Read Ebook: Essays on the Latin Orient by Miller William

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2648 lines and 252628 words, and 53 pages

The Greeks long remembered with terror the Catalan domination. A Greek girl, in a mediaeval 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 Euboea, 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 Catalu?a. And in the history of Athens, where nothing can lack interest, they, too, are entitled to a place.

And other works.

THE FRANKISH INSCRIPTION AT KARDITZA

To students of Frankish Greece the church at Karditza in Boeotia 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 Boeotian Kephissos. Buchon had twice 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 . 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 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."

To these certain facts Hopf 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:

???????? ? ????? ?? ???????? ???? ??? ???? ???????.? ???????? ??? ????????? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ????????????? ???????? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ????? ???????? ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???? ???? ???????? ??????????? ?? ???????????? ??? ????????? ??????????? ??? ?????????? ???? ????????????? ??? ???? ??????. + ???. ????. +

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."

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 mediaeval 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.

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; 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. 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 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 Piraeus 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. 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.

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 Caesar 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.

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 mediaeval 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 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 Euboea; 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 AEgina, 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 AEgina, as a Venetian colony, might well seem, as it had seemed to Aristotle, the "eyesore of the Piraeus."

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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 Boeotia in quest of game. The cultured Florentines were delighted with Athens and the Akropolis. "You have never seen," wrote Nicol? 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.

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 mediaeval 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. Unfortunately, we are not told whether the modest request of this universal genius was granted or not.

That extraordinary man, like Schliemann, a merchant by profession but an archaeologist 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. Of the inhabitants he says nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an archaeologist?

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. 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 archaeologist 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.

The very year of the antiquary's second visit to Athens witnessed the last attempt of a patriotic and ambitious Greek to recover all Greece for his race. The future Emperor Constantine was now Despot of Mistra, the mediaeval Sparta; and he thought that the moment had at last come for renewing the plan for the annexation of the Athenian duchy which had failed nine years before. The Turks, hard pressed by the Hungarians and Poles, defeated by "the white knight of Wallachia" at Nish, defied by Skanderbeg in the mountains of Albania, and threatened by the appearance of a Venetian fleet in the AEgean, could no longer protect their creature at Athens. Ere long the last Constantine entered the gates of Thebes and forced Nerio II to pay him tribute. The Court of Naples heard that he had actually occupied Athens; and Alfonso V of Aragon, who had never forgotten that he was still titular Duke of Athens and Neopatras, wrote at once to Constantine demanding the restitution of the two duchies to himself, and sent the Marquess of Gerace to receive them from the conqueror's hands. Scarcely, however, had the letter been despatched when the fatal news of the great Turkish victory at Varna reached the writer. We hear nothing more of Gerace's mission, for all recognised that the fate of Athens now depended upon the will of the victorious Sultan. To Murad II the shadowy claims of the house of Aragon and the efforts of the house of Palaiologos were alike indifferent.

Nerio's attitude at this crisis was pitiful in the extreme. The Turks punished him for having given way to Constantine. Constantine again threatened him for his obsequiousness in promising to renew his tribute to the Turks. But the Sultan, true to the traditional Turkish policy of supporting the weaker of two rival Christian nationalities, forced the Greek Despot to evacuate the Florentine duchy. Nerio had the petty satisfaction of accompanying his lord and master to the Isthmus and of witnessing the capture of the famous Six-mile Rampart, in which the Greeks had vainly trusted, by the Serbian janissaries. Five years later, in 1451, a Venetian despatch gives us a last and characteristic glimpse of the wretched Nerio, when the Venetian envoy to the new Sultan, Mohammed II, is instructed to ask that potentate if he will compel his vassal, "the lord of Sithines and Stives," to settle the pecuniary claims of two Venetians.

Nerio's death was followed by one of those tragedies in which the women of Frankish Greece were so often protagonists, and of which a modern dramatist might well avail himself. After the death of his first wife, Nerio II had married a passionate Venetian beauty, Chiara Zorzi, or Giorgio, one of the daughters of the baron of Karystos, or Castel Rosso, in the south of Euboea, who sprang from the former Marquesses of Boudonitza. The Duchess Chiara bore him a son, Francesco, who was unfortunately still a minor at the time of his father's death. The child's mother possessed herself of the regency and persuaded the Porte, by the usual methods, to sanction her usurpation. Soon afterwards, however, there visited Athens on some commercial errand a young Venetian noble, Bartolommeo Contarini, whose father had been governor of the Venetian colony of Nauplia. The Duchess fell in love with her charming visitor, and bade him aspire to her hand and land. Contarini replied that alas! he had left a wife behind him in his palace on the lagoons. To the Lady of the Akropolis, a figure who might have stepped from a play of AEschylus, the Venetian wife was no obstacle. It was the age of great crimes. Contarini realised that Athens was worth a murder, poisoned his spouse, and returned to enjoy the embraces and the authority of the Duchess.

