ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
C. F. CLAY, Manager
LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ESSAYS
ON
THE LATIN ORIENT

BY
WILLIAM MILLER, M.A. (Oxon.)
HON. LL.D. IN THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF GREECE: CORRESPONDING
MEMBER OF THE HISTORICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF GREECE:
AUTHOR OF THE LATINS IN THE LEVANT

CAMBRIDGE
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1921

“You imagine that the campaigners against Troy were the only heroes, while you forget the other more numerous and diviner heroes whom your country has produced.”

Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III. 19.

PREFACE

This volume consists of articles and monographs upon the Latin Orient and Balkan history, published between 1897 and the present year. For kind permission to reprint them in collected form I am indebted to the editors and proprietors of The Quarterly Review, The English Historical Review, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Die Byzantinische Zeitschrift, The Westminster Review, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and The Journal of the British and American Archæological Society of Rome. All the articles have been revised and brought up to date by the light of recent research in a field of history which is no longer neglected in either the Near East or Western Europe.

W. M.

36, Via Palestro, Rome.

March, 1921.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

I. THE ROMANS IN GREECE

From the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. Greece lost her independence for a period of nearly two thousand years. During twenty centuries the country had no separate existence as a nation, but followed the fortunes of foreign rulers. Attached, first to Rome and then to Constantinople, it was divided among various Latin nobles after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and succumbed to the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From that time, with the exception of the brief Venetian occupation of the Peloponnese, and the long foreign administration of the Ionian Islands, it remained an integral part of the Turkish Empire till the erection of the modern Greek kingdom. Far too little attention has been paid to the history of Greece under foreign domination, for which large materials have been collected since Finlay wrote his great work. Yet, even in the darkest hours of bondage, the annals of Greece can scarcely fail to interest the admirers of ancient Hellas.

The victorious Romans treated the vanquished Greeks with moderation, and their victory was regarded by the masses as a relief from the state of war which was rapidly consuming the resources of the taxpayers. Satisfied to forego the galling symbols, provided that they held the substance, of power in their own hands, the conquerors contented themselves with dissolving the Achaian League, with destroying, perhaps from motives of commercial policy, the great mart of Corinth, and with subordinating the Greek communities to the governor of the Roman province of Macedonia, who exercised supreme supervision over them. But these local bodies were allowed to preserve their formal liberties; Corfù, the first of Greek cities to submit to Rome, always remained autonomous, and Athens and Sparta enjoyed special immunities as “the allies of Rome,” while the sacred character of Delphi secured for it practical autonomy. A few years after the conquest the old Leagues were permitted to revive, at least in name; and the land tax, payable by most of the communities to the Roman Government, seemed to fulfil the expectation of the natives that their fiscal burdens would be diminished under foreign rule. The historian Polybios[1], who successfully pleaded the cause of his countrymen at this great crisis in their history, has contrasted the purity of Roman financial administration with the corruption of Greek public men, and has cited a saying current in Greece soon after the conquest: “If we had not perished quickly, we should not have been saved.” While this was the popular view, the large class of landed proprietors was also pleased by the recognition of its social position by its new masters, and the men who were entrusted with the delicate task of organising the conquered country at the outset of its new career wisely availed themselves of the disinterested services of Polybios, who enjoyed the confidence of both Greeks and Romans. Even Mummius himself, the destroyer of Corinth, if he carried off many fine statues to deck his triumph, left behind him the memory of his gentleness to the weak, as well as that of his firmness to the strong, and might have been taken as the embodiment of those qualities which Virgil, more than a century later, held up to the imitation of his countrymen.

The pax Romana, which the Roman conquest seemed likely to confer upon the jealous Greeks, was occasionally broken in the early decades of the new administration. The sacred isle of Delos, which was then subordinate to Athens, and which had become the greatest mart for merchandise and slaves in the Levant since the destruction of Corinth, and the silver-mines of Laurion, which had of old provided the sinews of naval warfare against the Persian host, were the scenes of servile insurrections such as that which about the same time raged in Sicily, and a democratic rising at Dyme not far from Patras called for repression. But the participation of many Greeks in the quarrel between Rome and Mithridates, King of Pontus, entailed far more serious consequences upon their country. While the warlike Cretans, who had not bowed as yet beneath the Roman yoke, sent their redoubtable archers to serve in his ranks, the Athenians were seduced from their allegiance by the rhetoric of their fellow-citizen, Athenion, or Aristion, a man of dubious origin, who had found the profession of philosopher so paying that he was now able to indulge in that of a patriot. Appointed captain of the city, he established a reign of terror, and included the Roman party and his own philosophic rivals in the same proscription. He despatched the bibliophile Apellikon, who had purchased the library of Aristotle, with an expedition against Delos, which failed; but a similar attempt by the Pontic forces was successful, and the prosperity of the island was almost ruined by their ravages. When the armies of Mithridates reached the mainland, there was a great rising against the Romans, and for the second time the plain of Chaironeia witnessed a battle, which on this occasion, however, was indecisive. A great change now took place in the fortunes of the war. Sulla arrived in Greece, routed the Athenian philosopher and his Pontic colleague in a single battle, cowed most of the Greeks by the mere terror of his name, and laid siege to Athens and the Piræus, which offered a vigorous resistance. The groves of the Academy and the Lyceum furnished the timber for his battering rams; the treasuries of the most famous temples, those of Delphi, Olympia and Epidauros, provided pay for his soldiers; the remains of the famous “long walls,” which had united Athens with her harbour, were converted into siegeworks. The knoll near the street of tombs, on which a tiny church now stands, is supposed to be part of Sulla’s mound, and the bones found there those of his victims. An attempt to relieve the besieged failed; and, as their provisions grew scarce, the Athenians lost heart and sought to obtain favourable terms from the enemy. In the true Athenian spirit, they prayed for consideration on the ground that their ancestors had fought at Marathon. But the practical Roman replied that he had “not come to study history, but to chastise rebels[2],” and insisted on unconditional surrender. In 86 B.C. Athens was taken by assault, and many of the inhabitants were butchered; but, in spite of his indifference to the glories of Marathon, the conqueror consented to spare the fabric of the city for the sake of its ancient renown. The Akropolis, where Aristion had taken refuge, still held out, and the Odeion of Perikles, which stood at the south-east corner of it, perished by fire in the siege. Want of water at last forced the garrison to surrender, and the evacuation of the Piræus by the Pontic commander made Sulla master of that important position also. To the Piræus he showed as little mercy as Mummius had shown to Corinth. While from Athens he carried off nothing except a few columns of the temple of Zeus Olympios, a large sum of money which he found in the treasury of the Parthenon, and a fine manuscript of Aristotle and Theophrastos, he levelled the Piræus with the ground, and inflicted upon it a punishment from which it did not recover till the time of Constantine. Then he marched to Chaironeia, where another battle ended in the rout of the Pontic army, and the Thebans atoned for their rebellion by the loss of half their territory, which the victor consecrated to the temples of Delphi and Olympia as compensation for what he had taken from them. A fresh Pontic defeat at Orchomenos in Bœotia ended the war upon Greek soil, but the struggle long left its mark upon the country. Athens still retained her privileges, and the Cappadocian King Ariobarzanes II, Philopator and his son, restored the Odeion of Perikles[3], but many of her citizens had died in the siege, and the rival armies had inflicted enormous injuries on Attica and Bœotia, the chief theatre of the war. Some small towns never recovered, and Thebes sank into a state of insignificance from which she did not emerge for centuries.

The pirates continued the work of destruction, which the first Mithridatic war had begun. The geographical configuration of the Ægean coasts has always been favourable to that ancient scourge of the Levant, and the conclusion of peace between Rome and the Pontic king let loose upon society a number of adventurers, whose occupation had ceased with the war. The inhabitants of Cilicia and Crete excelled above all others in the practice of this lucrative profession, and many were their depredations upon the Greek shores and islands. One pirate captain destroyed the sanctuaries of Delos and carried off the whole population into slavery; two others defeated the Roman admiral in Cretan waters. This last disgrace resulted in the conquest of that fine island by the Roman proconsul Quintus Metellus, whose difficult task fully earned him the title of “Creticus.” The islanders fought with the desperate courage which they have evinced in all ages. Beaten in the open, they retired behind the walls of Kydonia and Knossos, and when those places fell, a guerilla warfare went on in the mountains, until at last Crete surrendered, and the last vestige of Greek freedom in Europe disappeared in the guise of a Roman province. Meanwhile, Pompey had swept the pirates from the seas, and established a colony of those marauders at Dyme, the scene of the previous rebellion[4]. Neither before nor since has piracy been put down with such thoroughness in the Levant, and Greece enjoyed, for a time at least, a welcome immunity from its ravages.

But the administration of the provinces in the last century of the Roman Republic often pressed very heavily upon the unfortunate provincials. Even after making due deduction for professional exaggeration from the charges brought by Cicero against extortionate governors, there remains ample evidence of their exactions. The notorious Verres, the scourge of Sicily, though he only passed through Greece, levied blackmail upon Sikyon and plundered the treasury of the Parthenon, and bad governors of Macedonia, like Caius Antonius and Piso, had greater opportunities for making money at the expense of the Greeks. As Juvenal complained at a later period, even when these scoundrels were brought to justice on their return home, their late province gained nothing by their punishment, and Caius Antonius, in exile on Cephalonia, treated that island as if it were his private property. The Roman money-lenders had begun, too, to exploit the financial necessities of the Greeks, and even so ardent a Philhellene as Cicero’s correspondent, Atticus, who owed his name to his long sojourn at Athens and to his interest in everything Attic, lent money to the people of Sikyon on such ruinous terms that they had to sell their pictures to pay off the debt. Athens, deprived of her commercial resources since the siege by Sulla, resorted to the sale of her coveted citizenship, much as some modern States sell titles, and subsisted mainly on the reputation of her schools of philosophy. It became the fashion for young Romans of promise to study there; thus Cicero spent six months there and revisited the city on his way to and from his Cilician governorship, and Horace tells us that he tried “to seek the truth among the groves of Academe[5].” Others resorted to Greece for purposes of travel or health, and the hellebore of Antikyra (now Aspra Spitia) on the Corinthian Gulf and the still popular baths of Ædepsos in Eubœa were fashionable cures in good Roman society. Moreover, a tincture of Greek letters was considered to be part of the education of a Roman gentleman. Cicero constantly uses Greek phrases in his correspondence, and Latin poets borrowed most of their plumes from Greek literature.

The two Roman civil wars which were fought on Greek soil between 49 and 31 B.C., were a great misfortune for Greece, whose inhabitants took sides as if the cause were their own. The struggle between Cæsar and Pompey was decided at Pharsalos in Thessaly, and most of the Greeks found that they had chosen the cause of the vanquished, whose exploits against the pirates and generous gift of money for the restoration of Athens were still remembered. But Cæsar showed his usual magnanimity towards the misguided Greeks, with the exception of the Megareans, whose stubborn resistance to his arms was severely punished. Most of the survivors of the siege were sold as slaves, and one of Cæsar’s officials, writing to Cicero a little later, says that as he sailed up the Saronic Gulf, the once flourishing cities of Megara, the Piræus and Corinth lay in ruins before his eyes[6]. It was Cæsar, however, who in 44 B.C., raised the last of these towns from its ashes. But the new Corinth, which he founded, was a Roman colony rather than a Greek city, whose inhabitants were chiefly freedmen, and whose name was at first associated with a lucrative traffic in antiquities, derived from the plunder of the ancient tombs. Had he lived, Cæsar had intended to dig a canal through the Isthmus—a feat reserved for the reign of the late King George. On Cæsar’s death, his murderer, Brutus, was enthusiastically welcomed by the Athenians, who erected statues to him and Cassius besides those of the ancient tyrannicides, Harmodios and Aristogeiton. The struggle between him and the Triumvirs was decided at Philippi in Greek Macedonia, near the modern Kavalla, but had little effect upon the fortunes of Greece, though there were Greek contingents on either side. After the fall of Brutus, Antony spent a long time at Athens, where he flattered the susceptible natives by wearing their costume, amused them by his antics and orgies on the Akropolis, gratified them by the gift of Ægina and other islands, and scandalised them by the presence of Cleopatra, upon whom he expected them to bestow the highest honours. When the war broke out between him and Octavian for the mastery of the Roman world, Greece for the second time became the theatre of her masters’ fratricidal strife. At no previous time since the conquest had the unhappy country suffered such oppression as then. The inhabitants were torn from their homes to serve on the ships of Antony, the Peloponnese was divided into two hostile camps according to the sympathies of the natives, and in the great naval battle of Aktion the fleeing ship of Cleopatra was pursued by a Lacedæmonian galley. The geographer Strabo, who passed through Greece two years later, has left us a grim picture of the state of the country. Bœotia was utterly ruined; Larissa was the only town in Thessaly worth mentioning; many of the most famous cities of the Peloponnese were barren wastes; Megalopolis was a wilderness, Laconia had barely thirty towns; Dyme, whose citizens had taken to piracy again, was falling into decay. The Ionian Islands and Tegea formed pleasant exceptions to the general misery, but as an instance of the wretched condition of the Ægean, the islet of Gyaros was unable to pay its annual tribute of £5. The desolation of Greece impressed Octavian so deeply that he founded two colonies for his veterans on Hellenic soil, one in 30 B.C. on the spot where his camp had been pitched at the battle of Aktion, which received the name of Nikopolis (“City of victory”) in memory of that great triumph, the other at Patras, a site most convenient for the Italian trade. In both cases the numbers of the Roman colonists were augmented by the compulsory immigration of the Greeks who inhabited the neighbouring cities and villages. This measure had the bad effect of increasing the depopulation of the surrounding country, but it imparted immediate prosperity to both Patras and Nikopolis, and the factories of the former gave employment to numbers of women, while the celebration of the “Aktian games” at the latter colony attracted sight-seers from other places. Augustus, as Octavian was now called, made an important change in the administration of Greece, separating it from the Macedonian command, with which it had hitherto been combined, and forming it in 27 B.C. into a separate senatorial province of Achaia, which was practically identical with the boundaries of the Greek kingdom before 1912, and of which Cæsar’s recently founded colony of Corinth was made the capital. But this restriction of the limits of the province did not affect the liberties of the different communities, though here and there Augustus altered their respective jurisdictions. Thus, in order to give Nikopolis a share in the Amphiktyonic Council, he modified the composition of that ancient body, and he enfranchised the Free Laconians who inhabited the central promontory of the Peloponnese, from Sparta; thus founding the autonomy which that rugged region has so often enjoyed[7]. But Athens and Sparta both continued to be “allies of Rome,” Augustus made a Spartan Prince of the Lacedæmonians, and honoured them by his own presence at their public meals. If he forbade the Athenians to sell the honour of citizenship, he allowed himself to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, and his friend, Agrippa, presented Athens with a new theatre. As a proof of their loyalty and gratitude, the Athenians dedicated a temple on the Akropolis “to Augustus and Rome,” a large fragment of which may still be seen, and erected a statue of Agrippa, the pedestal of which is still standing in a perilous position at the approach to the Propylæa. It was in further honour of the master of the Roman world, that an aqueduct was constructed from the Klepsydra fountain to the Tower of the Winds, which the Syrian Andronikos had built at a somewhat earlier period of the Roman domination. The adjoining gate of Athena Archegetis was raised out of money provided by Cæsar and Augustus, a number of friendly princes proposed to complete the temple of Olympian Zeus, while an inscription still preserves the generosity of another ruler, Herod, King of the Jews, towards the home of Greek culture.

The land now enjoyed a long period of peace, and began to recover from the effects of the civil wars. A further boon was the transference of Achaia from the jurisdiction of the Senate to that of the Emperor soon after the accession of Tiberius, who, whatever his private vices may have been, was most considerate in his treatment of the provincials. He sternly repressed attempts at extortion, kept his governors in office for long terms, and, when an earthquake injured the city of Aigion on the gulf of Corinth, excused the citizens from the payment of taxes for three years. The restriction of the much-abused right of asylum in various temples, such as that of Poseidon on the island of Tenos, and the delimitation of the Messenian and Lacedæmonian boundary, showed the interest of the Roman Government in Greek affairs; and the cult of the Imperial family, which was now developed in Greece, was perhaps due to gratitude no less than to the natural obsequience of a conquered race. The visit of the Emperor’s nephew, Germanicus, to Athens delighted the Athenians and scandalised Roman officialdom by the Imperial traveller’s disregard of etiquette; and it was insinuated by a prejudiced Roman even at that early period that these voluble burgesses, who talked so much about their past history, were not really the descendants of the ancient Greeks, but “the offscourings of the nations.” So deep was the impression made by the courtesy of Germanicus that, several years later, an impostor, who pretended to be his son Drusus, found a ready following in Greece, which he traversed from the Cyclades to Nikopolis. It became the custom, too, to banish distinguished Romans, who had incurred the Emperor’s displeasure, to an Ægean island, and Amorgos, Kythnos, Seriphos, and Gyaros were the equivalent of Botany Bay. The last two islets in particular were regarded with intense horror, and Juvenal has selected them as types of the worst punishment that could befall one of his countrymen[8]. Caligula, less moderate than Tiberius in his treatment of the Greeks, carried off the famous statue of Eros from Thespiæ, for which his unaccomplished plan of cutting the Isthmus of Corinth was no compensation. Claudius restored the stolen statue, and in 44 A.D. handed over the province of Achaia to the Senate—an arrangement which, with one brief interval, continued to be the practice of the Roman Government for the future. Meanwhile, alike under Senatorial and Imperial administration, the Greeks had acquired Roman tastes and had even adopted in many cases Roman names. If old-fashioned Romans complained that Rome had become “a Greek city,” where glib Hellenic freedmen had the ear of the Emperor and starving Greeklings were ready to practise any and every profession, the conservatives in Greece lamented the introduction of such peculiarly Roman sports as the gladiatorial shows, of which the remains of the Roman amphitheatre at Corinth are a memorial. The conquering and the conquered races had reacted on one another; the Romans had become more literary; the Greeks had become more material.

It was at this period, about 54 A.D., that an event occurred which profoundly modified the future of the Greek race. In, or a little before, that year St Paul arrived at Athens, and, stirred by the idolatry of the city, delivered his famous speech in the midst of the Areopagos. The unvarnished narrative of the Acts of the Apostles does not disguise the failure of the great teacher’s first attempt to convert the argumentative Greeks, to whom the new gospel seemed “foolishness.” But “Dionysios the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them,” believed, thus forming the small beginnings of the Church which grew up there in later days. From Athens the Apostle proceeded to Corinth, where he stayed “a year and six months.” The capital of Achaia and mart of Greece was a fine field for his missionary labours. The Roman colony, which had now been in existence almost a century, had become the home of commerce and the luxury which usually accompanies it. The superb situation, commanding the two seas, had attracted a cosmopolitan population, including many Jews, and the vices of the East and the West seemed to meet on the Isthmus—the Port Said of the Roman Empire. We may trace in the language of the two Epistles, which the Apostle addressed to the Corinthians later on, the main characteristics of the seat of Roman rule in Greece. The allusions to the fights with wild beasts, to the Isthmian games, to the long hair of the Corinthian dandies, to the easy virtue of the Corinthian women, all show what was the daily life of the most flourishing city of Greece in the middle of the first century. Yet even at Corinth many were persuaded by the arguments of the tent-maker, and a Christian community was founded at the port of Kenchreæ on the Saronic Gulf. At the outset the converts were of humble origin, like “the house of Stephanas, the first fruits of Achaia”; but Gaius, Tertius, Quartus, and “Erastus, the chamberlain of the city,” were persons of better position. That a man like Gallio, the brother of Seneca the philosopher and uncle of Lucan the poet, a man whom the other great poet of the day, Statius, has described as “sweetness” itself, was at that time governor of Achaia, shows the importance attached by the Romans to their Greek province. St Paul had not the profound classical learning of the governor’s talented family, but the two Epistles to the Thessalonians, which he wrote during this first stay at Corinth, have conferred an undying literary interest on the capital of Roman Greece. Silas and Timotheus joined the Apostle at that place; and after his departure the learned Alexandrian, Apollos, carried on the work of Christianity among the Corinthians. But the germs of those theological parties, which were destined later on to divide the Greek Christians, had already been planted in the congenial soil of Achaia. The Christian community of Corinth, with the fatal tendency to faction which has ever marked the Hellenic race, was soon split up into sections, which followed, one St Paul, another Apollos, another the supposed injunctions of St Peter, another the simple faith of Christ. Even women, and that, too, unveiled, like the Laises of Corinth, had taken upon themselves to speak at Christian gatherings, and drinking and the other sensual crimes of that luxurious city had proved temptations too strong for some of the new converts. This state of things provoked the two Epistles to the Corinthians and the second visit of the Apostle to the then Greek capital, where he remained three months, writing on this occasion also two Epistles from Greece—that to the Romans and that to the Galatians. For the sake of the greater security which the land route afforded, he returned to Asia through Northern Greece, accompanied among others by St Luke, whose traditional connection with Greece may be traced in the wax figure of the Virgin, said to be his work, in the monastery of Megaspelæon, and in the much later Roman tomb venerated as his, at Thebes. With the exception of his delay at Fair Havens on the south coast of Crete, we are not told by the writer of the Acts that St Paul ever set foot on Greek territory again; but he left Titus in that island “to ordain elders in every city,” and contemplated spending a winter at Nikopolis. A tradition, unsupported, however, by good evidence, has been preserved to the effect that he was liberated from his Roman imprisonment, and it has been supposed that he employed part of the time that remained before his death in revisiting Corinth and Crete. His “kinsmen,” Jason and Sosipater, bishops of Tarsus and Ikonium, preached the Word at Corfù, where one of them was martyred, and where one of the two oldest churches of the island still preserves their names[9]. The Greek journey of the pagan philosopher, Apollonios of Tyana, who tried to restore the ancient life of Hellas and to check the Romanising tendencies of the age, took place only a few years after the first appearance of the Apostle of the Gentiles in Greece.

Another visitor of a very different kind next arrived in the classic land. Nero had already displayed his taste for the fine arts by despatching an emissary to Greece with the object of collecting statues for the adornment of his palace and capital. Delphi, Olympia and Athens, where, in the phrase of a contemporary satirist, “it was easier to meet a god than a man,” furnished an ample booty, and the Thespians again lost, this time for ever, the statue of Eros. But Nero was not content with the sculpture of Greece; he yearned to display his manifold talents before a Greek audience, “the only one,” as he said, “worthy of himself and his accomplishments.” Accordingly, in 66, he crossed over to Kassopo in Corfù, and began his theatrical tour by singing before the altar of Zeus there. Such was the zeal of the Imperial pot-hunter, that he commanded all the national games to be celebrated in the same year, so that he might have the satisfaction of winning prizes at them all in the same tour. In order to exhibit his musical gifts, he ordered the insertion of a new item in the time-honoured programme at Olympia, where he built himself a house, and at Corinth broke the Isthmian rules by contending in both tragedy and comedy. As a charioteer he eclipsed all previous performances by driving ten horses abreast, upsetting his car and still receiving the prize from the venal judges; as a victor, he had the effrontery to proclaim his own victory, and the number of his wreaths might have done credit to a royal funeral. In return for their compliance, the Greeks were informed by the voice of the Emperor himself on the day of the Isthmian games that they were once more free from the jurisdiction of the Senate and exempt from the payment of taxes[10]. The name of freedom and the practical advantage of fiscal immunity appealed with force to the patriotic and commercial sides of the Greek character, and outweighed the extortions of the Emperor and his suite to such a degree that Nero became a popular hero, in whose honour medals were struck and statues erected. To signalise yet further his stay in Greece, he bade the long projected canal to be dug across the Isthmus. This time the work was actually begun, and a prominent philosopher, who had incurred the Imperial displeasure, was seen digging away with a gang of other convicts. Nero himself dug the first sod with a golden spade, and carried away the first spadefuls of earth in a basket on his shoulders. But the task, of which traces may still be seen, was soon abandoned, and the dangers which threatened his throne recalled the Emperor to Italy. But first he consulted the Oracle of Delphi, which fully maintained its ancient reputation for obscurity and accuracy, but was bidden henceforth to be dumb. The two most celebrated seats of Greek antiquity, Athens and Sparta, he left, however, unvisited—Sparta, because he disapproved of its institutions; Athens, because he, the matricide, feared the vengeance of the Furies, whose fabled shrine was beneath the Areopagos[11].

The civil war, which raged in Italy between the death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian, had little influence upon Greece, except that it gave an adventurer, who bore a striking resemblance to the late Emperor and shared his musical tastes, the opportunity of personating him. But this pretender, who had made himself master of the island of Kythnos, was soon suppressed[12], and Vespasian, as he visited Greece on his way from the East to Rome, could calmly study the condition of that country. The stern old soldier, who, in spite of his Greek culture, had fallen asleep during Nero’s recitations, had no sympathy with Greek antiquities, and maintained that the Hellenes did not know how to use their newly-restored freedom, which had involved the impoverished Roman exchequer in the loss of the Greek taxes. He accordingly restored the organisation and fiscal arrangements which had been in force before Nero’s proclamation, only that the province of Achaia under the Flavian dynasty no longer included Thessaly, Epeiros, and Akarnania. For a long time Greece had no political history; but we know that Domitian, like Tiberius, was as considerate towards the provincials as he was tyrannical to the Roman nobles; that he cherished a special cult for the goddess Athena; and that he deigned to allow himself to be nominated as Archon Eponymos of Athens for the year 93—an instance which shows the continuance of an institution which had been founded nearly eight centuries earlier. Trajan’s direct connection with Greece was limited to a stay at Athens on the way to the Parthian war, but he counted among his friends the most celebrated Greek author of that age, the famous Plutarch, who passed a great part of his time in the small Bœotian town of Chaironeia, where his so-called “chair,” obviously the end seat of one of the rows in the theatre, may still be seen in the little church. Like Polybios in the first period of the Roman conquest, Plutarch served as a link to unite the Greeks and their masters. At once an Hellenic patriot and an admirer of Rome, he combined love of the past independence of his country with a shrewd sense of the advantages of Roman rule in the existing circumstances. True, the Greece of his time was very different from that of the Golden Age. While the single city of Megara had sent 3000 heavy armed men to the battle of Platæa, the whole province of Achaia could not raise a larger number in his days. Depopulation was going on apace; Eubœa was almost desolate, and the inland towns of the mainland were mostly losing their trade, which was gravitating to the coasts. The expenditure of the Greek taxes at Rome led to the want of funds for public objects, and the Roman system of making immunity from taxation a principle of Roman citizenship divided the Greeks into two classes, the rich and the poor. The former led luxurious lives, built expensive houses, added acre to acre, and fell into the hands of the foreign money-lenders of Corinth or Patras. The latter sank lower and lower in the social scale, and it was noticed that, while the Greek women had become more beautiful, the classic grace of Hellenic manhood had declined. But Greece continued to exercise her perennial charm on the cultured traveller. In spite of the Thessalian brigands, tourists journeyed to see the Vale of Tempe, and a race of loquacious guides arose, whose business it was to explain the history of Delphi. Men of the highest rank were proud to be made Athenian citizens, and one of them, Antiochos Philopappos, grandson of the last king of Kommagene, was commemorated in the last years of Trajan by the monument which is to-day one of the most conspicuous in all Athens.

The reign of Hadrian was a very happy period for the Greeks. A lover of both ancient and contemporary Hellas, which he visited several times, the Imperial traveller left his mark all over the country. We may gather from Pausanias, whose own wanderings began at this period, that there was scarcely a single Greek city of importance which had not received some benefit from this Emperor. Coins of Patras describe him as “the restorer of Achaia,” Megara regarded him as her “second founder,” Mantineia had to thank him for the restoration of her classical name. Alive to the want of through communication between the Peloponnese and Central Greece, he built a safe road along the Skironian cliffs, where now the tourist looks down on the azure sea from the train that takes him from Megara to Corinth. He provided the latter city with water by means of an aqueduct from Lake Stymphalos, and began the aqueduct at Athens which was completed by his successor. But this was only one of his many Athenian improvements. His affection for Athens, where he lived as a Greek among Greeks and had held the office of Archon Eponymos, like Domitian, led him to assign the revenues of Cephalonia to the Athenian treasury, to regulate the oil-trade, that important branch of Attic commerce, his edict about which may still be read on the gate of Athena Archegetis, to repair the theatre of Dionysos, and to present the city with a Pantheon, a library, contained within the Stoa which still bears his name and of which part is still standing, and a gymnasium. He also built there a temple of Hera, and completed that of Zeus Olympios, which had been begun by Peisistratos more than six centuries before and had provided Sulla with spoil. The still standing columns of this magnificent building formed the nucleus of the “new Athens,” which he founded outside “the old city of Theseus,” and to which the Arch of Hadrian, as the inscriptions upon it show, was intended as the entrance. With another of his foundations, the temple of Zeus Panhellenios, was connected the institution of the Panhellenic festival, which represented the unity of the Greek race and, like the more ancient games, had a religious basis. Hadrian called into existence a synod of “Panhellenes,” composed of members of the Greek communities on both sides of the Ægean, who met at Athens and whose treasurer was styled “Hellenotamias,” or “steward of the Hellenes”—a title borrowed from the classical Confederacy of Delos. In name, indeed, the golden age of Athens seemed to have returned, and the enthusiastic Athenians heaped one honour after another upon the head of the great Philhellene. They adored him as a god, and the President of the Panhellenic synod became his priest; his statues rose all over the city, his name was bestowed upon one of the months, a thirteenth tribe was formed and called after him, and the thirteen wedges of the repaired theatre of Dionysos contained each a bust of Hadrian; even an unworthy favourite of the Emperor was dubbed a deity with the same ease that we convert a charitable tradesman into a peer.

Hadrian’s two immediate successors continued his Philhellenic policy. Antoninus Pius erected new buildings for the use of the visitors to that fashionable health-resort, the Hieron of Epidauros; and in graceful recognition of the legend, according to which the founders of the first settlement on the Palatine were emigrants from Pallantion in Arkadia, raised that village to the rank of a city, with the privileges of self-government and immunity from taxes. Marcus Aurelius seemed to have realised the Utopian ideal of Plato, that philosophers should be kings or kings philosophers. The Imperial author of the Meditations wrote in Greek, had sat at the feet of Greek teachers, and greatly admired the products of the Greek intellect. But his reign was disturbed by warlike alarms, and it is noteworthy that at this period the first of those barbarian tribes from the North, which inflicted so much injury upon Greece in later centuries, penetrated into that country. The Greeks showed, however, that they had not in the long years of peace, forgotten how to defend themselves. At Elateia the Kostobokes—such was the name of the marauders—received a check from a local force and withdrew beyond the frontier[13]. In spite of his distant campaigns, Marcus Aurelius found time to visit Athens, restored the temple at Eleusis, was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and founded in 176 the Athenian University. It was, indeed, the heyday of Academic life, and Athens was under the Antonines the happy hunting-ground of professors, who received salaries from the Imperial exchequer, and enjoyed the privilege of exemption from costly public duties. One of their number, Herodes Atticus of Marathon, has, by his splendid gifts to the city, perpetuated his fame to our own time. His vast wealth, united to his renown as a professor of rhetoric, not only made him the most prominent man in Athens, where he held the post of President of the new Panhellenic synod, but gained him the Roman consulship, the friendship of Hadrian, and the honour of instructing the early years of Marcus Aurelius. When Verus, the colleague of the latter in the Imperial dignity, visited Athens, it was as the guest of the sophist of Marathon; when the University was founded, it was Herodes who selected the professors. The charm of his villas at Kephisia, then, as now, the suburban pleasaunce of the dust-choked Athenians, and in his native village, has been extolled by one of his pupils, while the Odeion which still bears his name was erected by him to the memory of his second wife[14]. He also restored the Stadion, which had been built by Lykourgos about five centuries earlier, and within its precincts his body was interred. There still exist remains of his temple of Fortune, a goddess of whom he had varied experiences. For his vast wealth and the sense of their own inferiority caused the Athenians to revile their benefactor, and as many of them owed him money, he was naturally regarded as their enemy until his death. Many other Greek cities benefited by his liberality; he built a theatre at Corinth and restored the bathing establishment at Thermopylæ; and he was even accused of making life too easy for his fellow-countrymen because he provided Olympia with pure water by means of an aqueduct, of which the Exedra is still visible.

It was at this period, too, that the traveller Pausanias wrote his famous Description of Greece, a work which gives a faithful account of that country as it struck his observant eyes. Compared with what it had been in Strabo’s time, the land seemed prosperous in the age of the Antonines, though some districts had never recovered from the ravages of the Roman wars. Much of Bœotia was still in the desolate state in which Sulla had left it; Ætolia had not been inhabited since Octavian carried off its population to Nikopolis; the lower town of Thebes was quite deserted, and the ancient name was then, as now, confined to the ancient Akropolis, while the sole occupants of Delos were the Athenians sent to guard the temple. But Delphi was in a flourishing condition, the Roman colonies of Patras and Corinth continued to prosper, and among the ancient cities of the Peloponnese, Argos and Sparta still held the foremost rank, while the much more modern Megalopolis, upon which such high hopes had been built, shared the fate of Tiryns and Mycenæ. Moreover, despite the robbery of statues by Romans from Mummius to Nero, Pausanias found a vast number of ancient masterpieces all over the country, and even the paintings, with which Polygnotos had adorned the Stoa Poikile at Athens, were still visible. As for the relics of classical lore and prehistoric legend, they abounded in every city that could boast of a hero, and the remark of Cicero was as true in the time of Pausanias, that in a Greek town one came upon the traces of history at every step. In the second century, too, good Doric was still spoken by the Messenians; and, if the pure Attic of Plato had been somewhat corrupted at Athens by the presence of many foreign students, it was still preserved in all its glory by the peasants of Attica. The writings of Lucian at this period show how even a Syrian could, by long residence at Athens, acquire a masterly gift of Attic prose. The illusion of a classical revival was further kept up by the continuance of ancient institutions, even though they had lost the reality of power. Pausanias mentions the existence, and describes the composition, of the Amphiktyonic Council in his time, when it was still the guardian of the Delphic oracle. The Court of the Areopagos preserved its ancient forms at Athens; the Ephors and other Spartan authorities had survived the disapproval of Nero; the Confederacy of the Free Laconians, though reduced in size, still included eighteen cities; Bœotia and Phokis enjoyed the privilege of local assemblies. The great games still attracted competitors and spectators; the great oracles still found some believers, who consulted them; and the old religion, if it had little moral force, was, at least in externals, still that of the majority, though philosophers regretted it and enlightened persons like Pausanias inclined to a rational interpretation of the myths, and told stories of bribes administered to the Pythian priestess. Christianity had made little progress in Greece during the three generations that had elapsed since the last visit of St Paul. Mention is, indeed, made by the Christian historian, Eusebius, of large communities at Larissa, Sparta, and in Crete; but Corinth still remained the chief seat of the new faith, and the Corinthian Christians still retained that factious spirit which St Paul had rebuked. Athens, as the home of philosophy, was little favourable to the simplicity of the Gospel; but the celebrated Athenian philosopher, Aristides, was not only converted to Christianity, but presented an Apology for that creed to Hadrian during his residence in the city; while another Athenian, Hyginos, was chosen Pope in the age of the Antonines. Anacletos, the second (or, in other lists, fourth) Bishop of Rome after St Peter, is said to have been a native of Athens, and a third, Xystos, perished, as Pope Sixtus II, in the persecution of Valerian. The tradition that Dionysios the Areopagite, became first Bishop of Athens[15], and there gained the crown of martyrdom, and that St Andrew suffered death at Patras, has been cherished, and in the case of Patras has had a considerable historical influence.

