Crete, after its conquest, was similarly parcelled out into seventeen zaimets and 2550 timars, which would produce 5355 cavalry. At first the timariot system was not in the nature of an hereditary aristocracy. The timars were originally life-rents only, conferred for services rendered to the Sultan upon veteran warriors, who might be called upon to appear with their retainers at the call of their liege lord. In the golden age of Turkish administration—if such a phrase can be applied to any Turkish institution—the son of timariot was entrusted with a large fief such as his sire had held only after he had proved his capacity as the holder of a small one. But, like all political systems, the Turkish began by making capacity the sole test of office, and ended by making office the reward of favourites. Gradually the beglerbeg was allowed to bestow these fiefs, which had formerly been in the Sultan’s gift, and that official naturally rewarded his own creatures, just as a British Prime Minister, allowed by weak or preoccupied monarchs to dispense patronage at his will, bestows the honours of the peerage and the baronetage upon subservient, or perhaps recalcitrant, supporters. Thus, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was the custom of Romania that, if a holder of a zaimet or timar died in the wars, his fief was divided into as many portions as he had sons, unless the rent was no more than 3000 aspers, in which case the whole went to the eldest son. But if the holder died in his bed, his lands fell to the beglerbeg, who could bestow them upon the dead man’s heirs, give them to any of his own servants, or sell them, as he pleased[654].
The Turks did not interfere with the Greek municipal system, which had existed for centuries before the Ottoman conquest. As far back as the Byzantine times we find that the Hellenic communities employed representatives, not necessarily drawn from their own members, at the Imperial Court at Constantinople. Thus, in the eleventh century, Michael Psellos represented the Ægean Islands at the capital[655]; but, in some cases, instead of having a permanent representative, whose functions may be compared with those of the agents-general of our self-governing colonies, a local deputation occasionally visited Constantinople to lay its grievances before the central authorities. In the Venetian island of Tenos a similar practice prevailed; there a committee was selected from among the primates to watch over the administration of the Venetian officials. The Turks, like the Romans, were quite willing that their Greek subjects should continue to enjoy local self-government. Accordingly, they allowed the communes to promote commerce and found schools, while Greek naturally continued to be the official language of the communal authorities. There was no hard and fast rule for their election, and no stereotyped title by which they were known all over Greece. But, generally speaking, every town and even every hamlet had its own Greek officials, elected by the Christian inhabitants, or by some portion of them, in a more or less indirect fashion, and variously styled “elders of the parish,” “elders,” archontes, “primates,” or, in Turkish, khodja-bashis. Thus, at a late period of the Ottoman domination, in the island of Psara the whole community met annually for the election of forty electors, who in turn elected four “elders of the parish”; at the same period, in the island of Spetsai, the five “primates” were elected annually by the ships’ captains and the well-to-do citizens; while Hydra, during a large part of the eighteenth century, was administered by its priests, with whom two laymen were associated. The Morea had certain special municipal privileges. It was permitted to send two or three “primates” to Constantinople, who were able to mitigate the exactions of the Turkish Pashas by the influence which they acquired during their stay there. Moreover, each province of the peninsula used to send two prominent Greeks once or twice a year to the seat of the Pasha to confer with him upon the affairs of the Morea. Sometimes, both there and in Thessaly, municipal office descended as a heritage from father to son, and too often the feuds, which continued to distinguish the Moreote archontes, descended, with their dignities, to their descendants. Their duties were to administer the local affairs of their communities, to act as arbitrators in civil cases, to levy local rates, to manage the local treasury, and to act as protectors and advisers of the oppressed. Sometimes they carried out this last duty without flinching, sometimes, however, their conduct earned them the name of “a kind of Christian Turks[656].”