But the Athenians soon grew tired of this Venetian domination. They complained to Mohammed II; the great Sultan demanded explanations; and Contarini was forced to appear with his stepson, whose guardian he pretended to be, at the Turkish Court. There he found a dangerous rival in the person of Franco Acciajuoli, only son of the late Duke Antonio II and cousin of Francesco, a special favourite of Mohammed and a willing candidate for the Athenian throne. When the Sultan heard the tragic story of Chiara's passion, he ordered the deposition of both herself and her husband, and bade the Athenians accept Franco as their lord. Young Francesco was never heard of again. But the tragedy was not yet over. Franco had no sooner assumed the government of Athens than he ordered the arrest of his aunt Chiara, threw her into the dungeons of Megara, and there had her mysteriously murdered. A picturesque legend current three centuries later at Athens makes Franco throttle her with his own hands as she knelt invoking the aid of the Virgin, and then cut off her head with his sword; so deep was the impression which her fate made upon the popular imagination.

Franco's three sons were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, where one of them showed military and administrative ability of so high an order as to win the favour of his sovereign. Their mother, a Greek of noble lineage and famed for her beauty, became the cause of a terrible tragedy which convulsed alike Court and Church. Amoiroutses, the former minister and betrayer of the Greek Empire of Trebizond, fell desperately in love with the fair widow, to whom he addressed impassioned verses, and swore, though he was already married, to wed her or die. The OEcumenical Patriarch forbade the banns, and lost his beard and his office rather than yield to the Sultan. But swift retribution fell upon the bigamist, for he dropped down dead, a dice-box in his hand.

Thus ended the strange connection between Florence and Athens. A titular Duke of Athens had become tyrant of the Florentines, a Florentine merchant had become Duke of Athens; but the age when French and Italian adventurers could find an El Dorado on the poetic soil of Greece was over. The dull uniformity of Turkish rule spread over the land, save where the Dukes of the Archipelago and the Venetian colonies still remained the sole guardians of Western culture, the only rays of light in the once brilliant Latin Orient.

And other works.

NOTES ON ATHENS UNDER THE FRANKS

THE TURKISH CAPTURE OF ATHENS

Item dictis anno et indictione et die xxvj octobris.

Magnifici et potentes domini domini priores artium et vexillifer iustitie populi et comunis Florentie Intellecta expositione facta pro parte Loysii Neroczi Loysii de Pictis civis florentini exponentis omnia et singula infrascripta vice et nomine Neroczi eius patris et domine Laudomine eius matris et filie olim Franchi de Acciaiuolis absentium et etiam suo nomine proprio et vice et nomine fratrum ipsius Loysii et dicentis et narrantis quod dictus Neroczus eius pater et domina Laudomina eius mater iam diu et semper cum eorum familia prout notum est multis huius civitatis habitaverunt in Grecia in civitate Athenarum in qua habebant omnia eorum bona mobilia et immobilia excepta tantum infrascripta domo Florentie posita et quod dictus Neroczus iam sunt elapsi triginta quinque anni vel circa cepit in uxorem dictam dominam Laudominam in dicta civitate Athenarum ubi per gratiam Dei satis honorifice vivebant. Et quod postea de mense iunii anni millesimi quadringentesimi quinquagesimi sexti prout fuit voluntas Dei accidit quod ipsa civitas Athenarum fuit capta a Theucris et multi christiani ibi existentes ab eisdem spoliati et depulsi fuerunt inter quos fuit et est ipse Neroczus qui cum dicta eius uxore et undecim filiis videlicet sex masculis et quinque feminis expulsus fuit et omnibus suis bonis privatus et ita se absque ulla substantia reduxit in quoddam castrum prope Thebes in quo ad presens ipse Neroczus cum omni eius familia se reperit in paupertate maxima; et quod sibi super omnia molestum et grave est coram se videre dictas puellas iam nubiles et absque principio alicuius dotis et cum non habeant aliqua bona quibus possint succurrere tot tantisque eorum necessitatibus nisi solum unam domum cum una domuncula iuxta se positam Florentie in loco detto al Poczo Toschanelli quibus a primo, secundo et tertio via a quarto domus que olim fuit domine Nanne Soderini de Soderinis ipsi Nerozus et domina Laudomina et eorum filii predicti optarent posse vendere domos predictas ut de pretio illarum possint partim victui succurrere partim providere dotibus alicuius puellarum predictarum.

