Essays on the Latin Orient

by William Miller

III. FRANKISH AND VENETIAN GREECE

1. THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE

Professor Krumbacher says in his History of Byzantine Literature, that, when he announced his intention of devoting himself to that subject, one of his classical friends solemnly remonstrated with him, on the ground that there could be nothing of interest in a period when the Greek preposition ἀπό governed the accusative, instead of the genitive case. I am afraid that many people are of the opinion of that orthodox grammarian. There has long prevailed in some quarters an idea that, from the time of the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. to the day when Archbishop Germanos raised the standard of Independence at Kalavryta in 1821, the annals of Greece were practically a blank, and that that country thus enjoyed for nearly twenty centuries that form of happiness which consists in having no history. Fifty years ago there was, perhaps, some excuse for this theory; but the case is very different now. The great cemeteries of Mediæval Greece—I mean the Archives of Venice, Naples, Palermo and Barcelona—have given up their dead. We know now, year by year, yes, almost month by month, the vicissitudes of Hellas under her Frankish masters, and all that is required now is to breathe life into the dry bones, and bring upon the stage in flesh and blood that picturesque and motley crowd of Burgundian, Flemish and Lombard nobles, German knights, rough soldiers of fortune from Cataluña and Navarre, Florentine financiers, Neapolitan courtiers, shrewd Venetian and Genoese merchant princes, and last, but not least, the bevy of high-born dames, sprung from the oldest families of France, who make up, together with the Greek archons and the Greek serfs, the persons of the romantic drama, of which Greece was the theatre for 250 years.

The history of Frankish Greece begins with the Fourth Crusade. I need not recapitulate the oft-told story of that memorable expedition, which influenced for centuries the annals of Eastern Europe, and which forms the historical basis of the Eastern question. We all know, from the paintings of the Doge’s Palace, how the Crusaders set out with the laudable object of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, how they turned aside to the easier and more lucrative task of overturning the oldest Empire in the world, and how they placed on the throne of all the Cæsars Count Baldwin of Flanders as first Latin Emperor of Constantinople. The Greeks fled to Asia Minor, and there at Nice, the city of the famous Council, and at Trebizond on the shores of the Black Sea, founded two Empires, of which the latter existed for over 250 years.

When the Crusaders and their Venetian allies sat down to partition the Byzantine Empire among themselves, they paid no heed to the rights of nationalities or to the wishes of the people whose fate hung upon their decisions. A fourth part of the Byzantine dominions, consisting of the capital, the adjacent districts of Europe and Asia, and several of the islands, was first set aside to form the new Latin Empire of Romania. The remaining three-fourths were then divided in equal shares between the Venetian Republic and the Crusaders, whose leader was Boniface of Montferrat in the North of Italy, the rival of Baldwin for the throne of the East. The Greek provinces in Asia, and the island of Crete had originally been intended as his share of the spoil; but he wished to obtain a compact extent of territory nearer his own home and his wife’s native land of Hungary, and accordingly sold Crete to the Venetians, and established himself as King of Salonika with sovereignty over a large part of Greece, as yet unconquered. The Venetians, with their shrewd commercial instincts and their much more intimate knowledge of the country, secured all the best harbours, islands and markets in the Levant—an incident which shows that an acquaintance with geography may sometimes be useful to politicians.

In the autumn of 1204 Boniface set out to conquer his Greek dominions. The King of Salonika belonged to a family, which was no stranger to the ways of the Orient. One of his brothers had married the daughter of the Greek Emperor Manuel I; another brother and a nephew were Kings of Jerusalem—a vain dignity which has descended from them, together with the Marquisate of Montferrat, to the present Italian dynasty. Married to the affable widow of the Greek Emperor Isaac II, Boniface was a sympathetic figure to the Greeks, who had speedily flocked in numbers to his side, and several of whom accompanied him on his march through Greece. Among these was the bastard Michael Angelos, of whom we shall hear later as the founder of a new dynasty. With the King of Salonika there went too a motley crowd of Crusaders in quest of fiefs, men of many nationalities, Lombards, Flemings, Frenchmen and Germans. There were Guillaume de Champlitte, a grandson of the Count of Champagne; Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble; Jacques d’Avesnes, son of a Flemish crusader who had been at the siege of Acre, and his two nephews, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer; Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, a Rhenish warrior who had given the signal for setting fire to Constantinople; the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma, who had gone to Greece because at home every common man could hale him before the courts; Thomas de Stromoncourt, and Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona, brother of the podestà Realdo, whose name still figures on the Casa dei Mercanti there. Just as the modern general takes with him a band of war-correspondents to chronicle his achievements, so Boniface was accompanied by Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a troubadour from Provence, who afterwards boasted in one of the letters in verse which he addressed to his patron, that he “had helped him to conquer the Empire of the East and the Kingdom of Salonika, the island of Pelops and the Duchy of Athens.” Such were the men at whose head the Marquess of Montferrat marched through the classic vale of Tempe, the route of so many armies, into the great fertile plain of Thessaly.