Both the law of Islâm and the laws of human nature forbade the wholesale conversion of the conquered to the faith of the conquerors. But Mohammed II, who spoke Greek and knew the Greeks well, recognised, like the wise statesman that he was, the possibility of managing his Christian subjects through the medium of their own Church. The Turks were a foreign garrison in a hostile country, and in the middle of the fifteenth century it was quite possible that some Catholic power might undertake a new crusade for the deliverance of the East. The bitter hatred of the Eastern for the Western Church provided the astute Sultan with a powerful incentive for the toleration and even patronage of the Orthodox religion. He saw that, if he favoured the one branch of Christendom, he would prevent its union with the other, and he made a most politic selection of an instrument for the accomplishment of his plan. One of the strongest opponents of the union had been Georgios Scholarios, a man of great influence with the Orthodox and of equal unpopularity with the Catholics. As soon as Constantinople had fallen, the Sultan caused diligent search to be made for this uncompromising champion of Orthodoxy, and about the end of the same year gave orders for his election as Œcumenical Patriarch, according to the time-honoured forms which the Byzantine Empire had recognised for centuries. Gennadios II, as the new Patriarch was styled, was invited to a banquet by the Sultan, who showed him the greatest attention, and accompanied him as far as the courtyard of the palace, where he assisted him to mount his horse. A berat of the Sultan determined the position, powers, and privileges of Gennadios and his successors. The Œcumenical Patriarch was declared to be “untaxable and irremovable,” and the document, of which only a summary has come down to us in the history of Phrantzes[657], is said to have prohibited the conversion of Christian churches into mosques. The loss of the original berat is of less importance because subsequent rescripts modified these notable concessions, while in practice the privileges of the Patriarch came to be far less respected than in theory. To him was assigned the supreme administration of all churches and monasteries, the right of deposing archbishops and bishops, and the highest criminal jurisdiction over all the clergy. He decided all matrimonial questions, and other suits, in which the parties, being both Christians, preferred his judgment to that of the Turkish courts. He could levy dues for the needs of the Church on laity and clergy alike, and it was provided that existing ecclesiastical property should be respected, and that no Christian should be forced to embrace Islâm. But in these respects, as well as with regard to the fiscal exemption and irremovability of the Patriarch, the ecclesiastical history of the Greeks under the Turks shows us a gradual falling off from the original intentions of Mohammed II. A later berat laid it down that the Patriarch could be deposed for one of three reasons—oppression of his flock, transgression of the ecclesiastical law, and treason towards his sovereign—elastic terms, capable of a wide interpretation. Mohammed II himself deposed the Patriarch Joseph I, for refusing to sanction the marriage of the widow of the last Duke of Athens with George Amoiroutses, the traitor who had been accused of handing over Trebizond to the Turks, and who had a wife still living. From the Turkish conquest to the present day 69 Patriarchs have been deposed, several more than once, 20 were thus removed in the seventeenth century, and the Sultans at times inflicted punishments on the Patriarchs, which recall the horrible mutilations of Byzantine times. From the moment of the conquest, Christian churches, beginning with St Sophia, were converted into mosques, and the seat of the Patriarchate, fixed by Mohammed II at the Church of the Holy Apostles, was successively moved, as church after church became a sacred place of Islâm, till it reached, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, its present home in the Phanar. All over Greece the same process went on, wherever the Mussulmans were numerous, and we have seen at Salonika, Livadia and Larissa buildings which have served first as churches and then as mosques. Certain dues, too, were fixed, which the Patriarch was expected to pay; and soon bakshîsh, the bane of Turkey, began to affect Patriarchal elections. This introduction of simony into the Greek Church was due to the intrigues of the Greeks themselves. After the fall of the empire of Trebizond in 1461 many of the Trapezuntine grandees sought careers at Constantinople. Among other posts they coveted that of the Patriarch, and as early as 1467 they conspired with that object against Markos II, the fourth successor of Gennadios[658]. They succeeded in securing his deposition and the election of one of their own party by promising that he would pay an annual sum of one thousand gold pieces and forego the allowance which his four predecessors had received from the government. The evil, thus soon introduced, spread apace. Two years later, an offer of double the sum paid by the Patriarch ensured his removal in favour of a wealthier candidate. Then the annual payment was raised to three thousand gold pieces, and large sums came to be spent in bribes to courtiers, eunuchs, janissaries and the female favourites of the Sultans, the money being ultimately raised out of the clergy and laity. Thus, the history of the Patriarchate resembles that of the mediæval Papacy in that the same means were employed to ensure an election. After the Reformation, Jesuits and Protestants, each anxious to have at the head of the Greek Church a man favourable to themselves, joined in the bidding, and between the years 1623 and 1700 there were about fifty Patriarchal elections, most of them won by bribery. The debts of the Patriarchate became enormous, as a consequence of this almost constant expenditure, and the necessity thus imposed upon the Patriarch of selling all the chief ecclesiastical offices in his gift was one of the main causes which made the Greek Church so unpopular in many parts of Turkey, where the population belonged to another race than the Hellenic. The history of Roumania abounds with examples of the exactions of Greek bishops, who sought to make the wretched people make up to them what they had spent on the purchase of their sees.
