Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.