With the death of Marcus Aurelius the series of Philhellenic Emperors ended, and the Roman civil wars in the last decade of the second century occupied the attention of the Empire. Without taking an active part in the struggle, Greece submitted to the authority of Pescennius Niger, one of the unsuccessful candidates, and this temporary error of judgment may have induced the Emperor Septimius Severus to inflict a punishment upon Athens, the cause of which is usually ascribed to a slight which he suffered during his student days there. His successor, Caracalla, by extending the Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire, gave the Greeks an opportunity, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. From that moment the doors of the Roman administration were thrown open to all the races of the Roman dominions, and the nimble-witted Greeks so obtained a predominance in that department such as they acquired much later under Turkish rule. From that moment, too, they considered themselves as “Romans,” and the name stuck to them long after the Roman Empire had passed away. But Caracalla, while he thus made them the equals of the Romans in the eyes of the law, increased the taxes which it had long been the privilege of Roman citizens to pay, while he continued to exact those which the provincials had paid previous to their admission to the citizenship. The reductions made by his successors, Macrinus and Alexander Severus, were to a large extent neutralised by the great depreciation of the currency, which began under Caracalla and continued for the next half century. The Government paid its creditors in depreciated money, but took good care that the taxes were paid in good gold pieces. The worst results followed: officials were tempted, like the modern Turkish Pashas, to recoup themselves by extortion for the diminution in their salaries; trade with foreign countries became uncertain, even the specially thriving Greek industries of marble and purple dye must have been affected, and possessors of good coin buried it in the ground. Amid this dismal scene of decay, Athens continued to preserve her reputation as a University town. Though no longer patronised by cultured Emperors, she still attracted numbers of pupils to her lecture rooms; and the name of Longinus, author of the celebrated treatise, On the Sublime, adorns the scanty Athenian annals of this period. That the drama was not neglected is clear from the inscription which records the restoration of the theatre of Dionysos by the Archon Phaidros during this period. But the philosophers and playgoers of Athens were soon to be roused by the alarm of an invasion such as their city had not experienced for many a generation.

Hitherto, with the unimportant exception of the raid of the Kostobokes as far as Elateia, Greece had never been submitted to the terrors of a barbarian inroad since the Roman Conquest, The Roman Empire had protected Achaia from foreign attack, and even the least friendly of the Emperors had allowed no one to plunder the art treasures of the Greek cities except their own occasional emissaries. Hence the Greece of the middle of the third century preserved in many respects the same external appearance as that of the same country four hundred years earlier. But this blessing of peace, which Rome had conferred upon the Greeks, had had the bad effect of training up a nation which was a stranger to the arts of war. Caracalla, indeed, had raised a couple of Spartan regiments; but the local militia of the Greek cities had had no experience of fighting, and the fortifications of the country had been allowed to fall into ruin. Such was the state of the Greek defences when in 250 the Goths crossed the Balkans and entered what is now South Bulgaria. Measures were at once taken to defend the Greek provinces. Claudius, afterwards Emperor, was ordered to occupy the historic pass of Thermopylæ, but his forces were small and most of them had been newly enrolled. The death of the Emperor Decius, fighting against the Goths, increased the alarm, and the siege of Salonika thoroughly startled the Greeks. No sooner had Valerian mounted the Imperial throne, than they signalised his reign by repairing the walls of Athens, which had been neglected since the siege of Sulla[16], and it was perhaps at the same time that a fort and a new gate were erected for the defence of the Akropolis[17]. As a second line of defence the fortifications across the Isthmus were restored, and occupied, just as by Peloponnesian troops of old on the approach of the Persian host. But these preparations did not long preserve the country from the attacks of the Goths. Distracted by the rival claims of self-styled Emperors, Valens in Achaia, and Piso in Thessaly, who had availed themselves of the general confusion to declare their independence, and visited by a terrible plague which followed in the wake of the Roman armies, the Greeks soon had the Gothic hosts upon them. A first raid was repulsed, only to be repeated in 267 on a far larger scale. This time the Goths and fierce Heruli arrived by sea, and, after ravaging the storied island of Skyros, captured Argos, Sparta, and the lower city of Corinth. Athens herself was surprised by the enemy, before the Emperor Gallienus, whose admiration for the ancient city had been shown by his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries and his acceptance of the Athenian citizenship with the office of Archon Eponymos, could send troops to her assistance. But at this crisis in her history, Athens showed herself worthy of her glorious past. At that time one of her leading citizens was the historian Dexippos, whose writings on the Scythian wars, preserved now only in fragments, were favourably compared by a Byzantine critic with those of Thucydides[18]. But Dexippos, if a less caustic writer, was a better general, than the historian of the Peloponnesian war. He assembled a body of Athenians, addressed them in a fiery harangue, a fragment of which still exists[19], and reminded them that the event of battles was usually decided by bravery rather than by numbers. Marshalling his troops in the Olive Grove, he accustomed them little by little to the noise of the Gothic war cries and the sight of the Gothic warriors. The arrival of a Roman fleet effected a timely diversion, and the barbarians, taken between two hostile forces, abandoned Athens and succumbed to the Emperor’s arms on their march towards the North. Fortunately they seem to have spared the monuments of the city during their occupation, and we are told that the Athenian libraries were saved from the flames by the deep policy of a shrewd Goth, who thought that the pursuit of literature would unfit the Greeks for the art of war[20]. Dexippos, who proved by his own example the compatibility of learning with strategy, has been commemorated in an inscription, which praises his merits as a writer, but is silent about his fame as a maker, of history—known to us from a single sentence of the Latin biographer of Gallienus[21]. Yet at that moment Greece needed men of action rather than men of letters. For another Gothic invasion took place two years later, and from Thessaly to Crete the vessels of the barbarians harried the coasts. But the interval had been used to put the defences of the cities into repair; and such was the ill-success of the invaders, who could not take a single town, that they did not renew the attack. For more than a century the land was spared the horrors of a fresh Gothic war. The great victory of the Emperor Claudius II over the Goths at Nish and the abandonment of what is now Roumania to them by his successor Aurelian secured the peace of Achaia. Although the three invasions had resulted in the loss of a considerable amount of moveable property and of many slaves, who had either been carried off as captives or had escaped from their Greek masters to the Gothic ranks, the recovery of Athens and Corinth seems to have been so rapid that seven years after the last raid they were among the nine cities of the Empire to which the Roman Senate wrote announcing the election of the Emperor Tacitus and bidding them direct any appeals from the Proconsul to the Prefect of the City of Rome—a clear proof of their civic importance.

But the Greeks soon looked for the fountain of justice elsewhere than on the banks of the Tiber. With the reign of Diocletian began the practice of removing the seat of Government from Rome, and that Emperor usually resided at Nicomedia. His establishment of four great administrative divisions of the Empire really separated the two Eastern, in which Greece was comprehended, from the two Western, and prepared the way for the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine and the ultimate division of the Eastern and Western Empires. Diocletian’s further increase in the number of the provinces, several of which were grouped under one of the Dioceses, into which the Empire was split up for administrative purposes, had the double effect of altering the size of the Greek provinces, and of scattering them over several Dioceses. Thus Achaia, Thessaly, “Old” Epeiros (as the region round Nikopolis was now called), and Crete, formed four separate provinces included in the Mœsian Diocese, the administrative centre of which was Sirmium, the modern Mitrovitz. The Ægean islands, on the other hand, composed one of the provinces of the Asian Diocese. The province of Achaia had, however, the privilege of being administered by a Proconsul, who was an official of more exalted rank than the great majority of provincial governors. Side by side with these arrangements, the currency reform of Diocletian and the edict by which he fixed the highest price of commodities cannot fail to have affected the trade of Greece, while his love of building benefited the Greek marble quarries.

After the abdication of Diocletian the Christians of Greece were visited by another of those persecutions, of which they had had experience under the Emperor Decius half a century earlier. But on neither occasion were the martyrdoms numerous, except in Crete, and it would appear that Christianity in Greece was less prosperous, or less progressive, than the same creed in the great cities of the East, where the victims were far more numerous. Constantine’s toleration made him as popular with the Greek Christians as his marked respect for the Athenian University made him with the Greek philosophers, and it is, therefore, no wonder that in his final struggle against his rival, Licinius, he was able to collect a Greek fleet, which mustered in the harbour of the Piræus, then once more an important station, and forced for him the passage of the Dardanelles. But the reign of Constantine, although he found a biographer in the young Athenian historian, Praxagoras[22], was not conducive to the national development of Greece. Adopting the administrative system of Diocletian, he continued the practice of dividing the Empire into four great “Prefectures,” as they were now called, each of which was subdivided into Dioceses, and the latter again into provinces. The four Greek provinces of Thessaly, Achaia (including some of the Cyclades and some of the Ionian Islands), Old Epeiros (including Corfù and Ithake), and Crete (of which Gortyna was the capital), formed part of the Diocese of Macedonia in the Prefecture of Illyricum, whereas the rest of the Greek islands composed a distinct province of the Asian Diocese in the Prefecture of the Orient. Thus, the Greek race continued to be split into fragments, while at the same time the levelling tendency of Constantine’s administration gradually swept away those Greek municipal institutions, which had hitherto survived all changes, and thus the inhabitants of different parts of the country began to lose their peculiar characteristics. A few time-honoured vestiges of ancient Greek freedom existed for some time longer; thus the Areopagos and the Archons of Athens and the provincial assembly of Achaia may be traced on into the fifth century. But their place was taken by the new local senates, composed of so-called Decuriones, who were chosen from the richest landowners, and who had to collect, and were held personally responsible for, the amount of the land-tax. This onerous office was made hereditary, and there was no means of escaping it except by death or flight to a monastic cell; even a journey outside the country required a special permit from the governor, and the rich Decurio, like the mediæval serf, was tied down to the land which he was so unfortunate as to own. Even an Irish landlord’s lot seems happy compared with that of a Greek Decurio, nor was the provincial who escaped the unpleasant privilege of serving the State in that capacity greatly to be envied. The exaction of taxes became at once more stringent and more regular—a combination peculiarly objectionable to the Oriental mind—and the re-assessment of their burdens every fifteen years led the people to calculate time by the “Indictions,” or edicts in which, with all the solemnity of purple ink, the Emperor fixed the amount of the imposts for this new cycle of taxation. That the ruler himself became conscious of the inequalities of his subjects’ contributions was evident half a century later when Valentinian I allowed the citizens of each municipality to elect an official, styled Defensor, whose duty it was to defend his fellow-citizens before the Emperor against the fiscal exactions of the authorities.

The transference of the capital to Constantinople, enormous as its ultimate results have proved to be, was at first a disadvantage to the inhabitants of Greece. We are accustomed to look on the centre of the Byzantine Empire as a largely Greek city, but it must be remembered that, at the outset, it was Roman in conception and that its language was Latin. Almost immediately, however, it began to drain Greece of its population, attracted by the prospects of work and the certainty of “bread and games” in the New Rome. In the days of Demosthenes Byzantium had been the granary of Athens; now Attica, always unproductive of wheat, began to find that Constantine’s growing capital had to import bread-stuffs for its own use, and the Athenians were thankful for an annual grant of corn from the Emperor. The founder wanted, too, Greek works of art to adorn his city, and 427 statues were placed in Sta Sophia alone; the Muses of Helikon were carried off to the palace of the Emperor; the serpent column, which the grateful Greeks had dedicated at Delphi after the battle of Platæa, was set up in the Hippodrome, where one of its three heads was struck off by the battle-axe of Mohammed II.

The conversion of Constantine to Christianity had the natural effect of bringing within the Christian ranks those lukewarm pagans who took their religious views from the Emperor. But the comparative immunity from persecution which the Christians of Greece had enjoyed under the pagan ascendancy led them to treat their opponents with the same mildness. There was no reaction, because there had been no revolution, and the devotees of the old and the new religion went on living peaceably side by side. The even greater temptation to the subtle Greek intellect to indulge in the wearisome Arian controversy, which so long convulsed a large part of the Church in the East, was rejected owing to the fortunate unanimity of the bishops who were sent from Greece to attend the Council of Nice. Their strong and united opposition to the heresy of Arius was re-echoed by their flocks at home, and the Church, undivided on this crucial question, became more and more identified with the people. After Constantine’s death the harmony between the pagans and the Christians was temporarily disturbed. Under Constantius II the public offerings ceased, the temples were closed, the oracles fell into disuse; under Julian the Apostate a final attempt was made to rehabilitate the ancient religion. Julian seemed, indeed, to the conservative party in Greece to have restored for two brief years the silver age of Hadrian, if not the golden age of Perikles. The jealousy of Constantius, by sending him in honourable exile to Athens, had made him an enthusiastic admirer of not only the literature but the creed of the old Hellenes. It was at that time that he abjured Christianity and was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, and when he took up arms against Constantius it was to the Corinthians, Lacedæmonians, and Athenians that he addressed Apologies for his conduct. These manifestoes, of which that to the Athenians is still extant among the writings of Julian, had such an effect upon the Greeks, flattered no doubt by such an attention, that they declared in his favour, and on his rival’s death they had their reward. The temples were re-opened, the altars once more smoked with the offerings of the devout, the great games were revived, including the Aktian festival of Augustus, which had fallen into decline with the falling fortunes of Nikopolis. Julian restored that city and others like it, and the Argives did not appeal in vain for a rehearing of a wearisome law-suit with Corinth to an Emperor who was steeped to the lips in classic lore. At Athens he purged the University by excluding Christians from professorial chairs, Christian students were often converted, like the Emperor, by the genius of the place, and the University became the last refuge of Hellenism in Greece, when Julian’s attempted restoration of the old order of things collapsed at his death. Throughout this period, indeed, the University of Athens was not only the chief intellectual centre of the Empire—for Rome had ceased, and the newly founded University of Constantinople had not yet begun, to attract the best intellects—but it was the all-absorbing institution of the city. Athenian trade had gone on decaying, and under Constans, the son of Constantine, the people of Athens were obliged to ask the Emperor for the grant of certain insular revenues, which he allowed them to devote to the purchase of provisions. So Athens was now solely a University town, and the ineradicable yearning of the Greeks for politics found vent, in default of a larger opening, in such academic struggles as the election of a professor or the merits of the rival corps of students. These corps, each composed as a rule of students from the same district, kept Athens alive with their disputes, which sometimes degenerated into pitched battles calling for the intervention of the Roman governor from Corinth. So keen was the competition between them, that their agents were posted at the Piræus to accost the sea-sick freshman as soon as he landed and enlist him in this or that corps. Each corps had its favourite professor, for whose class it obtained pupils, by force or argument, and whose lectures it applauded whenever the master brought out some fresh conceit or distorted the flexible Greek language into some new combination of words. The celebrated sophist Libanios, and the poetic divine, Gregory of Nazianzos, respectively the apologist and the censor of Julian, have left us a graphic sketch of the student life in their time at Athens, when the scarlet and gold garments of the lecturers and the gowns of their pupils mingled in the streets of the ancient city, which still deserved in this fourth century the proud title of “the eye of Greece.”

The triumph of paganism ceased with the death of Julian; but his successor Jovian, though he ordered the Church of the Virgin to be erected at Corfù out of the fragments of a heathen temple opposite the royal villa[23], proclaimed universal toleration. His wise example was followed by Valentinian I, who repealed Julian’s edict which had made the profession of paganism a test of professorial office at Athens, and allowed his subjects to approach heaven in what manner they pleased. The Greeks were specially exempted from the law forbidding nocturnal sacrifices because it would “make their life unendurable.” The Eleusinian mysteries were permitted to be celebrated, and Athens continued to derive much profit from those festivals. It was fortunate for the Greeks that, at the partition of the Empire between him and Valens in 364, the Prefecture of Illyricum, which included the bulk of the Greek provinces, was joined to the Western half, and thus fell to his share. His reign marked the last stage of that peaceful development which had gone on in Greece since the Gothic invasion of the previous century. A few years after his death the Emperor Theodosius I publicly proclaimed the Catholic faith to be the established creed of the Empire, and proceeded to stamp out paganism with all the zeal of a Spaniard. The Oracle of Delphi was closed for ever, the temples were shut, and in 393 the Olympic games, which had been the rallying point of the Hellenic race for untold centuries, ceased to exist. As a token of their discontinuance the statue of Zeus, which had stood in the temple of the god at Olympia, was removed to Constantinople, and the time-honoured custom of reckoning time by the Olympiads was definitely replaced by the prosaic cycle of Indictions. Yet Athens still remained a bulwark of the old religion, and the preservation of that city from the great earthquake which devastated large parts of Greece in 375 was attributed to the miraculous protection of the hero Achilles, whose statue had been placed in the Parthenon by the venerable hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries.

But a worse evil than earthquakes was about to befall the Greeks. After more than a century’s peace, the Goths crossed the Balkans and defeated the Emperor Valens in the battle of Adrianople. The Greek provinces, entrusted for their better defence to the strong arm of Theodosius, escaped for the moment with no further loss than that caused by a Gothic raid in the North and by the brigandage which is the natural result of every war in the Balkan Peninsula. But, on the death of that Emperor and the final division of the Roman Empire between his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, in 395, the Goths, under their great leader, Alaric, attacked the now divided Prefecture of Illyricum. The evil results of the complete separation of the Eastern from the Western Empire were at once felt. The Greek provinces, which had just been attached to the Eastern system, might have been saved from this incursion if the Western general, Stilicho, had been permitted by Byzantine jealousy to rout the Goths in Thessaly. As the arm of that great commander was thus arrested in the act of striking, Alaric not only was able to penetrate into Epeiros as far as Nikopolis, which at that time almost entirely belonged to St Jerome’s friend, the devout Paula, but he marched over Pindos into Thessaly, defeated the local militia, and turned to the South upon Bœotia and Attica. The last earthquake had laid many of the fortifications in ruins, the Roman army of occupation was small, and its commander unwilling to imitate the conduct of Leonidas at Thermopylæ. The monks facilitated the inroad of a Christian army. The famous fortifications of Thebes had been restored, but they did not check the course of the impetuous Goth, who, leaving them unassailed, went straight to Athens. A later pagan historian has invented the pleasing legend that Pallas Athena and the hero Achilles appeared to protect the city from the invaders. But the Goths, who were not only Christians but Arian heretics, would have been little influenced by such an apparition. Athens capitulated, and Alaric, who bade spare the holy sanctuaries of the Apostles when, fifteen years later, he entered Rome, abstained from destroying the artistic treasures of which Athens was full. But the great temple of the mysteries at the town of Eleusis, and that town itself, so intimately associated with that ancient cult, were sacrificed either to the fanaticism of the Arian monks who followed the Gothic army, to the cupidity of the troops, or to both. The last hierophant seems to have perished with the shrine, of which he was the guardian, and a pagan apologist saw in his fall the manifest wrath of the gods, angry at the usurpation of that high office by one who did not belong to the sacred family of the Eumolpidæ. Henceforth the Eleusinian mysteries ceased to exist, and the home of those great festivals is now a sorry Albanian village, where ruins still mark the work of the destroyer. Megara shared the fate of Eleusis, the Isthmus was left without defenders, and Corinth, Argos, and Sparta were sacked. Those who resisted were cut down, their wives carried off into slavery, their children made to serve a Gothic master. Even a philosopher died of a broken heart at the spectacle of this terrible calamity. Fortunately, Alaric’s sojourn in the Peloponnese was shortened by the arrival of Stilicho with an army in the Gulf of Corinth. The Goths withdrew to the fastnesses of Mount Pholoe, between Olympia and Patras, and it seemed as if Stilicho had only to draw his lines around them and then wait for hunger to do its work. But from some unexplained cause—perhaps a court intrigue at Constantinople, perhaps the negligence of the general—Alaric was allowed to escape over the Gulf of Corinth into Epeiros. After devastating that region he was rewarded by the Government of Constantinople with the office of Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial forces in the Eastern half of Illyricum, which comprised the scenes of his recent ravages. The principle of converting a brigand into a policeman has often proved successful, but there were probably many who shared the indignant feelings of the poet Claudian[24] at this sudden transformation of “the devastator of Achaia” into her protector. But Alaric could not rebuild the cities, which he had destroyed; he could not restore prosperity to the lands, which he had ravaged. We have ample evidence of the injury which this invasion had inflicted upon Greece in the legislation of Theodosius II in the first half of the next century. Two Imperial edicts remitted sixty years’ arrears of taxation; another granted the petition of the people of Achaia that their taxes might be reduced to one-third of the existing amount on the ground that they could pay no more; while yet another relieved the Greeks from the burden of contributing towards the expenses of the public games at Constantinople. There is proof, too, in the pages of a contemporary historian, as well as in the dry paragraphs of the Theodosian Code, that much of the land had been allowed to go out of cultivation and had been abandoned by its owners. Athens, however, had survived the tempest which had laid waste so large a part of the country. True, we find the philosopher Synesios, who visited that seat of learning soon after Alaric’s invasion, writing sarcastically to a correspondent, that Athens “resembled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaughtered victim,” and was now famous for its honey alone. But the disillusioned visitor makes no mention of the destruction of the buildings, for which the city was renowned. Throughout the vicissitudes of the five and a half centuries, which we have traversed since the Roman Conquest, one conqueror after another had spared the glories of Athens, and even after the terrible calamity of this Gothic invasion she remained the one bright spot amid the darkness which had settled down upon the land of the Hellenes.

II. BYZANTINE GREECE

The period of more than a century which separated Alaric’s invasion from the accession of Justinian was not prolific of events on the soil of Greece. But those which occurred there tended yet further to accelerate the decay of the old classic life. Scarcely had the country begun to recover from the long-felt ravages of the Goths, than the Vandals, who had now established themselves in Africa, plundered the west and south-west coasts of Greece from Epeiros to Cape Matapan. But at this crisis the Free Laconian town of Kainepolis showed such a Spartan spirit that the Vandal King Genseric was obliged to retire with considerable loss. He revenged himself by ravaging the beautiful island of Zante, and by throwing into the Ionian Sea the mangled bodies of 500 of its inhabitants[25]. Nikopolis was held as a hostage by the Vandals till peace was concluded between them and the Eastern Empire, when their raids ceased. Seven years afterwards, in 482, the Ostrogoths under Theodoric devastated Larissa and the rich plain of Thessaly. In 517 a more serious, because permanent enemy, appeared for the first time in the annals of Greece. The Bulgarians had already caused such alarm to the statesmen of Constantinople that they had strengthened the defences of that city, and it was probably at this time that the fortifications of Megara were restored. On their first inroad, however, the Bulgarians penetrated no further into Greece than Thermopylæ and the south of Epeiros. But they carried off many captives, and, to complete the woes of the Greeks, one of those severe earthquakes to which that country is liable laid Corinth in ruins.

The final separation of the Eastern and Western Empires tended to identify the interests of the Greeks with those of the Eastern Emperors, to make Greek the language of the Court, and to encourage the Greek nationality. But from that period down to the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Imperial city grew more and more in importance at the expense of the old home of the Hellenes, and Greece became more and more provincial. But it seems an exaggeration to say with Finlay that during those eight centuries “no Athenian citizen gained a place of honour in the annals of the Empire.” To Athens, at least, belongs the honour of having produced the Empress Eudokia, wife of Theodosius II, whose acts of financial justice to her native land she may have prompted, such as that which, in 435, reduced the tribute of the dwellers in Greece by two-thirds, while she is said to have founded twelve churches in her native city, among them the quaint little Kapnikarea, so conspicuous a feature of modern Athens, if we may trust the belief embodied in the inscription inside. The daughter of an Athenian professor, Leontios, celebrated alike for her beauty and accomplishments, she went to Constantinople to appeal against an unjust decision which had enriched her brothers but had left her almost penniless. She lost her case, but she won the favour of Pulcheria, the masterful sister of Theodosius, and was appointed one of her maids of honour. She used this favourable position to the best advantage, gained the heart of the young Emperor, who was seven years her junior in age and many more in knowledge of the world, and had no scruples about exchanging paganism and the name of Athenais for Christianity and the baptismal title of Eudokia. She showed her Christian charity by forgiving and promoting her brothers; she kept up her literary accomplishments by turning part of the Old Testament into Greek verse; but she was accused of ambition and infidelity, the latter charge being substantiated by a superb apple, which the Emperor had presented to his wife, which she in turn had sent to her lover, and he, like an idiot, had placed on the Emperor’s table! She died in exile at Jerusalem, a striking example of the vicissitudes of human fortunes. Yet even in the time of her power, she could not, perhaps would not, prevent her husband’s persecution of the religion which she had abjured. His orders to the provincial authorities to destroy the temples or to consecrate them to Christian worship were not always carried out, it is true. But the pictures of Polygnotus, which Pausanias had seen in the Stoa Poikile at Athens, excited the covetousness of an Imperial governor, and the gold and ivory statue of Athena by Phidias vanished from the Parthenon for ever[26]; the temple of Zeus at Olympia was destroyed by an earthquake or by Christian bigotry, the shrine of Asklepios on the slope of the Akropolis was pulled down, while the heathen divinities became gradually assimilated with the Christian saints, in whom they finally merged. Thus Helios, the sun-god, was converted into Elias, whose name is so prominent all over the map of modern Greece; the wine-god Dionysos became a reformed character in the person of St Dionysios, and the temples of Theseus and Zeus Olympios at Athens were dedicated to St George and St John. By a still more striking transformation the Parthenon was consecrated as a church of the Virgin during the sixth century, and was thenceforth regarded as the Cathedral of Athens. The growth of Christianity is observable, too, from the lists of Greek sees represented at the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, while the importance of Corinth as the seat of the Metropolitan of Achaia is shown by the synod which was held there to settle a point of Church discipline in 419. In spite, however, of its political separation from Rome, we find Greece making appeals to the Pope when grave theological questions arose. At this period the Archbishop of Salonika was regarded as the official head of all the Greek provinces in Europe, yet when he seemed to the orthodox Epeirotes to be affected with heresy, they sent in their adhesion to Rome.

Theodosius II was not content with the destruction of temples; he desired the final disappearance of such vestiges of municipal freedom as Constantine had spared. In the same spirit of uniformity in which he codified the law, he swept away the remains of Lycurgus’ system at Sparta and the Court of Areopagos. Yet, as institutions usually survive their practical utility in a conservative country, we are not surprised to find the name of an Eponymos Archon as late as 485. And the University of Athens still lived on, fighting the now hopeless battle of the old religion with all the zeal of the latest Neo-Platonic school of philosophy. The endowments of that school and the patriotism of rich Athenians, like Theagenes, one of the two last Archons, and known as the wealthiest Greek of his day, made up for the withdrawal of Imperial subsidies, and the bitter tongue of Synesios could still complain of the airs which those who had studied at Athens gave themselves ever afterwards. “They regard themselves,” wrote the philosopher, “as demi-gods and the rest of mankind as donkeys.” But the university received a severe blow when, in 425, Theodosius enlarged and enriched the University of Constantinople with a number of new professorial chairs. If his institution of fifteen professors of the Greek language and literature gave that tongue an official position in what had hitherto been mainly a Latin city, it also attracted the best talent—men like Jacobus, the famous physician of the Emperor Leo the Great—from Greece to Constantinople, which thus acted as a magnet to the aspiring provincials, just as Paris acts to the rest of France. The last great figure of the Athenian University, Proklos, whose commentaries on Plato are still extant, was engaged in demonstrating by the purity of his life and his doctrines that a pagan could be no less moral and more intellectual than a Christian. The old gods, deposed from their thrones, seemed to favour their last champion; so, when the statue of Athena was removed from the Akropolis, the goddess appeared to the philosopher in a dream and told him that henceforth his house would be her home. The famous Bœthius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was translated by our King Alfred, is thought to have studied at Athens in the last years of Proklos, and earlier in the fifth century the charming Hypatia, whom Kingsley has immortalised for English readers, may be numbered among the ladies who at that time sought higher education at Athens and softened by their presence the rough manners of the masculine students. But, with the death of Proklos, the cause of polytheism and the prosperity of the university declined yet more. The shrewd young Greeks saw that there was no longer a career for pagans; even the rich benefactor of Athens, Theagenes, was converted to Christianity. Justinian dealt the university its death-blow in 529 by decreeing that no one should teach philosophy at Athens, and by confiscating the endowments of the Platonic school. Seven philosophers, of whom the most celebrated was Simplikios, the Aristotelian commentator, resolved to seek under the benevolent despotism of Chosroes, King of Persia, that freedom of speech which was denied to them by Justinian. They believed at a distance that the barbarian monarch had realised the ideal of Plato—a philosopher on the throne; they went to his court and were speedily disillusioned. Home-sick and heart-broken, they begged their new patron to let them return to die in Greece. Chosroes, who was at the time engaged in negotiating a treaty of peace with Justinian, inserted a clause allowing the unhappy seven “to pass the rest of their days without persecution in their native land,” and Simplikios was thus enabled, in the obscurity of private life, to compose those commentaries which are still studied by disciples of Aristotle[27]. Thus perished the University of Athens, and with it paganism vanished from Greece, save where, in the mountains of Laconia, it lingered on till beyond the middle of the ninth century. The ancient name of “Hellenes” was now exclusively applied to the remnant which still adhered to the old religion, so much so that Constantine Porphyrogenitus[28] in the tenth century called the Peloponnesian Greeks “Graikoi,” because “Hellenes” would have still meant idolaters. All the subjects of Justinian were collectively described as “Romans,” while those who inhabited Greece came gradually to be specified as “Helladikoi.”

The reign of Justinian marked the annihilation of the ancient life in other ways than these. He disbanded the provincial militia, to which we have several times alluded, and which down to his time furnished a guard for the Pass of Thermopylæ. This garrison proved, however, unable to keep out the Huns and Slavs who invaded Greece in 539, and, like the Persians of old, marched through the Pass of Anopaia into the rear of the defenders. The ravages of these barbarians, who devasted Central Greece and penetrated as far as the Isthmus, led Justinian to repair the fortifications of Thermopylæ, where he placed a regular force of 2000 men, maintained out of the revenues of Greece. He also re-fortified the Isthmus, and put such important positions as Larissa, Pharsalos, Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, with the Akropolis, in a state of proper defence. But these military measures involved a large expenditure, which Justinian met by appropriating the municipal funds. The effect of this measure was to deprive the municipal doctors and teachers of their means of livelihood, to stop the municipal grants to theatres and other entertainments, to make the repair of public buildings and the maintenance of roads—the greatest of all needs in a country with the geographical configuration of Greece—most difficult. The old Greek life had centred in the municipality, so that from this blow it never recovered; fortunately, the Church was now sufficiently well organised to take its place, and henceforth that institution became the depository of the national traditions, the mainstay in each successive century of the national existence. Yet another loss to Greece was that of the monuments, which were taken to Constantinople to make good the ravages of the great conflagration, caused by the Nika sedition. The present church of Sta Sophia, which Justinian raised out of the ashes of the second, was adorned with pillars from Athens as well as marble from the Greek quarries, and thus once again, as St Jerome had said, other cities were “stripped naked” to clothe Constantinople. Earthquakes, which shook Patras, Corinth, and Naupaktos to their foundations, completed the destruction of much that was valuable, and the bubonic plague swept over the country, recalling those terrors of which Thucydides and Lucretius had left such a striking description in their accounts of the pestilence at Athens in the days of Perikles. The King of the Ostrogoths, Totila, after twice taking Rome, sent a fleet to harry Corfù and the opposite coast of Epeiros, plundered Nikopolis and the ancient shrine of Dodona. It was in consequence of this and similar raids that the Corfiotes finally abandoned their old city and took refuge in the present citadel, called later on in the tenth century from its twin peaks (Κορυφοί) Corfù, instead of Corcyra. The Bulgarians, a few years later, made a fresh raid as far as Thermopylæ, where they were stopped by the new fortifications. In short, the ambitious foreign policy of Justinian, the powers of nature, and the increasing boldness of the barbarians, contrived to make this period fatal to Greece. Yet the Emperor bestowed one signal benefit upon that country. By the importation of silkworms he gave the Greeks the monopoly, so far as Christendom was concerned, of a valuable manufacture, which was not infringed till the Norman invasion six centuries later.

The history of Greece becomes very obscure after the death of Justinian, and the historian must be content to piece together from the Byzantine writers such stray allusions as those chroniclers of court scandals make to the neglected fatherland of the Greeks. The salient fact of this period is the recurrence of the Slav invasions of Justinian’s time. We learn that in 578 or 581 an army of 100,000 Slavonians “ravaged Hellas” and Thessaly[29]; in 589, under the Emperor Maurice, the Avars, according to the contemporary historian, Evagrios, “conquered all Greece, destroying and burning everything[30].” This passage has given rise to a famous controversy, which at one time convulsed not only the learned, but the diplomatic world. In 1830 a German scholar, Professor Fallmerayer, published the first volume of a History of the Peninsula Morea during the Middle Ages, in which he advanced the astounding theory that the inhabitants of modern Greece have “not a single drop of genuine Greek blood in their veins.” “The Greek race in Europe,” he wrote, “has been rooted out. A double layer of the dust and ashes of two new and distinct human species covers the graves of that ancient people. A tempest, such as has seldom arisen in human history, has scattered a new race, allied to the great Slav family, over the whole surface of the Balkan peninsula from the Danube to the inmost recesses of the Peloponnese. And a second, perhaps no less important revolution, the Albanian immigration into Greece, has completed the work of destruction.” The former of these two foreign settlements in the Peloponnese, that of the Slavs and Avars, was supposed by Fallmerayer to have taken place as the result of the above-mentioned invasion of 589, and his supposition received plausible confirmation from a mediæval document. The Patriarch Nicholas, writing towards the end of the eleventh century to the Emperor Alexios I Comnenos, alludes to the repulse of the Avars from before the walls of Patras in 807, and adds that they “had held possession of the Peloponnese for 218 years (i.e. from 589), and had so completely separated it from the Byzantine Empire that no Byzantine official dared to set his foot in it[31].” A similar statement from the Chronicle of Monemvasia[32]—a late and almost worthless compilation—was also unearthed by the zealous Fallmerayer, who accordingly believed that he had proved the existence of a permanent settlement of the Peloponnese by the Slavs and Avars between 589 and 807, “in complete independence of the Byzantine governors of the coast.” It was in the coast-towns alone and in a few other strongholds, such as Mt Taygetos, that he would allow of any survival of the old Greek race, and he triumphantly pointed to the famous name of “Navarino” as containing a fresh proof of an Avar settlement, while in many places he found Slavonic names, corresponding to those of Russian villages. Another evidence of this early Slavonic settlement seemed to be provided by the remark of the very late Byzantine writer, Phrantzes, that his native city of Monemvasia on the south-east coast, which used to supply our ancestors’ cellars with malmsey, was separated from the diocese of Corinth and raised to the rank of a metropolitan see about this identical time, presumably because many Greeks had taken refuge there from the Slavs, and were cut off from Corinth. Finally, a nun, who composed an account of the pilgrimage of St Willibald, the Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Eichstätt, in 723, stated that he “crossed to Monemvasia in the Slavonian land,” an expression which Fallmerayer hailed as a proof that at that period the Peloponnese was known by that name. It need not be said that Fallmerayer’s theory was as flattering to Panslavism as it was unpleasant to Philhellenes. But it is no longer accepted in its full extent. No one who has been in Greece can fail to have been struck by the similarity between the character of the modern and the ancient Greeks. Many an island has its “Odysseus of many wiles”; every morning and evening the Athenians are anxious to hear “some new thing”; and the comedies of Aristophanes contain many personal traits which fit the subjects of the present king. Nor does even the vulgar language contain any considerable Slavonic element, although there are a certain number of Slavonic place-names to be found on the map, including perhaps Navarino. Moreover, the contemporary historian, Theophylact Simokatta, makes no mention of the invasion of 589, though he minutely describes the wars of that period. Yet, as we shall see later, there is no doubt that at one time there was a great Slavonic immigration into Greece, but it took place about 746, instead of in 589, and the incoming Slavs, so far from annihilating the Greeks, were gradually assimilated by that persistent race, as has happened to conquering peoples elsewhere.

But Fallmerayer was not content with wiping out the Greeks from the Peloponnese. He next propounded the amazing statement that the history of Athens was a blank for four centuries after the time of Justinian, and explained this strange phenomenon by a Slavonic inundation in that Emperor’s reign. In consequence of this invasion, the Athenians were said to have fled to Salamis, where they remained for 400 years, while their city was abandoned to olive groves and utterly neglected. These “facts,” which the learned German had culled from the chronicle of the Anargyroi Monastery[33], which, however, distinctly says “three years,” and not 400, and refers to Albanians, not Slavs, have since been disproved, not only by the obviously modern date of that compilation, which is now assigned to the nineteenth century, and which refers to the temporary abandonment of Athens after its capture by Morosini in 1687, but by the allusions which may be found to events at Athens during this period of supposed desertion. Thus, we hear of an heretical bishop being sent there towards the end of the sixth century, and we have the seal of the orthodox divine who was Bishop of Athens a hundred years later[34]. An eloquent appeal was made by the Byzantine historian, Theophylact Simokatta, to the city to put on mourning for the Emperor Maurice, who died in 602, and sixty years later another Emperor, Constans II, landed at the Piræus on his way to Sicily, spent the winter at Athens, and collected there a considerable force of soldiers. Even some few traces of culture may be found there in the century which followed Justinian’s closing of the university. St Gislenus, who went as a missionary to Hainault, and a learned doctor, named Stephen, were both born at Athens, and the former is stated to have studied there. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century, the famous Empress Irene first saw the light in the city, which had already given one consort to an Emperor of the East. Thus, if comparatively obscure, Athens was not a mere collection of ruins in an olive grove, but a city of living men and women which had never (as Zygomalas wrote to Crusius in the sixteenth century) “remained desolate for about 300 years.”

