placed a governor at Fotcha and had carved what was called the “Bosnian province” out of the district round it. The King assumed all the pompous titles of his predecessors—the sovereignty of Serbia, Dalmatia and Croatia—at a time when he could not defend his own land, and made liberal grants of privileges to Ragusa at the moment when he was imploring the Venetians to grant him a castle on the coast as a place of refuge.

The storm was not long in breaking. Mohammed II, learning that Tomashevich had promised the King of Hungary to refuse the customary tribute to the Turk, sent an envoy to demand payment. The Bosnian monarch took the envoy into his treasury and showed him the money collected for the tribute. “I do not intend,” he said, “to send the Sultan so much treasure and so rob myself of it. For should he attack me, I shall get rid of him the easier if I have money; and, if I must flee to another land, I shall live more pleasantly by means thereof[905].” So the envoy returned and told his master, and his master vowed vengeance upon the King. In the spring of 1463 he assembled a great army in Adrianople for the conquest of Bosnia. Alarmed at the result of his own defiant refusal Tomashevich sent an embassy at the eleventh hour to ask for a fifteen years’ truce. Konstantinovich, a Serbian renegade, who was an eye-witness of these events, has fortunately preserved the striking scene of Mohammed’s deceit. Concealed behind a money-chest in the Turkish treasury, he heard the Sultan’s two chief advisers decide upon the plan of campaign. “We will grant the truce,” said one of them, “and forthwith march against Bosnia, else we shall never take it, for it is mountainous, and besides, the King of Hungary and the Croats and other princes will come to its aid.” So Mohammed granted the envoys the truce which they desired, and they prepared to return and tell the good news to the King. But early next day the eavesdropper went and warned them that in the middle of the next week the Turkish army would follow on their heels. But they laughed at his tale, for they believed the word of the Sultan. Yet, sure enough, four days after their departure, Mohammed set out. One detachment of his army he sent to the Save to prevent the King of Hungary from effecting a junction with the Bosniaks, while the rest he led in person to Sjenitza, on the Bosnian frontier. His march had been so rapid and so secret that he[489] encountered little or no resistance, until he reached the ancient castle of Bobovatz, which had stood so many a siege in Bosnia’s stormy history. The fate of this old royal residence was typical of that of the land. Its governor, Prince Radak, had been converted by force from the Bogomile faith to Catholicism. He could have defended the fortress for years even against the great Turkish army, if his heart had been in the cause. But he was, like so many of his countrymen, a Bogomile first and a Bosniak afterwards. On the third day of the siege he opened the gates to Mohammed, who found among the inmates the two envoys, whom he had so lately duped. Radak met with the fitting reward of his treachery. When he claimed from Mohammed the price for which he had stipulated, the conqueror asked him how he could keep faith with a Turk when he had betrayed his Christian master, and had him beheaded. The giant cliff of Radakovitza served as the scaffold, and still preserves the name, of the traitor.

The fall of the virgin fortress filled the Bosniaks with dismay. At the news of Mohammed’s invasion, Stephen Tomashevich had withdrawn with his family to his capital of Jajce, hoping to raise an army and get help from abroad while the invader was expending his strength before the walls of Bobovatz. But its surrender left him no time for defence. He fled at once towards Croatia, closely followed by the van of Mohammed’s army. At the fortress of Kljuch (rightly so-called, as being a “key” of Bosnia) the pursuers came up with the fugitive. The secret of the King’s presence inside was betrayed to the Turks; and their commander, anxious to avoid a lengthy siege, promised Tomashevich in writing that, if he surrendered, his life should be spared. The King relied upon the pardon and gave himself up to Mohammed’s lieutenant, who brought him as his prisoner to the Sultan at Jajce. Meanwhile, the capital, like the King, had thrown itself upon the mercy of the conqueror, and thus, almost without a blow, the three strongest places in Bosnia had fallen. Tomashevich himself helped the Sultan to complete his conquest. He wrote, at his captor’s direction, letters to all his generals and captains, bidding them surrender their towns and fortresses to the Turk. In a week more than seventy obeyed his commands, and before the middle of June, 1463, Bosnia was a Turkish Pashalik, and Mohammed, with the captive King in his train, set out for the subjection of the Herzegovina. But the “heroic Herzegovina” offered greater obstacles to the invader than “lofty Bosnia.” Against those bare limestone rocks the Turkish cavalry was useless, while the natives, accustomed to every cranny of the crags, harassed the strangers with a ceaseless guerilla warfare. Duke Stephen and his son, Vladislav, who in better days had[490] wasted their energies in civil war, now joined hands against the common foe, and Mohammed, after a fruitless attempt to capture his capital of Blagaj, withdrew to Constantinople. But before he left he resolved to rid himself of that encumbrance, the King of Bosnia, who could now be no longer of use to his conqueror. Mohammed was bound by the solemn promise of his lieutenant to spare his prisoner’s life. But, as soon as his wishes were known, a legal excuse was invented for his inexcusable act of treachery. A learned Persian in his camp, Ali Bestami by name, pronounced the pardon to be invalid because it had been granted without the previous consent of the Sultan. Mohammed thereupon summoned Tomashevich to his presence on the “Emperor’s meadow,” near Jajce, whereupon the lithe Persian drew his sword, and, with a spring in the air, cut off the head of the last Bosnian King. According to another version, Tomashevich was first flayed alive. By the command of the Sultan, the fetva, in which Ali Bestami had composed the captive monarch’s sentence, was carved on the gate of Jajce, where as late as the middle of the last century could be read the words, “The true believer will not allow a snake to bite him twice from the same hole,” an allegory by which the pliant Persian strove to excuse his master’s treachery by representing his victim as the traitor. The body of Tomashevich was buried by order of the Sultan at a spot only just visible from the citadel of Jajce. In 1888 Dr Truhelka, the distinguished archæologist and custodian of the museum of Sarajevo, discovered on the right bank of the river Vrbas the skeleton of the King, the skull severed from the trunk just as history had said, with two small silver Hungarian coins, current in Bosnia in the fifteenth century, on the breast-bones. When the present writer visited Jajce, he found the skeleton set up in the Franciscan church there—a sad memorial of Bosnia’s past greatness. His portrait adorns the Franciscan monastery of Sutjeska. His uncle, Radivoj, and his cousin were executed after him; his half-brother and half-sister carried off as captives, and his widow, Maria, became the wife of a Turkish official[906].

Thus, after an existence of eighty-seven years, fell the Bosnian Kingdom. Mainly by the faults of her people and the mistakes of her rulers, mediæval Bosnia lost her independence. The country is naturally strong, and under the resolute government of one man, uniting all creeds and all classes beneath his banner, might have held out, like Montenegro, against the Turkish armies. But the jealousies of the nobles, and the still fiercer rivalries of the Roman Catholics and the Bogomiles, prepared[491] the way for the invader, and when he came the persecuted heretics welcomed him as a deliverer, preferring “the mufti’s turban to the cardinal’s hat.” This lesson of Bosnia’s fall is full of meaning for our own time, and those who meditate on her future destinies should not forget her past mistakes. She is perhaps the best and the saddest example of what boundless mischief religious persecution can accomplish.

Bosnia had entered upon her four centuries of submission to the Turks. Her King was dead, his consort and his step-mother, Queen Catherine, in exile, and his people at the mercy of the conqueror. Many of them were enlisted in the Turkish corps of Janissaries; many more fled to Croatia, Istria and the Dalmatian towns; a few took to the mountains, like the more or less mythical hero Toma, the Robin Hood of the Bosnian ballads, and lived as brigands and outlaws; most of the Bogomiles embraced the faith of Islâm, and became in the course of generations more fanatical than the Turks themselves. It seemed as if they would be left in sole possession of the land, but the earnest appeal of a Franciscan monk induced Mohammed to grant the Christians the free exercise of their religion and thus stay the tide of emigration from the country. But, though Bosnia could not defend herself, the Turks were not allowed undisturbed possession. Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, had been outwitted by the rapid march of Mohammed, but in the autumn of the very year in which Bosnia fell he set out to her rescue. The campaign was successful, and, aided by Duke Stephen’s eldest son Vladislav[907], and a Herzegovinian contingent, the Hungarians recovered Jajce, Banjaluka, and about twenty-five other towns. Even the return of Mohammed in the next spring failed to secure the second surrender of Jajce. Such was the terror of the Hungarian arms that the mere report of the King’s approach made him throw his cannon into the Vrbas and raise the siege. Matthias Corvinus now organised the part of Bosnia which he had conquered from the Turks into two Duchies or banats, one of which took its name from Jajce and the other from Srebrenik. Over these territories, which embraced all Lower Bosnia, he placed Nicholas of Ilok, a Hungarian magnate, with the title of King. Thus, under Hungarian rule, two portions of the old Bosnian Kingdom remained free from the Turks for two generations more, serving as a “buffer State” between the Ottoman Power and the Christian lands of Croatia and Slavonia.

The Herzegovina, which had repulsed the conqueror of Bosnia, did not long survive the sister state. The great Duke Stephen Vuktchich died in 1466 and his three sons Vladislav, Vlatko and Stephen, divided his[492] possessions between them. The eldest, however, whose quarrels with his father had wrought such infinite harm to his country, did not long govern the northern part of the Herzegovina, which fell to his share. He entered the Venetian service, and thence emigrated to Croatia, where he died. The second brother, Vlatko, assuming the title of Duke of St Sava re-united for a time the remains of the Duchy under his sole rule, relying now on Venetian, now on Neapolitan aid, but only secure as long as Mohammed II allowed him to linger on as a tributary of Turkey. In 1481 he ventured to invade Bosnia, but was driven back to seek shelter in his stronghold of Castelnuovo. Two years later Bayezid II annexed the Herzegovina, whose last reigning Duke died on the island of Arbe. The title continued, however, to be borne by Vladislav’s son, Peter Balsha, as late as 1511. The youngest embraced the creed and entered the service of the conqueror. Under the name of Ahmed Pasha Herzegovich[908], or, “the Duke’s son,” he gained a great place in Turkish history, and after having governed Anatolia and commanded the Ottoman fleet, attained to the post of Grand Vizier. His name and origin are still preserved by the little Turkish town of Hersek, on the Gulf of Ismid, near which he was buried.

All Bosnia and the Herzegovina, with the exception of the two newly formed banats of Jajce and Srebrenik, were now in the hands of the Turks. On the death of Nicholas of Ilok the meaningless title of “King of Bosnia” was dropped, and his successors contented themselves with the more modest name of ban, which had already been so familiar in Bosnian history. But the Turks did not allow the Hungarian viceroys undisturbed possession of their lands. Jajce became the great object of every Turkish attack, and against its walls the armies of Islâm dashed themselves again and again in vain. But after the capture of the banat of Srebrenik in 1520, it was clear that the doom of Jajce could not be long delayed. Two great feats of arms, however, shed lustre over the last years of the royal city. Usref, the Turkish governor of Bosnia, who will always be remembered as the founder of the noble mosque which is the chief beauty of Sarajevo, had vowed that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. So he collected a large army and invested Jajce. But, finding force useless, he pretended to raise the siege, so as to take the place unawares. But Peter Keglevich, who was at that time its ban, easily outwitted his crafty assailant. He bade the wives and daughters of the garrison sally forth and dance and sing—for it was the eve of a festival—on the “King’s meadow” outside the walls. Deceived by this feint, the Turks made a night attack upon the town. As they[493] came near, they heard the sound of the gusle and saw the feet of the maidens dancing in the moonlight on the green sward. The sight was more than they could bear. Casting their scaling ladders aside, they rushed upon the damsels instead of climbing the walls. At that moment Keglevich charged at the head of his men, while at the sound of the cannon a second detachment, which he had sent out into the woods, attacked the besiegers in the rear. Even the women bore their part in the fight, and not a Turk left the field alive. Once again Keglevich held his capital against the foe. Usref reappeared with a new army and laid siege to the city for a year and a half. Hunger began to make its appearance, even horse-flesh was unprocurable, and one mother threw her child into the Vrbas rather than see it die a lingering death; it seemed as if the garrison must surrender or starve. But Keglevich managed to despatch a trusty messenger to Buda-Pesth, where, in Count Frangipane he found a ready listener. Backed up by King Louis II of Hungary and the Pope, he raised an army and relieved the town, after a great battle. Frangipane received from the delighted King the title of “Defender and Protector of the Kingdoms of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia” in return for this signal service. But next year King Louis fell in the fatal battle of Mohács at the hands of the Turks, and from that moment Hungary was unable to protect her Bosnian outpost. Keglevich, weary of warfare and old in years, gave up the banat of Jajce to King Ferdinand I, who put a German garrison into the capital. But the German soldiers had had no experience of Turkish warfare, and their new commanders lacked the spirit of old Keglevich. Usref saw that the moment had come to redeem his former failures. Hungary and Croatia were in the throes of civil war, and not a hand was stretched out to save the doomed city. A ten days’ siege by the allied forces of Usref and his colleague, the Vizier of Serbia, was sufficient to make Jajce surrender. Banjaluka held out a little longer, and its brave governor set fire to the town rather than give it up to the enemy. With its fall, in 1528, all Bosnia was in the possession of the Turks, and for the next 170 years the German Emperors, who were now also Kings of Hungary, could make no effort to substantiate the old Hungarian claims to the lands south of the Save. Bosnia served as the starting-point from which Turkish armies ravaged their adjoining territories, and until the Ottoman power began to wane at the end of the seventeenth century, the Habsburgs had quite enough to do in defending their own land.

Left to themselves, the Turks organised the conquered provinces, without interfering with the feudal system, which had struck its roots so deep in Bosnian soil. A Turkish governor, called at first by the title[494] of sandjak beg and then by those of Pasha and Vali, represented the majesty of the Sultan, and moved his residence according to the requirements of Turkish policy. In the early days his seat was at Vrhbosna, round which the city of Sarajevo grew up; but, as the Turkish arms advanced further, Banjaluka was chosen as the official capital, while, when they receded at the close of the seventeenth century, the Pasha moved to Travnik, whence he issued his proclamations as “Vali of Hungary.” But, however high-sounding his titles, the Turkish governor was often, as the Bosnian Kings had been, the mere figure-head, while all real power was in the hands of the great nobles, who gradually became hereditary headmen or capetans of the forty-eight divisions of the province. So strong was their influence that they long resisted all attempts to transfer the Turkish headquarters from Travnik back to Sarajevo, and permitted the Pasha to visit the present capital only on sufferance and to remain there no more than forty-eight hours. It was not till 1850 that Omar Pasha put down all resistance and re-established the seat of government at Sarajevo, where it has since remained. But throughout the Turkish period the native aristocracy of Bosnia merely tolerated the Sultan’s representatives, of whom there were no less than 214 in 415 years, or an average of one every twenty months, and at times even flatly refused to obey orders from Constantinople itself. In a word, Bosnia under the Turks was an aristocratic republic, with a titular foreign head.

The social condition of the country changed, indeed, very little with the change of government. The Bogomiles, who had formed the bulk of the old Bosnian aristocracy, hastened to embrace the faith of Islâm upon the Turkish invasion. They had preferred to be conquered by the Sultan than converted by the Pope; and, when once they had been conquered, they did not hesitate to be converted also. The Mussulman creed possessed not a few points of resemblance with their own despised heresy. It conferred, too, the practical advantage upon those who embraced it of retaining their lands and their feudal privileges. Thus Bosnia presents us with the curious phenomenon of an aristocratic caste, Slav by race yet Mohammedan by religion. Hence the country affords a striking contrast to Serbia. There the Mohammedans were never anything more than a foreign colony of Turks; here the Mohammedans were native Slavs, men of the same race as the Christians, whom they despised. But, while the Bosnian nobles, henceforth styled begs or agas according as they were of greater or less distinction, never forgot that they were Bosniaks, they displayed the customary zeal of converts, and out-Ottomaned the Ottomans in their religious fanaticism. On the one[495] hand, they carefully preserved the heirlooms of their Bogomile forefathers, the Serb speech, and the old Glagolitic script; on the other, they were keener in the cause of Islâm than the Commander of the Faithful himself. The iron of papal persecution had entered into their ancestors’ souls, and the legacy thus inherited influenced the whole future of Bosnia. The Turks were not slow to recognise the merits of these new allies. It soon became a maxim of state that “one must be the son of a Christian renegade to attain to the highest dignities of the Turkish Empire.” In the long list of Pashas of Bosnia, we notice several who were called “the Bosniak” from their race. As early as 1470 we find mention of a native governor, Sinan Beg, who built the mosque at Tchajnitza, his birth-place. Just a century later a Herzegovinian renegade became Grand Vizier, and his successor was a member of the famous Bosnian family of Sokolovich, to whom tradition ascribes the foundation of Sarajevo. The natural aptitude of the Bosniaks for managing their own countrymen led the Sultans to choose their representatives from among them; for, in a highly aristocratic community like Bosnia, the head of an old family enjoyed far more respect, even though he were poor, than an upstart foreigner, who had nothing to commend him but his ostentation and his office. Now and again we hear of a Turkish governor like Usref, the conqueror of Jajce, whose word is supreme, and whose religious endowments are “richer than those in any other province of the Empire.” But the general rule is that the native nobles are the repositories of power, while the Sultan’s representative is a mere fleeting figure, here to-day and gone to-morrow.

While most of the Bogomiles had gone over to Islâm, there still remained some who adhered to the ancient doctrines of that maligned sect. The question has been much discussed as to the existence of these sectaries in Bosnia to-day. That some of them were still to be found in the beginning of the seventeenth century is clear from the report of a traveller of that period. A century and a half later the Franciscans asserted that the sect was extinct. This sweeping assertion does not, however, accord with later discoveries. There are parts of the Herzegovina, almost inaccessible till the construction of the railway from Sarajevo to Mostar, where traditions of the Bogomiles still linger. Thus, in the neighbourhood of Jablanitza, a region covered with Bogomile tombstones, the women, although Mohammedans, go unveiled—a custom all the more remarkable because the Mussulmans of Bosnia are, as a rule, far more particular about veiling than their co-religionists at Constantinople. It is, therefore, thought that this may be an old Bogomile observance, and it is stated by a recent ecclesiastical historian that only a few[496] years before the Austrian occupation a family named Helej, living near Konjitza, abandoned the “Bogomile madness” for the Mohammedan faith.

Bosnia, “the lion that guards the gates of Stambûl,” as the Turkish annalists called her, had to bear the full brunt of the struggle between Christendom and Islâm, as soon as the power of the Turks was beaten back from before the walls of Vienna, and driven out from within the walls of Buda-Pesth. The tide of Ottoman invasion began to ebb at the close of the seventeenth century from Hungary, Croatia and Slavonia, and the rivers Save and Una once more formed the boundaries between the domains of the Crescent and the Cross. Not without reason did the Bosniaks talk of “going to Europe” when they traversed the Save.

And now, after more than a century and a half of forgetfulness, the House of Habsburg remembered the ancient claims of the Hungarian Crown to the old Bosnian Kingdom. Henceforth, from being the starting-point of every Turkish attack upon the Hungarian dominions, Bosnia became the object of every expedition from beyond the Save and the Una. Ten times did the Imperial troops enter the country without permanent results, until at last in our own days the Austro-Hungarian forces occupied it with the consent of Europe. The first expedition, led by Prince Louis of Baden in 1688, entered Bosnia from the east, captured Zvornik, but collapsed before the strong fortifications of Banjaluka. Two years later an Imperial general beat the Turks near Dolnja Tuzla, and took back a number of Catholic Bosniaks with him to Croatia. In that year, indeed, the condition of the country was most miserable. Famine and pestilence raged unchecked, and the quaint old Franciscan monk who wrote a chronicle of that time, tells us how “blood-red snow fell upon the mountains,” and how the devil went about with bow and arrows to slay the people. One memorial of that année terrible still remains in the shape of a Turkish copper coin, which was minted in Sarajevo to defray the expenses of the Turkish army, and is almost the only example of a separate Turkish currency for Bosnia. A third invasion from the side of Croatia in 1693, although fairly successful, pales beside the daring exploit of Prince Eugène in 1697. This twenty days’ campaign has never been forgotten, and it is all the more interesting, because the dashing Prince of Savoy took the same route which was followed by the main body of the Austro-Hungarian army in 1878. Crossing the Save at Brod with 6000 men, the Prince went straight up the valley of the Bosna, along the course of the present railway to Sarajevo, capturing on his way Doboj, Maglaj, Jeptche and the picturesque Vranduk, rightly named in Turkish “the gate” of the country. Sarajevo itself seemed at his mercy, but the Bosnian Christians[497] did not respond to his appeals, there was no rising of the rajah in his favour, and he retired with an immense booty and 40,000 Christian refugees, whom he settled in Slavonia. The peace of Carlovitz two years later ratified the old boundaries of the Turk and Christendom.

But the war between the Emperor and the Sultan, which broke out in 1716, and was terminated by the peace of Passarovitz, had favourable, if only temporary, results for Bosnia as well as for Serbia. The military efforts of the Imperial troops in Bosnia were unsuccessful, but at the peace, just as Belgrade and half Serbia were rescued from the Turk, so also north Bosnia was transferred to the Emperor in his capacity of King of Hungary and Croatia. But the disastrous peace of Belgrade in 1739 restored all that had been gained at Passarovitz in 1718. The strategy of the Duke of Hildburghausen and Baron Raunach, the Imperial commanders in Bosnia, utterly failed before Ostrvitza and Banjaluka, and the Save and the Una once more became the frontiers. No Imperial army crossed them again for half a century, and even then it merely crossed to return empty-handed. The peace of Sistova in 1791 ratified that of Belgrade, and Bosnia remained, in spite of Austrian victories, a Turkish province, in fact till 1878, in name till 1908.

4. BALKAN EXILES IN ROME

Those of us who are students of Punch may remember a caricature, which appeared in 1848, the year of almost universal revolution. Two distinguished foreigners were represented as arriving at Claridge’s Hotel and asking for accommodation. “I regret,” replied the manager, “that I cannot oblige you; my hotel is entirely occupied by dethroned monarchs, all except one single-bedded room, and that I am reserving, in case of necessity, for His Holiness the Pope!” What London was to the royal refugees of western Europe in 1848, that was Rome to the Balkan exiles of the second half of the fifteenth century. The Pope was then their generous host, and the Borgo their Claridge’s Hotel. In the words of Pius II’s biographer, “he summoned to Rome almost all those whom the Turks had ejected from their homes, and contributed money for their maintenance[909].”

There has never been a period in the history of the Near East, when such a clean sweep has been made of principalities and powers. When Pope Nicholas V celebrated the mid-century Jubilee, the Balkan peninsula and the Levant were still largely occupied by a long series of Christian States, which had existed there for well-nigh 250 years. The romantic[498] Duchy of Athens was still standing under the Acciajuoli of Florence; the Morea was divided between the two brothers Thomas and Demetrios Palaiologos; their more famous brother, the Emperor Constantine, had just left his Peloponnesian palace at Mistra, the Sparta of the Middle Ages, to ascend the throne of all the Cæsars at Constantinople. The Italian family of Crispo, from whom the greatest Italian statesman of our time traced his descent, still ruled from their castle at Naxos over the far-flung Duchy of the Archipelago. Another Italian clan, the Gattilusj of Genoa, in whose veins flowed both the Imperial blood of the Greek Emperors and that of the House of Savoy, were still governing the island of Lesbos and the city of Ænos in Thrace, with their respective dependencies. A Genoese syndicate, the Maona of the Giustiniani, the forerunner of the Chartered Companies of our time, managed the rich mastic-plantations of the island of Chios. The picturesque Kingdom of Cyprus, with which were united the long-empty titles of King of Jerusalem and King of Armenia, was still in the hands of the French family of Lusignan, to which our Richard Cœur-de-Lion had sold it more than two-and-a-half centuries earlier; but the most important Cypriote harbour, that of Famagosta, where the Lusignans had been wont to be crowned Kings of Jerusalem, had passed into the possession of the Genoese Bank of St George, that famous institution, whose palace, lately restored, is now the seat of the Genoese Harbour Board. The family of Tocco, whose ancestors had migrated to Greece from Benevento, had just lost almost the last fragment of its possessions on the Greek mainland, but still retained the County Palatine of Cephalonia, which embraced four of the Ionian Islands and included the mythical realm of Odysseus. Venice was still the Queen of the Adriatic. The whole of the Dalmatian coast was Venetian, save where the commercial Republic of Ragusa maintained that independence, of which the recently erected statue of Orlando was the symbol and still is the memorial. From the southern extremity of Dalmatia, a chain of Venetian harbours—Antivari, Dulcigno and Durazzo—names familiar to modern diplomacy—united the northern territories of Venice with her colony of Corfù. Far to the south she held Crete; off the east coast of Greece she occupied the long island of Eubœa. In the north of the Balkan peninsula, Serbia was still a Christian Principality, and the riches of its Prince, derived from the Serbian mines, were almost fabulous. Montenegro, under the first of its “Black Princes,” had started on its career of independence; Albania was still largely unconquered, owing to the heroic resistance of the great national hero, Skanderbeg; while its capital, Scutari, was still a Venetian colony. The mediæval Kingdom of Bosnia with its elaborate feudal[499] system, still survived; the sister-land of the Herzegovina, then known as Hum, was ruled by a great Slav magnate, Stephen Vuktchich, who had lately received the title of Duke of St Sava, from which, in its German form of Herzog, his former Duchy to-day retains the name of the Herzegovina. Beyond the Danube, the two Roumanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were, the former still independent, the latter, if tributary, still restive. And far away on the shores of the Black Sea, the Greek Empire of Trebizond still lingered under the family of Grand-Komnenos—whose Princesses were the most beautiful women, whose Princes the most tragic figures of their time.

Such was the map of the Near East in 1450, on the eve of the accession of the greatest of the Sultans, Mohammed II. With his advent ancient Empires and mediæval Principalities disappeared as by magic, and a political earthquake shook the thrones of the Levant to their foundations. In 1453 the last Byzantine Emperor fell at his post on the walls of Constantinople; the oldest political institution in the world came to an end, and the Turkish capital was moved from Adrianople to the Bosporus. In 1456 Moldavia was made to pay tribute, the Gattilusj were driven from Ænos and the Acciajuoli from the city of Athens; in 1459 Serbia, in 1460 the Morea and the rest of the Duchy of Athens ceased to exist. Next year the Empire of Trebizond was incorporated with Turkey, the year following the Gattilusj no longer ruled over Lesbos. In 1463 the last native King of Bosnia was beheaded in the presence of the great Sultan on the meadow opposite the lovely city of Jajce; in 1468 the death of Skanderbeg deprived Albania of her brave defender. Two years later Venice lamented the loss of Eubœa, the greatest blow that had ever befallen the Republic. In 1479 the Tocchi were driven from their island county; by 1483 the Herzegovina was wholly Turkish. The rulers and nobles of most of these countries sought refuge in Rome, and thus the epilogue of the long and tragic drama of Balkan history was played here. Italy was their nearest land of refuge; it had been the cradle of many of their ancestors; and the Pope was the head of Western Christendom, to whom some of them had appealed in their distress.

The most notable of these distinguished exiles was the Despot Thomas Palaiologos, who sailed from Corfù for Ancona towards the end of 1460, accompanied by most of his magnates, and bearing the head of St Andrew, which had long been preserved at Patras. The relic was known to be a valuable asset in the dethroned Despot’s balance-sheet, although Amalfi already possessed a portion of the saint’s remains. Many Princes offered large sums for it, and its fortunate possessor had accordingly no[500] difficulty in disposing of it to the Pope in return for an annuity. The precious relic was deposited for safety in the castle of Narni, while Thomas proceeded to Rome, where Pius II bestowed upon him the Golden Rose, the symbol of virtues which he had scarcely displayed in his long career of intrigue, a lodging in the Santo Spirito hospital, and an allowance of 300 gold pieces a month, to which the Cardinals added 200 more—a sum which his too numerous followers considered barely enough for his maintenance and certainly not for theirs. Venice, however, contributed a further sum of 500 ducats to his treasury, but the cautious Republic begged him not to return to Corfù or any of her other colonies, so as not to embarrass her then rather delicate relations with the Turks. Meanwhile, on April 12, 1462, the day after Palm Sunday, Pius II received the head of St Andrew at the Ponte Milvio, on the spot where the little chapel of that Apostle with its commemorative inscription now stands. A recent visit to the chapel, which has been completely isolated, and is now standing alone in a network of tramlines and roads, suggests the melancholy reflection that ere long it too may be sacrificed to that civile progresso, which has cost this city so many interesting mediæval monuments. Thomas’ fellow-countryman, the famous Cardinal Bessarion, handed the case containing the head to the Pope, who bade the sacred skull welcome among its relatives, the Romans, “the nephews of St Peter”—a ceremony depicted on the tomb of Pius II in Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Shortly afterwards, upon the death of his wife, whom he had left behind in Corfù, Thomas summoned his two sons, Andrew and Manuel, and his daughter Zoe to join him in Rome. But before they arrived, he died, on May 12, 1465, and was buried in the crypt of St Peter’s, where all efforts to find his grave have proved fruitless. But every visitor to Rome unconsciously gazes upon his features, for on account of his tall and handsome appearance he served as a model for the statue of St Paul, which still stands at the steps of St Peter’s.

Misfortunes make strange bedfellows, and a common disaster had brought together as exiles in Rome, condemned to live upon the papal charity, the former Greek Despot of the Morea and his enemy, the natural son of the last Frankish Prince of Achaia. After two centuries of conflict, the Greeks had succeeded, at the eleventh hour, in extinguishing the rule of the Franks in the peninsula, only to fall themselves before the all-conquering Turk. To consecrate the Greek conquest, Thomas Palaiologos had married the heiress of Centurione II Zaccaria, the last Frankish ruler, and the last legitimate descendant of a famous Genoese family, which had made a fortune out of the alum-mines of Phocæa on[501] the coast of Asia Minor, become lords of the rich island of Chios in the days before the Chartered Company, and had at last attained to the throne of Achaia. But Centurione had left a natural son, Giovanni Asan, who had raised the standard of revolt against the Greeks. Imprisoned by Thomas in the splendid castle of Chlomoutsi, or Castel Tornese, the mint of the Morea, whose ruins still stand on a tortoise-shaped eminence which overlooks the fertile plain of Elis and the flourishing harbour of Zante, he had escaped a lingering death by hunger, rallied his old adherents, and actually received the congratulations of the King of Naples and the Venetian Republic upon his release and their recognition of his title. Thomas had, however, suppressed this rebellion with Turkish aid, and the pretender had fled first to one of the Venetian colonies, and thence to Naples, whence we find him writing for aid to the Bank of St George in his ancestral city of Genoa[910]. In 1459 a Genoese document reveals him begging the Genoese government to recommend him to the generosity of Pius II. Genoa was at that time under French rule, and the Duke of Calabria, who was the royal lieutenant, accordingly wrote to Pius II and to Cardinal Lodovico Scarampi, the Patriarch of Aquileia, who was the Pope’s Chamberlain, recommending to their notice “the magnificent lord Centurione Zaccaria, not long ago Prince of the Morea.” I think that there was a special reason for the activity of the Genoese government on the exile’s behalf. There is in the Cathedral of Genoa a splendid relic, known as “the cross of the Zaccaria,” and consisting of a piece of the true cross, encased in gold and studded with precious stones. This is said to have been brought by St John the Evangelist to Ephesus, captured by the Turks when they took that place, and pawned by them at Phocæa, which then belonged, as we saw, to the Zaccaria family. In 1307, in consequence of a quarrel between two of its members over the accounts of the alum-mines, Tedisio Zaccaria begged the famous Catalan chronicler, Ramon Muntaner, who was then encamped with the Catalan Grand Company at the Dardanelles, to assist him in sacking the town. Muntaner informs us that his share of the booty was this cross, and the problem has hitherto been to find when and how it was brought to Genoa. Now, as there is no mention of the cross at Genoa before 1466, I have no doubt whatever that it was this last scion of the Zaccaria who brought it from Greece, just as his brother-in-law, Thomas Palaiologos, had brought the head of St Andrew, and disposed of it to the city of Genoa for a valuable consideration, of which one portion was a letter of introduction to the Pope.