Of all the strange and romantic creations of the Middle Ages none is so curious as the capture of the poetic "Isles of Greece" by a handful of Venetian adventurers, and their organisation as a Latin Duchy for upwards of three centuries. Even to-day the traces of the ducal times may be found in many of the Cyclades, where Latin families, descendants of the conquerors, still preserve the high-sounding names and the Catholic religion of their Italian ancestors, in the midst of ruined palaces and castles, built by the mediaeval lords of the Archipelago out of ancient Hellenic temples. But of the Duchy of Naxos little is generally known. Its picturesque history, upon which Finlay touched rather slightly in his great work, has since then been thoroughly explored by a laborious German, the late Dr Hopf; but that lynx-eyed student of archives had no literary gifts; he could not write, he could only read, and his researches lie buried in a ponderous encyclopaedia. So this delightful Duchy, whose whole story is one long romance, still awaits the hand of a novelist to make it live again.

As we might expect from so shrewd a statesman, the founder of this island-duchy was fully sensible of the advantages to be derived from having the Greeks on his side. Instead of treating them as serfs and schismatics, he allowed all those who did not intrigue against him with the Greek potentates at Trebizond, Nice, or Arta, to retain their property. He guaranteed the free exercise of their religion, nor did he allow the Catholic archbishop, sent him by the Pope, to persecute the Orthodox clergy or their flocks. The former imperial domains were confiscated, in order to provide and maintain a new fleet, so necessary to the existence of islands menaced by pirates. That Marco I was a powerful and wealthy ruler is proved not only by his buildings, but also by the value set upon his aid. When the Cretans had risen, as they so often did, against the Venetians, the Governor sent in hot haste to Naxos for Marco's assistance. The Duke was still a citizen of the Republic; but the Governor knew his man, and stimulated his patriotism by the offer of lands in Crete. Marco lost no time in appearing upon the scene, defeated the insurgents, and claimed his reward. The Governor was also a Venetian, and not over-desirous of parting with his lands now that the danger seemed to be over. But Marco knew his Greeks by this time, and readily entered into a plot with a Cretan chief for the conquest of the island. Candia was speedily his, while the Governor had to escape in woman's clothes to the fortress of Temenos. But, just as he seemed likely to annex Crete to his Duchy, Venetian reinforcements arrived. Unable to carry out his design, he yet succeeded by his diplomacy in securing an amnesty and pecuniary compensation, with which he retired to his island domain. But the failure of his Cretan adventure did not in the least damp his ardour. With only eight ships he boldly attacked the squadron of the Emperor of Nice, nearly four times as numerous. Captured and carried as a prisoner to the Nicene Court, he so greatly impressed the Emperor by his courage and manly beauty that the latter ordered his release, and gave him one of the princesses of the imperial house in marriage. In short, his career was that of a typical Venetian adventurer, brave, hard-headed, selfish, and unscrupulous; in fact, just the sort of man to found a dynasty in a part of the world where cleverness counts for more than heroic simplicity of character.

During the long and peaceful reign of his son Angelo, little occurred to disturb the progress of the Duchy. But its external relations underwent a change at this time, in consequence of the transference of the suzerainty over it from the weak Emperor of Romania to the powerful Prince of Achaia, Geoffroy II, as a reward for Geoffroy's assistance in defending the Latin Empire against the Greeks. Angelo, too, equipped three galleys for the defence of Constantinople, and, after its fall, sent a handsome present to the exiled Emperor. Like his father, he was summoned to aid the Venetian Governor of Crete against the native insurgents, but on the approach of the Nicene fleet he cautiously withdrew. His son, Marco II, who succeeded him in 1262, found himself face to face with a more difficult situation than that which had prevailed in the times of his father and grandfather. The Greeks had recovered ground not only at Constantinople, but in the south-east of the Morea, and their successes were repeated on a smaller scale in the Archipelago. Licario, the Byzantine admiral, captured many of the AEgean islands, some of which remained thenceforth part of the imperial dominions. Besides the Sanudi, the dynasty of the Ghisi, lords of Tenos and Mykonos, alone managed to hold its own against the Greek invasion; yet even the Ghisi suffered considerably from the attacks of the redoubtable admiral. One member of that family was fond of applying to himself the Ovidian line, "I am too big a man to be harmed by fortune," and his subjects on the island of Skopelos, which has lately been notorious as the place of exile of Royalist politicians, used to boast that, even if the whole realm of Romania fell, they would escape destruction. But Licario, who knew that Skopelos lacked water, invested it during a hot summer, forced it to capitulate, and sent the haughty Ghisi in chains to Constantinople. Marco II had to quell an insurrection of the Greeks at Melos, who thought that the time had come for shaking off the Latin yoke. Educated at the court of Guillaume de Villehardouin, Marco had imbibed the resolute methods of that energetic prince, and he soon showed that he did not intend to relax his hold on what his grandfather had seized. Aided by a body of Frank fugitives from Constantinople, he reduced the rebels to submission, and pardoned all of them with the exception of a Greek priest whom he suspected of being the cause of the revolt. This man he is said to have ordered to be bound hand and foot, and then thrown into the harbour of Melos.

