Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

but other poets have sung of their triumphs. Indeed, there were bards in the ranks of the “wanderers” themselves, and a whole literature of their poems has been published, mostly written in a peculiar dialect resembling that now spoken in Calabria, where many Greek songs are still sung by the descendants of the numerous Epeirote families settled there after the Turkish conquest—the third time that Magna Græcia had received a large Greek population. One of their number, Marullus, of whom it was said that he “first united Apollo to Mars,” wrote Latin alcaics and sapphics, which, if not exactly Horatian, are, at any rate, as good as the ordinary product of the sixth-form intellect. Another, Theodore Spandounis, or Spandugino, more usefully employed his pen in the composition of a work on the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, with the patriotic object of arousing the sympathy of sixteenth-century statesmen for the deliverance of Greece. The Stradioti, were, however, mightier with the javelin and the mace—their characteristic weapons—than with the pen. The long javelin, which they carried on horseback, was a particularly formidable weapon. Shod at both ends with a sharp iron point, it could be used either way with equally deadly effect; and if it failed, the agile horseman could seize the mace which hung at his saddle bow, and bring it down on the skull of an opponent. Unfortunately, the blow was rarely struck for Greece, and the skull was usually that of a Christian, against whom the Stradioti had no personal or national quarrel.

But Greece was deprived of her literary as well as her military men by the Turkish conquest. For almost the first time in her long history, all traces of learning vanished from the home of the Muses. Most of the scholarly Greeks of that age emigrated to Italy, and, just as, in the words of Horace, “Captive Greece led her victors captive,” after her subjugation by the unlettered Romans, so, sixteen centuries later, she once more spread the light of Hellenic studies in the darkest West. Thus, the Athenian, Demetrios Chalkokondyles, became the tutor of one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sons at Florence, while the Spartan, George Hermonymos, was the first Greek who publicly taught that language in Paris. Two other Moreotes, Demetrios Ralles, a soldier and scholar, and Isidore, who had distinguished himself alike in theology and in the defence of Constantinople, spent the rest of their lives in Italy, while the historian Phrantzes wrote his history and died in peace at Corfù under the Venetian protection. We owe much of our modern culture to this fifteenth-century dispersion of the learned Greeks; but the gain of Europe was the loss of Greece. It required the lapse of two whole centuries to make up in the least degree the deficiencies in Greek education, which the departure of all these men of light and leading caused; and if they strove to interest European courts and scholars in the fortunes of their abandoned country, that was of small practical advantage compared with the loss which they inflicted upon it. Had they remained in Greece, their influence would soon have made itself felt; they would have obtained posts in the Turkish service, which might have enabled them to improve the condition of their fellow-countrymen, and their example would have prevented the complete spread of ignorance over large parts of Greece during the first two centuries after the conquest.

The flight of these two classes—the archontes and the men of letters—made the provincial landowners, the peasants, and the parish priests, who mostly sprang from the ranks of the latter, the sole representatives of the Greek nation[669]. But, though Hellenism has never suffered such enormous losses as during the Turkish period, owing to conversions to Islâm and emigration to the West, there never was any time in the history of Greece under alien dominion when the Greek race remained so pure as between the Turkish conquest and the War of Independence. There can be no doubt that, after the long era of confusion and disorder which had followed the break-up of the Frankish power in Greece, even the Turkish, or any other strong Government—and at that time Turkey was strong and the Sultans could govern—must have proved a benefit to the great mass of the population. Moreover, from the date of the Turkish conquest the immigrations of the foreign elements, which had occurred so often during the Byzantine and Frankish period, ceased, and for nearly four centuries the Hellenic race was uncontaminated by alien blood. The Franks left behind them few survivors, except in the islands, and there were no Slavonic raids, while the Greeks, who remained true to their faith, never intermarried with the Turks, for a Greek woman who became the wife of a Mussulman was excommunicated. The two religions remained absolutely apart, and, under Turkish rule, for the first time for centuries, perhaps also for the last, there was no racial rivalry between the Christians of the Near East. Union reigned between Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians and Roumanians; and the doctrine of nationalities, nowadays the keynote of Balkan politics, had no influence under the Turkish system of that period, which treated all Christians of whatever race as the inferiors of all Mussulmans, whether of Turkish, Slavonic, Albanian or Greek extraction.