Until recently there was no trace of the “Prince of the Morea’s”[502] sojourn in Rome. I noticed, however, in a book by a German scholar, Gottlob, on the subject of papal finance, an allusion to a certain “Prince of Sani.” There being no such place, it seemed to me that the learned German must have misunderstood the name of Giovanni Asani. Examination of the original documents in the “Archivio di Stato” proved this surmise to be correct. The Liber depositarii Sancte Cruciate contains numerous entries of twenty florins a month paid to domino Johanni Zaccarie olim Amoree principi, beginning with September, 1464, and ending with December 31, 1468, after which there is no more mention of the pension, and the pensioner was therefore probably deceased. These sums, which Paul II, and after him Sixtus IV, gave to Oriental potentates in distress, were derived from the proceeds of the alum-mines, discovered at Tolfa in 1462 by another exile from the Near East, Giovanni de Castro, who had been engaged in the dyeing trade at Constantinople, had fled to Rome after the Turkish conquest, and had been appointed treasurer of the patrimony of the Church. Genoese workmen, formerly employed in the alum-mines of Phocæa, were summoned to Tolfa, the Pope declared that the discoverer deserved a statue, Court poets wrote more or less excellent verses in his honour, and Pius told the world that the alum of Tolfa had been given by Providence as the sinews of war against the Infidels, and bade all good Christians deal exclusively with the papal alum factory. Thus, by a curious coincidence, the last of the Zaccaria kept body and soul together by a pittance derived from the sale of that mineral, which had formed in happier days the foundation of his forefathers’ fortunes.

In 1461 another very distinguished relative of the dethroned Imperial family of Constantinople arrived in Rome—Queen Charlotte of Cyprus. There are few more remarkable figures even in the romantic history of the Latin Orient than this brave and masculine woman, the offspring of France and Byzantium. Queen Charlotte was the only daughter and heiress of King Jean II de Lusignan by his marriage with Helen daughter of Theodore II Palaiologos, Despot of Mistra, and she was therefore grand-niece of Thomas Palaiologos. Succeeding to the throne of Cyprus in 1458, at the age of 18, she was already both an orphan and a widow—for her first husband, a son of the King of Portugal, was dead—and she therefore hastened to conclude a second marriage with her cousin, Louis, Count of Geneva, second son of Louis, Duke of Savoy. Her consort had already been engaged to a daughter of Robert III of Scotland, and those of us who are of Scottish descent will learn with a flush of pride that our business-like ancestors demanded a huge sum as damages for this breach of promise. Possibly the young scion of the[503] House of Savoy would have done better to establish himself in Scotland rather than Cyprus; for his Cypriote bride in the year after her marriage was driven from the greater part of her realm by her late father’s illegitimate son James, aided by the Sultan of Egypt. The castle of Cérines, or Kyrenia, however, which overlooks the sea to the north of the island, and of which a full description has recently been published by the British authorities, held out; and there the royal pair took refuge. During an interval in the siege, the intrepid Queen and her feeble husband journeyed to Rhodes on board a galley of the Knights, which lay in the harbour, to ask for aid. The Grand Master, Jacques de Milly, received them politely; but their journey had no practical results, beyond the gift of some money, corn and cannon, and after their return the Queen accordingly resolved to leave her husband at Cérines, and seek assistance in the West. On this journey, however, between Cyprus and Rhodes, her galley was stopped and pillaged by the Venetians, while some Mameluke prisoners, who were on board, cut the rigging and nearly murdered the Queen. Even thirty years later the Republic had not paid the damages due for this high-handed act of piracy[911]. At last, under the escort of Sor de Naves, the Sicilian governor of Cérines, the Queen arrived at Ostia in the second half of October, 1461, and proceeded up the Tiber till she reached St Paul-outside-the-walls. There she landed, and was met by the Cardinals, who escorted her to the city, where she took up her temporary residence at San Ciriaco[912], the church mentioned by the British visitor of 1450, Capgrave, recently introduced to our notice, and which was the predecessor of Sta Maria degli Angeli in the Baths of Diocletian. We have in the Commentaries[913] of Pius II an interesting description of the royal suppliant on the occasion of her first audience with the Pope. She appeared to be twenty-four years of age, she was of a mediocre height, and dressed like a Frenchwoman, her eyes sparkled with fire, and her tongue was “like a torrent.” It seems possible, however, that the Holy Father may have exaggerated her volubility, owing to the fact that she spoke in a language which was not his own. For to the end of her days, Queen Charlotte, although she could write French, Italian, and perhaps Latin, was unable to speak French and always used Greek, the language of her mother. Indeed, in the most important business transactions of her life, she resorted to an interpreter, whom we may be surprised to find a man of English extraction—not the last occasion, I[504] fear, on which treaties relating to the Eastern question have been negotiated by persons imperfectly acquainted with the language in which they were negotiating. The Queen humbly kissed the Pope’s feet, and on the next day delivered a set speech to him through the medium of a translator. She began by firing off a well-worn tag from the Æneid, which doubtless tickled the palate of the classical Æneas Sylvius, whom she saw before her. “My first husband,” she said, “is dead; my second is besieged: whether he be alive or dead, I do not know. Cérines is our only refuge; on the way hither the Venetians have robbed me. I can stand no more voyages by sea; I have neither horses nor money for a journey by land.”

The Pope, who had refused to receive officially the envoys of her rival, bade the Queen be of good cheer, for he would not desert her. “You are expiating,” he replied, “the faults of your father-in-law, who declined to offer Us aid against the Turks, and of your husband, who would not even take the trouble to meet Us when We were at Mantua. So We said, ‘the House of Savoy despises the Church’”—a remark which might have been taken from a clerical newspaper of our own day. Pius II concluded by the promise of horses and money for the journey to her father-in-law’s Court in Savoy. She remained on this occasion some ten days more in Rome, until she had seen the chief churches and had had four or five audiences with the Pope, who gave her much corn and wine for revictualling Cérines and twelve horses and 200 ducats for her journey. On November 5 she wrote from San Ciriaco to the Florentine Republic, stating that her business with the Pope was terminated, and asking for a passport for the dominions of Florence. On the 20th she reached Bologna, where she was lodged gratis at the “Osteria del Leone[914],” and whence she proceeded by way of Venice and Milan to Savoy. The Duke of Milan and the Council of Geneva gave her a good reception; but her father-in-law told her plainly that the connection with Cyprus had “exhausted” his Duchy, and complaint was afterwards made of the expense of entertaining her for nearly four months at Lausanne and Thonon, where the Court then was. Her appeals to the King of Aragon and to Pierre-Raymond Zacosta, the new Grand Master, were in vain; so, after bequeathing the Crown of Cyprus to the House of Savoy in the event of her death without heirs, the indomitable Queen returned in September of 1462 to her island, and shut herself up once more in the royal apartments at Cérines. Having obtained so little from the Christian Powers, she sent the Count of Jaffa to ask the aid of Mohammed II, offering to pay tribute and to surrender a city of the island to the Turks—a[505] fact, which is probably the origin of the erroneous statement of the Greek historian, Phrantzes[915], that Mohammed II rendered Cyprus tributary. The Sultan’s reply was to order her envoy to be sawn asunder. Meanwhile, her craven husband had abandoned Cérines and fled to Rhodes, whence he returned to Savoy in 1464. At last, when the garrison of Cérines was reduced to eat the cats that prowled along the battlements, the Queen likewise sought refuge in Rhodes, whither many of her knights and vassals accompanied her. Sor de Naves surrendered the castle to her relentless enemy, who thus, in October, 1463, was King of all Cyprus, save where the Banca di San Giorgio still held Famagosta.

The heroic Queen did not despair of recovering her Kingdom. She wrote from Rhodes a year later to her husband, urging him to send assistance, and telling him that her poverty alone prevented her from reconquering it. But Louis had had enough of both his consort and his castles, as the Italian chronicler[916] tells us, and remained for the rest of his life, which ended in 1482, in his native land, without occupying himself with either. Queen Charlotte continued to reside for several years in Rhodes, whence she could watch Cypriote politics and where she received a monthly allowance from the Order. The Holy See continued to recognise her as lawful sovereign of Cyprus; and in 1471, when the usurper sent the Archbishop of Nicosia to Rome to ask the Pope to crown him King and to give him in marriage the hand of Princess Zoe, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos and then a young widow, living there under the care of Cardinal Bessarion, His Holiness refused both requests. This is the version of the contemporary Greek chronicler; but the Italian annalist cynically remarks that the Pope agreed to crown him if he would marry the Holy Father’s niece, but that when the King of Cyprus saw the lady’s portrait and heard her habits, he declined the crown on such terms. Instead, he married the famous Catherine Cornaro, who in 1489 brought the Kingdom of Cyprus to Venice.

Upon the death of the bastard in 1473, we find Queen Charlotte renewing her attempts to recover the island. She then waited at Rhodes, and endeavoured to negotiate with the Sultan of Egypt, who arrested her envoy, and with the Venetian Admiral then in the Levant, who plainly told her that he marvelled at her ignorance of the fact that kingdoms were obtained by might not by right, and that Catherine Cornaro was the adopted daughter of his government. A plot to deliver Cérines to her failed; and, although there was a party in the island favourable to her, most of the Cypriotes preferred the Venetians, as being better able to protect them. Venice ordered her exclusion from[506] the coveted kingdom, many of her followers abandoned her, when they found that all chance of a restoration was over, and in 1475 she settled at Rome in the Palazzo Spinola, or dei Convertendi, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, where from September, 1476, Sixtus IV gave her a monthly allowance of 200 ducats. But in her Roman exile she did not abandon her schemes for the recovery of Cyprus. She had adopted Alonzo, son of Ferdinand I, King of Naples, and her plan was to proceed to Cairo on a Genoese galley, and thence, with the aid of the Sultan of Egypt, to recapture her throne. The Sultan actually invested her with the crown, and Venice was so much alarmed that a Venetian envoy was authorised to proceed to Rome, and offer her an annuity of 5000 ducats, if she would consent to reside on Venetian territory. Her schemes failed; she returned to Rome in 1482, and continued to be the honoured pensioner of the Pope. Such was the honour which he showed her, that in November, 1483, on the occasion of an audience, she was granted a seat “neither less distinguished nor lower than the chair of the Pontiff”—a mark of attention, so the contemporary diarist[917] remarks, “which was not approved by some.” On February 25, 1485, she ceded the Kingdom of Cyprus to her nephew Charles, Duke of Savoy, whose descendants, the present Italian dynasty, have thus inherited from her the titles of Kings of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. This document was executed in the presence of several Cardinals, of her Cypriote confessor, and of her councillor, James Langlois, who acted as interpreter. In return for this act of cession, the Duke agreed to pay to his aunt, as long as she remained in Rome, an annual pension of 4300 florins and to provide her with a residence worthy of her rank. A subsequent deed charged this pension upon the rates of Nice. The Queen did not long enjoy this annuity; on July 16, 1487, she died at her Roman residence of paralysis, and was buried in St Peter’s “near the chapel of St Andrew and St Gregory,” and not far from the spot, where, eleven years before, her faithful Chamberlain, Hugh Langlois, lord of Beirût, had been laid to rest. Eleven Cardinals were present at the mass held in St Peter’s for the repose of her soul; but her body was not allowed to rest permanently where it had been placed. In 1610, at the time of the destruction of the old basilica by Paul V, her tomb was opened, when it was found to contain the remains of a woman of moderate height, a few pieces of black silk, and some gilded buckles[918]. These remains were then re-interred in their present resting-place in the crypt of St Peter’s, where a slab in the pavement bears the simple inscription: “Karola Hierlm̅[507] Cipri et Armenie Regina obiit XVI Julii an D. MCCCCLXXXVII.” Other memorials of the exiled Queen of Cyprus still exist in Rome. One of the pictures (no. XXXI) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents her as kneeling before Sixtus IV, and the inscription below describes how “Charlotte, Queen of Cyprus, despoiled of her kingdom and her fortune, flees as a suppliant to Sixtus IV, and is received by him with the utmost benignity and munificence.” Torrigio adds, that on this occasion the voluble Queen felt unequal to the task of expressing her admiration for and gratitude to her benefactor. I think it is possible to identify the personages who are depicted behind the kneeling Queen. The two divines are probably John Chafforicios, her confessor, and Lodovico Podochatoro, a member of a well-known Cypriote family, who became secretary of Alexander VI and a Cardinal, and whose monument is still admired in Sta Maria del Popolo. The laymen are, I would suggest, Hugh Bousat and his wife, Charlotte Cantacuzene de Flory, daughter of the Count of Jaffa, who were her pensioners and who were in receipt of a small papal allowance as late as 1513, and Philip Langlois, who lived about 40 years in Rome, and was granted an annuity of 15 ducats from Julius II, increased to 20 in that year. The vestments, altar cloths, and the four lbs. of silver, which the Queen bequeathed to St Peter’s, have disappeared, but another proof of her piety is to be found in her entry, recorded in Latin by her own hand, into the Confraternity of the Santo Spirito on March 27, 1478. An example of the seal, which she used in Rome, is preserved in Turin, and reproduces the streamers of the Cypriote Order of the Sword, while her two rare coins are, I believe, in the King of Italy’s collection. Her little band of courtiers lingered on for many years here; Innocent VIII recommended them to the charity of the Duke of Savoy as distinguished by lineage and virtue; and one of them, Giorgio Flatro, by marrying his daughter to Pietro Aldobrandini, became the ancestor of Clement VIII. As late as January 1520, Leo X assigned 70 ducats out of the alum-mines of Tolfa to two other Cypriotes of the lineage of Lusignan—Eugène and John, natural sons of Queen Charlotte’s rival, whom the cautious Venetian Republic had removed from Cyprus with their mother and sister in 1477, and had imprisoned in the castle of Padua, lest they should embarrass Catherine Cornaro[919]. This is another example of papal generosity, which contrasts with the selfish conduct of the Venetian Republic, and incidentally disproves the statement of Count Mas Latrie[920], that the two illegitimate sons of James II died at Padua, where their sister is buried.

Another exiled Queen was living in Rome at the same time as Charlotte of Cyprus, and, like her, died and was buried here. Most visitors to this city have seen the tomb of the Queen Dowager Catherine of Bosnia in Ara Cœli; but perhaps her story is less familiar, because the very interesting history of Bosnia is little known. Queen Catherine was the daughter of Stephen Vuktchich, the Duke of St Sava, from whom the Herzegovina derives its name, and boasted her descent through her mother Helen from the mediæval Princes and Tsars of Serbia. Like her father and most of the Bosnian rulers and nobles of the fifteenth century, she belonged to the Bogomile or Patarene heresy, which corresponded with the Albigensian heresy of Provence, which coloured several centuries of Bosnian history, largely contributed to the Turkish conquest of that country, and survived there in the case of one family down to the memory of persons still living. Owing, however, to the efforts of the papal legate, the young Princess was converted to Catholicism probably at the time of her marriage in 1445, or 1446, to King Stephen Thomas of Bosnia. A Slav poet has commemorated her beauty and sung of her wedding; but her fate was hard, and many a tragedy was in store for her. To marry her, Stephen Thomas had put away his first wife, a woman of obscure birth, whom his proud barons would not accept as their Queen, and it was the discarded consort’s son, Stephen Tomashevich, who murdered him to obtain the crown on July 10, 1461, assassination or abdication being the usual alternative of Balkan monarchs. Thus, at the age of 37, Catherine was left a widow, with two children of her own, Sigismund and Catherine. In view, however, of the political situation, the stepmother and the stepson agreed to bury the past, and the Queen Dowager remained in Bosnia till the fall of the Kingdom in 1463. Both her children were then captured by the Turks and forced to embrace Islâm, while she managed to escape to the Republic of Ragusa, where the authorities offered her an annual rent for the land and houses of her late husband, and where she presented “marvellous choral books,” destroyed by fire in 1667, to the Franciscan convent. Thence she crossed the Adriatic and came to Rome, where we find her in receipt of a monthly pension of 100 ducats from 1466. In addition to this, Pope Paul II paid to one Jacopo Mentebone, a Roman citizen, a sum of 20 ducats a month from October, 1467, “for the rent of a house let with all the necessary utensils to the Queen of Bosnia.” At the time of her death, she was residing “near the Church of San Marco de Urbe in the Rione Pigna,” surrounded by a considerable court of faithful Slavs, and she was a personage of importance, figuring for example at the wedding of Zoe Palaiologina in 1472. She had, however, bitter disappointments. Her[509] father, the Duke of St Sava, who died in 1466, cut her out of his will; the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, whom she begged to lend her money for ransoming her children, declined to assist her. After a twelve years’ residence here, she felt her end approaching, and on October 20, 1478, made her last testament, a very curious document of great political interest. After directing that she should be buried in the church of Ara Cœli, she expressed the hope, that one day the Kingdom of Bosnia would once more submit to Christian rule—an aspiration accomplished in October, 1908. Meanwhile, mindful of the munificence of the Holy See and of the benefits which she had received from Paul II and Sixtus IV, who had always treated her hospitably, helping her according to her royal dignity with an annual pension and provision sufficient for her necessities, she bequeathed her kingdom in trust to the Holy See, until such time as her son or her daughter should return “from the vomit of Mahomet” to the true faith. Should they, however, remain Mohammedans, then Bosnia was to be at the absolute disposition of the Pope and his successors. It was this clause which prompted a well-known Slavonic journalist in Rome to announce immediately after the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, that the Emperor Francis Joseph would receive the Bosnian crown, as the last native King of Bosnia had received it, from the hands of the Pope. Having thus disposed of her phantom kingdom, Catherine proceeded to bequeath the rest of her real and personal property to the three faithful ladies-in-waiting, Paola Mirkovich, Helena Sempovich and Maria Misglenovich, who had shared her Roman exile. To the first she also left a legacy of 50 ducats, a dress of black satin lined with squirrel, and another of black cloth lined with lynx; to the second 25 ducats and a long gown of black cloth with a lining of marten-skin; to the third 30 ducats and a long, simple gown of black cloth. To her major-domo, Radich Klesich, she left 50 ducats, a scimitar inlaid with silver, and a Turkish dress of red silk woven with gold, as well as a sum of 38 ducats, which she had borrowed from him; to her servants, George Zubravich and Abraham Radich, respectively 50 and 30 ducats. To her son Sigismund she bequeathed his father’s sword, inlaid with silver; but, if he remained an infidel, the precious heirloom was to pass to her nephew Balsha, whom we find thirty years later as titular “Duke of St Sava.” To both her children she also left a silver dagger, two cups and two tankards of silver, with lids inlaid with emeralds. To the church of Ara Cœli she devised her royal mantle of cloth of gold and a silk dossal of divers colours for the altar, which had been used in her private chapel; to the hospital of San Gerolamo degli Schiavoni all the furniture and sacred vessels of the latter. The relics in her possession she bequeathed[510] to the Franciscan church of St Catherine at Jajce—a church in which she had always been deeply interested. In 1458, at her request, and again in 1462, Pius II had granted indulgences to all who visited this church, which was believed to contain the body of St Luke, brought thither from the castle of Rogus in Epeiros[921], and of which a beautiful Italian campanile still remains. Finally, after naming her executors, she directed that her will, together with the royal sword, should be presented to the Cardinal bishop of Porto, the vice-chancellor of the Church, then Rodrigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI.

Five days later the testatrix died, and was buried in Ara Cœli, as she had directed. It is said that over her grave was placed a Slavonic inscription, which ran as follows: “To the Bosnian Queen Catherine, daughter of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, and of the race of Helen of the house of Tsar Stephen, and wife of the Bosnian King Thomas, who lived 54 years and died in Rome October 25, 1478, this Monument was erected by her own written orders.” This Slavonic inscription has, however, long ago disappeared. It was fortunately copied by Palatino[922] in 1535 as an example of Slavonic writing from the monument in Ara Cœli, with an accurate Latin version. Casimiro Romano[923], the historian of that church, states that the monument of Queen Catherine, with that of Cardinal Alibret, was moved from the floor of the presbytery in front of the high altar in 1590 to its present position on a pillar behind an ambon to the left as one faces the altar. The Slavonic inscription was probably then lost and the present Latin inscription substituted. This latter corresponds with neither the Slavonic text nor the truth; for it describes how “To Catherine, the Bosnian Queen, sister of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, born of the race of Helen and of the house of Prince Stephen, wife of Thomas, King of Bosnia, who lived 54 years and fell asleep at Rome on October 25, 1478, this monument was erected by her own written orders.” This inscription was obviously composed by someone ignorant of her genealogy, for she was the daughter, not the “sister” of Duke Stephen, and the word sorori is probably a misunderstanding of the Slav poroda (“race”). On either side of her head is a coat of arms, that of her husband and that of her father. The latter is so greatly worn, that it can no longer be distinguished, but the former, which I examined from a ladder, still shows, on a close inspection, the two crowns and[511] the two horsemen, but not the mailed arm with the sword, which was in the centre, as may be seen from the representation of this monument in Ciacconius’ Lives and Acts of the Popes and Cardinals. The two crowns in the quarterings are those of Bosnia and Serbia, for from 1376 the Bosnian Kings always styled themselves also Kings of Serbia; the arm with the sword represents Primorje, or “the Coastland”—also a part of the Bosnian royal title; the two horsemen are the Kotromanich emblem. Considering the worn appearance of the actual monument, and the sharply cut lettering of the Latin inscription, I think that the latter can never have been placed on the floor of the church, but was a later addition, cut at a time when the Slavonic inscription was misunderstood, or perhaps even mislaid. It is said by Luccari[924], the old historian of Ragusa, that another portrait of Queen Catherine exists in Rome, and is to be found in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican, where a woman in the foreground may perhaps be the Queen.

The Pope did not forget the household of the testatrix. From the next month after her death her three ladies, Paola, Helena, and Maria, with a fourth named Praxina, received 14 ducats monthly from the papal treasury. Her will did not, however, prevent him from recognising another person as King of Bosnia. One of the paintings (No. 27) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents the visit of “the King of Bosnia and Wallachia” to the Pope, and the inscription adds how this monarch “although exhausted by age visits the thresholds of the Apostles and submissively venerates Sixtus IV by kissing his feet.” It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to ask who this mysterious personage was, although the last native King of Bosnia had been killed eight years before the accession of Sixtus IV, and the conjunction of the crowns of Bosnia and Wallachia is curious. It is not difficult, however, to identify this sovereign. One of the old books, which alludes to the picture, calls him “N.” which is the initial of Nicholas of Ilok on the Danube (the place where Prince Odescalchi’s Hungarian castle is situated). This great magnate, when the Hungarians temporarily captured Jajce from the Turks, received from Matthias Corvinus in 1471 the title of “King of Bosnia”—by which he is described in papal documents[925] of 1475-6. As he was also voivode of Transylvania, whose inhabitants were Wallachs, he is called also “King of Wallachia” in the inscription. His visit to Rome may be fixed from a letter of Sixtus IV, dated May 2, 1475, in which he is stated as having been “lately present.” Doubtless, he came[512] for the Jubilee of that year, and this is the explanation of Wadding’s erroneous statement, that Queen Catherine did not come to Rome till 1475.

Another Slavonic sovereign sought refuge in Rome. This was Stephen Brankovich, Despot of Serbia, who had been blinded by Murad II years before, and who, after the fall of his country had sought a refuge with Skanderbeg, the heroic champion of the Albanians. There he married Angelina, sister-in-law of Skanderbeg and daughter of Giorgio Arianiti, a great Albanian chieftain. As the struggle in Albania became more and more desperate, Skanderbeg, at the end of 1465, came to Rome to ask the aid of Paul II, who received him with extraordinary honours, due to one who was “the first soldier of Jesus Christ.” A memorial of his stay here is the Vicolo Scanderbeg, where the house, No. 116, bears his portrait over the door with the following inscription: “Geor. Castriota A. Scanderbeg Princeps Epiri ad fidem iconis rest. an. Dom. MDCCCXLIII.” Thence, at the end of January, 1466, he returned to defend his fortress of Kroja, where two years later he died, and Albanian independence with him. Before that event the Serbian Despot had left him for Rome, for from December, 1467, he was drawing a papal pension of 40 ducats a month, continued to his widow from December, 1479. Here, too, her brother Costantino Arianiti found a living, becoming protonotary apostolic under Sixtus IV, who gave him a monthly pension of 32 ducats from October, 1476, increased to 40 from November, 1479—not, indeed, much to keep up the position of one who styled himself “Prince of Macedonia.”

The Turkish annexation of the County Palatine of Cephalonia in 1479 brought another band of Oriental exiles to Rome. The Tocco family, however, which had ruled over the dominions of Ulysses for more than a century, had gone from Benevento to Greece, and Leonardo III was, therefore, merely returning to the land of his forebears. On February 29, 1480, he arrived in Rome with his son Carlo and his brothers Giovanni and Antonio. A man so well connected was sure of a good reception—for he had married a niece of King Ferdinand of Naples, while the Pope’s nephew had married his sister-in-law, and he was himself related to the Imperial houses of both Byzantium and Serbia. Accordingly, the Cardinals’ servants met him outside the Lateran Gate and escorted him to the house which he had hired between the Via Pellicciaria and the Botteghe Oscure. Sixtus IV, whose predecessor had already given him periodical sums of 1000 to 1200 ducats from 1466, gave him 1000 gold pieces and promised him 2000 a year—an event commemorated by another of the paintings in the Santo Spirito hospital,[513] where we are shown how the Pope “nourished with his royal bounty the rulers of the Peloponnese and of Epeiros, Andrew Palaiologos and Leonardo Tocco.” After staying rather more than a month here, he returned to Naples, leaving his natural son, Ferdinando, behind him—a spirited youth, who once said in the hearing of the diarist, Volaterranus, “though we have lost our rings, we have still got our fingers entire.” Leonardo received valuable fiefs in the south of Italy, but died in Rome under the pontificate of Alexander VI owing to the collapse of his house. His son Carlo III lived in the Via S. Marco, where, after enjoying a monthly pension, he died under Leo X, and we find that Pope paying monthly pensions of 60 and 32 ducats respectively to two other members of the family, Carlo’s sister Raymunda, Contessa de Mirandola, and his son and heir (Giovanni) Leonardo IV, Despot of Arta, and a small sum to Giovanni’s widow, Lucrezia[926]. The family of Tocco has only lately become extinct by the deaths of the Duca della Regina in 1908 and of his only son, the Duca di S. Angelo, in the motor accident near Cassino in 1907. At Naples in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele may still be seen a collection of the family portraits in the fine old Palazzo del Santo Piede (now Troise) so-called, from the foot of St Anna, which Leonardo III brought with him from Greece.

The heirs of the Palaiologoi were less fortunate than those of Leonardo Tocco. Upon the death of Thomas, Cardinal Bessarion drew up a scheme of education for his children, to whom the Pope continued his allowance. He laid it down, that they must not have an expensive retinue, like their father, but that they must be brought up by Latin priests as Latins. They were allowed a Greek doctor, one Kritopoulos, but were to dress like Franks and to show the utmost reverence to the Cardinals. They were to be taught to walk with dignity, to speak in a soft voice, not to stare about them, not to boast of their Imperial lineage but to remember that they were exiles and strangers, forced to live on charity. They were to learn by heart a humble address to the Pope, to talk little, never to laugh, and to acquire the art of kneeling with elegance. In short, they were to be perfect prigs. The result of Bessarion’s educational programme was what might have been expected. Zoe, or Sophia, indeed, soon escaped his tutelage by marrying a Caracciolo, after being regarded as a suitable bride for James II of Cyprus. The historian Phrantzes, an old and tried friend of the family, who was then in Rome on a visit, speaks with enthusiasm of the generosity of the bridegroom. Soon left a widow, and again wooed by the Cypriote King, she married by proxy in St Peter’s in 1472 the Grand Duke Ivan III of[514] Russia—a ceremony commemorated by the above-mentioned painting in the Santo Spirito hospital, in which, besides relieving Leonardo Tocco, Sixtus IV is described as presenting “Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, married to the Duke of the Ruthenians, with a dowry of 6000 gold pieces and other gifts[927].” These latter included 4400 ducats for her travelling expenses to Russia, whither many of the family’s retainers followed her, and where, in consequence of her Imperial origin, her husband took the title of Tsar. But her brother Andrew, who remained all his life a hanger-on of the papal court, profited little by Bessarion’s precepts. Falling into dissolute habits, he married a disreputable woman named Catherine; his garments moved the pity or contempt of the Romans; his allowance was reduced, he was relegated to a back seat at papal functions; and, after ceding all his rights to Charles VIII of France at San Pietro in Montorio, he died at Rome in 1502 in such misery that his widow had to beg his funeral expenses from the Pope. His portrait is supposed to be represented in a lunette of the third room of the Borgia apartments, where is also that of the Turkish Prince Djem, younger son of Mohammed II, and so long the prisoner of the Vatican. Thus the son of the conqueror of Constantinople and the nephew of its gallant defender are both depicted in the same room.