The attacks of the Slavs and of the newly-founded Arabian power marked the course of the seventh century. In 623 the Slavs made an incursion into Crete, and that island, of which we have heard little under the Imperial rule, was also visited by the Arabs in 651 and 674. But though the Cretans were forced to pay tribute to the Caliph, Moawyah, they were treated with kindness by the politic conqueror. About the same time as this second Arab invasion, and while the main Arab force was besieging Constantinople, a body of Slavs seized the opportunity to settle in the rich plain of Thessaly, and it is from one of their tribes that the present town of Velestino, so often mentioned in the war of 1897, received its name. Yet this tribe soon became so friendly that it assisted the Greeks in the defence of Salonika against a Slavonic army—a further proof of the readiness with which the Slavs adopted the Greek point of view. It is clear also that the command of the Imperial troops in Greece was regarded as an important post, for we find it entrusted to Leontios, who made himself Emperor. The Greek islands were still used as places of detention for prisoners of position. Thus Naxos was chosen as the temporary exile of Pope Martin I by the Emperor Constans II, and the future Emperor Philippicus was banished to Cephalonia.

A new era opened for the Empire with the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 716. In the first place, that sovereign completed the reform of the system of provincial administration, which had lasted more or less continuously since the time of Constantine. In place of the old provincial divisions, the Empire was now parcelled out into military districts, called Themes—a name originally applied to a regiment and then to the place at which the regiment was quartered. The choice of such a title indicates the essentially military character of the new arrangement, which implied the maintenance of a small division of troops in each district as a necessary defence against the Avars, Slavs, and Arabs, whose depredations had menaced provinces seldom exposed to attack in the old times. Six out of the twenty-eight Themes comprised Greece, as she was before the late Balkan wars. The Peloponnese, with its capital of Corinth, formed one; Central Greece, including Eubœa, formed another, under the name of Hellas, but its capital was Thebes, not Athens; Nikopolis, which comprised Ætolia and Akarnania, and Cephalonia (the latter created a separate Theme later on, and including all the Ionian Islands) were two more; the Ægean Sea, popularly known as the Dodekannesos, or “twelve islands,” composed one of the Asian Themes, and Thessaly was a part of the Theme of Macedonia. Both the military and civil authority in each Theme was vested in the hands of a Commander, known as strategós, except in the case of the Ægean Islands, where the post was filled by an Admiral, called droungários. Under the strategós were the protonotários or “judge,” who was a judicial and administrative authority, and two military personages, one of whom, the kleisourárches, was so-called because he watched the mountain passes, like the later Turkish derben-aga. So far as Greece is concerned, the eclipse of Athens by Thebes, perhaps owing to the silk industry for which the latter city was famous in the Middle Ages, is a very noticeable feature of the new administration.

Another reform of Leo the Isaurian aroused the intense indignation of the inhabitants of Greece. We have seen that the spread of Christianity in that country had been facilitated by the assimilation of pagan forms of worship in the new ritual. It was natural that a race, which had been accustomed for centuries to connect art with religion and to seek the noblest statuary in the temples of the gods, should have regarded with peculiar favour the practice of hanging pictures in churches. When therefore Leo, whose Armenian origin perhaps made him personally unsympathetic to the Greeks, issued an edict against image-worship, his orders met with the most bigoted resistance in Greece. It may be that a more searching census for the purposes of the revenue had already rendered him unpopular; but to those who know how strong is the influence of the Church in the East, and what fierce disputes an ecclesiastical question kindles there, the edict of the Emperor will seem ample ground for the Greek rising of 727. An eruption at the volcanic island of Santorin was interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure at the doings of the iconoclast sovereign; while Pope Gregory II addressed two violent missives to the Emperor, and probably encouraged the agitation in Greece, which still acknowledged him as spiritual head of the Church. The “Helladikoi,” as they were now called, and the seamen of the Cyclades fitted out a fleet under the leadership of a certain Stephen; and, with the co-operation of Agallianos, one of the Imperial military officials, set up an orthodox Emperor, named Kosmas, and boldly set sail for Constantinople—a proof of the resources of Greece at this period. But the result of this naval undertaking was very different from that which Greece had equipped on behalf of Constantine. A battle was fought under the walls of the capital between the two fleets. The Emperor Leo, availing himself of the terrible invention of the Greek fire, which had been used with such deadly effect in the recent Saracen siege of Constantinople, annihilated his opponents’ vessels. Agallianos, seeing that all was lost, leaped into the sea; Stephen and Kosmas fell by the axe of the executioner. We are not told what punishment was meted out to the Greeks, but, in consequence of the strong attitude of opposition which the Papacy had taken up to the Emperor, Leo in 732 deprived the Pope of all jurisdiction over Greece, and placed that country under the ecclesiastical authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The next important event in the history of Greece was the great plague, which broke out at Monemvasia in 746 and spread all over the Empire. The political consequences of this visitation were far-reaching. For not only was the population of Greece diminished by the increased mortality there, but it was further lessened by emigration to Constantinople, where there were openings for plasterers and other skilled workmen, and where great numbers had died of the epidemic. The place of these emigrants in the Peloponnese was taken by Slav colonists, and this is the true explanation of the Slavonic colonisation, which Fallmerayer placed so much earlier. In the celebrated words of the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, “All the open country was Slavonised and became barbarous, when the plague was devouring the whole world[35].” It seems from the phrase “open country,” that such Greeks as remained behind crowded into the towns, and that the rural districts were thus left free for the Slavs to occupy. And this is confirmed by the Epitome of Strabo’s Geography, compiled apparently about the end of the tenth century, which states that at that time “All Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were inhabited by Scythian Slavs.” The memory of this Slavonic occupation has been preserved by the Slavonic names of places, which Colonel Leake was the first to notice. That the Slavs excited the alarm of the Byzantine government is clear from the fact that in 783 Staurakios was despatched by the Empress Irene to crush their efforts at independence. The Empress was actuated by love of Greece as well as by motives of policy, for she was a native of Athens, like her predecessor, Eudokia. At the age of seventeen she had been selected by the Emperor Constantine Copronymos as the wife of his son, Leo IV, and the premature death of her husband left her the real mistress of the Empire, which she governed, first as Regent for her son and then as sole ruler, for over twenty years. One of the earliest acts of her Regency was to send the expedition against the Slavs. Those in Thessaly and Central Greece were forced to pay tribute; those in the Peloponnese yielded a rich booty to the Byzantine commander. But the Slavs were not permanently subdued, as was soon evident. Irene, for the greater security of her throne, had banished her five brothers-in-law to Athens, which was, of course, devoted to her, and was at that time governed by one of her kinsmen. But the five prisoners managed to communicate with Akamir, a Slav chieftain who lived at Velestino, and a plot was formed for the elevation of them to the throne. The plans of the conspirators fell into the hands of Irene’s friends, and the prisoners were removed to a safer place. Irene, however, was dethroned a little later by Nikephoros I, and banished to Mitylene, where she died. In spite of her appalling treatment of her son, whom she had dethroned and blinded in order to gratify her greed of power, tradition states that she showed her piety and patriotism by the foundation of several churches at Athens. Some of her foundations disappeared in the storm and stress of the War of Independence; others were removed to make way for the streets of the modern town; but the Church of the Panagia Gorgoepekoos, or so-called old Metropolis[36], which still stands, is ascribed to her, and the ruins of the monastery which she built and where she at one time lived strew the beautiful island of Prinkipo. Even with her death her native city did not lose its connection with the Byzantine Court. Among her surviving relatives at Athens was a beautiful niece, Theophano, who was married to a man of position there. Nikephoros, anxious, no doubt, like all usurpers, to connect his family with that of the Sovereign whom he had deposed, resolved that the fair Athenian should become the consort of his son, Staurakios. He accordingly snatched her from the arms of her husband and brought her to Constantinople, where her second marriage took place. But this third Athenian Empress did not long enjoy the reward of her infidelity to her first husband. Staurakios survived his father’s death at the hands of the Bulgarians a very few months, and his consort, like Eudokia and Irene, ended her life in a monastery.

The Slavs of the Peloponnese believed that their chance of obtaining independence had come during the troubled reign of Nikephoros, when the Saracens under Haroun Al Rashid and the growing power of the Bulgarians menaced the Byzantine Empire. They accordingly rose, and, after plundering the houses of their Greek neighbours, laid siege in 807 to the fortress of Patras, which was the principal stronghold of the old inhabitants in the north-west of the country. The Slavs blockaded the city from the land side, while a Saracen fleet prevented the introduction of supplies by sea. The besieged, knowing that the fate of Hellenism in the Peloponnese depended on their efforts, held out against these odds in the hope that they would thus give the Imperial commander at Corinth time to relieve them. At last, when all hope of deliverance seemed to have disappeared, they sent out a horseman to one of the hills in the direction of Corinth to see if the longed for army of relief was in sight. His orders were to gallop back as soon as he caught a glimpse of the approaching Imperialists and to lower the flag which he carried, so that his comrades in Patras might have the glad news at once. But his eyes in vain searched the road along the Gulf of Corinth for the gleam of weapons or the dust that would announce the march of soldiers. Sadly he turned his horse towards Patras, when, at a spot where he was in full view of the walls, his steed stumbled and the flag fell. The besieged, believing that help was at hand, were inspired with fresh courage, and, sallying from the gates, inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Slavs, which was followed up after the arrival of the relieving force three days later by the restoration of the Imperial authority along the west coast. At that age so great a victory was naturally ascribed to superhuman aid. St Andrew, the patron-saint of Patras, who, as we have seen, was believed to have suffered martyrdom there, and whose relics were then preserved there, had caused the scout’s horse to stumble and had been seen on a milk-white steed leading the citizens in their successful onslaught on the Slavs[37]. The gratitude, or policy, of the government showed itself in the dedication of the spoil and captives to the service of the church of St Andrew, and the Slavonic peasants of the neighbourhood became its tenants and paid it a yearly rent. The Archbishop of Patras, who had hitherto been dependent upon Corinth, was raised by Nikephoros to the rank of a Metropolitan, and Methone, Korone and Lacedæmon, were placed under his immediate jurisdiction. The political object and result of this step, which was ratified by later Emperors, was to hellenise the vanquished Slavs by means of the Greek clergy. Moreover, the policy of Nikephoros in organising Greek military colonies round the Slav settlements in Greece, tended to check Slavonic raids. Public lands were bestowed on these colonists whose establishment contributed much to the ultimate fusion of the two races. Thus, the defeat of the Slavs before Patras and the wise measures of Nikephoros prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slavonic State, like Servia or Bulgaria, and from that date the tide, which had at one time threatened to submerge the Greek nationality there, began to ebb. Of this phenomenon we shall be able to watch the progress.

A generation elapsed without a renewal of the Slav agitation in the Peloponnese; but about 849 a fresh rising took place. On this occasion the appearance of a Byzantine commander in the field soon caused the collapse of the rebels. Two Slavonic tribes, however, the Melings and Ezerits, which inhabited the slopes to the west, and the plain to the east of Mount Taygetos, were enabled by the strength of their geographical position to make terms with the Byzantine government, and agreed to pay a small tribute which was assessed according to their respective means[38]. The Church continued the work of the soldiers by building monasteries in the Slavonic districts, and from the middle of the ninth century the Greek element began to recover lost ground. Nearly all the Slavs and the last of the Hellenic pagans in the south of Taygetos were then converted, and the adoption of Christianity by the Bulgarians cannot have failed to affect the Slavonic settlers in the Byzantine Empire. Of the revived prosperity of Greece we have two remarkable proofs. In 823 that country raised a fleet of 350 sail for the purpose of intervening in the civil war then raging between the Emperor Michael the Stammerer and a Slavonic usurper, and this implies the possession of considerable resources. Still more striking is the story of the rich widow, Danielis of Patras. About the time of the Byzantine expedition against the Slavs of Taygetos, the future Emperor, Basil I, then chief groom in the service of a prominent courtier, was at Patras in attendance on his master, who had been sent there on political business. One day, as the comely groom was entering the church of St Andrew, a monk stopped him and told him that he should become Emperor. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of a fever, which, by detaining him at Patras after his master’s departure, proved to be a blessing in disguise. Moved by philanthropy or the prophecy of the monk, Danielis took the sick groom into her house, bade him be a brother to her son, and, when he had recovered from his illness, provided him with a train of thirty slaves to accompany him to Constantinople, and loaded him with costly presents. When, in 867, the monk’s forecast was fulfilled, and Basil mounted the Imperial throne, he did not forget his benefactress. He not only promoted her son to a high position in his court, but invited the aged lady to Constantinople. In spite of her age and infirmities, Danielis travelled in a litter, accompanied by 300 slaves, who took in turns the duty of carrying their mistress. As a gift to the Emperor, she brought 500 more, as well as 100 maidens, chosen for their skill in embroidery, 100 purple garments, 300 linen robes, and 100 more of such fine material that each piece could easily be packed away in a hollow cane. Every kind of gold and silver vessel completed the list of presents, which would not have disgraced a brother sovereign. When she arrived, she was lodged like a queen and addressed as “mother” by her grateful protégé. Basil’s gratitude was rewarded by fresh favours. Danielis called for a notary and made over to the Emperor and her own son a part of her landed estates in the Peloponnese. Finding that Basil had tried to atone for the murder of his predecessor, which had given him the throne, by the erection of a church, she had a huge carpet manufactured by her own workmen to cover the splendid mosaic floor. Once again, on the death of her favourite, she journeyed to Constantinople to greet his son and successor. Her own son was by that time dead, so she devised the whole of her property to the young Emperor Leo VI. At her request, a high official was sent to the Peloponnese to prepare an inventory of her effects. Even in these days a sovereign would rejoice at such a windfall. Her loose cash, her gold and silver plate, her bronze ornaments, her wardrobe, and her flocks and herds represented a princely fortune. As for her slaves, they were so numerous that the Emperor, in the embarrassment of his riches, emancipated 3000 of them and sent them as colonists to Apulia, then part of the Byzantine Empire. Eighty farms formed the real property of this ninth century millionairess, whose story throws light on the position of the Peloponnesian landed class, or archontes, at that period. Danielis was, doubtless, exceptionally rich, and Patras was then, as now, the chief commercial town in the Peloponnese. But the existence of such an enormous fortune as hers presupposes a high degree of civilisation, in which many others must have participated. Even learning was still cultivated in Greece, for the distinguished mathematician Leo, who was one of the ornaments of the Byzantine Court, is expressly stated to have studied rhetoric, philosophy and science under a famous teacher, Michael Psellos, who lectured at a college in the island of Andros, where his pupil’s name is not yet forgotten[39].

But while the Greeks had thus triumphed in the Peloponnese, they had lost ground elsewhere. Availing themselves of the disorders in the Byzantine Empire, when the Greek ships were all engaged in the civil war of 823, a body of Saracens, who had emigrated from the south of Spain to Alexandria, descended on Crete, at that time recovering from the effects of an earthquake, but still possessing thirty cities. Landing at Suda Bay, they found the islanders mostly favourable, or at any rate indifferent, to a change of masters. Reinforced by a further batch of their countrymen, the Saracens resolved to settle there. A Cretan monk is said to have shown them a strong position where they could pitch their camp; so they burnt their ships and established themselves at the spot indicated, the site of the present town of Candia, which derives its Venetian name from the Chandak or “ditch” surrounding it. The conquest of the island was soon accomplished—a clear proof of the islanders’ apathy when we remember the heroic defence of the Cretans in more recent times. Religious toleration reconciled many to the sway of the Saracens; in the course of years a number of the Christians embraced the creed of their conquerors, helping to man their fleets and sharing the profits of that nefarious traffic in slaves of which Crete, as in former days Delos, became the centre. One district, which we may identify with Sphakia, was permitted to enjoy autonomy. For Greece the rule of the Saracens in Crete was a serious misfortune. Cretan corsairs ably led by Christian renegades, in quest of booty and slaves, ravaged the Cyclades and the Ionian Islands, and menaced the coast towns of the mainland, whither the terrified inhabitants of Ægina and similarly exposed spots migrated in the hope of safety. The efforts of the Byzantine government to recover “the great Greek island,” which was now a terror to the whole Levant, were for more than a century unsuccessful, and during 138 years Crete remained in the possession of the Saracens. Occasionally their fleet was annihilated, as in the reign of Basil I, when the Byzantine admiral, hearing that they meditated a descent upon the west coast of Greece, conveyed his ships across the Isthmus in the night by means of the old tram-road, or diolkos, which had been used by the contemporaries of Thucydides, and has even now not entirely disappeared. By this brilliant device he took the enemy by surprise in the Gulf of Corinth, and destroyed their vessels. But new fleets arose as if by magic, and Basil was obliged to strengthen the garrisons of the Peloponnese. His successor, aroused to action by their daring attacks upon Demetrias and Salonika, both flourishing cities which they devastated and plundered, equipped a naval expedition, to which the Greek Themes contributed ships and men, with the object of recapturing Crete. But neither that nor the subsequent armada despatched by the Imperial author, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was destined to succeed. At last, in 961, the redoubtable commander, Nikephoros Phokas, restored Crete to the Byzantine Empire. But even at that early period, Candia began to establish the reputation which it so nobly increased during the Turkish siege seven centuries later. Its strong fortifications for seven long months resisted the Byzantine general; but he patiently waited for a favourable moment, and at last took the place by storm. The most drastic measures were adopted for the complete reduction of the island. The broad brick walls of Candia were pulled down; a new fortress called Temenos was erected on the height of Rhoka some miles inland, to overawe the inhabitants. Some of the Saracens emigrated, others sank into a state of serfdom. As usual the missionary followed the Byzantine arms, and the island attracted many Greek and Armenian Christians; the name of the latter still lingers in the Cretan village of Armeni; among the former were some distinguished Byzantine families, whose descendants furnished leaders to the insurrections later on. In the conversion of the Cretan apostates back to Christianity, an Armenian monk called Nikon, and nicknamed “Repent Ye” from the frequency of that phrase in his sermons, found a fine field for his labours. The Christian churches, for which Crete had once been famous, rose again, and the reconquest of the island gave to Nikephoros Phokas the Imperial diadem, to the deacon Theodosios the subject for a long iambic poem, and to Nikon the more lasting dignity of a saint. But, in spite of his efforts, not a few Arabs retained their religion, and the Cretan Mussulmans of Amari are still reckoned as their descendants.

The tenth century witnessed not only the recovery of Crete for the Byzantine Empire and for the Christian faith, but also the spread of monasteries over Greece. When Nikon had concluded his Cretan mission he visited Athens, where he is said by his biographer to have enchanted the people with his sermons, penetrated as far as Thebes, and then returned to Sparta, where he founded a convent and established his headquarters. Thence he set out on missionary journeys among the Slavonic tribes of the Melings and Ezerits, who had again risen against the Imperial authority and had again been reduced to the payment of a tribute. Those wild clans continued, however, to harry the surrounding country, and the monastery of St Nikon was only protected from their attacks by the awe which the holy man’s memory inspired. Long after his death he was adored as the guardian of Sparta, where his memory is still green, and the Peloponnesian mariner, caught in a storm off Cape Matapan, would pray to him, as his ancestors had prayed to Castor and Pollux. For Central Greece the career of the blessed Luke the younger was as important as that of St Nikon for the South. The parents of this remarkable man had fled from Ægina, when the Cretan corsairs plundered that island, and had taken refuge in Macedonia, where Luke was born. Filled with the idea that he had a call to a holy life, the young Luke settled as a hermit on a lonely Greek mountain by the sea-shore, where for seven long years he devoted himself to prayer. A Bulgarian raid drove him to the Peloponnese, where for ten years more he served as the attendant of another hermit, who, like the famous Stylites of old, lived on a pillar near Patras. After further adventures, he migrated to Stiris, between Delphi and Livadia, where the monastery which bears his name now stands.

The absorption of the Christianised Slavs by the Greeks was occasionally interrupted by the Bulgarian inroads, which now became frequent. Since the foundation of the first Bulgarian Empire towards the end of the ninth century, the power of that race had greatly increased, and the Byzantine sovereigns found formidable rivals in the Bulgarian tsars. About 929 the Bulgarians captured Nikopolis, and converted it into a Slavonic colony, which was only reconquered by considerable efforts. Arsenios, Metropolitan of Corfù, who was canonised later on, and was for centuries the patron saint of the island, where his festival is still celebrated and his remains repose, fell into the hands of these invaders, but was rescued by the valour of the islanders[40], and a new tribe, called Slavesians, probably an offshoot of the Bulgarians, made its way into the Peloponnese. The troublesome clans of Melings and Ezerits seized this opportunity to demand the reduction of their tribute, which had been raised after their last rising. The Government wisely granted their demand, and so prevented a formidable insurrection. Athens was also disturbed by a domestic riot. A certain Chases, a high Byzantine official, had aroused the resentment of the people by his tyranny and the scandals of his life. Alarmed at the threatening attitude of the inhabitants, who had been joined by others from the country, he took refuge at the altar in the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the ancient Parthenon. But the sanctuary did not protect him from the vengeance of his enemies, who stoned him to death at the altar, thus showing less reverence for the Virgin than the ancient Athenians had once shown under somewhat similar circumstances for the goddess Athena.

The Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about the middle of the tenth century, has left us a favourable sketch of the Peloponnese as it was in his day. Forty cities were to be found in that Theme, and some idea of its resources may be formed from the statement that the Peloponnesians excused themselves from personal service in an Italian campaign by the payment of 7200 pieces of gold and the presentation of 1000 horses all equipped[41]. The purple, parchment, and silk industries, as well as the shipping trade, must have yielded considerable profits to those who carried them on, and the presence of many Jews at Sparta in the time of St Nikon, who tried to expel them, shows that there was money to be made there. His biography represents that city—of which the contemporary Empress, Theophano, wife of Romanos II and Nikephoros Phokas, was perhaps a native[42]—as possessing a powerful aristocracy, and as having commercial relations with Venice. The reconquest of Crete, by freeing the coast-towns from the depredations of pirates, naturally increased the prosperity of Greece. Schools rose again at Athens and Corinth, and from that time down to the beginning of the thirteenth century the country improved, in spite of occasional invasions. Thus, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel captured Larissa and carried off many of its inhabitants, as well as the remains of the Thessalian Archbishop, St Achilleios, which had long been the chief relic of the place. His standards were twice seen south of the Isthmus, and Attica was ravaged by his forces. To this period we may refer the statement above quoted that “all Epeiros and a large part of Hellas and the Peloponnese and Macedonia were occupied by Scythian Slavs.” But when they arrived at the river Spercheios on their return march, they were surprised by a Byzantine army and utterly defeated. The Emperor Basil II, surnamed “the Bulgar-slayer,” completed the destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire, and on his triumphal progress through Northern and Central Greece in 1019 found the bones of the slain still bleaching on the banks of the Spercheios. After inspecting the fortifications of Thermopylæ, he proceeded to Athens, which no Byzantine Emperor had visited since the days of Constans II. The visit was an appropriate sequel to the campaign. For the first time for centuries the Byzantine dominions extended from the Bosporos to the Danube, and the Balkan peninsula once again was under Greek domination. In the Church of the Virgin on the Akropolis, the very centre and shrine of the old Hellenic life in bygone days, the victorious Emperor offered up thanks to Almighty God for his successes, and showed his gratitude by rich offerings to the church out of the spoil which he had taken. The beauty of the building, which he seems to have enhanced by a series of frescoes, traces of which are still visible, was justly celebrated in the next generation, and one curiosity of that holy spot, the ever-burning golden lamp, is specially mentioned by the author of the so-called Book of Guido, and by the Icelandic pilgrim, Saewulf. Other persons imitated the example of Basil, and the restoration or foundation of Athenian churches was one of the features of the first half of the eleventh century. Freed for the time from corsairs and hostile armies, Greece was once more able to pursue the arts of peace unhindered. During the great famine which prevailed at Constantinople in 1037, the Themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese were able to export 100,000 bushels of wheat for the relief of the capital. The chief grievance of the Greeks was the extortion of the Imperial Government, which aroused two insurrections after the death of Basil. The first of these movements took place at Naupaktos, where the people rose against “Mad George,” the hated representative of the Emperor, murdered him, and plundered his residence. This revolt was suppressed with great severity, the archbishop, who had been on the side of the people, being blinded, according to the prevalent fashion of Byzantine criminal law. Some years later, the inhabitants of the Theme of Nikopolis murdered the Imperial tax-collector, and called in the Bulgarians, who had risen against fiscal extortion like themselves. While Naupaktos held out in the West, the Thebans, then a rich and flourishing community, abandoned their silk manufactories, and took the field against the Bulgarians[43]. But they were defeated with great loss, and it has even been asserted that the victors occupied the Piræus with the connivance of the discontented Athenians.

This surmise, which has, however, been rejected by the German historian of mediæval Athens, rests upon one of the most curious discoveries that have been made in connection with the place. Every visitor to Venice has seen the famous lions which adorn the front of the arsenal. One of these statues, brought home as a trophy by Morosini from the Piræus in 1688, has upon it a runic inscription, which has been deciphered by an expert. According to his version, the inscription commemorates the capture of the Piræus at this period by the celebrated Harold Hardrada, whom our King Harold defeated at Stamford Bridge, and who, in 1040, was commander of the Imperial Guard at Constantinople. In consequence, it appears, of an Athenian rising, Harold had been sent with a detachment of that force, composed largely of Norwegians, to put down the rebellion. After accomplishing their object, the Northmen, in the fashion of the modern tourist, scrawled their names and achievements on the patient lion, which then stood, like the lion of Lindau, at the entrance of the Piræus and gave to that harbour its later name of Porto Leone. It would be difficult to find a more curious piece of historical evidence than that a monument in Venice should tell us of a Norwegian descent upon Athens.

Dissension among the Bulgarians led to their collapse, and Greece enjoyed a complete freedom from barbarian inroads for the next forty years, with the exception of a passing invasion by the Uzes, a Turkish tribe, who left no mark upon the country. Athens at this period was regarded by the Byzantine officials who were sent there as the uttermost ends of the earth, though at Constantinople Philhellenism had a worthy representative in the historian and philosopher Psellos, who constantly manifested a deep interest in “the muse of Athens.” A more curious figure, typical of that monastic age, was the Cappadocian monk Meletios, who established himself on the confines of Attica and Bœotia, and by means of his miracles gained great influence there. We find him descending from his solitary mountain to Athens to rescue a band of Roman pilgrims, who had taken refuge there and had been threatened with death by the bigoted Athenians. We hear of the convents which he founded in various parts of Greece, and it was to him that the land was largely indebted for the plague of monks, many of them merely robbers in disguise, which checked civic progress and injured all national life in the next century. Worse than this, the final separation of the Greek and Latin Churches in 1053, by kindling a fanatical hatred between West and East, brought countless woes upon the Levant, and was one of the causes of the Latin invasions which culminated in the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There now appeared, for the first time in the history of Greece, that vigorous race which in the same century conquered our own island. The Normans of Italy, under their redoubtable leader, Robert Guiscard, resolved to emulate the doings of William the Conqueror by subduing the Byzantine Empire, which seemed to those daring spirits an easy prey. They began by the annexation of the Byzantine provinces of Apulia and Calabria, and then turned their eyes across the Adriatic to the opposite coast. An excuse was easily found for this invasion. One of Guiscard’s daughters had been engaged to the son of the Emperor Michael VII. But the revolution, which overthrew Michael, sent his son into a monastery, and thus provided Guiscard with an opportunity of posing as the champion of the fallen dynasty. An impostor, who masqueraded as the deposed Emperor, implored his aid in the cause of legitimacy, and the great Pope, who then occupied the throne under the name of Gregory VII, bade the godly help in the contest against the schismatic Greeks. After long preparations Guiscard appeared in 1081 off Corfù, which surrendered to the Norman invader, and then directed his forces against the walls of Durazzo, now a crumbling Albanian fortress, then “the Western key of the empire.” Menaced at the same moment by the Turks in Asia and the Normans in Europe, the Emperor Alexios I made peace with the former and then set out to the relief of Durazzo. But he did not trust to a land force alone, and as the Byzantine navy, like the Turkish fleet in our own days, had been neglected and the money intended for its maintenance had been misappropriated, he applied for aid to the mercantile Republic of Venice. The Venetians saw a chance of consolidating their trade in the Levant, and, as the price of their assistance, obtained from the embarrassed Emperor the right of free trade throughout the empire, where the Greek cities of Thebes, Athens, Corinth, Nauplia, Methone, Korone, Corfù, Euripos, and Demetrias are specially mentioned as their haunts. But the aid of a Venetian fleet did not prevent the victory of the Normans over Alexios on the plain near Durazzo, where Cæsar and Pompey had once contended. The Emperor retreated to Ochrida, where, two generations earlier, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel had fixed his residence, while his conqueror, after taking Durazzo, marched across Albania and captured the city of Kastoria, which was defended by three hundred English, members of the Imperial Guard. Recalled to Italy by troubles in his own dominions and by the distress of his ally the Pope, Guiscard left the prosecution of the campaign to his son Bohemond, who penetrated into Thessaly, that historic battle-ground of the Near East. But the walls of Larissa and the gold of Alexios proved too much for the strength of the Normans, and Bohemond was forced to retire to Italy. He found his father fresh from his triumph at Rome, which he had delivered to the Pope, and ready for a second campaign against the Byzantine Empire. In 1084 Guiscard set sail again; after three naval battles with the Greeks and their Venetian allies, Corfù once more surrendered to the Normans, and their leader used it as a stepping-stone to the island of Cephalonia. But he contracted a fever there, which put an end to his life and to the expedition, of which he had been the heart and soul. The village of Phiskardo has perpetuated his name, thus marking this second attempt of the West to impose its sway upon the East.

Bohemond renewed, twenty-two years later, his father’s attacks upon the Byzantine Empire. In the meanwhile, as the result of his share in the first crusade, he had become Prince of Antioch—one of those feudal States which now adjoined the immediate dominions of the Eastern Emperor and exercised considerable social influence on the customs of his subjects. Aided by the Pisans, whose fleet ravaged the Ionian Islands, Bohemond seemed likely to repeat the early successes of his father; but Alexios had learnt how to deal with the Latins, and the Normans’ second assault on Durazzo ended in a treaty of peace, by which Bohemond swore fealty to the Emperor. For the next forty years Greece had nothing to fear from the Normans, but the evil results of the alliance with Venice now became manifest. The Republic of St Mark had jealous commercial rivals in Italy, who envied her the monopoly of the Levantine trade. When, therefore, concessions were made to the Pisans and the previous charter of the Venetians was not renewed, the Empire found itself involved in a naval war with the latter, from which the defenceless Greek islands suffered, and which was only ended by the renewal of the old Venetian privileges. The mercantile powers of Italy had come to treat the Byzantine possessions much as modern European States regard Turkey, as a Government from which trading concessions can be obtained. But every fresh grant offended some one and gave the favoured party more and more influence in the affairs of the Empire. Fresh Venetian factories were founded in Greece, and the increasing prosperity of that country had the disadvantage of attracting the covetous foreigner.

Such was the state of affairs when, in 1146, Guiscard’s nephew, King Roger of Sicily, availing himself of an insult to his honour, invaded Greece with far greater success than had attended his uncle. The Sicilian Admiral, George of Antioch, occupied Corfù, with the connivance of the poorer inhabitants, who complained of the heavy taxation of the Imperial Government which in the twelfth century levied from that one Ionian Island about 9,000,000 dr. of modern money, or more than the present Greek Exchequer raises from all the seven, but was repulsed by the bold inhabitants of the impregnable rock of Monemvasia; then, after plundering the west coast, he landed his troops at the modern Itea, on the north of the Gulf of Corinth, and thence marched past Delphi on Thebes, at that time the seat of the silk manufacture. The city was undefended, but that did not save it from the rapacity of the Normans. Alexander the Great had, at least, spared “the house of Pindaros” when he took Thebes; but its new conquerors left nothing that was of any value behind them. After they had thoroughly ransacked the houses and churches they made the Thebans swear on the Holy Scriptures that they had concealed nothing, and then departed, dragging with them the most skilful weavers and dyers so as to transfer the silk industry to Sicily. This last was a serious blow to the monopoly of the silk trade which Greece had hitherto enjoyed so far as Christian States were concerned. The secret of the manufacture had been jealously guarded; and the fishers who obtained the famous purple dye for the manufacturers were a privileged class, exempted from the payment of military taxes. Roger was well aware of the value of his captives; he established them and their families at Palermo, and at the conclusion of the war they were not restored to their homes in Greece. But the art of making and dyeing silk does not seem to have died out at Thebes, which, fifteen years after the Norman invasion, had recovered much of its former prosperity. When the Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, visited it about 1161, he found 2000 of his co-religionists there, among them the best weavers and dyers in Greece, and towards the end of the century forty garments of Theban silk were sent as a present by the Emperor to the Sultan of Iconium. Although there are no silks now manufactured at Thebes and no mulberry-trees there, the plain near the town is still called by the peasants Morokampos, from the mulberry-trees which once grew upon it. From Thebes the Normans proceeded to the rich city of Corinth, which fell into their hands without a blow. Those who have ascended the grand natural fortress of Akrocorinth may easily understand the surprise of the warlike Normans at its surrender by the cowardly Byzantine commandant. “If Nikephoros Chalouphes”—such was his name—“had not been more timid than a woman,” exclaimed the Sicilian admiral, “we should never have entered these walls.” The town below yielded an even richer booty than Thebes—for it was then, as under the Romans, the great emporium of the Levantine trade in Greece—and laden with the spoils of Thebes and Corinth and with the relics of St Theodore, the Norman fleet set sail on its homeward voyage. Nineteen vessels fell victims to privateers, but the surviving ships brought such a valuable cargo into the great harbour of Palermo that the admiral was able to build out of his share the bridge which is still called after him, Ponte dell’ Ammiraglio. The Church of La Martorana as its older name of Sta Maria dell’ Ammiraglio testifies, was also founded by him. The captives, except the silk-weavers, were afterwards restored to their homes, and Corfù was recaptured by the chivalrous Emperor, Manuel Comnenos, after a siege, in the course of which he performed such prodigies of valour as to win the admiration of the Norman commander.