Education was scanty enough in the Venetian possessions, as we saw in the case of Corfù; but it was much worse in Turkish Greece. For two hundred years after the conquest there was practically nothing done for the instruction of those Greeks who remained under the Turks, and even archbishops could with difficulty write their own names correctly. Larissa in Thessaly was then one of the wealthiest of Greek sees; yet a Greek scholar, who examined the archiepiscopal records during the Turkish period, found them a mass of bad grammar and remarkable spelling. As for literature, though Sathas has compiled a work on the Greek authors of the long period between the capture of Constantinople and the War of Independence, only four of them, with the exception of a few theological writers, came from Greece proper. Two of these four were the brothers Laonikos and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, of Athens, the former of whom wrote his history of the Turks in Italy, while the latter composed his critical editions of Homer, Isokrates and Suidas at Milan, where his monument may be seen in the church of Sta Maria della Passione. The remaining two were born and bred in Nauplia, at that time Venetian. One, Zygomalas, composed a Political History of Constantinople from 1391 to 1578; the other, Malaxos, produced a vernacular version of the Patriarchal History of the same city, where both resided for a great part of their lives. Another historical work, the Chronicle of Dorotheos, Metropolitan of Monemvasia, was written in Moldavia. It originally contained the history of the world from the creation down to the year 1629, but was subsequently extended to 1685, and for two hundred years after its publication was “the only historical text-book used by the Greek people.” At last, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an educational revival began in Greece, which derived its origin from the Flangineion, or Greek school founded by the Corfiote, Flangines, at Venice, in 1626, and still existing. The Hellenic community in that city, largely composed of business men, interested—as the Greek merchants of London, Manchester and Alexandria still are in the intellectual, moral and material welfare of their fatherland, sent out educational missionaries, who spread the gospel of learning in the home of their race. One of these Greeks of Venice, a native of Joannina, founded in 1647, two schools, one in his native town[670], another at Athens, where the Catholic monks also taught the young Athenians about the same period.

It must not be supposed that the Greeks acquiesced patiently in the Turkish domination for more than three centuries. The long rule of the Franks had had the effect of making the natives far more warlike than they had been before the Latin conquest; but the conviction of the overwhelming power of the Turks rendered them reluctant to rise, except when they were sure of foreign aid. During the first few years which followed the capture of Constantinople it seemed, indeed, as if such assistance would be speedily forthcoming. The East expected, and the West meditated, a new crusade against the Infidel. A Greek poet appealed to “French and English, Spaniards and Germans,” to make common cause for the recovery of Constantinople[671]. The many learned Greeks who had been scattered all over western Europe by the loss of that city endeavoured to interest the rulers of Christendom in the fate of their fellow-countrymen. Prominent among these missionaries of Hellenism was the famous Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond, who was twice regarded as a likely candidate for the Papacy, and who travelled across Europe with untiring zeal on behalf of the conquered Greeks. The Popes of that period—men, for the most part, of learning and statesmanlike views—warmly supported the plan, and Pius II set out to Ancona, where the crusaders were to assemble. But his death at that seaport caused the collapse of the proposed expedition, and the crusade, for which such great preparations had been made, ended in a fiasco.