Towards the orthodox clergy Marco II was, if we may believe the Jesuit historian of the Duchy, by no means so tolerant as his two predecessors. There was, it seems, in the island of Naxos an altar dedicated to St Pachys, a portly man of God, who was believed by the devout Naxiotes to have the power of making their children fat. In the East fatness is still regarded as a mark of comeliness, and in the thirteenth century St Pachys was a very popular personage, whose altar was visited by loving mothers, and whose hierophants lived upon the credulity of the faithful. Marco II regarded this institution as a gross superstition. Had he been a wise statesman, he would have tolerated it all the same, and allowed the matrons of Naxos to shove their offspring through the hollow altar of the fat saint, so long as no harm ensued to his State. But Marco II was not wise; he smashed the altar, and thereby so irritated his Orthodox subjects that he had to build a fortress to keep them in order. But the Greeks were not the only foes who menaced the Duchy at this period. The Archipelago had again become the happy hunting-ground of pirates of all nationalities--Greek corsairs from the impregnable rock of Monemvasia or from the islands of Santorin and Keos, Latins like Roger de Lluria, the famous Sicilian admiral, who preyed on their fellow-religionists, mongrels who combined the vices of both their parents. The first place among the pirates of the time belonged to the Genoese, the natural rivals of the Venetians in the Levant, and on that account popular with the Greek islanders. No sooner was a Genoese galley spied in the offing than the peasants would hurry down with provisions to the beach, just as the Calabrian peasants have been known to give food to notorious brigands. The result of these visitations on the smaller islands may be easily imagined: thus the inhabitants of Amorgos emigrated in a body to Naxos from fear of the corsairs; yet, in spite of the harm inflicted by Licario and the pirates, we are told that the fertile plain of Drymalia, in the interior of Naxos, "then contained twelve large villages, a number of farm buildings, country houses and towers, with about 10,000 inhabitants." Sometimes the remote consequences of the pirates' raids were worse than the raids themselves. Thus, on one of these expeditions, some corsairs carried off a valuable ass belonging to one of the Ghisi. The ass, marked with its master's initials, was bought by Marco II's son, Guglielmo, who lived at Syra. The purchaser was under no illusions as to the ownership of the ass, but was perfectly aware that he was buying stolen goods. Seeing this, Ghisi invaded Syra, laid the island waste, and besieged Sanudo in his castle. But the fate of the ass had aroused wide sympathies. Marco II had taken the oath of fealty to Charles of Anjou, as suzerain of Achaia, after the death of his liege lord, Guillaume de Villehardouin, and it chanced that the Angevin admiral was cruising in the Archipelago at the time of the rape of the ass. Feudal law compelled him to assist the son of his master's vassal; a lady's prayers conquered any hesitation that he might have felt; so he set sail for Syra, where he soon forced Ghisi to raise the siege. The great ass case was then submitted to the decision of the Venetian bailie in Euboea, who restored the peace of the Levant, but only after "more than 30,000 heavy soldi" had been expended for the sake of the ass!

