Appendix

Appendix

DIGEST OF GENOESE DOCUMENTS

22-24 Aug. 1285. Fourteen documents of these dates refer to the mercantile transactions of Benedetto and Manuele Zaccaria, such as their appointment of agents to receive their wares from “Fogia” and to send them to Genoa, Majorca, Syria, the Black Sea, and other places.

(Pandette Richeriane, fogliazzo ii. fasc. 10.)

17 April, 1287. “Benedetto Zaccaria in his own name and in that of his brother Manuele” gives a receipt at Genoa to “ Percivalis Spinula.”

(Ibid. fasc. 20.)

24 Jan. 1287. “Nicolino” is mentioned as brother of Benedetto and Manuele Zaccaria.

(Ibid. fogliazzo i. fasc. 178.)

9 May, 1291. “Clarisia, wife of the late Manuele Zaccaria, in her own name and on behalf of her sons Tedisio, Leonardo, Odoardo and Manfred,” appoints an agent for the sale of a female slave.

(Ibid. fogliazzo ii. fasc. 27.)

14 April, 1304. “Paleologo Zaccaria” is cited as witness to a monetary transaction.

(Ibid. fogliazzo A. fasc. 7.)

31 May, 1311. Two documents executed at Genoa. In one Domenico Doria acknowledges receipt of monies from Andriolo Cattaneo, son of Andriolo; in the other Andriolo appoints Lanfranchino Doria and Luchino Cattaneo his agents.

(Ibid. fasc. 7.)

13 Aug. 1313. “Manuel Bonaneus” acknowledges receipt of monies from Andriolo Cattaneo.

(Ibid. fasc. 13.)

21, 24 Sept. 1316. Mention of “the galley of Paleologo Zaccaria, which was at Pera in 1307.”

(Ibid. fasc. 13.)

GENOESE COLONIES IN GREEK LANDS

I. LORDS OF PHOCÆA (Foglia).

Manuele Zaccaria. 1275. Benedetto I ” 1288. [Tedisio ” governor. 1302-7.] Nicolino ” 1307. Andriolo Cattaneo della Volta, governor, 1307; lord, 1314. Domenico ” ” ” 1331-40. [Byzantine. 1340-6.] Genoese (with Chios). 1346-8. | +-----------------+-------------------------+ | | (a) Foglia Vecchia:— (b) Foglia Nuova:— [Byzantine: 1348-58.] [Byzantine: 1348-51.] Genoese (with Chios): 1358-(c.) 1402. Genoese (with Chios): Gattilusj, (c.) 1402-55 (December 24). 1351-1455 (Oct. 31). | | +---------------------+----------------------+ | Both Turkish: 1455-1919; Greek (with Smyrna): 1919-

II. LORDS OF CHIOS, SAMOS AND IKARIA.

[Latin Emperors: 1204-25; Greek Emperors: 1225-1304.] Benedetto I Zaccaria. 1304. Paleologo ” 1307. Benedetto II ” } Martino ” } 1314-29. [Byzantine. 1329-46.] | +------------+----------+-------------------------+ | | | (a) (b) (c) Chios:— Samos:— Ikaria:— Genoese: 1346-1566. Genoese: 1346-1475. Genoese: 1346-62. [Turkish: 1566-1694.] [Turkish: 1475-1832. ] Arangio: 1362-1481. [Venetian: 1694-5. ] [Autonomous: 1832-1912] [Knights of St John:] [Turkish: 1695-1912.] | [ 1481-1521. ] | | [Turkish: 1521-1694.] | | [Venetian: 1694-5. ] | | [Turkish: 1695-1912.] | | | +-----------------------+-------------------------+ | All Greek: 1912-

III. LORDS OF LESBOS.

[Latin Emperors: 1204-25; Greek Emperors: 1225-1333.] Domenico Cattaneo. 1333-6. [Byzantine. 1336-55.] Francesco I Gattilusio. 1355. Francesco II ” 1384. [Nicolò I of Ænos, regent. 1384-7.] Jacopo Gattilusio. 1404. [Nicolò I of Ænos again regent. 1404-9.] Dorino I Gattilusio: succeeded between March 13, 1426, and October 14, 1428. [Domenico ” regent 1449-55.] Domenico ” 1455. Nicolò II ” 1458-62. [Turkish: 1462-1912; Greek: 1912- .]

IV. LORDS OF THASOS.

Tedisio Zaccaria. 1307-13. [Greek Emperors. 1313-c. 1434.] Dorino I Gattilusio. c. 1434 or ? c. 1419. ? Jacopo Gattilusio. c. 1419. [Oberto de’ Grimaldi, governor. 1434.] Francesco III Gattilusio. 1444-c. 1449. Dorino I ” again. c. 1449. [Domenico, regent. 1449-55.] Domenico. 1455. (June 30-October.) [Turkish: 1455-6; Papal: 1456-9; Turkish: 1459-60; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-79; Turkish: 1479-1912; Greek: 1912- .]

V. LORDS OF LEMNOS.

[Navigajosi, Gradenighi, Foscari: 1207-69; Greek Emperors: 1269-1453.] Dorino I Gattilusio. 1453. (Castle of Kokkinos from 1440.) [Domenico, regent. 1453-5.] Domenico. 1455-6. [Nicolò II, governor. 1455-6.] [Turkish: 1456; Papal: 1456-8; Turkish: 1459-60; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-4; Comnenos: 1464; Venetian: 1464-79; Turkish: 1479-1656; Venetian: 1656-7; Turkish (except for Russian occupation of 1770): 1657-1912; Greek: 1912- .]

VI. LORDS OF SAMOTHRACE.

[Latin Emperors: 1204-61; Greek Emperors: 1261-c. 1431.] Palamede Gattilusio. c. 1431. [Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, governor: 1444-55.] Dorino II Gattilusio. 1455-6. [Turkish: 1456; Papal: 1456-9; Turkish: 1459-60; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-79; Turkish: 1479-1912; Greek: 1912- .]

VII. LORDS OF IMBROS.

[Latin Emperors: 1204-61; Greek Emperors: 1261-1453.] Palamede Gattilusio. 1453. [Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, governor.] Dorino II Gattilusio. 1455-6. [Turkish: 1456-60; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-70; Turkish: 1470-1912; Greek: 1912-14; Turkish: 1914-20; Greek: 1920- .]

VIII. LORDS OF ÆNOS.

Nicolò I Gattilusio. c. 1384. Palamede ” 1409. Dorino II ” 1455-6. [Turkish: 1456-60; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-8; Turkish: 1468-1912; Bulgarian: 1912-3; Turkish: 1913-20; Greek: 1920- .]

IX. SMYRNA.

Genoese. 1261-c. 1300. [Turkish, c. 1300-44.] Genoese. 1344-1402. [Mongol: 1402; Turkish, interrupted by risings of Kara-Djouneïd: 1402-24; continuously Turkish: 1424-1919; Greek (“under Turkish sovereignty”): 1919- .]