Besides these exiled Princes, a number of Greek authors found a permanent or temporary home in Rome, whither their famous fellow-countryman, Bessarion of Trebizond, had preceded them. Created a Cardinal in 1439 for his services to the Union of the Churches, he had shortly afterwards settled in a house to the right of the church of the SS. Apostoli, which gave him his title, and his abode became a literary centre, where Greeks and Italians alike congregated. Theodore Gazes of Salonika, George of Trebizond, and Nicholas Saguntino of Eubœa frequented his house, and another Greek man of letters, Andronikos Kallistos, lived with him, till poverty forced him to migrate to Florence and thence to England, where he died. But with the exception of Bessarion, who rose to be titular Archbishop of Nice and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, as well as bishop of Tusculum, and who narrowly missed being elected Pope on the death of Paul II, these learned fugitives met with the usual fate of scholars. Sometimes their misfortunes were their own fault. Thus George of Trebizond, a man who could not endure criticism, quarrelled with his patron over the rival merits of Plato and Aristotle, with Gazes over their respective translations of the maestro di color che sanno, and with Valla over the pre-eminence of Cicero over Quintilian; at last, this cantankerous old man, the scourge of all authors[515] except Aristotle, crept about Rome in rags supported by a stick, till he found near his humble abode a rest in the church of Sta Maria sopra Minerva, where the inscription on his tomb has long been illegible. His adversary Gazes, for whom Bessarion had obtained a benefice in Magna Græcia, retired thither in disgust, because Sixtus IV paid him only 50 gold pieces for his translation of Aristotle’s Natural History of Animals. Of Bessarion we have still several memorials: the tomb which he erected during his lifetime in the monastery of the SS. Apostoli, the cup which now belongs to the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata, of which he was Abbot commandatory; the beautiful little house, called the casino di Bessarione on the Via Appia within the city near the church of SS. Nereus and Achillios. This “vineyard within the walls of the city in loco qui dicitur S. Cæsarii in Turri sub proprietate ejusdem monasterii S. Cæsarii[928],” he bequeathed in 1467 with his property at “Cecchignola nova extra portam Appii,” on the right of the Via Ardeatina, to the chapel of S. Eugenia in the SS. Apostoli. When the Zona archeologica was being made in 1910, it was proposed to destroy this picturesque house, then an inn, but now deserted; but it was happily spared, after a protest. Argyropoulos, the translator of Aristotle, who died here in 1486, has been immortalised by Ghirlandajo in the Sistine Chapel, where he is the original of the bearded old man in the scene of the calling of the first disciples, and also in the Cancelleria[929]. The list of these literary wanderers may fitly close with Janus Laskaris, the Greek grammarian, founder of a Greek school at the foot of the Quirinal, whose tomb lies not far from the heart of O’Connell in S. Agata in Subura, where a touching epitaph expresses the mingled joys and sorrows of a Roman exile.

5. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, 1099-1291

No event of the late war was so dramatic, or has made such a powerful appeal to the imagination, as the liberation of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, after a Moslem occupation of 673 years. While the name of Athens is full of meaning for the cultured alone, and many excellent citizens are not quite sure “whether the Greeks or the Romans came first,” that of Jerusalem is known in every peasant’s cottage of Christendom and represents the aspirations of an ancient race scattered all over the globe. But to us Anglo-Saxons the redemption of the Holy City has special significance, because a British general at the head of[516] a force gathered from every part of the British Empire, and aided by our French and Italian allies, has repeated the achievement of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Crusaders, among them a brother of the King of England, and Edgar Etheling, the descendant of our Saxon line, in 1099, and has accomplished what even our lion-hearted monarch failed to do in 1192, and our soldierly Prince Edward in 1271. Thus the aspiration of the poet of Gerusalemme Liberata,

has been realised by Britons from lands whose very existence was unknown at the time of the Crusades.

The present essay is not intended to be a drum-and-trumpet history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and its almost constant wars, but an account of the organisation and social life of the Crusading kingdom. First, as to its extent. The Kingdom of Jerusalem attained its zenith at the end of the reign of Baldwin II in 1131, when it stretched from the Egyptian frontier at El-ʿArîsh, “the river of Egypt” of the Book of Numbers, on the south-west, and from Aila, the modern ʿAkaba (on the gulf of the same name), the Eloth of the First Book of Kings, and the site of Solomon’s Red Sea naval station, on the south-east, to the stream now called Nahr Ibrahîm, which flows into the sea between Beirût and Giblet, the modern Jebeil—about 300 miles as the crow flies. To the east the kingdom rarely overstepped the Jordan except at the triangle of Banias, the ancient Cæsarea Philippi; indeed, in the north it was only thirteen miles broad, but in the Dead Sea region it attained a breadth of 100 miles. This did not, however, comprise the whole of the Latin territory. To the north of the above-mentioned stream stretched the county of Tripolis, of which the foundations were laid by Count Raymond of Toulouse in 1102, to the rivulet, now called Wâdi-Mehika, between Maraclée and Valénia (the modern Bâniyâs), which flowed at the foot of the castle of Margat—a further distance of about 100 miles. From that rivulet began the Principality of Antioch, whose first Prince was, in 1098, Bohemond of Taranto, and which at one time extended almost to Aleppo in the east and embraced a large slice of the Kingdom of Armenia almost as far west as Tarsus, but latterly extended no farther north than a little beyond Alexandretta. On the north-east it was bounded until 1144 by the County of Edessa, the modern Urfa, founded by Baldwin I in 1098, which began at the forest of Marris and extended eastward beyond the Euphrates; but, owing to the permanent state of war, in which the forty-six years of its existence were passed, it never[517] had any fixed boundaries. Thus, a Syrian writer could truly say that, in 1129, “everything was subject to the Franks, from Mardîn and Schabachtana to El ʿArîsh,” far more than the “Dan to Beersheba” of the Israelites[930].

The first diminution of the Crusading States was the loss of the County of Edessa in 1144. In 1170, at the other extremity, they were cut off from the Red Sea by the capture of Aila. Jerusalem and most of the kingdom, except Tyre and a few fortresses, fell before Saladin in 1187, after the battle of Hattin, which the Crusaders identified with the site of the Sermon on the Mount, and the greater part of the Principality of Antioch and of the County of Tripolis in the next year. By the treaty of 1192, the Christians obtained the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; and Frederick II, by the so-called “bad peace” of 1229, recovered the Holy City, except two mosques, the two other towns—Bethlehem and Nazareth—most closely associated with the life of our Lord, and all the chief pilgrimage roads. Fifteen years later, however, the Kharezmians, a Turkish tribe, finally captured Jerusalem, murdered the Latin Christians, and desecrated the Holy Sepulchre and the tombs of the Latin Kings. Saladin, in 1187, had treated Jerusalem as an English gentleman would; the Kharezmians treated it in the German fashion.

The battle of Gaza completed the disaster of 1244. From that time the recovery of Jerusalem was manifestly impossible. The Crusade of the saintly Louis IX was a failure; that of our Prince Edward was weakly supported, ended in a separate peace, concluded by the people of Acre against his will, and was only remarkable for one of the most beautiful stories of conjugal devotion in English history. Meanwhile Antioch had fallen in 1268 before Beibars, the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt; and Jaffa had entered upon the long captivity from which our armies at last redeemed it on November 17, 1917. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was thenceforth a mere phantom of its former self. Kings of Cyprus were crowned Kings of Jerusalem at Tyre, with all the pomp and splendour of the Middle Ages; Acre continued to be, as it had been since its recapture by Cœur-de-Lion, the capital of Frankish Palestine, where even on the eve of its fall, as a traveller[931] tells us, dwelt “the richest merchants under Heaven, gathered from all nations, where resided the King of Jerusalem and many members of his family, the Princes of Galilee and Antioch, the lords of Tyre, Tiberias and Sidon, the Counts of Tripolis and Jaffa, all walking about the squares with their golden coronets on their heads.”

There, too, were the headquarters of the Military Orders, the Templars, the Knights of St John, the Brothers of the German House, and the Masters and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury. But the end of this carnival of Kings and Princes in exile was at hand. Since the second capture of Jerusalem, the kingdom had been slowly but surely dying, as its inhabitants knew full well. Signs and wonders foretold to the pious the coming catastrophe; shrewd business men hastened to sell their property in the doomed country. Tripolis followed the fate of Antioch in 1289; Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beirût were taken by Melik-el-Aschraf, the Sultan of Egypt, in 1291; and, with the fall of the last two strongholds of the Templars, Tortosa and Château Pèlerin, ended the rule of the Franks in Palestine. In Gibbon’s phrase, “A mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the world’s debate.”

Let us now see how Frankish Palestine was organised. At the head of the Latin Kingdom stood the King. During the first three reigns the monarchy was elective; and it was not till 1131 that it became hereditary, as Baldwin II was the first sovereign who left progeny. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, the election of their first ruler was by means of an examination, from which few of us would emerge unscathed. The electors questioned the servants of the various candidates about their masters’ morals and characters. Godfrey’s attendants stated that their master’s chief defect was, that he would linger on in church, after the service was over, asking questions about the images and pictures, and thereby making his household late for meals, “which thus lost all their relish[932].” But this interest in ecclesiastical archæology, which seemed such a drawback to the hungry men-at-arms, was counted as a recommendation by the pious electors, and Godfrey was elected. He declined, however, to take the title of King, preferring that of “Protector of the Holy Sepulchre,” and refusing to wear a golden crown in the city where Our Lord had worn a crown of thorns[933]. His modesty was also probably due to a tactful desire to disarm the opposition of the clergy, who had desired that Jerusalem should not have a lay ruler. He died, however, next year, and Baldwin I, Count of Edessa, his brother, who was elected his successor, then took the title of King, but salved his conscience by being crowned not in Jerusalem, but at Bethlehem. Baldwin II’s daughter, Mélisende, and her husband, Fulk, were the first to be crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where was also the royal mausoleum. Adelaide, Baldwin I’s Queen, is[519] buried at Patti. During the Moslem occupation of Jerusalem the King was crowned at Tyre; and, when the whole of the Holy Land was lost, the Kings of Cyprus, who were titular Kings of Jerusalem, assumed the former crown at Nicosia and the latter at Famagosta. From Queen Charlotte of Cyprus, in 1485, the title passed to Duke Charles of Savoy, and thus to the present Italian dynasty.

The Latin sovereigns of Jerusalem were mostly above the average in character and intelligence. Bravery and piety were essential to their position as chiefs of a crusading colony in the midst of a hostile country. Godfrey “excelled his contemporaries in the handling of arms and in all the exercises of chivalry”; Baldwin I was described in his epitaph as “a second Judas Maccabæus”—a comparison confirmed by his warlike achievements; of Baldwin II we are told, that “his memory was blessed by all, because of the excellence of his faith and the glorious deeds which ennobled his reign.” Baldwin III was also a lover of literature and a graceful speaker, of whom a Moslem rival said that “there was not such another king in the world.” His brother, Amaury I, prompted Archbishop William of Tyre to compose his valuable history, and both these sovereigns possessed considerable legal knowledge. The Archbishop’s pupil, Baldwin IV, was unfortunately a leper, and Baldwin V died in his boyhood. Fulk was generous and experienced in warfare, but signally lacked the common royal faculty of remembering faces. Queen Mélisende, who was the real ruler in her husband’s lifetime, was an excellent woman of business, of whom it was said that “she had in her bosom the heart of a man[934]”; indeed, so masterful was she, that on one occasion her son had to besiege her in the Tower of David. Unfortunately, Guy de Lusignan, who was King at the moment of Saladin’s fatal attack, was notoriously inferior to the task of saving his wife’s kingdom. Had he not been so good-looking and so irresistible to Princess Sibylla, the fall of Jerusalem might have been at least postponed.

Society was constructed by the crusaders on feudal lines. According to the thirteenth century edition of the Assises de la Haute Cour, by Jean d’Ibelin, Count of Jaffa, one of Godfrey’s first acts was to appoint a commission to enquire from men of various nationalities then in Jerusalem the usages of their respective countries. From the report of this commission were drawn up the usages and assizes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including a High Court, presided over by the King, for the nobility; a “Court de la Borgesie,” presided over by an officer styled the “Vicomte,” for the middle class; and a third court, under an official, called “rays,” for the Syrians. As time went on, these usages[520] were modified; and, at the arrival of each large batch of new crusaders, the King used to assemble the Patriarch and other notables at Acre, and enquire from the newcomers about their laws, while occasionally special missions of investigation were sent abroad. The written original of the Assises was called the Letres dou Sepulcre, because it was deposited in a large chest in the Holy Sepulchre; and, whenever a moot point arose, this chest was opened in the presence of nine persons, including the King, or his deputy, and the Patriarch, or the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre[935]. The Assizes of Jerusalem, of which the Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois have also been preserved, are the most endurable monument of the Franks in Palestine, and not in Palestine alone; for they formed the basis of the Assizes of Cyprus, and of the feudal organisation of the Principality of Achaia.

William of Tyre expressly tells us[936] that the Counts of Tripolis were always lieges of the King of Jerusalem. But the Princes of Antioch (which had its own code) and the Counts of Edessa seem to have merely recognised him as primum inter pares by virtue of his possession of the Holy City, and the Princes of Antioch, beginning with Bohemond himself, were at times reluctantly forced to confess themselves vassals of the Greek Emperor. Thus, the existence of four practically independent states, instead of one centralised government, and the consequent lack of what the Italians would call a fronte unico against the Infidels, formed one cause of the collapse of Frankish rule, notably in the case of Edessa, sacrificed to the jealousy of the Prince of Antioch. Moreover, feudal regulations impeded the exercise of the royal power. Not only were the lieges not obliged to perform military service outside the realm; not only had the King to consult a great council of magnates on all important questions—for we hear of Parliaments held in the Patriarch’s palace at Jerusalem, in a church at Acre, and at Tyre, Nâbulus and Bethlehem—but Baldwin I was forced to revoke an ordinance for the cleaning of the streets of Jerusalem, because he had omitted to ask the consent of the citizens. Thus, Frankish Jerusalem was a limited monarchy, and its King really only the first of the barons—a system unsuited to a state of almost constant war.

The kingdom proper contained four great baronies—the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, which comprised the fertile plain of Sharon; the seigneurie of Krak and Montréal, which lay in the biblical land of Moab to the east and south-east of the Dead Sea, and dominated the caravan-route from Syria to Egypt; the Principality of Galilee, of which the capital was Tabarie (the Tiberias of St John); and the seigneurie of[521] Sidon, or Sagette. Besides these great baronies, upon which in turn smaller tenures depended, it also included twelve lesser fiefs, likewise directly dependent on the Crown, of which the most curious was that of St Abraham, the mediæval name of Hebron, and the most important that of Toron, founded by a member of the great crusading family of St Omer, which succeeded Tancred in the Principality of Galilee, but played an even more conspicuous part in Frankish Greece than in Frankish Palestine. The romantic title of Prince of Galilee survived at the Cypriote Court after the loss of the Holy Land; and a Lusignan bearing that scriptural name intervened in the tortuous politics of the Morea in the fourteenth century. Nazareth was naturally included in the Principality of Galilee; it was the See of an Archbishop, and was governed by a “Viscount.”

As in Greece, the Latin barons erected castles over the country; and the remains of some of these, particularly Krak de Montréal and Krak des Chevaliers, are among the finest specimens extant of mediæval military architecture, while others, notably that of the famous family of d’Ibelin at Beirût, were decorated with paintings and mosaics by Syrian and Greek artists. We may infer from the description of the castle of St Omer at Thebes in the Chronicle of the Morea, that the subject of these paintings may sometimes have been the Frankish Conquest of the Holy Land, in which the baronial family had taken part.

Each great feudatory presided over the high court of justice of his fief; and the Assizes enumerate twenty of them, besides the King and the Archbishop of Nazareth, who possessed the right of coinage. M. Schlumberger has published a number of these coins, among them those of Jerusalem, bearing a representation of the Holy Sepulchre, the Tower of David, or the Cupola of the Temple. The inscriptions on the coins of Edessa and on some of those of Antioch are in Greek—a proof of the preponderance of the Greek population there. Ecclesiastically, the Latin states of Syria were organised under two Patriarchs—those of Jerusalem and Antioch; and the first Archbishop of the kingdom was he of Tyre, whose function it was to crown the King in the Patriarch’s absence.

The Salic law did not obtain in the Holy Land; and as, by some mysterious law of population, common also to Frankish Greece, many noble families consisted of daughters only, women played an important part in the crusading states. On two occasions, the election of the Patriarch of Jerusalem (Amaury in 1159 and Heraclius in 1180) was due to female influence, and, on the second occasion the personal predilection of the Queen-Mother Agnes prevailed (to the great detriment of Church[522] and State alike) over the disinterested advice of William of Tyre, who urged the election of a candidate from beyond the sea, and recalled an old prophecy that, as the Emperor Heraclius had brought the true cross to Jerusalem, so in the time of another Heraclius would it be lost—a prophecy verified at the battle of Hattin[937]. This was the Patriarch who visited London in 1185 to seek aid from Henry II, and consecrated the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, where a thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Holy City was recently held.

The competition for the hands of noble heiresses was another result of the extinction of families in the male line, and frequently caused serious political complications and encouraged penniless adventurers, like Guy de Lusignan, whose success aroused the jealousy of less fortunate rivals. Thus, the great disaster of Hattin, which led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, was indirectly due to the revenge of an Englishman, Girard de Rideford, for his failure as a suitor. He had come to the Holy Land as a knight-errant to make his fortune; and Count Raymond II of Tripolis had promised him the hand of his ward, the wealthy heiress of Boutron. A rich Pisan, however, arrived with a weighing-machine, placed the lady (probably an opulent beauty) in one scale and his money-bags in the other, and gave the Count her weight in gold. The baffled Briton became a Templar and rose to be Seneschal and Master of the Order, but never forgot how he had been cheated[938], and persuaded the weak monarch to reject Raymond’s strategy on the eve of Hattin.

An even more romantic but equally fatal example was that of Renaud de Châtillon, who, coming to Palestine as a younger son to seek his fortune in the suite of Louis VII of France at the time of the second crusade, married the widowed Princess-Regent of Antioch, and governed the Principality for his stepson. Local gossips, and especially the Patriarch, criticised this mésalliance, whereupon the audacious Frenchman had the Patriarch stripped, smeared with honey, and exposed, a feast for the flies, during a long summer day. A born soldier of fortune, he put his sword at the disposal of the Greek Emperor for an attack on an Armenian baron, and when a little difference arose as to the payment of the costs of the expedition, paid himself by ravaging the then Greek province of Cyprus. We next find him begging the Emperor’s pardon in his shirt-sleeves, with a rope round his neck. Then he was captured by the Saracens in the course of a cattle-lifting expedition, and kept for fifteen years a prisoner at Aleppo. Finding, on his liberation, that his wife was dead and his stepson reigning at Antioch, he looked out for[523] a second heiress, and found one in the widowed baroness of Montréal. There, in the land beyond Jordan, he was in his element. His next enterprise was, indeed, a bold one. He constructed a flotilla at Krak—“the stone of the Desert,” as it was picturesquely called—conveyed it on camel-back to the Gulf of ʿAkaba, and sailed down into the Red Sea with the object of plundering Mecca and Medina, and conquering the Hedjaz and the Yemen. For this daring attempt, and for intercepting, in time of peace, the Moslem caravan, Saladin swore twice to kill him with his own hand. The second of these acts provoked the invasion which led to the capture of Jerusalem, and in Saladin’s tent, as a captive after the battle of Hattin, the adventurous Frenchman, who declared that, to Princes, treaties were “scraps of paper,” was beheaded. His seal with the gateway of Krak upon it still survives as a memorial of his strange career. The love affairs of the nobles were also sometimes fatal to the interests of the state. Thus the charms of a beautiful Armenian were partly responsible for the loss of Edessa, and an attractive Italian widow was a prominent figure in the last days of Jerusalem.

The middle class was a far more important body than in either the England or the France of that day. Palestine during the Crusades was not visited exclusively for religious or military reasons. Besides being a goal of pilgrimage, it was also what California or Australia was in the middle of the last century—a place where shrewd men of business could make money rapidly. Long before the first Crusade, there had been an Italian colony from Amalfi at Jerusalem, in the capture of which a Genoese detachment had assisted; colonies from Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Marseilles followed; in the monastery of La Cava is a deed of Baldwin IV, granting the ships of the monks access to the Syrian coast; we even find an “English quarter” at Acre[939]. Owing to the small numbers of the nobility, and the constant need of recruiting its ranks after its losses in battle, it was easy for the wealthy members of the middle class to enter the aristocracy, while, from the nature of its occupations, it was thrown into much closer contact with the natives. Mixed marriages were consequently commoner among the bourgeoisie, although Baldwin I and II and Josselin I of Edessa married Armenians, and Baldwin III and Amaury I Greeks.

The issue of these mixed marriages was known as the Poulains[940]. These half-castes, who corresponded to the Γασμοῦλοι of Frankish Greece, are not depicted in flattering terms by contemporary writers.[524] Jacques de Vitry[941], the Bishop of Acre, describes them as “nourished in delights, soft and effeminate, more accustomed to baths than to battles, given to uncleanliness and luxury, dressed in soft garments like women, slothful and idle, cowardly and timid, little esteemed by the Saracens,” with whom they were ready to make peace, and from whom they were prone to accept assistance against their fellow Christians in their internecine quarrels. They were, alike by nature and interest, opposed to the arrival of fresh bodies of Crusaders, because war interfered with their business and interrupted their commercial relations with the Moslems, whose family life they imitated, veiling their wives, shutting them up in Oriental seclusion, and allowing them to go out thrice a week to the baths, but only once a year to church. This undue preference of cleanliness to godliness had disastrous effects, for it led the ladies to intrigue all the more to get out.

The worthy Bishop, speaking doubtless from personal experience, adds that the Poulains swindled the ingenuous pilgrims by overcharges at inns, by exorbitant prices in shops, and by giving them poor exchange. Worse still, they despised these Christian “boxers” and exiles, calling them fatuous idiots for their pains—for to the Poulains the Holy Land had no halo. They wore flowing robes, as even the first King of Jerusalem had done, while a coin of Tancred of Antioch represents him with a turban; and their whole outlook was Oriental rather than European. Indeed, Foucher, Baldwin I’s chaplain, remarked quite early how soon the Westerner became an Easterner in Palestine, and how the Crusader who married an Armenian or a Syrian soon forgot the land of his birth, adopting the comfortable maxim—“ubi bene, ibi patria.” Hence the marked contrast between the Frankish residents, and still more the Poulains, and the newly-arrived Crusaders. Hence, too, the often far too harsh judgments passed by the latter, especially after the second crusade in 1148. Like the Philhellenes, who went to Greece in the War of Independence, expecting to find the Peloponnese peopled by the superhuman heroes of Plutarch, instead of by men like themselves, they did not realise that poor human nature, even under conditions far more favourable, could not have possibly shone resplendent in the tremendous setting of the Holy Land. Consequently, they were often disillusioned, whereas men like William of Tyre, born and living in the country, were far fairer in their judgments, because they measured the Holy Land by the standard of other and more prosaic lands and not by the unattainable perfection of the greatest figure in all history, with whom it must ever be associated.

Society in the Crusading States was, it must be remembered, even apart from the Poulains, an extraordinary mixture of races. Even an Austrian army did not contain so many nationalities as the Crusaders. The Franks, as they were generically called, included Normans (at first the dominant race), French (who ousted the Normans, and thenceforth maintained their influence, culture and language, as they did nearly two centuries later at the Court of Athens), English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Flemings, Italians, Germans (these not very numerous), and Scandinavians. Jacques de Vitry considered the Italians as the most satisfactory. He describes them as “prudent, temperate in eating and drinking, ornate and prolix in speaking, but circumspect in counsel, diligent in managing their own public affairs, and a very necessary element in the country, not only in battle, but at sea and in business, especially in the import trade. Since they are sober in food and drink, they live longer than other Western nations in the East”; and “they would be very formidable to the Saracens, if they would cease fighting among themselves.” Unfortunately, the rivalries between Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were even more serious than the feuds between the Normans and the French; and the possession of the Church of St Saba at Acra (two pillars of which are now outside St Mark’s Venice) led to an Italian colonial war, in which we may find one cause of the final loss of the Holy Land. These Italian colonies, indeed, formed practically an imperium in imperio. Their respective quarters in the Syrian towns were the property of their governments, which appointed their officials (called “Consuls” in the Genoese and Pisan colonies, “Bailies” in the Venetian), often from among the most celebrated families of the Venetian Republic. Venice had also what we should call a Consul-General, a “Bailie” for all Syria; and both she and Genoa received a large portion of the harbour dues at Tyre and Acre. The Italian colonies had their own tribunals, like the consular courts in Turkey in our own day. Thus, Italian interests in the Holy Land were considerable and mainly commercial. To Venice and Genoa foreign affairs were—the affairs of their merchants.

The French and the English settlers were “less composed and more impetuous, less circumspect in action and more full of superfluity in food and drink, more lavish in expense and less cautious in talk, hasty in counsel, but more fervent in almsgiving, and more vehement in battle, and most useful for the defence of the Holy Land, and very formidable to the Saracens.”

Besides these various elements among the Crusaders, Palestine contained a large variety of indigenous races. Of these the native[526] Christians of Arab speech, collectively known as Syrians, were the most favoured. Baldwin I gave them marked privileges at Jerusalem, and they could give evidence on oath. But they were of little use in war, except as archers; and are accused by Jacques de Vitry of betraying the secrets of the Christians to the Saracens, whose customs they largely imitated. The Maronites of the Lebanon were, however, noted for their military prowess and for the help which they rendered to the Franks.

Next to the Syrians came the Armenians, reckoned the best fighters of the Orientals, who, from the proximity of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia to the County of Edessa, often assisted the Frank Counts, and copied their feudal arrangements. It is noticeable that the Assizes of Antioch have come to us through the Armenian, and that the Court of Sis, like that of Jerusalem, had its seneschal, its marshal, and its constable. The Greeks were regarded as opponents of the Latins; and, when Saladin took Jerusalem, he allowed them to remain. But we could scarcely expect them to view with sympathy the annexation of the Greek states of Edessa (still governed by a Greek official at the time of the Latin conquest) and Antioch, which only fourteen years before had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. And Anna Comnena describes her father’s alarm at the march of large armies of foreigners across his rich and peaceful dominions who might (and in 1204 did) say with the Roman centurion: Hic manebimus optime!

Historians of the Moslem Arabs admit that, except in war time, Christians and Moslems lived together in harmony. There are examples of friendship, and even of adopted brotherhood, between Frank barons and Moslem emirs, who used to grant each other mutual permits to hunt. Every reader of The Talisman knows of the mutual courtesies between Richard I and Saladin, who sent medical aid to a sick opponent, but even more curious was the action of Guy de Lusignan, whose first act, on exchanging the Kingdom of Jerusalem for that of Cyprus, was to ask his former captor how to keep the island. Many Franks spoke Arabic; and it was even found necessary for commercial purposes to coin money bearing in Arabic characters the name of Mohammed and the date of the Moslem era! The merchants of Tyre and Acre, where these heretical coins were minted, protested that “business is business”; but the Papal Legate, who accompanied Louis IX on the sixth crusade, was so scandalised that he reported the matter to Pope Innocent IV, who excommunicated all who coined them. The wily merchants, however, circumvented his prohibition by minting similar coins with Christian inscriptions and the year of our Lord, both in Arabic, and with a cross in the centre of the coin. Of this hybrid currency, which[527] began in 1251, there are several specimens. Like Frederick II in Sicily, the later Princes of Antioch and Counts of Tripolis had Saracen guards; and, under the name of Turcoples, given originally to Turks born of Greek mothers, Moslems entered the Christian armies as light cavalry. Of actual Turks there were few, for they had overrun Syria too short a time before the Crusades to take root in Palestine. Like the Franks, and like the Turks in the Balkans, they were only a garrison.

Special interest attaches to the Jews, at this period only a small section of the population, and, as usual, exclusively urban. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Palestine about 1173, found two hundred Jews in the ghetto at Jerusalem beneath the Tower of David, where they had a monopoly of the dyeing trade, and twelve, all dyers, at Bethlehem. The largest Jewish colonies were, as was natural, in the great commercial towns, Tyre and Acre; and the total in the whole of the Latin states was only 7000 to 8000. They could not hold land, and were classed below the Moslems, but practised successfully as doctors and bankers, and had their own judges. Many had come from the south of France. A few Samaritans still survived at Nâbulus, the biblical Shechem, and at Cæsarea.

Below all these freemen came the slaves, including Christians, partly prisoners of war and partly imported. The Assizes of Jerusalem contain special regulations for the slave-trade (largely in Venetian and Genoese hands), but the legislators felt some scruples about allowing a Christian slave to be sold to a Moslem. There was one other very undesirable element in the population—persons who had left their country for their country’s good; for it was not unusual to pardon criminals on condition that they made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and never returned. The Bishop of Acre complains of this practice of making the Holy Land a convict station, just as some of our colonies did in the first half of the last century; and he quotes the Horatian tag, that people, who cross the sea, change the climate, but not their character. Nor does he approve of the tourist, who came from mere curiosity and not from devotion.

Among this heterogeneous mass the smallness of the Frankish forces makes us marvel that the Latin Kingdom lasted for 99 years at Jerusalem and for nearly 200 at Acre. The Assizes[942] inform us that the paper strength of the royal army was only 577 knights and 5025 foot-soldiers, to which we must add the contingents of the two great Military Orders and the Turcoples. At no time, in actual warfare, did the total armed forces of the four Crusading States much exceed 25,000; at Hattin—the Hastings[528] of the Holy Land—Guy de Lusignan had only some 21,000 men under his command; Baldwin I crossed the Euphrates with only 80 knights to take Edessa; and some of the great battles of Tancred were fought by only 200 knights. William of Tyre[943], writing a few years before the catastrophe of 1187, explains the greater success of the Franks in the earlier years of the kingdom by their piety and courage as contrasted with the immorality and diminished martial spirit of his contemporaries. Other causes were the lack of military skill of the Moslems of that generation, and the disunion of their chiefs. When, however, Saladin united Syria and Egypt in his strong hand, the fate of the little Frankish colony was sealed. Disunion of allies neutralised the splendid courage of our Richard I in his attempt to restore what had been lost; Frederick II was a Crusader malgré lui; and in the thirteenth century many Franks, realising that the end was at hand, left for the Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus, or for Armenia, leaving as the most important factors in the Latin population the Italian colonies and the Religious Orders.

The Knights of St John, who originally took their name from St John the Merciful[944], a Cypriote who became Patriarch of Alexandria, arose at the time of the conquest in connection with the hospital, founded at Jerusalem a generation earlier by a citizen of Amalfi. Their first aim was to tend and nourish the sick, then to guard pilgrims up from the coast, and next to fight against the Infidels. They never forgot their original object, and pilgrims were enthusiastic in their praise. Indeed, Saladin is said to have gained admission to their hospital at Acre as a patient to see whether all that he heard about their beneficence was true. Gradually, as the feudal barons found it harder to defend their castles, they handed them to the Knights, who specially chose difficult frontier positions. Margat, Krak des Chevaliers, Chastel-Rouge, Gibelin and Belvoir were their chief fortresses; and Mount Tabor was one of their possessions.

The Templars, founded in 1118 to protect the pilgrims on their way from the coast, enjoyed a less enviable reputation. William of Tyre[945] remarks, that “for a long time they maintained their original object, but subsequently forgot the duty of humility.” They were accused of greed and selfishness, and of being too anxious to stand well with Moslem Princes, with whom they sometimes made a separate peace, to the detriment of Christendom. Thus they warned a Moslem chief of an intended raid by our Prince Edward. Their treachery to the sect of the Assassins scandalised the Court of Jerusalem and immensely damaged Christian interests. The chief of that terrible community, the “Old[529] Man,” as he was called, whose territory was separated from the County of Tripolis by boundary stones, marked on the Christian side with a cross, on that of the Assassins with a knife, had sent an envoy to King Amaury I, offering to embrace Christianity, on condition that the Templars consented to forego the tribute paid to them by the Assassins. All had been arranged, and the diplomatist was on his way home, when the Templars assassinated the Assassin[946].

The Templars’ vow of poverty contrasted ill with their immense wealth, which enabled them, in 1191, to buy Cyprus from Richard I, and to lend a large sum to our Henry III. They acted as bankers; and through their hands passed the money collected in the West for future crusades. They were suspected, too, of heretical opinions, and were accused of initiating their novices with pagan rites. They possessed eighteen fortresses, of which Tortosa was the most important; but the Order did not long survive the loss of the Holy Land, being abolished by Clement V in 1312.