The revival of material prosperity in Greece after the close of this conflict was most remarkable, and in the second half of the twelfth century that country must have been one of the most flourishing parts of the Empire. The Arabian geographer, Edrisi, who wrote in 1153, tells us that the Peloponnese had thirteen cities, and alludes to the vegetation of Corfù, the size of Athens, and the fertility of the great Thessalian plain, while Halmyros was then one of the most important marts of the Empire. Benjamin of Tudela tells us of Jewish communities in Larissa, Naupaktos, Arta, Corinth, Patras, Eubœa, Corfù (consisting of one man), Zante, and Ægina, as well as in Thebes, and this implies considerable wealth. Like St Nikon, he found them in Sparta, and we may note as a curious phenomenon the existence of a colony of Jewish agriculturists on the slopes of Parnassos. Salonika, where the Hebrew element is now so conspicuous, even then had 500 Jews. When we remember how rare are Jews in Greece to-day, except there and at Corfù, their presence in such numbers in the twelfth century is all the more strange. Nor were they all engaged in money-making. The worthy rabbi met Jews at Thebes who were learned in the Talmud, while the Greek clergy had also some literary representatives. It was about this time that the biography of St Nikon was composed; the philosophical and theological writings of Nicholas, Bishop of Methone, and Gregory, the Metropolitan of Corinth, belonged to the same epoch. Athens, after a long eclipse, had once more become a place of study. Yet, in point of wealth, Athens was inferior to several other Greek cities, and perhaps for that reason had no Jewish colony. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Greek Metropolitan of Athens before the Latin conquest, who was appointed about 1175, a full if somewhat pessimistic account of the condition of his diocese, which then included ten bishoprics. Michael was a man of distinguished family, a brother of the Byzantine statesman and historian, Niketas Choniates, and a pupil of the great Homeric scholar, Eustathios, who was Archbishop of Salonika. An ardent classical scholar, he had been enchanted at the prospect of taking up his abode in the episcopal residence on the Akropolis, of which he had formed the most glorified idea. But the golden dream of the learned divine vanished at the touch of reality. It was said of the Philhellenes, who went to aid the Greeks in the War of Independence, that they expected to find the Peloponnese filled with “Plutarch’s men”; finding that the modern Greeks were not ancient heroes and sages, they at once put them down as scoundrels and cut-throats. The worthy Michael seems to have experienced the same disillusionment and to have committed the same error as the Philhellenes. Fallen walls and rickety houses fringing mean streets gave him a bad impression as he entered the city in triumphal procession. His cathedral, it is true, with its frescoes and its offerings from the time of Basil the Bulgar-slayer, with its eternal lamp, the wonder of every pilgrim, and with the noble memories of the golden age of Perikles which clung round its venerable structure, seemed to him superior to Sta Sophia in all its glory, a palace worthy of a king. And what bishop could boast of a minster such as the Parthenon? But the Athenians, “the off-spring of true-born Athenians,” as he styled them in his pompous inaugural address, did not appreciate, could scarcely even understand, the academic graces of his style. The shallow soil of Attica had become a parched desert, where little or no water was; the classic fountain of Kallirrhoe had ceased to run, the olive-yards were withered up by the drought. The silk-weavers and dyers, traces of whose work have been found in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, had disappeared. Emigration and the exactions of the Byzantine officials completed the tale of woe, which Michael was ever ready to pour into the ear of a sympathetic correspondent. In 1198, he addressed a memorial to the Emperor Alexios Comnenos III, on behalf of the Athenians, from which we learn that the city was free from the jurisdiction of the provincial governor, who resided at Thebes, and who was not even allowed to enter the city, which, like Patras and Monemvasia, was governed by its own archontes. But it appears that the governor none the less quartered himself on the inhabitants, and had thrice imposed higher ship-money on Athens than on Thebes and Chalkis. Nor did the Metropolitan hesitate to tell another Emperor, Isaac Angelos, that Athens was too poor to present him with the usual coronation offering of a golden wreath. Yet, when the Lord High Admiral came to Athens, he found merchantmen in the Piræus, and the Government raised more out of the impoverished inhabitants than out of Thebes and Eubœa. We must therefore not take too literally all the rhetorical complaints of the archbishop, which are incompatible with the great luxury of the Athenian Court under the French Dukes in the next century. As a good friend of Athens, he was anxious to make the city appear as poor as possible in the eyes of a grasping Government, for in the East it has always been a dangerous thing to appear rich. As a cultured man of the world, he exaggerated the “barbarism”—such is his own phrase, which would have staggered the ancient Athenians—of the spot where his lot had been cast. He derided the Attic Greek of his time as a rude dialect, and told his classical friends that few of the historic landmarks in Attica had preserved their ancient names pure and undefiled. Sheep grazed, he said, among the remains of the Painted Porch. “I live in Athens,” he wrote in a poem on the decay of the city, “yet it is not Athens that I see.” Yet Athens was at least spared the horrors of the sack of Salonika by the Normans of Sicily, whose great invasion in 1185 touched only the fringe of Greece.

Then, as in the war which broke out between Venice and the Empire some years earlier, it was the islands which suffered. After the attack by the mob on the Latin quarter of Constantinople, those Latins who escaped revenged themselves by preying upon the dwellers in the Ægean, whose flourishing state had been noted by Edrisi before that terrible visitation. Cephalonia and Zante were now permanently severed from the Byzantine sway, many Italians settled there, and after succumbing to Margaritone, the Sicilian admiral, Corfù, then a very rich island, became for some years the home of Vetrano, a Latin pirate, who was soon the terror of the Greek coasts. As if this were not enough, Isaac Angelos robbed many of the churches of their ornaments and pictures for the benefit of his capital, such as the famous picture at Monemvasia of Our Lord being dragged to the Cross, and extortion once more roused an insurrection in the Theme of Nikopolis. His successor injured Greek trade by granting most extensive privileges to the Venetians, who secured the commercial supremacy in the Levant. The Byzantine State was becoming visibly weaker every day, and the re-establishment of the second Bulgarian Empire suggested to a bold official, Manuel Kamytzes, the idea of carving out, with Bulgarian aid, a kingdom for himself in Greece. His attempt failed, but the growth of feudalism had loosened the old ties which bound that country to Constantinople. The power of the landed aristocracy, the archontes, as they were called, had gone on growing since the days of Danielis of Patras. Their rivalries threatened the Greek towns with the scenes which disgraced the cities of mediæval Italy, and some of them, like the great clan of Sgouros at Nauplia, were hereditary nobles of almost princely position. Large estates, the curse of ancient Italy, had grown up in Greece; the Empress Euphrosyne, for example, was owner of a vast property in Thessaly, which included several flourishing towns. Moreover, that province was no longer inhabited by a mainly Greek population; in the twelfth century it had passed so completely under Wallachian influence that it was known as Great Wallachia, and its colonists were the ancestors of those Koutso-Wallachs, who still pasture their herds in the country near the Thessalian frontier, descending to Bœotia in the winter, and who, in the war of 1897, were on the Turkish side. Finally a debased currency pointed to the financial decline of the Byzantine Government. In short, the Empire was ripe for the Latin conquest. It was not long delayed.

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.

Piracy was then, as so often, the curse of the islands and the deeply indented coast of Greece. We learn from the English Chronicle ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, which gives a graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, that many of the islands were uninhabited from fear of pirates, and that others were their chosen lairs. Cephalonia and Ithake, which now appears under its mediæval name of Val di Compare—first used, so far as I know by the Genoese historian, Caffaro, in the first half of the twelfth century—had a specially evil reputation, and bold was the sailor who dared venture through the channel between them. Near Athens, the island of Ægina was a stronghold of corsairs, who injured the property of the Athenian Church, and dangerously wounded the nephew of the Metropolitan. Yet the remedy for piracy was almost worse than the disease. Well might the anxious Metropolitan tell the Lord High Admiral, that the Athenians regarded their proximity to the sea as the greatest of their misfortunes.

Besides the Byzantine officials and the pirates, the Greeks had a third set of tormentors in the shape of a brood of native tyrants, whose feuds divided city against city and divided communities into rival parties. Even where the Emperor had been nominally sovereign, the real power was in the hands of local magnates, who had revived, on the eve of the Frankish conquest, the petty tyrannies of ancient Greece. Under the dynasty of the Comneni, who imitated and introduced the ways of Western chivalry, feudalism had already made considerable inroads into the East. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, local families were in possession of large tracts of territory which they governed almost like independent princes. Of all these archontes, as they were called, the most powerful was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had extended his sway over Argos “of the goodly steeds,” and had seized the city and fortress of Corinth, proudly styling himself by a high-sounding Byzantine title, and placing his fortunes under the protection of St Theodore the Warrior. The manners of these local magnates were no less savage than those of the Western barons of the same period. Thus, Sgouros on one occasion invited the Archbishop of Corinth to dinner, and then put out the eyes of his guest, and hurled him over the rocks of the citadel. The contemporary historian Niketas has painted in the darkest colours the character of the Greek archontes, upon whom he lays the chief responsibility for the evils which befell their country. He speaks of them as “inflamed by ambition against their own fatherland, slavish men, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of fighting the Latins.” The Emperor and historian, John Cantacuzene, gives much the same description of their descendants a century and a half later.

Such was the condition of Greece, when Boniface and his army emerged from the vale of Tempe and marched across the plain of Thessaly to Larissa. He bestowed that ancient city upon a Lombard noble, who henceforth styled himself Guglielmo de Larsa from the name of his fief. Velestino, the ancient Pheræ, the scene of the legend of Admetos and Alcestis, and the site of the modern battle, fell to the share of Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, whose name must have proved a stumbling-block to his Thessalian vassals. The army then took the usual route by way of Pharsala and Domoko—names familiar alike in the ancient and modern history of Greek warfare—down to Lamia and thence across the Trachinian plain to Thermopylæ, where Sgouros was awaiting it. But the memories of Leonidas failed to inspire the archon of Nauplia to follow his example. Niketas tells us that the mere sight of the Latin knights in their coats of mail sufficed to make him flee straight to his own fastness of Akrocorinth, leaving the pass undefended. Conscious of its strength—for Thermopylæ must have been far more of a defile then than now—Boniface resolved to secure it permanently against attack. He therefore invested the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, nicknamed by the Greeks “Marchesopoulo,” with the fief of Boudonitza, which commanded the other end of the pass. Thus arose the famous Marquisate of Boudonitza, which was destined to play an important part in the Frankish history of Greece, and which, after a continuous existence of over two centuries, as guardian of the Northern marches, has left a memory of its fallen greatness in the ruins of the castle and chapel of its former lords, of whose descendants, the Zorzi of Venice, there are still living—so Mr Horatio Brown informs me—some thirty representatives in that city. Following the present carriage-road from Lamia to the Corinthian Gulf, Boniface established another defensive post at the pass of Gravia, so famous centuries afterwards in the War of Independence, conferring it as a fief on the two brothers Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer. At the foot of Parnassos, on the site of the ancient Amphissa, he next founded the celebrated barony of Salona, which lasted almost as long as the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Upon the almost Cyclopean stones of the classic Akropolis of Amphissa, which Philip of Macedon had destroyed fifteen centuries before, Thomas de Stromoncourt built himself the fortress, of which the majestic ruins—perhaps the finest Frankish remains in Greece—still stand among the cornfields on the hill above the modern town. According to the local tradition, the name of Salona, which the place still bears in common parlance, despite the usual official efforts to revive the classical terminology, is derived from the King of Salonika, its second founder. The lord of Salona soon extended his sway down to the harbour of Galaxidi, and the barony became so important that two at least of the house of Stromoncourt struck coins of their own, which are still preserved.

Boniface next marched into Bœotia, where the people, glad to be relieved from the oppression of Sgouros, at once submitted. Thebes joyfully opened her gates, and then the invaders pursued their way to Athens. The Metropolitan thought it useless to defend the city, and a Frankish guard was soon stationed on the Akropolis. The Crusaders had no respect for the great Cathedral. To these soldiers of fortune the classic glories of the Parthenon appealed as little as the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. The rich treasury of the Cathedral was plundered, the holy vessels were melted down, the library which the Metropolitan had collected was dispersed. Unable to bear the sight, Akominatos quitted the scene where he had laboured so long, and, after wandering about for a time, finally settled down in the island of Keos, whence he could at least see the coast of Attica.

Thebes with Bœotia and Athens with Attica and the Megarid were bestowed by the King of Salonika upon his trusty comrade in arms, Othon de la Roche, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle a serious dispute between him and the Emperor Baldwin, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between Boniface’s daughter and Baldwin’s brother and successor. Thus, in the words of a monkish chronicler, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans.” The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had thus succeeded to the glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself Sire d’Athènes, or Dominus Athenarum in official documents, which his Greek subjects magnified into “the Great Lord” (Μέγας κύρ), and Dante, who had probably heard that such had been the title of the first Frankish ruler of Athens, transferred it by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Half a century after the conquest, Othon’s nephew and successor, Guy I, received, at his request, the title of Duke from Louis IX of France—and Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Chaucer in The Knight’s Tale have by a similar anachronism conferred the ducal title of the De la Roche upon Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to the Lord of Athens on the part of the Greeks. Later Venetian authors, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story, that the Athenians sent an embassy to offer their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated “not without bloodshed by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche.”

We naturally ask ourselves what was the appearance and condition of the most famous city of the ancient world at the time of Othon’s accession, and the voluminous writings of the eminent man who was Metropolitan at that moment, which have been published by Professor Lampros of Athens, throw a flood of light upon the Athens of the beginning of the thirteenth century. The only Athenian manufactures were soap and the weaving of monkish habits, but the ships of the Piræus still took part in the purple-fishing off the lonely island of Gyaros, the Botany Bay of the Roman Empire. There was still some trade at the Piræus, for the Byzantine Admiral had found vessels there. It was then guarded by the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, which gave the harbour its mediæval name of Porto Leone, and on which Harold Hardrada, afterwards slain at Stamford Bridge, had scratched his name nearly two centuries before. We may infer, too, from the mention of Athens in the commercial treaties between Venice and the Byzantine Empire that the astute Republicans saw some prospect of making money there. But the “thin soil” of Attica was as unproductive as in the days of Thucydides, and yielded nothing but oil, honey, and wine, the last strongly flavoured with resin, as it still is, so that the Metropolitan could write to a friend that it “seems to be pressed from the juice of the pine rather than from that of the grape.” The harvest was always meagre, and famines were common. Even ordinary necessaries were not always obtainable. Akominatos could not find a decent carriage-builder in the place; and, in his despair at the absence of blacksmiths and workers in iron, he was constrained to apply to Athens the words of Jeremiah: “the bellows are burnt.” Emigration, still the curse of Greece, was draining off the able-bodied poor, so that the population had greatly diminished, and the city threatened to become what Aristophanes had called “a Scythian wilderness.”

Externally, the visitor to the Athens of that day, must have been struck by the marked contrast between the splendid monuments of the classic age and the squalid surroundings of the mediæval town. The walls were lying in ruins, the houses of the emigrants had been pulled down, the streets, where once the sages of antiquity had walked, were now desolate. But the hand of the invader and the tooth of time had, on the whole, dealt gently with the Athenian monuments. The Parthenon, converted long before into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Athens, was almost as little damaged, as if it had only just been built. The metopes, the pediments, and the frieze were still intact, and remained so when, more than two centuries later, Cyriacus of Ancona, the first archæologist who had ever visited Athens during the Frankish period, drew his sketch of the Parthenon, which is still preserved in Berlin and of which a copy by Sangallo may be seen in the Vatican library. On the walls were the frescoes, traces of which are still visible, executed by order of the Emperor Basil II, “the slayer of the Bulgarians,” nearly two centuries earlier. Over the altar was a golden dove, representing the Holy Ghost, and ever flying with perpetual motion. In the cathedral, too, was an ever-burning lamp, fed by oil that never failed, which was the marvel of the pilgrims. So widespread was the fame of the Athenian Minster, that the great folk of Constantinople, in spite of their supercilious contempt for the provinces and their dislike of travel, came to do obeisance there. Of the other ancient buildings on the sacred rock, the graceful temple of Nike Apteros had been turned into a chapel; the Erechtheion had become a church of the Saviour, or a chapel of the Virgin, while the episcopal residence, which is known to have then been on the Akropolis, was probably in the Propylæa. The whole Akropolis had for centuries been made into a fortress, the only defence which Athens then possessed, strong enough to have resisted the attack of a Greek magnate like Sgouros, but incapable of repulsing a Latin army. Already strange legends and new names had begun to grow round some of the classical monuments. The Choragic monument of Lysikrates was already popularly known as “the lantern of Demosthenes,” its usual designation during the Turkish domination, when it became the Capuchin Convent, serving in 1811 as a study to Lord Byron, who from within its walls launched his bitter poem against the filcher of the Elgin marbles. But, even at the beginning of the thirteenth century, many of the ancient names of places lingered in the mouths of the people. The classically cultured Metropolitan was gratified as a good Philhellene, to hear that the Piræus and Hymettos, Eleusis and Marathon, the Areopagos and Kallirrhoe, Salamis and Ægina were still called by names, which the contemporaries of Perikles had used, even though the Areopagos was nothing but a bare rock, the plain of Marathon yielded no corn, and the “beautifully-flowing” fountain had ceased to flow. But new, uncouth names were beginning to creep in; thus, the partition treaty of 1204 describes Salamis as “Culuris” (or, “the lizard”), a vulgar name, derived from the shape of the island, which I have heard used in Attica at the present day.

Of the intellectual condition of Athens we should form but a low estimate, if we judged entirely from the lamentations of the elegant Byzantine scholar whom fate had made its Metropolitan. Akominatos had found that his tropes, and fine periods, and classical allusions were far over the heads of the Athenians who came to hear him, and who talked in his cathedral, even though that cathedral was the Parthenon. He wrote that his long residence in Greece had made him a barbarian. Yet he was able to add to his store of manuscripts in this small provincial town. Moreover, there is some evidence to prove that, even at this period, Athens was a place of study, whither Georgians from the East and English from the West came to obtain a liberal education. Matthew Paris tells us of Master John of Basingstoke, Archdeacon of Leicester in the reign of Henry III, who used often to say, that whatever scientific knowledge he possessed had been acquired from the youthful daughter of the Archbishop of Athens. This young lady could forecast the advent of pestilences, thunderstorms, eclipses, and earthquakes. From learned Greeks at Athens Master John professed to have heard some things of which the Latins had no knowledge; he found there the testaments of the twelve Patriarchs, and he brought back to England the Greek numerals and many books, including a Greek grammar which had been compiled for him at Athens. The same author tells us, too, of “certain Greek philosophers”—that is, in mediæval Greek parlance, monks—who came from Athens at this very time to the Court of King John, and disputed about nice sharp quillets of theology with English divines. It is stated, also, though on indifferent authority, as Mr F. C. Conybeare of Oxford kindly informs me, that the Georgian poet, Chota Roustavéli, and other Georgians spent several years at Athens on the eve of the Frankish conquest.

Othon de la Roche showed his gratitude to his benefactor, the King of Salonika, by accompanying him in his attack upon the strongholds of Sgouros in the Peloponnese. The Franks routed the Greek army at the Isthmus of Corinth, and while Othon laid siege to the noble castle above that town, Boniface proceeded to the attack on Nauplia. There he was joined by a man, who was destined to be the conqueror and ruler of the peninsula.

It chanced that, a little before the capture of Constantinople, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, nephew of the quaint chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, had set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine. On his arrival in Syria, he heard of the great achievements of the Crusaders, and resolved without loss of time to join them. But his ship was driven out of its course by a violent storm, and Geoffroy was forced to take shelter in the harbour of Methone on the coast of Messenia. During the winter of 1204, which he spent at that spot, he received an invitation from a local magnate to join him in an attack on the lands of the neighbouring Greeks. Villehardouin, nothing loth, placed his sword at the disposal of the Greek traitor, and success crowned the arms of these unnatural allies. But the Greek archon died, and his son, more patriotic or more prudent than his father, repudiated the dangerous alliance with the Frankish stranger. But it was too late. Villehardouin had discovered the fatal secret, that the Greeks of the Peloponnese were an unwarlike race, whose land would fall an easy conquest to a resolute band of Latins. At this moment, tidings reached him that Boniface was besieging Nauplia. He at once set out on a six days’ journey across a hostile country to seek his aid. In the camp he found his old friend and fellow-countryman, Guillaume de Champlitte, who was willing to assist him. He described to Champlitte the richness of the land which men called “the Morea”—a term which now occurs for the first time in history, and which seems to have been originally applied to the coast of Elis and thence extended to the whole peninsula, just as the name Italy, originally a part of Calabria, has similarly spread over the whole of that country. He professed his readiness to recognise Champlitte as his liege lord in return for his aid, and Boniface consented, after some hesitation, to their undertaking. With a hundred knights and some men-at-arms, the two friends rode out from the camp before Nauplia to conquer the peninsula.

The conquest of the Morea has been compared with that of England by the Normans. In both cases a single pitched battle decided the fate of the country, but in the Morea, the conquerors did not, as in England, amalgamate with the conquered. The Hastings of the Peloponnese was fought in the olive-grove of Koundoura, in the North-East of Messenia, and the little Frankish force of between 500 and 700 men easily routed the over-confident Greeks, aided by the Slavs of Taygetos, who altogether numbered from 4000 to 6000. After this, one place after another fell into the hands of the Franks, who showed towards the conquered that tact which we believe to be one of the chief causes of our own success in dealing with subject races. Provided that their religion was respected, the Greeks were not unwilling to accept the Franks as their masters, and on this point the conquerors, who were not bigots, made no difficulties. By the year 1212, the whole of the peninsula was Frankish, except where the Greek flag still waved over the impregnable rock of Monemvasia, the St Michael’s Mount of Greece, and where at the two stations of Methone and Korone in Messenia Venice had raised the lion-banner of St Mark. Insignificant as they are now, those twin colonies were of great value to the Venetian traders, and there is a whole literature about them in the Venetian Archives. All the galleys stopped there on the way to Syria and Crete; pilgrims to the Holy Land found a welcome there in “the German house,” founded by the Teutonic Knights, and as late as 1532 there was a Christian Governor at Korone. The population was then removed to Sicily, and of those exiles the present Albanian monks of Grottaferrata are the descendants.

I have now described the conquest of the mainland; it remains to speak of the islands, which had mostly been allotted to Venice by the treaty of partition. But the shrewd Government saw that its resources could not stand the strain of conquering and administering the large group of the Cyclades. It was, therefore, decided to leave to private citizens the task of occupying them. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that day, and on the bench of the Consular Court, as we should now call it, at Constantinople, sat the very man for such an enterprise—Marco Sanudo, nephew of “the old Doge Dandolo.” Sanudo descended from the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, equipped eight galleys and was soon master of seventeen islands, some of which he distributed as fiefs to his comrades. Naxos alone offered any real resistance, and, in 1207, the conqueror founded the Duchy of “the Dodekannesos” (or “Twelve Islands,” as the Byzantines called it), which soon received the title of the “Duchy of Naxos,” or “of the Archipelago”—a corruption of the name “Ægeopelagos,” which occurs as early as a Venetian document of 1268. This delectable Duchy lasted, first under the Sanudi, and then under the Crispi, till 1566, while the Gozzadini of Bologna held seven of the islands down to 1617, and Tenos remained in Venetian hands till it was finally taken in 1715 and ceded to the Turks by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718. For persons so important as the Dukes it was necessary to invent a truly Roman genealogy; accordingly, the Paduan biographer, Zabarella, makes the Sanudi descend from the historian Livy, while the Crispi, not to be beaten, claimed Sallust as their ancestor, and may, perhaps, be regarded as the forbears of the late Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi.

The two great islands of Crete and Eubœa had very different fortunes. Crete, as we saw, was sold by Boniface to the Venetians, and remained a Venetian colony for nearly five centuries. Eubœa, or Negroponte, as it was called in the Middle Ages, was divided by Boniface into three large baronies, which were assigned to three Lombard nobles from Verona, who styled themselves the terciers, or terzieri. We have no English equivalent for the word; perhaps, borrowing a hint from Shakespeare, we may call them “the three Gentlemen of Verona.” But Venice soon established a colony, governed by a bailie, at Chalkis, the capital of the island, and the subsequent history of Negroponte shows the gradual extension of Venetian influence over the Lombards.

The seven Ionian Islands naturally fall into three divisions. Kythera (or Cerigo) in the far South; the centred group, consisting of Zante, Cephalonia, Ithake, and Levkas (or Santa Maura); and Corfù and Paxo in the North. Of these divisions, the first fell to the share of a scion of the great Venetian family of Venier—a family which traced its name and descent from Venus, and naturally claimed the island, where she had risen from the sea. Zante, Cephalonia and Ithake had a very curious history—a history long obscure, but now well ascertained. They belonged to Count Maio (or Matteo) Orsini, a member of the great Roman family, who came, as the Spanish Chronicle of the Morea informs us, from Monopoli in Apulia. This bold adventurer, half-pirate, half-crusader,—a not unusual combination in those days—thus succeeded to the realm of Odysseus, which was thenceforth known, from his title, as the County Palatine of Cephalonia. Corfù with its appendage of Paxo, was at first assigned to ten nobles of the Republic in return for an annual payment. But, ere long, those two islands, together with Levkas, which is scarcely an island at all, were included in the dominions of a Greek prince, the bastard Michael Angelos, who had slipped away from the camp of Boniface, and had established himself, by an opportune marriage with the widow of the late Byzantine governor, as independent Greek sovereign of Epeiros. His wife was a native of the country; his father had been its governor; he thus appealed to the national feelings of the natives, whose mountainous country has in all ages defied the attacks of invading armies. A man of great vigour, he soon extended his sway from his capital of Arta to Durazzo in the North, and to the Corinthian Gulf in the South, and his dominions, known as the principality, or Despotat of Epeiros, served as the rallying point of Hellenism—the only portion of Greece, except Monemvasia, which still remained Greek.

I would fain have said something of the inner life of Frankish Greece—of its society, of its literature, and of the great influence which women exercised in its affairs. But for these subjects there is no time left. I would only add, in conclusion, that the Frankish conquest of Greece affords the clue to one of the vexed problems of modern literature—the second part of Goethe’s Faust, which an American scholar, Dr Schmitt, has shown to have been inspired by the account given in the Chronicle of the Morea, a work which was first printed by Buchon in 1825, at the time when Goethe was engaged on that part of his famous tragedy. Its origin is obvious from the following lines, which he puts into the mouth of his hero:

I hail you Dukes, as forth ye sally

Beneath the rule of Sparta’s Queen[44]!

Thine, German, be the hand that forges

Defence for Corinth and her bays:

Achaia, with its hundred gorges,

I give thee, Goth, to hold and raise.

Towards Elis, Franks, direct your motion;

Messene be the Saxon’s state:

The Norman claim and sweep the Ocean,

And Argolis again make great.

2. FRANKISH SOCIETY IN GREECE

We saw in the last essay, how at the beginning of the thirteenth century a small body of Franks conquered nearly the whole of Greece, and how, as the result of their conquests, a group of Latin states sprang into existence in that country—the Duchies of Athens and of the Archipelago, the principality of Achaia, the County Palatine of Cephalonia, the three baronies of Eubœa, and the Venetian colony of Crete, while at two points alone—in the mountains of Epeiros and on the isolated rock of Monemvasia, so well-known to our ancestors as the place whence they obtained their Malmsey wine—the Greek flag still waved. In the present essay, I would give some account of Frankish organisation, political and ecclesiastical, of Frankish society, and of Frankish literature.

The usual tendency of the desperately logical Latin intellect, when brought face to face with a new set of political conditions, is to frame a paper constitution, absolutely perfect in theory, and absolutely unworkable in practice. But the French noblemen whom an extraordinary accident had converted into Spartan and Athenian law-givers, resisted this temptation, nor did they seek inspiration from the laws of Solon and Lycurgus. They fortunately possessed a model, the Assizes of Jerusalem which had been drawn up a century before for that Kingdom, and which, under the name of the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania—a work still preserved in a Venetian version of 1452 drawn up for the island of Eubœa—was applied to all the Frankish states in Greece. This feudal constitution, barbarous as it may seem to our modern ideas, seems to have worked well; at any rate, it was tried by the best test, that of experience, and lasted, with one small amendment, for 250 years. In Achaia, about which we have most information, a commission was appointed, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five leading Greeks, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, for the purpose of dividing the Morea into fiefs and of assigning these to the members of the conquering force according to their wealth and the numbers of their followers, and the book, or “register” as the Chronicler calls it, containing the report of this commission, was then laid before a Parliament, held at Andravida, or Andreville, in Elis, now a small village which the traveller passes in the train between Patras and Olympia, but then the capital of the principality of Achaia.

According to this Achaian Doomsday-book, twelve baronies, whose number recalls the twelve peers of Charlemagne, were created, their holders, with the other lieges, forming a High Court, which not only advised the Prince in political matters but acted as a judicial tribunal for the decision of feudal questions. In the creation of these twelve baronies due regard was paid to the fact that the Franks were a military colony in the midst of an alien, and possibly hostile, population, spread over a country possessing remarkable strategic positions. Later on, after the distribution of the baronies, strong castles were erected in each upon some natural coign of vantage, from which the baron could overawe the surrounding country. The main object of this system may be seen from the name of the famous Arcadian fortress of Matagrifon, a name given also to our Richard I’s castle at Messina[45], (“Kill-Greek,” the Greeks being usually called Grifon by the French chroniclers), built near the modern Demetsana by the baron of Akova, Gautier de Rozières, to protect the rich valley of the Alpheios. The splendid remains of the castle of Karytaina, the Greek Toledo, which dominates the gorge of that classic river, which the Franks called Charbon, still mark the spot where Hugues de Bruyères and his son Geoffroy built a stronghold out of the ruins of the Hellenic Brenthe to terrify the Slavs of Skorta, the ancient Gortys and the home of the late Greek Prime Minister, Delyannes. The special importance of these two baronies was demonstrated by the bestowal of 24 knights’ fees upon the former and of 22 upon the latter. The castle-crowned hill of Passavâ, so-called, not, as Fallmerayer imagined, from a Slavonic Passau, but from the French war-cry Passe Avant, still reminds us how Jean de Neuilly, hereditary marshal of Achaia and holder of four fiefs, once watched the restless men of Maina; and, if earthquakes have left no mediæval buildings at Vostitza, the classic Aigion, where Hugues de Lille de Charpigny received eight knights’ fees, his family name still survives in the village of Kerpine, now a station on the funicular railway between Diakophto and Kalavryta. At Kalavryta itself Othon de Tournay, and at Chalandritza to the south of Patras Audebert de la Trémouille, scion of a family famous in the history of France, were established, with twelve and four fiefs respectively. Veligosti near Megalopolis with four fell to the share of the Belgian Matthieu de Valaincourt de Mons, and Nikli near Tegea with six to that of Guillaume de Morlay. Guy de Nivelet kept the Tzakones of Leonidi in check and watched the plain of Lakonia from his barony of Geraki with its six fiefs—a castle which has been surveyed by the British School at Athens—and Gritzena, entrusted to a baron named Luke with four fiefs depending on it guarded the ravines of the mountainous region round Kalamata. Patras became the barony of Guillaume Aleman, a member of a Provençal family still existing at Corfù, and the bold baron did not scruple to build his castle out of the house and church of the Latin Archbishop. Finally, the dozen was completed by the fiefs of Kalamata and Kyparissia (or Arkadia, as it was called in the Middle Ages, when what we call Arcadia was known as Mesarea) which became the barony of Geoffroy de Villehardouin. In addition to these twelve temporal peers there were seven ecclesiastical barons, whose sees were carved out on the lines of the existing Greek organisation, and of whom Antelme of Clugny, Latin Archbishop of Patras and Primate of Achaia was the chief. The Archbishop received eight knights’ fees, the bishops four a piece, and the same number was assigned to each of the three great Military Orders of the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St John, and the Templars. When, a century later, the Templars were dissolved, their possessions went to the Knights of St John. In Elis was the domain of the Prince, and his usual residence, when he was not at Andravida, was at Lacedæmonia, or La Crémonie, as the Franks called it.

After the distribution of the baronies came the assignment of military service. All vassals were liable to render four months’ service in the field, and to spend four months in garrison (from which the prelates and the three Military Orders were alone exempted), and even during the remaining four months, which they could pass at home, they were expected to hold themselves ready to obey the summons of the Prince. After the age of 60, personal service was no longer required; but the vassal must send his son, or, if he had no son, some one else in his stead. Thus the Franks were on a constant war footing; their whole organisation was military—a fact which explains the ease with which they held down the unwarlike Greeks, so many times their superiors in numbers. This military organisation had, however, as the eminent modern Greek historian Paparregopoulos has pointed out, the effect of making the Greeks, too, imbibe in course of time something of the spirit of their conquerors. It is thus that we may explain the extraordinary contrast between the tameness with which the Greeks accepted the Frankish domination, and their frequent rebellions against that of the Turks. All over the Levant and even in Italy the Frankish chivalry of Achaia became famous. They fought against the luckless Conradin at Tagliacozzo, and the ruse, which won that battle and which Dante has ascribed to Erard de Valéry, is attributed by the Chronicle of the Morea to Prince William of Achaia. Round the Prince there grew up a hierarchy of great officials with high-sounding titles, to which the Greeks had no difficulty in fitting Byzantine equivalents. The Prince himself bore a sceptre, as the symbol of his office, when he presided over the sessions of the High Court.

We learn from the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania something about the way in which the feudal system worked in the principality of Achaia. Society was there composed of six main elements—the Prince, the holders of the twelve great baronies, the greater and lesser vassals (among whom were some Greeks), the freemen, and the serfs. The Prince and his twelve peers alone had the power of inflicting capital punishment; but even the Prince could not punish any of the barons without the consent of the greater vassals. If he were taken prisoner in battle, he could call upon his vassals to become hostages in his place, until he had raised the amount of his ransom. No one, except the twelve peers, was allowed to build a castle in Achaia without his permission, and without it any vassal, who left the country and stayed abroad, was liable to lose his fief. Leave of absence was, however, never refused if the vassal wished to claim the succession to a fief abroad, to contract a marriage, or to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, or to the Churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome or to that of St James at Compostella. But in such cases the vassals must return within two years and two days. The vassals were of two classes, the greater (or ligii) and the lesser (or homines plani homagii), who took no part in the Council of the Prince. A liege could not sell his fief without the Prince’s consent; but if the liege were a widow—for the Salic Law did not obtain in Frankish Greece, and ladies often held important fiefs—she might marry whom she pleased, except only an enemy of the Prince. When a fief fell vacant, the successor must needs appear to advance his claim within a year and a day if he were in Achaia, within two years and two days if he were abroad. It was the tricky application of this rule which led to the succession of Geoffroy de Villehardouin to the throne of Achaia. Champlitte had been summoned away to claim a fief in France, and had requested his trusted comrade in arms to act as his viceroy till he had sent a relative to take his place. When the news reached the Morea that a young cousin of Champlitte was on his way, Geoffroy resolved to use artifice in order to prevent his arrival in time. He accordingly begged the Doge to assist him, and the latter, who had excellent reasons for remaining on good terms with him, managed to entertain his passing guest at Venice for more than two months. When, at last, young Robert de Champlitte put to sea, the ship’s captain received orders to leave him ashore at Corfù, and it was with difficulty that he managed to obtain a passage from there to the Morea. When he landed there he had, however, a few days still in hand; but the crafty Villehardouin managed by marching rapidly from one place to another to avoid meeting him till the full term prescribed by the feudal pact had expired. He was then informed that he had forfeited the principality, which thus fell to Villehardouin by a legal quibble. The pious did not, however, forget to point out later on, that the crime of the founder of the dynasty was visited upon his family to the third and fourth generation, as we shall see in the sequel.

There was a great difference between feudal society in Achaia and in the Duchy of Athens. While in the principality the Prince was merely primus inter pares, at Athens the “Great Lord” had at the most one exalted noble, the head of the great house of St Omer, near his throne. It is obvious from the silence of all the authorities, that the Burgundians who settled with Othon de la Roche in his Greek dominions were men of inferior social position to himself—a fact further demonstrated by the comparative lack in Attica and Bœotia of those baronial castles, so common in the Morea. Indeed, it is probable that, in one respect, the Court of Athens under the De la Roche resembled the Court of the late King George, namely, that there was no one, except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on equal terms. But in Frankish, as in modern Athens, the family of the sovereign was soon numerous enough to form a coterie of its own. The news of their relative’s astounding fortune attracted to Attica several members of his clan from their home in Burgundy; they doubtless received their share of the good things, which had fallen to Othon; one nephew divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes, another more distant kinsman became commander of the castle of Athens. Other Burgundians will doubtless have followed in their wake, for in the thirteenth century Greece, or “New France,” as Pope Honorius III called it, was to the younger sons of French noble houses what the British colonies were fifty years ago to impecunious but energetic Englishmen. The elder Sanudo, who derived his information from his relatives, the Dukes of Naxos, specially tells us that this was the case at the Achaian Court. He says of Geoffroy II of Achaia, that “he possessed a broad domain and great riches; he was wont to send his most confidential advisers from time to time to the Courts of his vassals, to see how they lived, and how they treated their subjects. At his own Court he constantly maintained 80 knights with golden spurs, to whom he gave their pay and all that they required; so knights came from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts; others because of crimes which they had committed at home.”

There was another marked distinction between Attica and the Morea. Niketas mentions no great local magnates as settled at Athens or Thebes in the last days of the Byzantine domination, nor do we hear of such during the whole century of Burgundian rule. Thus, whereas Crete, Negroponte, and the Morea still retained old native families, which in Crete headed insurrections, in Negroponte showed a tendency to emigrate, and in the Morea held fiefs and even occasionally, as in the case of the Sgouromallaioi, intermarried with the Franks, who usually, as Muntaner tells us, took their wives from France and despised marriages with Greeks even of high degree, Athens contained no such native aristocracy. It is only towards the close of the fourteenth century that we hear of any Greeks prominent there, and then they are not nobles, but notaries. Only in the last two generations of Latin rule, is there a national party at Athens, in which the famous family of Chalkokondyles, which produced the last Athenian historian, was prominent. The Greeks of Attica were, therefore, mostly peasants, whose lot was much the same as it was all over the feudal world, namely that of serfdom. We have examples, too, of actual slavery at Athens, even in the last decades of the Latin domination.

Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small standard of classical Greece. Burgundian Athens embraced Attica, Bœotia, the Megarid, the ancient Opuntian Lokris, and the fortresses of Nauplia and Argos, which the “Great Lord” had received as a fief from the principality of Achaia in return for his services at the time of their capture. Thus situated, the Athenian state had a considerable coast-line and at least four ports—the Piræus, Nauplia, the harbour of Atalante opposite Eubœa, and Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of Corinth—the usual port of embarkation for the West. Yet the Burgundian rulers of Athens made little attempt to create a navy, confining themselves to a little amateur piracy. Venice was most jealous of any other Latin state, which showed any desire to rival her as a maritime power in the Levant, and in a treaty concluded in 1319 between the Republic and the Catalans, who then held the Duchy of Athens, it was expressly provided that they should launch no new ships in “the sea of Athens” and should dismantle those already afloat and place their tackle in the Akropolis.

We are not told where the first Frankish ruler of Athens resided, but there can be no doubt that, like his immediate successors, he fixed his capital at Thebes—for it was not till the time of the Florentine Dukes in the fifteenth century that the Propylæa at Athens became the ducal palace. The old Bœotian city continued, under the Burgundian dynasty, to be the most important place in the Athenian Duchy. The silk manufacture still continued there; for it is specially mentioned in the commercial treaty which Guy I of Athens concluded with the Genoese in 1240, and we hear of a gift of 20 silken garments from Guy II to Pope Boniface VIII. The town contained both a Genoese and a Jewish colony, and it was a nest of Hebrew poets, whose verses, if we may believe a rival bard, were one mass of barbarisms. But the great feature of Thebes was the castle, built by Nicholas II de St Omer out of the vast fortune of his wife, Princess Marie of Antioch. This huge building is described as “the finest baronial mansion in all the realm of Romania”; it contained sufficient rooms for an Emperor and his court, and the walls were covered with frescoes illustrating the conquest of the Holy Land, in which the ancestors of the Great Theban baron had played a prominent part. Unhappily, the great castle of Thebes was destroyed by the Catalans in the fourteenth century, and one stumpy tower alone remains to preserve, like the Santameri mountains in the Morea, the name and fame of the great Frankish family of St Omer.

I have spoken of the political organisation of the two chief Frankish states of Greece; I would next say something of their ecclesiastical arrangements. The policy of the Franks towards the Greek Church was more than anything else the determining factor of their success or failure in Greece, for in all ages the Greeks have regarded their Church as inseparably identified with their nationality, and even to-day the terms “Christian” and “Greek” are often used as identical terms. Now, as that fair-minded modern Greek historian, Paparregopoulos, has pointed out, the Franks were confronted at the outset with an ecclesiastical dilemma, from which there was no escape. Either they must persecute the Orthodox Church, in which case they would make bitter enemies of the persecuted clergy and of the Nicene and Byzantine Emperors; or they must tolerate it, in which case their Greek subjects would find natural leaders in the Orthodox bishops, who would sooner or later conspire against their foreign rulers. This was exactly what happened as soon as the Franks abandoned the policy of persecution for that of toleration. At first, they simply annexed the existing Greek ecclesiastical organisation, which had subsisted, with one or two small changes, ever since the days of the Emperor Leo the Philosopher, ousted the Orthodox hierarchy from their sees, and installed in their places Catholic ecclesiastics from the West.

Thus, at Athens, a Frenchman, named Bérard, became the first Catholic Archbishop of Athens, and thus began that long series which existed without a break till the time of the Turkish conquest and was subsequently renewed in 1875. Later on, however, when the Florentine Dukes of Athens, at the end of the fourteenth century, permitted the Greek Metropolitan to reside in his see, he at once entered into negotiations with the Turks, and the same phenomenon meets us at Salona and other places. As Voltaire has said, the Greek clergy “preferred the turban of a Turkish priest to the red hat of a Roman Cardinal,” and this strange preference contributed in great measure to the downfall of Latin rule in the Levant. For, throughout the long period of the Frankish domination, the Catholic Church made hardly any headway among the Greeks. The elder Sanudo, who knew the Levant better than most of his contemporaries, wrote to Pope John XXII, that the Western Powers might destroy the Byzantine Empire but could not retain their conquests, for the examples of Cyprus, Crete, the principality of Achaia, and the Duchy of Athens showed that only the foreign conquerors and not the natives belonged to the Roman faith. Even to-day, the Catholics of Greece come mostly from those Italian families, whose ancestors emigrated to the Levant in the Frankish period, and are mostly to be found just where we should expect to find them—in the Ionian Islands and the Cyclades, that is to say, in the two places where Latin rule lasted longest. Moreover, the Catholic Church did not receive the consideration which it might have reasonably expected from the Frankish rulers themselves. The correspondence of Innocent III, who sat on the Chair of St Peter at the time of the conquest, is full of complaints against the hostile attitude of the Franks towards the Roman clergy. The Archbishop of Patras was not safe even in his own palace, for the sacrilegious baron Aleman, who, as we saw, had received that town as a fief, considered the Archiepiscopal plan of fortifying the place against pirates as amateurish, carried the Primate off to prison, cut off his representative’s nose, and converted the palace and the adjacent church of St Theodore into the present castle. Geoffroy I de Villehardouin neither paid tithes himself, nor compelled his subjects to pay them; he forced the clergy to plead before the secular tribunals, and exempted the Greek priests and monks from the jurisdiction of the Catholic Archbishop. His son and successor, Geoffroy II, went even farther in this secular policy. When the Latin clergy refused to perform military service, on the ground that they owed obedience to the Pope alone, he confiscated their fiefs and devoted the funds which he thus obtained to building the great castle of Chlomoutsi, or Clermont, near Glarentza in the West of Elis, the ruins of which still remain a striking monument of the relations between Church and State in Frankish Greece. This castle took three years to construct; and, as soon as it was finished, Geoffroy laid the whole matter before Pope Honorius III. He pointed out that if the Latin priests would not help him to fight the Greeks, they would only have themselves to blame if the principality, and with it their Church, fell under the sway of those Schismatics. The Pope saw the force of this argument; the Prince ceased to appropriate the revenues of the clergy; and peace reigned between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. It is interesting to note, that, under the next Prince, the castle of Chlomoutsi became the mint of the principality, whence coins known as tournois, or tornesi, because they bore on them a representation of the Church of St Martin of Tours, were issued for more than a century. Many thousands of these coins have been found in Greece, specimens may be seen in the Doge’s Palace and in the Museo Correr at Venice, and from this Achaian currency the castle received its Italian name of Castel Tornese. The town and harbour of Glarentza near it rose to be the chief port of the principality. Boccaccio mentions Genoese merchantmen there in one of the novels of the Decameron, in which a “Prince of the Morea” is one of the characters; the famous Florentine banking house of the Peruzzi had a branch there, and Pegalotti describes to us the weights, measures, and customs duties of this flourishing commercial place.

When we come to consider the social life of Frankish Greece, we are struck by the prominent part which women played in it, and in political life as well. The Salic law did not obtain in the Latin states of the Levant, except at Naxos under the Crispi, and, without expressing any opinion upon the thorny question of female suffrage, I do not think that it can be denied that the participation of the weaker sex in the government of a purely military community had disastrous effects. It happened on two occasions that almost the entire baronage of Frankish Greece was annihilated on the field of battle, and after the former of these disasters—the battle of Pelagonia in 1259, in which Prince William of Achaia was taken prisoner by the troops of the Greek Emperor of Nice—the fate of the principality was decided by the votes of its ladies. The Emperor Michael VIII was resolved to make the best use of the advantage which the rashness of the Prince had placed within his power, and demanded, as the price of his captive’s freedom, the cession of the three great fortresses of Monemvasia, Mistra, and Maina, the first of which had only recently been surrendered by the Greeks to the Franks, while the other two had been erected by Prince William himself. The question was submitted by Duke Guy I of Athens, who was then acting as Regent of Achaia, to a Parliament, convened at Nikli in 1262. At this “Ladies’ Parliament” there were only two other men present—for all the men of mark were either in prison or had been slain at Pelagonia—and their wives or widows had to take their place at the Council. Naturally, an assembly so composed was guided by sentiment rather than by reasons of high policy. In vain the statesmanlike Duke of Athens argued in scriptural language, that “it were better that one man should die for the people than that the other Franks of the Morea should lose the fruits of their fathers’ labours”; in vain, to show his disinterestedness, he offered to take the Prince’s place in prison or to pledge his own Duchy to provide a ransom. The conjugal feelings of the ladies prevailed, the three castles were surrendered, and from that day dates the gradual recovery of the Morea by the Greeks. Two noble dames were sent, in strict accordance with feudal law, as hostages for their lord to Constantinople, and it is interesting to note the ingratitude with which one of them was treated by him in the sequel. While she was still in prison on his account, the great barony of Matagrifon, to which she was entitled as next of kin, fell vacant. But the Prince, who wished to bestow it upon one of his daughters, declined to invest her with it, on the technical ground that she had permitted the period of time allowed by the feudal code to elapse without appearing to claim the fief. Unable to obtain justice, she resorted to matrimony with one of the powerful barons of St Omer as the only means of compelling the Prince to give her what was hers. In this she was partially successful; but the incident throws a lurid light on the chivalry of the brave warrior, whom the author of the Chronicle of the Morea has made his hero.

It would be interesting to present a few portraits of the leading women of Frankish Greece. There were the two daughters of Prince William, of whom the elder, Princess Isabelle, succeeded him and whose hand was eagerly sought in marriage by three husbands; her younger sister, Marguérite, died in the grim castle of Chlomoutsi, the prisoner of the turbulent Moreote barons, who never forgave her for having married her daughter without their approval. There was Isabelle’s daughter, Matilda, who had already been twice a widow when she was only 23, and who was left all alone to govern the principality, where every proud feudal lord claimed to do what was right in his own eyes. Compelled by King Robert “the Wise” of Naples to go through the form of marriage with his brother, John of Gravina, a man whom she loathed, she was imprisoned for her contumacity in the Castel dell’ Uovo of Naples. There were the three Duchesses of Athens—Helene Angela, widow of Duke William, Regent for her son, and the first Greek who had governed Athens for 80 years; Maria Melissene, widow of Duke Antonio I, who tried to betray the Duchy to her countrymen the Greeks; and most tragic of all, Chiara Giorgio, a veritable villain of melodrama, widow of Nerio II, who fell in love with a young Venetian noble, induced him by the offer of her hand and land to poison the wife whom he had left behind in his palace at Venice, and expiated her crime before the altar of the Virgin at Megara at the hands of the last Frankish Duke of Athens, thus causing the Turkish conquest. Of like mould was the Dowager Countess of Salona, whose evil government drove her subjects to call in the Turks, and whose beautiful daughter, the last Countess of that historic castle, ended her days in the Sultan’s harem. Another of these masculine dames was Francesca Acciajuoli, wife of Carlo Tocco, the Palatine Count of Cephalonia, the ablest and most masterful woman of the Latin Orient, who used to sign her letters in cinnabar ink “Empress of the Romans.” In her castles at Sta Maura and at Cephalonia she presided over a bevy of fair ladies, and Froissart has quaintly described the splendid hospitality with which she received the French nobles, whom the Turks had taken prisoners at the battle of Nikopolis on the Danube. “The ladies,” writes the old French chronicler, “were exceeding glad to have such noble society, for Venetian and Genoese merchants were, as a rule, the only strangers who came to their delightful island.” He tells us, that Cephalonia was ruled by women, who scorned not, however, to make silken coverings so fine, that there was none like them. Fairies and nymphs inhabited this ancient realm of Odysseus, where a mediæval Penelope held sway in the absence of her lord! Yet another fair dame of the Frankish world, the Duchess Fiorenza Sanudo of Naxos, occupied for years the astute diplomatists of Venice, who were resolved that so eligible a young widow should marry none but a Venetian, and who at last, when suitors of other nationalities became pressing, had the Duchess kidnapped and conveyed to Crete, where she was plainly told that, if she ever wished to see her beloved Naxos again, she must marry the candidate of the Most Serene Republic. And finally, we have the portrait of a more feminine woman than most of these ladies, Marulla of Verona, a noble damsel of Negroponte, whom old Ramon Muntaner describes from personal acquaintance as “one of the fairest Christians in the world, the best woman and the wisest that ever was in that land.”

Social life must have been far more brilliant in the hey-day of the Frankish rule than anything that Greece had witnessed for centuries. The Chronicle of the Morea tells us, that the Achaian nobles in their castles “lived the fairest life that a man can,” and has preserved the account of the great tournament on the Isthmus of Corinth—a mediæval revival of the Isthmian games—which Philip of Savoy, at that time Prince of Achaia, organised in 1305. From all parts of the Frankish world men came in answer to the summons of the Prince. There were Duke Guy II of Athens with a brave body of knights, the Marquess of Boudonitza and the three barons of Eubœa, the Duke of the Archipelago and the Palatine Count of Cephalonia, the Marshal of Achaia, Nicholas de St Omer, with a following of Theban vassals, and many another lesser noble. Messengers had been sent throughout the highlands and islands of the Latin Orient to proclaim to all and sundry, how seven champions had come from beyond the seas and did challenge the chivalry of Romania to joust with them. Never had the fair land of Hellas seen a braver sight than that presented by the lists at Corinth in the lovely month of May, when the sky and the twin seas were at their fairest. More than 1000 knights and barons took part in the tournament, which lasted for twenty days, while all the fair ladies of Achaia and Athens “rained influence” on the combatants. There were the seven champions, clad in their armour of green taffetas covered with scales of gold; there was the Prince of Achaia, who acquitted himself right nobly in the lists, as a son of Savoy should, with all his household. Most impetuous of all was the Duke of Athens, eager to match his skill in horsemanship and with the lance against Master William Bouchart, accounted one of the best jousters of the West. The chivalrous Bouchart would fain have spared his less experienced antagonist; but the Duke, who had cunningly padded himself beneath his plate armour, was determined to meet him front to front; their horses collided with such force that the iron spike of Bouchart’s charger pierced Guy’s steed between the shoulders, so that horse and rider rolled in the dust. St Omer would fain have met the Count John of Cephalonia in the lists; but the Palatine, fearing the Marshal’s doughty arm, pretended that his horse could not bear him into the ring, nor could he be shamed into the combat, when Bouchart rode round and round the lists on the animal, crying aloud, “This is the horse which would not go to the jousts!” So they kept high revel on the Isthmus; alas! it was the last great display of the chivalry of “New France”; six years later, many a knight who had ridden proudly past the dames of the Morea, lay a mangled corpse on the swampy plain of Bœotia, the victim of the knife of Aragon. Besides tournaments, hunting was one of the great attractions of life in mediæval Greece; we hear, too, of an archery match in Crete, at which the archers represented different nations; we are told of great balls held in Negroponte, which the gay Lombard society of that island attended; and mention is made of the jongleurs who were attached to the brilliant Court of Thebes. Muntaner, who knew Duke Guy II and had visited his capital, has given us a charming account of the ceremony in the Theban Minster, when the last De la Roche came of age and received the order of knighthood—“a duty which the King of France or the Emperor himself would have thought it an honour to perform, for the Duke was one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a King, and eke one of the richest.” The episode gives us some idea of the wealth and splendour and open-handed generosity of the Burgundian Dukes of Athens.

In conclusion, I should like to say something about Frankish influence on the language and literature of Greece. We are specially told that the Franks of Achaia spoke most excellent French; but, at the same time, there is direct evidence, that in the second generation, at any rate, they also spoke Greek. The Chronicle of the Morea describes how Prince William of Achaia after the battle of Pelagonia addressed his captor in that language, and Duke John of Athens, according to Sanudo, once used a Greek phrase, which is a quotation from Herodotus. Later on, the Florentine Dukes of Athens drew up many of their documents in Greek, just as Mohammed II employed that language in his diplomatic communications. The Venetian Governors of Eubœa, however, who held office for only two years, had to employ an interpreter, who is specially mentioned in one of the Venetian documents. While a number of French feudal and Italian terms crept into the Greek language, as may be seen in the Cyclades at the present day, and especially in the Venetian island of Tenos, the Franks covered the map of Greece with a strange and weird nomenclature. Thus, Lacedæmonia became “La Crémonie,” the first syllable being mistaken for the definite article; Athens was known as “Satines,” or “Sethines,” Thebes as “Estives,” Naupaktos as “Lepanto,” Zeitounion, the modern Lamia, as “Gipton,” Kalavryta as “La Grite,” Salona as “La Sole,” Lemnos as “Stalimene,” and the island of Samothrace as “Sanctus Mandrachi.” Most wonderful transformation of all, Cape Sunium becomes in one Venetian document “Pellestello” (πολλοὶ στῦλοι), from the “Many columns” of the temple, which gave it its usual Italian name of “Cape Colonna.”

The Franks have too often been accused of being barbarians, whereas there is evidence that they were not indifferent to literature. Among the conquerors were not a few poets. Conon de Béthune was a writer of poems as well as an orator; Geoffroy I of Achaia composed some verses which have been preserved; Rambaud de Vaqueiras, the troubadour of Boniface of Montferrat, was rewarded for his songs by lands in Greece. Count John II Orsini of Epeiros ordered Constantine Hermoniakos to make a paraphrase of Homer in octosyllabic verse. We may say of this production, as Bentley said of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, “it is a pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer”; still it is interesting to find a Latin ruler patronising Greek literature. The courtly poet was so delighted that he tells us that his master was “a hero and a scholar,” and that the Lady Anna of Epeiros “excelled all women that ever lived in beauty, wisdom, and learning.” Historical accuracy compels me to add that the “heroic and scholarly” Count had gained his throne by the murder of his brother, while the “beautiful, wise and learned” Anna assassinated her husband! Throughout a great part of the Frankish period, too, people were engaged in transcribing Greek manuscripts. Several Athenians copied medical treatises, William of Meerbeke, the Latin Archbishop of Corinth in 1280, whose name survives in the Argive Church of Merbaka[46], translated Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, and Proklos, and one of the Tocchi—the Italian family which followed the Orsini as Counts of Cephalonia—employed a monk to copy for him manuscripts of Origen and Chrysostom. Yet, in 1309, a Theban canon had to go to the West to continue his studies; and, a century later, the Archbishop of Patras obtained leave to study at the University of Bologna.

But the chief literary monument of Frankish Greece is the Chronicle of the Morea—the very curious work which exists in four versions, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. The Italian version need not detain us, for it contains no new facts and is merely an abbreviated translation of the Greek, chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary, but characteristic, mutilation of the proper names. The Spanish version, made in 1393 by order of Heredia, the romantic Grand-Master of the Knights of St John, and the French version, found in the castle of St Omer—another proof of Frankish culture—are of great historic interest. But by far the most remarkable of all the four versions is the Greek—a poem of some 9000 lines in the usual jog-trot “political” metre of most mediæval and modern Greek poetry, composed, in my opinion, by a half-caste lawyer, who obviously had the most enthusiastic admiration for the Franks, to whom he doubtless owed his place and salary. With the exception of a few French feudal terms, this most remarkable poem may be read without the slightest difficulty by any modern Greek scholar,—a striking proof that the vulgar Greek spoken to-day is almost exactly the same as that in common use in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the Chronicle was composed. As regards its literary merits, opinions differ. As a rule, it is merely prose in the form of verse; but here and there, the author rises to a much higher level, and his work is a store-house of social, and especially legal information, even where his chronology and history have been shown by documentary evidence to be inaccurate.

The bright and chivalrous Frankish society has long passed away; but a few Italian and Catalan families still linger in the Cyclades, there are still Venetian names and titles in the Ionian Islands; the Tocchi were till lately represented at Naples and the Zorzi still are at Venice; the towers of Thebes and Paros, the Norman arch of Andravida, the noble castles of Karytaina and Chlomoutsi, and the carvings and frescoes of Geraki still remind us of the romance of feudal Greece, when every coign of vantage had its lord, and from every donjon floated the banner of a baron.

3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE

It is satisfactory to note that, after a long period of neglect, the great romance of mediæval Greek history is finding interpreters. Since George Finlay revealed to the British public the fact that the annals of Greece were by no means a blank in the Middle Ages, and that Athens was a flourishing city in the thirteenth century, much fresh material has been collected, by both Greek and German scholars, from the Venetian and other archives, which throws fresh light upon the dark places of the Latin rule in the Levant. Finlay’s work can never lose its value. Its author had not the microscopic zeal for genealogies and minutiæ which distinguished Hopf; but he possessed gifts and advantages of a far higher order. He knew Greece and the Greeks as no other foreign scholar has known them; he had a deep insight into the causes of political and social events; he drew his picture, as the Germans say, in grossen Zügen, and he left a work which no student of mediæval Greece can afford to ignore, and every statesman engaged in Eastern affairs would do well to read. All that is now wanted is for some one to do in England what Gregorovius did in so agreeable a manner for the Germans—to make the dry bones of the Frank chivalry live again, and to set before us in flesh and blood the Dukes of Athens and the Princes of Achaia, the Marquesses of Boudonitza, the Lords of Salona, the Dukes of the Archipelago, and the three barons of Eubœa. Despite the vandalism of mere archæologists, who can see nothing of interest in an age when Greeks were shaky in their declensions, and of bigoted purists among the Greeks themselves, who strive to erase every evidence of foreign rule alike from their language and their land, the feudal castles of the Morea, of continental Greece, and of the islands, still remind us of the days when classic Hellas, as Pope Honorius III said, was “New France,” when armoured knights and fair Burgundian damsels attended Mass in St Mary’s Minster on the Akropolis, and jousts were held on the Isthmus of Corinth.

Of the Frankish period of Greek history the Chronicle of the Morea is the most curious literary production, valuable alike as an historical source—save for occasional errors of dates and persons, especially in the earlier part—and as a subject for linguistic study. The present edition, the fruit of many years’ labour, is almost wholly devoted to the latter aspect of the Chronicle, about which there is much that is of interest. Versions exist in French, in Italian, and in Aragonese, as well as in Greek; and the question as to whether the Greek or the French was the original has been much discussed. The present editor, differing from Buchon and Hopf, believes that the French Livre de la Conqueste could not have been the original. In any case, the Greek Chronicle is of more literary interest than the French, because it throws a strong light on modern Greek. Any person familiar with the modern colloquial language could read with ease, except for a few French feudal terms, this fourteenth century popular poem, many of whose phrases might come from the racy conversation of any Greek peasant of to-day, and is very different from the classical imitation of the contemporary Byzantine historians. Its poetic merits are small, nor does the jog-trot “political” metre in which it is composed tend to lofty flights of poetry. We know not who was its author; but, on the whole, there seems to be reason for believing that he was a Gasmoulos—one of the offspring of mixed marriages between Greeks and Franks—probably employed, as his love of legal nomenclature shows, in some clerkly post. Unpoetical himself, he has at least been the cause of noble poetry in others; for, as Dr Schmitt shows, the second part of Goethe’s Faust has been largely inspired by its perusal; and the hero of that drama finds his prototype in the chivalrous builder of Mistra.

No chapter of this mediæval romance is more striking than the conquest of the Morea by the Franks and the history of their rule in the classic peninsula. At the time of the fourth crusade the Peloponnese was a prey to that spirit of particularism which has been, unhappily, too often characteristic of the Greeks in ancient, in mediæval, and in modern times. Instead of uniting among themselves in view of the Latin peril, the great archontes of the Morea availed themselves of the general confusion to occupy strong positions and to extend their own authority at the expense of their neighbours. The last historian and statesman of Constantinople before the Latin conquest, Niketas of Chonæ, has left us a sad picture of the demoralisation of society in Greece at that critical moment. The leading men, he says, instead of fighting, cringed to the conquerors; some were inflamed by ambition against their own country, slavish creatures, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of opposing the Latins[47]. Of these archontes the most prominent was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had seized the Larissa of Argos and the impregnable citadel high above Corinth, and who, though he failed to imitate the heroism of Leonidas in the Pass of Thermopylæ, held out at Akrocorinth till his death.

Such was the state of the country when a winter storm drove into the haven of Modon, on the Messenian coast, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, a crusader from Champagne, and nephew of the chronicler of the conquest of Constantinople. A Greek archon of the neighbourhood, thinking that the opportunity was too good to be lost, invited the storm-bound warrior to aid him in the conquest of the surrounding country. Geoffroy was nothing loth; and the two unnatural allies speedily subdued one place after another. But, as ill-luck would have it, the Greek died; and his son, more patriotic or less trustworthy than the father, broke the compact with the Frankish intruder, and turned Geoffroy out of his quickly-won possessions. The crusader’s position was serious; he was in a hostile country and surrounded by an alien and suspicious population; but he was a man of resource, and, hearing that Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat and King of Salonika, had made a triumphal march through continental Greece and was at that moment besieging the great stronghold of Nauplia, he set out across the Peloponnese—a six days’ journey—and succeeded in reaching the Frankish camp. There he found an old friend and neighbour, Guillaume de Champlitte, to whom he confided the scheme which he had been revolving in his mind. “I come,” he said, so we learn from his uncle’s chronicle, “from a land which is very rich, and men call it the Morea”—a name which here occurs for the first time in the history of Greece, and the origin of which is still a puzzle to all her historians. He urged Champlitte to join him in the task of conquering this El Dorado, promising to recognise him as his liege lord in return for his assistance. Champlitte agreed, and the two friends, at the head of a small body of a hundred knights and some esquires, started on their bold venture[48].

The ease with which the little band of Western warriors conquered the peninsula, which had once produced the Spartan warriors, strikes every reader of the Chronicle of the Morea—the prosaic, but extremely curious and valuable poem in which the Frank conquest is described. The cause lay partly in the disunited state of Greek society and the feuds of the local archontes, but still more in the neglect of military training, due to the fact that the Byzantine emperors had long drawn their best troops from the non-Hellenic portions of their heterogeneous dominions. It is remarkable that, apart from Sgouros, interned, as it were, on Akrocorinth, and a Greek archon, Doxapatres, who held a small but strongly situated castle in one of the gorges of Arcadia, the invaders met with little opposition. Greece, as we know from the complaints of Michael Akominatos, the last orthodox Archbishop of Athens before the conquest, had been plundered by Byzantine tax-gatherers and despised as a “Scythian wilderness” by Byzantine officials. So, when the inhabitants found that the Franks had no intention of interfering with their prized municipal privileges, they had no great objection to exchanging a master who spent their money at Constantinople for one who spent it in Elis at the new Peloponnesian capital of Andreville or Andravida. One pitched battle decided the fate of “the isle of Greece,” as the Franks sometimes called it. At the olive grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia, the small force of Franks easily routed a Greek army six times larger; and as the chronicler, always in sympathy with the invaders, puts it,

Αὐτὸν καὶ μόνον τὸν πόλεμον ἐποῖκαν οἱ Ρωμαῖοι

Εἰς τὸν καιρὸν ποὺ ἐκέρδισαν οἱ Φράγκοι τὸν Μορέαν.

Yet a modern Greek historian of singular fairness, the late K. Paparregopoulos, has remarked how great was the change in the Turkish times. The descendants of the unwarlike Moreotes, who fell so easy a prey to the Frankish chivalry in 1205, never lost an opportunity of rising against the Turks after the Frankish domination was over. As he justly says, one of the main results of the long Latin rule was to teach Greek “hands to war and their fingers to fight.”

Thus, almost by a single blow, the Franks had become masters of the ancient “island of Pelops.” Here and there a few natural strongholds still held out. Even after the death of Sgouros his triple crown of forts, Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos, was still defended for the Greek cause in the name of the lord, or Despot, of Epeiros, where a bold scion of the imperial house of Angelos had founded an independent state on the ruins of the Byzantine Empire. The great rock of Monemvasia in the south-east of the Morea, whence our ancestors derived their Malmsey wine, remained in the hands of its three local archontes; while, in the mountains of southern Lakonia, a race which had often defied Byzantium scorned to acknowledge the noblemen of Champagne. The local magnate, Joannes Chamaretos, could boast for a time that he kept his own lands in Lakonia, but he, too, had to take refuge at the Epeirote Court at Arta[49]. Finally, the two Messenian ports of Modon and Koron were claimed by Venice, which, with her usual astuteness, had secured those valuable stations on the way to Egypt in the deed of partition by which the conquerors of the empire had divided the spoils among themselves at Constantinople. Not without reason did Pope Innocent III, whose letters are full of allusions to the Frankish organisation of Greece, style Guillaume de Champlitte “Prince of all Achaia.”

Champlitte now attempted to provide for the internal government of his principality by the application of the feudal system, which, even before the Frankish conquest, had crept into many parts of the Levant. The Chronicle of the Morea, whose author revels in legal details, gives an account of the manner in which “the isle of Greece” was organised by its new masters. A commission, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five Greek archontes, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, drew up a species of Domesday-book for the new state. In accordance with the time-honoured feudal custom, twelve baronies were created and bestowed upon prominent members of the Frankish force, who were bound to be at the prince’s beck and call with their retainers in time of need; and the castles of these warrior barons were purposely erected in strong positions, whence they could command important passes or overcome troublesome neighbours. Even to-day the traveller may see the fine fortress above the town of Patras which Guillaume Aleman, one of the feudatories, constructed out of the Archbishop’s palace; the castle of Karytaina, the Toledo of Greece, still reminds us of the time when Hugues de Bruyères held the dalesmen of Skorta, ancestors of M. Delyannes, in check; and, far to the South, the war-cry of Jean de Neuilly, hereditary Marshal of Achaia, Passe avant, lingers in the name of Passavâ, the stronghold which once inspired respect in the men of Maina, who boast that they spring from Spartan mothers. Seven ecclesiastical peers, the Latin Archbishop of Patras at their head, and the three military orders of St John, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights also received fiefs; and, while Geoffroy de Villehardouin was invested with Kalamata and Kyparissia, fertile Elis became the princely domain.

But Guillaume de Champlitte did not long enjoy his Achaian dignity. If he was a prince in Greece he was still a French subject; and the death of his brother made it necessary for him to do homage in person for his fief in France. On the way he died; and the cunning Villehardouin, by an ingenious stratagem, contrived to become master of the country. It had been declared that a claimant must take possession of Achaia within a year and a day after the date of the last vacancy; and Geoffroy contrived to have Champlitte’s heir detained in Venice and left behind at Corfù till the fatal date had almost passed. A little skilful manœuvring from one place to another in the Morea filled up the rest of the time, so that, when young Robert de Champlitte at last met Geoffrey in full court at Lacedæmonia, the mediæval town which had risen near the Eurotas, the year and a day had already elapsed. The court decided in favour of Geoffrey, anxious, no doubt, that their ruler should be a statesman of experience and not a young man fresh from France. Robert gave no further trouble, and Geoffrey remained for the rest of his days “Lord of Achaia.” By his tact and cleverness he had contrived to win the regard both of the Frank barons and of the Greek population, whose religion and ancient customs he had sworn to respect. He was thus enabled to subdue the three outstanding fortresses which had once been the domain of Sgouros, while he settled all claims that the Venetians might have upon the Morea by allowing them to keep Modon and Koron, granting them a separate quarter in every town in his principality, and doing homage to them for the whole peninsula on the island of Sapienza. He crowned his career by marrying his son to the daughter of the Latin Emperor Peter of Courtenay, from whose family the Earls of Devon are descended.

Under his son and successor, Geoffrey II, the Frank principality prospered exceedingly. The Venetian historian, Marino Sanudo, who derived much of his information from his relative, Marco II Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, has given us a vivid picture of life at the Peloponnesian court under the rule of the second of the Villehardouins. A just prince, Geoffrey II used to send his friends from time to time to the baronial castles of the Morea to see how the barons treated their vassals. At his own court he kept “eighty knights with golden spurs”; and “knights came to the Morea from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne, to follow him. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts, others again because of crimes which they had committed[50].” In fact, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the Morea had become for the younger sons of the French chivalry much what the British colonies were to adventurers and ne’er-do-weels fifty years ago. It was a place where the French knights would find their own language spoken—we are specially told what good French was spoken in Greece in the Frankish period—and could scarcely fail to obtain congenial employment from a prince of their own race.

One difficulty, however, had soon arisen in the Frank principality. The Latin clergy, who had had their full share of the spoils, declined to take any part in the defence of the country. Geoffrey, with all the energy of his race, opposed a stout resistance to these clerical pretensions, and confiscated the ecclesiastical fiefs, spending the proceeds upon the erection of the great castle of Clermont or Chlomoutsi above the busy port of Glarentza, the imposing ruins of which are still a land-mark for miles around. When he had finished the castle Geoffroy appealed to the Pope, placing before the Holy Father the very practical argument that, if the principality, through lack of defenders, were recaptured by the Greeks, the loss would fall just as much on the Roman Church as on the prince, while the fault would be entirely with the former. The Pope was sufficiently shrewd to see that Geoffroy was right; the dispute was settled amicably; and both the prince and the Latin clergy subscribed generously for the preservation of the moribund Latin empire, which exercised a nominal suzerainty over the principality of Achaia.

Geoffroy’s brother and successor, the warlike Guillaume de Villehardouin, saw the Frank state in the Morea reach its zenith, and by his rashness contributed to its decline. Born in Greece, and speaking Greek, as the Chronicle of the Morea expressly tells us, the third of the Villehardouins began by completing the conquest of what was his native land. It was he who laid siege to the rock of Monemvasia for three long years, till at last, when the garrison had been reduced to eat mice and cats, the three archontes advanced along the narrow causeway which gives the place its name[51], and surrendered on terms which the prince wisely granted. It was he, too, who built the noble castle of Mistra on the site of the Homeric Messe, now abandoned to tortoises and sheep, but for two centuries a great name in the history of Greece. To a ruler so vigorous and so determined even the weird Tzakones, that strange tribe, perhaps Slavs but far more probably Dorians, which still lingers on and cherishes its curious language around Leonidi, yielded obedience; while the men of Maina, hemmed in by two new castles, ceased to trouble.

For the first and last time in its history the whole Peloponnese owned the sway of a Frank prince, except where, at Modon and Koron, Venice kept “its right eye,” as it called those places, fixed on the East. So powerful a sovereign as St Louis of France wished that he had some of Guillaume’s knights to aid him in his Egyptian war; and from seven hundred to one thousand horsemen always attended the chivalrous Prince of Achaia. His court at La Crémonie, the French version of Lacedæmonia, was “more brilliant than that of many a king”; and this brilliance was not merely on the surface. “Merchants,” says Sanudo, “went up and down without money, and lodged in the house of the bailies; and on their simple note of hand people gave them money[52].” But Guillaume’s ambition and his love of fighting for fighting’s sake involved the principality in disaster. Not content with beginning the first fratricidal war between the Frank rulers of the East by attacking Guy de la Roche, Lord of Athens, he espoused the cause of his father-in-law, the Greek Despot of Epeiros, then engaged in another brotherly struggle with the Greek Emperor of Nice. On the field of Pelagonia in Macedonia the Franks were routed; and the Prince of Achaia, easily recognised by his prominent teeth, was dragged from under a heap of straw, where he was lying, and carried off a prisoner to the court of the Emperor Michael VIII.

Guillaume’s captivity was the cause of endless evils for the principality; for Michael, who in 1261, by the recapture of Constantinople, had put an end to the short-lived Latin empire and restored there the throne of the Greeks, was resolved to regain a footing in the Morea and to make use of his distinguished captive for that purpose. He accordingly demanded, as the price of the prince’s freedom, the three strong fortresses of Mistra, Monemvasia, and Maina. The matter was referred to a ladies’ parliament held at Nikli, near the site of the ancient Tegea, for so severe had been the losses of the Frank chivalry that the noble dames of the Morea had to take the places of their husbands. We can well understand that, with a tribunal so composed, sentiment and the ties of affection would have more influence than the raison d’état. Yet Guillaume’s old opponent, Guy de la Roche, now Duke of Athens and bailie of Achaia during the prince’s captivity, laid before the parliament the argument that it was better that one man should die for the people than that the rest of the Franks should lose the Morea[53]. At the same time, to show that he bore no malice, he chivalrously offered to go to prison in place of the prince. But the ladies of the Morea thought otherwise. It was decided to give up the three castles; and two of the fair châtelaines were sent as hostages to Constantinople.