X. FAMAGOSTA.

Genoese: 1374-1464. [Banca di San Giorgio: 1447-64; Lusignans: 1464-89; Venetian: 1489-1571; Turkish: 1571-1878; British (under Turkish suzerainty): 1878-1914; British: 1914- .]

2. THE GENOESE IN CHIOS (1346-1566)

Of the Latin states which existed in Greek lands between the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, there were four principal forms. Those states were either independent kingdoms, such as Cyprus; feudal principalities, of which that of Achaia is the best example; military outposts, like Rhodes; or colonies directly governed by the mother-country, of which Crete was the most conspicuous. But the Genoese administration of Chios differed from all the other Latin creations in the Levant. It was what we should call in modern parlance a Chartered Company, which on a smaller scale anticipated the career of the East India and the British South Africa Companies in our own history.

The origins of the Latin colonization of Greece are usually to be found in places and circumstances where we should least expect to find them. The incident which led to this Genoese occupation of the most fertile island of the Ægean is to be sought in the history of the smallest of European principalities—that of Monaco, which in the first half of the fourteenth century already belonged to the noble Genoese family of Grimaldi, which still reigns over it. At that time the rock of Monaco and the picturesque village of Roquebrune (between Monte Carlo and Mentone) sheltered a number of Genoese nobles, fugitives from their native city, where one of those revolutions common in the mediæval republics of Italy had placed the popular party in power. The proximity and the preparations of these exiles were a menace to Genoa, but the resources of the republican treasury were too much exhausted to equip a fleet against them at the cost of the state. Accordingly, an appeal was made to the patriotism of private citizens, whose expenses were to be ultimately refunded, and in the meanwhile guaranteed by the possession of any conquered territory. In response to this appeal, twenty-six of the people and three nobles of the popular party equipped that number of galleys, which were placed under the command of Simone Vignoso, himself one of the twenty-nine privateers. On April 24, 1346, the fleet set sail; and, at its approach, the outlawed nobles fled to Marseilles, whence many of them entered the French army and died four months later fighting at Crécy against our King Edward III.

The immediate object for which the fleet had been fitted out had been thus accomplished. But it seemed to Vignoso a pity that it should not be employed, and the Near East offered a tempting field for its activities. The condition of south-eastern Europe in 1346 might perhaps be paralleled with its situation in later times. An ancient empire, which Gladstone described as “more wonderful than anything done by the Romans,” enthroned on the Bosporos with one brief interval for ten centuries, was obviously crumbling away, and its ultimate dissolution was only a question of time. A lad of fourteen, John V Palaiologos, sat on the throne of the Cæsars, while a woman and a foreigner, the Empress-mother Anne of Savoy, governed in his name. Against her and her son the too-powerful Grand Domestic (or, as we should say, prime minister), John Cantacuzene, whom posterity remembers rather as an historian than as an Emperor, had raised the standard of revolt. In Asia Minor Byzantium retained nothing but the suburb of Scutari, Philadelphia, and the two towns of Phocæa. Independent emirs ruled the south and centre, the Ottomans the north, whence in seven years they were to cross into Europe, in eight more to transfer their capital to Adrianople. Already the European provinces of Byzantium were cut short by the frontier of the Bulgarian Empire and still more by the rapid advance of Serbia, then the most powerful state in the Balkan peninsula. Seventeen days before Vignoso sailed for the East, the great Serbian conqueror and lawgiver, Stephen Dushan, one of the most remarkable figures in mediæval history, was crowned at Skoplje “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks” and had proposed to Genoa’s rival, Venice, an alliance for the conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Greece proper, with the exception of the Byzantine province in the Morea, was parcelled out between Latin rulers, while Byzantium had no fleet to protect her outlying territories. Under these circumstances a commercial Italian republic might not unnaturally seek to peg out claims in the midst of the general confusion in the East, where only two years before Smyrna, formerly a Genoese colony, had been recaptured from the Turks.

Vignoso’s first intention was to protect the Genoese settlements on the Black Sea against the attacks of the Tartars; but information received at Negroponte, where he touched on the way, led him to change his plans. There he found a fleet of Venetian and Rhodian galleys, under the Dauphin of Vienne, preparing to occupy Chios as a naval base for operations against the Turks in Asia Minor. Vignoso and his associates were offered large sums for their co-operation, but their patriotism rejected the idea of handing over to the rival republic an island which had belonged to the Genoese family of Zaccaria from 1304 to 1329, and which as recently as seventeen years earlier had been recovered by the Greeks. They made all sail for Chios, and offered to assist the islanders against a Venetian attack, if they would hoist the Genoese flag and admit a small Genoese garrison. The scornful refusal of the garrison was followed by the landing of the Genoese; four days sufficed to take the rest of the island; but the citadel made such a spirited resistance that three months passed before food gave out and on September 12 the capitulation was signed. The governor, Kalojanni Cybo, himself of Genoese extraction, and a member of the well-known Ligurian family which afterwards produced Pope Innocent VIII, made excellent terms for himself and his relatives, while the Greeks were to enjoy their former religious liberties and endowments, their property, and their privileges. A Genoese governor was to be appointed to administer the island according to the laws of the Republic, and 200 houses in the citadel were assigned at once for the use of the Genoese garrison. Vignoso proved by his example that he meant to keep these promises. He ordered his own son to be flogged publicly for stealing grapes from a vineyard belonging to one of the natives, and bequeathed a sum of money for providing poor Chiote girls with dowries as compensation for any damage that he might have inflicted upon the islanders.

Vignoso completed the conquest of Chios by the annexation of Old and New Phocæa, or Foglia Vecchia and Nuova, as the Italians called them, almost the last Byzantine possessions on the coast of Asia Minor, and celebrated for their valuable alum-mines, whence English ships used to obtain materials for dyeing, and of the neighbouring islands of Psara, or Santa Panagia, Samos, Ikaria, and the Œnoussai[486]. All these places had belonged to the former Genoese lords of Chios, with whose fortunes they were now reunited. The two Foglie, with the exception of a brief Byzantine restoration, remained in Genoese hands till they were conquered by the Turks in 1455; Foglia Vecchia, after about 1402, being administered by the Gattilusj of Lesbos, Foglia Nuova being leased to a member of the maona for life or a term of years. Samos and Psara were abandoned in 1475 from fear of corsairs, and their inhabitants removed to Chios, whilst the harbourless Ikaria, where pirates could not land, was in 1362 granted to the Genoese family of Arangio, which held it with the title of Count until 1481. In that year it was ceded for greater security to the knights of Rhodes, and remained united with that island till it too was conquered by the Turks in 1522. Vignoso desired to add the rich island of Lesbos and the strategic island of Tenedos, which, as we have been lately reminded, commands the mouth of the Dardanelles, to his acquisitions. But his crews had had enough of fighting, and were so mutinous that he returned to Genoa[487].