Less important were the Teutonic Knights, the Brüder vom deutschen Hause of Freytag’s well-known historical novel—an off-shoot of the Hospitallers—because the Germans contributed little towards the foundation of the Frankish states, and their distinct Order was not founded till after the first capture of the Latin capital. Their principal sphere of activity was not in Palestine but in Prussia, where they laboured to civilise the barbarous Prussians—a task in which they do not appear to have been altogether successful. A lasting memorial of their activity is the former Prussian fortress of Thorn—a name said to be derived from the castle of Toron in the Holy Land, once their possession. To us a more interesting Order is that of the Hospital of “the Master and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury,” at Acre, founded in 1191, in which Edward I showed interest, and which was transferred after the fall of Acre to Cyprus, where it still existed in 1350. A hospital for poor British pilgrims was also founded at Acre in 1254[947].

Palestine was a fruitful land during the Frankish period, although we hear much of the plagues of locusts and field-mice. Contemporary visitors wrote enthusiastically about the gardens of Jericho and the fertile plains of Jezreel and Tripolis, with its vineyards, its olive-yards, and its sugar plantations, whence the cane was taken to the factory at Tyre. The wines of Engaddi were as noted as in the Song of Solomon; and the vintages of Bethlehem and Jerusalem were highly esteemed.[530] Jericho produced grapes so huge that “a man could scarcely lift a bunch of them”—a statement which shows that the vines had not degenerated since the days when the spies of Moses “cut down” from the brook of Eschcol “one cluster of grapes, and bare it between two upon a staff.” Even the silent waters of the Dead Sea were then traversed by fruit barges; and in the so-called “Valley of Moses” to the south of it the olive-trees formed “a dense forest.” There was more wood than now, and consequently more water, but corn had to be imported, for the harvests of Moab, Hebron, Bethlehem (“the house of bread”), and Jericho did not suffice to feed the population. The Sea of Galilee was as full of fish as in the time of Our Lord, and boats plied upon its waters. But, owing to the general insecurity of the open country, few of the cultivators of the soil were Franks; and, where we find Latin peasants, they are usually not far from the shelter of fortified towns. Of manufactures the most important were those of silk at Tripolis, Tiberias, and Tyre, dyeing, and pottery; the glass of Tyre is specially praised by its Archbishop, and the goldsmiths had a street all to themselves at Jerusalem.

Civilisation, so far as comfort was concerned, had reached a high level. Every castle had its baths; and minstrels and dancers appeared at the entertainments of the barons, while we read of theatrical performances at a coronation. A considerable amount of gambling went on in royal circles. Baldwin III was devoted to dice; the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Edessa were so busy with their dice-boxes during a campaign, that they demoralised many of their officers; the Count of Jaffa was so deeply engrossed in a game of dice that he was playing in the street of the Tanners at Jerusalem, that he allowed himself to be assassinated. Hunting with the falcon, and, in Arab fashion, with the cat-like animal known as the carable, were favourite amusements. It seems strange that nothing was done to encourage horse-breeding; and, as the Moslems were loth to sell horses to be used against themselves, the Franks usually imported their steeds from Apulia. Every spring it was the custom of the Frankish chivalry to take their horses to feed on the rich grass at the foot of Mt Carmel; and there, by the brook Kishon, where Elijah slew the prophets of Baal, tournaments were held, in which Saracen chiefs sometimes took part, and after which the combatants refreshed themselves with sherbet, made from the snows of Lebanon.

We must not expect a military colony, always fighting for its existence, to be very productive of literature. But perhaps the best specimen of mediæval history, the great work of William of Tyre, was produced by a Frank born in the Holy Land. The author possessed the[531] two greatest qualities for writing the history of his own times: personal acquaintance with the principal actors in the drama by reason of his high official position, and at the same time fearless love of truth. He tells us that he was well aware of the perils to which he thus exposed himself; and, if it be true that he was poisoned in Rome by order of a rival whom he had denounced, his forebodings were only too accurate. Having been a diplomatist, a prelate, a royal tutor, and chancellor of the kingdom, he possessed an unrivalled experience of men and affairs; and, as is usual with such persons, he was much more moderate in his judgments of human frailty than purely literary or monastic chroniclers. The abrupt close of his work in 1183 has been ascribed to the desire of powerful enemies to suppress the facts about the last years of Jerusalem—a further proof of his dreaded influence.

A lesser luminary was Renaud, baron of Sagette, who amazed the pundits of Saladin by his Oriental scholarship; and the cult of French novels was diffused among the nobles of the Holy Land, whose legal knowledge was considerable. Philip of Navarre[948], the celebrated pleader, who has left a treatise showing how to make the worse cause appear the better in the feudal courts, tells us that he owed his knowledge of legal practice to the accident of being appointed reader of romances to the Seneschal of Jerusalem, who in return taught him law. The pleader, who also composed a historical work, and a treatise on the four ages of man, and was an opponent of the higher education of women, is described by Florio Bustron, the Cypriote historian, as a “huomo universale.”

In estimating the architectural results of the Frankish rule, we must remember the short time available—so far as all but the coast towns were concerned. But a traveller, who visited the country in 1185, tells us that the Franks had done much for the mural decoration of their churches, of which, beginning with Tancred’s church on Mt Tabor in 1111, they erected a number down to the catastrophe of Hattin. William of Tyre specially mentions the munificence of Queen Mélisende in founding a church and convent at Bethany, of which her youngest sister was Superior, and her splendidly bound copy of the Gospels is in the British Museum. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the Cathedral and Castle of Tortosa, still linger traces of the Crusaders. It has been remarked that in their architecture more than in aught else the Franks of Palestine remained Westerners.

In conclusion we may ask how Frankish society in Palestine compares with Frankish society in Cyprus and in the Latin Principalities of the present Greek Kingdom. Very different from either Frankish Palestine[532] or Frankish Greece was the condition of the Kingdom of Cyprus, created by a mere accident of the Crusades, which nominally continued the tradition of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. While the reason of the latter’s existence was war, Cyprus was essentially a commercial state, to which the loss of Acre was a blessing in disguise. So long as the Kings of Cyprus, in their capacity of Kings of Jerusalem, had territory on the opposite coast of Syria, they were necessarily involved in continental wars, and could not devote themselves to the development of their own island; as was the case of the Kings of England, so long as they held the damnosa hereditas of the Plantagenets in France. Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The Popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the Kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. Consequently, the Cypriote monarchy was more independent, and continued to prosper until it allowed—and this should be to us a warning—foreign competitors, under the guise of commerce, to creep into its cities and ultimately to dictate its policy.

All the Latin states in the East, whether in Jerusalem, Cyprus, or Greece proper, presented examples of that difficult political experiment—the rule of a small alien minority over a large native majority of a different religion, an experiment worked most successfully in those states, like Lesbos under the Genoese Gattilusj, where the Latin rulers became assimilated with the ruled. But in Frankish Greece the feudal states were not commercial; and the Venetian and Genoese colonies were, except in Negroponte, quite distinct from them. The Frank conquerors of Greece did not go thither with the noble aims which led some of the leaders of the first Crusade to the Holy Land; on the contrary, they turned aside from the recovery of the Holy City to partition a Christian Empire. Yet the moral standard of the Franks in Greece was much higher than that of their predecessors in Palestine, or their contemporaries in Cyprus. Possibly, the reason was that they lived healthier lives, and had fewer temptations. Big maritime commercial towns, like Tyre and Acre, and Famagosta, did not exist, and country life was more developed. Certainly, the Chronicle of the Morea is more edifying reading than the Letters of Jacques de Vitry on the condition of Acre at the time of his appointment as its bishop in[533] 1216. But in one respect Frankish Palestine and Frankish Greece present the same strange phenomenon—that union of antiquity with the Middle Ages, of the biblical and the classical with the romantic, which inspired the second part of Faust. To find the feudal system installed at Hebron and Athens, at Shechem and Sparta, at Tiberias and Thebes, to read of Princes of Galilee and of Princes of Achaia, causes surprise only surpassed by that which we should have felt in August, 1914, had we been told that before four Christmases had passed, Australians and New Zealanders would have shared in the taking of Jerusalem.

AUTHORITIES

1. Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Seventeen vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1841-1906.

3. Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, 1100-1291. Von R. Röhricht. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1898.

4. Regesta Regni Hierosolimitani, 1097-1291, and Additamentum. Von R. Röhricht. Œniponti: Lib. Acad. Wagneriana, 1893-1904.

5. Les Colonies franques de Syrie aux xiiᵐᵉ et xiiiᵐᵉ siècles. Par E. Rey. Paris: Picard, 1883.

6. Numismatique de l’Orient Latin, avec Supplément. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Leroux, 1878-82.

7. Renaud de Châtillon, prince d’Antioche. Par G. Schlumberger. Paris: Plon, 1898.

6. A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA

One of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho; Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother strove to restrain by chaining her to her neglected spinning-wheel; and Elephantis, whose poetry was considered too realistic for display upon drawing-room tables. Novels were in those days chiefly written by bishops—a class of men not now usually associated with light literature. In Latin literature, although Juvenal has drawn a[534] picture of the learned lady weighing in the critical balance the respective claims of Homer and Virgil, the poem attributed to Sulpicia is almost the sole surviving example of female composition. It has been reserved for Byzantine literature to present us with the rare phenomenon of a first-class lady historian—first-class, that is to say, according to the standards of that day—in the person of the Imperial Princess, Anna Comnena, a writer better known to the general public than are most Byzantine authors owing to the fact that Sir Walter Scott introduced her as one of the characters in Count Robert of Paris, and based one of the chief episodes of that novel upon a historical event recorded in her life of her father.

Since Scott’s time, novelists and dramatists have done something to popularise Byzantine history. Neale, in his Theodora Phranza, daughter of the last Byzantine historian, has described the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; Sardou produced on the stage a far more famous Theodora, the consort of Justinian, whom Prokopios so virulently besmirched in his Secret History. Mr Frederic Harrison has portrayed in Theophano the ambitious and unscrupulous wife and widow of the Emperors Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas. Jean Lombard in Byzance depicted, with immense erudition, the games and ceremonial of the Imperial city and court in the time of the Iconoclast Emperor, Constantine V Copronymos, and endeavoured to solve the Balkan question by marrying and placing on the throne the Slav Oupravda and the Greek Eustokkia; while Marion Crawford gave us in Arethusa a story from a much later period, the year 1376, based upon the struggle at the Court of John V between the Venetian adventurer, Carlo Zeno, and the Genoese, for the possession of the isle of Tenedos, the key of the Dardanelles.

Anna Comnena was born in 1083 at an interesting moment in the history not only of the Greek Empire, but of Christendom. It was the time when the Mediæval West and the Mediæval East first met; when the Normans, after their recent conquest of England and Southern Italy, first crossed the Adriatic and Ionian seas to attack the Greek Empire, soon to be followed by the hosts of the First Crusade. Just as, with the accession of William the Conqueror fifteen years earlier, a new order of things had begun in Northern Europe, so with the accession of her father, the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, in 1081, two years before her birth, a new era, and practically a new dynasty—though Alexios was not the first of the family to seize the throne—had begun at Byzantium. From 1025, the end of the long and glorious reign of Basil II, whom the Greeks of to-day still admire as the “Bulgar-slayer,” the destroyer of[535] the first Bulgarian Empire on those self-same battlefields of Macedonia where King Constantine defeated the Bulgarians in the second Balkan war of 1913, the Byzantine throne had been occupied by no less than twelve sovereigns, whose consecutive reigns filled a period scarcely longer than that embraced by the single reign of the great Basil. After the death of his brother and successor, Constantine VIII, there began a period of palace intrigues and female influence, for Constantine’s two mature daughters, Zoe and Theodora, assigned the throne to whomsoever they chose; and the successive marriages of the elderly Zoe furnished Psellos with a chronique scandaleuse of the Imperial Court and boudoir, and MM. Schlumberger and Diehl with their brilliant modern paraphrases of the contemporary writer. When, with the death of Theodora, the Macedonian dynasty came to an end in the person of its last representative, revolution succeeded revolution. Every general of aristocratic birth was justified in believing that he carried in his baggage the red boots which were the peculiar mark of the Imperial dignity, and a female regency enabled the Empress Eudokia to bestow the Empire with her hand. At last, the ablest and astutest of the Byzantine commanders, Alexios Comnenos, deposed the feeble old voluptuary, Nikephoros Botaneiates, whose Slavonic ministers had discredited his authority by their “barbarous” pronunciation and foreign origin, and placed himself and his descendants upon the throne for 100 years.

These internal dissensions had naturally injured the external prestige of the Empire and contracted its frontiers. It was then that there came the final separation between the Eastern and the Western Churches; it was then, too, that, by the loss of Bari, Brindisi, and Otranto, the Byzantine Empire forfeited its last Italian possessions. Meanwhile, the advance of the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor had pushed back the Greek frontier in a second continent close to the capital; and Anna Comnena[949] declares that, on her father’s accession, “the Bosporus was the eastern, and Adrianople the western, limit of the Greek sceptre.” Alexios, she proudly adds, “widened the circle of the Empire, and made the Adriatic its western, the Euphrates and the Tigris its eastern, border.”

Yet, as she truly says, her father had to contend all the time against enormous difficulties, alike domestic and foreign. At the outset of his reign, his throne was surrounded with possible pretenders. Both his immediate predecessors were alive, although the one was a bishop, the other in a monastery, besides four sons of dethroned Emperors who had received the Imperial title during their fathers’ reigns, and several[536] persons who had endeavoured unsuccessfully to seize and keep the crown. There were constant conspiracies against Alexios so long as he sat on the throne, while the eternal theological questions, which were the favourite mental distraction of Byzantium, caused him constant anxiety, for there, as in the Balkans to-day, theology and politics were inextricably mingled. From abroad there came, too, the menace of invasion on all sides—from the wild tribes of the Patzinaks and Cumans on the north, from the Normans on the west, from the Turks on the east. And, worse than all, the unhappy Alexios was suddenly called upon to cope with the hurricane of the First Crusade, and to find his Empire overrun by swarms of fierce warriors, whose motives he suspected and whose intentions he judged from their acts to be predatory.

Alexios owed his crown to a successful insurrection; but he was no vulgar upstart. He belonged to a rich family of Paphlagonia, where the Comnenoi held property at Kastamon, the modern Kastamouni, the place known in contemporary history as the exile for nearly thirty years of the late Mirdite Prince, Prenk Bib Doda. The Comnenoi had first come into prominence about a century earlier under Basil II; and one of the clan, the distinguished general, Isaac Comnenos, had occupied the throne from 1057 to 1059. Anna’s father was this man’s nephew, and, in spite of his uncle’s brief reign, the real founder of the dynasty. For the Emperor Isaac, in a moment of discouragement and disillusionment, not only abdicated but failed to induce his brother John, the father of Alexios, to accept the heavy burden of the crown. It was not, however, to his timorous and unambitious father, but to his energetic mother, Anna Dalassene, that Alexios owed his success. She was resolved that her son should be Emperor, and during four intervening reigns, she was waiting and intriguing for the diadem which her husband had allowed to go out of his family. A great lady herself, the daughter of an eminent official and soldier, whose skill in never failing to kill his man had earned him the nickname of “Charon,” she belonged, like the Comnenoi, to a powerful Asiatic family, one of whose members had been at first thought by Constantine VIII as worthy to succeed him, and had subsequently been regarded as a possible husband for the old Empress Zoe. Like many eminent Byzantine personages, she had known the reverses of fortune, and had at one time been exiled to Prinkipo. Such was the esteem which the Emperor Alexios felt for the mother, who had constantly encouraged and facilitated his ambition, that when, at the outset of his reign, he was compelled to leave his capital to fight against the Normans in Albania, he entrusted to her the absolute authority over the Empire during his absence. This is only one of many instances[537] proving the influence of women in the Byzantine system. Thus, the mother of Alexios made history, his daughter wrote it; his mother made him Emperor, his daughter preserved the memory of his reign. Such were the origin and parents of the hero of the Alexiad. Let us now look at its author.

The literary Princess has given us in her history of her father a considerable amount of autobiographical information. Anna Comnena was not at all disposed to hide her light under a bushel, nor did she ever forget that she had been born in the purple chamber—the room to which an Empress was always removed when her confinement was imminent. Like most members of the reigning Imperial family, she received an excellent literary education. “I am not destitute of letters,” she writes in her preface, “but have thoroughly studied classical Greek”; and she adds that she had applied herself diligently to the mathematical quadrivium, to rhetoric, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the dialogues of Plato. In another passage she alludes to her knowledge of geometry. Her quotations show a wide range of reading. Her history contains citations from, or allusions to, Homer, Sappho, Sophokles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, the Tactics of Ælian, and the astronomer Eudoxos, while she repeats a whole sentence from Polybios and another from John of Epiphania, and shows, as Byzantine writers always do, great familiarity with the Bible. Niketas summed her up as “acquainted with every art.”

Nor need we, who have in our own history a similarly learned lady of royal lineage, Lady Jane Grey, wonder at the erudition of this Byzantine blue stocking. There had been a recrudescence of literary culture in the eleventh century at Byzantium[950], as in the sixteenth century in London. Shortly before Anna’s birth the Imperial Court had been the scene of the many-sided activities of that remarkable man, Michael Psellos, “the Prince of Philosophers,” as he was called by his contemporaries, the Voltaire of mediæval Greek literature, at once philosopher, historian, lawyer, monk, courtier and prime minister, who demonstrated, as other learned statesmen have proved in our own time, that great intellectual attainments may coincide with a poor character and political ineptitude. Another writer, the historian Michael of Adalia, or Attaleiates, who had gained by his legal abilities the favour of successive sovereigns, dedicated his history of his own time to the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates, and made a sufficient fortune out of speculations in real estate to found an almshouse for his less fortunate fellows. But in the time of Psellos and Attaleiates learning had disciples on the throne, as well as in the[538] lecture-hall. The Imperial family of Doukas was noted for its devotion to literature; the collection of genealogies of gods and heroes, known under the title of Ionia (or Violarium), has been by some ascribed to the ambitious Empress Eudokia, wife of Constantine X Doukas and of his successor; while the Emperor Michael VII Doukas, who had been a pupil of Psellos and is known in history by the nickname of “Parapinakes,” or the “Peck-filcher,” from his fraudulent manipulation of the corn-monopoly, spent his time in composing iambics and anapæsts quite in the fashion of our classically-educated eighteenth century statesmen, who lost us the American colonies and were stronger at Greek verses than at political economy. Even the old roué Botaneiates, was, if we believe his panegyrist Attaleiates, a lover of books. When Alexios succeeded him, he further encouraged literature; one of his physicians, Kallikles, was a writer of epitaphs, not always on his own patients; and the historian, John Skylitzes, who was a captain of the bodyguard, dedicated some legal treatises to this Emperor.

It was not, therefore, remarkable that Alexios’ daughter was highly educated, nor that her husband, Nikephoros Bryennios, was, like herself, a historian, although, like Julius Cæsar, he modestly described his work as merely supplying “the materials for those who wished to write history.” A soldier by profession, the son of the pretender of the same name who had revolted against Michael VII, and had been crushed by Alexios, he defended Constantinople against Godfrey of Bouillon in 1097, and fought against the Sultan of Ikonium in 1116. Taking Xenophon, another literary soldier, as his model, he possessed, like Attaleiates, a much simpler and more straightforward style than his learned consort, and his soldierly prose is, although a glorification of his father-in-law, pleasing to read.

But the cultured Anna, unlike her husband, had other besides literary ambitions, of which her distracted account of her father’s death-bed shows no trace. We learn, however, from the later historian, Niketas, of the mundane designs which agitated the bosoms of the Empress and her daughter at that solemn moment, of the efforts made by Irene to induce her expiring husband to disinherit his son in favour of his son-in-law, and how, when the dying Emperor lifted up his hands to heaven with a forced smile on his pallid cheeks, his wife bitterly reproached him with the words: “Husband, all thy life thou hast been versed in every kind of deceit, saying one thing and thinking another; and now that thou art dying, thou art true to thine old ways.” Gibbon has summed up the remark in the caustic sarcasm: “You die as you have lived—a hypocrite.” Nor was the virtuous Anna inclined to acquiesce[539] in the accession of her brother John II. She had been, till his birth, the heiress-presumptive, and as such had been betrothed as a child to the son of the dethroned Emperor, Michael VII, the young Constantine Doukas, who died, however, before their marriage. She had thus missed the throne once, and was determined not to miss it again.

Scott, in his novel, has completely misrepresented the character of her husband by representing him as plotting to seize the throne, even during the lifetime of Alexios. Such a conception of the honest Bryennios is quite erroneous. For Anna’s plot was entirely frustrated by the sluggish indifference and greater humanity of her consort. So greatly annoyed was his wife at his reluctance to accept the crown by killing or blinding his brother-in-law, that she bitterly reproached nature in a phrase which must be left in the obscurity of the original language, for having made the mistake of creating her a woman and him a man. The conspiracy was discovered; but the Emperor treated his sister with more mercy than she deserved, contenting himself with bestowing her richly furnished palace upon his favourite and faithful minister. Even this punishment, at the instance of the minister himself, was rescinded; her palace was restored to the princess; her husband held office under the new Emperor and accompanied him in the Syrian campaign of 1137; but her pride was wounded by her brother’s magnanimity. She retired in Byzantine fashion to the convent of Our Lady of Grace, founded by her mother, the ex-Empress Irene, whose charter has been preserved.

At the age of thirty-five her career at Court was over; her old friends, courtier-like, turned away from her to worship the rising sun; her mother, her favourite brother, her husband, whom, despite his weakness of character and unwillingness to reign, she loudly praises in her history and regarded with obvious affection[951], successively passed away. Their son, Alexios, who took his mother’s surname, held office under her nephew, the Emperor Manuel, as Lord High Admiral. She bitterly complains, with her customary rhetorical exaggeration, of her hard lot since her eighth year, when her brother John was associated with his father in the Imperial dignity; to enumerate her sufferings and her enemies, she exclaims, “requires the Siren eloquence of Isokrates, the deep voice of Pindar, the vehemence of Polemon, the muse of Homer, the lyre of Sappho.” For twenty-nine years she had not seen or spoken with any of her father’s friends, of whom many were dead, and many were afraid to visit her. She compares herself with Niobe, and introduces into her history transparent allusions to her treatment by “the great,” and to the folly of her father’s successors—both monarchs of distinction[952].[540] Under these circumstances, she endeavoured to console herself with the composition of her history—a work written mostly, as she tells us, under the reign of her nephew, Manuel I, who ascended the throne in 1143. By 1148, at the age of 65, she had finished her work; the date of her death is unknown.

The princess had set herself the filial task of writing a biography of her father from 1069 to his death in 1118, thus covering the whole of his reign and twelve years before it. Her history thus formed a continuation of those composed by Attaleiates and by her husband, the former of whom had narrated the events of the years 1034 to 1079, the latter those of the years 1070 to 1079. As it had been the object of the former to glorify the still living Botaneiates, so it was the aim of the latter to whitewash Alexios, representing him as a legitimate sovereign, who had merely renounced the throne, once occupied by his uncle.

She begins her history by describing her father’s exploits during the three previous reigns, the “three labours of Hercules[953],” as she characteristically calls his suppression of the rebellions of Oursel Bailleul, or Russell Balliol, a member of the family which founded Balliol College (whom Scott has, by a pardonable anachronism, represented as a fellow-prisoner of Count Robert of Paris in the dungeon), and his victory over the two pretenders from Durazzo, her husband’s father, Nikephoros Bryennios, and Basilakios. She then proceeds to trace the career of the famous Norman leader, Robert Guiscard, and the causes of his war against the Byzantine Empire, the first attack of the Latin West against the Greek East and the forerunner of the Fourth Crusade. The second book is devoted to her father’s revolt against the Emperor Nikephoros Botaneiates and his seizure of the throne. With the third book begins his reign. She describes the Norman invasion, how Guiscard crossed the Adriatic, besieged and took Durazzo, the historic town which has played so large a part in the Balkan history of the last seven years, and which was then the western gate of the Byzantine Empire, just as in the days of Catullus and Plautus it had been the “tavern of the Adriatic.” In the sixth book we have Guiscard’s second expedition and death at the Cephalonian village, which, under the name of Phiskardo, still recalls the end of that famous Norman leader. Here is related the legend that in the opposite island of Ithake there was a ruined city, called Jerusalem; and thus was fulfilled the prophesy that Guiscard should die when he had reached Jerusalem. Similar prophecies were similarly accomplished in the case of Pope Silvester II, who died after celebrating mass in the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and in that of our King Henry IV,[541] dying, as Shakespeare has narrated, in the Jerusalem chamber. Next follow the military operations in Asia Minor and against the Cumans, or “Scythians,” as the classically-educated writer calls them, in Europe. Then, after some account of the affairs of Crete and Cyprus and of the Dalmatian revolt, the tenth book treats of the heresy of Neilos, and introduces us to the First Crusade.

At this point the chief interest of this history for modern readers begins, for Anna Comnena is writing of a movement of world-wide importance, and her descriptions of the Crusading chiefs are those of an eyewitness. The eleventh book deals with the progress of the Crusaders in Asia—the capture of Nice, the foundation of the Principality of Antioch and of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the accession of Baldwin I, the quarrel of Alexios and Bohemond about Antioch and Laodicea, and Bohemond’s strangely contrived journey to Italy in a coffin with the odorous carcase of a dead cock. Books twelve and thirteen describe his second invasion of Albania, his siege of Durazzo, and his second pact of vassalage with Alexios, who gave him Antioch as a fief for life with the County of Edessa. The fourteenth book records his death, the siege of Tyre and the Turkish war, and gives an interesting account of the Bogomile heretics at Philippopolis. The last book is also partly occupied with their treatment by the Emperor, and ends with a somewhat mutilated description of the death of Alexios. Thus, as a later Greek epigram expressed it, the Alexiad ended when Alexios died.

As its name implies, the Alexiad is a biography rather than a history, with the Emperor as the central figure, placed in what his admiring daughter regarded as the most favourable light, but what, according to modern ideas, is sometimes quite the reverse. The Imperial biographer was well aware that she would be accused of partiality, and is at considerable pains to repudiate in advance the charge of filial prejudice. She specially pleads her unbiased judgment in dealing with her father’s career, declares that she does not like to praise her relatives or to repeat scandal, adapts Aristotle’s famous saying about Plato by averring that, if her father is dear to her, truth is dearer, and sums up her aim as “love of her father and love of truth[954].” She admits that he had some defects, that he stammered[955] and found difficulty in pronouncing the letter R; and she candidly avows that he was merely an instrument in the hand of his mother, Anna Dalassene, an excellent woman of business, when he first ascended the throne[956]. But she is apt to forget her precept of impartiality when she comes to describe his achievements. With characteristic exaggeration she exclaims that, “not even if another[542] Demosthenes and all the chorus of the orators, not even if all the Academy and all the Stoic philosophers combined together to extol the services of Alexios, could they attain unto them”; and in another passage she asks, “what echo of Demosthenes or whirling words of Polemon, why, not all the muses of Homer, could worthily hymn his successes; I should say that not Plato himself, nor all the Porch and Academy combined together could have philosophised in a manner such as befitted his soul[957].”

She tells us that her father hated not only lying but the appearance of lying; yet, she naïvely applauds his sharp practice in sending letters to Bohemond’s officers, in which he thanked them for letters to himself which they had never written, in order to compromise them with their chief; she acknowledges without a blush how he deceived the Crusaders at the taking of Nice; and she describes with admiration how he invited the Bogomile heretic, Basil, to a private colloquy, telling him that he admired his virtue and urging him to make a full statement of his doctrine, while all the time a secretary, concealed behind a curtain, took down the statements which fell from the unsuspecting heresiarch’s mouth and which were used as evidence against him to send him to the stake. Such tactics only evoke from the complaisant daughter the laudatory comment, that her father’s theological skill in dealing with heretics like the Manichæans should earn him the title of “the thirteenth apostle[958].” Modern readers will agree with Finlay that “even Anna’s account makes the Bogomilian a noble enthusiast, and her father a mean traitor.”

Yet Alexios was, in spite of these moral defects, a brave soldier, who, however, usually followed the plan of gaining a victory by craft, if craft were possible. His character was a combination, not uncommon in the Near East, of courage and intrigue; he was no coward, but he was a born schemer, rather than a statesman. Like many Byzantine rulers, he had a weakness for theology—a dangerous taste in an autocrat—and his daughter describes with admiration how he lectured the heretic Neilos on the doctrine of the Trinity, and how he ordered a monk named Zygavenos to compile a list and refutation of all the heresies, under the title of “A Dogmatic Panoply.” He had the politician’s love for an immediate success, rather than for a lasting benefit, although he was, as his daughter tells us, fond of playing chess, in which immediate success counts for less than a far-seeing plan. Thus, to obtain the temporary advantage of securing the aid of the Venetian fleet against the Normans, he gave the Venetians enormous commercial concessions[543] throughout his Empire, which were one of the causes, 120 years later, of the Latin capture of Constantinople. The policy of Alexios Comnenos has had disciples in Southern and South-Eastern Europe in our own day; but the most successful Greek statesman of our time attained his wonderful triumphs by frankness and honesty of purpose, to which the Byzantine Emperor was a stranger.

But Anna’s partiality is not limited to her father; it extends to other members of her family, except, of course, her brother, the Emperor John II, who was, in reality, an excellent sovereign. Although she despised her husband’s weakness in not seizing the throne, she praises in Homeric language his skill as an archer, and devotes a long passage to the learning and wisdom, the strength and physical beauty, which made “my Cæsar,” as she affectionately calls him, what Achilles was among the Homeric Greeks. Like Achilles, he was a fine soldier, but, like not a few soldiers of Byzantium, he was also a student and a writer, who composed his history at the command of that “most learned mind and intelligence” as he called his wife’s mother, the Empress Irene[959]. Of that lady her daughter writes with enthusiasm, comparing her with Athena, and praising her for her zealous study of the branch of science which was most appreciated at the Byzantine Court—dogmatic theology. The Empress, so her daughter tells us, did not like publicity; she preferred to stay at home and read religious books; and, when she was obliged to perform any Court function, she blushed like a girl[960].

Of her fiancé, the young Constantine, the Princess writes with an enthusiasm which seems to come from the heart. She describes him as “a living statue,” and says that “if any one merely looked at him, he would speak of him as a descendant of the fabled age of gold”; and she confesses that after all these years the memory of this youth filled her eyes with tears. To the beauty of his mother, the Dowager-Empress Maria, by whom she was in part educated, she has dedicated a glowing passage, in which she likens her to a cypress in stature, with a skin white as snow—in short, a statue such as neither Phidias nor Apelles ever produced, “for such a harmony of all the members was never yet seen in any human body.” Thus, the Court circle of the reign of Alexios Comnenos, if we may believe his daughter, was a galaxy of that beauty which modern society journals assume to be the attribute of royal ladies.