Thus, in 1262, the Byzantine Government regained a foothold in the Morea; a Byzantine province was created, with Mistra as its capital, and entrusted at first to a general of distinction annually appointed, and ultimately conferred as an appanage for life upon the Emperor’s second son. The native Greeks of the whole peninsula thus had a rallying-point in the Byzantine province, and the suspicion of the Franks that the surrender of the three fortresses “might prove to be their ruin[54],” turned out to be only too well-founded. As for the Franks who were left in the Byzantine portion of the Morea, their fate is obscure. Probably, as Dr Schmitt thinks, some emigrated to the gradually dwindling Frankish principality, while others became merged in the mass of Greeks around them. In all ages the Hellenes, like the Americans of to-day, have shown the most marvellous capacity for absorbing the various races which have come within their borders. A yet further element of evil omen for the country was introduced in consequence of this partial restoration of the Byzantine power. As might have been foreseen, the easy morality of that age speedily absolved the prince from his solemn oaths to the Emperor, and he was scarcely released when a fresh war broke out between them. It was then, for the first time, that we hear of Turks in the Morea—men who had been sent there as mercenaries by the Emperor Michael. Careless whom they served, so long as they were paid regularly, these Oriental soldiers of fortune deserted to the prince; and those who cared to settle in the country received lands and wives, whose offspring were still living, when the Chronicle of the Morea was written (p. 372), at two places in the peninsula.

Unhappily for the principality, as the chronicler remarks, Guillaume de Villehardouin left no male heir; and nothing more strongly justifies the Salic law than the history of the Franks in the Morea, where it was not applied. Anxious to take what precautions he could against the disruption of his dominions after his death, the last of the Villehardouin princes married his elder daughter Isabelle to the second son of Charles of Anjou, the most powerful sovereign in the south of Europe at that time, who, in addition to his other titles, had received from the last Latin Emperor of the East, then a fugitive at Viterbo, the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, hitherto held by the Emperor. This close connection with the great house of Anjou, to which the kingdom of the Two Sicilies then belonged, seemed to provide Achaia with the strongest possible support. The support, too, was near at hand; for communication between Italy and Glarentza, the chief port of the Morea, was, as we know from the novels of Boccaccio, not infrequent; and we hear of Frankish nobles from Achaia making pilgrimages to the two great Apulian sanctuaries of St Nicholas of Bari and Monte Santangelo. But, when Guillaume de Villehardouin died in 1278 and was laid beside his brother and father in the family mausoleum at Andravida (where excavations, made in 1890, failed to find their remains)[55], his daughter Isabelle was still a minor, though already a widow.

The government of the principality accordingly fell into the hands of bailies appointed by the suzerain at Naples. Sometimes the bailie was a man who knew the country, like Nicholas St Omer, whose name is still perpetuated by the St Omer tower at Thebes and the Santameri mountains not far from Patras; sometimes he was a foreigner, who knew little of the country, and, in the words which the Chronicle (p. 544) puts into the mouths of two Frankish nobles, “tyrannised over the poor, wronged the rich, and sought his own profit.” The complainants warned Charles II of Anjou, who was now their suzerain, that he was going the right way to “lose the principality”; and the King of Naples took their advice. He bestowed the hand of the widowed Isabelle upon a young Flemish nobleman, Florenz of Hainault, who was then at his court, and who thus became Prince of the Morea. Florenz wisely made peace with the Byzantine province, so that “all became rich, both Franks and Greeks,” and the land recovered from the effects of war and maladministration. But the Flemings, who had crowded over to Greece at the news of their countryman’s good fortune, were less scrupulous than their prince and provoked reprisals from the Greeks, from whom they sought to wring money. On the other hand, it would seem that the natives of the Byzantine province were able to secure good treatment from the Emperor, for there is preserved in that interesting little collection, the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, a golden bull of Andronikos II, dated 1293, concerning the privileges of the sacred rock of Monemvasia. When the modern Greeks come to think more highly of their mediæval history, they should regard that rugged crag with reverence. For two centuries it was the guardian of their municipal and national liberties.

Florenz of Hainault lived too short a time for the welfare of the Morea; and Isabelle, once more a widow, was married again in Rome (whither she had gone for the first papal jubilee of 1300) to a prince of the doughty house of Savoy, which thus became concerned with the affairs of Greece. Philip of Savoy was at the time in possession of Piedmont; and, as might have been expected, Piedmontese methods of government were not adapted to the latitude of Achaia. He was a man fond of spending, and an adept at extorting, money. The microscopic Dr Hopf has unearthed from the archives at Turin the bill—a fairly extensive one—for his wedding-breakfast; and the magnificent tournament which he organised on the Isthmus of Corinth, and in which all the Frankish rulers of Greece took part, occupied a thousand knights for more than twenty days. “He had learned money-making at home,” it was said, when the extravagant prince from Piedmont let it be understood that he expected presents from his vassals, and imposed taxes on the privileged inhabitants of Skorta. But the days of the Savoyard in Achaia were numbered. The house of Anjou, suzerains of the principality, had never looked with favour on his marriage with Isabelle; an excuse was found for deposing him in favour of another Philip, of Taranto, son of the King of Naples. To make matters smoother, Isabelle and her husband received, as some compensation for relinquishing all claims to the Morea, a small strip of territory on the shores of the Fucine lake. They both left Greece for ever. Isabelle died in Holland; and Philip of Savoy sleeps in the family vault at Pinerolo, near Turin, leaving to his posterity by a second marriage the empty title of “Prince of Achaia.”

The house of Villehardouin was not yet extinct. Isabelle had a daughter, Matilda of Hainault, whose husband, Louis of Burgundy, was permitted, by the tortuous policy of the Neapolitan Angevins, to govern the principality. But a rival claimant now appeared in the field in the person of Fernando of Majorca, one of the most adventurous personages of those adventurous times, who is well known to us from the quaint Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. Fernando had already had his full share of the vicissitudes of life. He had been at one time head of the Catalan Grand Company, which had just won the Duchy of Athens on the swampy meadows of the Bœotian Kephissos, and he had sat a prisoner in the castle of Thebes, the famous Kadmeia, whose walls were painted with the exploits of the crusaders in the Holy Land. He had married the daughter of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s younger child, the Lady of Akova, and he claimed Achaia in the name of his dead wife’s infant son. Such was the violence of the age that both the rivals perished in the struggle, Fernando on the scaffold, and Louis of Burgundy by a poison administered to him by one of the petty potentates of Greece. Even more miserable was the end of the unhappy Matilda. Invited by the unscrupulous King of Naples to his court, she was informed that she must marry his brother, John of Gravina. With the true spirit of a Villehardouin, the Princess refused; and even the Pope himself, whose authority was invoked, could not make her yield. She had already, she said, married again, and must decline to commit bigamy. This gave the King of Naples the opportunity he sought. He declared that, by marrying without her suzerain’s consent, she had forfeited her principality, which he bestowed upon his brother. The helpless Princess was thrown into the Castel dell’ Uovo at Naples, and was afterwards allowed to die a lingering death in that island-prison, the last of her race. So ended the dynasty of the Villehardouins.

Grievous, indeed, was the situation of the Franks in Greece at this moment. Though little more than a hundred years had elapsed since the conquest, the families of the conquerors were almost extinct. The terrible blow dealt at the Frank chivalry by the rude Catalans, almost on the very battlefield of Chaironeia, was as fatal to Frankish, as was the victory of Philip of Macedon to free, Greece. Of the barons who had taken part in that contest, where many Achaian nobles had stood by the side of the headstrong Athenian duke, only four survived. Moreover, the Frank aristocracy, as Finlay has pointed out, committed racial suicide by constituting themselves an exclusive class. Intermarriages with the Greeks took place, it is true; and a motley race, known as Gasmoûloi[56], the offspring of these unions, of whom the author of the Chronicle was perhaps a member, fell into the usual place of half-castes in the East. But Muntaner expressly says that the nobles of Achaia usually took their wives from France. Meanwhile new men had taken possession of some of the old baronies—Flemings, Neapolitans, and even Florentines, one of whom, Nicholas Acciajuoli, whose splendid tomb is to be seen in the Certosa near Florence, laid on the rocks of Akrocorinth the foundations of a power which, a generation later, made the bankers of Tuscany dukes of Athens. The Greeks, had they been united, might have recovered the whole peninsula amidst this state of confusion. But the sketch which the imperial historian, John Cantacuzene, has left us of the archontes of the Morea shows that they were quite as much divided among themselves as the turbulent Frank vassals of the shadowy Prince of Achaia. “Neither good nor evil fortune,” he wrote, “nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual hatred, which not only endures all their lives, but is transmitted after death as a heritage to their children[57].”

Cantacuzene, however, took a step which ultimately led to the recapture of the Morea, when he abolished the system of sending a subordinate Byzantine official to Mistra, and appointed his second son, Manuel, with the title of Despot, as governor of the Byzantine province for life. The Despot of Mistra at once made his presence felt. He drove off the Turkish corsairs, who had begun to infest the deep bays and jagged coast-line of the peninsula, levied ship-money for its defence against pirates, and, when his Greek subjects objected to be taxed for their own benefit, crushed rebellion by means of his Albanian bodyguard. Now, for the first time, we hear of that remarkable race, whose origin is as baffling to ethnologists as is their future to diplomatists, in the history of the Morea, where hereafter they were destined to play so distinguished a part. It is to the policy of Manuel Cantacuzene, who rewarded his faithful Albanians with lands in the south-west and centre of the country, that modern Greece owes the services of that valiant race, which fought so vigorously for her independence and its own in the last century. Manuel’s example was followed by other Despots; and ere long ten thousand Albanians were colonising the devastated and deserted lands of the Peloponnese.

Meanwhile the barren honour of Prince of Achaia had passed from one absentee to another. John of Gravina, who had been installed in the room of the last unhappy Villehardouin princess, grew disgusted with the sorry task of trying to restore order, and transferred his rights to Catherine of Valois, widow of his brother, Philip of Taranto; her son Robert, who was both suzerain and sovereign of the principality, was a mere phantom ruler whom the Achaian barons treated with contempt. After his death they offered the empty title of princess to Queen Joanna I of Naples on condition that she did not interfere with their fiefs and their feuds. Then a new set of conquerors descended upon the distracted country, and began the last chapter of Frankish rule in Achaia.

The great exploit of the Catalans in carving out for themselves a duchy bearing the august name of Athens had struck the imagination of Southern Europe. Towards the close of the fourteenth century a similar, but less famous band of freebooters, the Navarrese Company, repeated in Achaia what the Catalans, seventy years earlier, had achieved in Attica and Bœotia. Conquering nominally in the name of Jacques de Baux, a scion of the house of Taranto, but really for their own hands, the soldiers of Navarre rapidly occupied one place after another. Androusa, in Messenia, at that time the capital of the Frankish principality, fell before them; and at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, then called Zonklon, they made such a mark that the spot was believed by Hopf to have derived its name of Navarino from the castle which they held there. In 1386 their captain, Pedro Bordo de San Superan, styled himself Vicar of the principality, a title which developed into that of prince.

Meanwhile another Western Power, and that the most cunning and persistent, had taken advantage of these troublous times to gain a footing in the Peloponnese. Venice, true to her cautious commercial policy, had long been content with the two Messenian stations of Modon and Koron, and had even refused a tempting offer of some desperate barons to hand over to her the whole of Achaia. During the almost constant disturbances which had distracted the rest of the peninsula since the death of Guillaume de Villehardouin, the two Venetian ports had enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity. The high tariffs which the Frankish princes had erected round their own havens had driven trade to these Venetian harbours, so conveniently situated for trade with the great Venetian island of Crete as well. The documents which Sathas has published from the Venetian archives are full of allusions to these two now almost forgotten places. But at last, towards the end of the fourteenth century, Venice resolved on expansion. She accordingly bought Argos and Nauplia, the old fiefs which the first French Lord of Athens had received from the first of the Villehardouins, and which lingered on in the hands of the representatives of the fallen Athenian duke. A little later Lepanto, the old Naupaktos, gave the Venetians a post on the Corinthian Gulf.

As the Byzantine Empire dwindled before the incursions of the Turks, the Greek province of Mistra assumed more importance in the eyes of the statesmen at Constantinople. In 1415 the Emperor Manuel II, with an energy which modern sovereigns of Greece would do well to imitate, resolved to see for himself how matters stood, and arrived in the Morea. He at once set to work to re-erect the six-mile rampart, or “Hexamilion,” across the Isthmus, which had been fortified by Xerxes, Valerian, Justinian, and, in recent times, by the last Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaiologos. Manuel’s wall followed the course of Justinian’s; and, in the incredibly short space of twenty-five days, forced labourers, working under the imperial eye, had erected a rampart strengthened by no less than 153 towers.

But the Emperor saw that it was necessary to reform the Morea from within as well as to fortify it without. We have from the pen of a Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, who has written a Dialogue of the Dead in the manner of Lucian, a curious, if somewhat highly-coloured account of the Moreotes as they were, or at any rate seemed to him to be, at this time[58]. In the Peloponnese, he tells us, are “Lacedæmonians, Italians, Peloponnesians (Greeks), Slavonians, Illyrians (Albanians), Egyptians (gypsies), and Jews, and among them are not a few half-castes.” He says that the Lakonians, who “are now called Tzakones,” have “become barbarians” in their language, of which he gives some specimens. He goes on to make the shrewd remark, true to-day of all Eastern countries where the Oriental assumes a veneer of Western civilisation, that “each race takes the worst features of the others,” the Greeks assimilating the turbulence of the Franks, and the Franks the cunning of the Greeks. So insecure was life and property that arms were worn night and day—a practice obsolete in the time of Thucydides. Of the Moreote archontes he has nothing good to say; they are “men who ever delight in battles and disturbances, who are for ever breathing murder, who are full of deceit and craft, barbarous and pig-headed, unstable and perjured, faithless to both Emperor and Despots.” Yet a Venetian report—and the Venetians were keen observers—sent to the government a few years later, depicts the Morea as a valuable asset. It contained, writes the Venetian commissioner, 150 strong castles; the soil is rich in minerals; and it produces silk, honey, wax, corn, raisins, and poultry.

Even in the midst of alarms an eminent philosopher—to the surprise of the elegant Byzantines, it is true—had fixed his seat at Mistra. George Gemistos Plethon believed that he had found in Plato a cure for the evils of the Morea. Centuries before the late Mr Henry George, he advocated a single tax. An advanced fiscal reformer, he suggested a high tariff for all articles which could be produced at home; a paper strategist, he had a scheme which he submitted, together with his other proposals, to the Emperor, for creating a standing army; an anti-clerical, he urged that the monks should work for their living, or discharge public functions without pay. The philosopher, in tendering this advice to the Emperor, modestly offered his own services for the purpose of carrying it out. Manuel II was a practical statesman, who knew that he was living, as Cicero would have said, “non in Platonis republica, sed in fæce Lycurgi.” The offer was rejected.

At last the long threatened Turkish peril, temporarily delayed by the career of Timour and the great Turkish defeat at Angora, was at hand. The famous Ottoman commander, Evrenos Beg, had already twice entered the peninsula, once as the ally of the Navarrese prince against the Greek Despot, once as the foe of both. In 1423 a still greater captain, Turakhan, easily scaled the Hexamilion, leaving behind him at Gardiki, as a memorial of his invasion, a pyramid of eight hundred Albanian skulls. But, by the irony of history, just before Greeks and Franks alike succumbed to the all-conquering Turks, the dream of the Byzantine court was at last realised, and the Frank principality ceased to exist.

The Greek portion of the Morea was at this time in the hands of the three brothers of the Emperor John VI Palaiologos—Theodore II, Thomas, and Constantine—the third of whom was destined to die on the walls of Constantinople as last Emperor of the East. Politic marriages and force of arms soon extinguished the phantom of Frankish rule; and the Genoese baron, Centurione Zaccaria, nephew of Bordo de San Superan, who had succeeded his uncle as last Prince of Achaia, was glad to purchase peace by giving his daughter’s hand to Thomas Palaiologos with the remaining fragments of the once famous principality, except the family barony and the princely title, as her dowry. Thus, when Centurione died in 1432, save for the six Venetian stations, the whole peninsula was once more Greek. Unhappily, the union between the three brothers ended with the disappearance of the common enemy. Both Theodore and Constantine were ambitious of the imperial diadem; and, while the former was pressing his claims at Constantinople, the latter was besieging Mistra, having first sent the historian Phrantzes, his confidential agent in these dubious transactions, to obtain the Sultan’s consent. Assisted by his brother Thomas and a force of Frank mercenaries, Constantine was only induced to keep the peace by the intervention of the Emperor; till, in 1443, Theodore removed this source of jealousy by carrying out his long-cherished scheme of retiring from public life. He accordingly handed over the government of Mistra to Constantine and received in exchange the city of Selymbria on the Sea of Marmora, where he afterwards died of the plague.

The Morea was now partitioned between Constantine, who took possession of the eastern portion, embracing Lakonia, Argolis, Corinth, and the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf as far as Patras, and Thomas, who governed the western part. With all his faults Constantine was a man of far greater energy and patriotism than the rest of his family, and he lost no time in developing a national policy. His first act was to restore the Hexamilion; his next, to attempt the recovery of the Athenian duchy from the Acciajuoli family for the Greek cause, which he personified. Nine years earlier, on the death of Duke Antonio, he had sent Phrantzes to negotiate for the cession of Athens and Thebes. Foiled on that occasion, he now invaded the duchy and forced the weak Duke Nerio II to do homage and pay tribute to him. The Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs of Thessaly rose in his favour; the Serbs promised to aid him in defending the Isthmus against the Turks; it seemed for the moment as if there were at last some hope of a Christian revival in the Near East. But the battle of Varna soon put an end to these dreams. Murad II, accompanied by the Duke of Athens, set out in 1446, at the head of a large army, for the Isthmus. The two Despots had assembled a considerable force behind the ramparts of the Hexamilion, which seemed so imposing to the Sultan that he remonstrated with his old military counsellor, Turakhan, for having advised him to attack such apparently impregnable lines so late in the season. But the veteran, who knew his Greeks and had taken the Hexamilion twenty-three years before, replied that its defenders would not long resist a determined attack. A Greek officer, who had been sent by Constantine to reconnoitre the Turkish position, came back so terrified at the strength of the enemy that he urged his master to retreat at once to the mountains of the Morea. The Despot ordered his arrest as a disciplinary measure, but he was so greatly struck by what he had heard that he sent the Athenian Chalkokondyles, father of the historian, to offer terms of peace to the Sultan. Murad scornfully rejected the proposals, arrested the envoy, and demanded, as the price of his friendship, the destruction of the Hexamilion and the payment of tribute. This was too much for the high-spirited Despot, and the conflict began.

For three whole days the excellent Turkish artillery played upon the walls of the rampart. Then a general assault was ordered, and, after a brave defence by the two Despots, a young Serbian janissary climbed to the top of the wall and planted the Turkish flag there in full view of the rival hosts. The towers on either side of him were soon taken by his comrades, the gates were forced in, and the Turks streamed through them into the peninsula. The Greeks fled; the two Despots among them; Akrocorinth surrendered, and a band of 300, who had thought of “making a new Thermopylæ” at Kenchreæ, were soon forced to lay down their arms. Together with 600 other captives, they were beheaded by the Sultan’s orders. Then the Turkish army was divided into two sections; one, under old Turakhan, penetrated into the interior; the other, commanded by the Sultan in person, followed the coast of the Corinthian Gulf, burning the mediæval town which had arisen on the ruins of Sikyon. Aigion shared the same fate; but most of the inhabitants of Patras had escaped over the Gulf before Murad arrived there. The old Frankish citadel defied all the efforts of the besiegers, for the besieged knew that they had nothing to hope from surrender. A breach was made in the walls, but the defenders poured boiling resin on to the heads of the janissaries and worked at the rampart till the breach was made good. The season was by this time very far advanced, so the Sultan and his lieutenant withdrew to Thebes, dragging with them 60,000 captives, who were sold as slaves. The Despots were glad to obtain peace and a qualified independence by paying a capitation tax, and by sending their envoys to do homage to the Sultan in his headquarters at Thebes. The Greeks ascribed their misfortunes to their Albanian and Frankish mercenaries, the former of whom had begun to feel their power, while the latter had espoused the cause of Centurione’s illegitimate son at the moment when the Despots were engaged in the defence of the country.

On the death of the Emperor in 1448 the Despot Constantine succeeded to the imperial title; and it is a picturesque fact that the last Emperor of Constantinople was crowned at Mistra, where his wife still lies buried, near that ancient Sparta which had given so many heroes to Hellas. His previous government was bestowed on his youngest brother Demetrios, with the exception of Patras, which was added to the province of Thomas. The new partition took place in Constantinople, where the two brothers solemnly swore before God and their aged mother to love one another and to rule the Morea in perfect unanimity. But no sooner had they arrived at their respective capitals of Mistra and Patras than they proceeded to break their oaths. Thomas, the more enterprising of the two, attacked his brother; Demetrios, destitute of patriotism, called in the aid of the Turks, who readily appeared under the leadership of Turakhan, made Thomas disgorge most of what he had seized, and on the way destroyed what remained of the Hexamilion. The object of this was soon obvious. As soon as the new Sultan, Mohammed II, was ready to attack Constantinople, he ordered Turakhan to keep the two Palaiologoi busy in the Morea, so that they might not send assistance to their brother the Emperor. The old Pasha once again marched into the peninsula; but he found greater resistance than he had expected on the Isthmus. He and his two sons, Achmet and Omar, then spread their forces over the country, plundering and burning as they went, till the certainty of Constantinople’s fall rendered their presence in the Morea no longer necessary. But as Achmet was retiring through the Pass of Dervenaki, that death-trap of armies, between Argos and Corinth, the Greeks fell upon him, routed his men and took him prisoner. Demetrios, either from gratitude for Turakhan’s recent services to him, or from fear of the old warrior’s revenge, released his captive without ransom. It was the last ray of light before the darkness of four centuries descended upon Greece.

The news that Constantinople had fallen and that the Emperor had been slain came like a thunderbolt upon his wretched brothers, who naturally expected that they would be the next victims. But Mohammed was not in a hurry; he knew that he could annihilate them when he chose; meanwhile he was content to accept an annual tribute of 12,000 ducats. The folly of the greedy Byzantine officials, who held the chief posts at the petty courts of Patras and Mistra, had prepared, however, a new danger for the Despots. The Albanian colonists had multiplied while the Greek population had diminished; and the recent Turkish devastations had increased the extent of waste land where they could pasture their sheep. Fired by the great exploits of their countryman, Skanderbeg, in Albania, they were seized by one of those rare yearnings for independence which meet us only occasionally in Albanian history. The official mind seized this untoward moment to demand a higher tax from the Albanian lands. The reply of the shepherds was a general insurrection in which 30,000 Albanians followed the lead of their chieftain, Peter Boua, “the lame.” Their object was to expel the Greeks from the peninsula; but this, of course, did not prevent other Greeks, dissatisfied, for reasons of their own, with the rule of the Despots, from throwing in their lot with the Albanians. A Cantacuzene gained the support of the insurgents for his claims on Mistra by taking an Albanian name; the bastard son of Centurione emerged from prison and was proclaimed as Prince of Achaia. Both Mistra and Patras were besieged; and it soon became clear that nothing but Turkish intervention could save the Morea from becoming an Albanian principality. Accordingly, the aid of the invincible Turakhan was again solicited; and, as Mohammed believed in the policy—long followed in Macedonia by his successors—of keeping the Christian races as evenly balanced as possible, the Turkish general was sent to suppress the revolt without utterly destroying the revolted. Turakhan carried out his instructions with consummate skill. He soon put down the insurgents, but allowed them to retain their stolen cattle and the waste lands which they had occupied, on payment of a fixed rent. He then turned to the two Despots and gave them the excellent advice to live as brothers, to be lenient to their subjects, and to be vigilant in the prevention of disturbances. Needless to say, his advice was not taken.

The power of the Palaiologoi was at an end; and the Greek archontes and Albanian chiefs did not hesitate to put themselves in direct communication with the Sultan when they wanted the confirmation of their privileges. But the Despots might, perhaps, have preserved the forms of authority for the rest of their lives had it not been for the rashness of Thomas, who seemed to be incapable of learning by experience that he only existed on sufferance. In 1457, emboldened by the successes of Skanderbeg, he refused to pay his tribute. Mohammed II was not the man to submit to an insult of that sort from a petty prince whom he could crush whenever he chose. In the spring of the following year the great Sultan appeared at the Isthmus; but this time the noble fortress of Akrocorinth held out against him. Leaving a force behind him to blockade it, he advanced into the interior of the peninsula, accompanied by the self-styled Albanian leader in the late revolt, Cantacuzene, whose influence he found useful in treating with the Arnauts. The Greeks, whom he took, were despatched as colonists to Constantinople; the Albanians, who had broken their parole, were punished by the breaking of their wrists and ankles—a horrible scene long commemorated by the Turkish name of “Tokmak Hissari,” or “the castle of the ankles.” Mouchli, at that time one of the chief towns in the Morea, near the classic ruins of Mantinea, offered considerable resistance; but lack of water forced the defenders to yield, and then the Sultan returned to Corinth. His powerful cannon soon wrecked the bakehouse and the magazines of the citadel; provisions fell short; and the fact was betrayed by the archbishop to the besiegers. At last the place surrendered, and its gallant commander was deputed by Mohammed to bear his terms of peace to Thomas. The latter was ordered to cede the country as far south as Mouchli, and as far west as Patras; this district was then united with the Pashalik of Thessaly, the governor of the whole province being Turakhan’s son Omar, who remained with 10,000 soldiers in the Morea. The other Despot, Demetrios, was commanded to send his daughter to the Sultan’s harem.

Thomas at once complied with his conqueror’s demands; but his ambition soon revived when Mohammed had gone. Fresh victories of Skanderbeg suggested to him the flattering idea that a Palaiologos could do more than a mere Albanian. Divisions among the Turkish officers in his old dominions increased his confidence—a quality in which Greeks are not usually lacking. Early in 1459 he raised the standard of revolt; but, at the same time, committed the folly of attacking his brother’s possessions. Phrantzes, who, after having been sold as a slave when Constantinople fell, had obtained his freedom and had entered the service of Thomas, has stigmatised in forcible language the wickedness of those evil counsellors who had advised his master to embark on a civil war and to “eat his oaths as if they were vegetables.” Most of Thomas’ successes were at the expense of his brother, for, of all the places lately annexed by the Turks, Kalavryta alone was recovered. But the Albanians did far more harm to the country than either the Greeks or the Turkish garrison by plundering both sides with absolute impartiality and deserting from Thomas to Demetrios, or from Demetrios to Thomas, on the slightest provocation. Meanwhile the Turks attacked Thomas at Leondari, at the invitation of his brother; and the defeat which he sustained induced the miserable Despot to go through the form of reconciliation with Demetrios, under the auspices of Holy Church. This display of brotherly love had the usual sequel—a new fratricidal war; but Mohammed II had now made up his mind to put an end to the Palaiologoi, and marched straight to Mistra. Demetrios soon surrendered, and humbly appeared in the presence of his master. The Sultan insisted upon the prompt performance of his former command, that the Despot’s daughter should enter the seraglio, and told him that Mistra could no longer be his. He therefore ordered him to bid his subjects surrender all their cities and fortresses—an order which was at once executed, except at Monemvasia. That splendid citadel, which had so long defied the Franks at the zenith of their power, and boasted of the special protection of Providence, now scorned to surrender to the infidel. The daughter of Demetrios, who had been sent thither for safety, was, indeed, handed over to the Turkish envoys, and Demetrios himself was conducted to Constantinople; but the Monemvasiotes proclaimed Thomas as their liege lord, and he shortly afterwards presented Monemvasia to the Pope, who appointed a governor.

Having thus wiped the province of Demetrios from the map, Mohammed turned his arms against Thomas. Wherever a city resisted, its defenders were punished without mercy and in violation of the most solemn pledges. The Albanian chiefs who had defied the Sultan at Kastritza were sawn asunder; the Albanian captain of Kalavryta was flayed alive; Gardiki was once more the scene of a terrible massacre, ten times worse than that which had disgraced Turakhan thirty-seven years before. These acts of cruelty excited very different feelings in the population. Some, especially the Albanians, were inspired to fight with the courage of despair; others preferred slavery to an heroic death. From the neighbourhood of Navarino alone 10,000 persons were dragged away to colonise Constantinople; and a third of the Greeks of Greveno, which had dared to resist, were carried off as slaves. The castles of Glarentza and Santameri were surrendered by the descendants of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s Turks, who experienced, like the Albanians, the faithless conduct of their conquerors. Meanwhile Thomas had fled to Navarino, and, on the day when the Sultan reached that place, set sail with his wife and family from a neighbouring harbour for Corfù. There the faithful Phrantzes joined him and wrote his history of these events—the swan-song of free Greece.

Another Palaiologos, however, Graitzas by name, showed a heroism of which the Despot was incapable. This man, the last defender of his country, held out in the castle of Salmenikon between Patras and Aigion till the following year, and, when the town was taken, still defied all the efforts of the Turks, who allowed him to withdraw, with all the honours of war, into Venetian territory at Lepanto. In the autumn of 1460 Mohammed left the Morea, after having appointed Zagan Pasha as military governor, with orders to install the new Turkish authorities and to make arrangements for the collection of the capitation tax and of the tribute of children. Thus the Morea fell under Turkish rule, which thenceforward continued for an almost unbroken period of three hundred and fifty years. Save at Monemvasia, where the papal flag still waved, and at Nauplia, Argos, Thermisi, Koron, Modon, and Navarino, where Venice still retained her colonies, there was none to dispute the Sultan’s sway.

The fate of the Palaiologoi deserves a brief notice. Demetrios lived ten years at Ænos in Thrace in the enjoyment of the pension which Mohammed allowed him, and died a monk at Adrianople in 1470. His daughter, whom the Sultan never married after all, had predeceased him. Thomas proceeded to Rome with the head of St Andrew from Patras as a present for the Pope, who received the precious relic with much ceremony at the spot near the Ponte Molle, where the little chapel of St Andrew now commemorates the event, and assigned to its bearer a pension of 300 ducats a month, to which the cardinals added 200 more, and Venice a smaller sum. He died at Rome in 1465, leaving two sons and two daughters. One of the latter died in a convent on the island of Santa Maura; the other married, first a Caracciolo of Naples and then the Grand Duke Ivan III of Russia, by whom she had a daughter, afterwards the wife of Alexander Jagellon of Poland. With this daughter the female line became extinct. Of Thomas’ two sons, the elder, Andrew, married a woman off the streets of Rome, ceded all his rights, first to Charles VIII of France, and then to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and died in 1502 without issue. The younger son, Manuel, escaped from papal tutelage to the court of Mohammed II, who gave him an establishment and allowed him a daily sum for its maintenance. He died a Christian; but of his two sons (the elder of whom died young), the younger became a Mussulman, took the name of Mohammed, and is last heard of in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. Though the family would thus appear to have long been extinct, a Cornish antiquary announced in 1815 that the church of Landulph contained a monument to one of Thomas’ descendants. A few years ago a lady residing in London considered herself to be the heiress of the Palaiologoi and aspired to play a part in the Eastern question[59]. But neither of these claims is genealogically sound; for there is no historical proof of the existence of the supposed third son of Thomas, mentioned in the Landulph inscription. But, after all, the world has not lost much by the extinction of this race, nor would the future of Constantinople or Greece be affected by its revival.

APPENDIX
THE NAME OF NAVARINO

Ever since Hopf published his history of mediæval Greece writers on that subject have followed his opinion that the name of Navarino was derived from the Navarrese Company, which entered the Morea in 1381 to support the claims of Jacques de Baux, titular emperor of Constantinople and prince of Achaia, and which established its headquarters at the classic Pylos. Hopf adduces no evidence in support of this derivation, which he thrice repeats[60], except that of the French traveller De Caumont, who saw at Pylos in 1418 ung chasteau hault sur une montaigne que se nomme chasteau Navarres[61]. But his opinion, mainly formed in order to controvert the anti-Hellenic theory of Fallmerayer, has been followed, also without proof, by Hertzberg[62], Tozer[63], and more tentatively by Paparregopoulos[64]. The name of Navarino, however, seems to have existed long before the Navarrese Company ever set foot in Greece. Nearly a century earlier a golden bull[65] of the Emperor Andronikos II, dated 1293, confirmed the possessions of the church of Monemvasia, among which it specially mentions τὴν Πύλον, τὸν καλούμενον Ἀβαρῖνον. A little before the date of this imperial document (1287-1289) Nicholas II de Saint-Omer, lord of half Thebes, was bailie of the principality of Achaia for Charles II of Naples, and the Greek Chronicle of the Morea[66] tells us that ἔχτισεν τὸ κάστρον τοῦ Ἀβαρίνου. Now Hopf himself thought that the French version of the Chronicle, Le Livre de la Conqueste[67] (in which the above passage runs ferma le chastel de port de Junch), was the original of the four editions which we possess. It is generally agreed that the French version was written between 1333 and 1341; but it is by no means certain that the French is the original and the Greek a translation; rather would it appear that the Greek was the original, in which case it was composed in the early part of the fourteenth century, for the one passage[68] which refers to an event as late as 1388 is regarded as an interpolation by the latest editor of the Chronicle, Dr Schmitt. Even the most recent of all the four versions—the Aragonese—was written, as it expressly says[69], no later than 1393. Therefore we have every reason for regarding the mention of the name Ἀβαρῖνος in the Greek Chronicle as a second proof that it was in common use long before the time of the Navarrese[70].

There are several other passages in which the name occurs, the date of which cannot, however, be fixed with certainty. In the Synekdemos of Hierokles[71] we have three times the phrase Πύλος, ἡ πατρὶς Νέστορος, νῦν δὲ καλεῖται Ἀβαρῖνος. Now Hierokles wrote before 535, but all these three passages occur in the lists of towns which have changed their names, and these three lists must belong, as Krumbacher points out, to a much later period than the main body of the work. The scholiast to Ptolemy[72] also makes an annotation Πύλος ὀ καὶ Ἀβαρῖνος, and in the Latin manuscripts of that passage the rendering is Pylus, qui et Abarmus (sic).

The alteration of Abarinos into Navarino follows, of course, the usual Greek habit of prefixing to the mediæval name the last letter of the accusative of the article. Thus εἰς τὸν Ἀβαρῖνον becomes Ναβαρῖνον, just as εἰς τὴν Πόλιν becomes Stambûl, εἰς τὰς Ἀθῆνας Satines or Sathines, εἰς τὰς Θῆβας Estives. The conclusion seems to be that Fallmerayer was right after all when he derived the name of Navarino from a settlement of Avars on the site of the ancient Pylos[73]. The settlement of the Navarrese Company there was merely a coincidence.

It may be added that Abarinus also occurs in a document[74] of Charles I of Naples, dated 1280, as the name of a place in Apulia, not apparently Bari.

Since I wrote the above note on this subject I have found two other passages which confirm the view that the name of Navarino existed before the Navarrese Company entered Greece. They occur in the Commemoriali[75], where we find Venice complaining to Robert, prince of Achaia, and to the bailie of Achaia and Lepanto that the crew of a Genoese ship had started from Navarrino vecchio and had plundered some Venetian subjects. The dates of these two documents are 1355 and 1356. The late Professor Krumbacher, in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift (XIV. 675), agreed that Hopf’s derivation had been disproved by my article, but thought that the name of Navarino comes not from the Avars, but from the Slavonic javorina, “a wood of maples.”

AUTHORITIES

1. The Chronicle of Morea. Ed. John Schmitt, Ph.D. London, 1904.

2. Le Livre de la Conqueste. In Recherches historiques sur la Principauté française de Morée. Tome II. By J. A. Buchon. Paris, 1845. New Edn. by J. Longnon. Paris, 1911.

3. Ἱστορία τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ἔθνους (History of the Greek Nation). By K. Paparregopoulos. 4th Edn. Athens, 1903.

4. Geschichte Griechenlands vom Beginn des Mittelalters. Von K. Hopf. In Ersch und Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie. Bände 85, 86. Leipzig, 1867.

5. Chroniques Gréco-Romanes inédites ou peu connues. Published by Charles Hopf. Berlin, 1873.

6. Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter. Von F. Gregorovius. 3rd Edn. Stuttgart, 1889.