The Genoese exchequer was unable to repay to Vignoso and his partners their expenses, amounting to 203,000 Genoese pounds (£79,170 of our money) or 7000 for each of the twenty-nine galleys, the Genoese pound being then, according to Desimoni, worth 9 lire 75 centesimi. Accordingly, by an arrangement made on February 26, 1347, it was agreed that the Republic should liquidate this liability within twenty years and thereupon become the direct owner of the conquered places, which in the meanwhile were to be governed—and the civil and criminal administration conducted—in her name. The collection of taxes, however, and the monopoly of the mastic, which was the chief product of the island, were granted to the twenty-nine associates in the company, or mahona, as it was called. The origin of this word is uncertain. In modern Italian maona means a “lighter”; but those vessels of Turkish invention are not mentioned before 1500. On the other hand, we read of a maona, or madona (as it is there written), in connexion with a Genoese expedition to Ceuta in a document of 1236, and it has, therefore, been suggested that maona is a Ligurian contraction of Madonna, and that such trading companies were under the protection of Our Lady, whose image was to be seen on the palace of the Giustiniani at Genoa. At any rate, the name was applied to other Genoese companies, to the Old and New maona of Cyprus, founded in 1374 and 1403, and to the maona of Corsica, founded in 1378. Other derivations are from the Greek word μονάς (“unit”), the Genoese mobba (“union”), and the Arabic me-unet (“subsidy”)[488].

This convention with the maonesi[489] was to be valid only as long as the popular party remained in power at Genoa. The Republic was to be represented in Chios by a podestà, selected annually out of a list of twenty Genoese democrats submitted in February by the Doge and his council to the maonesi; from these twenty the maonesi were to choose four, and one of these four was then appointed podestà by the Doge and council. Should the first list of twenty be rejected by the maonesi, a second list was to be prepared by the home government. The podestà was to swear to govern according to the regulations of Genoa and the convention concluded by Vignoso with the Greeks. Twice a year he went on circuit through the island to hear the complaints of the natives, and no maonese was allowed to accompany him on those journeys. Another officer of the Republic was the castellano, or commander of the castle of Chios, likewise chosen annually, from a list of six names, submitted to the Duke and his council by the maonesi. This officer was bound to find security to the amount of 3000 Genoese pounds (£1170) for his important charge. A podestà and castellano for Foglia Nuova and the castellano of Foglia Vecchia, who had the powers of a podestà, were appointed in the same way. These officials were responsible for their misdeeds to a board of examiners, and the podestà was assisted by six, afterwards twelve, councillors called gubernatores, elected by the maonesi or other nominees, in everything except his judicial work, where their co-operation was at his discretion. Salaries were not high; those of the podestà of Chios and Foglia Nuova were only 1250 (or £560) and 600 hypérpera (or £268 16_s._) respectively; those of the three castellani ranged from 400 to 500 (or £179 4_s._ to £224). Out of these sums they had to keep and clothe a considerable retinue. Local officials called generically rettori, but familiarly known as codespótæ (“joint lords”) or protogérontes (“chief elders”) in the eight northern, and as logariastaí (or “calculators”) in the four southern or mastic districts of Chios, were appointed by the podestà.

The podestà had the right of coining money, provided that his coins bore the effigy of the Doge of Genoa and the inscription “Dux Ianuensium Conradus Rex” in memory of Conrad III, King of the Romans, who in 1138 had conceded to the Republic the privilege of a mint on condition that her coins always bore his name[490]. This condition was not, however, always observed in the Chiote mint. The maonesi between 1382 and 1415 coined base imitations of the Venetian zecchini, a practice likewise adopted by Francesco I Gattilusio of Lesbos, and by Stephen Urosh II of Servia, and which procured for the latter a place among the evil kings in the Paradiso[491] of Dante. From 1415 the name and figure of St Laurence, the patron saint of the cathedral at Genoa, and the initial or name of the Doge began to appear on the Chiote coins; during the Milanese domination of Genoa two Dukes of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti and Galeazzo Maria Sforza, figured on the currency of the island, and two issued during the French protectorate of Genoa (1458-61) actually bear the kneeling figure of Charles VII[492]. Finally, from 1483 small pieces bear the initials of the podestà. The financial affairs of the company were entrusted to two officials known as massarj, who were obliged to send in annual accounts to the Genoese Audit Office. Lastly, Chios was to be a free port for Genoese ships, which were to stop a day there on the voyage to Greece or between Greece and Syria, but no Genoese outlaws were to be harboured there. Thus, while the nominal suzerainty was vested in the home government, the real usufruct belonged to the company, especially as the former was never able to clear off its liabilities to the latter.

The members of the maona soon began to tire of their bargain and to sell their shares. Vignoso died, most of his partners resided at Genoa, and only eleven years after the constitution of the original company the island was in the possession of eight associates, of whom one alone, Lanfranco Drizzacorne, had been a member of the old maona. These persons, being mainly absentees, had farmed out the revenues to another company, formed in 1349 for the extraction of mastic, and consisting of twelve individuals under the direction of Pasquale Forneto and Giovanni Oliverio. Difficulties arose between the eight partners and their lessees; the Republic intervened, and, by the good offices of the Doge of Genoa, Simone Boccanegra, a fresh arrangement[493] was made on March 8, 1362. The island was farmed out for twelve years to the twelve persons above mentioned or their heirs, who collectively formed an “inn” (or albergo), and, abandoning their family names, called themselves both collectively and individually the Giustiniani—a name assumed three years earlier by the members of the old maona, and perhaps derived from the palace where their office was. One of the twelve partners, Gabriele Adorno, alone declined to merge that illustrious name in a common designation. The members of this new maona were to enjoy the revenues of the island in equal shares; but the Republic reserved to herself the right of purchasing Chios before February 26, 1367, the date fixed by the previous arrangement for the liquidation of her original debt of 203,000 Genoese pounds; if that date were allowed to pass without such payment, the Republic could not exercise the right of purchase for three years more; if no payment were made by February 26, 1374, that right would be forfeited altogether. No member of the new company could sell his twelfth or any fraction of it (for each twelfth was divided into three parts called caratti grossi and each of these three was subsequently subdivided into eight shares, making 288 caratti piccoli in all) to any of his partners, but, with the consent of the Doge, he might substitute a fresh partner in his place, provided always that the number of the partners remained twelve and that they belonged to the popular party at Genoa. The number was not, however, strictly maintained. Thus, while at first the partners were twelve, viz. Nicolò de Caneto, Giovanni Campi, Francesco Arangio, Nicolò di S. Teodoro, Gabriele Adorno, Paolo Banca, Tommaso Longo, Andriolo Campi, Raffaelle di Forneto, Lucchino Negro, Pietro Oliverio, and Francesco Garibaldi, there was soon added a thirteenth in the person of Pietro di S. Teodoro, whose share, however, only consisted of two caratti grossi, or sixteen caratti piccoli, that is to say, two-thirds of the share of each of the other members. In the very next year some of the partners retired to Genoa, selling their shares, and thus two entire twelfths came into the possession of the same individual, Pietro Recanelli, who had succeeded Vignoso as the leading spirit of the company. Later on, the shares became subdivided to such an extent that at the date of the Turkish conquest more than 600 persons held fractions of them. The shareholders were entitled not only to their dividends but also to a proportionate share of the local offices, of which two or three were attached to each share, but no shareholder could hold the more important for two consecutive years.

