Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

Geoffroy’s brother and successor, the warlike Guillaume de Villehardouin, saw the Frank state in the Morea reach its zenith, and by his rashness contributed to its decline. Born in Greece, and speaking Greek, as the Chronicle of the Morea expressly tells us, the third of the Villehardouins began by completing the conquest of what was his native land. It was he who laid siege to the rock of Monemvasia for three long years, till at last, when the garrison had been reduced to eat mice and cats, the three archontes advanced along the narrow causeway which gives the place its name[51], and surrendered on terms which the prince wisely granted. It was he, too, who built the noble castle of Mistra on the site of the Homeric Messe, now abandoned to tortoises and sheep, but for two centuries a great name in the history of Greece. To a ruler so vigorous and so determined even the weird Tzakones, that strange tribe, perhaps Slavs but far more probably Dorians, which still lingers on and cherishes its curious language around Leonidi, yielded obedience; while the men of Maina, hemmed in by two new castles, ceased to trouble.

For the first and last time in its history the whole Peloponnese owned the sway of a Frank prince, except where, at Modon and Koron, Venice kept “its right eye,” as it called those places, fixed on the East. So powerful a sovereign as St Louis of France wished that he had some of Guillaume’s knights to aid him in his Egyptian war; and from seven hundred to one thousand horsemen always attended the chivalrous Prince of Achaia. His court at La Crémonie, the French version of Lacedæmonia, was “more brilliant than that of many a king”; and this brilliance was not merely on the surface. “Merchants,” says Sanudo, “went up and down without money, and lodged in the house of the bailies; and on their simple note of hand people gave them money[52].” But Guillaume’s ambition and his love of fighting for fighting’s sake involved the principality in disaster. Not content with beginning the first fratricidal war between the Frank rulers of the East by attacking Guy de la Roche, Lord of Athens, he espoused the cause of his father-in-law, the Greek Despot of Epeiros, then engaged in another brotherly struggle with the Greek Emperor of Nice. On the field of Pelagonia in Macedonia the Franks were routed; and the Prince of Achaia, easily recognised by his prominent teeth, was dragged from under a heap of straw, where he was lying, and carried off a prisoner to the court of the Emperor Michael VIII.

Guillaume’s captivity was the cause of endless evils for the principality; for Michael, who in 1261, by the recapture of Constantinople, had put an end to the short-lived Latin empire and restored there the throne of the Greeks, was resolved to regain a footing in the Morea and to make use of his distinguished captive for that purpose. He accordingly demanded, as the price of the prince’s freedom, the three strong fortresses of Mistra, Monemvasia, and Maina. The matter was referred to a ladies’ parliament held at Nikli, near the site of the ancient Tegea, for so severe had been the losses of the Frank chivalry that the noble dames of the Morea had to take the places of their husbands. We can well understand that, with a tribunal so composed, sentiment and the ties of affection would have more influence than the raison d’état. Yet Guillaume’s old opponent, Guy de la Roche, now Duke of Athens and bailie of Achaia during the prince’s captivity, laid before the parliament the argument that it was better that one man should die for the people than that the rest of the Franks should lose the Morea[53]. At the same time, to show that he bore no malice, he chivalrously offered to go to prison in place of the prince. But the ladies of the Morea thought otherwise. It was decided to give up the three castles; and two of the fair châtelaines were sent as hostages to Constantinople.

Thus, in 1262, the Byzantine Government regained a foothold in the Morea; a Byzantine province was created, with Mistra as its capital, and entrusted at first to a general of distinction annually appointed, and ultimately conferred as an appanage for life upon the Emperor’s second son. The native Greeks of the whole peninsula thus had a rallying-point in the Byzantine province, and the suspicion of the Franks that the surrender of the three fortresses “might prove to be their ruin[54],” turned out to be only too well-founded. As for the Franks who were left in the Byzantine portion of the Morea, their fate is obscure. Probably, as Dr Schmitt thinks, some emigrated to the gradually dwindling Frankish principality, while others became merged in the mass of Greeks around them. In all ages the Hellenes, like the Americans of to-day, have shown the most marvellous capacity for absorbing the various races which have come within their borders. A yet further element of evil omen for the country was introduced in consequence of this partial restoration of the Byzantine power. As might have been foreseen, the easy morality of that age speedily absolved the prince from his solemn oaths to the Emperor, and he was scarcely released when a fresh war broke out between them. It was then, for the first time, that we hear of Turks in the Morea—men who had been sent there as mercenaries by the Emperor Michael. Careless whom they served, so long as they were paid regularly, these Oriental soldiers of fortune deserted to the prince; and those who cared to settle in the country received lands and wives, whose offspring were still living, when the Chronicle of the Morea was written (p. 372), at two places in the peninsula.