It must not, however, be imagined that Anna Comnena, because she wrote like a Princess and a daughter, is not a valuable historian. She possessed a first-hand knowledge of the events of a large part of her father’s reign; and, as she tells us, she drew her information about the[544] events, of which she had not been an eyewitness, largely from her father’s fellow-comrades in war, men like George Palaiologos, the defender of Durazzo, as well as from her father himself. Writing in the reign of Manuel I, when no one was interested in flattering the long-dead Alexios, she could claim, like Tacitus, that the time had arrived to describe his distant reign “sine irâ et studio.” From her birth and position, she possessed what mere scribes in all ages lack, an intimate acquaintance with the men who are really making history. She knew courts, and, a princess of the blood royal herself, she made the frank admission that even her father, against whom there were constant plots, was no exception to the rule that subjects usually dislike their sovereigns[961].

She had access to State papers, which to the ordinary literary man would have remained inaccessible for generations. Thus, she gives us the ipsissima verba of the golden bull appointing the Empress-mother, Anna Dalassene, regent in the absence of her son, and the text of her father’s letter to the Emperor Henry IV, his “most Christian brother,” urging him to attack Guiscard in Southern Italy, offering him money, and suggesting a marriage between one of Henry’s daughters and his own nephew. These curious pieces are of interest as a specimen of the Byzantine Chancery’s epistolary style; and we note the care with which the Byzantine Emperor, who regarded himself as the sole heir of all the Cæsars, avoided giving the Imperial title to this Western “brother,” whom Anna describes by the Latinised form rex, while reserving for her father the more dignified title of basileús[962]. She gives, too, the full text of the lengthy agreement made between Alexios and Bohemond in 1108, which she probably had from her husband, who negotiated that treaty—a document of much value for the historical geography of the Holy Land during the Latin domination[963]. She has apparently used for her account of Guiscard a now lost Latin Chronicle, perhaps the work of the Archdeacon John of Bari, which was employed by William the Apulian as material for his Latin poem on that Norman chief, for she quotes the envoy of the Bishop of Bari as having described to her an incident in the campaign of Guiscard, at which he was present[964].

She had access, also, to the simple and unvarnished memoirs of retired veterans, and was therefore well posted in military affairs. Her accurate use of technical military terms would do credit to a war-correspondent of the scientific school, while the glowing rhetoric of some of her descriptions would win the admiration of the modern descriptive[545] writer, who, not being allowed to see anything of the operations, has to fall back upon the scenery. As examples of her military phraseology[965] may be cited the words ἐξώπολον for the circle outside the camp, κοπός (or σκοπός) used in soldiers’ slang to designate their “fatigue parties,” and ἀρχοντόπουλοι, a term originally applied to the corps of soldiers’ sons first formed by her father, but extended in modern Greek to mean the children of any notables. She twice uses the technical term for a galley, and gives an elaborate description of the cross-bow, then an unknown weapon to the Greeks. More interesting still, she allows us to read, imbedded in her severely literary Greek, occasional specimens of the vulgar idiom used by the ordinary people in their conversation. Thus, she has preserved the popular lines about the successful conspiracy which placed her father on the throne; she cites a satiric verse about him during the Cuman war, and alludes to the comic song, sung in the vernacular, during the conveyance to execution of Michael Anemas, who had tried to kill him[966]. She so far forgets the dignity of historical narrative as to perpetrate two atrocious puns.

We find in her pages, too, some of the modern geographical names which had already, in popular speech, replaced the classical denominations for various Balkan mountains, rivers and towns. Thus, like her husband, she uses the modern name “Vardar” for the famous Macedonian river, instead of the classical “Axios”; she calls the Homeric “Ossa” by its present title of “Kissavos”; she describes the poetic “Peneios” as the “Salamvrias,” and uses the contemporary term “Dyrrachion” (whence comes the modern Italian “Durazzo” and the modern Serbian “Dratch”), as well as the older form “Epidamnos.” She apologetically asks no one to blame her for using such a vulgar name as “Vojussa,” with which the war has made us so familiar, for the classic river “Aoos[967].”

As a rule she adopts an exaggeratedly lofty style. Just as it was said of Dr Johnson, that he would have made “little fishes talk like whales,” so the learned Princess makes a man address a crew of boatmen in the language of Homer[968]. Her contemporary, the annalist Zonaras, says of her that “she employed an accurately Attic Greek style,” and that “she had applied herself to books and to learned men and did not merely hold incidental converse with them.” But she frequently descends to quite every-day words, with which students of such mediæval Greek works as the Chronicle of the Morea and of the ordinary language of to-day are familiar. Thus, she describes an army, just as the Chronicler described it, as φοσσάτον; the French forms “liege” and “sergeants” are[546] scarcely disguised under her Greek renderings λίζιος and σεργέντιοι. The classic word for “plains” (πεδία) becomes, in her prose, κάμπαι; the poetic τέμπη assume (as in Attaleiates) the guise of κλεισούραι, while κουλᾶ thrice displaces the classic ἀκρόπολις; φάμουσα, the vulgar word for “libels,” has crept into her pages; and πιγκέρνης has supplanted οἰνοχόος as the term for the court butler[969]. She remarks that those who led a nomadic life were called in “the common dialect, ‘Vlachoi’”; she quotes the popular Byzantine mot, that “the Scythians (i.e. Cumans) missed seeing May by a single day,” because they were defeated on April 29, and makes her father, when Bohemond at first rejected his presents, humorously apply to himself the current saying, “Let a bad thing return to its own master” (αὐθέντην)[970].

One of the most interesting features of Anna Comnena’s history is the aspect which the First Crusade assumes in her pages. To Western historians the Crusades appeared as, on the whole, a great material benefit to Europe, quite apart from their religious and moral motives and results. But we learn from this Byzantine Princess, herself an eye-witness of the Crusaders’ arrival in her father’s capital, how this religious movement struck the Eastern Christians. The incursion of vast masses of more or less undisciplined soldiers into the Byzantine Empire naturally inspired alarm in the mind of its ruler, who feared—and the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the redemption of the Holy Land to the capture of Constantinople three generations later justified his fears—that the pilgrims might be tempted to occupy his territories on the way. East and West rarely thoroughly understand one another; and the mutual reproaches of bad faith, which Greek historians have flung at the Crusaders and Latin historians at Alexios, were probably largely due, as is usually the case when two different nationalities quarrel, to a misunderstanding of one another’s mentality.

Alexios could scarcely feel reassured, when he heard that one of the Crusading chiefs was that same Bohemond who had fought against him in Thessaly, and whose father had sought a shadowy pretext to invade his Empire and capture Durazzo, “the Metropolis of Illyricum[971].” Anna tells us what were the Emperor’s feelings when he first heard the news of the forthcoming Crusade and the approaching advent of vast Frankish armies. “He feared,” she wrote, “their attack, knowing their unrestrainable dash, their changeable and easily influenced minds, and all the other qualities, or concomitant attributes, of the French character.... For the French race is extremely hot-blooded and keen, and whenever[547] it has once started on any course, impossible to check.” She accused the Crusaders of treating treaties like “scraps of paper” and of inordinate love of lucre; “for the Latin race,” she wrote, “is in other respects most devoted to money.” In her eyes these “barbarians,” as she called them in the contemptuous language of a highly cultivated Greek, were actuated by motives very different from the ostensible aim of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidels. “In appearance,” she remarked, “they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but in truth they wanted to oust the Emperor from his throne and seize the capital.” She noticed the sudden ups and downs of the French character, rapidly going from one extreme to the other, and pathetically described how one cause of her father’s rheumatism in his feet was the constant exertion to which they subjected that patient monarch, by worrying him with their requests all day and all night, so that he could not even find time to take his meals[972]!

In these circumstances, it was perhaps hardly to be expected that he should be very enthusiastic about taking an active part in the Crusade, although he more than once ransomed captured Crusaders. Nor was his enthusiasm increased by such acts of spoliation as the erection into a Latin County and a Latin Principality respectively of Edessa, still governed at the time of the Latin conquest by a Greek governor, and of Antioch, which only fourteen years earlier had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. Again, no sovereign, and not least the ceremonious Emperor of Byzantium, could have been expected to put up with such an affront as that described by Sir Walter Scott after Anna Comnena, when a boorish Crusading noble seated himself on the Emperor’s seat. Yet Alexios took this unwarranted act of rudeness with great tact and dignity, even though it had been accompanied by an insulting remark about “a yokel remaining alone seated while so many nobles were standing in his presence.” Indeed, he not only deigned to ask who this unmannerly churl might be, but gave him some excellent advice, derived from long personal experience, of the safest way to wage war against the Turks. The arrogant Frank paid with his life at the battle of Dorylæum for his neglect of the Emperor’s well-meant warning[973].

The literary Princess was not, however, so far led away by her national prejudices as to see no good in the Crusaders. She said of a very good Greek horseman, that “one would have thought him to be not a Greek, but of Norman origin,” so well did he ride. Indeed, the incapacity of the French to fight on foot struck her so forcibly that she[548] remarked: “A Frenchman on horseback is unrestrainable and would ride through the walls of Babylon, but once dismounted he is at the mercy of the first comer.” For that reason her father bade his archers kill the horses of the Western cavaliers, for then the riders would be helpless[974]. She specially eulogises the honesty of the Comte de St Gilles, Isangeles, as she calls him, who “differed in all things from all the Latins, as much as the sun differs from the stars[975].” While she expresses the horror felt by her fellow-countrymen at the Church militant as represented by the fighting Latin clergy, armed with shield and spear[976], in her character of Guiscard, who did so much harm to her father, she praises his courage and strategic ability, and her description of Bohemond’s personal appearance is so detailed and so flattering that it may have been prompted by a very feminine motive. “No such man, whether barbarian or Greek,” she wrote of him, “was ever seen in the land of the Greeks (for he was a marvel to behold and a wonder to be narrated)[977].” Of the warlike wife of Guiscard, Gaïta, she says with mixed admiration and alarm, that “she was a Pallas, but not an Athena,” skilled in battle but not in arts, and terrible when armed with her lance and piercing voice.

Students of Balkan geography are no less indebted to Anna Comnena than are historians of the First Crusade. Her pages are full of the names of places, rendered household words to us by the events of the last seven years. On this subject she had access to a very high authority, her father, who possessed a minute knowledge of both coasts of the Adriatic with their harbours, a list of which he sent to his Admiral, and with the prevailing winds of that turbulent sea. Alexios was, in fact, an Adriatic specialist, as he would be described in the jargon of to-day. No writer on the historical geography of Durazzo could afford to neglect our author, who minutely describes the origin, topography, and contemporary condition of that famous town. She tells us that at that time most of the inhabitants were colonists from Amalfi and Venice; and she describes the walls of that now squalid little Albanian town as at that time so broad that more than four horsemen could safely ride abreast along them, while there stood a bronze equestrian statue over the eastern gate. She talks of the old Bulgarian capitals of “Pliskova” and “Great Pristhlava” (Pliska and Prêslav); she narrates the origin of Philippopolis, where she herself had lived for some time; and she makes one interesting allusion to the comparatively recent Norman Conquest of England in the passage, in which she says that Bohemond was aided in his second[549] invasion of Albania by men from “Thule” (Britain)[978], which she also mentions as furnishing the Varangian guard. We know from a contemporary British historian how glad the English exiles were to fight in Greece against the Normans, and how Alexios built a town for them at Civetot, the modern Guemlek, on the Asiatic coast near Constantinople. We hear, too, how 300 of them defended Kastoria.

She uses the correct word jupan (or “count”) for the Serbian chieftains[979], but designates both King Michael (who was the first ruler of Dioklitia to bear the royal title and whose dominions included Scutari, Montenegro, the Herzegovina and the coast), and his son and co-regent, Bodin, as Exarchs of the Dalmatians[980]. She mentions also the contemporary “great” jupan of the other and inland Serbian state of Rascia, the modern sandjak of Novibazar, Vukan, describing him as “wielding the entire authority over the Dalmatians,” of whom she says that, “although they were Dalmatians, still they were Christians.” It is interesting to find in this passage that one of his nephews already bore the name of Urosh, so famous in the later Serbian dynasty of Nemanja, which etymologists derive from the Magyar word úr, meaning “lord.” The identification of the Serbians with “Dalmatians” would tend to prove the predominantly Serbian character of Southern Dalmatia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. She was acquainted, too, with the pirates, who infested the mouth of the river Narenta, and whom she twice mentions under the name of “Vetones.”

The name of the Albanians was known to Anna Comnena, as to her predecessors, Attaleiates and Skylitzes, the first Byzantine authors who applied it to that mysterious race. She notices the exclusive admiration felt by the Albanians, as by the modern British school-boy, for physical prowess, and remarks that in that country bodily strength and size were the principal requirements that made a man a suitable candidate for the purple and the diadem[981]. In the case, however, of that tall but inane guardsman, Prince William of Wied, gigantic size was not sufficient to ensure the loyalty of the Albanians. Anna Comnena is also the first writer who mentions the existence of the Wallachs[982] in Thessaly, soon to be called “Great Wallachia” by her successor Niketas, and “Wallachia” by Benjamin of Tudela, at a place called Ezeva near Mount Ossa. Notices of this kind are what make her history valuable to us rather than the classical reminiscences, which to her and her contemporaries were doubtless its chief merit. She complained of having to insert “barbarous[550] names[983],” which “befouled” her historical style, in her polished narrative, just as some modern imitators of Cicero objected to employing words for recent inventions unknown to the Roman orator. She cited as an excuse the example of Homer, who disdained not to mention the Bœotians and certain barbarous islands for the sake of historical accuracy. Fortunately, the more plastic Greek language is usually quite equal to this difficulty, and even the uncouth names of French Crusaders and Serbian jupani are admitted to the honours of the Greek declensions by this skilled writer, of whom a contemporary said that, if the ancients had known her, “they would have added a fourth Grace and a tenth Muse.”

The time has come when it is no longer the fashion to decry Byzantine history and to deny the name of literature to the writings of the mediæval Greeks. Finlay rehabilitated the Byzantine Empire from the contempt which Gibbon had thrown upon it; in Greece a succession of modern writers, beginning with Paparregopoulos, in his great History of the Hellenic Nation, have reminded his countrymen that Greek history is a whole, and that contemporary Hellas owes as much, or more, to the great figures of the Middle Ages as to the heroes of classical antiquity; in France MM. Schlumberger and Diehl have combined, in truly French fashion, great erudition with great literary skill in dealing with the “Byzantine epic” of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and with the female figures that in various ages filled the Court of Constantinople. Of these Anna Comnena is perhaps the most curious. We are too much accustomed to regard Byzantine personages as merely so many stained-glass portraits, all decorations and angles, instead of men and women of like passions with ourselves. Anna Comnena was, in her loves and her dislikes, her vanities and her ambitions, very much a woman. Beneath her Attic prose, acquired by study and polished by art, there transpire the feminine feelings, which lend a peculiar turn to her history. Among the sovereigns, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, and ecclesiastics who form the corpus of the Byzantine historians, she is the only woman.

AUTHORITIES

5. Figures Byzantines. Par Charles Diehl. Deuxième Série. Paris: Armand Colin, 1908.

FOOTNOTES

[1] XL. 5.

[2] Plutarch, Sulla, 13.

[3] Two Athenian inscriptions (Böckh, C.I.G., I. 409) allude to this restoration.

[4] Plutarch, Pompey, 28.

[5] Epist. II. 2, 45.

[6] Epistolæ ad Diversos, IV. 5, 4.

[7] Paparregopoulos, Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους (ed. 4), II. 440, inclines however to the view that their enfranchisement was of earlier date.

[8] Juvenal, I. 73, X. 170. Tacitus, Annales, II. 53-55, 85; III. 38, 63, 69; IV. 13, 30, 43; V. 10.

[9] Mustoxidi, Delle Cose Corciresi, pp. 403, 404, xi.

[10] In 1888 an inscription, containing this proclamation, was found at the Bœotian Karditza. Karolides, note 31 to Paparregopoulos, op. cit. II. 448.

[11] Suetonius, Nero, 19, 22-24.

[12] Tacitus, Historiæ, II. 8, 9.

[13] Pausanias, X. 34.

[14] Ibid. VII. 20.

[15] Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. III. 4; IV. 23; Liber Pontificalis, I. 125, 131, 155.

[16] The passages of Zosimos (I. 29), who says Ἀθηναῖοι μὲν τοῦ τείχους ἐπεμελοῦντο μηδεμιᾶς, ἐξότε Σύλλας τοῦτο διέφθειρεν, ἀξιωθέντος φροντίδος, and of Zonaras (XII. 23) seem to support Finlay’s view that this was not a new wall. Paparregopoulos, op. cit., II. 490, agrees with it.

[17] Hertzberg: Die Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, III. 79.

[18] Ἄλλος μετά τινος σαφηνείας Θουκυδίδης, μάλιστά γε ἐν ταῖς Σκυθικαῖς ἱστορίαις.—Photios, Cod. 82.

[19] Historici Græci Minores, I. 186-89.

[20] Zonaras, XII. 26.

[21] Trebellius Pollio, Gallien, 13.

[22] Historici Græci Minores, I. 438-40.

[23] A Greek inscription alluding to Jovian may still be read over the west door, but Mustoxidi (Delle Cose Corciresi, pp. 406-7) differs from Spon and Montfaucon in thinking that some other Jovian is meant.

[24] In Eutropium, II. 212 et seq.

[25] Procopios, De bello Vand., I. ch. 22.

[26] Hertzberg thinks it was the bronze statue of Athena Promachos which was carried off. But Gregorovius’ view (Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, I. 49), that given in the text, seems more probable.

[27] Agathias, II. chs. 30, 31.

[28] III. 217 (ed. Bonn).

[29] Menander in Hist. Gr. Min. II. 98.

[30] Hist. Eccles. VI. 10.

[31] Leunclavius, Jus Græco-Romanum, I. 278.

[32] The latest study of this Chronicle is by N. A. Bees in Βυζαντίς, I. 57-105.

[33] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηναίων, I. 36-72; Μνημεῖα, I. 41-46.

[34] Schlumberger, Sigillographie de l’Empire Byzantin, 172.

[35] III. 53.

[36] Neroutsos, Χριστιανικαὶ Ἀθῆναι in Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστ. καὶ Ἐθν. Ἑταιρίας, III. 30.

[37] Constantine Porphyrogenitus, III. 217-20.

[38] Ibid. III. 220-24.

[39] Kedrenos (ed. Bonn), II. 170.

[40] Mustoxidi, Delle Cose Corciresi, 409.

[41] Constantine Porphyrogenitus, III. 243.

[42] The two large tombs in the crypt at Hosios Loukas are according to tradition those of Romanos II and Theophano who is known to English readers as the eponymous heroine of Mr Frederic Harrison’s novel. Leo Diakonos (p. 49) calls her “the Laconian”; some say she was of low origin, others of a noble family of Constantinople. I noticed a great number of Hebrew inscriptions at Mistra, near Sparta.

[43] Kedrenos, II. 475, 482, 516, 529; Zonaras (ed. Leipzig), IV. 123; Early Travels in Palestine, 32.

[44] An absolutely historical fact, because the Princes of Achaia claimed to be suzerains of the two Dukes of Athens and Naxos.

[45] G. de Vinsauf, Itin. Ricc. I, II. 24.

[46] Athenische Mitteilungen, XXXIV. 234-36.

[47] Niketas Choniates (ed. Bonn), pp. 840-42.

[48] Geoffroy de Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople (ed. Bouchet), I. 226-32.

[49] Pitra, Analecta sacra et classica, VII. 90, 93.

[50] Marino Sanudo apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 101.

[51] Μόνη ἔμβασις, Monemvasia.

[52] Marino Sanudo apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 102.

[53] The Chronicle of the Morea, p. 296.

[54] Sanudo apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 108.

[55] Βυζαντινὰ χρονικά, II. 427.

[56] Μοῦλος is still Moreote Greek for “a bastard”; in the first part of the word we perhaps have the French gars.

[57] Cantacuzene (ed. Bonn), bk. IV. ch. 13.

[58] Mazaris apud Boissonade, Anecdota Græca, III. 164-78.

[59] Finlay, IV. 267; Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 131-33; Rev. F. Vyvyan Jago in the Archæologia, XVIII. 83 sqq. I am indebted to the courtesy of the Rev. S. Gregory, the present rector of Landulph, for the following copy of the brass plate there:

Here lyeth the body of Theodoro Paleologus
of Pesaro in Italye, descended from ye Imperyall
lyne of ye last Christian Emperors of Greece,
being the Sonne of Camilio ye Sonne of Prosper
the Sonne of Theodoro the Sonne of John ye
Sonne of Thomas, second brother to Constantine
Paleologus the 8th of that name, and last of
yt lyne yt raygned in Constantinople until subdewed
by the Turkes; who married with Mary
ye daughter of William Balls of Hadlye in
Souffolke gent, and had issue 5 children: Theodoro,
John, Ferdinando, Maria, and Dorothy & departed
this lyfe at Clyfton ye 21st January, 1636.

[60] Geschichte Griechenlands vom Beginn des Mittelalters, in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXV. 212, 321, LXXXVI. 24.

[61] Voyaige d’Oultremer, p. 89.

[62] Geschichte Griechenlands, I. 138.

[63] Finlay, I. 338, note.

[64] Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους, V. 300 (4th ed.).

[65] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, V. 155-61.

[66] L. 8096.

[67] P. 275.

[68] L. 8469.

[69] P. 160.

[70] The form Abarinos does not occur in the French, Italian, and Aragonese versions of the Chronicle, because the Franks always called the place port de Junch, or Zonklon, from the rushes which grew there—a name very frequent, in a more or less corrupt form, in the Venetian documents of the thirteenth century, e.g. in that locus classicus for Frankish names the list of depredations by pirates in Greece drawn up in 1278 (Tafel und Thomas, Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abth. II. B. XIV. 237).

[71] Pp. 61, 66, 68 (ed. Burckhardt).

[72] Geogr. III. 16.

[73] Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea, I. 188.

[74] Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, II. i. 332.

[75] Ed. Predelli, II. 231, 248.

[76] Tafel und Thomas, Fontes Rer. Austr. pt. II. vol. XII. 464-88.

[77] Albericus Trium Fontium, Chronicon, II. 439.

[78] A. Dandolo, Chronicon Venetum, apud Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, XII. 335; L. de Monacis, Chronicon, p. 143; Magno, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 179.

[79] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, III. 61.

[80] Innocentii III Epistolæ, XI. 111-113, 238, 240, 252, 256.

[81] Henri de Valenciennes (ed. Paulin Paris), ch. 35.

[82] Sanudo, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 136.

[83] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, ll. 8071-8092.

[84] Schlumberger, Numismatique de l’Orient latin, p. 382.

[85] Sathas in Annuaire des études grecques, vol. XIII. 122-133.

[86] D’Arbois de Jubainville, Voyage paléographique dans le département de l’Aube, pp. 332-340.

[87] Muntaner, ch. 240; Thomas, Diplomatarium, I. 111; Predelli, Commemoriali, I. 198.

[88] Hist. de’ suoi Tempi, VIII. 50.

[89] Raynaldi, Annales ecclesiastici, V. 22, 23.

[90] Thomas, Dipiomatarium, I. 120-122.

[91] Çurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, bk. X. ch. 30.

[92] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, ll. 8086-8092; Le Livre de la Conqueste, pp. 1, 274.

[93] Rubió y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia, p. 309, n. 2; a much more probable explanation, derived from the word bort (“bastard”), than that of Ducange (note to Cinnamus, p. 392), who says that he was so called because our Black Prince had conferred on him the freedom of Bordeaux.

[94] Rubió in Anuari de l’Institut (1907), 253.

[95] La Grèce continentale, 217; Recherches historiques, I. 409.

[96] Ibid., I. 409-10.

[97] St Genois, Droits primitifs ... de Haynaut, I. 337.

[98] Ibid., I. 215.

[99] Mélanges historiques: choix de Documents, III. 240

[100] Lettere di Collegio (ed. Giomo), p. 66.

[101] Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 178.

[102] Idem, apud Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXV. 321, 360. Cf. J. H. S. XXVIII. 238.

[103] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, II. 166.

[104] Lampros, Ἔγγραφα (Documents), pp. 305, 324-27.

[105] Lampros, Ὁ τελευταῖος κόμης τῶν Σαλώνων (The Last Count of Salona).

[106] Gregorovius, Briefe, pp. 309, 310.

[107] “Nicolai de Marthono Liber,” in Revue de l’Orient Latin, III. 657.

[108] The earlier fourteenth-century traveller, Ludolf von Suchem, who mentions Athens, did not actually visit it.

[109] Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορικῆς καὶ Ἐθνολογικῆς Ἑταιρίας (Report of the Historical and Ethnological Society), v. 827.

[110] Predelli, Commemoriali, III. 309.

[111] Cornelio Magni, Relazione, pp. 14, 49.

[112] Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, II. i. 276.

[113] Michael Laskaris, the Athenian patriot of the fourteenth century, in K. Rhanghaves’ play, The Duchess of Athens, is unhappily a poetic anachronism.

[114] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας (Memorials of Greek History), III. 427.

[115] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων (Greek Remembrancer), new series, I. 55.

[116] The anonymous traveller (?Domenico of Brescia) who describes Athens about 1466 speaks of the city as “ultimamente murata.” (Mitteilungen des K. deutschen Arch. Instituts, XXIV. 74.)

[117] Tozzetti, Relazione di alcuni viaggi fatti in ... Toscana, V. 439, 440. This letter, dated “Kyriaceo die, iv Kal. Ap.,” fixes the year of the second visit, because March 29 fell on a Sunday in 1444, and we know from another letter, written before June 1444, that Cyriacus left Chalkis for Chios, where the letter about Athens was written, on “v Kal. Mart.” of that year.

[118] Jahrbuch der K. preussischen Kunstsammlungen, IV. 81.

[119] Studi e documenti di Storia e di Diritto, XV. 337.

[120] Jorga in Revue de l’Orient Latin, VIII. 78.

[121] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα (Memorials), III. 141. The legend places the scene in a still more romantic spot than Megara—the monastery of Daphni, the mausoleum of the French dukes.

[122] A contemporary note in MS., No. 103 of the Liturgical section of the National Library at Athens, fixes the date as “May 4, 1456, Friday”; but in that year June 4, not May 4, was on a Friday, which agrees with the date of June 1456 given by Phrantzes, the Chronicon breve, the Historia Patriarchica, and Gaddi.

[123] Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane, XXVIII. 203.

[124] De Rossi, Inscriptiones Christianæ Urbis Romæ, II. i. 374.

[125] Spon, Voyage, II. 155, 172.

[126] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων (Greek Remembrancer), new series, I. 216-18.

[127] The portraits of the six Florentine Dukes of Athens in Fanelli’s Atene Attica are unfortunately imaginary. On the other hand, the figure of Joshua in one of the frescoes at Geraki in Lakonia seems to be intended to portray one of the Frankish barons of that Castle.

[128] Ἱστορία τῆς Πόλεως Ἀθηνῶν κατὰ τοὺς μέσους αἰῶνας (Ἐν Ἀθήναις, Κ. Μπὲκ’ 1904-6.)

[129] Barcelona, L’Avenç, 1906. Cf. Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans (1907-8, 1911, 1913-14). Estudis Universitaris Catalans, VIII. (1915).

[130] Vols. XXVII. 3-93, 380-456, 555-634, 771-852; XXVIII. 154-212.

[131] Lampros, op. cit., II. 729; Παρνασσός, VII. 23.

[132] Cod. Palat. 226, f. 122; Lampros, op. cit., I. 421, note.

[133] Pressutti, Regesta Honorii III, II. 304; Les Registres d’Urbain IV, III. 426; Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορικῆς καὶ Ἐθνολογικῆς Ἑταιρίας, II. 28; Les Registres de Clément IV, I. 214, 245.

[134] Lampros, op. cit., III. 119.

[135] Catalunya a Grecia, pp. 42, 53.

[136] Catalunya a Grecia, pp. 50, 91.

[137] “Geschichte Griechenlands,” in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 18, 19; Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 475; Anuari (1911).

[138] Lampros, op. cit., p. 344.

[139] Ibid., pp. 234-6, 238.

[140] Ibid., p. 344.

[141] Ibid., pp. 279, 350.

[142] Ibid., p. 335.

[143] Ibid., p. 283.

[144] Ibid., p. 315.

[145] Ibid., pp. 240, 282, 330.

[146] Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, II. 156, note 1.

[147] Rubió y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia, p. 476.

[148] Op. cit., pp. 82-8.

[149] Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορικῆς καὶ Ἐθνολογικῆς Ἑταιρίας, V. 824-7.

[150] Revue de l’Orient Latin, III. 647-53, 656.

[151] Catalunya a Grecia, pp. 57, 63.

[152] Predelli, Commemoriali, III. 206, 208; Hopf, Chroniques, p. 229; Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, II. i. 257; Gregorovius, Briefe aus der “Corrispondenza Acciajoli,” p. 308; Chalkokondyles, pp. 145, 213.

[153] Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane, XXVII. 430-1.

[154] Op. cit., II. 747-52; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, I. 43-56.

[155] Op. cit., III. 407-9; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, I. 216-24.

[156] Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane, XXVIII. 203.

[157] Μνημεῖα τῆς Ἱστορίας τῶν Ἀθηναίων, II. 153.

[158] p. 385.

[159] p. 520.

[160] p. 124.

[161] Elogiographus, 300-1.

[162] Loysii Neroczi de Pictis nomine Neroczi eius patris pro venditione cuiusdam domus.

[163] R. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Aul. della Repubblica, Balie, no. 29 c. 67.

[164] Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, II. i. 292.

[165] p. 38.

[166] Apud Pagnini, Della Decima, II. 251.

[167] V. 28.

[168] Sauger, Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs, p. 65.

[169] See The Mad Duke of Naxos.

[170] See The Last Venetian Islands in the Ægean.

[171] Geschichte Griechenlands, apud Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 166; Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 482; Veneto-Byzantinische Analekten, p. 414.

[172] Les Ducs de l’Archipel, p. 13, in the Venetian Miscellanea, vol. IV.

[173] Sanuto, Diarii, VIII. 328, 337, 355, 366.

[174] Ibid., XI. 393, 394, 705.

[175] Ibid., II. 701.

[176] Ibid.

[177] Hopf, Gozzadini, apud Ersch und Gruber, op. cit., LXXVI. 425; LXXXVI. 166.

[178] Sanuto, Diarii, XII. 22, 175, 503.

[179] Sanuto, Diarii, XI. 450, 525, 748; XII. 175; XX. 354, 356, 376.

[180] Ibid., XVII. 35.

[181] Ibid., XXIV. 380, 384, 387-8.

[182] Ibid., XXIV. 467, 596, 645; XXV. 158, 185.

[183] Stavrakes, Στατιστικὴ τοῦ πληθυσμοῦ τῆς Κρήτης, 183 sqq.; Pashley, Travels in Crete, II. 326.

[184] Paparregopoulos, Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους, V. 3. Cf. Gerland, Histoire de la Noblesse crétoise au Moyen Age.

[185] Cf. Gerola, La dominazione genovese in Creta.

[186] Hopf, in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie, vol. 85, pp. 221-2, 241-3, 312-4; Paparregopoulos, V. 52.

[187] Cf. Gerola, Per la Cronotassi dei vescovi cretesi all’ epoca veneta; Monumenti veneti nell’ isola di Creta, II. 64, 67.

