Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

Donato Acciajuoli made no claim to succeed his brother in the Duchy of Athens. He was Gonfaloniere of Florence and Senator of Rome; and he preferred those safe and dignified positions in Italy to the glamour of a ducal coronet in Greece, in spite of the natural desire of the family that one of their name should continue to take his title from Athens[106]. But it was obvious that a conflict would arise between the sons-in-law of the late duke, for Nerio had practically disinherited his elder daughter in favour of her younger but abler sister. Carlo Tocco of Cephalonia at once demanded the places bequeathed to his wife, occupied Megara and Corinth, and imprisoned the terrified executors in his island till they had signed a document stating that he had carried out the terms of his father-in-law’s will. Theodore Palaiologos, who contended that Corinth had always been intended to be his after Nerio’s death, besieged it with a large force, till Tocco, calling in a still larger Turkish army, drove his brother-in-law from the Isthmus[107].

Meanwhile, the Greeks of Athens had followed the same fatal policy of invoking the common enemy as arbiter of their affairs. It was not to be expected that the Greek race, which had of late recovered its national consciousness, and which had ever remained deeply attached to its religion, would quietly acquiesce in the extraordinary arrangement by which the city of Athens was made the property of the Catholic cathedral. The professional jealousy and the odium theologicum of the two great ecclesiastics, Makarios, the Greek Metropolitan, and Ludovico da Prato, the Latin archbishop, envenomed the feelings of the people. The Greek divine summoned Timourtash, the Turkish commander, to rid Athens of the filioque clause; and his strange ally occupied the lower town. The castle, however, was bravely defended by Matteo de Montona, one of the late duke’s executors, who despatched a messenger in hot haste to the Venetian colony of Negroponte, offering to hand over Athens to the Republic if the governor would promise in her name to respect the ancient franchises and customs of the Athenians. The bailie of Negroponte agreed, subject to the approval of the home Government, and sent a force which dispersed the Turks, and, at the close of 1394, for the first time in history, hoisted the lion-banner of the Evangelist on the ancient castle of Athens.

The Republic decided, after mature consideration, to accept the offer of the Athenian commander. No sentimental argument, no classical memories, weighed with the sternly practical statesmen of the lagoons. The romantic King of Aragon had waxed enthusiastic over the glories of the Akropolis; and sixty years later the greatest of Turkish Sultans contemplated his conquest with admiration. But the sole reason which decided the Venetian Government to annex Athens was its proximity to the Venetian colonies, and the consequent danger which might ensue to them if it fell into Turkish or other hands. Thus Venice took over the Akropolis in 1395, not because it was a priceless monument, but because it was a strong fortress; she saved the Athenians, not, as Cæsar had done, for the sake of their ancestors, but for that of her own colonies, “the pupil of her eye.” From the financial point of view, indeed, Athens could not have been a valuable asset. The Venetians confessed that they did not know what its revenues and expenses were; and, pending a detailed report from their governor, they ordered that only eight priests should serve “in the Church of St Mary of Athens”—an act of economy due to the fact that some of Nerio’s famous brood-mares had been stolen and the endowment of the cathedral consequently diminished. On such accidents did the maintenance of the Parthenon depend in the Middle Ages.

We are fortunately in a better position than was the Venetian Government to judge of the contemporary state of Athens. At the very time when its fate was under discussion an Italian notary spent two days in that city; and his diary is the first account which any traveller has left us, from personal observation, of its condition during the Frankish period[108]. “The city,” he says, “which nestles at the foot of the castle hill, contains about a thousand hearths” but not a single inn, so that, like the archæologist in some country towns of modern Greece, he had to seek the hospitality of the clergy. He describes “the great hall” of the castle (the Propylaia), with its thirteen columns, and tells how the churchwardens personally conducted him over “the Church of St Mary,” which had sixty columns without and eighty within. On one of the latter he was shown the cross made by Dionysios the Areopagite at the moment of the earthquake which attended our Lord’s passion; four others, which surrounded the high altar, were of jasper and supported a dome, while the doors came—so he was told—from Troy. The pious Capuan was then taken to see the relics of the Athenian cathedral—the figure of the Virgin painted by St Luke, the head of St Makarios, a bone of St Denys of France, an arm of St Justin, and a copy of the Gospels written by the hand of St Elena—relics which the wife of King Pedro IV of Aragon had in vain begged the last Catalan archbishop to send her fifteen years before[109].

