Such was the state of the country when a winter storm drove into the haven of Modon, on the Messenian coast, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, a crusader from Champagne, and nephew of the chronicler of the conquest of Constantinople. A Greek archon of the neighbourhood, thinking that the opportunity was too good to be lost, invited the storm-bound warrior to aid him in the conquest of the surrounding country. Geoffroy was nothing loth; and the two unnatural allies speedily subdued one place after another. But, as ill-luck would have it, the Greek died; and his son, more patriotic or less trustworthy than the father, broke the compact with the Frankish intruder, and turned Geoffroy out of his quickly-won possessions. The crusader’s position was serious; he was in a hostile country and surrounded by an alien and suspicious population; but he was a man of resource, and, hearing that Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat and King of Salonika, had made a triumphal march through continental Greece and was at that moment besieging the great stronghold of Nauplia, he set out across the Peloponnese—a six days’ journey—and succeeded in reaching the Frankish camp. There he found an old friend and neighbour, Guillaume de Champlitte, to whom he confided the scheme which he had been revolving in his mind. “I come,” he said, so we learn from his uncle’s chronicle, “from a land which is very rich, and men call it the Morea”—a name which here occurs for the first time in the history of Greece, and the origin of which is still a puzzle to all her historians. He urged Champlitte to join him in the task of conquering this El Dorado, promising to recognise him as his liege lord in return for his assistance. Champlitte agreed, and the two friends, at the head of a small body of a hundred knights and some esquires, started on their bold venture[48].
The ease with which the little band of Western warriors conquered the peninsula, which had once produced the Spartan warriors, strikes every reader of the Chronicle of the Morea—the prosaic, but extremely curious and valuable poem in which the Frank conquest is described. The cause lay partly in the disunited state of Greek society and the feuds of the local archontes, but still more in the neglect of military training, due to the fact that the Byzantine emperors had long drawn their best troops from the non-Hellenic portions of their heterogeneous dominions. It is remarkable that, apart from Sgouros, interned, as it were, on Akrocorinth, and a Greek archon, Doxapatres, who held a small but strongly situated castle in one of the gorges of Arcadia, the invaders met with little opposition. Greece, as we know from the complaints of Michael Akominatos, the last orthodox Archbishop of Athens before the conquest, had been plundered by Byzantine tax-gatherers and despised as a “Scythian wilderness” by Byzantine officials. So, when the inhabitants found that the Franks had no intention of interfering with their prized municipal privileges, they had no great objection to exchanging a master who spent their money at Constantinople for one who spent it in Elis at the new Peloponnesian capital of Andreville or Andravida. One pitched battle decided the fate of “the isle of Greece,” as the Franks sometimes called it. At the olive grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia, the small force of Franks easily routed a Greek army six times larger; and as the chronicler, always in sympathy with the invaders, puts it,
Αὐτὸν καὶ μόνον τὸν πόλεμον ἐποῖκαν οἱ Ρωμαῖοι
Εἰς τὸν καιρὸν ποὺ ἐκέρδισαν οἱ Φράγκοι τὸν Μορέαν.
Yet a modern Greek historian of singular fairness, the late K. Paparregopoulos, has remarked how great was the change in the Turkish times. The descendants of the unwarlike Moreotes, who fell so easy a prey to the Frankish chivalry in 1205, never lost an opportunity of rising against the Turks after the Frankish domination was over. As he justly says, one of the main results of the long Latin rule was to teach Greek “hands to war and their fingers to fight.”
Thus, almost by a single blow, the Franks had become masters of the ancient “island of Pelops.” Here and there a few natural strongholds still held out. Even after the death of Sgouros his triple crown of forts, Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos, was still defended for the Greek cause in the name of the lord, or Despot, of Epeiros, where a bold scion of the imperial house of Angelos had founded an independent state on the ruins of the Byzantine Empire. The great rock of Monemvasia in the south-east of the Morea, whence our ancestors derived their Malmsey wine, remained in the hands of its three local archontes; while, in the mountains of southern Lakonia, a race which had often defied Byzantium scorned to acknowledge the noblemen of Champagne. The local magnate, Joannes Chamaretos, could boast for a time that he kept his own lands in Lakonia, but he, too, had to take refuge at the Epeirote Court at Arta[49]. Finally, the two Messenian ports of Modon and Koron were claimed by Venice, which, with her usual astuteness, had secured those valuable stations on the way to Egypt in the deed of partition by which the conquerors of the empire had divided the spoils among themselves at Constantinople. Not without reason did Pope Innocent III, whose letters are full of allusions to the Frankish organisation of Greece, style Guillaume de Champlitte “Prince of all Achaia.”