While the Crusaders are traversing the vale of Tempe, let us ask ourselves for a moment, who were the races, and what was the condition, of the country which they were about to enter? The question is important, for the answer to it will enable us to understand the ease with which a small body of Franks conquered, almost without opposition, nearly the whole of Greece. The bulk of the inhabitants were, of course, Greeks; for no one, except a few propagandists, now believes the theory, so confidently advanced by Professor Fallmerayer 90 years ago, according to which there is not a single drop of Hellenic blood in the Greek nation, but the Kingdom of Greece is inhabited by Slavs and Albanians. At the time of the Frankish conquest, the Slavonic elements in the population, the survivals of the Slavonic immigrations of the dark centuries, were confined to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia and Laconia, where Taygetos was known as “the mountain of the Slavs.” The marvellous power of the Hellenic race for absorbing and hellenising foreign nationalities—a power like that of the Americans in our own day—had prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slav state, a Southern Serbia or Bulgaria, though such Slavonic names as Charvati near Mycenæ and Slavochorio still preserve the memory of the Slavonic settlements. As for the Albanians, they had not yet entered Greece; had they done so, the conquest would probably have been far less easy. Besides the Greeks and the Slavs, there were Wallachs in Thessaly, who extended as far south as Lamia, and who had bestowed upon the whole of that region the name, which we find employed by the Byzantine historian Niketas, of “Great Wallachia.” That the Wallachs are of Roman descent, scarcely admits of doubt; at the present day the Roumanians claim them as their kinsmen; and the “Koutso”—or “lame,” Wallachs, so-called because they cannot pronounce chinch (or cinque) correctly, form one of the most thorny questions of contemporary diplomacy. The Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Greece about 40 years before the Frankish conquest, argued from their Scriptural names and from the fact that they called the Jews “brethren,” that they were connected with his own race. They showed, however, their “brotherly” love by merely robbing the Israelites, while they both robbed and murdered the Greeks.

In the south-east of the Peloponnese were to be found the mysterious Tzakones, a race which now exists at Leonidi and the adjacent villages alone, but which then occupied a wider area. Opinions differ as to the origin of this tribe, which still retains a dialect quite distinct from that spoken anywhere else in Greek lands and which was noticed as a “barbarian” tongue by the Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, in the fifteenth century. But Dr Deffner of Athens, the greatest living authority on their language, of which he has written a grammar, regards them as the descendants of the ancient Laconians, their name as a corruption of the words Τοὺς Λάκωνας, and their speech as “new Doric.” Scattered about, wherever money was to be made by trade, were colonies of Jews.

The rule of the Franks must have seemed to many Greeks a welcome relief from the financial oppression of the Byzantine Government. Greece was, at the date of the Conquest, afflicted by three terrible plagues: the tax collectors, the pirates, and the native tyrants. The Imperial Government did nothing for the provinces, but wasted the money which should have been spent on the defences of Greece, in extravagant ostentation at the capital. Byzantine officials, sent to Greece, regarded that classic land, in the phrase of Niketas, as an “utter hole,” an uncomfortable place of exile. The two Greek provinces were governed by one of these authorities, styled prætor, protoprætor, or “general,” whose headquarters were at Thebes. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Metropolitan of Athens before the conquest and brother of the historian Niketas, a vivid account of the exactions of these personages. Theoretically, the city of Athens was a privileged community. A golden bull of the Emperor forbade the prætor to enter it with an armed force, so that the Athenians might be spared the annoyance and expense of having soldiers quartered upon them. Its regular contribution to the Imperial Exchequer was limited to a land-tax, and it was expected to send a golden wreath as a coronation offering to a new Emperor. But, in practice, these privileges were apt to be ignored. The indignant Metropolitan complains that the prætor, under the pretext of worshipping in the Church of “Our Lady of Athens,” as the Parthenon was then called, visited the city with a large retinue. He laments that one of these Imperial Governors had treated the city “more barbarously than Xerxes,” and that the leaves of the trees, nay almost every hair on the heads of the unfortunate Athenians, had been numbered. The authority of the prætor, he says, is like Medea in the legend; just as she scattered her poisons over Thessaly, so it scatters injustice over Greece—a classical simile, which had its justification in the hard fact, that it had long been the custom of the Byzantine Empire to pay the Governors of the European provinces no salaries, but to make their office self-supporting, a practice still followed by the Turkish Government. The Byzantine Government, too, following a policy similar to that which cost our King Charles I his throne, levied ship-money, really for the purpose of its own coffers, nominally for the suppression of piracy.