When the term for the purchase of the island by the Genoese Republic drew near, her treasury, exhausted by the war arising out of her quarrels with the Venetians in Cyprus, was unable to liquidate its debt to the company of 203,000 Genoese pounds, at that time (owing to the change in the value of the pound) equivalent to 152,250. Anxious not to forfeit her right of purchase, the Republic paid to the company collectively this sum, which she had first borrowed from the chief members of it in their individual capacity as bankers. By this financial juggle she became possessed of Chios; but, in order to pay the interest on her new loan, she let the island for twenty years more to the maonesi, who were to deduct from its revenues the amount of the interest and remit the balance, calculated at 2000 gold florins, to the Genoese exchequer. Seven years’ balance was to be paid in advance. But such was the financial distress of Genoa that the government in 1380 was obliged to mortgage this annual balance to the bank of St George for 100,000 Genoese pounds. The company then came to the aid of the mother-country, and voluntarily offered to furnish a loan of 25,000 Genoese pounds. In return, the Republic, by a convention of June 28, 1385, renewed the lease of Chios, which would otherwise have expired in 1394, till 1418. Five years before the latter date it was again renewed, in return for a fresh loan of 18,000 Genoese pounds, till 1447; again, in 1436, in consideration of a further loan of 25,000, it was prolonged till 1476, when it was extended to 1507 and then till 1509. Then, at last, the Republic not only resolved to pay off the maonesi, but even raised the money for the purpose; but the shareholders protested that 152,250 Genoese pounds were no longer sufficient in view of the altered value of the pound (then worth only 3 lire 73 c.) and the large sums which they had advanced. Payment was accordingly postponed till 1513, when it was decided to leave the island in the hands of the Giustiniani till 1542, with some modifications of their charter. In 1528, however, it was finally agreed to lease Chios to them in perpetuity, in return for an annual rent of 2500 Genoese pounds. At that time most of the shareholders were enrolled in the Golden Book of Genoa.

Such were the arrangements between the company and the mother-country, arrangements which worked so well that in 220 years there was only one revolt against her, when Marshal Boucicault occupied Genoa for the King of France. Considering their contract thereby annulled, the Giustiniani deposed the podestà and on December 21, 1408, proclaimed their independence. Venice allowed them to buy provisions and arms; but in June, 1409, a Genoese force under Corrado Doria forced them to yield[494]. Let us now look at their relations with foreign powers. Of these, three were at one time or another a menace to their existence—the Greek Empire, Venice, and the Turks. Both Anne of Savoy[495] and Cantacuzene demanded the restoration of Chios from the Republic, which replied that no official orders had been given for its capture and the government could assume no responsibility for the acts of a private company, nor could it dislodge the latter without great expense; at some future date, however, when circumstances were more favourable, it would undoubtedly be possible to restore it to the Emperor. The latter was not satisfied with this reply, but bade the Genoese envoys, who were sent to pacify him, fix a definite date for the evacuation of Chios. It was then agreed between him and the Republic that the maonesi should retain the city of Chios, and enjoy its revenues, for ten years, on condition that they paid an annual tribute of 12,000 gold pieces to the Emperor, hoisted his flag, mentioned his name in their public prayers, and received their metropolitan from the church of Constantinople. The rest of the island, including the other forts, was to belong to the Emperor, and to be governed by an Imperial official, who was to decide all disputes between the Greeks, while those between a Greek and a Latin were to be referred to the two Byzantine and Genoese authorities sitting together. At the end of the ten years, calculated from Cantacuzene’s occupation of Constantinople, the Genoese were to evacuate Chios altogether. Vignoso and his co-partners, however, declined to be bound by an arrangement made between the Emperor and the Republic, whereupon Cybo attempted to restore Greek rule, and perished in the attempt. The two Foglie were, however, temporarily reoccupied[496], but the Greek peril ceased when the Emperor John V Palaiologos in 1363 granted Chios to Pietro Recanelli and his colleagues in return for an annual payment of 500 hypérpera (or £224)[497]. Eight years earlier the position of the maona had been strengthened by the same Emperor’s gift of Lesbos as his sister’s dowry to another Genoese, Francesco Gattilusio, whose family, as time went on, ruled also over Thasos, Lemnos, Samothrace, Imbros, and the town of Ænos on the mainland, in 1913 the Turkish frontier in Europe. In 1440 John VI renewed the charter of 1363.

Venice was a more obstinate rival. The war which broke out between the two Republics in 1350 involved Chios, for a defeated Genoese squadron took refuge there. But Vignoso, with his usual energy, fitted out a flotilla, sailed to Negroponte, captured the castle of Karystos, ravaged Keos, and hung the keys of Chalkis as a trophy over the castle-gate of Chios—a humiliation avenged by the despatch of a Venetian squadron which carried off many of the islanders[498]. During the struggle of the two Italian commonwealths for the possession of Tenedos (granted to Genoa by Andronikos IV in 1376), Foglia Vecchia was attacked and the suburbs of Chios laid in ashes. For a time the common danger from the Turks united the Venetians and the Genoese company; but in 1431-2 a Venetian fleet bombarded the town. The captain of the Venetian foot-soldiers, who bore the appropriate name of Scaramuccia, was killed while laying a mine, and the admiral, Mocenigo, contented himself with ravaging the mastic-gardens. On his return home he was condemned to ten months’ imprisonment in the Pozzi, while his Genoese rival, Spinola, carried off the keys of Karystos to adorn the castle of Chios, where they were still visible in the sixteenth century[499].

There remained the most serious of all enemies—the Turks. Murad I, who died in 1389, had already levied tribute from Chios[500]; Mohammed I in 1415 fixed this sum at 4000 gold ducats, while the lessee of Foglia Nuova paid 20,000 out of the profits of the alum mines. By this system of Danegeld the maonesi kept on fairly good terms with the Turks till the capture of Constantinople. The active part taken in its defence by one of the Giustiniani, whose name will ever be connected with that of the heroic Constantine XI, exasperated Mohammed II against Chios, whither the chalices and furniture from the Genoese churches of Pera were removed, and many of the survivors fled for safety. An increase of the tribute to 6000 ducats was accepted[501]. But in 1455 the Turks sent two fleets to Chios under the pretext of collecting a debt for alum, alleged to have been supplied to the maona by Francesco Drapperio, former lessee of Foglia Nuova, and then established at Pera[502]. These expeditions cost the company Foglia Nuova, but it gained a further respite by the payment of a lump sum of 30,000 gold pieces and the increase of the annual tribute to 10,000 ducats. In vain it appealed to Genoa and to the Pope; in vain on April 7, 1456, the Republic wrote to our King Henry VI[503], then struggling against the Yorkists, for assistance, reminding him that there had been few wars against the infidels in which the most Christian Kings of England had not borne a great part of the toils and dangers. The extinction of the Lesbian principality of the Gattilusj in 1462, the taking of Caffa in 1475, the capture of the Venetian colony of Negroponte by the Turks in 1479, were signs of what was in store for Chios, now completely isolated. The maonesi in vain wrote to Genoa, threatening to abandon the island, if help were not forthcoming, and offered to cede it to her altogether. “We cannot put our hands,” so ran their letter, “on 100 ducats; we owe 10,000. The Genoese mercenaries sent us were very bad. Send us none from the district between Rapallo and Voltri, for they quarrel daily, steal by day and night, and pay too much attention to the Greek ladies,” whose charms were the theme of every visitor to the island[504]. The only means of maintaining independence was to pay tribute punctually and to propitiate any persons who might be influential at the Porte, notably the French ambassadors, two of whom visited Chios in 1537 and 1550. Finally, in 1558 Genoa disavowed all connexion with the island, and instructed her representative at Constantinople to repudiate her sovereignty over it[505].