Unhappily for the principality, as the chronicler remarks, Guillaume de Villehardouin left no male heir; and nothing more strongly justifies the Salic law than the history of the Franks in the Morea, where it was not applied. Anxious to take what precautions he could against the disruption of his dominions after his death, the last of the Villehardouin princes married his elder daughter Isabelle to the second son of Charles of Anjou, the most powerful sovereign in the south of Europe at that time, who, in addition to his other titles, had received from the last Latin Emperor of the East, then a fugitive at Viterbo, the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, hitherto held by the Emperor. This close connection with the great house of Anjou, to which the kingdom of the Two Sicilies then belonged, seemed to provide Achaia with the strongest possible support. The support, too, was near at hand; for communication between Italy and Glarentza, the chief port of the Morea, was, as we know from the novels of Boccaccio, not infrequent; and we hear of Frankish nobles from Achaia making pilgrimages to the two great Apulian sanctuaries of St Nicholas of Bari and Monte Santangelo. But, when Guillaume de Villehardouin died in 1278 and was laid beside his brother and father in the family mausoleum at Andravida (where excavations, made in 1890, failed to find their remains)[55], his daughter Isabelle was still a minor, though already a widow.

The government of the principality accordingly fell into the hands of bailies appointed by the suzerain at Naples. Sometimes the bailie was a man who knew the country, like Nicholas St Omer, whose name is still perpetuated by the St Omer tower at Thebes and the Santameri mountains not far from Patras; sometimes he was a foreigner, who knew little of the country, and, in the words which the Chronicle (p. 544) puts into the mouths of two Frankish nobles, “tyrannised over the poor, wronged the rich, and sought his own profit.” The complainants warned Charles II of Anjou, who was now their suzerain, that he was going the right way to “lose the principality”; and the King of Naples took their advice. He bestowed the hand of the widowed Isabelle upon a young Flemish nobleman, Florenz of Hainault, who was then at his court, and who thus became Prince of the Morea. Florenz wisely made peace with the Byzantine province, so that “all became rich, both Franks and Greeks,” and the land recovered from the effects of war and maladministration. But the Flemings, who had crowded over to Greece at the news of their countryman’s good fortune, were less scrupulous than their prince and provoked reprisals from the Greeks, from whom they sought to wring money. On the other hand, it would seem that the natives of the Byzantine province were able to secure good treatment from the Emperor, for there is preserved in that interesting little collection, the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, a golden bull of Andronikos II, dated 1293, concerning the privileges of the sacred rock of Monemvasia. When the modern Greeks come to think more highly of their mediæval history, they should regard that rugged crag with reverence. For two centuries it was the guardian of their municipal and national liberties.

Florenz of Hainault lived too short a time for the welfare of the Morea; and Isabelle, once more a widow, was married again in Rome (whither she had gone for the first papal jubilee of 1300) to a prince of the doughty house of Savoy, which thus became concerned with the affairs of Greece. Philip of Savoy was at the time in possession of Piedmont; and, as might have been expected, Piedmontese methods of government were not adapted to the latitude of Achaia. He was a man fond of spending, and an adept at extorting, money. The microscopic Dr Hopf has unearthed from the archives at Turin the bill—a fairly extensive one—for his wedding-breakfast; and the magnificent tournament which he organised on the Isthmus of Corinth, and in which all the Frankish rulers of Greece took part, occupied a thousand knights for more than twenty days. “He had learned money-making at home,” it was said, when the extravagant prince from Piedmont let it be understood that he expected presents from his vassals, and imposed taxes on the privileged inhabitants of Skorta. But the days of the Savoyard in Achaia were numbered. The house of Anjou, suzerains of the principality, had never looked with favour on his marriage with Isabelle; an excuse was found for deposing him in favour of another Philip, of Taranto, son of the King of Naples. To make matters smoother, Isabelle and her husband received, as some compensation for relinquishing all claims to the Morea, a small strip of territory on the shores of the Fucine lake. They both left Greece for ever. Isabelle died in Holland; and Philip of Savoy sleeps in the family vault at Pinerolo, near Turin, leaving to his posterity by a second marriage the empty title of “Prince of Achaia.”