After the recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks, the policy of Venice towards the dukes underwent a change. As we have seen, neither the founder of the Duchy nor his son and grandson were vassals of the Republic, though they were all three Venetian citizens. But the Venetian Government, alarmed at the commercial privileges accorded to its great rivals, the Genoese, by the Byzantine Emperor, now sought to obtain a stronger military and commercial position in the Archipelago, and, if possible, to acquire direct authority over the Duchy. An excuse for the attempt was offered by the affairs of Andros. That island had been bestowed by Marco I as a sub-fief of Naxos upon Marino Dandolo. Marco II resumed immediate possession of it after the death of Dandolo's widow, and refused to grant her half of the island to her son by a second marriage, Nicol? Quirini, on the plausible plea that he arrived to do homage after the term allowed by the feudal law had expired. But Quirini was a Venetian bailie, and accordingly appealed to Venice for justice. The Doge summoned Marco II to make defence before the Senate; but Marco replied that Venice was not his suzerain, that the ducal Court at Naxos, and not the Senate at Venice, was the proper tribunal to try the case, and that he would be happy to afford the claimant all proper facilities for pleading his cause if he would appear there. The question then dropped; Marco remained in possession of Andros, while the Republic waited for a more favourable opportunity of advancing its political interests in the Archipelago.

But though Naxos and all the important islands had been annexed by the Turks, there still remained a few fragments of the Latin rule in the Levant. The seven islands of Siphnos, Thermia, Kimolos, Polinos, Pholegandros, Gyaros, and Sikinos were retained by the Gozzadini family on payment of a tribute until 1617, while Venice still preserved Tenos as a station in the Levant for a whole century more. Everywhere else in the AEgean the crescent floated from the battlements of the castles and palaces where for three and a half centuries the Latin nobles had practised the arts of war.

THE MAD DUKE OF NAXOS

The division of the island into fiefs naturally caused much bad blood among the natives, who objected to this appropriation of their lands. In 1212, the same year which witnessed the arrival of the colonists, an insurrection broke out under the leadership of the powerful family of the Hagiostephanitai. The rising soon assumed such serious proportions that Tiepolo called in the aid of Duke Marco I of Naxos, whose duplicity in this connection was narrated in a previous essay. In addition to these internal troubles, the Genoese and Alamanno Costa, Count of Syracuse, an old comrade of the Count of Malta again became active; but the Venetians wisely purchased the acquiescence of the Genoese in the existing state of things by valuable concessions, the chief of which was the recognition of Genoa's former privileges of trade with the Empire of Romania, and imprisoned Costa in an iron cage. From that moment, save for two brief raids in 1266 and 1293, Genoa abandoned the idea of contesting her rival's possession of Crete. In the same year, however, only five years after the first rising, a fresh Cretan insurrection, due to the high-handed action of the Venetian officials, caused the proud Republic of St Mark to admit the necessity of conceding something to the islanders. The ringleaders received a number of knights' fiefs, and became Venetian vassals. But a further distribution of lands in the parts of the island hitherto unconfiscated kindled a new revolt. The rebels, seeing the growth of the Empire of Nice, offered their country to the Emperor Vatatzes if he would come and deliver them, while the Duke summoned the reigning sovereign of Naxos to his aid. The latter withdrew on the approach of the Nicene admiral, who managed to land a contingent in the island. Long after the admiral's departure these men held their own in the mountains, and it was eight years before the Venetians succeeded in suppressing the rising. On the death of Vatatzes, the Cretans seemed to have lost hope of external assistance, and no further attempt was made to throw off the Venetian yoke till after the fall of the Latin Empire of Romania. Meanwhile, in 1252, a fresh scheme of colonisation was carried out; ninety more knights' fiefs were granted in the west of the island, and the town of Canea, the present capital, was founded, on or near the site of the ancient Cydonia; one half of the new city was reserved to Venice, and the other half became the property of the colonists.