Then came the final catastrophe. The company was no longer able to provide the annual tribute, which had risen to 14,000 gold pieces, and to give the usual presents, valued at 2000 ducats, of scarlet cloth to the Turkish viziers, “a race of men full of rapacity and avarice,” as De Thou called them. It was accused of having betrayed the Turkish plans against Malta to the knights and thus helping to stultify the siege of that island in 1565; while the fugitive slaves who found refuge in Chios were a constant source of difficulties. One of them was the property of the grand vizier; the podestà, Vincenzo Giustiniani, called upon either to give him up or pay compensation, confided the latter to an emissary, who absconded with the money. Thereupon Pialì Pasha, a Hungarian renegade in the Turkish service, appeared off Chios with a fleet of from 80 to 300 sail on Easter Monday, April 15, 1566. The pasha told the Chiotes that he would not land, as he did not wish to disturb the Easter ceremonies. Next day he entered the harbour and demanded the tribute. After having landed and studied the strategic position, he invited the podestà and the twelve “governors” on board to confer with him, and clapped them into irons. On April 17, as an inscription[506] in the chief mosque, then a church, still tells us, he took the town, and the flag of St George with the red cross gave way to the crescent almost without resistance.

The fall of Genoese rule was ennobled by the heroism of the bishop, Timoteo Giustiniani, who bade a renegade kill him rather than profane the mass, and by the martyrdom of eighteen boys, who died rather than embrace Islâm—a scene depicted by Carlone in the chapel of the Ducal Palace at Genoa[507]. The other boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, while the leading maonesi were exiled to Caffa, whence some of them, thanks to the intervention of the French ambassador, returned to Chios or Genoa[508]. In vain they demanded from the home government compensation for the loss of their island. As late as 1805 their descendants were still trying to recover a sum of money, deposited with the bank of St George, and in 1815 the bank ceased to exist and with it the last faint hope of repayment. There were, however, some lucky exceptions to these misfortunes. Thus Vincenzo Negri Giustiniani, who was a child of two at the date of the Turkish conquest, came to Rome, was created by Pope Paul V in 1605 first marquess of Bassano, and in 1610 built the Palazzo Giustiniani, now the seat of the Italian Freemasons and of the Prussian Historical Institute. Professor Kehr, the director of that body, informs me, however, that there is no trace there of the Chiote inscription of 1522, which is said to have been removed thither[509]. On the other hand, although the Turks destroyed many churches, Chios still abounds with Latin monuments[510], in which the arms of the Giustiniani—a castle of three towers, surmounted after 1413 by the imperial eagle granted by the Emperor Sigismund[511]—are conspicuous. It may be of interest to mention that when in 1912, an Italian attack upon Chios was contemplated, orders were issued to spare the historical monuments of Chios. That island, however, with the exception of a brief Venetian occupation in 1694-5, remained Turkish till November 24, 1912, when a Greek force landed and on the following day easily captured the capital, which thus, for the first time since 1346, passed from under foreign domination.

We may now ask ourselves whether the rule of the company was successful. Financially, it certainly was. Even in its latter days, when heavy loans had been contracted with the bank of St George and the Turkish tribute was 14,000 gold ducats, a dividend of 2000 ducats was paid on each of the thirteen original shares; while in its best times the small caratto, originally worth some 30 Genoese pounds, was quoted at 4930. Chios during the middle ages was one of the most frequented marts of the Levant, while the alum of Foglia Nuova (which, as long as that factory remained Genoese, covered the annual rent to Genoa) and the mastic of the island (in which a part of the Turkish tribute was paid) were two valuable sources of revenue. The production of mastic was carefully organised. The company leased to each hamlet a certain area of plantation, and the lessees once a year handed in a certain weight of mastic in proportion to the number of the trees. If it were a good year and the yield were greater, they received a fixed price per pound for the excess quantity delivered; but if they failed to deliver the stipulated amount, they had to pay twice that sum[512]. In order to keep up prices in years of over-production, all the mastic over a certain amount was either warehoused or burned. Special officials divided the net profit accruing from its sale among the shareholders; no private person might sell it to foreigners; and thefts or smuggling of the precious gum, if committed on a small scale, cost the delinquent an ear, his nose, or both; if on a large scale, brought him to the gallows. Another curious source of revenue was the tax on widows[513]. The latter must have had ample opportunities of avoiding the penalty, for the courtesy and beauty of the Chiote ladies was the theme of every traveller. Indeed, one impressionable Frenchman[514] proclaimed Chios to be “the most agreeable residence” with which he was acquainted, while another visitor[515] declared their natural charm, the elegance of their attire, and the attraction of their gestures and conversation to be such “that they might rather be judged to be nymphs or goddesses than mortal women or maids.” He then, greatly daring, attempts a detailed description of their costume, upon which I shall not venture. Nor were amusements lacking. The inhabitants were musical; they were wont to dance by the Skaramangkou torrent; the chief religious feasts were kept in state; and Cyriacus of Ancona[516] was a witness of the festivities which accompanied the carnival in what Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti[517], another traveller of the fifteenth century, called the first island of the Archipelago.