Another cause tended, in course of time, to make the Turkish Government less careful of the Patriarch’s privileges and dignities. He had been regarded by Mohammed II as a bulwark against the Catholic powers; but, a century after the fall of Constantinople, Rome, distracted by the Protestant secession, had become far less dangerous, and Venice had lost her last possessions in the Morea, while in the seventeenth century Spain was no longer an enemy to be feared. Moreover, France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” and the patroness of the Jesuits, had become the ally of Turkey, and supported her protégés, who first appeared at Constantinople in 1609, against the Œcumenical Patriarch. Thus, finding himself in little danger from a disunited Europe and an impotent Papacy, the Sultan could afford to modify his attitude towards the head of the Greek Church. After 1657, the Patriarch ceased to be installed by the Sultan in person, who was thenceforth represented by the Grand Vizier, and further restrictions were soon placed upon the honours paid to him. Still, the Œcumenical Patriarch enjoyed, throughout the Turkish domination, a great ecclesiastical and political position, such as some of his predecessors had not held under the Byzantine Empire, such as his successors have never held since the Church in Greece became autocephalous, and the Bulgarian Church became independent. In the Turkish days, he was the spiritual, and in many respects the political, head, not only of the Greek subjects of the Sultan, but of all the Orthodox Christians within his dominions, Bulgarians, Serbs[659], Albanians, and Armenians of the Orthodox rite, who, as well as Greeks, were all collectively described as Romaîoi—for in those days religion and not race was the mark by which Ottoman subjects were distinguished. Moreover, he was not only the accredited representative of the Orthodox with the Porte, but he was also the ecclesiastical superior of all the Orthodox communities in the Venetian dominions, and he was therefore permitted to correspond with all those foreign powers which had subjects of that religion. Thus, so long as Venice was a Levantine State, she had continual relations with the Patriarch, and the Venetian bailie at Constantinople conducted diplomatic business with him, no less than with the Turkish government. Mohammed II, in the treaty which he concluded with Venice in the year after the capture of Constantinople, specially provided for the preservation to the Patriarch of all the revenues which his predecessors had received from the Orthodox. We frequently find the Patriarchs intervening with the Venetians on behalf of the Orthodox inhabitants of the Venetian colonies, sometimes urging the claims of the Greeks of Koron, Modon and Crete, sometimes successfully deprecating the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in the Venetian possessions, and in one case rebuking the Orthodox Cretans for their persecution of the Jews. Nothing more clearly proves the peculiar position of the Patriarch as the head of an imperium in imperio, than the fact that the Turkish government conducted its business with him through the medium of the Reis-effendi, or Minister for foreign affairs. Not without reason did men address so powerful a personage as “master” and even “king.” We might, indeed, compare his situation with that of the Pope since 1870. Like the Pope, he had no territory, but his ecclesiastical sway ranged over and beyond the dominions of the sovereign, in whose capital his seat was fixed. Like the Pope, he negotiated with diplomatists, corresponded with foreign governments, and combined, or identified, politics and religion. And, like the Pope, he at times intrigued against the monarch who had ensured him the secure exercise of his privileges within his dominions.
