6. Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter. Von F. Gregorovius. 3rd Edn. Stuttgart, 1889.
7. La Conquête de Constantinople, par Geoffroy de Villehardouin. By Émile Bouchet. Paris, 1891.
8. Georgii Acropolitæ Opera. Ed. by A. Heisenberg. Leipzig, 1903.
9. Corpus Scriptorum Historiæ Byzantinæ. Bonn, 1828-43.
10. Anecdota Græca. Ed. J. Fr. Boissonade. Tom. III. Paris, 1831.
4. THE DUKES OF ATHENS
Nations, like individuals, sometimes have the romance of their lives in middle age—a romance unknown, perhaps, to the outside world until, long years afterwards, some forgotten bundle of letters throws a flash of rosy light upon a period hitherto regarded as uneventful and commonplace. So is it with the history of Athens under the Frankish domination, which Finlay first described in his great work. But since his day numerous documents have been published, and still more are in course of publication, which complete the picture of mediæval Athens as he drew it in a few master-strokes. Barcelona and Palermo have been ransacked for information; the Venetian archives have yielded a rich harvest; Milan has contributed her share; and a curious collection of Athenian legends has been made by an industrious and patriotic Greek. We know now, as we never knew before, the strange story of the classic city under her French, her Catalan, and her Florentine masters; and it is high time that the results of these researches should be laid before the British public. The present paper deals with the first two of these three periods.
The history of Frankish Athens begins with the Fourth Crusade. By the deed of partition, which divided up the Byzantine Empire among the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, the crusading army, whose chief was Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat, had received “the district of Athens with the territory of Megara[76]”; and both Attica and Bœotia were included in that short-lived realm of Salonika, of which he assumed the title of king. Among the trusty followers who accompanied Boniface in his triumphal progress across his new dominions was Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle the serious dispute between him and the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between his daughter and the Emperor Baldwin I’s brother and successor. This was the man upon whom the King of Salonika, in 1205, bestowed the most famous city of the ancient world. Thus, in the words of an astonished chronicler from the West, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans[77].”
The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had succeeded by an extraordinary stroke of fortune to the past glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself “Sire d’Athènes” or “Dominus Athenarum,” which his Greek subjects magnified into the “Great Lord” (Μέγας Κύρ or Μέγας Κύρης), and Dante, in the Purgatorio, transferred by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to Othon de la Roche on the part of the Greeks, nor was such likely; for the eminent man, Michael Akominatos, who was then Metropolitan of Athens, was fully aware that the Akropolis could not long resist a Western army. Later Venetian writers, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story that the Athenians sent an embassy offering their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated, “not without bloodshed, by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche[78].” If so, it was the sole effort which the Greeks of Attica made during the whole century of French domination.