There was more intellectual life at Chios than in some of the Latin settlements in the Levant; indeed, the two Genoese colonies of Chios and Lesbos stood higher in that respect than most of the Venetian factories. The list of authors during the period of the maona is considerable. Among them we may specially notice Leonardo Giustiniani, archbishop of Lesbos, but a native of Chios, and author of a curious treatise, De vera nobilitate, intended as a reply to the book De nobilitate of the celebrated scholar, Poggio Bracciolini. But the chief value of the literary divine for us at the present day is the graphic account which he has left us in two letters, addressed respectively to Popes Nicholas V and Pius II, of the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and of Lesbos in 1462—accounts of the greatest historical interest, because their author was an eyewitness of what he described. In Gerolamo Garibaldi Giustiniani, born in Chios in 1544, the island found an historian, who wrote in French a work entitled La Description et Histoire de l’Isle de Scios, ou Chios; Vincenzo Banca Giustiniani, another Latin Chiote, edited the works of St Thomas Aquinas; while Alessandro Rocca Giustiniani translated portions of Aristotle and Hippocrates. But the most curious local literary figure of the period was Andriolo Banca Giustiniani (1385-1456), who sang in Italian verse the Venetian siege of Chios[518] of 1431. The poet was a man of taste and had the means to satisfy it; he constructed near the so-called “School of Homer” (who, according to Thucydides, was a native of Chios) an “Homeric villa” in a forest of pines near a crystal well, where he was visited by the well-known antiquary and traveller, Cyriacus of Ancona, his frequent correspondent[519]. This elegant Chiote accumulated a library of 2000 manuscripts, and for him Ambrogio Traversari of Florence translated into Latin the treatise on the Immortality of the Soul by the fifth-century philosopher, Æneas of Gaza. His son, in 1474, entertained at his villa a greater even than the archæologist of Ancona, then, however, only a modest ship’s captain, the future discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus. The culture, however, of the Giustiniani seems to have been mainly Latin—a fact explained by their practice of sending their sons to be educated at Genoa, Pavia, Padua, or Bologna; and it was from Italy that they summoned the architects to build their palaces “of divers kinds of marbles, with great porticoes and magnificent galleries,” and their villas, of which there were more than 100 in the last century of their rule. It was only just before the Turkish conquest that they thought of founding a university[520].

But we must also look at the picture from another point of view—that of the governed. The judgment of Finlay that the rule of the company was “the least oppressive government in the Levant” seems by the light of later research to need qualification. If we are to take as our standard the happiness of the people as a whole, then of all the Latin establishments in the Levant Lesbos comes first. But for that there were special reasons. The first Gattilusio came to Lesbos not as a foreign conqueror, but as brother-in-law of the Greek Emperor; he soon spoke the language of his subjects; his successors wrote in Greek, and as time went on the family became hellenized. But a company is apt to be deficient on the human side; and this would seem to have been the weak point of the maona. Quite early in its career a conspiracy of the Greeks was discovered, which led to the permanent expulsion of the metropolitan and the substitution in his place of a vicar, called Δίκαιος (or “the Just”), elected by the company and confirmed by the patriarch. Moreover, the dominant church, whose bishops were usually Pallavicini or Giustiniani, was partly supported by tithes, which the members of the other creed had also to pay, and which they paid so reluctantly that in 1480 the bishop was glad to abandon all claims to tithe and all the church property to the company[521] in return for a fixed stipend. Moreover, we are told that certain Latins seized property belonging to Νέα Μονή, “one of the most beautiful churches of the Archipelago,” as it was called[522]. To these ecclesiastical disadvantages was added social inferiority. The native nobles, or archontes, sixty in number, although their privileges had been guaranteed at the conquest and although instructions were subsequently given to see that that pledge was respected, ranked not only below the Giustiniani, who formed the apex of the social scale, but below the Genoese bourgeoisie also, from which they suffered most. They lived apart in the old town (much as the Catholics still do at Syra); and if they sold their property and left the island, they forfeited to the company one-quarter of the proceeds of such sale.

Worse still was the position of the Greek peasantry, who were practically serfs, forbidden to emigrate without permission and passports. Liable to perform military service even out of the island, they had to undertake in time of peace various forced labours, of which the lightest was to act as beaters once a year for their masters during the partridge season. So many of them sought to escape from Chios that a local shibboleth was invented for their identification, and they were obliged to pronounce the word fragela (a sort of white bread), which became frangela in the mouth of a native. Still, the Greeks were consulted at least formally before a new tax was imposed; a Greek noble sat in the commercial court and on the commission of public works, and during the administration of Marshal Boucicault in 1409 and down to 1417 four out of the six councillors who assisted the podestà were Greeks. In later times when there was a Turkish element in the population—for after 1484 the Turks paid no dues—the company provided the salary of the Turkish kâdi. Cases were tried in a palace known as the Δικαιότατο (“Most Just”), and a “column of justice” hard by served for the punishment of the guilty. A great hardship was the cost of appeals to the ducal council in Genoa—the counterpart of our judicial committee of the privy council. Worst treated of all classes were the Jews, forced to wear a yellow bonnet, to live in their ghetto, which was hermetically closed at Easter, to present a white banner with the red cross of St George to the podestà once a year, and to make sport for the Genoese at religious festivals[523]. Such, briefly, was the Genoese administration of Chios—an episode which may serve to remind us how very modern in some ways were the methods of Italian mediæval commonwealths.

3. THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)

Me clara Cæsar donat Lesbo ac Mytilene, Cæsar, qui Graio præsidet imperio.

Corsi apud Folieta.

The Genoese occupation of Chios, Lesbos, and Phocæa by the families of Zaccaria and Cattaneo was not forgotten in the counting-houses of the Ligurian Republic. In 1346, two years after the capture of Smyrna, Chios once more passed under Genoese control, the two Foglie followed suit, and in 1355 the strife between John Cantacuzene and John V Palaiologos for the throne of Byzantium enabled a daring Genoese, Francesco Gattilusio, to found a dynasty in Lesbos, which gradually extended its branches to the islands of the Thracian sea and to the city of Ænos on the opposite mainland, and which lasted in the original seat for more than a century.

Disappointed in a previous attempt to recover his rights, the young Emperor John V was at this time living in retirement on the island of Tenedos, then a portion of the Greek Empire and from its position at the mouth of the Dardanelles both an excellent post of observation and a good base for a descent upon Constantinople. During his sojourn there, a couple of Genoese galleys arrived, commanded by Francesco Gattilusio, a wealthy freebooter, who had sailed from his native city to carve out for himself, amidst the confusion of the Orient, a petty principality in the Thracian Chersonese, as others of his compatriots had twice done in Chios, as the Venetian nobles had done in the Archipelago 150 years earlier. The Emperor found in this chance visitor an instrument to effect his own restoration; the two men came to terms, and John V promised, that if Gattilusio would help him to recover his throne, he would bestow upon him the hand of his sister Maria—an honour similar to that conferred by Michael VIII upon Benedetto Zaccaria.

The family of Gattilusio, which thus entered the charmed circle of Byzantine royalty, had already for two centuries occupied a prominent position at Genoa. One of the name is mentioned as a member of the Great Council in 1157; a second is found holding civic office in 1212 and 1214; and two others were signatories of the treaty of Nymphæum. Luchetto, grandfather of the first lord of Lesbos, was both a troubadour and a man of affairs, who went as envoy to Pope Boniface VIII to negotiate peace between his native city and Venice, served as podestà of Bologna, Milan, Savona, and Cremona; and founded in 1295 the family church of San Giacomo at Sestri Ponente in memory of his father—a foundation which remained in the possession of the Gattilusj till 1483, and of which the Lesbian branch continued to be patron. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the family seems to have turned its attention to the Levant trade, for a Gattilusio was among the Genoese who had sustained damage from the subjects of the Greek Emperor at that period, and by 1341 another member of the clan was a resident at Pera. In that year Oberto Gattilusio was one of the Genoese ambassadors, who concluded the treaty between the Republic and the Regent Anne of Savoy at Constantinople, and ten years later the same personage was sent on an important mission to all the Genoese commercial settlements in the East. The future ruler of Lesbos was this man’s nephew[524].

