"Questo é de' rei del fuoco furo."
I have only space to epitomize a passage of the history of Crete, under the Venetians, to show how utterly infamous, unjust, and devilish was their régime. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the provinces of Selino, Sfakia, and Rhizo seceded, and established an independent government, which was for some time unmolested by the Venetian authorities. The governor of the seceded republic finally presuming to ask in marriage for his son the daughter of a Venetian noble, the latter, to revenge the insult, plotted with the governor of Canéa, and, pretending to consent, lured the family of the soi-disant Greek governor, with a company of nearly 500 of his compatriots, to the marriage feast. The guests having been intoxicated and gone to sleep, and the signal given to the authorities at Canéa, the governor came with 1,700 foot and 150 horse, took the whole prisoners, and in various ways and different places massacred them, except a few who were sent to the galleys.
This was followed up, for the better terrifying of the seditious, by a raid on the village of Foligniaco, near Murnies, and on the edge of the plain of Canéa, in which they took the whole population prisoners asleep, burned the village, hanged twelve of the primates, ripped open three or four pregnant women, wives of the principal people, put to death and exiled the whole population remaining, except five or six who escaped. The Provveditore then called on all the Greeks of the lately revolted district to come in and surrender themselves, but, as they naturally declined, they were put under a ban which is perhaps the most horrible sentence ever given by a civilized community. No inhabitant of the proscribed district could secure his life except on condition of bringing in the "head of his father, brother, cousin, or nephew."
"At length a priest of the family of the Pateri-Zapa entered the city, accompanied by his two sons and by two of his brothers, each of the mournful party carrying in his hand a human head. (Of the five heads, the first belonged to the son of the priest, the second to one of his brothers, the third to his son-in-law, and the fourth and fifth to sons of one of his brothers.) The wretched men placed their bleeding offerings before the Signor Cavalli and the other representatives of Venice, and with the bitterest tears stated whose heads they were. The facts were duly established by witnesses; even the governor who had been sent to Crete to extirpate the seditious Greeks was moved, and the law was at length abolished."
This was under the auspices of Christianity. Under the Crescent, things were at first better, but finally such as to cause wonder how there is still a Cretan people, considering that even Dante could say:
"Nel mezzo 'l mar siede un paese guasto
Diss' egli allora, che s'appella Creta."
The Venetian rule had reduced the population of the island to about 160,000, the tenth of its probable number under the Byzantine emperors. The anticipations of Garzoni were to the full realized, for the Cretan, favoring the Turkish conquest, made it possible, and avenged himself in the way of the weak. The Turks, in recompense for the important assistance rendered them by the Cretans, exempted them from conscription or military tax, but learned no lesson from their conquered enemies, and, until the cession of the island to Egypt in 1830, Crete was the scene of the most unbridled license of individuals and fanaticism of sects.
In passing from the Venetian to the Turkish despotism the Cretans had exchanged bad for worse. The Venetian was oppressive to the last degree in pecuniary extortions, but the Turk brought in slavery of another form—the harem and all its horrors to a captive people, even then celebrated for the beauty of its women. The Turkish rule has never been, and probably never will be, anything but piracy—the rule of the strong hand. The great object of government was to wring from the governed the largest possible amount of plunder; it is so still. No motive of civilized government has ever yet entered into the head of the Ottoman. The development of a country's resources, even to increase its revenues, has never been thought of. A race of nomad conquerors, holding the land as if it waited the trumpet that should expel it, and could only reap where its predecessors had planted, but never from its own sowing, it has extorted, butchered, and enslaved, without leaving behind it more than its bones to fertilize the soil. The noble public works which marked the Venetian régime in Crete were allowed to fall into decay, the walls of the cities show the shot-holes made by the siege-guns, only filled up when it was necessary to keep the wall from falling.
Of the early period of Turkish rule in Crete we know little. Pirates keep no record; and the only insurrection of any note we hear of was that of 1770, which seems to have been mainly a Sphakiote affair, and to have resulted, on the whole, favorably for the mountaineers, from their having been allowed to maintain a virtual independence, as up to 1860 no Turkish garrison was ever permitted in Sphakia. The fortress of Samaria has not been, in the records of modern history, penetrated by an enemy in arms.