7. La Conquête de Constantinople, par Geoffroy de Villehardouin. By Émile Bouchet. Paris, 1891.

8. Georgii Acropolitæ Opera. Ed. by A. Heisenberg. Leipzig, 1903.

9. Corpus Scriptorum Historiæ Byzantinæ. Bonn, 1828-43.

10. Anecdota Græca. Ed. J. Fr. Boissonade. Tom. III. Paris, 1831.

4. THE DUKES OF ATHENS

Nations, like individuals, sometimes have the romance of their lives in middle age—a romance unknown, perhaps, to the outside world until, long years afterwards, some forgotten bundle of letters throws a flash of rosy light upon a period hitherto regarded as uneventful and commonplace. So is it with the history of Athens under the Frankish domination, which Finlay first described in his great work. But since his day numerous documents have been published, and still more are in course of publication, which complete the picture of mediæval Athens as he drew it in a few master-strokes. Barcelona and Palermo have been ransacked for information; the Venetian archives have yielded a rich harvest; Milan has contributed her share; and a curious collection of Athenian legends has been made by an industrious and patriotic Greek. We know now, as we never knew before, the strange story of the classic city under her French, her Catalan, and her Florentine masters; and it is high time that the results of these researches should be laid before the British public. The present paper deals with the first two of these three periods.

The history of Frankish Athens begins with the Fourth Crusade. By the deed of partition, which divided up the Byzantine Empire among the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, the crusading army, whose chief was Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat, had received “the district of Athens with the territory of Megara[76]”; and both Attica and Bœotia were included in that short-lived realm of Salonika, of which he assumed the title of king. Among the trusty followers who accompanied Boniface in his triumphal progress across his new dominions was Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle the serious dispute between him and the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between his daughter and the Emperor Baldwin I’s brother and successor. This was the man upon whom the King of Salonika, in 1205, bestowed the most famous city of the ancient world. Thus, in the words of an astonished chronicler from the West, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans[77].”

The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had succeeded by an extraordinary stroke of fortune to the past glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself “Sire d’Athènes” or “Dominus Athenarum,” which his Greek subjects magnified into the “Great Lord” (Μέγας Κύρ or Μέγας Κύρης), and Dante, in the Purgatorio, transferred by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to Othon de la Roche on the part of the Greeks, nor was such likely; for the eminent man, Michael Akominatos, who was then Metropolitan of Athens, was fully aware that the Akropolis could not long resist a Western army. Later Venetian writers, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story that the Athenians sent an embassy offering their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated, “not without bloodshed, by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche[78].” If so, it was the sole effort which the Greeks of Attica made during the whole century of French domination.

Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small standard of classical Greece. The Burgundian state of Athens embraced Attica, Bœotia, Megaris, and the ancient Opuntian Lokris to the north; while to the south of the isthmus the “Great Lord’s” deputies governed the important strongholds of Argos and Nauplia, conferred upon him, in 1212, by Prince Geoffroy I of Achaia as the reward of his assistance in capturing them, and thenceforth held by Othon and his successors for a century as fiefs of the Principality. The Italian Marquess of Boudonitza on the north, the Lord of Salona on the west, were the neighbours, and the latter subsequently the vassal, of the ruler of Athens, his bulwarks against the expanding power of the Greek despots of Epeiros. Thus situated, mediæval Athens had at least four ports—Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of Corinth, where Othon’s relatives landed when they arrived from France; the harbour of Atalante opposite Eubœa; the beautiful bay of Nauplia; and the famous Piræus, known in the Frankish times by the name of Porto Leone from the huge lion, now in front of the Arsenal at Venice, which then guarded the entrance to the haven of Themistokles. It is strange, in these circumstances, that the Burgundian rulers of Athens made little or no attempt to create a navy, especially as Latin pirates infested the coast of Attica, and a sail down the Corinthian Gulf was described as “a voyage to Acheron[79].”

Guiltless of a classical education, and unmoved by the genius of the place, Othon abstained from seeking a model for the constitution of his new state in the laws of Solon. Like the other Frankish princes of the Levant, he adopted the “Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania,” a code of usages based on the famous “Assizes of Jerusalem.” But the feudal society which was thus installed in Attica was very different from that which existed in the Principality of Achaia or in the Duchy of the Archipelago. The “Great Lord” of Athens had, at the most, only one exalted noble, the head of the famous Flemish house of St Omer, near his throne. It is obvious, from the silence of all the authorities, that the Burgundians who settled in Othon’s Greek dominions were men of inferior social position to himself, a fact further demonstrated by the comparative lack in Attica and Bœotia of those baronial castles so common in the Peloponnese.

In one respect the Court of Athens, under Othon de la Roche, must have resembled the Court of the late King George, namely, that there was no one, except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on equal terms. But, as in Georgian, so in Frankish Athens, the family of the sovereign was numerous enough to form a society of its own. Not only did Othon marry a Burgundian heiress, by whom he had two sons, but the news of his astounding good fortune attracted to the new El Dorado in Greece various members of his clan from their home in Burgundy. They doubtless received their share of the good things which had fallen to their lucky relative; a favourite nephew, Guy, divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes; a more distant relative became commander of the castle of Athens. Both places became the residences of Latin archbishops; and in the room of Michael Akominatos, in the magnificent church of “Our Lady of Athens,” as the Parthenon was now called, a Frenchman named Bérard, perhaps Othon’s chaplain, inaugurated the long series of the Catholic prelates of that ancient see. The last Greek Metropolitan retired sorrowfully from his plundered cathedral to the island of Keos, whence he could still see the shores of his beloved Attica; and for well-nigh two centuries his titular successors never once visited their confiscated diocese. The Greek priests who remained behind performed their services in the church near the Roman market, which was converted into a mosque at the time of the Turkish conquest, and has now been degraded to a military bakery; while Innocent III assigned to the Catholic archbishop the ancient jurisdiction of the Orthodox Metropolitan over his eleven suffragans, and confirmed to the Church of Athens its possessions at Phyle and Marathon—places still called by their classical names.

The renewal of the divine grace (wrote the enthusiastic Pope to Bérard) suffereth not the ancient glory of the city of Athens to grow old. The citadel of most famous Pallas hath been humbled to become the seat of the most glorious Mother of God. Well may we call this city “Kirjath-sepher,” which when Othniel had subdued to the rule of Caleb, “he gave him Achsah, his daughter to wife[80].”

But the “Othniel” of Athens, to whom the Pope had made a punning allusion, was, like the other Frankish rulers of his time, a sore trial to the Holy See. He forbade his subjects to give or bequeath their possessions to the Church, levied dues from the clergy, and showed no desire to pay tithes or compel his people to pay them. A “concordat” between Church and State was at last drawn up in 1210, at a Parliament convened by the Latin Emperor Henry in the valley of Ravenika, near Lamia, and attended by Othon and all the chief feudal lords of continental Greece. By this it was agreed that the clergy of both dominations should pay the old Byzantine land-tax to the temporal authorities, but that, in return, all churches, monasteries, and other ecclesiastical property, should be entrusted to the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople free of all feudal services.

Othon was more loyal to the Empire than to the Papacy. When the Lombard nobles of Salonika, on the death of Boniface, tried to shake off the feudal tie which bound that kingdom to the Latin Emperor, he stood by the latter, even though his loyalty cost him the temporary loss of his capital of Thebes. He was rewarded by a visit which the Emperor Henry paid him at Athens, where no Imperial traveller had set foot since Basil “the Bulgar-slayer,” two centuries earlier, had offered up prayer and thanksgivings in the greatest of all cathedrals. Like Basil, Henry also prayed “in the Minster of Athens, which men call Our Lady,” and received from his host “every honour in his power[81].” Only once again did an emperor of Constantinople bow down in the Parthenon; and then it was not as a conqueror but as a fugitive that he came.

The “Great Lord” was not fired with the romance of reigning over the city of Perikles and Plato. When old age crept on, he felt, like many another baron of the conquest, that he would like to spend the evening of his days in his native land; and in 1225 he departed for Burgundy with his wife and sons, leaving his nephew, Guy, to succeed him in Greece. Under the wise rule of his successor, the Athenian state prospered exceedingly. Thebes, where Guy and his connections, the great family of St Omer, resided, had recovered much of its fame as the seat of the silk manufactory. Jews and Genoese both possessed colonies there; and the shrewd Ligurian traders negotiated a commercial treaty with the new ruler which allowed them to have their own consul, their own court of justice, and their own buildings both there and at Athens.

The Greeks too profited by the enlightened policy of their sovereign. One Greek monk at this time made the road to the monastery of St John the Hunter on the slopes of Hymettos, to which the still standing column on the way to Marathon alludes; another built one of the two churches at the quaint little monastery of Our Lady of the Glen, not far from the fort of Phyle. For thirty years Athens enjoyed profound peace, till a fratricidal war between Guillaume de Villehardouin, the ambitious Prince of Achaia, and the great barons of Eubœa involved Guy in their quarrel. The prince summoned Guy, his vassal for Argos and Nauplia, to assist him against his foes; Guy, though bound not only by this feudal tie but by his marriage to one of William’s nieces, refused his aid, and did all he could to help the enemies of the prince. The latter replied by invading the dominions of his nephew. Forcing the Kakè Skála, that narrow and ill-famed road which leads along the rocky coast of the Saronic Gulf towards Megara, he met Guy’s army at the pass of Mount Karydi, “the walnut mountain,” on the way to Thebes. There Frankish Athens and Frankish Sparta first met face to face; the Sire of Athens was routed and fled to Thebes, where he obtained peace by a promise to appear before the High Court of Achaia and perform any penalty which it might inflict upon him for having borne arms against the Prince.

The High Court met at Nikli near Tegea; and the Sire of Athens, escorted by all his chivalry, made a brave show before the assembled barons. They were so much impressed by the spectacle that they declared they could not judge so great a man, and referred the decision to St Louis of France, the natural protector of the French nobles of Greece. The chivalrous monarch propounded the question to the parlement at Paris, which decided that Guy was technically guilty, but that the trouble and cost of his long journey to France was ample punishment for his offence. Louis IX, anxious to show him some mark of royal favour, conferred upon him, at his special request, the title of Duke of Athens, for which, he told the king, there was an ancient precedent. The ducal style borne by Guy and his successors has become famous in literature as well as in history. Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare bestowed it upon Theseus, and the Catalan chronicler, Muntaner, upon Menelaos.

Meanwhile the wheel of fortune had avenged the Duke of Athens. His victorious enemy, involved in a quarrel between the rival Greek states of Nice and Epeiros, had been taken prisoner by the Greek Emperor; and the flower of the Achaian chivalry was either dead or languishing in the dungeons of Lampsakos. In these circumstances the survivors offered to Guy the regency of Achaia—a post which he triumphantly accepted. But he had not been long in Greece when another blow descended upon the Franks. The Latin Empire of Constantinople fell; and the Emperor Baldwin II, a landless exile, was glad to accept the hospitality of the Theban Kadmeia and the Castle of Athens. Thus, on that venerable rock, was played the last pitiful scene in the brief Imperial drama of the Latin Orient[82].

Fired by the reconquest of Constantinople, Michael VIII now meditated the recovery of the Peloponnese, and demanded the cession of the three strongest castles in the peninsula as the price of his prisoner’s freedom. It was Guy’s duty, as regent of Achaia, to convene the High Court of the Principality to consider this momentous question. The parliament, almost exclusively composed of ladies—for all the men of mark had been slain or were in prison—decided, against Guy’s better judgment, in favour of accepting the Emperor’s terms; and Guy, whose position was one of great delicacy, finally yielded. Not long afterwards, the first Duke of Athens died, conscious of having heaped coals of fire upon the head of his enemy, and proud of leaving to his elder son, John, a state more prosperous than any other in Greece.

The second Duke, less fortunate than his father, was involved in the wars against the Greek Emperor, which occupied so much of that period. The restless scion of the house of Angelos, who had carved out for himself a principality in the ancient realm of Achilles in Phthiotis, and reigned over Wallachs and Greeks at Neopatras, or La Patre, beneath the rocky walls of Mount Œta, fled as a suppliant to the Theban Court and offered the duke the hand of his daughter Helene if he would only assist him against the Palaiologoi. The duke, gouty and an invalid, declined matrimony, but promised his aid. At the head of a picked body of Athenian knights he easily routed the vastly superior numbers of the Imperial army, which he contemptuously summed up in a phrase, borrowed from Herodotos, as “many people, but few men.” As his reward he obtained for his younger brother William the fair Helene as a bride; and her dowry, which included the important town of Lamia, extended the influence of the Athenian duchy as far north as Thessaly. But John of Athens was destined to experience, like William of Achaia, the most varied changes of fortune. Wounded in a fight with the Greeks and their Catalan allies outside the walls of Negroponte, he fell from his horse and was carried off a prisoner to Constantinople. Michael VIII did not, however, treat the Duke of Athens as he had treated the Prince of Achaia. He made no demand for Athenian territory, but contented himself with a ransom of some £13,500. Policy, rather than generosity, was the cause of this apparent inconsistency. Fears of an attack by Charles of Anjou, alarm at the restless ambition of his prisoner’s kinsman, the Duke of Neopatras, and suspicion of the orthodox clerical party in his own capital, which regarded him as a schismatic because of his overtures to Rome, convinced him that the policy of 1262 would not suit the altered conditions of 1279. He even offered his daughter in marriage to his prisoner, but the latter refused the Imperial alliance. A year later John died, and William his brother reigned in his stead.

During the seven years of his reign William de la Roche was the leading figure in Frankish Greece. Acknowledging the suzerainty of the Angevin kings of Naples, who had become overlords of Achaia by the treaty of Viterbo, he was appointed their viceroy in that principality, and in that capacity built the castle of Dematra, the site of which may be perhaps found at Kastri, between Tripolitsa and Sparta. Possessed of ample means, he spent his money liberally for the defence of Frankish Greece, alike in the Peloponnese and in Eubœa; and great was the grief of all men when his valiant career was cut short. Now, for the first time since the conquest, Athens was governed by a Greek, for Guy’s mother, Helene Angela of Neopatras, who has given her title to K. Rhanghaves’ drama, The Duchess of Athens, acted as regent for her infant son, Guy, until a second marriage with her late husband’s brother-in-law, Hugh de Brienne, provided him with a more powerful guardian. The family of Brienne was one of the most famous of that day. First heard of in Champagne during the reign of Hugh Capet, it had, in the thirteenth century, won an Imperial diadem at Constantinople, a royal crown at Jerusalem, and a count’s coronet at Lecce and at Jaffa; ere long it was destined to provide the last French Duke of Athens.

The Burgundian duchy of Athens had now reached its zenith; and the ceremony of Guy II’s coming of age, which has been described for us in the picturesque Catalan chronicle of Muntaner, affords a striking proof of the splendour of the ducal Court at Thebes. The young duke had invited all the great men of his duchy; he had let it be known, too, throughout the Greek Empire and the Despotat of Epeiros and his mother’s home of Thessaly, that whosoever came should receive gifts and favours from his hands, “for he was one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a king, and eke one of the richest.” When all the guests had assembled, Archbishop Nicholas of Thebes celebrated mass in the Theban minster; and then all eyes were fixed upon the Duke, to see whom he would ask to confer upon him the order of knighthood—“a duty which the King of France, or the Emperor himself, would have thought it a pleasure and an honour to perform.” What was the surprise of the brilliant throng when Guy, instead of calling upon such great nobles as Thomas of Salona or Othon of St Omer, co-owner with himself of Thebes, called to his side a young Eubœan knight, Boniface of Verona, lord of but a single castle, which he had sold the better to equip himself and his retinue. Yet no one made a braver show at the Theban Court; he always wore the richest clothes, and on the day of the ceremony none was more elegantly dressed than he, though every one had attired himself and his jongleurs in the fairest apparel. This was the man whom the young duke bade dub him a knight, and upon whom, as a reward for this service, he bestowed the hand of a fair damsel of Eubœa, Agnes de Cicon, Lady of the classic island of Ægina and of the great Eubœan castle of Karystos or Castel Rosso, still a picturesque ruin. The duke gave him also thirteen castles on the mainland and the famous island of Salamis—sufficient to bring him in a revenue of 50,000 sols.

Prosperous indeed must have been the state whose ruler could afford such splendid generosity. Worthy too of such a sovereign was the castle in which he dwelt—the work of the great Theban baron, Nicholas II de St Omer, who had built it out of the vast wealth of his wife, Marie of Antioch. The castle of St Omer, which was described as “the finest baronial mansion in all Romania[83],” contained sufficient rooms for an emperor and his court; and its walls were decorated with frescoes illustrating the conquest of the Holy Land by the Franks, in which the ancestors of its founder had borne a prominent part. Alas! one stumpy tower, still bearing the name of Santameri, is all that now remains of this noble residence of the Athenian dukes and the Theban barons.

French influence now spread from Thebes over the great plain of Thessaly to the slopes of Olympos. The Duke of Neopatras died, leaving his nephew of Athens guardian of his infant son and regent of his dominions, threatened alike by the Greek Emperor, Andronikos II, and by the able and ambitious Lady of Epeiros. At Lamia, the fortress which had been part of his mother’s dowry, Guy received the homage of the Thessalian baronage, and appointed as his viceroy Antoine le Flamenc, a Fleming who had become lord of the Bœotian Karditza (where a Greek inscription on the church of St George still commemorates him as its “most pious” founder), and who is described as “the wisest man in all the duchy.” The Greek nobles of Thessaly learnt the French language; coins with Latin inscriptions were issued in the name of Guy’s young ward from the mint of Neopatras[84]; and the condition of Thessaly was accurately depicted in that curious story the Romance of Achilles, in which the Greek hero marries a French damsel and the introduction of French customs is allegorically represented by cutting the child’s hair in Frankish fashion[85].

Wherever there was knightly work to be done, the gallant Duke of Athens was foremost; none was more impetuous than he at the great tournament held on the Isthmus of Corinth in 1305, at which the whole chivalry of Frankish Greece was present. He needs must challenge Master Bouchart, one of the best jousters of the West, to single combat with the lance; and their horses met with such force that the ducal charger fell and rolled its rider in the dust. His Theban castle rang with the songs of minstrels; festival after festival followed at his Court; and this prosperity was not merely on the surface. Now for the first time we find Attica supplying Eubœa with corn, while the gift of silken garments to Pope Boniface VIII is a proof of the continued manufacture of silk at Thebes. But the duke’s health was undermined by an incurable malady; he had no heirs of his body; and, when he died in 1308, there was already looming on the frontiers of Greece that Grand Company of Catalan soldiers of fortune whom the weakness of the Emperor, Andronikos II, had invited from the stricken fields of Sicily to be the terror and the scourge of the Levant. The last duke of the house of la Roche was laid to rest in the noble Byzantine abbey of Daphni or Dalfinet (as the Franks called it), on the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis, which Othon had bestowed upon the Cistercians a century before. Even to-day there may be seen in the courtyard a sarcophagus, with a cross, two snakes, and two lilies carved upon it, which the French scholar Buchon (La Grèce continentale) believed to have been the tomb of “the good duke,” Guy II.

The succession to the “delectable duchy” of Athens—for such, indeed, it was in the early years of the fourteenth century—was not seriously disputed. There were only two claimants, both first cousins of the late duke—Eschive, Lady of Beyrout, and Walter de Brienne, Count of Lecce, a true scion of that adventurous family, who had been a “knight of death” in the Angevin cause in Sicily, and had fought like the lion on his banner at the fatal battle of Gagliano. The rival claims having been referred to the High Court of Achaia, of which the Duke of Athens was, in Angevin times, a peer, the barons decided, as was natural, in favour of the gallant and powerful Count of Lecce, more fitted than a lonely widow to govern a military state. Unfortunately, Duke Walter of Athens was as rash as he was brave; prison and defeat in Sicily had not taught him to respect the infantry of Cataluña. Speaking their language and knowing their ways, he thought that he might use them for his own ends and then dismiss them when they had served his purpose.

In the spring of 1309 the Catalan Grand Company threatened by starvation in Macedonia, marched through the vale of Tempe into the granary of Greece, whence, a year later, they descended upon Lamia. The Duke of Neopatras had now come of age, and had not only emancipated himself from Athenian tutelage, but had formed a triple alliance with the Greek Emperor and the Greek Despot of Epeiros in order to prevent the ultimate annexation of his country by his French neighbours. In these circumstances the new Duke of Athens bethought himself of employing the wandering Catalans against the allies. Thanks to the good offices of Roger Deslaur, a knight of Roussillon who was in his employ, he engaged them at the same high rate of payment which they had received from Andronikos II. The Catalans at once showed that they were well worth the money, for by the end of a six months’ campaign they had captured more than thirty castles for their employer. Thereupon his three adversaries hastened to make peace with him on his own terms.

Walter now rashly resolved to rid himself of the expensive mercenaries for whom he had no further use. He first selected 500 men from their ranks, gave them their pay and lands on which to settle, and then abruptly bade the others begone, although at the time he still owed them four months’ wages. They naturally declined to obey this summary order, and prepared to conquer or die; for retreat was impossible, and there was no other land where they could seek their fortune. Walter, too, assembled all available troops against the common enemies of Frankish Greece—for as such the savage Catalans were regarded. Never had a Latin army made such a brave show as that which was drawn up under his command in the spring of 1311 on the great Bœotian plain, almost on the self-same spot where, more than sixteen centuries before, Philip of Macedon had won that “dishonest victory” which destroyed the freedom of classic Greece, and where, in the time of Sulla, her Roman masters had thrice met the Pontic troops of Mithridates. All the great feudatories of Greece rallied to his call. There came Alberto Pallavicini, Marquess of Boudonitza, who kept the pass of Thermopylæ; Thomas de Stromoncourt of Salona, who ruled over the slopes of Parnassos, and whose noble castle still preserves the memory of its mediæval lords; Boniface of Verona, the favourite of the late Duke of Athens; George Ghisi, one of the three great barons of Eubœa; and Jean de Maisy, another powerful magnate of that famous island. From Achaia, and from the scattered duchy of the Archipelago, contingents arrived to do battle against the desperate mercenaries of Cataluña. Already Walter dreamed of not merely routing the company, but of planting his lion banner on the ramparts of Byzantium.

But the Catalans were better strategists than the impetuous Duke of Athens. They knew that the strength of the Franks lay in the rush of their splendid cavalry, and they laid their plans accordingly. The marshy soil of the Copaic basin afforded them an excellent defence against a charge of horsemen; and they carefully prepared the ground by ploughing it up, digging a trench round it, and then irrigating the whole area by means of canals from the river Kephissos. By the middle of March, when the two armies met face to face, a treacherous covering of green grass concealed the quaking bog from the gaze of the Frankish leaders.

As if he had some presentiment of his coming death, Walter made his will—a curious document still preserved[86]—and then, on March 15, took up his stand on the hill called the Thourion, still surmounted by a mediæval tower, to survey the field. Before the battle began, the 500 favoured Catalans whom he had retained came to him and told him that they would rather die than fight against their old comrades. The duke bade them do as they pleased; and their defection added a welcome and experienced contingent to the enemy’s forces. When they had gone, the duke, impatient for the fray, placed himself at the head of 200 French knights with golden spurs and charged with a shout across the plain. But, when they reached the fatal spot where the grass was greenest, their horses, heavily weighted with their coats of mail, plunged all unsuspecting into the treacherous morass. Some rolled over with their armoured riders in the mire; others, stuck fast in the stiff bog, stood still, in the picturesque phrase of the Byzantine historian, “like equestrian statues,” powerless to move. The shouts of “Aragon! Aragon!” from the Catalans increased the panic of the horses; showers of arrows hailed upon the helpless Franks; and the Turkish auxiliaries of the Catalans rushed forward and completed the deadly work. So great was the slaughter that only four Frankish nobles are known to have survived that fatal day—Boniface of Verona, Roger Deslaur, the eldest son of the Duke of Naxos, and Jean de Maisy of Eubœa[87]. At one blow the Catalans had destroyed the noble chivalry of Frankish Greece; and the men, whose forefathers had marched with Boniface of Montferrat into Greece a century earlier, lay dead in the fatal Bœotian swamp. Among them was the Duke of Athens, whose head, severed by a Catalan knife, was borne, long afterwards, on a funeral galley to Brindisi and buried in the church of Santa Croce in his Italian county of Lecce.

The Athenian duchy, “the pleasaunce of the Latins,” as Villani[88] quaintly calls it, now lay at the mercy of the Grand Company; for the Greeks made no resistance to their new masters, and in fact looked upon the annihilation of the Franks as a welcome relief. We would fain believe the story of the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea, that the heroic widow of the fallen duke, a worthy daughter of a Constable of France, defended the Akropolis, where she had taken refuge with her little son Walter, till she saw that there was no hope of succour. But the Byzantine historian, Nikephoros Gregoras, expressly says that Athens fell without a struggle, as Thebes had already fallen. Argos and Nauplia alone held aloft the banner of the Frankish dukes. Thus the Catalans were able, without opposition, to parcel out among themselves the towns and castles of the duchy; the widows of the slain became the wives of the slayers; each soldier received a consort according to his services; and many a rough warrior thus found himself the husband of some noble dame in whose veins flowed the bluest blood of France, and “whose washhand-basin,” in the phrase of Muntaner, “he was not worthy to bear.”

After nine years’ wandering these vagabonds settled down in the promised land, which the most extraordinary fate had bestowed upon them. But they lacked a leader of sufficient social position to preside over their changed destinies. Finding no such man in their own ranks, they offered the post to one of their four noble prisoners, Boniface of Verona, whom Muntaner, his guest at Negroponte, has described as “the wisest and most courteous nobleman that was ever born.” Both of these qualities made him disinclined to accept an offer which would have rendered him an object of suspicion to Venice, his neighbour in Eubœa, and of loathing to the whole Frankish world. On his refusal the Catalans turned to Roger Deslaur, whom neither ties of blood nor scruples of conscience prevented from becoming their leader. As his reward he received the castle of Salona together with the widow of its fallen lord.

But the victors of the Kephissos soon recognised that they needed some more powerful head than a simple knight of Roussillon, if they were to hold the duchy against the jealous enemies whom their meteoric success had alarmed and excited. Their choice naturally fell upon King Frederick II of Sicily, the master whom they had served in that island ten years earlier, and who had already shown that he was not unwilling to profit by their achievements. Accordingly, in 1312, they invited him to send them one of his children. He gave them as their duke his second son Manfred, in whose name—as the Duke was still too young to come himself—he sent, as governor of Athens, Beranger Estañol, a knight of Ampurias. On his arrival Deslaur laid down his office, and we hear of him no more.

The Catalan duchy of Athens was now organised as a state, which, though dependent in name on a Sicilian duke, really enjoyed a large measure of independence. The duke nominated the two chief officials, the vicar-general and the marshal, of whom the former, appointed during good pleasure, was the political, the latter the military, governor of the duchy. The marshal was always chosen from the ranks of the Company; and the office was for half a century hereditary in the family of De Novelles. Each city and district had its own local governor, called veguer, castellano, or capitán, whose term of office was fixed at three years, and who was nominated by the duke, by the vicar-general, or by the local representatives from among the citizens of the community. The principal towns and villages were represented by persons known as sindici, and possessed municipal officials and councils, which did not hesitate to present petitions, signed with the seal of St George by the chancellor, to the duke whenever they desired the redress of grievances. On one occasion we find the communities actually electing the vicar-general; and the dukes frequently wrote to them about affairs of state. One of their principal subsequent demands was that official posts should be bestowed upon residents in the duchy, not upon Sicilians.

The feudal system continued to exist, but with far less brilliance than under the Burgundian dukes. The Catalan conquerors were of common origin; and, even after seventy years of residence, the roll of noble families in the whole duchy contained only some sixteen names. The Company particularly objected to the bestowal of strong fortresses, such as Livadia, upon private individuals, preferring that they should be administered by the government officials. The “Customs of Barcelona” now supplanted the feudal “Assizes of Romania”; the Catalan idiom of Muntaner took the place of the elegant French which had been spoken by the Frankish rulers of Greece. Even to their Greek subjects the Spanish dukes wrote in “the Catalan dialect,” the employment of which, as we are expressly told, was “according to the custom and usage of the city of Athens.” Alike by Catalans and French, the Greeks were treated as an inferior race, excluded, as a general rule, from all civic rights, forbidden to intermarry with the conquerors, and still deprived of their higher ecclesiastical functionaries. But there were some notable exceptions to these harsh disqualifications. The people of Livadia, for services rendered to the Company, early received the full franchise of the Conquistadors; towards the end of the Catalan domination we find Greeks holding such important posts as those of castellano of Salona, chancellor of Athens, and notary of Livadia; a count of Salona and a marshal married Greek ladies; and their wives were allowed to retain their own faith.

Under the rule of Estañol the Catalans not only held their ground in Attica and Bœotia, but increased the terror of their name among all their neighbours. In vain the Pope appealed to King James II of Aragon to drive them out of Attica; in vain he described the late Duke Walter as a “true athlete of Christ and faithful boxer of the Church”; the king’s politic reply was to the effect that the Catalans, if they were cruel, were also Catholics, who would prove a valuable bulwark of Romanism against the schismatic Greeks of Byzantium[89]. The appointment of King Frederick II’s natural son, Don Alfonso Fadrique (or Frederick), as “President of the fortunate army of Franks in the Duchy of Athens” yet further strengthened the position of the Company. The new vicar-general was a man of much energy and force of character; and during his thirteen years’ administration the Catalan state attained its zenith. Practically independent of Sicilian influence—for the nominal Duke Manfred died in the year of Fadrique’s appointment, and his younger brother William was likewise a minor—he acquired a stronger hold upon Attica, and at the same time a pretext for intervention in the affairs of Eubœa, by his marriage with Marulla, the heiress of Boniface of Verona, “one of the fairest Christians in the world, the best woman and the wisest that ever was in that land,” as Muntaner, who knew her, enthusiastically describes her. With her Fadrique received back, as her dowry, the thirteen castles which Guy II of Athens had bestowed upon her father on that memorable day at Thebes.

The growing power of the Catalans under this daring leader, who had marched across “the black bridge” of Negroponte and had occupied two of the most important castles of the island, so greatly alarmed the Venetians that they persuaded King Frederick II of Sicily to curb the restless ambition of his bastard son, lest a European coalition should be formed against the disturber of Greece. Above all else, the Republic was anxious that a Catalan navy should not be formed at the Piræus; and it was therefore stipulated, in 1319, that a plank was to be taken out of the hull of each of the Catalan vessels then lying in “the sea of Athens,” and that the ships’ tackle was to be taken up to “the Castle of Athens” and there deposited[90]. Thus shut out from naval enterprise, Fadrique now extended his dominions by land. The last Duke of Neopatras had died in 1318, and the best part of his duchy soon fell into the hands of the Catalans of Athens, who might claim that they represented the Burgundian dukes, and were therefore entitled to some voice in the government of a land which Guy II had once administered. At Neopatras, the seat of the extinct Greek dynasty of the Angeloi, Fadrique made his second capital, styling himself “Vicar-General of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras.” Thenceforth the Sicilian dukes of Athens assumed the double title which figures on their coins and in their documents; and, long after the Catalan duchies had passed away, the Kings of Aragon continued to bear it. This conquest made the Company master of practically all continental Greece; even the Venetian Marquess of Boudonitza paid an annual tribute of four horses to the Catalan vicar-general[91]. Still, however, the faithful family of Foucherolles held the two great fortresses of Argos and Nauplia for the exiled house of Brienne.

Young Walter had now grown up to man’s estate, and it seemed to him that the time had come to strike a blow for the recovery of his Athenian heritage. The Angevins of Naples supported him in their own interest as well as his; Pope John XXII bade the Archbishops of Patras and Corinth preach a crusade against the “schismatics, sons of perdition, and pupils of iniquity” who had seized his patrimony; but the subtle Venetians, who could have contributed more than Angevin aid or papal thunder to the success of his expedition, had just renewed their truce with the Catalans. From that moment his attempt was bound to fail.

Walter was, like his father, a rash general, while his opponents had not forgotten the art of strategy, to which they owed their success. At first the brilliant band of French knights and Tuscan men-at-arms which crossed over with him to Epeiros in 1331 carried all before it. But, when he arrived in the Catalan duchy, he found that the enemy was much too cautious to give his fine cavalry a chance of displaying its prowess on the plains of Bœotia. While the Catalans remained behind the walls of their fortresses, the invaders wasted their energies on the open country. Ere long Walter’s small stock of money ran out, and his chances diminished with it. The Greeks rendered him no assistance. It is true that a correspondent of the historian Nikephoros Gregoras wrote that they were “suffering under extreme slavery,” and had “exchanged their ancient happiness for boorish ways,” while Guillaume Adam said that they were “worse than serfs”; but either their sufferings were insufficient to make them desire a change of masters, or their boorishness was such that it made them indifferent to the advantages of French culture. Early in the following year Walter took ship for Italy, never to return. Summoned by the Florentines to command their forces, he became tyrant of their city, whence he was expelled amidst universal rejoicings eleven years later. His name and arms may still be seen in the Bargello of Florence. Thirteen years afterwards he fell fighting, as Constable of France, against the English at the battle of Poitiers. His sister Isabelle, wife of Walter d’Enghien, succeeded to his estates and his pretensions; some of her descendants continued to bear, till 1381, the empty title of Duke of Athens, while the last fragments of the French duchy—the castles of Nauplia and Argos—remained in the possession of others of her line till, in 1388, they were purchased by Venice.

One irreparable loss was inflicted upon Greece by this expedition. In order to prevent the castle of St Omer at Thebes from falling into his hands, the Catalans destroyed that noble monument of Frankish rule. Loudly does the Chronicle of the Morea lament over the loss of a building more closely associated than any other with the past glories of the De la Roche. At the time of its destruction it belonged to Bartolommeo Ghisi, Great Constable of Achaia, one of the three great barons of Eubœa, son-in-law of Fadrique, and a man of literary and historic tastes, for the French version of the Chronicle, Le Livre de la Conqueste, was originally found in his Theban castle[92]. Had Fadrique still been head of the Company at the time, he would probably have saved his kinsman’s home; but for some unexplained reason he was no longer vicar-general, though he was still in Greece. Possibly, as he paid a visit to Sicily about this time, he may have been accused at the Sicilian Court of aiming at independent sovereignty in the duchies—an accusation to which his too successful career may have lent some colour. Though he never resumed the leadership of the Catalans he passed the rest of his life in Greece, where one of his sons was Count of Salona, and another became, later on, vicar-general of the duchies.

Soon after Walter’s futile expedition the Papacy made its peace with the “sons of perdition,” who came to be regarded as a possible defence against the growing Turkish peril. Unfortunately, when the Catalans became respectable members of Christendom, they ceased to be formidable. Occasionally the old Adam broke out, as when the Count of Salona plied the trade of a pirate with the aid of the “unspeakable” Turk. But their Thessalian conquests were slipping away from the luxurious and drunken progeny of the hardy warriors who had smitten the Franks in the marshes of the Kephissos. Meanwhile, in distant Sicily, the shadowy Dukes of Athens and Neopatras came and went without ever seeing their Greek duchies. Duke William died in 1338; and his successors, John and Frederick of Randazzo, the picturesque town on the slopes of Etna, both succumbed to the plague a few years later—mere names in the history of Athens. But in 1355 the new Duke of Athens became also King of Sicily, under the title of Frederick III; and thus the two duchies, which had hitherto been the appanage of younger members of the royal family, were united with the Sicilian crown in the person of its holder.

Thenceforth, as is natural, the archives of Palermo contain far more frequent allusions to the duchies of Athens and Neopatras, whose inhabitants petition their royal duke for redress of grievances and for the appointment of suitable officials. But it is evident from the tenour of these documents that the Catalan state was rapidly declining. In addition to the Turkish peril and the menaces of the Venetians of Negroponte, the once united soldiers of fortune were divided into factions, which paralysed the central authority, and were aggravated by the prolonged absence of the vicar-general in Sicily. One party wished to place the duchies under the protection of Genoa, the natural enemy of Venice, while two bitter rivals, Roger de Lluria and Pedro de Pou, or Petrus de Puteo, the chief justice, an unjust judge and a grasping and ambitious official, both claimed the title of vicar of the absent vicar-general. Pou’s tyranny became so odious to Catalans and Greeks alike that the former rose against him and slew him and his chief adherents. The experiment of allowing the vicar-general as well as the duke to remain an absentee had thus proved to be a failure; Lluria, as the strongest man on the spot, was rewarded with the office of vicar-general as the sole means of keeping the duchies intact. So vulnerable did the Catalan state appear that the representatives of Walter of Brienne, the Baron of Argos and the Count of Conversano, renewed the attempt of their predecessor and, if we may believe the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea, actually occupied for a time the city of Athens.