Although the Koran forbade the forcible conversion of the Christians, there were various causes which swelled the ranks of Islâm. The Turks, being but a small body of men compared with the great numbers of the Christians, early saw that they could neither preserve nor extend their conquests without the aid of the latter. Accordingly, just as some Christian rulers of the East had enlisted young Turks to fight their battles, so the Sultan Orchan, more than a century before the capture of Constantinople, founded the terrible institution of the Janissaries, a corps entirely recruited from that time till the middle of the sixteenth century from Christian children who embraced the faith of the sovereign. At the outset the numbers of these children were not less than one thousand a year, and they were taken at the tender age of six or seven years at the most; but later on, perhaps in the reign of Mohammed II, a regular levy of children was ordered to be made throughout all the subject provinces of Turkey, with a few favoured exceptions. This tribute of Christian children, or παιδομάζωμα, as the Greeks called it, was subsequently erected into a complete system, and became one of the greatest engines of conversion. Every five years, or even oftener, for the tribute came at last to be levied annually, an officer of the Janissaries would descend with a clerk upon each district, and demand from the head man of the place a list of all the Christian families. Every Christian father was compelled to make a declaration of the number of his sons and to present them for inspection. At first, only one boy out of every five and only one out of every family were taken. Then no proportion was observed, but the government took as many children as it wanted, always selecting the strongest, and not even sparing the only son of a family. The age, too, was raised to ten, fifteen, and even more years. We can easily imagine the misery inflicted upon the unhappy parents by a system which recalled the fabled tribute paid by the Athenians to the Minotaur. We are told by an eye-witness that mothers sometimes prayed God to strike their sons dead in order to save them from enlistment. Others, in order to evade the law, would marry their children at nine years of age; but the authorities soon disregarded these infantile unions, and marriage was no excuse in the eyes of an arbitrary official. There were only two ways of avoiding the payment of this hideous blood-tax—bribery or flight into one of the Venetian colonies, and the latter means of escape became more difficult when Venice lost her last possessions on the mainland. It might have been thought that this tax would have been more likely to cause a rising. Yet in the long list of insurrections against the Turks we can recall one only, that of 1565, which is specially ascribed to this reason, and that was an Albanian and not a Greek agitation[660]. Moreover, as time went on, and the Janissaries became more pampered and more powerful, it was esteemed by many a blessing rather than a curse that their sons should serve in the corps. The Venetian bailie at Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century expressly says that the tribute of children had by that time come to be regarded as a special favour enjoyed by the Christians, who were thus able to provide their sons with an easy and comfortable profession! We even hear of Mussulman parents so anxious to share in this singular privilege that they lent their children to the Christians so that they might be enrolled as such among the Janissaries. But the loss to Hellenism and to Christianity through the tribute of children was enormous. If we remember that for two centuries the Janissaries were exclusively recruited from the Christians, and that the latter were chiefly to be found in European Turkey, and if we take into consideration that the tribute children were not only the strongest members of their respective families, but were also prohibited by the original constitution of the corps from marrying, for the Janissaries, like the Zulu army of Cetewayo, were a celibate body, we may form some idea of what a drain the παιδομάζωμα was upon the actual and possible resources of Eastern Christianity. A modern Greek historian[661] estimates at about a million the number of Christian children taken to serve in the corps during the first two centuries of its existence. At last, however, it fell into disuse, and in the seventeenth century ceased to exist. A variety of causes contributed to the decline of an institution which had so greatly strengthened the Turkish army at the expense of the Christian population. From the time when the Janissaries were allowed to marry, they naturally desired to have their own children taken into the corps, while others obtained admission to its privileges by bribery. On the other hand, the Sultans came to regard the Janissaries as dangerous to themselves, much as the Roman Emperors had found the Prætorians to be, and were thus less anxious to have the corps recruited. The number of conversions to Islâm had also narrowed the area of enlistment from among the Christians; and Rycaut, writing shortly after the custom had fallen into disuse, mentions the corruption of the officers and the carelessness in their discipline as the cause of its decay. Accordingly we last hear of the tribute being levied in 1676, though an isolated case is mentioned as late as 1703[662].
Besides the tribute of Christian children, there was a further reason for the conversion of the Greeks in the honours offered to those who apostatised. When the Turks found themselves masters of a great European Empire, they had neither the financial nor the diplomatic skill requisite for conducting it. The Turkish method of keeping accounts was cumbrous, the Turkish language is extremely difficult to write, and the Turks resembled the British in their absolute ignorance of foreign tongues, while treaties and diplomatic correspondence continued to be composed in Greek. But empires are not won by linguists but by men of character, who are easily able to find subtle intellects to do their office work for them. The precise qualities which the Turks lacked the Greeks possessed, and Mohammed II saw at once how useful the versatile talents of his new subjects would be in the administration of his dominions. But there was this difficulty, that nearly all the best educated Greeks had fled abroad after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, and it was owing to this reason that, during the two first centuries of the Turkish rule, the Greeks did not, as a rule, rise higher in the Turkish service than a clerkship in the Treasury or the Foreign Office. There was, however, even at that period, one notable exception, the office of Grand Vizier. Of the five Grand Viziers of Mohammed II, two were Greeks, the former of whom, Mahmûd Pasha, was the first Christian to hold that great position. Under Bayezid II we find two more Greeks as Grand Viziers. Suleyman the Magnificent gave that post to two others, and later on one Grand Vizier was the son of a Greek priest; while the terrible Barbarossa, the scourge of the Christians at sea, was of Greek origin. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Venetian bailie at Constantinople could write that the great places in the Sultan’s service usually fell to the Christians, and the Turks complained that the children of the poor rayah were put over their heads.