The house of Villehardouin was not yet extinct. Isabelle had a daughter, Matilda of Hainault, whose husband, Louis of Burgundy, was permitted, by the tortuous policy of the Neapolitan Angevins, to govern the principality. But a rival claimant now appeared in the field in the person of Fernando of Majorca, one of the most adventurous personages of those adventurous times, who is well known to us from the quaint Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. Fernando had already had his full share of the vicissitudes of life. He had been at one time head of the Catalan Grand Company, which had just won the Duchy of Athens on the swampy meadows of the Bœotian Kephissos, and he had sat a prisoner in the castle of Thebes, the famous Kadmeia, whose walls were painted with the exploits of the crusaders in the Holy Land. He had married the daughter of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s younger child, the Lady of Akova, and he claimed Achaia in the name of his dead wife’s infant son. Such was the violence of the age that both the rivals perished in the struggle, Fernando on the scaffold, and Louis of Burgundy by a poison administered to him by one of the petty potentates of Greece. Even more miserable was the end of the unhappy Matilda. Invited by the unscrupulous King of Naples to his court, she was informed that she must marry his brother, John of Gravina. With the true spirit of a Villehardouin, the Princess refused; and even the Pope himself, whose authority was invoked, could not make her yield. She had already, she said, married again, and must decline to commit bigamy. This gave the King of Naples the opportunity he sought. He declared that, by marrying without her suzerain’s consent, she had forfeited her principality, which he bestowed upon his brother. The helpless Princess was thrown into the Castel dell’ Uovo at Naples, and was afterwards allowed to die a lingering death in that island-prison, the last of her race. So ended the dynasty of the Villehardouins.

Grievous, indeed, was the situation of the Franks in Greece at this moment. Though little more than a hundred years had elapsed since the conquest, the families of the conquerors were almost extinct. The terrible blow dealt at the Frank chivalry by the rude Catalans, almost on the very battlefield of Chaironeia, was as fatal to Frankish, as was the victory of Philip of Macedon to free, Greece. Of the barons who had taken part in that contest, where many Achaian nobles had stood by the side of the headstrong Athenian duke, only four survived. Moreover, the Frank aristocracy, as Finlay has pointed out, committed racial suicide by constituting themselves an exclusive class. Intermarriages with the Greeks took place, it is true; and a motley race, known as Gasmoûloi[56], the offspring of these unions, of whom the author of the Chronicle was perhaps a member, fell into the usual place of half-castes in the East. But Muntaner expressly says that the nobles of Achaia usually took their wives from France. Meanwhile new men had taken possession of some of the old baronies—Flemings, Neapolitans, and even Florentines, one of whom, Nicholas Acciajuoli, whose splendid tomb is to be seen in the Certosa near Florence, laid on the rocks of Akrocorinth the foundations of a power which, a generation later, made the bankers of Tuscany dukes of Athens. The Greeks, had they been united, might have recovered the whole peninsula amidst this state of confusion. But the sketch which the imperial historian, John Cantacuzene, has left us of the archontes of the Morea shows that they were quite as much divided among themselves as the turbulent Frank vassals of the shadowy Prince of Achaia. “Neither good nor evil fortune,” he wrote, “nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual hatred, which not only endures all their lives, but is transmitted after death as a heritage to their children[57].”

Cantacuzene, however, took a step which ultimately led to the recapture of the Morea, when he abolished the system of sending a subordinate Byzantine official to Mistra, and appointed his second son, Manuel, with the title of Despot, as governor of the Byzantine province for life. The Despot of Mistra at once made his presence felt. He drove off the Turkish corsairs, who had begun to infest the deep bays and jagged coast-line of the peninsula, levied ship-money for its defence against pirates, and, when his Greek subjects objected to be taxed for their own benefit, crushed rebellion by means of his Albanian bodyguard. Now, for the first time, we hear of that remarkable race, whose origin is as baffling to ethnologists as is their future to diplomatists, in the history of the Morea, where hereafter they were destined to play so distinguished a part. It is to the policy of Manuel Cantacuzene, who rewarded his faithful Albanians with lands in the south-west and centre of the country, that modern Greece owes the services of that valiant race, which fought so vigorously for her independence and its own in the last century. Manuel’s example was followed by other Despots; and ere long ten thousand Albanians were colonising the devastated and deserted lands of the Peloponnese.