But the calm was soon disturbed by a fresh outbreak. In 1283 the same Alexios Kallerges who had been so valuable an auxiliary of Venice in the last rising inaugurated a rebellion which, arising out of the curtailment of his own family privileges, spread to the whole island and lasted for sixteen years. The home Government made the mistake of under-estimating the importance of this movement, which it neglected to suppress at the outset by the despatch of large bodies of men. As usual, the insurgents operated in the mountains, whence the Venetians were unable to dislodge them, while the Genoese laid Canea in ashes in 1293, and tried to establish relations with the insurrectionary chief. But Kallerges was not disposed to exchange the rule of one Italian State for that of another, and, as he saw at last that he could not shake off the Venetian yoke single-handed, he came to terms with the Governor. His patriotic refusal of the Genoese offers had excited the admiration of the Venetians, who were ready to make concessions to one whom Genoa could not seduce. He was allowed to keep the fiefs which the Angeloi had granted in the Byzantine days to his family, he was created a knight, and his heirs received permission to intermarry with Venetians--a practice absolutely prohibited as a rule in Venetian colonies. It is pleasant to be able to record that both parties to this treaty kept their word. Kallerges on his death-bed bade his four sons remain true to Venice; one of his grandsons fought in her cause, and his descendants were rewarded with the title of patricians--at that time a rare distinction. These frequent insurrections, combined with the horrors of plague and famine, do not seem to have permanently injured the resources of the island, nor were the ravages of corsairs, fitted out by the Catalans of Attica in the early part of the fourteenth century, felt much beyond the coast. At any rate, in 1320 such was the prosperity of the colony that the Governor was able to remit a large surplus to Venice after defraying the costs of administration. But the harsh policy of the Republic gradually alienated the colonists as well as the natives. A demand for ship-money caused a fresh rebellion of the Greeks in 1333, in which one of the Kallergai fought for, and another of them against, the Venetian Government. Eight years later a member of that famous Cretan family, forgetting the patriotic conduct of his great ancestor, entered into negotiations with the Turks; but he was invited to a parley by the Venetian Governor, who had him arrested as a traitor and thrown in a sack into the sea. This act of cruelty and treachery had the effect of embittering and prolonging the Cretan resistance, so that the Venetians soon held nothing in the island except the capital and a few castles. At last the arrival of overwhelming reinforcements forced the rebel leader, Michael Psaromelingos, to bid his servant kill him, and the rebellion was over. The death of this chieftain has formed the subject of a modern Greek drama, for the Greeks of the mainland have always admired, and sometimes imitated, the desperate valour of their Cretan brethren. On the Venetians this revolt made so great an impression that the Duke was ordered to admit no Cretan into the Great Council of the island without the special permission of the Doge--an order due as much to the fears of the home Government as to the jealousy of the colonists.

But the most significant feature of this insurrection was the apathy of the Venetian vassals in contributing their quota of horses and men for the defence of the island. Somewhat earlier, the knights had been compelled, in spite of their vigorous protests, to pay the sum which, by the terms of their feudal tenure, they were supposed to expend upon their armed followers, direct to the Exchequer, which took care to see that the money was properly applied. Many of the poorer among them now found themselves unable to provide the amounts which the Government required, and so became heavily indebted to the Treasury. It was the opinion of Venetian statesmen that Crete should be self-supporting, but it at last became necessary to grant a little grace to the impoverished debtors, some of whom had shown signs of coquetting with the Turks. Thus the discontented Venetian colonists, who had been born and trained for the most part in an island which exercises a strong attraction on even foreign residents, found that they had more grievances in common with the Greeks than bonds of union with the city of their ancestors. More than a century and a half had elapsed since the first great batch of colonists had left the lagoons for the great Greek island. Redress had been stubbornly refused, and it only needed a spark to set the whole colony ablaze.

When the news reached Venice, it excited the utmost consternation. But, as no sufficient forces were available, the Republic resolved to try what persuasion could effect. A trusty Greek from the Venetian colony of Modon was sent to treat with the Greeks, while five commissioners proceeded to negotiate with the revolutionary Government at Candia. The commissioners were courteously heard; but when it was found that they were empowered to offer nothing but an amnesty, and that only on condition of prompt submission to the Republic, they were plainly told that the liberty recently won by arms should never be sacrificed to the commands of the Venetian Senate. Nothing remained but to draw the sword, and the home Government had prudently availed itself of the negotiations to begin its preparations, both diplomatic and naval. All the Powers friendly to Venice, the Pope, the Emperor Charles IV, the King of France, and the Queen of Naples, even Genoa herself, forbade their subjects to trade with the island, and the Pope, alarmed at the apostasy of the colonists, addressed a pastoral to the recalcitrant Cretans. But neither papal arguments nor an international boycott could bend the stubborn minds of the insurgents. It was not till the arrival of the Venetian fleet and army, the latter under the command of Luchino dal Verme, the friend of Petrarch, who had warned him, with the inevitable allusions to the classic poets and to St Paul, of the "untruthfulness," "craft," and "deceit" of the Cretans, that the movement was crushed.

The armament was of considerable size. Italy had been ransacked for soldiers, the Duchy of the Archipelago and Euboea for ships, and Nicol? "Spezzabanda," the regent of Naxos, hastened to assist his Venetian patrons. Candia speedily fell, and then the commissioners who accompanied the military and naval forces proceeded to mete out punishment to the chief insurgents without mercy. Marco Gradenigo and two others were beheaded on the platform of the castle, where their corpses were ordered to remain, under penalty of the loss of a hand to any one who tried to remove them. The same bloody and brief assizes were held in Canea and Rethymno; the most guilty were executed, the less conspicuous were banished. Tito Venier was captured by Venetian ships on the high sea, and paid for his treasonable acts with his head; his accomplice, Tito Gradenigo, managed to escape to Rhodes, but died in exile. The property of the conspirators was confiscated by the State.