Champlitte now attempted to provide for the internal government of his principality by the application of the feudal system, which, even before the Frankish conquest, had crept into many parts of the Levant. The Chronicle of the Morea, whose author revels in legal details, gives an account of the manner in which “the isle of Greece” was organised by its new masters. A commission, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five Greek archontes, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, drew up a species of Domesday-book for the new state. In accordance with the time-honoured feudal custom, twelve baronies were created and bestowed upon prominent members of the Frankish force, who were bound to be at the prince’s beck and call with their retainers in time of need; and the castles of these warrior barons were purposely erected in strong positions, whence they could command important passes or overcome troublesome neighbours. Even to-day the traveller may see the fine fortress above the town of Patras which Guillaume Aleman, one of the feudatories, constructed out of the Archbishop’s palace; the castle of Karytaina, the Toledo of Greece, still reminds us of the time when Hugues de Bruyères held the dalesmen of Skorta, ancestors of M. Delyannes, in check; and, far to the South, the war-cry of Jean de Neuilly, hereditary Marshal of Achaia, Passe avant, lingers in the name of Passavâ, the stronghold which once inspired respect in the men of Maina, who boast that they spring from Spartan mothers. Seven ecclesiastical peers, the Latin Archbishop of Patras at their head, and the three military orders of St John, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights also received fiefs; and, while Geoffroy de Villehardouin was invested with Kalamata and Kyparissia, fertile Elis became the princely domain.
But Guillaume de Champlitte did not long enjoy his Achaian dignity. If he was a prince in Greece he was still a French subject; and the death of his brother made it necessary for him to do homage in person for his fief in France. On the way he died; and the cunning Villehardouin, by an ingenious stratagem, contrived to become master of the country. It had been declared that a claimant must take possession of Achaia within a year and a day after the date of the last vacancy; and Geoffroy contrived to have Champlitte’s heir detained in Venice and left behind at Corfù till the fatal date had almost passed. A little skilful manœuvring from one place to another in the Morea filled up the rest of the time, so that, when young Robert de Champlitte at last met Geoffrey in full court at Lacedæmonia, the mediæval town which had risen near the Eurotas, the year and a day had already elapsed. The court decided in favour of Geoffrey, anxious, no doubt, that their ruler should be a statesman of experience and not a young man fresh from France. Robert gave no further trouble, and Geoffrey remained for the rest of his days “Lord of Achaia.” By his tact and cleverness he had contrived to win the regard both of the Frank barons and of the Greek population, whose religion and ancient customs he had sworn to respect. He was thus enabled to subdue the three outstanding fortresses which had once been the domain of Sgouros, while he settled all claims that the Venetians might have upon the Morea by allowing them to keep Modon and Koron, granting them a separate quarter in every town in his principality, and doing homage to them for the whole peninsula on the island of Sapienza. He crowned his career by marrying his son to the daughter of the Latin Emperor Peter of Courtenay, from whose family the Earls of Devon are descended.
Under his son and successor, Geoffrey II, the Frank principality prospered exceedingly. The Venetian historian, Marino Sanudo, who derived much of his information from his relative, Marco II Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, has given us a vivid picture of life at the Peloponnesian court under the rule of the second of the Villehardouins. A just prince, Geoffrey II used to send his friends from time to time to the baronial castles of the Morea to see how the barons treated their vassals. At his own court he kept “eighty knights with golden spurs”; and “knights came to the Morea from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne, to follow him. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts, others again because of crimes which they had committed[50].” In fact, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the Morea had become for the younger sons of the French chivalry much what the British colonies were to adventurers and ne’er-do-weels fifty years ago. It was a place where the French knights would find their own language spoken—we are specially told what good French was spoken in Greece in the Frankish period—and could scarcely fail to obtain congenial employment from a prince of their own race.
One difficulty, however, had soon arisen in the Frank principality. The Latin clergy, who had had their full share of the spoils, declined to take any part in the defence of the country. Geoffrey, with all the energy of his race, opposed a stout resistance to these clerical pretensions, and confiscated the ecclesiastical fiefs, spending the proceeds upon the erection of the great castle of Clermont or Chlomoutsi above the busy port of Glarentza, the imposing ruins of which are still a land-mark for miles around. When he had finished the castle Geoffroy appealed to the Pope, placing before the Holy Father the very practical argument that, if the principality, through lack of defenders, were recaptured by the Greeks, the loss would fall just as much on the Roman Church as on the prince, while the fault would be entirely with the former. The Pope was sufficiently shrewd to see that Geoffroy was right; the dispute was settled amicably; and both the prince and the Latin clergy subscribed generously for the preservation of the moribund Latin empire, which exercised a nominal suzerainty over the principality of Achaia.