[188] See Pashley, I. 11-17, on this point. He identifies the two places, like Gerola (Mon. ven. I. 17), who derives the name of Canea from λαχανιά (“vegetable garden”), the first syllable being mistaken for the feminine of the article.

[189] Zinkeisen, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches in Europa, IV. 611 et sqq.

[190] Cornelius, Creta Sacra, II. 355.

[191] Pashley, II. 150-156.

[192] Zinkeisen, IV. 629-723.

[193] Pashley, II. 285.

[194] The totall discourse (ed. 1906), pp. 70-83.

[195] Zinkeisen, IV. 789, 808. Like the British Government in 1819, the Turks did not know what Parga was.

[196] To this period belongs the fountain at Candia, described by Pashley (I. 203), and still standing. An inscription on it states that it was erected by Antonio Priuli in 1666, “when the war had been raging for four lustres.”

[197] Zinkeisen, IV. 992.

[198] Paparregopoulos, V. 552.

[199] Childe Harold, IV. 14.

[200] Von Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, VI. 573, VII. 182; Tournefort, Voyage du Levant, I. 62.

[201] Stavrakes, 138 sqq.

[202] Pashley, II. 150-156.

[203] Ibid. I. 54.

[204] Sathas, Ἑλληνικὰ Ἀνέκδοτα, II., Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, 222-300; Κρητικὸν Θέατρον, which includes a comedy, a pastoral tragi-comedy, a tragedy and an imitation of Simeon’s Zeno.

[205] Paparregopoulos, V. 636-38.

[206] Stavrakes, 139-41.

[207] Mustoxidi, Delle Cose Corciresi, pp. 399 and vi.

[208] Ibid. p. 401.

[209] Mustoxidi, p. 441. Aleman belonged to a family from Languedoc, which received the barony of Patras after the Frank conquest of the Morea, and whose name is still borne by the bridge near Thermopylæ, the scene of the heroic fight of 1821.

[210] Idromenos, Συνοπτικὴ Ἱστορία τῆς Κερκύρας, p. 68. There is, however, a document of Philip II of Taranto in favour of the Greek clergy: Marmora, Della Historia di Corfù, p. 223.

[211] Romanos, Ἡ Ἑβραϊκὴ κοινότης τῆς Κερκύρας, Mustoxidi, pp. 443-50.

[212] Mustoxidi, p. 452.

[213] Mustoxidi, pp. 456-64, lx-lxxii.

[214] Finlay, V. 62; Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, I. 315.

[215] This mediæval name, “the black saint,” applied first to a fortress, then to a chapel on the site of the fortress, then (like Negroponte) to the whole island, is said by Saint-Sauveur (Voyage Historique, Littéraire et Pittoresque, II. 339) to have come in with the Tocchi, and to be derived from the black image of the Virgin in the cathedral at Toledo. It occurs, however, in a Neapolitan document of 1343, a Venetian document of 1355, and a Serbian golden bull of 1361 and is mentioned in the French version of the Chronicle of the Morea, probably written between 1333 and 1341. It has now been officially superseded by the classic Levkas.

[216] Hopf, in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 168.

[217] Marmora, Della Historia di Corfù, p. 253.

[218] “Celsam Buthroti accedimus urbem,” III. 293.

[219] Cicero ad Atticum, IV. 8 a; Marmora, p. 431.

[220] Marmora, p. 387.

[221] Ibid. p. 396; Saint-Sauveur, I. 345.

[222] Marmora, p. 420.

[223] Viscount Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, I. 28.

[224] Marmora, p. 312.

[225] Lounzes, Περὶ τῆς πολιτικῆς καταστάσεως τῆς Ἑπτανήσου ἐπὶ Ἑνετῶν, pp. 188-90; Hopf, ubi supra, LXXXVI. 186.

[226] The words are quoted in the Ὁδηγὸς τῆς νήσου Κερκύρας (1902).

[227] Mustoxidi, p. lxvi.

[228] Marmora, pp. 394, 419, 445.

[229] Lounzes, p. 101.

[230] Saint-Sauveur, II. 15-21.

[231] Marmora, p. 369.

[232] Idromenos, p. 87.

[233] Saint-Sauveur, II. 22-31.

[234] Marmora, p. 430.

[235] Lounzes, pp. 178-82; Romanos, Ἡ Ἑβραϊκὴ κοινότης τῆς Κερκύρας; Pinkerton’s Collection of Travels, IX. 4; Marmora, pp. 255, 286, 370, 430, 437. The last writer approvingly says about the Jews, loro non conviene di stabile, che il sepolcro.

[236] Viaro Capodistria, Remarks respectfully submitted to the Consideration of the British Parliament, p. 64.

[237] Marmora, p. 433; Paparregopoulos, Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους (4th ed.), V. 644.

[238] Ibid. V. 530.

[239] Idromenos, Συνοπτικὴ Ἱστορία τῆς Κερκύρας, p. 90, and the same author’s essay Περὶ τῆς ἐν ταῖς Ἰονίοις νήσοις ἐκπαιδεύσεως.

[240] Paparregopoulos, V. 635; Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, p. 127; Νεοελληνικὴ Φιλολογία, pp. 138, 165.

[241] Quirini, Primordia Corcyræ, pp. 167, 168; Mustoxidi, Illustrazioni Corciresi, I. 10, 11.

[242] Marmora, p. 425.

[243] Finlay, V. 284-5; Idromenos, Συνοπτικὴ Ἱστορία τῆς Κερκύρας, pp. 91-3; Paparregopoulos, V. 645-7.

[244] Saint-Sauveur, III. 112, 140, 199, 260, 268, 277.

[245] Jervis, History of the Island of Corfù, p. 125.

[246] Marmora, p. 389.

[247] Hopf, ubi supra, LXXXVI. 186. Sathas, Μνημεῖα, IV. p. xxxvii; Ἑλληνικὰ Ἀνέκδοτα, I. 157-93.

[248] Quoted by Lounzes, p. 63 n.

[249] Saint-Sauveur, III. 8, 91. When, in the sixteenth century, the Cephalonians claimed precedence over Zante, they quoted to the Venetians, in support of their claim, the fact that in the Homeric catalogue the people of Zakynthos are only cited as the subjects of Odysseus (Sathas, Μνημεῖα, IV. p. iv).

[250] Hopf, ubi supra, LXXXVI. 186; Saint-Sauveur, III. 201.

[251] Andreades, Περὶ τῆς οἰκονομικῆς διοικήσεως τῆς Ἑπτανήσου ἐπὶ Βενετοκρατίας (1914).

[252] Lounzes, pp. 83-5; Hopf, ubi supra, LXXXVI. 160, 186; Grivas, Ἱστορία τῆς νήσου Ἰθάκης.

[253] Lounzes, p. 77; Saint-Sauveur, II. 351.

[254] Saint-Sauveur, II. 239-48.

[255] Mrs Dawes, Saint Spiridion, translated from L. S. Brokines’s work Περὶ τῶν ἐτησίως τελουμένων ἐν Κερκύρᾳ λιτανειῶν τοῦ Ἁγίου Σπυρίδωνος. See also Marmora, pp. 261-7.

[256] Ibid. p. 333.

[257] Marmora, pp. 301-12; M. Mustoxidi, Ἱστορικὰ καὶ Φιλολογικὰ Ἀνάλεκτα, 24-44, 83-97; Paparregopoulos, V. 667; Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, 112-18.

[258] Idromenos, Συνοπτικὴ Ἱστορία τῆς Κερκύρας, pp. 24, 80, 94; Marmora, p. 414; Anagrafi dell’ Isola di Corfù, 1761; Daru, Histoire de Venise, V. 213; Saint-Sauveur, II. 154.

[259] One plan is in Jervis, History of the Island of Corfù, p. 126, the other in Marmora, pp. 364-5.

[260] Marmora, p. 345.

[261] Finlay, V. 85-6; Marmora, pp. 348-50.

[262] Marmora, p. 370.

[263] Pinkerton’s Collection of Travels, IX. 4.

[264] Marmora, pp. 389-91; Mrs Dawes, Saint Spiridion.

[265] Paparregopoulos, V. 672. A Latin inscription of 1684 at Santa Maura bears Morosini’s name.

[266] Viscount Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, I. 29-30.

[267] Zinkeisen, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches in Europa, V. 501-2.

[268] Jervis, History of the Island of Corfù, p. 132.

[269] A recent Greek writer in the Ὀδηγὸς τῆς νήσου Κερκύρας states, I know not on what authority, that, as a reward for their bravery, Schulenburg called Mt Abraham at Corfù after the patriarch. The name occurs in Marmora long before Schulenburg’s time.

[270] Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, I. 464.

[271] Leben und Denkwürdigkeiten Johann Mathias Reichsgrafen von der Schulenburg, II; Zinkeisen, op. cit. V. 520-31; Daru, Histoire de Venise, V. 145-53; Greek chronicle of Epeiros printed by Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, V. 294-9; Idromenos, Συνοπτικὴ Ἱστορία, pp. 81-6.

[272] Two plans, one of the siege, one of the works executed by Schulenburg, are in the British Museum, and are reproduced by Jervis, pp. 139, 145.

[273] Daru, V. 159, 171.

[274] Saint-Sauveur, II. 99, III. 251-3; Andreades, I. 278.

[275] Saint-Sauveur, II. 148. I copied down the dates 1759 and 1778 from two of the ruins there.

[276] Paparregopoulos, V. 686; Daru, V. 198-9; Jervis, p. 153.

[277] Paparregopoulos, V. 701; Saint-Sauveur, II. 288.

[278] Saint-Sauveur, II. 150-3; Hazlitt, The Venetian Republic, II. 311; Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia, VIII. 289-99; Legrand, Bibliothèque grecque vulgaire, III. 332-6.

[279] Saint-Sauveur, II. 199-206.

[280] Romanin, IX. 134-8.

[281] Daru, V. 221; Saint-Sauveur, III. 38-49.

[282] Daru, V. 30.

[283] Saint-Sauveur (an eye-witness), II. 63 et sqq.

[284] Romanin, X. 240-5; Rodocanachi, Bonaparte et les Îles Ioniennes, pp. 24, 26.

[285] Πολιορκία καὶ ἄλωσις τῆς Μονεμβασίας ὑπὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων τῷ 1821. Ἀθήνησι, 1874.

[286] p. 398.

[287] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, II. 287; Dorotheos of Monemvasia, Βιβλίον Ἱστορικόν (ed. 1814), 397.

[288] Lampros, Μιχαὴλ Ἀκομινάτου, II. 137; Niketas, 97, 581-92.

[289] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, l. 2065.

[290] Ibid. ll. 2630, 2644.

[291] Ibid. ll. 2765-9.

[292] Ibid. ll. 2891-6; Romanos, Γρατιανὸς Ζώρζης, 136. The French version of the Chronicle omits the Naxian and Cephalonian contingents.

[293] Epistolæ, vol. II. p. 622; Les Registres d’Innocent IV, vol. III. 306, 397.

[294] La Grèce Continentale, p. 412; Sir T. Wyse, Excursion into the Peloponnesus, I. 6. Cf. Tozer in J.H.S. IV. 233-6.

[295] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, l. 1306; Le Livre de la Conqueste, p. 27.

[296] Les Registres d’Urbain IV, II. 100, 341; Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, ll. 4534, 4547, 4580, 4584, 4643, 5026, 5569, 5576.

[297] Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abt. II. B. XIV. 164, 192-3, 204, 215, 220, 226, 248.

[298] Antique Memorie di Cerigo, apud Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, VI. 301.

[299] Sanudo, Istoria del Regno, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 127; Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abt. II. B. XIV. 181; Sansovino, Cronologia del Mondo, fol. 185; Hopf apud Ersch und Gruber, LXXXV. 310.

[300] Miklosich und Müller, op. cit. V. 155-61; Phrantzes, 399, 400; Dorotheos of Monemvasia, Βιβλίον Ἱστορικόν, 400.

[301] Le Livre de la Conqueste, 363; Libro de los Fechos, 107; Muntaner, Cronaca, ch. 117; Bartholomæus de Neocastro and Nicolaus Specialis apud Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. XIII. 1185; X. 959.

[302] Chs. 199, 201.

[303] Thomas, Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, I. 127.

[304] Miklosich und Müller, l.c.

[305] Phrantzes, 57; Manuel Palaiologos, Theodori Despoti Laudatio Funebris, apud Migne, Patrologia Græca, CLVI. 228-9; Chalkokondyles, 80.

[306] Hopf, op. cit. LXXXVI. 79: see Appendix.

[307] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, I. 269; II. 181.

[308] Montfaucon, Palæographia Græca, 81, 89; Ἑλληνομνήμων, 336-46.

[309] Miklosich und Müller, V. 171-4; Παρνασσός, VII. 472-6.

[310] Ibid. III. 258.

[311] P. 447.

[312] Chalkokondyles, 476, 485; Phrantzes, 396-7; Spandugino (ed. 1551), 44-5.

[313] Magno, Annali Veneti, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 203-4; Pii II. Commentari, 103-4.

[314] Phrantzes, 415; Magno, 204; Sathas, VI. 95; Chalkokondyles, 556. Regina, fol. 52, 56 (for a copy of which I am indebted to Mr Horatio F. Brown: see Appendix). The actual date is uncertain; Phrantzes and Magno give 1464, and the Venetian document above quoted points to that year; but Malatesta’s secretary in his account of the war (Sathas, l.c.) puts it in 1463, before the siege of Corinth.

[315] Sanudo, Diarii, I. 703.

[316] Predelli, Commemoriali, V. 228-30, 238-9, 241; Miklosich und Müller, op. cit. III. 293-309.

[317] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, IV. 230; Sanudo, Diarii, XXIX. 482.

[318] Feyerabend, Reyssbuch des Heyligen Lands, fol. 182; Faber, Evagatorium, III. 314. The name was so long preserved that a wine-shop in Venetian dialect was called “Malvasia.”

[319] Sanudo, Diarii, VII. 714; XXIII. 536; XXIV. 669; XXV. 64; XXIX. 402; XXXI. 227; XXXV. 363; XLIV. 475; LV. 296; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, III. 56.

[320] Sanudo, Diarii, XI. 349; XXXIII. 366; Sathas, IV. 224, 227, 229, 234; Lamansky, Les Secrets de l’État de Venise, p. 659; Feyerabend, op. cit. fol. 112.

[321] Predelli, Commemoriali, VI. 236, 238.

[322] Paruta, Historia Venetiana, I. 451-3.

[323] Lami, Deliciæ Eruditorum, XV. 203; Sathas, op. cit. VIII. 310-3, 320-1, 335, 344, 377-8, 441-3.

[324] Ibid. 342, 413, 450, 454.

[325] Sathas, op. cit. VIII. 396; Meliarakes, Οἰκογένεια Μαμωνᾶ.

[326] Litta, Le famiglie celebri italiane, vol. v. Plate XIV.

[327] Epistolæ Innocentii III (ed. Baluze), II. 477.

[328] Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abt. II. B. XIV. 201, 213, 218, 222; Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Documents Arméniens, II. 508.

[329] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, ll. 1559, 3187; Le Livre de la Conqueste, 102; Libro de los Fechos, 25, 26; Cronaca di Morea, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 424; Dorotheos of Monemvasia, Βιβλίον Ἱστορικόν (ed. 1814), 461; Sanudo, Istoria del Regno di Romania, apud Hopf, op. cit. 100.

[330] Canciani, Barbarorum Leges Antiquæ, III. 507; Muntaner, Cronaca, ch. 261.

[331] Archivio storico italiano, Ser. IV. I. 433.

[332] Rubió y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia, 482.

[333] Epistolæ Innocentii III, II. 265.

[334] Rubió y Lluch, op. cit. 481.

[335] Cairels apud Buchon, Histoire des Conquêtes, 449; Henri de Valenciennes apud Buchon, Recherches et Matériaux, II. 203, 205-6.

[336] Epistolæ Innocentii III, II. 261-2, 264, 477, 835-7; Honorii III Opera, IV., 414.

[337] Raynaldi Annales Ecclesiastici (ed. 1747), I. 492.

[338] Regesta Honorii III, II. 96, 167, 207, 333.

[339] Chroniques gréco-romanes, 478; and apud Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXV. 276.

[340] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, ll. 3196-3201, 3295-6, 4613; Le Livre de la Conqueste, 119, 160; Cronaca di Morea, 438-9; Libro de los Fechos, 56, 75.

[341] Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abt. II. B. XIV. 201, 213, 218, 222.

[342] Litta, l.c.

[343] Τὸ Χρονικὸν τοῦ Μορέως, l. 7915; Le Livre de la Conqueste, 260.

[344] Hopf, apud Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXV. 321. The original document has now been rendered illegible by the damp.

[345] Le Livre de la Conqueste, 465; Libro de los Fechos, 114.

[346] Ibid. 120; Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 177; Sanudo, op. cit. 125.

[347] D’Arbois de Jubainville, Voyage paléographique dans le Département de l’Aube, 337.

[348] Sanudo, l.c.

[349] Archivio Veneto, XX. 87, 89.

[350] Raynaldi op. cit. V. 95; Thomas, Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, I. 120-1.

[351] Archivio Veneto, l.c.; Misti, XVI. f. 97tᵒ. (See Appendix.)

[352] Rubió y Lluch, l.c.; Çurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, II. f. 537.

[353] Misti, XVII. f. 71; XVIII. f. 10; XX. ff. 37tᵒ, 40; XXIII. ff. 26, 30tᵒ, 46tᵒ; XXIV. 53tᵒ, 63, 102tᵒ, 103 (see Appendix); Predelli, Commemoriali, II. p. 153.

[354] Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum meridionalium, III. 160; Predelli, Commemoriali, II. 181; Misti, XXVII. f. 3; XXVIII. f. 28.

[355] Orbini, Regno degli Slavi, 271.

[356] Raynaldi op. cit. VII. 224; Jauna, Histoire générale des royaumes de Chypre, etc., II. 882.

[357] Rubió y Lluch, op. cit. 436, 482; Çurita, l.c.; Misti, XXXIV. f. 88tᵒ.

[358] Chroniques gréco-romanes, 230.

[359] Misti, XLI. f. 58.

[360] Thomas and Predelli, Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, II. 292; Revue de l’Orient latin, IV. 295, 302.

[361] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, II. 210.

[362] Predelli, Commemoriali, III. p. 310 (given in full by Lampros, Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, 399).

[363] Sathas, op. cit. II. 145.

[364] Revue de l’Orient latin, VI. 119; Sathas, op. cit. III. 431; Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum, IX. 90-91; Misti, XLVIII. ff. 143, 148.

[365] Revue de l’Orient latin, IV. 513; Thomas and Predelli, op. cit. 203.

[366] Revue de l’Orient latin, VI. 119; Sathas, op. cit. 430-1.

[367] Sathas, op. cit. II. 270-1.

[368] Sanudo and Navagero, apud Muratori, S.R.I. XXII. 890, XXIII. 1080; Cronaca di Amadeo Valier (Cod. Cicogna, N. 297), II. f. 259; Revue de l’Orient latin, IV. 546.

[369] Sanudo and Navagero, ibid., XXII. 911, XXIII. 1081; Revue de l’Orient latin, V. 196.

[370] Sathas, op. cit. III. 429-30; Hopf, Dissertazione documentata sulla storia di Karystos (tr. Sardagna, 91-5).

[371] La Grèce continentale et la Morée, 286.

[372] Sigillographie, 177.

[373] Γεωγραφία τοῦ νομοῦ Κεφαλληνίας, pp. 153, 190.

[374] Pertz, Monumenta Germaniæ historica, XVIII. 46.

[375] Gesta Regis Ricardi, Rolls Series, II. 197-200, 203-5.

[376] Libro de los fechos (Aragonese version of “The Chronicle of the Morea”), pp. 53-4.

[377] A. Dandolo apud Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. XII. 336; Misti, VI. fol. 17, quoted in Archivio Veneto, XX. 93.

[378] Albericus Trium Fontium, II. 558.

[379] Miklosich und Müller, Acta Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, V. 44.

[380] Tafel und Thomas, Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, Abt. II. B. XIV. p. 215.

[381] Riccio, Saggio di Codice Diplomatico, Supplemento, pt I., p. 87; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, XI. 415.

[382] Miklosich und Müller, op. cit. II. 139.

[383] Hopf, apud Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 48.

[384] Dell’ Origine dei Principi Turchi (ed. 1551), pp. 12, 26, 27, 62.

[385] Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, I. i. 319; II. i. 351, 352; Magno apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 196.

[386] p. 57 (ed. Sinner).

[387] Jorga, “Notes et Extraits pour servir à l’Histoire des Croisades,” in Revue de l’Orient latin, VI. 84.

[388] Epigrammata reperta per Illyricum, p. v.

[389] Hopf, apud Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 160; Meliarakes, op. cit. 150.

[390] Lunzi, Della condizione politica delle Isole Ionie, p. 190.

[391] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, VI. 215-6; cf. Lunzi, op. cit. p. 197.

[392] Sathas, op. cit. V. 157; Meliarakes, op. cit. 191; Sanudo, Diarii, V. 883, 1009.

[393] Karavias, Ἱστορία τῆς νήσου Ἰθάκης ἀπὸ τῶν ἀρχαιοτάτων χρόνων μεχρὶ τοῦ 1849.

[394] Sathas, op. cit. VI. 285.

[395] De la Ville, Napoli Nobilissima (1900), xii. 180-1.

[396] Geschichte Griechenlands in Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 170, 173, 177, and 179; Geschichte der Insel Andros, p. 128.

[397] Geschichte Griechenlands, III. 26, 39, 190.

[398] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, I. 14; II. 145, 163, 168, 178; III. 181. Predelli, Commemoriali, III. 278, 354.

[399] Library of St Mark, Venice, MS. Ital. Cl. VI. 286, vol. II. ff. 94, 95.

[400] Predelli, Commemoriali, VI. 236, 238.

[401] Lamansky, Secrets de l’État de Venise, p. 58.

[402] Sathas, op. cit. VIII. 451.

[403] Ibid. IV. 245.

[404] Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs de l’Archipel, p. 296.

[405] Lamansky, op. cit. pp. 641-2, 651 et sqq.; Sathas, op. cit. IV. 310-40.

[406] M. C. Scrutinio alle voci, vols. VII. and VIII.

[407] Chroniques gréco-romanes, pp. 373-6.

[408] L’Isole le più famose del Mondo, p. 77.

[409] P. 206.

[410] Relatione della Rep. Venetiana, pp. 18-9.

[411] Voyage de Levant, pp. 348-9.

[412] Viaggio di Levante (Ital. tr.), p. 3.

[413] Relation d’un Voyage, p. 196.

[414] L’Archipelago, p. 42.

[415] Vol. I. p. 687.

[416] Voyage, I. 145-7.

[417] Journey into Greece, pp. 62-5.

[418] Viaggio all’ Arcipelago, p. 68.

[419] The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago, pp. 14-20.

[420] L’Egeo Redivivo, pp. 331-2.

[421] Naukeurige Beschryving (French tr.), pp. 267, 354.

[422] Voyage du Levant, I. 108.

[423] Vols. XV. to XVIII.

[424] Delle Notizie Storiche della Lega, p. 41.

[425] Greek mediæval scholars, owing to the disturbed political conditions, have scarcely had time since Salonika became Greek to continue the historical studies of Tafel, Papageorgiou, and Tafrali—for even the last composed his two valuable treatises on the topography of Salonika and its history in the fourteenth century early in 1912, therefore before the reconversion of the mosques into churches and while the city was still Turkish. But the well-known mediævalist. Professor Adamantiou, has already written a handbook on Byzantine Thessalonika, Ἡ Βυζαντινὴ Θεσσαλονίκη (Athens, 1914); M. Risal has popularised the story of this “Coveted City,” La Ville convoitée (3rd ed., Paris, 1917); K. Zesiou, the epigraphist, has examined the Christian monuments; the late Professor Lampros published “eight letters” of its Metropolitan Isidore, who flourished towards the end of the fourteenth century; and K. Kugeas has edited the note-book of an official of the archbishopric who was at Salonika between 1419 and 1425, a few years before its conquest by the Turks. See Πρακτικὰ τῆς ... Ἀρχαιολογικῆς Ἑταιρείας τοῦ 1913, pp. 119-57; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, IX. 343-414; Byz. Zeitschr. XXIII. 144-63.

[426] Migne, Patr. Gr., CXVI. 1116, 1169, 1173, 1185 (where “Maximian Herculius” of the text is corrected to Galerius, the younger Maximian).

[427] Akropolites (ed. Teubner), I. 82.

[428] Adamantiou, 49.

[429] A History of the Eastern Empire, pp. 381-401, 485-8.

[430] ii. 451.

[431] Ibid., pp. 529, 531-2.

[432] Migne, Patr. Gr., CX. 26.

[433] Kameniates, pp. 491, 519; Theodore Studita, in Migne, Patr. Gr., XCIX. 917.

[434] An inscription found in 1874 confirms Kameniates: Byz. Zeitschr. X. 151-4.

[435] Schlumberger, Sigillographie, pp. 102-6.

[436] Ellissen, Analekten, IV. 46-53.

[437] Tafel, De Thessalonica, p. 474.

[438] Eustathios (ed. Bonn), p. 449.

[439] Eustathios, p. 452.

[440] Niketas, pp. 384-401, 471.

[441] Salonika was still Lombard in May 1223: Pitra, Analecta sacra et classica, VII. 335-8, 577.

[442] Mission au Mont Athos, p. 64; Wroth, Catalogue of the Coins of the Vandals, pp. 193-203; Schlumberger, Mélanges d’Archéologie byzantine, I. 57.

[443] Migne, Patr. Gr. CIX. 644.

[444] II. 234, 393, 568-82; Nikephoros Gregoras, II. 673-5, 740, 795; Kydones, in Migne, Patr. Gr. CIX. 649; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, IV. pp. viii-xxxvi.

[445] Müller, Byz. Analekten in Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie, IX. 394; Chalkokondyles, pp. 47, 174; Phrantzes, p. 47; Doukas, pp. 50, 199; Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, II. 291; Βυζαντίς, I. 234.

[446] Doukas, p. 197; Phrantzes, pp. 64, 122; Chalkokondyles, p. 205; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, I. 133-50.

[447] Sathas, Μεσαιωνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη, I. 257.

[448] Perhaps the name is a reminiscence of the bishop of Samaria, to whom Mount Athos belonged from 1206 to 1210: Innocent III, Epp. IX. 192.

[449] p. 235; Anagnostes; Phrantzes, pp. 90, 155; Doukas, pp. 199-201; Byz. Zeitschr. XXIII. 148, 152; Ν. Ἑλλ., V. 369-91.

[450] Nikephoros Gregoras, I. 29; Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata, I. 125.

[451] Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, XVII. 227-9; XXVIII. 791-809; Dandolo, Chronicon, apud Muratori, R.I.S. XII. 370.

[452] Ibid. 371; M. da Canal, La Cronique des Veneciens, in Archivio Storico Italiano, VIII. 488; Annales Januenses, apud Pertz, M.G.H. Script. XVIII. 245.

[453] Atti, XXVIII. 500-4.

[454] Ogerii Panis, Annales, apud Pertz, ibid. 119; Atti, XXVIII. 805.

[455] Recueil des Historiens des Croisades. Documents Arméniens, II. 747; Lanfranci Pignolli, etc. Annales, apud Pertz, ibid. 249.

[456] Pachymeres, I. 420; II. 558; Nikephoros Gregoras, I. 526; Sanudo, Istoria del Regno di Romania, apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 146; Atti, XXXI. ii. 37 n²; M. Giustiniani, La Scio Sacra del rito Latino, 7.

[457] Doukas, 161-2; Friar Jordanus, Mirabilia descripta (tr. H. Yule), 57.

[458] Genoese document of April 25, 1288, in Pandette Richeriane, fogliazzo II. fasc. 25, cp. Appendix.

[459] Sanudo, apud Hopf, op. cit. 133; Documents Arméniens, II. 789; Carini, Ricordi del Vespro, II. 4; Ptolomæi Lucensis Historia Ecclesiastica, apud Muratori, R.I.S. XI. 1186.

[460] J. Aurie Annales Januenses, apud Pertz, op. cit. XVIII. 307-8, 312, 315-8, 322-4, 336-7, 340, 344; Documents Arméniens, I. 745-54; II. 795-6, 801-2, 827; Liber Jurium Reipublicæ Genuensis, II. 275; Notices et extraits des Manuscripts de la Bibliothèque du Roi, XI. 41-52.

[461] Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’Île de Chypre, II. 129.

[462] J. a Varagine Chronicon Genuense; F. Pipini Chronicon; and R. Caresini Continuatio, apud Muratori, R.I.S. IX. 56, 743; XII. 406.

[463] Sanudo, apud Hopf, op. cit. 146.

[464] Raynaldi Annales Ecclesiastici (ed. 1749), IV. 319; Les Registres de Boniface VIII, III. 290-3.

[465] Pachymeres, II. 436, 510, 558; Muntaner, Cronaca, ch. 117; Le Livre de la Conqueste, 362; Libro de los Fechos, 107; B. de Neocastro Historia Sicula, apud Muratori, R.I.S. XIII. 1186.

[466] Cantacuzene, I. 370; N. Gregoras, I. 438.

[467] Muntaner, op. cit. ch. 234; J. Aurie Annales, apud Pertz, M.G.H. XVIII. 315; Atti, XXXI. ii. p. xxxvii. n¹.

[468] Atti, I. 73-5; XI. 322; Giornale Ligustico di Archeologia, Storia e Belle Arti, V. 361-2; B. Senaregae De Rebus Genuensibus Commentaria, apud Muratori, R.I.S. XXIV. 559.

[469] Muntaner, l.c.; Pachymeres, II. 638; Giomo, Lettere di Collegio, p. 96.

[470] Cantacuzene, I. 371.

[471] G. Adae De modo Sarracenos extirpandi, in Documents Arméniens, II. 531-3, 537, 542, who makes them “sons of Paleologo”; Jean XXII, Lettres Communes, V. 302.

[472] Secreta Fidelium Crucis and Epistolæ, apud Bongars, Gesta Dei per Francos, II. 30, 298.

[473] Brocardus, Directorium ad passagium faciendum, in Documents Arméniens, II. 457-8, makes Martino “nephew of the late Benedetto.”

[474] Schlumberger, Numismatique de l’Orient latin, 413-5; Supplément, 16; Pls. XIV, XXI; P. Lampros, Νομίσματα τῶν ἀδελφῶν Μαρτίνου καὶ Βενεδίκτου Β’ Ζαχαρίων, δυναστῶν τῆς Χίου, 1314-1329, pp. 9-13; ibid. Μεσαιωνικὰ νομίσματα τῶν δυναστῶν τῆς Χίου, 6-11, Pl. I; Promis, La Zecca di Scio, 34-6, Pl. I.

[475] Libro de los Fechos, 137.

[476] Minieri Riccio, Saggio di Codice diplomatico. Supplemento, II. 75-7, where the year “MCCCXV” will not tally with “Indictionis octavæ” (= 1325). Gittio (Lo Scettro del Despota, 18) gives both correctly.

[477] Raynaldi Annales Ecclesiastici, V. 95; Archivio Veneto, XX. 87, 89.