Great was the joy at Venice when it was known that the insurrection had been suppressed. Three days were given up to thanksgivings and festivities, at which Petrarch was present, and of which he has left an account. Foreign powers congratulated the Republic on its success, while in Crete itself the new Duke ordered the celebration of May 10 in each year-the anniversary of the capitulation of Candia--as a public holiday. But the peace, or perhaps we should say desolation, of the island was soon disturbed. Some of the banished colonists combined with three brothers of the redoubtable family of the Kallergai, who proclaimed the Byzantine Emperor sovereign of Crete. This time the Venetian Government sent troops at once to Candia, but hunger proved a more effective weapon than the sword. The inhabitants of Lasithi, where the insurgents had their headquarters, surrendered the ringleaders rather than starve. Then followed a fresh series of savage sentences, for the Republic considered that no mercy should be shown to such constant rebels. While the chiefs were sent to the block, the whole plateau of Lasithi was converted into a desert, the peasants were carried off and their cottages pulled down, and the loss of a foot and the confiscation of his cattle were pronounced to be the penalty of any farmer or herdsman who should dare to sow corn there or to use the spot for pasture. This cruel and ridiculous order was obeyed to the letter; for nearly a century one of the most fertile districts of Crete was allowed to remain in a state of nature, till at last in 1463 the urgent requirements of the Venetian fleet compelled the Senate to consent to the recultivation of Lasithi. But as soon as the temporary exigencies of the public service had been satisfied, Lasithi fell once more under the ban, until towards the end of the fifteenth century the plain was placed under the immediate supervision of the Duke and his Councillors. It would be hard to discover any more suicidal policy than this, which crippled the resources of the colony in order to gratify a feeling of revenge. But it has ever been the misfortune of Crete that the folly of her rulers has done everything possible to counteract her natural advantages.

A long period of peace now ensued, a peace born not of prosperous contentment but of hopeless exhaustion. The first act of the Republic was to substitute for the original oath of fealty, exacted from the colonists at the time of the first great settlement in 1212, a much stricter formula of obedience. The next was to put up to auction the vacant fiefs of the executed and banished knights at Venice, for it had been resolved that none of those estates should be acquired by members of the Greek aristocracy. The bidding was not very brisk, for Crete had a bad character on the Venetian exchange, so that, some years later, on the destruction of the castle of Tenedos, the Republic transported the whole population to Candia. There they settled outside the capital in a suburb which, from their old home, received the name of Le Tenedee.

The next problem was that of the Venetian knights. It had been the original intention of the Republic that none of their fiefs should pass into Greek hands. But as time went on many of the colonists had secretly sold their estates to the natives, and had gone back to Venice to spend the proceeds of the sale in luxurious idleness. When Foscarini arrived, he found that many even of those Venetians who remained in Crete had become Greek in dress, manners, and speech. More than sixty years earlier we hear complaints of the lack of Catholic priests and of the consequent indifference of the colonists to the religion of their forefathers, so that we are not surprised to hear Foscarini deploring the numerous conversions of the Venetians in the country districts to the Orthodox faith through the want of Latin churches. In the town of Candia, where the nobles were better off, they still remained strict Catholics, and this difference of religion marked them off from the Orthodox people; but their wives had adopted Oriental habits, and lived in the seclusion which we associate with the daily life of women in the East. In Canea, which was a more progressive place than the capital, things were a little more hopeful, but even there education was almost entirely neglected. In the country, owing to the subdivision of fiefs, many of the smaller Venetian proprietors had sunk to the condition of peasants, retaining neither the language nor the chivalrous habits of their ancestors, but only the sonorous names of the great Venetian houses whence they sprang. All the old martial exercises, on which the Republic had relied for the defence of the island, had long fallen into abeyance. Few of the knights could afford to keep horses; few could ride them. When they were summoned on parade at Candia, they were wont to stick some of their labourers on horseback, clad in their own armour, to the scandal of the Government and the amusement of the spectators, who would pelt these improvised horsemen with bad oranges or stones. Another abuse arose from the possession of one estate by several persons, who each contributed a part of the horse's equipment which the estate was expected to furnish. Thus the net result of the feudal arrangements in Crete at this period was an impoverished nobility and an utterly inadequate system of defence.

