PLATE VI
Fig. 1. Boudonitza. The Castle from the West.
Fig. 2. Boudonitza. The Castle from the East.
PLATE VII
Fig. 1. Boudonitza. The Keep and the Hellenic Gateway.
Fig. 2. Boudonitza. The Hellenic Gateway.
Guido, first Marquess of Boudonitza, the “Marchesopoulo,” as his Greek subjects called him, played a very important part in both the political and ecclesiastical history of his time—just the part which we should have expected from a man of his lawless disposition. The “Chronicle” above quoted represents him as present at the siege of Corinth. He and his brother, whose name may have been Rubino, were among the leaders of the Lombard rebellion against the Latin Emperor Henry in 1209; he obstinately refused to attend the first Parliament of Ravenika in May of that year; and, leaving his castle undefended, he retreated with the still recalcitrant rebels behind the stronger walls of the Kadmeia at Thebes. This incident procured for Boudonitza the honour of its only Imperial visit; for the Emperor Henry lay there one evening—a certain Wednesday—on his way to Thebes, and thence rode, as the present writer has ridden, through the closure, or pass, which leads over the mountains and down to Dadi and the Bœotian plain—then, as now, the shortest route from Boudonitza to the Bœotian capital[335], and at that time the site of a church of our Lady, Sta Maria de Clusurio, the property of the abbot and canons of the Lord’s Temple. Like most of his fellow-nobles, the Marquess was not over-respectful of the rights and property of the Church to which he belonged. If he granted the strong position of Lamia to the Templars, he secularised property belonging to his bishop and displayed a marked unwillingness to pay tithes. We find him, however, with his fellows, signing the concordat which was drawn up to regulate the relations between Church and State at the second Parliament of Ravenika in May, 1210[336].
As one of the leading nobles of the Latin kingdom of Salonika, Guido continued to be associated with its fortunes. In 1221 we find him acting as bailie for the Regent Margaret during the minority of the young King Demetrius, in whose name he ratified a convention with the clergy respecting the property of the Church[337]. His territory became the refuge of the Catholic Archbishop of Larissa, upon whom the bishopric of Thermopylæ was temporarily conferred by Honorius III, when the Greeks of Epeiros drove him from his see. And when the ephemeral kingdom had fallen before them, the same Pope, in 1224, ordered Geoffroy II de Villehardouin of Achaia, Othon de la Roche of Athens, and the three Lombard barons of Eubœa to aid in defending the castle of Boudonitza, and rejoiced that 1300 hyperperi had been subscribed by the prelates and clergy for its defence, so that it could be held by “G. lord of the aforesaid castle,” till the arrival of the Marquess William of Montferrat[338]. Guido was still living on May 2, 1237, when he made his will. Soon after that date he probably died; Hopf[339] states in his genealogy, without citing any authority, that he was killed by the Greeks. He had survived most of his fellow-Crusaders; and, in consequence of the Greek reconquest of Thessaly, his Marquisate was now, with the doubtful exception of Larissa, the northernmost of the Frankish fiefs, the veritable “March” of Latin Hellas.