For 80 years after the Turkish conquest Venice continued to keep a foothold in the Morea, and consequently Greece became from time to time the scene of Turco-Venetian wars, for the Sultans naturally desired to round off their Greek territories by the acquisition of the remaining Venetian colonies upon Greek soil. The first of these wars, lasting, more or less continuously, from 1463 to 1479, led to the temporary capture of the lower town of Athens by Vettor Capello in 1466—the second occasion on which that famous city had fallen into Venetian hands. It is characteristic of Turkish toleration, that at that time the heretics, known as the fraticelli della mala opinione, whom in that very year Pope Paul II was persecuting and imprisoning in the castle of Sant’ Angelo[672] and whose church may still be seen on Monte Sant’ Angelo between Poli and Casape in the Roman Campagna, were living quietly at Athens. For more than a century Athens disappeared from the notice of the western world, but a Greek chronicle in the library of Lincoln College, Oxford, informs us that seven severe plagues afflicted the city between 1480 and 1554, and that the aqueduct was begun in 1506. We know, too, of the existence of three Metropolitans of Athens during the first century of Turkish rule, and somewhat later an Athenian became Œcumenical Patriarch. But the honour of having momentarily re-occupied Athens was far outweighed in the minds of the practical Venetians by the definite loss of Argos and Negroponte during this war, while the Greeks had been the chief sufferers whichever side was victorious. The next Turco-Venetian war, which began in 1499 and was closed by the treaty of 1502-3, yet further diminished the colonies of Venice, involving the loss of Lepanto, her last outpost on the mainland north of the Isthmus, and of Modon, Koron and Navarino, in the Morea, where Nauplia and Monemvasia, with the castles depending upon them, alone remained. The thirty years’ peace which followed enabled Greece to recover somewhat from the ravages of the late struggle, while patriotic Greek exiles, like Markos Mousouros and Joannes Laskaris in vain tried to interest the powers in a fresh crusade for their deliverance. Charles V was not the man to liberate Greece for the sake of those ancient heroes and sages, whose names Laskaris invoked in an eloquent speech, and when, in 1532, war broke out between him and the Sultan, he showed more anxiety to damage the Turks than to benefit the Greeks, who paid dearly for the triumphs of the Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria. The re-capture of Koron (like that of Modon by the Knights of St John in the previous year) merely led to its abandonment and the compulsory emigration of its unwilling inhabitants to Sicily and Naples. Then, in 1537, came the Turco-Venetian war, which was destined to cost the Republic Ægina, Mykonos, the Northern Sporades and her last surviving colonies in the Morea. For nearly 150 years after the disastrous peace of 1540 Venice did not own an inch of soil on the mainland of Greece, except the Ionian dependencies of Parga and Butrinto, but of her insular dominions Cyprus, Crete, Tenos and six Ionian islands still remained.