He concluded his mission by strengthening the two harbours of Suda and Spinalonga, by increasing the numbers and pay of the garrison, by improving the Cretan fleet and the mercantile marine, and by restoring equilibrium to the budget. The Levantine possessions of Venice cost her at this period more than they brought in, and it was the desire of the Republic that Crete, should, at any rate, be made to pay expenses. With this object, Foscarini regulated the currency, raised the tariff in such a way that the increased duties fell on the foreign consumer, saw that they were honestly collected, and endeavoured to make the island more productive. But in all his reforms the commissioner met with stubborn resistance from the vested interests of the Venetian officials and the fanaticism of the Orthodox clergy, always the bitterest foes of Venice in the Levant. In dealing with the latter, Foscarini saw that strong measures were necessary; he persuaded his Government to banish the worst agitators, and to allow the others to remain only on condition that they behaved well. Then, after more than four years of labour, he returned to Venice, where he was thanked by the Doge for his eminent services. He had been, indeed, as his monument in the Carmelite church there says, "Dictator of the island of Candia"; but even his heroic policy did "but skin and film the ulcerous place." Not ten years after his departure we find another Venetian authority, Giulio de Garzoni, writing of the tyranny of the knights and officials, the misery of the natives, the disorder of the administration, and the continued agitation of the Greek clergy among the peasantry. So desperate had the latter become that there were many who preferred even the yoke of the Sultan to that of the Catholic Republic. The population of the island, which Foscarini had estimated at 219,000, had sunk in this short space of time to about 176,000. Numbers of Cretans had emigrated to Constantinople since Foscarini left, where they formed a large portion of the men employed in the Turkish arsenal, and where the information which they gave to the Turks about the weakness of the Cretan garrison and forts filled the Venetian representatives with alarm. Yet Venice seemed powerless to do more for the oppressed islanders; indeed, she inclined rather to the Machiavellian policy of Fra Paolo Sarpi, who advised her to treat the Cretans like wild beasts, upon whom humanity would be only thrown away, and to govern the island by maintaining constant enmity between the barbarised colonists and the native barbarians. "Bread and the stick, that is all that you ought to give them." Such a policy could only prevail so long as Venice was strong enough to defend the colony, or wise enough to keep at peace with the Sultan.

The time had now arrived when the Cretans were to realise their desires, and exchange the Venetian for the Turkish rule. The Ottoman sultans had long meditated the conquest of the island, and two recent events had infuriated Ibrahim I against the Venetians. The Near East was at that time cursed with a severe outbreak of piracy, in which there was little to choose between Christians and Mussulmans. While the Venetians had chased some Barbary corsairs into the Turkish harbour of Valona, on the coast of Albania, and had injured a minaret with their shots, they had allowed a Maltese squadron, which had captured the nurse of the Sultan's son, to sail into a Cretan harbour with its booty. The fury of the Sultan, whose affection for his son's nurse was well known, was not appeased by the apologies of the Venetian representative. Great preparations were made for an expedition against Crete, and Ibrahim constantly went down to the arsenals to urge on the workmen. All over the Turkish empire the word went forth to make ready. The forests of the Morea were felled to furnish palisades, the naval stores of Chalkis were emptied to supply provisions for the troops. All the time the Grand Vizier kept assuring the Venetian bailie that these gigantic efforts were directed not against the Republic, but against the knights of Malta. In vain the Mufti protested against this act of deception, and pleaded that, if war there must be against Venice, at least it might be open. The Capitan-Pasha and the war party silenced any religious scruples of the Sultan, and the Mufti was told to mind his own business. As soon as the truth dawned upon the Venetians they lost no time in preparing to meet the Turks. Andrea Cornaro, the new Governor of Crete, hastily strengthened the fortifications of Candia and of the island at the mouth of Suda bay, while the home Government sent messages for aid to every friendly State, from Spain to Persia, with but little result. The Great Powers were then at each other's throats; France was quarrelling with Spain, Germany was still in the throes of the Thirty Years' War, England was engaged in the struggle between King and Parliament, and it was thought that the English wine trade would benefit by the Turkish conquest of Crete. Besides, the downfall of the Levantine commerce of Venice was regarded with equanimity by our Turkey merchants, and the Venetians accused us of selling munitions of war to the infidel. It was remarked, too, that Venice, of all States, was the least entitled to expect Christendom to arm in her defence, for no other Government had been so ready to sacrifice Christian interests in the Levant when it suited her purpose. Only the Pope and a few minor States promised assistance.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet