Meanwhile the barren honour of Prince of Achaia had passed from one absentee to another. John of Gravina, who had been installed in the room of the last unhappy Villehardouin princess, grew disgusted with the sorry task of trying to restore order, and transferred his rights to Catherine of Valois, widow of his brother, Philip of Taranto; her son Robert, who was both suzerain and sovereign of the principality, was a mere phantom ruler whom the Achaian barons treated with contempt. After his death they offered the empty title of princess to Queen Joanna I of Naples on condition that she did not interfere with their fiefs and their feuds. Then a new set of conquerors descended upon the distracted country, and began the last chapter of Frankish rule in Achaia.
The great exploit of the Catalans in carving out for themselves a duchy bearing the august name of Athens had struck the imagination of Southern Europe. Towards the close of the fourteenth century a similar, but less famous band of freebooters, the Navarrese Company, repeated in Achaia what the Catalans, seventy years earlier, had achieved in Attica and Bœotia. Conquering nominally in the name of Jacques de Baux, a scion of the house of Taranto, but really for their own hands, the soldiers of Navarre rapidly occupied one place after another. Androusa, in Messenia, at that time the capital of the Frankish principality, fell before them; and at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, then called Zonklon, they made such a mark that the spot was believed by Hopf to have derived its name of Navarino from the castle which they held there. In 1386 their captain, Pedro Bordo de San Superan, styled himself Vicar of the principality, a title which developed into that of prince.
Meanwhile another Western Power, and that the most cunning and persistent, had taken advantage of these troublous times to gain a footing in the Peloponnese. Venice, true to her cautious commercial policy, had long been content with the two Messenian stations of Modon and Koron, and had even refused a tempting offer of some desperate barons to hand over to her the whole of Achaia. During the almost constant disturbances which had distracted the rest of the peninsula since the death of Guillaume de Villehardouin, the two Venetian ports had enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity. The high tariffs which the Frankish princes had erected round their own havens had driven trade to these Venetian harbours, so conveniently situated for trade with the great Venetian island of Crete as well. The documents which Sathas has published from the Venetian archives are full of allusions to these two now almost forgotten places. But at last, towards the end of the fourteenth century, Venice resolved on expansion. She accordingly bought Argos and Nauplia, the old fiefs which the first French Lord of Athens had received from the first of the Villehardouins, and which lingered on in the hands of the representatives of the fallen Athenian duke. A little later Lepanto, the old Naupaktos, gave the Venetians a post on the Corinthian Gulf.
As the Byzantine Empire dwindled before the incursions of the Turks, the Greek province of Mistra assumed more importance in the eyes of the statesmen at Constantinople. In 1415 the Emperor Manuel II, with an energy which modern sovereigns of Greece would do well to imitate, resolved to see for himself how matters stood, and arrived in the Morea. He at once set to work to re-erect the six-mile rampart, or “Hexamilion,” across the Isthmus, which had been fortified by Xerxes, Valerian, Justinian, and, in recent times, by the last Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaiologos. Manuel’s wall followed the course of Justinian’s; and, in the incredibly short space of twenty-five days, forced labourers, working under the imperial eye, had erected a rampart strengthened by no less than 153 towers.
But the Emperor saw that it was necessary to reform the Morea from within as well as to fortify it without. We have from the pen of a Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, who has written a Dialogue of the Dead in the manner of Lucian, a curious, if somewhat highly-coloured account of the Moreotes as they were, or at any rate seemed to him to be, at this time[58]. In the Peloponnese, he tells us, are “Lacedæmonians, Italians, Peloponnesians (Greeks), Slavonians, Illyrians (Albanians), Egyptians (gypsies), and Jews, and among them are not a few half-castes.” He says that the Lakonians, who “are now called Tzakones,” have “become barbarians” in their language, of which he gives some specimens. He goes on to make the shrewd remark, true to-day of all Eastern countries where the Oriental assumes a veneer of Western civilisation, that “each race takes the worst features of the others,” the Greeks assimilating the turbulence of the Franks, and the Franks the cunning of the Greeks. So insecure was life and property that arms were worn night and day—a practice obsolete in the time of Thucydides. Of the Moreote archontes he has nothing good to say; they are “men who ever delight in battles and disturbances, who are for ever breathing murder, who are full of deceit and craft, barbarous and pig-headed, unstable and perjured, faithless to both Emperor and Despots.” Yet a Venetian report—and the Venetians were keen observers—sent to the government a few years later, depicts the Morea as a valuable asset. It contained, writes the Venetian commissioner, 150 strong castles; the soil is rich in minerals; and it produces silk, honey, wax, corn, raisins, and poultry.
Even in the midst of alarms an eminent philosopher—to the surprise of the elegant Byzantines, it is true—had fixed his seat at Mistra. George Gemistos Plethon believed that he had found in Plato a cure for the evils of the Morea. Centuries before the late Mr Henry George, he advocated a single tax. An advanced fiscal reformer, he suggested a high tariff for all articles which could be produced at home; a paper strategist, he had a scheme which he submitted, together with his other proposals, to the Emperor, for creating a standing army; an anti-clerical, he urged that the monks should work for their living, or discharge public functions without pay. The philosopher, in tendering this advice to the Emperor, modestly offered his own services for the purpose of carrying it out. Manuel II was a practical statesman, who knew that he was living, as Cicero would have said, “non in Platonis republica, sed in fæce Lycurgi.” The offer was rejected.