The fast approaching Turkish danger ought to have united all the Latin states of the Levant against the common foe, to whom they all eventually succumbed. An attempt at union was made by Pope Gregory XI, at the instance of the Archbishop of Neopatras; and a congress of the Christian rulers of the East was convened by him to meet at Thebes in 1373. We can well imagine how the ancient city, the capital of the Athenian duchy, was enlivened by the arrival of these more or less eminent persons, or their envoys; how the Archbishops of Neopatras and Naxos preached a new crusade against the infidel in the church of Our Lady; how every one applauded their excellent advice; and how personal jealousies marred the results of that, as of every subsequent congress on the Eastern question. Scarcely had the delegates separated, when Nerio Acciajuoli, Baron of Corinth, the boldest and astutest of them all, a worthy scion of that great Florentine family of bankers established for a generation in the principality of Achaia showed his appreciation of the value of unity by seizing Megara as the first step on the way to Athens. It is an interesting proof of the popularity of Catalan rule among those Greeks, at any rate, who held office under the Company, that one of the warmest defenders of Megara was a Greek notary, Demetrios Rendi, who afterwards rose to a position of importance at Athens. Such was the weakness of the once terrible Catalan state that the upstart Florentine’s attack remained unavenged. The fall of Catalan rule was now only a question of time.

The death of the royal Duke of Athens and Neopatras, Frederick III, in 1377, yet further injured his Greek duchies. The duke had bequeathed them to his young daughter Maria; but the succession was disputed by King Pedro IV of Aragon, brother-in-law of Frederick III, who appealed to the principle of the Salic law as laid down by that monarch’s predecessor, Frederick II. The Catalans of Attica were naturally disinclined to accept the government of a young girl at so critical a moment, when the Turk was at their gates. All the three archbishops and the principal barons and knights at once declared for the King of Aragon; but there was a minority in favour of Maria, headed by the Venetian Marquess of Boudonitza, who was eager to shake off the bond of vassalage to the vicar-general. The burgesses, anxious for security, supported the Aragonese party. At this moment, however, a third competitor appeared in the duchies in the shape of the Navarrese Company, which sought to repeat the exploits of the Catalans seventy years before. The researches of the learned historian of the Catalans and Navarrese, Don Antonio Rubió y Lluch, have thrown a flood of light upon this portion of the Athenian annals, and have explained much that was hitherto obscure. Employed originally by King Charles II of Navarre in his struggle with Charles V of France, the Navarrese mercenaries had found their occupation gone when those two rival sovereigns made peace in 1366. After many vicissitudes they found congenial service, fourteen years later, under the banner of Jacques de Baux, Prince of Achaia and the last titular Emperor of Constantinople, who thought the moment had come to recover his ancestors’ dominions.

Accordingly, early in 1380, they directed their steps towards Attica, under the command of Mahiot de Coquerel, chamberlain of the King of Navarre, and Pedro de Superan, surnamed Bordo, or the bastard[93]. These experienced leaders found valuable assistance in the chiefs of the Sicilian party; in the knights of St John who sallied forth from the Morea to pillage the distracted duchy; in the Count of Conversano, who seems to have now made a second attempt to regain his ancestors’ heritage; and in the mutual jealousies of Thebes and Athens, fomented by the characteristic desire of the Athenians to be independent of Theban supremacy. In Bœotia, one place after another fell before the adventurers from Navarre; the noble castle of Livadia, which still preserves the memory of its Catalan masters, was betrayed by a Greek from Durazzo; and the capital was surrendered by two Spanish traitors. But the fortress of Salona defied their assaults; and the Akropolis, thanks to the bravery of its governor, Romeo de Bellarbe, and to the loyalty of the ever useful notary, Demetrios Rendi, baffled the machinations of a little band of malcontents. These severe checks broke the force of the soldiers of Navarre; their appearance in Greece had alarmed all the petty potentates of the Morea and the islands; and they withdrew to Bœotia, whence, some two years later, they were finally dislodged. Thence they proceeded to the Morea, where they carved out a principality, nominally for Jacques de Baux, really for themselves.

The people of Athens and Salona, whose loyalty to the crown of Aragon had saved the duchies, were well aware of the value of their services, and were resolved to have their reward. Both communities accordingly presented petitions to King Pedro; and these capitulations, drawn up in the Catalan language, have fortunately been preserved in the archives of Barcelona. Both the Athenian capitulations and those of Salona are largely concerned with personal questions—requests that this or that faithful person should receive privileges, lands, and honours, especially his Majesty’s most loyal subject, the Greek, Demetrios Rendi. From the date of the Frankish conquest no member of the conquered race had ever risen to such eminence as this serviceable clerk, who now obtained broad acres, goods, and serfs in both Attica and Bœotia. But there were some clauses in the Athenian petition of a more general character. The Athenians begged the central authorities at Thebes for a continuance of their recently won independence, and for permission to bequeath their property and serfs to the Catholic Church. Both these prayers met with a blank refusal. King Pedro told the petitioners that he intended to treat the duchies as an indivisible whole, and that home-rule for Athens was quite out of the question. He also reminded them that the Catalans were only a small garrison in Greece, and that, if holy Church became possessed of their property, there would be no one left to defend the country. He also observed that there was no hardship in this, for the law of Athens was also that of his kingdoms of Majorca and Valencia. The soundness of his Majesty’s statesmanship was obvious in the peculiar conditions of the Catalan state; but this demand shows the influence of the Church, an influence rarely found in the history of Frankish Greece.

Of all the dukes who had held sway over Athens, Pedro IV was the first to express himself in enthusiastic terms about the Akropolis. The poetic monarch—himself a troubadour and a chronicler—described that sacred rock in eloquent language as “the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such as all the kings of Christendom together would imitate in vain.” He had doubtless heard from the lips of Bishop Boyl of Megara, who was chaplain in the chapel of St Bartholomew in the governor’s palace on the Akropolis, a description of the ancient buildings, then almost uninjured, which the bishop knew so well. Yet he considered twelve men-at-arms sufficient defence for the brightest jewel in his crown.

Pedro now did his best to repair the ravages of the civil war; he ordered a general amnesty for all the inhabitants of the duchies, and showered rewards on faithful cities and individuals. Livadia, always a privileged town in the Catalan period, not only received a confirmation of its rights, but became the seat of the Order of St George in Greece, an honour due to the fact that the head of the saint was then preserved there. Most important of all for the future history of Greece, the king granted exemption from taxes for two years to all Albanians who would come and settle in the depleted duchies. This was the beginning of that Albanian colonisation of Attica of which so many traces remain in the population and the topography of the present day.

But the Albanian colonists came too late to save the Catalan domination. From the heights of Akrocorinth and from the twin hills of Megara, Nerio Acciajuoli, the Florentine upstart, had been attentively watching the rapid dissolution of the Catalan power. He saw a land weakened by civil war and foreign invasion; he knew that the titular duke was an absentee, engrossed with more important affairs; he found the ducal viceroys summoned away to Spain or Sicily, while the old families of the conquest were almost as extinct as the French whom they had displaced. He was a man of action, without scruples, without fear, and he resolved to strike. Hiring a galley from the Venetian arsenal at Candia, under pretext of sweeping Turkish corsairs from the two seas, he assembled a large force of cavalry, and sought an excuse for intervention. The pride of a noble dame was the occasion of the fall of Athens. Nerio asked the Dowager Countess of Salona to give her daughter’s hand to his brother-in-law, Pietro Saraceno, scion of a Sienese family long settled in Eubœa. The Countess, in whose veins flowed the Imperial blood of the Cantacuzenes, scornfully rejected the offer of the Florentine tradesman, and affianced her daughter to a Serbian princeling of Thessaly. Franks and Greeks at Salona were alike indignant at this alliance with a Slav; Nerio’s horsemen invaded the county and the rest of the duchy, while his galley went straight for the Piræus. In the absence of a guiding hand—for the vicar-general was away in Spain—the Catalans made no serious resistance; only the Akropolis and a few other castles held out. In vain the King of Aragon despatched Pedro de Pau to take the command; that gallant officer, the last Catalan governor of the noblest fortress in Europe, defended the “Castle of Athens” for more than a twelvemonth, till, on May 2, 1388, it too surrendered to the Florentine. In vain, on April 22, as a last resource, it had been offered to the Countess of Salona, if she could save it[94]. The new King of Aragon in vain promised the Sindici of Athens to visit “so famous a portion of his realm,” and announced that he was sending a fleet to “confound his enemies.” We know not whether the fleet ever arrived; if it did, it was unsuccessful. The sovereigns of Aragon might gratify their vanity by appointing a titular vicar-general, or even a duke, of the duchies whose names they still included in their titles; once, indeed, the news of an expedition aroused alarm at Athens. But it proved to be merely the usual tall talk of the Catalans; the flag of Aragon never waved again from the ramparts of the Akropolis; the duchy passed to the Acciajuoli.

The Catalan Grand Company disappeared from the face of Attica as rapidly as rain from its light soil. Like their Burgundian predecessors, these soldiers of fortune conquered but struck no root in the land. Some took ship for Sicily; some, like Ballester, the last Catalan Archbishop of Athens, are heard of in Cataluña; while others, among them the two branches of the Fadrique family, lingered on for a time, the one at Salona, the other at Ægina, where we find their connections, the Catalan family of Caopena, ruling till 1451—a fact which explains the boast of a much later Catalan writer, Peña y Farel, that his countrymen maintained their “ancient splendour” in Greece till the middle of the fifteenth century. Thither the Catalans conveyed the head of St George, and thence it was removed to the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, when the Venetians succeeded the Caopena as masters of Ægina. Even to-day a noble family in Zante bears the name of Katalianos; and in the island of Santorin are three families of Spanish origin—those of Da Corogna, De Cigalla, and Delenda, to which last the recent Catholic Archbishop of Athens belonged. Besides the castles of Salona, Livadia, and Lamia, and the row of towers between Livadia and Thebes, the Catalans have left a memorial of their stay in Greece in the curious fresco of the Virgin and Child, now in the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, which came from the church of the Prophet Elias near the gate of the Agora. Unlike their predecessors, they minted no coins; unlike them, they had no ducal court in their midst to stimulate luxury and refinement. Yet even in the Athens of the Catalans there was some culture. A diligent Athenian priest copied medical works; and we hear of the libraries belonging to the Catholic bishops of Salona and Megara.

The Greeks long remembered with terror the Catalan domination. A Greek girl, in a mediæval ballad, prays that her seducer may “fall into the hands of the Catalans”; even a generation ago the name of Catalan was used as a term of reproach in Attica and in Eubœa, in Akarnania, Messenia, Lakonia, and at Tripolitsa. Yet, as we have seen, the Greeks did not raise a finger to assist a French restoration when they had the chance, while there are several instances of Greeks rendering valuable aid to the Catalans against the men of Navarre. Harsher they may have been than the French, but they probably gained their bad name before they settled down in Attica, and became more staid and more tolerant as they became respectable. In our own time they have found admirers and apologists among their own countrymen, who are justly proud of the fact that the most famous city in the world was for two generations governed by the sons of Cataluña. And in the history of Athens, where nothing can lack interest, they, too, are entitled to a place.

AUTHORITIES

1. I Libri Commemoriali. Vols. I-VI. Ed. by R. Predelli. Venice: Reale Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria, 1876-1903.

2. Libro de las Fechos et Conquistas del Principado de la Morea. Ed. by A. Morel-Fatio. Geneva, 1885.

3. La Espedición y Dominación de los Catalanes en Oriente; Los Navarros en Grecia. By D. Antonio Rubió y Lluch. Barcelona, 1887.

4. Sul Dominio dei Ducati di Atene e Neopatria dei Re di Sicilia. By F. Guardione. Palermo, 1895.

5. Chronik des Edlen En Ramon Muntaner. Ed. Karl Lanz. Stuttgart, 1844.

6. Οἱ Καταλάνοι ἐν τῇ Ἄνατολῇ (The Catalans in the East). By E. I. Stamatiades. Athens, 1869.

7. Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum. Ed. G. M. Thomas and R. Predelli. Venice, 1880-1899.

8. De Historiæ Ducatus Atheniensis Fontibus. By K. Hopf. 1852.

9. Catalunya a Grecia. By D. Antonio Rubió y Lluch. Barcelona, 1906.

10. Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (Documents relating to the Mediæval History of Athens). Ed. Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1906.

And other works.

APPENDIX
THE FRANKISH INSCRIPTION AT KARDITZA

To students of Frankish Greece the church at Karditza in Bœotia is one of the most interesting in the country, because it contains an inscription referring to an important Frankish personage, Antoine le Flamenc, and dating from the fatal year 1311, which witnessed the overthrow of the Frankish Duchy of Athens in the swamps of the Bœotian Kephissos. Buchon had twice[95] published this inscription; but, as I was anxious to know in what condition it was and to have an exact facsimile of it, I asked Mr D. Steel, the manager of the Lake Copais Company, to have a fresh copy taken. Mr Steel kindly sent his Greek draughtsman to copy the inscription, and at the same time visited the church and took the photographs now published (Plate I, Figs. 1 and 2). Subsequently, in 1912, I visited the church with him and saw the inscription, which is painted on the plaster of the wall. Mr Steel informed me that, when he first saw the church about 1880, “the extension of the west end,” clearly visible in the photographs, “had not yet been made, while at that end there existed a sort of verandah set on pieces of ancient columns.”

On comparing the present copy (Text-fig. 1) with Buchon’s versions, it will be noticed that not only are there several differences of spelling, but that the French scholar omitted one important addition to the year at the end of the inscription—the indiction, which is rightly given as the 9th. This is a further proof that the date of the inscription is 1311, which corresponds with both the year 6819 and the 9th indiction. As the battle of the Kephissos was fought on March 15th of that year, and as Antoine le Flamenc is known to have survived the terrible carnage of that day, we may surmise, as I have elsewhere suggested, that the work commemorated in the inscription was “in pursuance of a vow made before he went into action.”

Fig. 1. Inscription on the Church at Karditza.

Antoine le Flamenc, whose ancestors had settled in the Holy Land, is several times mentioned during the first decade of the fourteenth century. The Livre de la Conqueste[96] states that Guy II, Duke of Athens, appointed him his “bailie and lieutenant” in Thessaly in 1303, and describes him as un des plus sages hommes de Romanie and le plus sage dou duchame. The same passage alludes also to Jean le Flamenc, his son, as receiving a post in Thessaly. Doubtless their experience of the Wallachs, who then, as now, wandered as winter approached from the Thessalian to the Bœotian Karditza, would specially commend these two distinguished men for such duties. Two years later we find Antoine as one of the witnesses of a deed[97] regarding the property of the Duchess of Athens, just come of age at Thebes, in her father’s land of Hainault. On April 2nd, 1309, both Antoine and Jean were present at the engagement of the then widowed Duchess with Charles of Taranto at Thebes[98]. On the 23rd of a certain month (? September) of 1308, a Venetian document[99] alludes to the intention of Fiammengo Antonio, together with Guy II, Rocaforte, and Bonifacio da Verona, to tentar l’impresa di Negroponte—in other words, to make an attempt upon that Venetian colony. On August 11th, 1309, another Venetian letter, this time addressed to Egregio militi Antonio Fiammengo, informs us that he had rented the property of Pietro Correr, an absent canon of Thebes, and bids him not to consign the rents to any but the rightful person. A second letter of the same day, addressed to the bailie and councillors of Negroponte, mentions him again in connection with this affair[100]. Finally, the list of Greek dignitaries, with whom the Republic was in correspondence, originally drawn up before the battle of the Kephissos and then corrected in 1313, mentions Ser Antonius Flamengo miles[101]. As his name is not followed by the word decessit or mortuus, added to those who had fallen in the battle, he was one of the very few survivors.

To these certain facts Hopf[102] added the assumption, based on no evidence, that he was the “Frank settled in the East,” whom Isabella, Marchioness of Boudonitza, married, and who, in 1286, disputed the succession to that castle with her cousin.

As Buchon’s books are rare, I append his transcript of the inscription:

ΑΝΗΓΕΡΘΗ Ο ΘΥΙΩΣ ΚΕ ΠΝΣΕΠΤΟΣ
ΝΑΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΙΠΟΥ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΜ.Τ
ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΥ ΔΗΑ ΣΙΝΕΡΓΙΑΣ ΚΕ
ΠΟΘΟΥ ΠΟΛΛΟΥ ΤΟΥ ΘΕΩΣΕΒΕΣΤΑΤΟΥ
ΚΑΒΑΛΑΡΙ ΜΙΣΕΡ ΑΝΤΟΝΙ
ΛΕ ΦΛΑΜΑ
ΟΔΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΗΛΙΦΕΝ ΠΟΛΩΝ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΩΝ
ΟΔΕ ΤΕΛΟΣ ΕΥΡΕΝ ΗΣΤΟΡΗΑ ΑΥΤΑ
ΠΑΡΑ ΓΕΡΜΑΝΟΥ ΙΕΡΟΜΟΝΑΧΟΥ
ΚΕ ΚΑΘΕΓΟΥΜΕΝΟΥ
ΚΑΙ ΝΙΚΟΔΕΜΟΥ ΙΕΡΟΜΟΝΑΧΟΥ
ΤΟΝ ΑΥΤΑΔΕΛΦΩΝ ΤΟΥΣ
ΑΝΑΚΕΝΕΣΑΝΤΑΣ ΤΟΝ
ΗΚΟΝ ΤΟΥΤΟΝ.
+ ΕΤΙ. ϛωΙΘ. +

PLATE I

Fig. 1. The Church of St George at Karditza, looking towards the end, which is modern

Fig. 2. The Church of St George at Karditza, showing old belfry and buttresses supporting old part of the building

5. FLORENTINE ATHENS

The history of mediæval Athens is full of surprises. A Burgundian nobleman founding a dynasty in the ancient home of heroes and philosophers; a roving band of mercenaries from the westernmost peninsula of Europe destroying in a single day the brilliant French civilisation of a century; a Florentine upstart, armed with the modern weapons of finance, receiving the keys of the Akropolis from a gallant and chivalrous soldier of Spain—such are the tableaux which inaugurate the three epochs of her Frankish annals. In an earlier paper in the Quarterly Review (January 1907) we dealt with the French and the Catalan periods; we now propose to trace the third and last phase of Latin rule over the most famous of Greek cities.

When, in the spring of 1388, Nerio Acciajuoli found himself master of “the Castle of Setines,” as the Franks called the Akropolis, his first care was to conciliate the Greeks, who formed by far the largest part of his subjects, and who may have aided him to conquer the Athenian duchy. For the first time since the day, nearly two centuries before, when Akominatos had fled from his beloved cathedral to exile at Keos, a Greek Metropolitan of Athens was allowed to reside in his see, not, indeed, on the sacred rock itself, but beneath the shadow of the Areopagos. We may be sure that this remarkable concession was prompted, not by sentiment, but by policy, though the policy was perhaps mistaken. The Greek hierarchy has in all ages been distinguished for its political character; and the presence of a high Greek ecclesiastic at Athens at once provided his fellow-countrymen with a national leader against the rulers, whom they distrusted as foreigners and he hated as schismatics. He was ready to call in the aid of the Turks against his fellow-Christians, just as in modern Macedonia a Greek bishop abhorred the followers of the Bulgarian Exarch far more than those of the Prophet. Thus early in Florentine Athens were sown the seeds of the Turkish domination; thus, in the words of the Holy Synod, “the Athenian Church seemed to have recovered its ancient happiness such as it had enjoyed before the barbarian conquest[103].”

Nor was it the Church alone which profited by the change of dynasty. Greek for the first time became the official language of the Government; Nerio and his accomplished daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, used it in their public documents; the Countess, the most masterful woman of the Latin Orient, proudly signed herself, in the cinnabar ink of Byzantium, “Empress of the Romans”; even Florentines settled at Athens assumed the Greek translation of their surnames. Thus, a branch of the famous Medici family was transplanted to Athens, became completely Hellenised under the name of Iatros, and has left behind it a progeny which scarcely conceals, beneath that of Iatropoulos, its connection with the mediæval rulers of Florence. There is even evidence that the “elders” of the Greek community were allowed a share in the municipal government of Florentine, no less than in that of Turkish, Athens.

Hitherto the career of Nerio Acciajuoli had been one of unbroken success. His star had guided him from Florence to Akrocorinth, and from Akrocorinth to the Akropolis; his two daughters, one famed as the most beautiful, the other as the most talented woman of her time, were married to the chief Greek and to the leading Latin potentate of Greece—to Theodore Palaiologos, Despot of Mistra, and to Carlo Tocco, the Neapolitan noble who ruled over the County Palatine of Cephalonia. These alliances seemed to guard him against every foe. He was now destined, however, to experience one of those sudden turns of fortune which were peculiarly characteristic of Frankish Greece. He was desirous of rounding off his dominions by the acquisition of the castles of Nauplia and Argos, which had been appendages of the French Duchy of Athens, but which, during the Catalan period, had remained loyal to the family of Brienne and to its heirs, the house of Enghien. In 1388, Marie d’Enghien, the Lady of Argos, left a young and helpless widow, had transferred her Argive estates to Venice, which thus began its long domination over the ancient kingdom of Agamemnon. But, before the Venetian commissioner had had time to take possession, Nerio had instigated his son-in-law, the Despot of Mistra, to seize Argos by a coup de main. For this act of treachery he paid dearly. It was not merely that the indignant Republic broke off all commercial relations between her colonies and Athens, but she also availed herself of the Navarrese Company, which was now established in the Morea, as the fitting instrument of her revenge. The Navarrese commander accordingly invited Nerio to a personal conference on the question of Argos; and the shrewd Florentine, with a childlike simplicity remarkable in one who had lived so many years in the Levant, accepted the invitation, and deliberately placed himself in the power of his enemies. The opportunity was too good to be lost; the law of nations was mere waste-paper to the men of Navarre; Nerio was arrested and imprisoned in a Peloponnesian prison. At once the whole Acciajuoli clan set to work to obtain the release of their distinguished relative; the Archbishop of Florence implored the intervention of the Pope; the Florentine Government offered the most liberal terms to Venice; a message was despatched to Amedeo of Savoy; most efficacious of all, the aid of Genoa was invoked on behalf of one whose daughter was a Genoese citizen. Nerio was released; but his ransom was disastrous to Athens. In order to raise the requisite amount, he stripped the silver plates off the doors of the Parthenon and seized the gold, silver and precious stones which the piety of many generations had given to that venerable cathedral.

Nerio was once more free, but he was not long allowed to remain undisturbed in his palace on the Akropolis. The Sicilian royal family now revived its claims to the Athenian duchy, and even nominated a phantom vicar-general[104]; and, what was far more serious, the Turks, under the redoubtable Evrenos Beg, descended upon Attica. The overthrow of the Serbian Empire on the fatal field of Kossovo had now removed the last barrier between Greece and her future masters; and Bayezid, “the Thunderbolt,” fell upon that unprotected land. The blow struck Nerio’s neighbour, the Dowager Countess of Salona, the proud dame who had so scornfully rejected his suit nine years before. Ecclesiastical treachery and corruption sealed the fate of that ancient fief of the Stromoncourts, the Deslaurs, and the Fadriques, amid tragic surroundings, which a modern Greek drama has endeavoured to depict[105]. The Dowager Countess had allowed her paramour, a priest, to govern in her name; and this petty tyrant had abused his power to wring money from the shepherds of Parnassos and to debauch the damsels of Delphi by his demoniacal incantations in the classic home of the supernatural. At last he cast his eyes on the fair daughter and full money-bags of the Greek bishop; deprived of his child and fearing for his gold, the bishop roused his flock against the monster and begged the Sultan to occupy a land so well adapted for his Majesty’s favourite pastimes of hunting and riding as is the plain at the foot of Parnassos. The Turks accepted the invitation; the priest shut himself up in the noble castle, slew the bishop’s daughter, and prepared to fight. But there was treachery among the garrison; a man of Salona murdered the tyrant and offered his head to the Sultan; and the Dowager Countess and her daughter in vain endeavoured to appease the conqueror with gifts. Bayezid sent the young Countess to his harem; her mother he handed over to the insults of his soldiery, her land he assigned to one of his lieutenants. Her memory still clings to the “pomegranate” cliff (ροιά) at Salona, whence, according to the local legend, repeated to the author on the spot, “the princess” was thrown.

Nerio feared for his own dominions, whence the Greek Metropolitan had fled—so it was alleged—to the Turkish camp, and had promised the infidels the treasures of the Athenian Church in return for their aid. For the moment, however, the offer of tribute saved the Athenian duchy; but its ruler hastened to implore the aid of the Pope and of King Ladislaus of Naples against the enemies of Christendom, and at the same time sought formal recognition of his usurpation from that monarch, at whose predecessors’ court the fortunes of his family had originated, and who still pretended to be the suzerain of Achaia, and therefore of its theoretical dependency, Athens. Ladislaus, nothing loth, in 1394 rewarded the self-seeking Florentine for having recovered the Duchy of Athens “from certain of His Majesty’s rivals,” with the title of duke, with remainder—as Nerio had no legitimate sons—to his brother Donato and the latter’s heirs. Cardinal Angelo Acciajuoli, another brother, was to invest the new duke with a golden ring; and it was expressly provided that Athens should cease to be a vassal state of Achaia, but should thenceforth own no overlord save the King of Naples. The news that one of their clan had obtained the glorious title of Duke of Athens filled the Acciajuoli with pride—such was the fascination which the name of that city exercised in Italy. Boccaccio, half a century before, had familiarised his countrymen with a title which Walter of Brienne, the tyrant of Florence, had borne as of right, and which, as applied to Nerio Acciajuoli, was no empty flourish of the herald’s college.

The first Florentine Duke of Athens did not, however, long survive the realisation of his ambition. On September 25 of the same year he died, laden with honours, the type of a successful statesman. But, as he lay on his sick-bed at Corinth, the dying man seems to have perceived that he had founded his fortunes on the sand. Pope and King might give him honours and promises; they could not render effective aid against the Turks. It was under the shadow of this coming danger that Nerio drew up his remarkable will.

His first care was for the Parthenon, Our Lady of Athens, in which he directed that his body should be laid to rest. He ordered its doors to be replated with silver, its stolen treasures to be bought up and restored to it; he provided that, besides the twelve canons of the cathedral, there should be twenty priests to say masses for the repose of his soul; and he bequeathed to the Athenian minster, for their support and for the maintenance of its noble fabric, the city of Athens, with its dependencies, and all the brood-mares of his valuable stud. Seldom has a church received such a remarkable endowment; the Cathedral of Monaco, built out of the earnings of a gaming-table, is perhaps the closest parallel to the Parthenon maintained by the profits of a stud-farm. Nerio made his favourite daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, his principal heiress; to her he bequeathed his castles of Megara, Sikyon, and Corinth, while to his natural son, Antonio, he left the government of Thebes, Livadia, and all beyond it. To the bastard’s mother, Maria Rendi, daughter of the ever-serviceable Greek notary who had been so prominent in the last years of the Catalan domination, and had retained his position under the new dynasty, her lover granted the full franchise, with the right to retain all her property, including, perhaps, the spot between Athens and the Piræus which still preserves the name of her family. Finally, he recommended his land to the care of the Venetian Republic, which he begged to protect his heiress and to carry out his dispositions for the benefit of Our Lady of Athens.

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.

Antonio and his Florentine relatives must have led a merry life in their delectable duchy. In the family correspondence we find allusions to hawking and partridge shooting; and the ducal stable provided good mounts for the young Italians who scoured the plains of Attica and Bœotia in quest of game. The cultured Florentines were delighted with Athens and the Akropolis. “You have never seen,” wrote Nicolò Machiavelli to one of his cousins, “a fairer land nor yet a fairer fortress than this.” It was there, in the venerable Propylaia, that Antonio had fixed his ducal residence. No great alterations were required to convert the classic work of Mnesikles into a Florentine palace. All that the Acciajuoli seem to have done was to cut the two vestibules in two so as to make four rooms, to fill up the spaces between the pillars with walls—removed so recently as 1835—and to add a second storey, the joist-sockets of which are still visible, to both that building and the Pinakotheke, which either then, or in the Turkish times, was crowned with battlements.

To the Florentine dukes is also usually ascribed the construction of the square “Frankish tower,” which stood opposite the Temple of Nike Apteros till it was pulled down in 1874 by one of those acts of pedantic barbarism which considers one period of history alone worthy of study, instead of regarding every historical monument as a precious landmark in the evolution of a nation. We can well believe that the Florentine watchman from the projecting turret daily swept sea and land in all directions, save where the massive cathedral of Our Lady shut out part of Hymettos from his view; and at night the beacon-fire kindled on the summit warned Akrocorinth of the approach of Turkish horsemen or rakish-looking galleys. Nor did the Italians limit their activity as builders to the castle-crag alone. Chalkokondyles expressly says that Antonio’s long and peaceful administration enabled him to beautify the city. There is evidence that the dukes possessed a beautiful villa at the spring of Kallirrhoe, and that close by they were wont to pray in the church of St Mary’s-on-the-rock, once a temple of Triptolemos. More than two centuries later a French ambassador heard mass in this church; and one of his companions found the lion rampant and the three lilies of the Florentine bankers, which visitors to the famous Certosa know so well, still guarding—auspicium melioris ævi—the entrance of the Turkish bazaar[111].

Of literary culture there are some few traces in Florentine Athens. It was in Antonio’s reign that Athens gave birth to her last historian, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, the Herodotos of mediæval Greece, who told the story of the new Persian invasion, and to his brother Demetrios, who did so much to diffuse Greek learning in Italy. Another of Antonio’s subjects is known to scholars as a copyist of manuscripts at Siena; and it is obvious that the two Italian Courts of Athens and Joannina were regarded as places where professional men might find openings. A young Italian writes from Arezzo to ask if either Antonio Acciajuoli or Carlo Tocco could give him a chair of jurisprudence, logic, medicine, or natural or moral philosophy[112]. Unfortunately, we are not told whether the modest request of this universal genius was granted or not.

Thus, for a long period, the Athenian duchy enjoyed peace and prosperity, broken only by a terrible visitation of the plague and further diminished by emigration—that scourge of modern Greece. But the modern Greeks have not the twin institutions, serfdom and slavery, on which mediæval society rested. Even the enlightened Countess of Cephalonia presented a young female slave to one of her cousins, with full power to sell or otherwise dispose of her as he pleased. Antonio did all in his power to retain the useful Albanians, who had entered his dominions in large numbers after the capture of the Despotat of Epeiros by Carlo Tocco in 1418, and thus rendered a service to Attica, the results of which are felt to this present hour. It is to the wise policy of her last Aragonese and her second Florentine duke that that Albanian colonisation is due which has given “the thin soil” of Attica numbers of sturdy cultivators, who still speak Albanian as well as Greek, and still preserve in such village names as Spata, Liosia, and Liopesi, the memory of the proud Albanian chieftains of Epeiros. Greek influence, too, grew steadily under a dynasty which was now half Hellenised. The notary and chancellor of the city continued to be a Greek; and a Greek archon was, for the first time since the Frankish conquest, to play a leading part in Athenian politics[113].

When one morning in 1435, after a reign of thirty-two years, Antonio’s attendants found him dead in his bed, a Greek as well as an Italian party disputed the succession. The Italian candidate, young Nerio, eldest son of Franco Acciajuoli, baron of Sykaminon, whom the late Duke had adopted as his heir, occupied the city. But the Duchess Maria Melissene and her kinsman, Chalkokondyles, father of the historian and the leading man of Athens, held the castle. Well aware, however, that the Sultan was the real master of the situation, the Greek archon set out for the Turkish Court to obtain Murad II’s consent to this act of usurpation. The Sultan scornfully rejected the bribes of the Athenian diplomatist, threw him into prison, and sent his redoubtable captain, Tourakhan, to occupy Thebes. Even then the Greek Duchess did not abandon all hope of securing Athens for the national cause. Through the historian Phrantzes she made an arrangement with Constantine Palaiologos, the future Emperor, then one of the Despots of the Morea, and the foremost champion of Hellenism, that he should become Duke of Athens, and that she should receive compensation near her old home in the Peloponnese. This scheme would have united nearly all Greece under the Imperial family; but it was doomed to failure. There was a section of Greeks at Athens hostile to Chalkokondyles—for party spirit has always characterised Greek public life—and this section joined the Florentine party, decoyed the Duchess out of the Akropolis, and proclaimed Nerio II. The marriage of the new Duke with the Dowager Duchess[114] and the banishment of the family of Chalkokondyles secured the internal peace of the distracted city; and the Sultan was well content to allow a Florentine princeling to retain the phantom of power so long as he paid his tribute with regularity.

The weak and effeminate Nerio II was exactly suited for the part of a Turkish puppet. But, like many feeble rulers, the “lord of Athens and Thebes” seems to have made himself unpopular by his arrogance; and a few years after his accession he was deprived of his throne by an intrigue of his brother, Antonio II. He then retired to Florence, the home of his family, where he had property, to play the part of a prince in exile, if exile it could be called. There he must have been living at the time of the famous Council, an echo of whose decisions we hear in distant Athens, where a Greek priest, of rather more learning than most of his cloth, wrote to the Œcumenical Patriarch on the proper form of public prayer for the Pope. A bailie—so we learn from one of his letters[115]—was then administering the duchy, for Antonio had died in 1441; his infant son, Franco, was absent at the Turkish Court; and his subjects had recalled their former lord to the Akropolis. There he was seen, three years later, by the first antiquary who ever set foot in Frankish Athens, Cyriacus of Ancona, the Pausanias of mediæval Greece.

That extraordinary man, like Schliemann, a merchant by profession but an archæologist by inclination, had already once visited Athens. In 1436 he had stayed there for a fortnight as the guest of a certain Antonelli Balduini; but on that occasion he was too much occupied copying inscriptions to seek an audience of the Duke. He, too, like the Capuan notary, went to see “Aristotle’s Study”; he describes the “house” or “palace of Hadrian”; he alludes to the statue of the Gorgon on the south of the Akropolis. But of contemporary Athens, apart from the monuments, he tells us little beyond the facts that it possessed four gates and that it had “new walls”—a statement corroborated by that of another traveller thirty years later, which might indicate the so-called wall of Valerian as the work of the Acciajuoli[116]. Of the inhabitants he says nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an archæologist?

In February 1444 the worthy Cyriacus revisited Athens; and on this occasion, accompanied by the Duke’s cousin and namesake, he went to pay his respects to “Nerio Acciajuoli of Florence, then prince of Athens,” whom he “found on the Akropolis, the lofty castle of the city[117].” Again, however, the archæological overpowered the human interest; and he hastened away from the ducal presence to inspect the Propylaia and the Parthenon. His original drawing of the west front of the latter building has been preserved in a manuscript, which formerly belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, but is now in the Berlin Museum, and is the earliest known pictorial reproduction of that splendid temple[118]. Other Athenian sketches may be seen in the Barberini manuscript of 1465, now at the Vatican, which contains the diagrams of San Gallo; and it seems that the eminent architect, who took the explanatory text almost verbatim from the note-books of Cyriacus, also copied the latter’s drawings.

The travels of the antiquary of Ancona in Greece demonstrate an interesting fact, which has too often been ignored, that the Latin rulers of the Levant were sometimes men of culture and taste. Crusino Sommaripa, the baron of Paros, took a pride in showing his visitor some marble statues which he had had excavated, and allowed him to send a marble head and leg to his friend Giustiniani-Banca, of Chios, a connoisseur of art who composed Italian verses in his “Homeric” villa. So deeply was Cyriacus moved by Crusino’s culture and kindness that he too burst out into an Italian poem, of which happily only one line has been published. Dorino Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos, aided him in his investigation of that island; the Venetian governor of Tenos escorted him in his state-galley to inspect the antiquities of Delos; and Carlo Tocco II, whom he quaintly describes as “King of the Epeirotes,” gave him every facility for visiting the ruins of Dodona, and was graciously pleased to cast his royal eye over the manuscript account of the antiquary’s journey[119]. Another of the Tocchi is known to have employed a Greek priest to copy for him the works of Origen and Chrysostom; and in the remote Peloponnesian town of Kalavryta Cyriacus met a kindred soul, who possessed a large library from which he lent the wandering archæologist a copy of Herodotos. Thus, on the eve of the Turkish conquest, Greece was by no means so devoid of culture as has sometimes been too hastily assumed. It is clear, on the contrary, that her Frankish princes were by no means indifferent to their surroundings, and that the more enlightened of her own sons were conscious of her great past.