But for a long time these mundane advantages could only be obtained by apostasy, and thus the lukewarm Christian had strong incentives to turn Mussulman. But in Greece there were fewer conversions than among the Slavs of Bosnia and the Herzegovina; and when, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the Turkish Government relaxed the strictness of its policy, and abolished religious tests for certain important offices of state, the Greeks were able to gratify a laudable ambition without abandoning the religion of their fathers. By that time education had revived among the Greeks of the capital, so that the lack of qualified Hellenes, which had been felt so acutely immediately after the conquest, no longer existed. It was then that, for the first time, a Greek was appointed Grand Dragoman of the Porte in the person of Panagiotes Nikouses, who conducted the negotiations for the surrender of Candia on behalf of the Turks. From the close of that century down to the War of Independence most of his successors in that post were Greeks[663]. Similarly, the position of Dragoman of the Fleet was usually held by a Greek, and the island of Paros has still many monuments of the family of Mavrogenes, two of whose members conducted the naval negotiations of the Capitan Pasha. One of them, Nicholas Mavrogenes, rose from that rank to be Prince of Wallachia; and it is scarcely necessary to remind those who have studied Roumanian history, that in the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century the two thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia were occupied by Greeks, and the two Danubian principalities were regarded as the happy hunting-ground of the Phanariotes of Constantinople. There was even an idea of erecting the Morea into a Christian principality on similar lines; and, though this was never carried out, the Morea was entrusted to a native governor. But the advancement of the Greeks in the Turkish service, though always beneficial to the individuals concerned and sometimes to their employers, was of doubtful value to the Greek national cause. When their private and racial interests clashed, the Greek officials almost always sacrificed the latter, and, indeed, it would have been an Utopian idea to expect the virtues of heroes and saints from the descendants of men who for centuries had been under foreign domination. It is easy for English historians, belonging to a race which has never known what an alien yoke implies, to demand impossible qualities from a down-trodden people, and we are fond of trying foreign nations by an ideal standard—which fortunately we never apply to our own public affairs. But, after all allowances have been made, it must be confessed that some of the worst blows to Hellenism, such as the loss of Eubœa and that of Crete, were dealt by the Greeks themselves, just as the Bosnian, Cretan and Albanian apostates have ever been the bitterest enemies of the Christians, and the warmest supporters of Turkish rule, so long as it permitted them to tyrannise over their own fellow-countrymen. In other words, religion replaced all racial sympathies, and a Mussulman Slav or Cretan was first a Mussulman and then a Slav or Cretan. Even in our own time, at the crisis of the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a Greek was trying to counteract Greek interests in the capacity of Turkish ambassador in London; and the show statesmen of the Porte, whose virtues and culture are always exhibited for the edification of Europe, are invariably Greeks. Samos, too, with its Greek prince, was, till 1912, an interesting survival of the former practice of sending Greeks to rule beyond the Danube in the interest of the Sultan.