[478] Schlumberger, op. cit. 326, 415-6, Pls. XII-XIII; Promis, La Zecca di Scio, 36-7, Pl. I; P. Lampros, Νομίσματα, 13-15; Μεσαιωνικὰ νομίσματα, 12-14, Pl. I; Ἀνέκδοτα νομίσματα καὶ μολυβδόβουλλα τῶν κατὰ τοὺς μέσους αἰῶνας δυναστῶν τῆς Ἑλλάδος, 31-2.

[479] Cantacuzene, I. 370-91; N. Gregoras, I. 438-9; Phrantzes, 38; Chalkokondyles, 521-2; Friar Jordanus, op cit. 57; Ludolphi De Itinere Terræ Sanctæ, 23-4; Continuazione della Cronaca di Jacopo da Varagine, in Atti, X. 510; Brocardus, l.c.; Archives de l’Orient latin, I. 274.

[480] Benoît XII, Lettres closes, patentes et curiales, I. 182-3; Ludolphi l.c.

[481] Clément VI, Lettres closes, patentes et curiales, I. 150, 171, 182, 431-3.

[482] Raynaldi op. cit. VI. 342-3.

[483] Cantacuzene, II. 582-3; Caresini op. cit.; Cortusii Patavini duo; G. Villani, Historie Fiorentine, and Stellae Annales Genuenses, apud Muratori, R.I.S. XII. 417, 914; XIII. 918; XVII. 1081; Folieta, Clarorum Ligurum Elogia, 90.

[484] Doukas, 162-3; Cantacuzene, I. 388-90, 476-95; N. Gregoras, I. 525-31, 534-5, 553; Phrantzes, 38; Chalkokondyles, 521; Friar Jordanus, op. cit. 57.

[485] P. Lampros, Ἀνέκδοτα νομίσματα, 69-70, 72.

[486] Jerosme Justinian, La Description et Histoire de l’Isle de Scios, ou Chios, part I. 19; part II. 166; Boschini, L’Arcipelago, pp. 72, 74; Piacenza, L’Egeo Redivivo, pp. 200, 216; Coronelli, Isola di Rodi, p. 360. To this occupation of Ikaria refers the ballad in Journal of Hellenic Studies, I. 293-300.

[487] G. Stellae Annales Genuenses, apud Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script., XVII. 1086-90; Uberti Folietæ Historiæ Genuensis Libri xii (Genoa, 1585), fo. 137-8ᵛ; 313ᵛ; Ag. Giustiniani, Castigatissimi Annali della eccelsa & Illustrissima Republi. di Genoa (Genoa, 1537), CXXXIIⱽ-IVⱽ; P. Interiano, Ristretto delle Historie Genovesi (Genoa, s.a.), fo. 107ᵛ-8ᵛ; Documenti, apud Pagano, Delle Imprese e del Dominio dei Genovesi nella Grecia, pp. 261-70; Cantacuzene, II. 583-4; Nikephoros Gregoras, II. 765-7; Chalkokondyles, p. 522.

[488] Comte de Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’Île de Chypre, II. 366-70; Promis, La Zecca di Scio, 14 n². Atti della Società Ligure di Storia patria, XXXV. 52, 210; Rhodokanakes, Ἰουστινιάναι—Χίος I. 8-9, n. 15; J. Justinian, part II. 143; Araldica e Diritto (Jan. 1915), p. 46.

[489] Documenti, apud Pagano, pp. 271-85; Liber Iurium Reipublicæ Genuensis, II. (Historiæ Patriæ Monumenta, IX.), 558-72, 1498-1512.

[490] Promis, p. 39.

[491] XIX. 140-1.

[492] Schlumberger, Numismatique de l’Orient latin, pp. 422 f. and Plate XIV, 19, 25.

[493] Liber Iurium, II. 714-20; Documenti, apud Pagano, 285-91.

[494] Stella, op. cit. pp. 1217-20; Folieta, op. cit. fo. 531; Ag. Giustiniani. op. cit. CLXXIIⱽ.

[495] Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, II. 4.

[496] Cantacuzene, III. 81-4; Nikephoros Gregoras, II. 842, 851.

[497] Vlastos, Χιακά, 228-31.

[498] G. Stella, p. 1091; Raphayni Caresini Continuatio Chronicorum Andreæ Danduli, apud Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script., XII. 420-1; Sanudo, Vite de’ Duchi di Venezia, ibid. XXII. 621-2; Matteo Villani, Istorie, ibid. XIV. 117-18.

[499] Atti della Società Ligure di Storia patria, XIII. 198; J. Justinian, part II. 165; J. Stellae, Annales Ianuenses, in Rer. Ital. Script., XVII. 1307-8.

[500] Chalkokondyles, p. 519.

[501] Atti, VI. 20, 353-4; XIII. 222, 231, 260-2, 996-7; Doukas, p. 314.

[502] Doukas, pp. 322-8.

[503] Veneroso, Genio Ligure risvegliato, Prove, p. 30.

[504] Atti, VII. part II. 94-6, 480-7; The Chronicles of Rabbi Joseph ben Joshua (transl. Bialloblotzky), p. 289.

[505] Atti, XXVIII. 761, 767.

[506] Annual of the Brit. School at Athens, XVI. (1909-10) 154-5; Χιακὰ Χρονικά. (Athens, 1914), II. 127.

[507] Thuani, Historiarum sui temporis Libri cxxxviii. (ed. 1620), II. 368-70; Bosio, Dell’ Istoria della Sacra Religione et illᵐᵃ Militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano, III. 757-9; Luccari, Copioso Ristretto degli Annali di Rausa, p. 147; A. Mauroceni, Historia Veneta, p. 335; Rhodokanakes, facing I. 359.

[508] Vlastos, Χιακά, 232-4.

[509] Ann. of Brit. School at Athens, XVI. 146.

[510] F. W. Hasluck, ibid. pp. 137-84.

[511] J. Justinian, part III. 116-18.

[512] P. Belon du Mans, Les observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables (Paris, 1588), pp. 185-7; N. de Nicolay, Les navigations, peregrinations et voyages, faicts en la Turquie (Antwerp, 1576), pp. 66-7.

[513] Ibid. p. 76.

[514] Belon, p. 186.

[515] N. de Nicolay, p. 67.

[516] Targioni Tozzetti, Relazione di alcuni viaggi fatti in diverse parti della Toscana (ed. 2), V. 436; J. Justinian, part II. 71-7.

[517] Pp. 43-4.

[518] Published by G. Porro-Lambertenghi in Miscellanea di Storia Italiana, VI. 541-8.

[519] Tozzetti, V. 454.

[520] Thevet in Ann. of Brit. School at Athens, XVI. 183-4.

[521] J. Justinian, part I. 34-7; M. Giustiniani, La Scio Sacra del Rito Latino, pp. 15-16, 78-88; E. Alexandrides in Χιακὰ Χρονικά (Athens, 1911), I. 10-17; Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, II. 90-2.

[522] Miklosich und Müller, III. 260-4; Atti, XXVIII. 563-8; J. Justinian, part II. 82.

[523] J. Justinian, part I. 31-3; part II. 170-1; Thevet in Ann. of Brit. School at Athens, XVI. 183

[524] Atti della Società Ligure di Storia patria, I. 296; II. 1, 396; XI. 343; XVII. 241-51; XXVIII. 522, 543, 545-50, 805-6; XXXIV. 157, 253, 268, 322, 326, 345; Les Registres de Boniface VIII, I. 222-3; Giornale Ligustico di Archeologia, Storia e Belle Arti, I. 218; IX. 3-13.

[525] Doukas, 40-3, 46; Nikephoros Gregoras, III. 554; Chalkokondyles, 520; Kritoboulos: lib. II. c. 13; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 39; M. Villani, Istorie, and G. Stellae, Annales Genuenses, apud Muratori, R.I.S., XIV. 447; XVII. 1094; Pii II Commentarii, 245; Ag. Giustiniano, Annali della Repubblica di Genova (ed. 1854), II. 95; P. Bizari, Senatus populique Genuensis ... historiæ, 134; U. Folietæ, Historiæ Genuensium libri XII (ed. 1585), 141-2; Clarorum Ligurum Elogia (ed. 1573), 97-8.

[526] Servion, Gestez et chroniques de la Mayson de Savoye, II. 138-9.

[527] M. Villani, Istorie, apud Muratori, R.I.S., XIV. 447.

[528] N. Gregoras, III. 503-4, 565.

[529] Servion, op. cit. II. 138-9, 143.

[530] Phrantzes, 48.

[531] Misti, XXVIII. f. 73 (Doc. of Sept. 20, 1358).

[532] Predelli, I Libri Commemoriali della Repubblica di Venezia, II. 266; Giornale Ligustico, I. 84-5.

[533] Predelli, op. cit. III. 156 (Documents of Jan. 11, 14, 1382).

[534] Raynaldi Annales ecclesiastici (ed. 1752), VII. 19, 172; Innocentii VI Epistolæ secretæ, IV. f. 164 (Reg. Vat. 238). Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, XII. 474-5.

[535] Raynaldi op. cit. 224. The invitation to Francesco, otherwise practically identical with that to John V, contains the important variant, that the Turkish race “tam potenter tamque fortiter terram tuam ... obsidet.” Gregorii XI Secret. Anno II. ff. 85-6 (Reg. Vat. 268). Jauna, Histoire générale des roiaumes de Chypre ... etc. II. 882.

[536] Raynaldi op. cit. VII. 249; Wadding, Annales Ordinis Minorum, VIII. 289; Gregorii XI Secret. Anno IV. f. 63 (Reg. Vat. 270).

[537] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, I. 433, 513, 531; II. 129-30, 159, 212, 250, 252-3, 255-6, 264-6.

[538] Libri Bullarum, IV. (1365-6), f. 270ᵛ.

[539] Chalkokondyles, 520-1; Kritoboulos, lib. II. c. 13

[540] Giornale Ligustico, I. 86-7.

[541] Hasluck in B.S.A., XV. 262; Conze, Reise auf der Insel Lesbos, 5; Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant, I. 115.

[542] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 39-40, VII. 144, 344; Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour, at Samarkand, A.D. 1403-6 (tr. Markham), 23; Bondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi (ed. de Sinner), 115.

[543] Atti, XIII. 169, 953-67.

[544] Bauyn, Mémoires du voiage fait en Hongrie, f. 351-2; Froissart, Chroniques (ed. K. de Lettenhove), XV. 345, 347. The relationship was as follows:

[545] Le Livre des faicts du bon Messire Jean le Maingre dit Boucicaut (ed. Paris, 1825), part I. ch. 28; Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient au XIVᵉ siècle, II. 33 (Doc. of April 15, 1397).

[546] Ibid. II. 34-5, 48, 91-3; Froissart, Chroniques, XVI. 38, 40, 261 (Doc. of June 24, 1397); Doukas, 52-3.

[547] Bauyn, Mémoires du voiage, f. 35; Froissart, Chroniques, XVI. 41-2.

[548] Le Livre des faicts, part I. ch. 28; Froissart, Chroniques, XVI. 46, 48-50. Le Roulx, op. cit. II. 43-5 (Doc. of Aug. 10, 1397).

[549] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, X. 248-51.

[550] Le Livre des faicts, part I. ch. 31; Narrative, 24.

[551] Revue de l’Orient latin, IV. 93; Constantine the Philosopher, Life of Stephen Lazarevich in Glasnik, XLII. 279; Archiv für slavische Philologie, XVIII. 429.

[552] Doukas, 75-6.

[553] Narrative, 23-4; Mélanges historiques. Choix de documents, III. 174.

[554] Le Livre des faicts, part II. chs. 14, 31; Le Roulx, op. cit. I. 484 n¹; II. 189.

[555] Narrative, 22-3.

[556] Gioffredo, Storia delle Alpi Marittime, in Monumenta Historiæ Patriæ, IV. 1001-2, 1077.

[557] Giornale Ligustico, I. 89-90, 217.

[558] Ibid. I. 219.

[559] Bibliotheca Carmelitana, II. 943; Fontana, Sacrum Theatrum Dominicanum, 238; Sp. P. Lampros, Catalogue of the Greek Manuscripts on Mount Athos, II. 305.

[560] Miklosich und Müller, Acta, II. 140, 234, 338.

[561] Noiret, Documents inédits pour servir à l’histoire de la domination vénitienne en Crète de 1380 à 1485, pp. 107, 127.

[562] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 40; VII. 341. From Giornale Ligustico, I. 219, it has been assumed that he was still alive on May 25, 1409; but the Greek is confirmed by Noiret, Documents, 161, where Nicolò is described as regent on April 4, 1405, and by Libri Bullarum, XXIV. (1409-16) f. 194ᵛ, where Jacopo is addressed as “lord of Mytilene” on April 12, 1409.

[563] Bondelmonti, Liber Insularum, 115.

[564] Noiret, Documents, p. 161; Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, II. 127; Revue de l’Orient latin, IV. 279-80, 282.

[565] Innocent VII. Ann. I. Lib. Mist. ff. 53-4. Bened. XIII. Avin. t. XL. ff. 157-9.

[566] Probably between April 12 and May 25. Giornale Ligustico, I. 217-9; Libri Bullarum, l.c.

[567] Inscription at Ænos, B.S.A., XV. 251, 254: Χριστιανικῆς Ἀρχαιολογικῆς Ἑταιρείας Δελτίον, VIII. 16.

[568] Lib. IV. c. 13.

[569] Sathas, Μνημεῖα, I. 43-4; III. 24-5; Noiret, Documents, 230-1.

[570] Revue de l’Orient latin, V. 176, 188, 315.

[571] Libri Bullarum, XXIV. (1409-16).

[572] Doukas, 106, 108; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, III. 118-20; Revue, IV. 574; V. 193.

[573] Giornale Ligustico, I. 219-20.

[574] Between March 13, 1426 (probably after May 11, 1428) and October 14, 1428. Giornale Ligustico, I. 219-20; II. 86-7. Hopf’s assumption that it was Jacopo who was killed in the fall of the tower must be wrong, because Bondelmonti, writing in 1422, speaks of that event as having occurred meis diebus. The allusion to the lord of Foglia Vecchia as a distinct person in the document of May 11, 1428, indicates that Jacopo was still alive.

[575] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 40, 492; VII. 95; Gioffredo, op. cit. 1077; Anselme, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la Maison de France, IV. 501.

[576] Revue de l’Orient latin, V. 114.

[577] Giornale Ligustico, V. 347; Bertrandon de la Brocquière, Le Voyage d’Outremer in Recueil de Voyages et de Documents (ed. Ch. Schefer), XII. 173-4.

[578] B.S.A. XV. 258.

[579] B.S.A. XV. 254-6; Χρ. Ἀρχ. Ἑτ. Δελτίον, VIII. 13, 16-7, 19-20, 29-30.

[580] l.c.

[581] Conze, Reise auf den Inseln des Thrakischen Meeres, 55-6; Pl. II. 7, 8; Athenische Mitteilungen, XXXIV. 26-7; Atti, XI. 341.

[582] Tozzetti, Relazioni d’alcuni viaggi fatti in diverse parti della Toscana (ed. 1773), V. 452.

[583] Joannis Canabutzæ magistri ad principem Æni et Samothraces in Dionysium Halicarnassensem commentarius, 2, 14; B.S.A. XV. 256.

[584] Sathas, Μνημεῖα, I. 44.

[585] Giornale Ligustico, I. 220-1; II. 86-9; III. 314-5; Revue de l’Orient latin, V. 371-2; VI. 96.

[586] Documenti diplomatici tratti dagli Archivj Milanesi, III. 49 n¹.

[587] Giornale Ligustico, II. 90-3, 292-6, 313-4, 316; Atti, XXIII. 265; Revue de l’Orient latin, VI. 112.

[588] Chalkokondyles, 462; Pero Tafur, Andanças é viajes in Colleccion de libros españoles raros ó curiosos, VIII. 159, 187; Giornale Ligustico, II. 292-3; Lampros, Catalogue, II. 305. A Genoese document (Revue de l’Orient latin, VI. 67), proves that Alexios IV died in 1429, not, as usually assumed, c. 1445.

[589] Phrantzes, 191.

[590] Stefano Magno apud Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 199.

[591] Phrantzes, 193-5; Chalkokondyles, 306; Revue de l’Orient latin, VII. 75; Ekthesis Chronica, 7.

[592] Description des Îles de l’Archipel (ed. Legrand), 92; Phrantzes, 96; Ath. Mitt. XXII. 119 n³.

[593] Conze, Reise auf den Inseln, 37, Pl. III, 4; Libri Bullarum, XXXIV. (1432-3), f. 112.

[594] Sathas, Μνημεῖα, III. 24-5; Tozzetti, Relazioni, V. 436.

[595] Tozzetti, Relazioni, V. 449, 451; De Rossi, Inscriptiones Christianæ Urbis Romæ, II. part I. 372 n⁴; Atti, XIII. 983.

[596] Tozzetti, Relazioni, V. 435-6, 447, 451-2; Pero Tafur, in op. cit. VIII. 134, 187.

[597] Colucci, Delle Antichità Picene, XV. pp. cxxxiii, cxxxvii-cxli; Codex Vat. lat. 5250, ff. 11-13, 15-17 (mostly published in Ath. Mitt. XXII. 115-7); Ciriaci Anconitani codex (in Biblioteca Capitolare of Treviso), I. 138, f. 152ᵛ et seqq.

[598] Ibid. f. 152 et sqq.; Colucci, Delle Antichità, XV. p. cxxxii; Tozzetti, Relazioni, V. 459; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VII. 341-2; De Rossi, Inscriptiones, II. part I. 370 n¹; Revue de l’Orient latin, VII. 53, 384.

[599] Conze, Hauser und Niemann, Archaeologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake, I. 1 n¹, 2, 16, Pls. IV-VIII, LXII; vol. II. Pl. IX; Conze, Reise auf den Inseln, 62, Pl. XII; Cod. Vat. lat. 5250, f. 14; Annali dell’ Instituto (1842), XIV. 141 and tav. d’agg. p. 3, where the date should be, ͵ϛϡξγʹ = 1454/5; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VII. 94; Ath. Mitt., XXXIV. 28.

[600] Cod. Vat. lat. 5250, f. 11, published by Ziebarth, Eine Inschriftenhandschrift der Hamburger Stadtbibliothek, 15; Ath. Mitt., XVIII. 361; XXXI. 405-8; Conze, Reise auf den Inseln, 82, Pl. III, 5, 9, 13.

[601] Tozzetti, Relazioni, V. 435; Moschides, Ἡ Λῆμνος, I. 168.

[602] Leonardi Chiensis, De vera nobilitate, 55; Revue de l’Orient latin, VII. 427.

[603] Ibid. VIII. 54; Giornale Ligustico, V. 347-9.

[604] Chalkokondyles, 519. But Ænos was described in 1457 as semper in servitute Teucrorum (Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VII. 366).

[605] Giornale Ligustico, II. 295-6; Revue, VIII. 43.

[606] Giornale Ligustico, V. 350; Revue, VIII. 29, 65; Chalkokondyles, 519. Folietæ Clarorum Ligurum Elogia (ed. 1573), 97-8; B. Campofulgosi Exemplorum, hoc est, dictorum factorumque memorabilium ... lib. IX (ed. Bâle), 328 (who makes her the wife of Luchino); Æneæ Sylvii, Opera ... omnia, 355-6 (who calls the heroine a virgin, and who heard the story told in 1455 by the bishop of Caffa, who had heard it in Lesbos). Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VII. 317-8.

[607] Atti, XIII. 247.

[608] Phrantzes, 327.

[609] Doukas, 266.

[610] Kritoboulos, lib. I. cc. 74-5; Doukas, 314, 328; Magno apud Hopf, Chroniques, 198-9.

[611] Pp. 321-2.

[612] Doukas, 326, 328-35; Kritoboulos, lib. II. c. 5; Campofulgosi Exemplorum, 526; Ἱστορία πολιτικὴ Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, 26; Ag. Giustiniani, Annali, II. 384; Giornale Ligustico, V. 354.

[613] Giornale Ligustico, V. 349-50.

[614] Kritoboulos, lib. II. cc. 11-16; III. 24; Doukas, 335; Chalkokondyles, 469; Ἱστορία πολιτικὴ, 25; Ecthesis Chronica, 17-18. Sa’d al-Dīn (tr. Bratutti), Chronica dell’ origine e progressi di casa Ottomana, II. 168; Hadji Khalfa, Cronologia historica (tr. Carli), 130; Hammer, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (ed. 1828), II. 20 nᵃ; Conze, Reise auf den Inseln, 82, Pl. III, 11.

[615] Doukas, 335-7; Chalkokondyles, 469.

[616] Giornale Ligustico, V. 353-5; Raynaldi Annales, X. 56, 59, 61-2; Reg. Vat. 443, f. 140.

[617] Sathas, Μνημεῖα, I. 231.

[618] Guglielmotti, Storia della Marina Pontificia, 260 n; Æneæ Sylvii Opera ... omnia (ed. Bâle), 370.

[619] Kritoboulos, lib. II. c. 23; Doukas, 338; Chalkokondyles, 469; the two last say that Imbros was also captured in 1456—a statement contradicted not only by Kritoboulos, but by the omission of Imbros from the list of papal islands in Atti, VI. 937-8 and in Raynaldi Annales, X. 88, which shows that the capture of the other three took place before Dec. 31, 1456. Pius II’s letter (Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, X. 113) shows that Imbros was “still under the rule of the infidels” in 1459.

[620] Doukas, 338; Kritoboulos, lib. III. c. 10; Atti, VI. 800; Raynaldi, Annales, X. 111; Chalkokondyles, 519; Letter of Scarampi to Gaetani of Sept. 15, 1457, apud Guglielmotti, Storia della Marina Pontificia, II. 280; Reg. Vat. 443, f. 113.

[621] Giornale Ligustico, III. 313-4.

[622] Doukas, 346; Chalkokondyles, 520, 528; Kritoboulos, lib. IV. c. 2; Æneæ Sylvii, Opera ... omnia (ed. Bâle), 355; Ag. Giustiniani, Annali, II. 384; Magno, apud Hopf, Chroniques, 201.

[623] Giornale Ligustico, V. 363-4.

[624] J. Paulides, Μαρία Γατελούζη in Ἡ Ἑλλὰς τὴν Βάρβιτον. Rhodokanakes, Ἰουστινιάναι—Χίος, I. 115 n. 101; II. 107.

[625] Raynaldi Annales, X. 179-80.

[626] Kritoboulos, lib. III. cc. 14, 15, 17, 18, 24; Chalkokondyles, 469-70, 483, 494; Æneæ Sylvii Opera, 370; Magno, apud Hopf, Chroniques, 200 (confused); Phrantzes, 413-4.

[627] Raynaldi, Annales, X. 285-6; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, X. 113-5.

[628] Giornale Ligustico, III. 180-1 n; V. 352-3, 355-61, 363; Atti, V. 429; Rymer, Fœdera, XI. 418, 441.

[629] Atti, VII. part I. 77-8, 108; Giornale Ligustico, V. 364-6; Doukas, 341.

[630] Βυζαντίς, II. 266; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VII. 342-3; VIII. 94-5, 361.

[631] S. Cali (Καλή, the Greek equivalent of “Bonne”).

[632] Leonardi Chiensis De Lesbo a Turcis capta, apud Hopf, Chroniques, 359-66 (an eye-witness); Magno, ibid. 201-2; Doukas, 345-6, 512; Chalkokondyles, 518-21, 523-9, 553; Kritoboulos, lib. IV. cc. 11-14; Phrantzes, 94; Malipiero, Annali Veneti, in Archivio Storico Italiano, VII. 11; Pii II Commentarii, 244; Atti, VII. part I. 159-60, 190; Giornale Ligustico, V. 366-7; Sabellici Historiæ Rerum Venetarum (ed. 1556), 867, 873; Cambini and Spandugino apud Sansovino, Historia Universale dell’ Origine et Imperio de’ Turchi (ed. 1573), ff. 156, 191; Ἱστορία πολιτικὴ, 26; Bosio, Dell’ Historia della sacra religione di San Giovanni, I. 196; The Chronicles of Rabbi Joseph ben Joshua (tr. Bialloblotzky), 289.

[633] Atti, VII. part I. 227, 242, 244.

[634] Sabellici op. cit. 883; Malipiero in Arch. Stor. It., VII. 28; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, VI. 93, 97; Magno apud Hopf, Chroniques, 204; Chalkokondyles, 565; Phrantzes, 415.

[635] Sabellici op. cit. 885-6; Malipiero, l.c.; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, I. 244, VI. 98; Phrantzes, l.c.; Sanudo and Navagiero apud Muratori, R.I.S., XXII. 1170; XXIII. 1123, 1132; Kritoboulos, lib. V. c. 7; Sa’d al-Dīn, II. 223; Cepio, De P. Mocenigi rebus gestis, 30.

[636] Sathas, op. cit. VI. 99; Malipiero, 37; Sabellicus, 890; Navagiero, 1125; Secreta, XXII. f. 186; Magno, 204.

[637] Malipiero, 50; Sanudo and Navagiero in R.I.S., XXII. 1190, XXIII. 1128; Magno, 206; Phrantzes, 448.

[638] Magno, 205, 208; Sathas, Μνημεῖα, V. 48; Malipiero, 50, 59, 67, 107, 121; Sanudo, 1190, 1210; Kritoboulos, lib. V. c. 15; Miklosich und Müller, Acta, III. 297; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 299-318.

[639] Malipiero, 44; Sabellicus, 895; Cambini apud Sansovino, f. 158; Phrantzes, 447; Sa’d al-Dīn, II. 244; Hammer, II. 98 nᵃ; Piacenza, L’Egeo Redivivo, 439.

[640] Giornale Ligustico, V. 370-2.

[641] Ibid. V. 367-70.

[642] Gottlob, Aus der Camera Apostolica, 293.

[643] Revue de l’Orient latin, I. 537-9.

[644] Anonymous, Οἱ Γατελοῦζοι ἐν Λέσβῳ, 70 n¹.

[645] Atti, XXXIV. 322, 326, 345.

[646] P. 521.

[647] Schlumberger, Numismatique de l’Orient latin, 436-43; Supplément, 18-19; Pls XVI, XVII, XXI; Lampros, Catalogue, II. 305; Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, VI. 41, 491-2; VII. 87-8.

[648] Fontana, Sacrum Theatrum Dominicanum, 81; Scriptores Ordinis Prædicatorum (ed. Echard), I. 816-7; Rovetta, Bibliotheca Provinciæ Lombardiæ Sacri Ordinis Prædicatorum, 76; Bullarium Ordinis Fr. Prædicatorum (ed. Bremond). III. 210-11, 236, 336.

[649] De vera nobilitate, 53, 55, 82-3.

[650] Reg. Vat. 443, ff. 111-2.

[651] Jireček, Geschichte der Bulgaren, 449.

[652] Zinkeisen, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, III. 132, 319.

[653] Hopf, in Ersch und Gruber’s Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 189.

[654] Rycaut in Knolles, Turkish History, II. 87 (ed. 1687).

[655] Sathas, Μεσαιωνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη, V. 339. Paparregopoulos, V. 575.

[656] Finlay, VI. 11.

[657] P. 308.

[658] Historia Patriarchica, 102-7; Cobham, The Patriarchs of Constantinople; Paparregopoulos, op. cit. V. 502-36; Finlay, V. 130-49.

[659] The Serb Patriarchate of Ipek was practically removed to Carlovitz in 1738, and ceased to exist even in name in 1766. The Bulgarian Patriarchate of Ochrida was formally abolished in 1767.

[660] Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, p. 128.

[661] Paparregopoulos, V. 471.

[662] Rycaut, in Knolles, op. cit. II. 90. Ranke, Fürsten u. Völker von Süd. Europa, p. 69, says that it ceased between 1630 and 1650. Paparregopoulos (V. 471) puts the date of its abolition in 1638; Finlay (V. 163-4) at 1676.

[663] Paparregopoulos says that “all but one” were Greeks; but he includes the Albanian family of Ghika and the Kallimachai, who came, as their latest biographer, M. Jorga, has shown, from Moldavia. See my notice in The English Historical Review, XVIII. 577. Blancard, Les Mavroyéni.

[664] Finlay, V. 21, 31.

[665] Zinkeisen, III. 360.

[666] Paparregopoulos, V. 489.

[667] Paparregopoulos, V. 494.

[668] Sathas, Μνημεῖα, IV. pp. liv-lxi; and vols. VII.-IX., which contain documents relating to them from 1464 to 1570, some of their literary productions, and a picture of one of them fully armed.

[669] Finlay, V. 122

[670] Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, XIII. 273-317.

[671] Θρήνος τῆς Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, l. 354 apud Ellissen, Analekten, III.

[672] Gregorovius, Storia della Città di Roma nel medio evo [ed. 1901], III. 826; IV. 207, 240; Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, II. 382; Lanciani, Wanderings in the Roman Campagna, 217.

[673] Paruta, Storia della Guerra di Cipro, 79-80.

[674] Op. cit. 294.

[675] Memorie istoriche dei Monarchi Ottomani, 401.

[676] Paruta, 299-300. Négociations de la France dans le Levant, III. 191.

[677] pp. 212-214.

[678] Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, p. 171.

[679] Paruta, 391.

[680] Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, p. 175, where the dates of their deaths, given in his Χρονικὸν Ἀνέκδοτον Γαλαξειδίου, p. 153, are corrected; Philadelpheus, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ἐπὶ Τουρκοκρατίας, I. 40.

[681] Zinkeisen, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, III. 529.

[682] Crusius, Turco-Græcia, VII. 10, 19; Laborde, Athènes aux xvᵉ, xviᵉ et xviiᵉ siècles, I. 55-60.

[683] It is headed Περὶ τῆς Ἀττικῆς and has last been published and annotated by my friend K. Philadelpheus, in his excellent Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ἐπὶ Τουρκοκρατίας, I. 189-92. He assigns to it the date 1628.

[684] Philadelpheus, I. 202-8; Konstantinides, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (ed. 2), pp. 447-50.

[685] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα τῆς Ἱστορίας τῶν Ἀθηναίων (ed. 2), I. 191, 336.

[686] Konstantinides thinks his figures much too high (op. cit. 442-7).

[687] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηναίων, II. 77-83. Konstantinides (pp. 421-2) relying on a statement of Sanuto that the governor of Athens, even before 1470, was styled only subashi, thinks that all the time down to 1610 Athens was merely a district of a sandjak. Philadelpheus (I. 287-90) agrees with the latter view, but extends the duration of this arrangement to 1621 or even later.

[688] Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, pp. 178-9.

[689] See the Greek history of Epeiros given in Pouqueville, Voyage dans la Grèce, V. 82-90.

[690] Finlay, History of Greece, V. 57, 90-1, 94, 96, 101, 108.

[691] Dapper, Description des Îles de l’Archipel, p. 224.

[692] Spon, Voyage, II. 23 (ed. 1679).

[693] Finlay, V. 108, 114.

[694] Laborde, I. 67-70. An Austrian archæologist has suggested that the Hermes, Paris, or Perseus, of Antikythera, discovered some 20 years ago, and now at Athens, was part of the spoil of a vessel bound for England which foundered in 1640 off that island.