The Genoese of Galata had good reasons to be dissatisfied with the commercial and naval policy of Cantacuzene, and it was no less their interest than that of their ambitious fellow-countryman to see John V replaced on the throne of his ancestors. They accordingly entered into negotiations with him at Tenedos, and thus Gattilusio could rely upon the co-operation of his compatriots at the capital. On a dark and windy night in the late autumn of 1354 he arrived with the young Emperor off the “postern of the Pathfinding Virgin,” where his Ligurian mother-wit at once suggested a device for obtaining admittance. He had on board a number of oil-jars, which he had brought full from Italy—for he combined business with politics—but which were by this time empty. These he ordered the sailors to hurl against the walls one at a time, until the noise awoke the sleeping sentinels. To the summons of the latter voices shouted from the galleys, that they were merchantmen with a cargo of oil, that one of their ships had been wrecked, and that they were willing to share the remains of the cargo with anyone who would help them in their present distress. At this appeal to their love of gain the guards opened the gate, whereupon some 500 of the conspirators entered, slew the sentries on the adjoining tower, and were speedily reinforced by the rest of the ships’ crews and marines. Francesco, who was throughout the soul of the undertaking, mounted a tower in which he placed the young Emperor with a strong guard of Italians and Greeks, and then ran along the wall with a body of soldiers, shouting aloud: “long live the Emperor John Palaiologos!” When dawn broke and the populace realised that their young sovereign was within the walls, their demonstrations convinced Cantacuzene that resistance would be sanguinary, even if successful. He therefore relinquished the diadem which he could not retain, and retired into a monastery, while John V, accompanied by Francesco and the rest of the Italians, marched in triumph into the palace. The restored Emperor was as good as his word; he bestowed the hand of his sister upon his benefactor, and gave to Francesco as her dowry the island of Lesbos. On July 17, 1355, Francesco I began his reign[525].

Connected by marriage with the Greek Imperial house, the Genoese lord of Lesbos seems to have met with no resistance from his Greek subjects, who would naturally regard him not so much in the light of an alien conqueror as in that of a lawful ruler by the grace of the Emperor. He soon learnt to speak their language[526], and continued to assist his Greek brother-in-law with advice and personal service. At the moment of his accession, the Greek Empire was menaced by the Turks, who had lately crossed over into Europe, and occupied Gallipoli, and by Matthew Cantacuzene, the eldest son of the deposed Emperor. In the very next year the capture of the Sultan Orkhan’s son, Halil, by Greek pirates from Foglia Vecchia, at that time a Byzantine fief, enabled John V to divide these two enemies by promising to obtain the release of the Sultan’s son. The promise proved, indeed, to be hard of fulfilment, for John Kalothetos, the Greek governor of Foglia Vecchia, resisted the joint attacks of the Emperor and a Turkish chief, whom John V had summoned to aid him, until he received a large ransom and a high-sounding title. It was during these operations, in the spring of 1357, that the Emperor, on the advice of Francesco Gattilusio, treacherously invited his Turkish ally to visit him on an islet off Foglia and then arrested him[527]. Such reliance, indeed, did John place in his brother-in-law, whose interests coincided with his own, that, when Matthew Cantacuzene was captured by the Serbs and handed over to the Emperor, the latter sent the children of his rival to Lesbos, and even meditated sending thither Matthew himself, because he knew that they would be in safe keeping[528]. In 1366, when the Bulgarian Tsar, John Shishman, had treacherously arrested John V, and the Greeks of Byzantium, hard pressed by the Turks, sought the help of the chivalrous Conte verde, Amedeo VI of Savoy, Francesco Gattilusio was present with one of his nephews at the siege and capture of Gallipoli from the Ottomans and assisted at the taking of Mesembria from the Bulgarians[529]. But fear of Murad I made him refuse to see or speak to his wife’s nephew, Manuel, when the latter, after plotting against the Sultan, sought refuge in Lesbos[530].

Meanwhile, as a Genoese, he naturally had difficulties with the Venetians. Thus, we find him capturing[531] in the Ægean a Venetian colonist from Negroponte, and quite early in his reign he imitated the bad example of his predecessor, Domenico Cattaneo, and coined gold pieces in exact counterfeit of the Venetian ducat, although of different weight. This was so serious an offence, that the Venetian Government made a formal complaint at Genoa, and in 1357 the Doge of his native city wrote to Francesco[532] bidding him discontinue this dishonest practice, which augured badly for the future of his administration, and would entail severe penalties upon him, if he insisted in its continuance. Francesco felt himself strong enough to go on his way, heedless of the ducal thunders alike of Genoa and of Venice, and coins of himself and of at least four out of his five successors have been preserved. The great war, which broke out between the two Republics in 1377 on account of the cession of Tenedos by the usurper Andronikos to Genoa and its seizure by Venice, must have placed Francesco in a difficult position. He was, it is true, a Genoese but he was also brother-in-law of John V, whom Andronikos had deposed and who had promised the disputed island, which he and Francesco knew so well, to Venice. Accordingly, when the treaty of Turin imposed upon Venice the surrender of Tenedos to Amedeo VI of Savoy, who was to raze the castle to the ground at the cost of Genoa, yet the islanders none the less swore that they would retain their independence. Muazzo, the Venetian governor, excused his action in refusing to give up the island by pleading Francesco’s intrigues. An agent of the Lesbian lord, he wrote, one Raffaele of Quarto, had stirred up the inhabitants, some 4000 in number, to resist the cession, by spreading a rumour that, if Tenedos fell into Genoese hands, the Venetian colonists would all be forced to turn Jews or emigrate[533]. When, however, Venice found herself reluctantly compelled to force her recalcitrant officer to carry out the provisions of the treaty, Francesco helped to victual the Venetian fleet, and Tenedos was reduced to be the desert that it long remained.

While such were his relations with the Byzantine Empire and the rival Republics of the West, the Papacy regarded Francesco as one of the factors in the Union of the Churches and thereby as a champion of Christendom against the Turks. When Innocent VI in 1356, despatched St Peter Thomas and another bishop to compass the Union of the Old and the New Rome, he recommended his two envoys to the lord of Lesbos. Thirteen years later, Francesco accompanied his brother-in-law, the Emperor John V, to Rome, and signed as one of the witnesses of that formal confession of the Catholic faith, which the sorely-pressed sovereign made on October 18, 1369, in the palace of the Holy Ghost before Urban V[534]. He was one of the potentates summoned by Gregory XI in 1372 to attend the Congress[535] of Thebes on October 1, 1373, to consider the Turkish peril—a peril which at that time specially menaced his island—and in the following year the Pope recommended Smyrna to his care, and sent two theologians to convince him, a strenuous fighter against the Turks, and defender of Christendom beyond the seas, that the Union of the Churches would be a better defence against them than armed force[536]. The Popes might well have thought that no one could be a better instrument of their favourite plan than this Catholic brother-in-law of the Greek Emperor. But the astute Genoese was too wise to compel his Greek subjects to accept his creed. Throughout his reign, besides a Roman Catholic Archbishop, there was a Greek Metropolitan of Mytilene, and under his successor the Metropolitan throne of Methymna was also occupied[537]. The Armenian colony, settled in Lesbos, preferred, however, to seek shelter in Kos under the Knights of St John rather than remain as his subjects, without proper protection from a hostile raid[538].