He saw, too, in a cleft of the wall, the light which never fails, and outside, beyond the castle ramparts, the two pillars of the choragic monument of Thrasyllos, between which there used to be “a certain idol” in an iron-bound niche, gifted with the strange power of drowning hostile ships as soon as they appeared on the horizon—an allusion to the story of the Gorgon’s head, mentioned by Pausanias, which we find in later mediæval accounts of Athens. In the city below he noticed numbers of fallen columns and fragments of marble; he alludes to the Stadion; and he visited the “house of Hadrian,” as the temple of Olympian Zeus was popularly called. He completed his round by a pilgrimage to the so-called “Study of Aristotle, whence scholars drank to obtain wisdom”—the aqueduct, whose marble beams, commemorating the completion of Hadrian’s work by Antoninus Pius, were then to be seen at the foot of Lykabettos, and, after serving in Turkish times as the lintel of the Boubounistra gate, now lie, half buried by vegetation, in the palace garden. But the fear of the prowling Turks and the feud between Nerio’s two sons-in-law rendered travelling in Attica difficult; the notary traversed the Sacred Way in fear of his life, and was not sorry to find himself in the castle of Corinth, though the houses in that city were few and mean, and the total population did not exceed fifty families.

The Venetian Government next arranged for the future administration of its new colony. The governor of Athens was styled podestà and captain, and was appointed for the usual term of two years at an annual salary of £70, out of which he had to keep a notary, an assistant, four servants, two grooms, and four horses. Four months elapsed before a noble was found ambitious of residing in Athens on these terms, and of facing the difficult situation there. Attica was so poor that he had to ask his Government for a loan; the Turkish corsairs infested the coast; the Greek Metropolitan, though now under lock and key at Venice, still found means of communicating with his former allies. Turkish writers even boast—and a recently published document confirms their statement—that their army captured “the city of the sages” in 1397; and an Athenian dirge represented Athens mourning the enslavement of the husbandmen of her suburb of Sepolia, who will no longer be able to till the fields of Patesia.

The Turkish invaders came and went; but another and more obstinate enemy ever watched the little Venetian garrison on the Akropolis. The bastard Antonio Acciajuoli fretted within the walls of his Theban domain, and was resolved to conquer Athens, as his father had done before him. In vain did Venice, alarmed by the reports of her successive governors, raise the numbers of the garrison to fifty-six men; in vain did she order money to be spent on the defences of the castle; in vain did she attempt to pacify the discontented Athenians, who naturally preferred the rule of an Acciajuoli who was half a Greek to that of a Venetian noble. By the middle of 1402 Antonio was master of the lower city; it seemed that, unless relief came at once, he would plant his banner on the Akropolis. The Senate, at this news, ordered the bailie of Negroponte to offer a reward for the body of the bold bastard, alive or dead, to lay Thebes in ashes, and to save the castle of Athens. That obedient official set out at the head of six thousand men to execute the second of these injunctions, only to fall into an ambush which his cunning enemy had laid in the pass of Anephorites. Venice, now alarmed for the safety of her most valuable colony far more than for that of Athens, hastily sent commissioners to make peace. But Antonio calmly continued the siege of the Akropolis, till at last, seventeen months after his first appearance before the city, when the garrison had eaten the last horse, and had been reduced to devour the plants which grew on the castle rock, its gallant defenders, Vitturi and Montona, surrendered with the honours of war. The half-caste adventurer had beaten the great Republic.

Venice attempted to recover by diplomacy what she had lost by arms. She possessed in Pietro Zeno, the baron of Andros, a diplomatist of unrivalled experience in the tortuous politics of the Levant. Both he and Antonio were well aware that the fate of Athens depended upon the Sultan; and to his Court they both repaired, armed with those pecuniary arguments which have usually proved convincing to Turkish ministers. The diplomatic duel was lengthy; but at last the Venetian gained one of those paper victories so dear to ambassadors and so worthless to practical men. The Sultan promised to see that Athens was restored to the Republic, but he took no steps to perform his promise; while Antonio, backed by the Acciajuoli influence in Italy, by the Pope, and the King of Naples, held his ground. Venice wisely resigned herself to the loss of a colony which it would have been expensive to recover. To save appearances, Antonio was induced to become her vassal for “the land, castle, and place of Athens, in modern times called Sythines[110],” sending every year, in token of his homage, a silk pallium from the Theban manufactories to the church of St Mark—a condition which he was most remiss in fulfilling.