On two occasions, under Selim II, in 1514, and in the early days of the Candian war, in 1646, it was actually proposed to exterminate all the Christians of Turkey. But wiser counsels happily prevailed; and towards the close of the seventeenth century, as we saw, the policy of the Turkish government was to preserve, rather than further diminish, the numbers of its Christian taxpayers. By that time fears were felt lest the Christians should continue to dwindle away, and a taxable infidel seemed a more valuable asset than a less remunerative believer in the true faith of Islâm. Accordingly, in 1691, a first serious attempt was made to secure the Christians against exactions by the Nizam-djedid[664], or “new system,” which commanded the provincial governors to levy no other impost than the haratch, or “capitation-tax,” from them. Originally, the only fiscal disadvantages of the Christians, besides the blood-tax of their children, had been this haratch, which was payable by all unbelievers over the age of ten years, except priests, old men, and the blind, the maimed, and the paralytic. A Christian had also to pay on all imports and exports twice the duty levied upon a Mussulman. But, as is still the case in Turkey, the hardships of taxation arose not so much from its legal amount as from its illegal collection. Thus, in 1571, we hear of the incredible extortions suffered by the Christian subjects of the Sultan, who were mostly so deeply sunk in poverty and misery that they scarce durst look a Turk in the face, and who only cultivated their lands sufficiently for their own wants and for the payment of haratch, knowing that the Turks would seize any surplus that was over[665]. However, the Nizam-djedid represented, like the abolition of the tribute of children, a new and humaner policy, which resulted in the diminution of apostasy. From that time onward the Greeks had less temptation to become Mohammedans; the Venetian occupation of the Morea in the early part of the eighteenth century had the double effect of causing many re-conversions to Christianity, and of forcing the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, from fear of comparisons; while, a little later, the Russian claims to a protectorate over the Eastern Christians further checked the movement towards Mohammedanism.
But it was not only in the numbers, but also in the quality of their population, that the Greek provinces of Turkey suffered from the effects of the Turkish conquest. Almost all the men of learning, nearly all the chief families, in short the intellectual and political leaders of the people, went into exile immediately after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Mohammed II did, indeed, address a proclamation in Greek to the principal archontes of the Morea, in which he promised to respect their families and property and make them more prosperous than before[666]; but his promises had little effect in checking the general exodus of the great Moreote families. So universal was their emigration, that only four or five of the Peloponnesian clans, which had played the prominent part during the mediæval period, remained behind, and there were similar wholesale emigrations from continental Greece and Eubœa. As the leading men all went with their relatives and followers, the drain upon the Greek population was as serious a danger to the nation as the emigration of the Peloponnesian peasants to America, which has lately been robbing the land of its cultivators and causing widespread alarm in the Greek press. Most of the exiles went, as was natural, to the Venetian possessions in Greece, which thus became what in earlier times the Despotat of Mistra had been to the Franks—a thorn in the side of the Turkish conqueror. Thus, Michael Ralles, one of the most prominent of Spartan archontes, and the protagonist of the first Turco-Venetian war after the conquest, and the brothers Daimonoyannai, belonging to the great family of that name at Monemvasia, sought homes in the colonies of the Republic in the Morea; thus, too, Graitzas Palaiologos, the last defender of the peninsula, entered the Venetian service. Other Greek leaders accompanied Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, on her marriage with the Grand Duke Ivan of Russia, and the Russian Court soon became another favourite resort of the Peloponnesian magnates who had known her father, and whose descendants were recruited three centuries later by a further band of Greek refugees after the abortive rising in the Morea[667]. Many Greeks, anxious to fight against the foes of their own, or even those of their adopted country, became of their own free will Venetian light horsemen, or Stradioti, just as others were forced to enlist in the ranks of the Turkish Janissaries. The researches of a learned Greek historian have thrown a flood of light upon the constitution and exploits of that remarkable body of soldiers[668]. The name by which they were known is not derived from the Greek word στρατιῶται (“soldiers”) but from the Italian, strada, and signified that those who bore it were “always on the road”—wanderers, who had no fixed abodes. Composed of Greeks and Albanians, the corps was entirely recruited from the Morea, and mainly from Laconia, but the most valiant were the men of Nauplia. Among their leaders we find many historic Moreote names, such as those of Boua and Palaiologos, whose bearers were descendants or relatives of the men who had fought the good fight for the liberty of the Peloponnese. The sixteenth century was the golden age of the Stradioti, who demonstrated all over Europe that Greek valour was not extinct. One of them was even in the service of our Henry VIII, fighting in Scotland and acting as governor of Boulogne, at that time an English fortress. But they had their weaknesses, as well as their good qualities, and their inordinate vanity was the favourite theme of Venetian comedians, just as Plautus had satirised the boastfulness of the Miles Gloriosus for the amusement of the ancient Romans. Tasso has blamed their rapacity in the line:
Il leggier Greco alle rapine intento,