For the next thirty years after the disappearance of the Venetian flag from the Morea, the Greeks were undisturbed by further fighting on the mainland, though learned men continued to make appeals to Europe on their behalf. The fall of the Duchy of Naxos in 1566 and the capture of Chios from the maona, or Chartered Company, of the Giustiniani of Genoa, in the same year yet further diminished the influence of the Latins in the Levant; but it was not till Selim II attacked the (since 1489) Venetian island of Cyprus in 1570, that Greece once more became the theatre of a European war. The first operations of the Venetians were directed against the coast opposite Corfù and against a fort which the Turks had newly constructed to command the Mainate harbour of Porto delle Quaglie, where the Turkish galleys could wait and intercept the Venetian vessels on their way to Cyprus. Thanks to the aid of the Mainates, ever ready for a fight, the Venetian commander was able to capture this strong position. But he found it necessary to blow it up, as he could not retain it, and sailed for the island of Andros, captured by the Turks four years before, whose Greek inhabitants suffered more than the garrison from the excesses of his soldiers[673]. Meanwhile, the Republic had been working hard to form an alliance against the Sultan. At last, in the spring of 1571, a league was concluded at Rome between Pope Pius V, Philip II of Spain, and the Venetians for the destruction of the Ottoman power. It was the thirteenth time that a Holy Alliance had been made with that object; but it seemed as if the efforts of Christendom would finally be crowned with success. A large fleet was collected, under the supreme command of Don John of Austria, bastard son of the Emperor Charles V, while the papal galleys were placed under the charge of Marcantonio Colonna. But more than a month before the Armada had left Sicily for Corfù Cyprus had fallen, and while the allies were discussing their plans the Turkish fleet had ravished the Cretan coast, and carried off more than 6000 souls from Cephalonia. It was not till the morning of October 7 that the two navies met. The Turkish commander had taken up his position off Lepanto; while the Christian ships were stationed off the Echinades islands, outside the Gulf of Corinth. Against the advice of wiser men, Ali, the Turkish admiral, issued from the Gulf in search of the enemy. Suddenly the two fleets came in sight of one another. It was a striking scene; the varied colours of the Ottoman ships lighted up by the brilliant sunshine, which played upon the shining cuirasses of the Christian warriors; the blue waves of a Greek sea, calm and peaceful, where, centuries before, Corinthians and Corcyræans had fought a naval battle. On either side their modern representatives were to be found, 25,000 were serving as sailors in the Ottoman service, and 5000 more were on board the Venetian ships. Several Venetian galleys were actually commanded by Greeks; especially noteworthy were the exploits of the Corfiote Condocalli, who was the most famous of these Greek commanders; among his Greek colleagues were two Cretans, one a member of the historic clan of the Kallergai, whose name is writ large in the stormy history of the great Greek island. The contemporary Venetian historian, Paruta[674], specially awards the palm for courage, discipline, and skill combined to the Greeks, “as being most accustomed to that kind of warfare,” while he places both Italians and Spaniards below them. And another historian, Sagredo, says that “being more experienced in seafaring, they contributed not a little to the victory[675].” The defeat of the Turks was overwhelming; 224 ships taken or destroyed and 30,000 men slain represented their losses, while the allies lost only 15 galleys and 8000 men. Among the dead were the Turkish admiral and many of the scions of the noblest Venetian houses; among the wounded was the author of Don Quixote, who lost, like Æschylos at Marathon, a hand at Lepanto for the cause of Greece. The first impression which the victory caused at Constantinople was one of consternation, and for three days Selim refused to take food. Nor was this dismay without foundation: the Ottoman fleet had been annihilated; the Greeks were in revolt; and a cool-headed French diplomatist considered that the allies could easily have destroyed the Turkish Empire and taken Constantinople. But the discord of the victors and the energy of the Grand Vizier, Mohammed Sokolli, saved the Ottoman dominions. Within eight months after the battle a new Turkish fleet of 250 galleys, fifteen of which were contributed by the wealthy Greek merchant of Constantinople, Michael Cantacuzene, better known from his nickname of Saïtan Oglou, or “the Devil’s son,” left the Dardanelles, and Sokolli, contrasting the capture of Cyprus with the barren victory of Lepanto, could truly say that, if “the Republic had shorn his beard, he had cut off one of her arms.”

