Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

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 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 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.

The renewal of the divine grace (wrote the enthusiastic Pope to Bérard) suffereth not the ancient glory of the city of Athens to grow old. The citadel of most famous Pallas hath been humbled to become the seat of the most glorious Mother of God. Well may we call this city “Kirjath-sepher,” which when Othniel had subdued to the rule of Caleb, “he gave him Achsah, his daughter to wife[80].”

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 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 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 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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.

5. Chronik des Edlen En Ramon Muntaner. Ed. Karl Lanz. Stuttgart, 1844.

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.

8. De Historiæ Ducatus Atheniensis Fontibus. By K. Hopf. 1852.

9. Catalunya a Grecia. By D. Antonio Rubió y Lluch. Barcelona, 1906.

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

And other works.

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 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.”

Fig. 1. Inscription on the Church at Karditza.

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, 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.

As Buchon’s books are rare, I append his transcript of the inscription:

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. +

PLATE I

Fig. 1. The Church of St George at Karditza, looking towards the end, which is modern

Fig. 2. The Church of St George at Karditza, showing old belfry and buttresses supporting old part of the building