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 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, 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 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:
I hail you Dukes, as forth ye sally
Beneath the rule of Sparta’s Queen[44]!
Thine, German, be the hand that forges
Defence for Corinth and her bays:
Achaia, with its hundred gorges,