The battle of Lepanto has made a great noise in history, and Rome and Venice still preserve many memorials of that victory. But its results were valueless, so far as the Greeks were concerned, and, indeed, it would have been better for them if it had never been fought. They had welcomed with enthusiasm the advent of the allied fleet, which they confidently hoped would free them from the Turkish yoke; and, in the first excitement of the Christian victory, they flew to arms, and begged the victors to support their efforts on land by the presence of the fleet off the coast of the Morea. But, as usual, the Christian commanders differed as to the best means of utilising their success. At the council of war, which was held on board after the battle, one party advocated a naval demonstration off the Peloponnese, and another the capture of Eubœa, while a third proposed the seizure of Santa Maura, which the Venetians alone actually attempted, and a fourth suggested the siege of the two forts on either side of the Corinthian Gulf. In the end, as the season was far advanced, all farther united action was postponed to next year, and the fleet withdrew to Corfù, whence the Spanish and Papal contingents sailed to Italy, leaving the insurgents to themselves[676]. Many Moreotes had crossed over to the little town of Galaxidi, which the visitor to Delphi sees as he approaches the harbour of Itea, and there in a church they solemnly bound themselves, together with the townsfolk and the inhabitants of Salona, to rise against the Turk on the self-same day. “May he, who repents him of his oath or betrays what we have said, never see the face of God,” so runs the picturesque formula of the conspirators in the Chronicle of Galaxidi[677]. “And then,” says the Chronicler, “they all lifted up their hands to the eikons and swore a terrible oath.” But there was at least one traitor in the church at Galaxidi, a man from Aigion, on the opposite shore of the Gulf, who betrayed the dread secret to the Turks. While in the Morea the Ottomans wreaked vengeance on the conspirators and burnt the Archbishop of Patras alive as a fearful example, the ringleaders of the insurrection at Galaxidi, still “relying on the aid of the Franks,” marched with 3000 men against the noble Catalan fortress of Salona, then the residence of a Turkish Bey. On their arrival, however, they found a Turkish force drawn up in order of battle, and no Frankish contingent awaiting them. Disheartened and abandoned, they trusted to the invitation of the crafty Bey, who bade them come and tell him the story of their woes. The Bey received the deputation, eighty in all, with every honour, and listened sympathetically to their tale, bidding them be good subjects and mind their own affairs for the future. But, when the evening was come, he threw them into a dungeon of the castle, where all save one, a priest who escaped by his great personal strength, “died for their country and their faith.” Meanwhile, the Moreotes who had escaped from the Turks, had taken refuge in Maina, where the two brothers Melissenoi, from Epidauros, members of that famous Peloponnesian family, placed themselves at the head of 28,000 men, who continued the struggle for two whole years in that difficult country. Don John, who was still lingering idly at Messina, afraid to return to the East in consequence of the growing dissensions between France and Spain, wrote to one of the heroic brothers, bidding him keep the insurrection going till his arrival[678]. But it was not till August, 1572, that the victor of Lepanto again joined the allies in Greek waters. Even then, he accomplished nothing. For some time the two hostile fleets hovered off the coast of Messenia without an engagement, and attempts upon Navarino and Modon were abandoned. Then, as in the previous year, the allied armada broke up, while the Moreote insurgents withdrew to the most inaccessible mountains, until, abandoning all hope of their emancipation, they once more bowed their necks beneath the Turkish yoke[679]. The two Melissenoi survived and escaped to Naples, where a monument, removed in 1634, was erected to them in the Greek Church of SS. Peter and Paul[680], with an appropriate inscription, like those commemorating two exiles from Koron. Early in 1573 Venice made peace with the Sultan, and the historian Paruta considered that such a course was the wisest that his country could have adopted. The Republic acquiesced in the loss of Cyprus, and gained nothing in return for her efforts and her losses of blood and treasure during the war but the barren laurels of Lepanto. Upon the Turks the lessons of the recent campaign had not been thrown away. In order to check any fresh Greek rising, they fortified the coasts of the Morea, and built a fort at the entrance of the famous haven of Navarino. Nor had the disillusioned Greeks failed to gain a sad experience from their abandonment. Now, for the first time, we find the Venetian representative in Constantinople writing that the Sultan was afraid of the Muscovite, because of the devotion shown by the Eastern Christians towards a ruler of their own faith. As early as 1576 that astute diplomatist remarked that the Greeks were ready to take up arms and place themselves under Russian protection, in order to escape from the Turkish yoke[681]. The shadow of the Russian bear was beginning to wax, while that of the Venetian lion waned.

One result of the battle of Lepanto was to turn the attention of civilised Europe to Greece. Four years after the victory we find Athens “re-discovered” by the curiosity of Martin Kraus—or Crusius, as he styled himself—a professor at Tübingen, who wrote for information about the celebrated city to Theodosios Zygomalas, a Greek born at Nauplia but living at Constantinople. Zygomalas had often visited Athens, which the frequent wars in the Levant, the depredations of corsairs, and the fact that the usual pilgrims’ route to Palestine lay far to the south had so completely isolated from Europe that the densest ignorance prevailed about it in the West. He mentions in his reply the melody of the Athenian songs, which “charmed those who heard them, as though they were the music of sirens,” the salubrity of the air, the excellence of the water, the good memories and euphonious voices of the inhabitants, among whom, as he states elsewhere, there then were “about 160 bishops and priests.” At the same time he remarks of the language then spoken at Athens that “if you heard the Athenians talk your eyes would fill with tears.” Another Greek, Simeon Kabasilas of Arta, informed Kraus that of all the seventy odd dialects of Greece the Attic of that day was the worst. The Greek and “Ishmaelite,” or Turkish, populations lived, he wrote, in separate quarters of the town, which contained “12,000 male inhabitants[682].” We learn too, from a short account of Athens discovered in the National Library at Paris in 1862, and composed in Greek in the sixteenth century[683], that the Tower of the Winds was then a tekkeh of dervishes, and the mosque in the Parthenon was called Ismaïdi.