At last the long threatened Turkish peril, temporarily delayed by the career of Timour and the great Turkish defeat at Angora, was at hand. The famous Ottoman commander, Evrenos Beg, had already twice entered the peninsula, once as the ally of the Navarrese prince against the Greek Despot, once as the foe of both. In 1423 a still greater captain, Turakhan, easily scaled the Hexamilion, leaving behind him at Gardiki, as a memorial of his invasion, a pyramid of eight hundred Albanian skulls. But, by the irony of history, just before Greeks and Franks alike succumbed to the all-conquering Turks, the dream of the Byzantine court was at last realised, and the Frank principality ceased to exist.
The Greek portion of the Morea was at this time in the hands of the three brothers of the Emperor John VI Palaiologos—Theodore II, Thomas, and Constantine—the third of whom was destined to die on the walls of Constantinople as last Emperor of the East. Politic marriages and force of arms soon extinguished the phantom of Frankish rule; and the Genoese baron, Centurione Zaccaria, nephew of Bordo de San Superan, who had succeeded his uncle as last Prince of Achaia, was glad to purchase peace by giving his daughter’s hand to Thomas Palaiologos with the remaining fragments of the once famous principality, except the family barony and the princely title, as her dowry. Thus, when Centurione died in 1432, save for the six Venetian stations, the whole peninsula was once more Greek. Unhappily, the union between the three brothers ended with the disappearance of the common enemy. Both Theodore and Constantine were ambitious of the imperial diadem; and, while the former was pressing his claims at Constantinople, the latter was besieging Mistra, having first sent the historian Phrantzes, his confidential agent in these dubious transactions, to obtain the Sultan’s consent. Assisted by his brother Thomas and a force of Frank mercenaries, Constantine was only induced to keep the peace by the intervention of the Emperor; till, in 1443, Theodore removed this source of jealousy by carrying out his long-cherished scheme of retiring from public life. He accordingly handed over the government of Mistra to Constantine and received in exchange the city of Selymbria on the Sea of Marmora, where he afterwards died of the plague.
The Morea was now partitioned between Constantine, who took possession of the eastern portion, embracing Lakonia, Argolis, Corinth, and the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf as far as Patras, and Thomas, who governed the western part. With all his faults Constantine was a man of far greater energy and patriotism than the rest of his family, and he lost no time in developing a national policy. His first act was to restore the Hexamilion; his next, to attempt the recovery of the Athenian duchy from the Acciajuoli family for the Greek cause, which he personified. Nine years earlier, on the death of Duke Antonio, he had sent Phrantzes to negotiate for the cession of Athens and Thebes. Foiled on that occasion, he now invaded the duchy and forced the weak Duke Nerio II to do homage and pay tribute to him. The Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs of Thessaly rose in his favour; the Serbs promised to aid him in defending the Isthmus against the Turks; it seemed for the moment as if there were at last some hope of a Christian revival in the Near East. But the battle of Varna soon put an end to these dreams. Murad II, accompanied by the Duke of Athens, set out in 1446, at the head of a large army, for the Isthmus. The two Despots had assembled a considerable force behind the ramparts of the Hexamilion, which seemed so imposing to the Sultan that he remonstrated with his old military counsellor, Turakhan, for having advised him to attack such apparently impregnable lines so late in the season. But the veteran, who knew his Greeks and had taken the Hexamilion twenty-three years before, replied that its defenders would not long resist a determined attack. A Greek officer, who had been sent by Constantine to reconnoitre the Turkish position, came back so terrified at the strength of the enemy that he urged his master to retreat at once to the mountains of the Morea. The Despot ordered his arrest as a disciplinary measure, but he was so greatly struck by what he had heard that he sent the Athenian Chalkokondyles, father of the historian, to offer terms of peace to the Sultan. Murad scornfully rejected the proposals, arrested the envoy, and demanded, as the price of his friendship, the destruction of the Hexamilion and the payment of tribute. This was too much for the high-spirited Despot, and the conflict began.
For three whole days the excellent Turkish artillery played upon the walls of the rampart. Then a general assault was ordered, and, after a brave defence by the two Despots, a young Serbian janissary climbed to the top of the wall and planted the Turkish flag there in full view of the rival hosts. The towers on either side of him were soon taken by his comrades, the gates were forced in, and the Turks streamed through them into the peninsula. The Greeks fled; the two Despots among them; Akrocorinth surrendered, and a band of 300, who had thought of “making a new Thermopylæ” at Kenchreæ, were soon forced to lay down their arms. Together with 600 other captives, they were beheaded by the Sultan’s orders. Then the Turkish army was divided into two sections; one, under old Turakhan, penetrated into the interior; the other, commanded by the Sultan in person, followed the coast of the Corinthian Gulf, burning the mediæval town which had arisen on the ruins of Sikyon. Aigion shared the same fate; but most of the inhabitants of Patras had escaped over the Gulf before Murad arrived there. The old Frankish citadel defied all the efforts of the besiegers, for the besieged knew that they had nothing to hope from surrender. A breach was made in the walls, but the defenders poured boiling resin on to the heads of the janissaries and worked at the rampart till the breach was made good. The season was by this time very far advanced, so the Sultan and his lieutenant withdrew to Thebes, dragging with them 60,000 captives, who were sold as slaves. The Despots were glad to obtain peace and a qualified independence by paying a capitation tax, and by sending their envoys to do homage to the Sultan in his headquarters at Thebes. The Greeks ascribed their misfortunes to their Albanian and Frankish mercenaries, the former of whom had begun to feel their power, while the latter had espoused the cause of Centurione’s illegitimate son at the moment when the Despots were engaged in the defence of the country.