The reign of Antonio Acciajuoli—the longest in the history of Athens save that of the recent King of the Hellenes—was a period of prosperity and comparative tranquillity for that city. While all around him principalities and powers were shaken to their foundations; while that ancient warden of the northern March of Athens, the Marquisate of Boudonitza, was swept away for ever; while Turkish armies invaded the Morea, and annexed the Albanian capital to the Sultan’s empire; while the principality of Achaia disappeared from the map in the throes of a tardy Greek revival, the statesmanlike ruler of Athens skilfully guided the policy of his duchy. At times even his experienced diplomacy failed to avert the horrors of a Turkish raid; on one occasion he was forced to join, as a Turkish vassal, in an invasion of the Morea. But, as a rule, the dreaded Mussulmans spared this half-Oriental, who was a past-master in the art of managing the Sultan’s ministers. From the former masters of Athens, the Catalans and the Venetians, he had nothing to fear. Once, indeed, he received news that Alfonso V of Aragon, who never forgot to sign himself “Duke of Athens and Neopatras,” intended to put one of his Catalan subjects into possession of those duchies. But Venice reassured him with a shrewd remark that the Catalans usually made much ado about nothing. On her part the Republic was friendly to the man who had supplanted her. She gave Antonio permission, in case of danger, to send the valuable Acciajuoli stud—for, like his father, he was a good judge of horse-flesh—to the island of Eubœa; and she ordered her bailie to “observe the ancient commercial treaties between the duchy and the island, which he would find in the chancery of Negroponte.” But when he sought to lay the foundations of a navy, and strove to prevent the fruitful island of Ægina, then the property of the Catalan family of Caopena, from falling into the hands of Venice, he met with a severe rebuff. To the Florentine Duke of Athens Ægina, as a Venetian colony, might well seem, as it had seemed to Aristotle, the “eyesore of the Piræus.”

With his family’s old home, Florence, Antonio maintained the closest relations. In 1422 a Florentine ambassador arrived in Athens with instructions to confer the freedom of the great Tuscan Commonwealth upon the Duke; to inform him that Florence, having now, by the destruction of Pisa and the purchase of Leghorn, become a maritime power, intended to embark in the Levant trade; and to ask him, therefore, for the benefit of the most-favoured-nation clause. Antonio gladly made all Florentine ships free of his harbours, and reduced the usual customs dues in favour of all Florentine merchants throughout his dominions. Visitors from Tuscany, when they landed at Riva d’Ostia, on the Gulf of Corinth, must, indeed, have felt themselves in the land of a friendly prince, though his Court on the Akropolis presented a curious mixture of the Greek and the Florentine elements. Half a Greek himself, Antonio chose both his wives from that race—the first the beautiful daughter of a Greek priest, to whom he had lost his heart in the mazes of a wedding-dance at Thebes; the second an heiress of the great Messenian family of Melissenos, whose bees and bells are not the least picturesque escutcheon in the heraldry of mediæval Greece. As he had no children, numbers of the Acciajuoli clan came to Athens with an eye to the ducal coronet, which had conferred such lustre upon the steel-workers and bankers of Brescia and Florence. One cousin settled down at the castle of Sykaminon, near Oropos, which had belonged to the Knights of the Hospital, and served his kinsman as an ambassador; another became bishop of Cephalonia, the island of that great lady, the Countess Francesca, whom Froissart describes as a mediæval Penelope, whose maids of honour made silken coverings so fine that there was none like them, and whose splendid hospitality delighted the French nobles on their way home from a Turkish prison after the battle of Nikopolis. Two other Acciajuoli were archbishops of Thebes; and towards the close of Antonio’s long reign a second generation of the family had grown up in Greece. With such names as Acciajuoli, Medici, Pitti, and Machiavelli at the Athenian Court, Attica had, indeed, become a Florentine colony.