[695] His genealogy is given in Sathas, Τουρκοκρατουμένη Ἑλλάς, p. 197, n. 2.

[696] Sathas, p. 209.

[697] Ibid. pp. 197-210.

[698] Nani, Istoria della R. Veneta, pt. II. p. 134.

[699] Randolph, The Present State of the Morea, p. 9; Guillet, Athènes ancienne et nouvelle, pp. 28-38. It must be added, however, that the Capuchins of Athens, upon whose notes this book was based, may from theological bias have exaggerated the misdeeds of the Orthodox clergy. On this ground the local historian, Alexandrakos, in his Ἱστορία τῆς Μάνης, p. 18, indignantly rejects these accusations. But in 1894 I heard in Athens a similar story about a Thessalian priest, implicated in a celebrated case of brigandage.

[700] Finlay, V. 116-7; Spon, I. 123; Sathas, pp. 308-10; Paparregopoulos, Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους, V. 493; Leake, Travels in the Morea, III. 450.

[701] Laborde, I. 63; Philadelpheus (I. 184, 187) puts his visit in 1621. The passage about Athens is in his Voyage de Levant (ed. 1645), pp. 473-5.

[702] Laborde, I. 75, 201; Guillet, p. 223.

[703] His Relation d’État présent de la ville d’Athènes is reprinted in full in Laborde’s book.

[704] Laborde, I. 176; Finlay, V. 104, n. 2; Ray’s Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages, vol. II.; Randolph, The Present State of the Morea; Magni, Relazione della città d’Atene.

[705] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, III. 135.

[706] Laborde, II. 358, 363. The Venetian report, given in Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστ. καὶ Ἐθν. Ἑτ. V. 226, says the borgo in 1687 contained “4000 and more houses.”

[707] Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter, II. 417 n.

[708] Ubi supra, II. 187.

[709] There is a picture, taken from Stuart, of this Παναγία στὴν πέτρα in Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, II. 280. See his Μνημεῖα, I. 93. It was destroyed by Hadji Ali, to provide materials for the defences of Athens against the Albanians in 1778.

[710] Laborde, I. 126 n.

[711] In the third volume of Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία.

[712] Spon, II. 180. Even now there is no synagogue in Athens.

[713] E.g. the thief who pillaged the king’s study at Tatoi in 1902 was an Albanian from Markopoulo, between Athens and Laurion. Many of the names of the Attic villages—e.g. Tatoi, Liosia and Liopesi—are Albanian.

[714] Printed by Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, II. 238-43.

[715] Guillet, who tells the story, upon which Spon casts doubt, places this under Ahmed I. Spon says the boon was granted about 1645.

[716] Ἄρχοντες, νοικοκυραῖοι, παζαρῖται, ξωτάρηδες.

[717] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, II. 102.

[718] The Present State of the Morea, p. 22.

[719] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, III. 120.

[720] Ἐπῆραν τὰ παιδιὰ ἀπὸ τὴν Ἀθήνα [sic] are the words. This chronicle, which is dated 1606, has been re-published by Kampouroglos in his Μνημεῖα, I. 89-90, and by Lampros, Ecthesis Chronica and Chronicon Athenarum, 85-6.

[721] Spon, II. 103.

[722] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, I. 33; Paparregopoulos, V. 597.

[723] The θρῆνος for him is published in Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, I. 7-27, and by Legrand, Bibliothèque grecque vulgaire, II. 123-47.

[724] Laborde, I. 208.

[725] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, II. 174.

[726] Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, III. 120.

[727] Vernon, in Ray’s Collection of Curious Travels and Voyages, II. 22.

[728] Spon, II. 194; Paparregopoulos, V. 645. Philadelpheus has treated exhaustively of the Athenian schools in the Turkish period (II. ch. XIX.).

[729] In Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, vol. III.

[730] Kampouroglos, (Ἱστορία, II. 37) thinks that it had been the metropolitan church of Athens during the whole Frankish period. Philadelpheus (I. 178, 273, 312) agrees with him. When I visited it I could see not only that it had been a mosque, but that it might easily have been a church. There are old pillars inside it, a continuation of those in the Roman market outside.

[731] Ἱστορία, II. 275, 304. Philadelpheus, I. 273. This identification is conclusively proved not only by tradition among very old Athenians, but by an entry in a Gospel found at Ægina with the words τοῦ Καθολικοῦ τῆς Ἀθήνας τοῦ Ἁγίου Παντελεήμονος. This church stood in the square where the public auctions are still held.

[732] Spon, II. 155, 172. “Deli-Dagh” is a translation of “Monte Matto,” the Italian version of Hymettos. Kampouroglos, Ἱστορία, II. 50.

[733] Babin in Laborde, I. 188 n.

[734] Finlay, V. 100.

[735] Spon, II. 192-4; Laborde, I. 163.

[736] Laborde, I. 81, 198; Spon, II. 121.

[737] Spon, II. 122.

[738] Spon, II. 107-8; Laborde, I. 81.

[739] Babin, in Laborde, I. 199.

[740] Randolph, The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago, p. 5.

[741] Spon, II. 179.

[742] The Greeks call any large beast a δράκος.

[743] Spon, II. 211, 213, 220, 223, 230; Randolph, Present State of the Morea, p. 1.

[744] Vernon, ubi supra, II. 22, 25.

[745] Spon, II. 16, 23, 28, 41, 51, 57-62, 65, 73, 232, 246; Finlay, V. 100; Vernon, ubi supra, II. 27.

[746] Paparregopoulos, V. 590.

[747] Spon, II. 219, 270-3.

[748] Randolph, The Present State of the Morea, p. 4.

[749] Pègues, Histoire ... de Santorin, 591-619.

[750] Spon, I. 149.

[751] Randolph, The Present State of the Islands in the Archipelago, 8-14.

[752] Sanger, Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs, 305-24; Sathas, Νεοελληνικὴ Φιλολογία, 345; Dowling, Hellenism in England, 46-7, 80-5.

[753] Hopf, ubi supra, LXXXVI. 172-3.

[754] Hopf, Veneto-byzantinische Analekten, pp. 422-6; and in Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 177.

[755] Racconto historico della Veneta Guerra in Levante (Colonia, 1691), I. 62, 65.

[756] Laborde, Athènes aux xvᵉ, xviᵉ et xviiᵉ siècles, II. 74-8.

[757] Ἡμερολόγιον Μάτεση apud Sathas, Ἑλληνικὰ Ἀνέκδοτα, I. 198; Chiotes, Ἱστορικὰ Ἀπομνημονεύματα, III. 281, 318.

[758] La Morea combattuta dall’ armi Venete (Venetia, 1686), pp. 180-2.

[759] Locatelli, I. 151, 161, 167, 174, 213.

[760] Mateses apud Sathas, I. 210; Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, II. i. 139; Locatelli, I. 263, 276.

[761] Ibid. I. 338.

[762] Journal d’Anna Akerhjelm, apud Laborde, II. 307.

[763] Locatelli, I. 348.

[764] Morosini’s dispatches apud Laborde, II. 121-31.

[765] Locatelli, II. 3.

[766] Laborde, I. 116-17.

[767] Morosini’s dispatch apud Laborde, II. 158; Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor and Greece (ed. 1825), II. 111.

[768] Apud Laborde, II. 277; Locatelli, II. 3; Ranke, “Die Venezianer in Morea,” in Sämmt. Werke, XLII. 297.

[769] Locatelli, II. 8; Morosini’s dispatch apud Laborde, II. 162.

[770] Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστ. καὶ Ἐθν. Ἑταιρίας, V. 222-7: Locatelli, II. 24-34.

[771] Laborde, II. 358.

[772] Ibid. II. 279.

[773] Ibid. II. 279, 313.

[774] Ibid. II. 179, 317.

[775] Ibid. II. 150, 172, 176, 180, 182; Fanelli, Atene Attica, pp. 113, 308, 317.

[776] Laborde, II. 90; Mateses apud Sathas, I. 216.

[777] Atene Attica, p. 344.

[778] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, I. 43; Philadelpheus, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, II. 315; Δελτίον, V. 545.

[779] Mateses, loc. cit.; Locatelli, II. 50; Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, I. 189, 296; Ἱστορία, I. 343; III. 256.

[780] Δελτίον, V. 457; Lampros, Ἱστορικὰ Μελετήματα, p. 217.

[781] Locatelli, II. 109, 164, 247; Garzoni, Istoria della Repubblica di Venezia (ed. 1720), I. 365.

[782] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, I. 34-6.

[783] Ibid. I. 211; Philadelpheus, II. 62.

[784] Kampouroglos, Μνημεῖα, II. 339; Konstantinides, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν, p. 494, n. 1.

[785] J. Benizelos, Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν apud Philadelpheus, II. 273.

[786] Garzoni, I. 432-4, 509-10; Δελτίον, V. 525.

[787] Garzoni, I. 622, 629; Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Levant, I. 141.

[788] Authorities, the reports of the Venetian governors, used by Ranke for his essay “Die Venezianer in Morea” (Sämmt. Werke, XLII. 277-361), and by Zinkeisen (Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, V. 473-89), have since been published by the late Professor Lampros in his Ἱστορικὰ Μελετήματα, pp. 199-220, and in Δελτίον τῆς Ἱστορικῆς καὶ Ἐθνολογικῆς Ἑταιρίας, II. 282-317, 686-710; V. 228-51, 425-567, 605-823. For the campaign of 1715 Brue, Journal de la campagne; Diedo, Storia della Repubblica di Venezia, IV. 73-107; the Greek poem by Manthos of Joannina (an eye-witness), “Conquête de la Morée par les Turcs” in Legrand, Bibliothèque grecque vulgaire, III. 280-331; Ferrari, Delle notizie storiche della lega ... contra ... Acmet III, pp. 41-69; Chronique de l’expédition des Turcs en Morée, 1715, attribuée à Constantin Dioikétès.

[789] Itinéraire (ed. 1826), I. 80-2; Lampros, p. 209.

[790] Chroniques gréco-romanes, pp. 385-90.

[791] Buchon, Nouvelles Recherches, II. i. 99, 102, which disprove the statement that it was introduced from Naxos about 1580.

[792] French Consular dispatches apud Zinkeisen, V. 486, n. 2.

[793] Voyages, I. 462.

[794] IV. 83.

[795] Lamprynides, Ἡ Ναυπλία, 230-40.

[796] I. 138.

[797] Δελτίον, V. 802; Ferrari, p. 44.

[798] History of Modern Greece, I. 242 n.; Depellegrin, Relation du voyage dans la Morée, p. 14; Lamprynides, p. 284.

[799] Philadelpheus, II. 69.

[800] Zinkeisen, V. 499 n.; Gerola, Monumenti Veneti nell’ Isola di Creta, I. ii. 535.

[801] Art. Am. II. 658; Epist. ex Ponto, IV. xiv. 45.

[802] H. N. III. 26.

[803] II. 627; V. 650.

[804] VII. 480.

[805] III. 12, § 2.

[806] Ed. Wesseling, 323, 329, 332, 489, 497, 549, 608, 611-12.

[807] Ed. Teubner, p. 13.

[808] Travels in Northern Greece, I. 2.

[809] Voyage dans la Grèce, I. 284.

[810] Acta et Diplomata res Albaniæ mediæ ætatis illustrantia, I. 4, 5, 7.

[811] Procopius (ed. Teubner), II. p. 23.

[812] III. 56.

[813] Jireček, Geschichte der Bulgaren, 167, 191, 202 n.

[814] Ed. Teubner, I. 49-50, 126, 132, 137, 161, 177, 187, 193-94; II. 168-69, 189, 194, 197; Recueil des historiens des Croisades: Historiens occidentaux, III. 177.

[815] Fontes Rerum Austriacarum, II. xii. 118, 184.

[816] Niketas, 118-19.

[817] Font. Rer. Aust. II. xii. 472, 570.

[818] Miklosich und Müller, Acta et Diplomata Græca Medii Ævi, III. 240; M. Sanudo, ap. Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes, 107; Ughelli, Italia Sacra, VI. 774.

[819] Del Giudice, Codice Diplomatico del Regno di Carlo Iᵒ e IIᵒ d’Angiò, I. 308; Pachymeres, I. 508.

[820] Buchon, Recherches et Matériaux, I. 33.

[821] Del Giudice, II. i. 239; Act. et Dip. Alb. I. 73, 84, 85, 93, 94.

[822] Ibid. 106, 115, 117, 127, 139; Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. IV. ii. 355; Font. Rer. Aust. ii. xiv. 226, 243.

[823] Act. et Dip. Alb. I. 146, 157.

[824] Ducange, Histoire de l’Empire de Constantinople (ed. 1729), II. Recueil, 21, 22.

[825] Act. et Dip. Alb. I. 159; Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, I. 150, 233; Miklosich und Müller, III. 109.

[826] Dip. Ven.-Lev. I. 135, 161; Act. et Dip. Alb. I. 214, 215, 220, 237; Archivio Veneto, XX. 94.

[827] Dip. Ven.-Lev. I. 125, 130, 136-38, 147-49, 154, 159-62, 191; Arch. Ven. XX. 92; Act. et Dip. Alb. I. 217, 245.

[828] Cantacuzene, I. 495.

[829] Starine, IV. 29; Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, I. 385 (thus disproving Hopf’s statement, for which there is no authority, that Valona became Serbian in 1337).

[830] Spomenik, XI. 29, 30.

[831] Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium, III. 176; Predelli, I Libri Commemoriali, III. p. 307.

[832] Hopf apud Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXV. 458ᵇ.

[833] Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. IV. 58.

[834] Ibid. XXVII. 264; Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica, 178.

[835] Orbini, Il regno degli Slavi, 289; Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. IV. 100-103. For the history of Saseno cp. Lampros in Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων, XI. 57-93.

[836] Ibid. VII. 145; Historia della casa Musachia ap. Hopf, Chroniques, 290.

[837] From turri del Prego, turris Pirgi, Hopf has evolved Parga, which in 1320 formed part of the Despotat of Epeiros (Dip. Ven.-Lev. I. 170), and became Venetian in 1401. Pyrgos was at the mouth of the Semeni (Act. et Dip. Alb. II. 107, III).

[838] Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. IV. 226.

[839] Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. IV. 263, 266, 308, 349.

[840] Miklosich und Müller, II. 230; Hopf, Chroniques, l.c.; Chalkokondyles, 251.

[841] Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. IV. 384, 412, 423; V. 81, 120; XII. 198, 199, 263; Gelcich, La Zedda e la Dinastia dei Balšidi, 204.

[842] Sathas, Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας, I. 173.

[843] Epigrammata reperta per Illyricum, p. XXI.

[844] Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer. XXII. 372.

[845] Hopf ap. Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 159ᵃ.

[846] Sathas, Μνημ. VI. 135, 137, 139, 173, 218.

[847] Sathas, Μνημ. IX. 174.

[848] A. Mauroceni, Historia Veneta (ed. 1623), 172.

[849] Sathas, Μνημ. IX. 218; Paruta, Storia della guerra di Cipro, 225.

[850] Predelli, Commem. VII. pp. 190-93.

[851] Garzoni, Istoria della Repubblica di Venezia (ed. 1720), I. 365-71.

[852] Ibid. 390-407; Epirotica, 254.

[853] Voyage, I. 285.

[854] Aravantinos, Χρονογραφία τῆς Ἠπείρου, I. 190-92, 248-49.

[855] Ibid. I. 261, 288, 306, 311, 319, 328-29, 383, 400-1, 409-10.

[856] Diplomatische Aktenstücke (Wien, 1914), p. 71.

[857] Il Messaggero, Oct. 31, 1914.

[858] I. 333.

[859] Lost in 1903, but recently re-discovered at Corfù. See Morning Post, July 25, 1916.

[860] Ur = “Prince” in Hungarian.

[861] Justly, as Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer., I. 131 show.

[862] Jireček (II. 120 n. 2) has shown that the form “Obilich” was substituted in the eighteenth century, because “Kobilich” (= “son of a mare”) was considered vulgar.

[863] Il Regno degli Slavi, p. 294.

[864] Copioso Ristretto degli Annali di Rausa, pp. 85, 132.

[865] Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium, XXI. 123.

[866] Historia Byzantina, I. 347.

[867] Abhandlungen der historischen Classe der k. bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, VIII. 698.

[868] Istorija Crne Gore, p. 43.

[869] Turcs et Monténégrins, pp. 20, 30, 33.

[870] Istorija o Černoj Gorê, Italian translation by Ciàmpoli, pp. 23, 25, 29-30.

[871] In Ersch und Gruber, Allgemeine Encyklopädie, LXXXVI. 101; Chroniques gréco-romanes, p. 534.

[872] Trésor de Chronologie, p. 1773.

[873] Mon. sp. hist. Slav. Merid. IV. 301, 305, 372, 377.

[874] Gelcich, La Zedda e la Dinastia dei Balšidi, p. 226.

[875] Mon. sp. hist. Slav. Merid. V. 68; XVII. 36.

[876] Ersch und Gruber, LXXXVI. 42-3.

[877] Die serbischen Dynasten Crnojević, p. 61.

[878] Mon. sp. hist. Slav. Merid. XXI. 10.

[879] Ibid. XXI. 164-5, 167-8, 202, 205, 382, 384.

[880] Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica, p. 566.

[881] Between May 2 and November 11: Mon. sp. hist. Slav. Merid. XXII. 364, 383.

[882] Ibid. XXVII. 212.

[883] Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina, II. 229.

[884] I have drawn largely for this essay from the Wissenschaftliche Mittheilungen aus Bosnien und der Hercegovina, of which twelve volumes were published during the Austro-Hungarian occupation, and which throw new light on many points of Bosnian history. I have also visited all the chief places of historic interest in the occupied territory and the sandjak of Novibazar.

[885] P. 159 (ed. Bonn).

[886] Wiss. Mitth. I. 333, 434.

[887] Constantine Porph. III. 156, 160.

[888] Pp. 104, 131-32 (ed. Bonn).

[889] Wiss. Mitth. VII. 215-20; Miklosich, Monumenta Serbica, 1; Theiner, Vetera Monumenta Slavorum Meridionalium historiam illustrantia, I. 6, 12-13, 15, 19-20, 22.

[890] Miklosich, Mon. Serb., 24, 28-30, 32-34; Theiner, Vetera Monumenta historica Hungariam sacram illustrantia, I. 31-32, 55-56, 72, 113, 120, 128-30, 133, 137, 147, 162-63, 168-73, 201-06; Thomas Archidiaconus in Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer., XXVI. 91, 103, 105, 113, 121, 195.

[891] Wiss. Mitth. XI. 260, 262.

[892] Ibid. XI. 278; Orbini, Il Regno degli Slavi, 350.

[893] L. v. Thallóczy in Wiss. Mitth. XI. 268-73 (reprinted in his Studien zur Geschichte Bosniens und Serbiens im Mittelalter, 7-75).

[894] Miklosich, Mon. Serb. 42, 44, 60, 69; Theiner, Mon. Hung. I. 230, 273-76, 303, 348, 359-60, 364, 375-78, 395, 403, 456, 458, 463; Mon. Slav. I. 135.

[895] Wiss. Mitth. XI. 184, 235, 239-44; Miklosich, Mon. Serb. 101-03, 105-07; Thallóczy, op. cit., 273.

[896] Wiss. Mitth. IV. 324-42; Miklosich, Mon. Serb. 187.

[897] Makuscev, Monumenta historica Slavorum Meridionalium, I. 528; Doukas (Italian version), 354 (ed. Bonn).

[898] Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, II. 126.

[899] Wiss. Mitth. II. 94-124; IV. 390-93; VI. 284-90; Thallóczy, op. cit., 303.

[900] Recueil de Voyages et de Documents (Paris, 1892), XII. 195; Thallóczy, op. cit., 79-109.

[901] P. 249; Wiss. Mitth. II. 125-51.

[902] Farlati, Illyricum Sacrum, IV. 68.

[903] Another theory is that he received the ducal title from the Pope in 1449, when he turned Catholic, or the King of Aragon, or that he took it with the agreement of the Sultan. (Wiss. Mitth. III. 503-09; X. 103 n.; Thallóczy, Studien zur Geschichte Bosniens und Serbiens im Mittelalter, 146-59.) But he is styled dux terre Huminis as early as Aug. 23, 1445 (Mon. sp. hist. Slav. Mer. XXI. 226), “Duke of St Sava” in 1446 (Farlati, l.c.), and “Duke” in a dubious inscription of that year (Wiss. Mitth. III. 502).

[904] Chalkokondyles, 459; Kritoboulos, III. ch. 2.

[905] Chalkokondyles, 532; Kritoboulos, IV. ch. 15.

[906] Wiss. Mitth. I. 496; III. 384; Hopf, Chroniques, 333; Historia Politica, 33; Chalkokondyles, 535-44; Makuscev, I. 309, 532; II. 25.

[907] Kritoboulos, V. chs. 4-6.

[908] Wiss. Mitth. IV. 395; Mon. sp. h. Sl. Mer., VI. 114, 126; XXV. 386; Orbini, 388.

[909] Campani Vita Pii II, apud Muratori, R.I.S., III. pt ii. 981.

[910] Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, VI. 648-9.

[911] Mélanges historiques, IV. 395.

[912] Her stay in Rome on this occasion may be dated approximately by two letters which she wrote there on October 23 and November 5 (Mon. Pat. Script. II. 115; Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’île de Chypre, III. 114). Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, 138.

[913] P. 179 (Ed. 1614).

[914] Cronaca di Bologna, apud Muratori R.I.S. XVIII. 742.

[915] P. 94.

[916] Mélanges historiques, V. 411.

[917] Volaterranus apud Muratori, R.I.S. (ed. 1904), XXIII. 87, 127, 148.

[918] Torrigio, Le sagre grotte Vaticane (ed. 1675), 285-6, 288-9, 299; J. Burchardi, Diarium (ed. 1883), I. 272-3.

[919] Archivio storico italiano, Ser. III. iii. 226, 234-5.

[920] Histoire de l’île de Chypre, III. 346-7, 408, 412-3.

[921] Theiner, Vetera monumenta historica Hungariam sacram illustrantia, II. 318, 373-4.

[922] Libro nel qual s’ insegna a scriver ogni sorte lettera (ed. 1578) f. 55; (ed. 1553) f. 54.

[923] Memorie Istoriche della Chiesa e Convento di S. Maria in Araceli, 129, 148 (which give the Slavonic inscription, taken from Palatino).

[924] Copioso ristretto degli Annali di Ragusa, 10; Thallóczy, op. cit., 110-20, 309-10.

[925] Theiner, Vet. Mon. Hung. II. 442, 447, 452; Makuscev, Monumenta historica Slavorum Meridionalium, II. 95.

[926] Arch. stor. ital. Ser. III. iii. 229; Gottlob, Aus der Camera Apostolica, 292-4.

[927] Mas Latrie, Histoire, III. 174; Sathas, Μεσαιωνικὴ Βιβλιοθήκη, II. 474.

[928] Migne, Patrologia Græca, CLXI. pp. lxxxvi-vii.

[929] Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle, I. 386; Abb. 25; Schrader, Mon. Ital. IV. 216.

[930] William of Tyre, Bk XVI. 29; Jacques de Vitry (ed. Bongars), 1068-9, Röhricht, Geschichte des Königreichs Jerusalem, 191.

[931] Ludolphi, De Itinere Terræ Sanctæ, 40-1.

[932] William of Tyre, Bk IX. 2.

[933] Recueil des Hist., Lois, I. 22; Jacques de Vitry, 1116.

[934] William of Tyre, Bk XVII. 1.

[935] Recueil des Hist., Lois, I. 22-26.

[936] Bk XI. 10.

[937] Recueil des Hist., Hist. Occid., II. 47, 58; Morning Post, Jan. 11, 1918.

[938] Ibid. II. 36, 50; Archives de l’Orient Latin, I. 663-8.

[939] Röhricht, Regesta Regni Hieros., pp. 285, 321, 325.

[940] From pullus, a “colt,” and probably of the same origin as the Moreote termination -όπουλος.

[941] Pp. 1088-9.

[942] Lois, I. 426-7.

[943] Bk XXI. 7.

[944] Jacques de Vitry, p. 1082.

[945] Bk XII. 7.

[946] William of Tyre, Bk XX. 29-30; Jacques de Vitry, p. 1063.

[947] Radulfus de Diceto, II. 80-1; Annales de Dunstapliâ, 126; Röhricht, Regesta, pp. 321, 361; Geschichte, 965; Mas Latrie, Hist. de l’Île de Chypre, II. 81-2, 213.

[948] Mas Latrie, Histoire de l’Île de Chypre, I. 200, 256.

[949] I. 214-5.

[950] Ibid. I. 178-82; II. 54.

[951] Ibid. I. 231.

[952] Ibid. II. 230, 253-54, 316-17.

[953] Ibid. I. 34.

[954] Ibid. I. 151; II. 252, 273.

[955] Ibid. I. 30.

[956] Ibid. I. 113.

[957] Ibid. II. 18, 58.

[958] Ibid. II. 106, 186, 259, 296.

[959] Ibid. I. 230-1; II. 89-90.

[960] Ibid. I. 101, 181; II. 149.

[961] Ibid. I. 204; II. 149, 253.

[962] Ibid. I. 109-11, 120-3.

[963] Ibid. II. 209-22.

[964] Ibid. I. 128.

[965] Ibid. I. 220, 227, 246; II. 82, 83, 169.

[966] Ibid. I. 69, 240; II. 162.

[967] Ibid. I. 28, 55, 169, 174; II. 81.

[968] Ibid. I. 89.

[969] Ibid. II. 13, 26, 60, 71, 104, 114, 115, 138, 176, 204, 209.

[970] Ibid. II. 8, 15, 97.

[971] Ibid. I. 27.

[972] Ibid. I. 199; II. 76, 78, 86, 205, 241-2.

[973] Ibid. II. 94, 111.

[974] Ibid. II. 65, 199.

[975] Ibid. II. 99.

[976] Ibid. II. 84.

[977] Ibid. II. 206.

[978] Ibid. I. 84, 128-9, 154, 179, 183, 197; II. 170, 256.

[979] Ibid. II. 53.

[980] Ibid. I. 57.

[981] Ibid. I. 27, 153, 202.

[982] Ibid. I. 169.

[983] Ibid. I. 222; II. 81, 194.

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ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
Fig. 1.	Inscription on the Church at Karditza	133
” 2.	Arms on Well-Head in the Castle at Monemvasia	242

†De parte	474
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Non syncere	9

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CHAP.			PAGE
I.	THE ROMANS IN GREECE		1
II.	BYZANTINE GREECE		29
III.	FRANKISH AND VENETIAN GREECE		57
	1.	THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE	57
	2.	FRANKISH SOCIETY IN GREECE	70
	3.	THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE	85
		APPENDIX: THE NAME OF NAVARINO	107
	4.	THE DUKES OF ATHENS	110
		APPENDIX: THE FRANKISH INSCRIPTION AT KARDITZA	132
	5.	FLORENTINE ATHENS	135
		APPENDIX:
		NOTES ON ATHENS UNDER THE FRANKS	155
		THE TURKISH CAPTURE OF ATHENS	160
	6.	THE DUCHY OF NAXOS	161
		APPENDIX: THE MAD DUKE OF NAXOS	175
	7.	CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)	177
	8.	THE IONIAN ISLANDS UNDER VENETIAN RULE	199
	9.	MONEMVASIA	231
	10.	THE MARQUISATE OF BOUDONITZA (1204-1414)	245
	11.	ITHAKE UNDER THE FRANKS	261
	12.	THE LAST VENETIAN ISLANDS IN THE ÆGEAN	265
	13.	SALONIKA	268
IV.	THE GENOESE COLONIES IN GREECE		283
	1.	THE ZACCARIA OF PHOCÆA AND CHIOS (1275-1329)	283
	2.	THE GENOESE IN CHIOS (1346-1566)	298
	3.	THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)	313
V.	TURKISH GREECE (1460-1684)		355
VI.	THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE (1684-1718)		403[viii]
VII.	MISCELLANEA FROM THE NEAR EAST		429
	1.	VALONA	429
	2.	THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE	441
		APPENDIX: THE FOUNDER OF MONTENEGRO	458
	3.	BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST	460
	4.	BALKAN EXILES IN ROME	497
	5.	THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM (1099-1291)	515
	6.	A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA	533

PLATE	FIGS.		TO FACE PAGE
I.	1 & 2.	The Church of St George at Karditza	134
II.	1.	Monemvasia from the Land	234
	2.	Monemvasia. Entrance to Kastro	234
III.	1.	Monemvasia. Παναγία Μυρτιδιώτισσα	235
	2.	Monemvasia. Ἁγία Σοφία	235
IV.		Monemvasia. Kastro	240
V.	1.	Monemvasia. Town Walls and Gate	241
	2.	Monemvasia. Modern Town at Base of Cliff	241
VI.	1.	Boudonitza. The Castle from the West	246
	2.	Boudonitza. The Castle from the East	246
VII.	1.	Boudonitza. The Keep and the Hellenic Gateway	247
	2.	Boudonitza. The Hellenic Gateway	247

22-24 Aug. 1285.	Fourteen documents of these dates refer to the mercantile transactions of Benedetto and Manuele Zaccaria, such as their appointment of agents to receive their wares from “Fogia” and to send them to Genoa, Majorca, Syria, the Black Sea, and other places.
	(Pandette Richeriane, fogliazzo ii. fasc. 10.)
17 April, 1287.	“Benedetto Zaccaria in his own name and in that of his brother Manuele” gives a receipt at Genoa to “Percivalis Spinula.”
	(Ibid. fasc. 20.)
24 Jan. 1287.	“Nicolino” is mentioned as brother of Benedetto and Manuele Zaccaria.
	(Ibid. fogliazzo i. fasc. 178.)
9 May, 1291.	“Clarisia, wife of the late Manuele Zaccaria, in her own name and on behalf of her sons Tedisio, Leonardo, Odoardo and Manfred,” appoints an agent for the sale of a female slave.
	(Ibid. fogliazzo ii. fasc. 27.)
14 April, 1304.	“Paleologo Zaccaria” is cited as witness to a monetary transaction.
	(Ibid. fogliazzo A. fasc. 7.)
31 May, 1311.	Two documents executed at Genoa. In one Domenico Doria acknowledges receipt of monies from Andriolo Cattaneo, son of Andriolo; in the other Andriolo appoints Lanfranchino Doria and Luchino Cattaneo his agents.
	(Ibid. fasc. 7.)[296]
13 Aug. 1313.	“Manuel Bonaneus” acknowledges receipt of monies from Andriolo Cattaneo.
	(Ibid. fasc. 13.)
21, 24 Sept. 1316.	Mention of “the galley of Paleologo Zaccaria, which was at Pera in 1307.”
	(Ibid. fasc. 13.)

Byzantine Empire		-1081
Normans of Sicily		1081-4
Byzantine Empire		1084-1204
Despotat of Epeiros		1204-57
Manfred		1257-66
Chinardo		1266
Giacomo di Balsignano		1266-73
Angevins of Naples		1273-(?)97
Byzantine Empire	(?)	1297-1345/6
Serbs		1345/6-1417
Turks		1417-1690
Venetians		1690-1
Turks		1691-1912
Albanians		1912-14
Italians	Dec. 25, 1914-Aug. 3, 1920
Albanians		1920-