The success of their kinsman encouraged other members of the Gattilusio clan to seek a comfortable seigneurie in the Levant. The barony of Ænos, at the mouth of the Maritza, had been assigned in the partition of the Byzantine Empire to the Crusaders, and, although reconquered by the Greeks, the exiled Latin Emperor Baldwin II had been pleased to consider it as still his to bestow, together with the titular kingdom of Salonika, upon Hugues, Duke of Burgundy, in 1266. Besieged by Bulgarians and Tartars in 1265, and invaded by the Catalans in 1308, it had been governed in the middle of the fourteenth century by Nikephoros II Angelos, the dethroned Despot of Epeiros, the son-in-law and nominee of John Cantacuzene. When, however, Cantacuzene fell, the Despot thought it more prudent to surrender the city to John V, who thus, in 1356, became its master. We do not know the precise time or manner of its transference to the Gattilusio family. A later Byzantine historian[539], however, states that the inhabitants, dissatisfied with the Imperial governor, called in a member of the reigning family of Lesbos, who was able to maintain his position owing to the domestic quarrels in the Imperial family, and by payment of an annual tribute to the Sultan, when the Turks became masters of Thrace and Macedonia. Whether the ancient barony became a Genoese possession by the will of the natives or by grant of the Emperor, one fact is certain, that in June, 1384, it was in the possession of Francesco’s brother, Nicolò[540]. Some six weeks later, a great upheaval of nature, prophesied, it was afterwards said, by a Lesbian monk, made the new lord of Ænos regent of his brother’s island also.

The violent end of the first Gattilusio who reigned in Lesbos was long remembered in the island. On August 6, 1384, a terrible earthquake buried him beneath the ruins of the castle which he had built, as an inscription proudly informs us[541], some eleven years before. After a long and painful search, his mutilated body was found and laid to rest in a coffin, which he had already prepared, in the church of St John Baptist, which he had founded. By his side were laid the mangled bodies of two of his sons, Andronico and Domenico, who, with his wife, had also perished in the disaster. A third son, named Jacopo, escaped, however, by a miracle. At the time of the shock, he was sleeping by the side of his brothers in a tower of the castle; next day, however, he was discovered by a good woman in a vineyard near the Windmills at the foot of the fortress. The woman hastened to tell the good news to the chief men of the town, who came and fetched the young survivor. The boy took the oath on the Gospels as lord of Lesbos before the people and the nobles, and, as he was still a minor, his uncle, Nicolò Gattilusio, lord of Ænos, who hastened over to Lesbos on the news of the catastrophe, shared authority with him. In order to perpetuate the name of the popular founder of the dynasty, Jacopo on his accession took the name of Francesco II[542].

The joint government of uncle and nephew lasted for three years, when a dispute arose between them, and Nicolò returned to the direction of his Thracian barony. In November, 1388, Francesco II joined the league of the Knights of Rhodes, Jacques I of Cyprus, the Genoese Chartered Company of Chios, and the Commune of Pera against the designs of the Sultan Murad I. His popularity with his Perote compatriots was such, that, on the occasion of a visit to Constantinople in 1392, they gave him a banquet; but four years later they complained that he had not performed his treaty obligations, made in 1388, against the Turks. In the summer of 1396, Pera was besieged by the forces of Bayezid I, and although Francesco was actually in the port of Constantinople at the time, and his galley was stationed in the Golden Horn near “the Huntsman’s Gate” in the modern district of Aivan Serai the Commune thought it necessary to draw up a formal protest against his inaction and execute it on the stem of his ship. He replied by offering to aid his fellow-Genoese, if they would make a sortie, and his galley subsequently assisted the Venetians in relieving the capital[543]. After the disastrous defeat of the Christians at the battle of Nikopolis later in the same year, both he and Nicolò of Ænos rendered signal services to the Sultan’s noble French prisoners, and Lesbos emerged into prominence throughout the French-speaking world. Thither came the Duke of Burgundy’s chamberlain, Guillaume de l’Aigle, on his preliminary mission to mollify the heart of Bayezid, with whom Francesco had such influence that he was able to obtain leave for his sick cousin, Enguerrand VII de Coucy, to remain behind at Brusa, when the rest of the captives were dragged farther up country by the Sultan[544]. The humane feelings of the lord of Lesbos were doubtless further moved by the fact that de Coucy was, through his mother, an Austrian princess, connected with the reigning family of Constantinople, from which he was himself descended, and by the recent establishment of a French protectorate over Genoa.

Accordingly, he offered bail for his suffering relative, and when Marshal Boucicault, another of the prisoners, was set free to raise the amount necessary for their ransom, Francesco and other rich merchants of Lesbos advanced him the preliminary sum of 30,000 francs. Nicolò of Ænos willingly lent 2000 ducats more, and sent the prisoners a present of fish, bread and sugar, while his wife added a goodly supply of linen, for which they expressed their deep gratitude[545]. Of the total ransom, fixed at 200,000 ducats, Francesco and Nicolò, anxious to please the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, respectively made themselves liable for 110,000 and 40,000, which the prisoners promised to repay as soon as possible. Half of these two sums was actually paid, and the lord of Ænos further furnished on account of the Comte de Nevers 10,000 ducats to a son of Bayezid and another Turk, who had guarded that nobleman on the day of his capture. Some years later the two Gattilusj of Lesbos and Ænos sent in a claim for what they had advanced and for sundry expenses amounting in all to 108,500 ducats. Another member of the family lent 5075 ducats, and during his stay in Lesbos the Comte de Nevers negotiated another loan from his host for 2500 more[546]. These sums show the wealth and credit of these merchant princes.

When the ransom had been settled, the three French and Burgundian envoys who had been treating with Bayezid, embarked for Lesbos, escorted by Francesco and Nicolò and accompanied by one of the ransomed prisoners, who took with him to Burgundy a natural son of Francesco, destined to become the grandfather of Giuliano Gattilusio, the terrible corsair of the next century[547]. The rest of the prisoners followed early in July, and remained for six weeks the guests of Francesco and his lady, a noble dame of gentle breeding and European accomplishments, acquired at the court of Marie de Bourbon, titular Empress of Constantinople and Princess of Achaia, in whose society she had been educated. Feeling herself highly honoured at the presence of the Comte de Nevers and his companions in the castle of Lesbos, she clothed them with fine linen and cloth of Damascus, according to the fashion of the Levant, not forgetting to replenish the wardrobe of their retainers, while her husband and his uncle rendered them every honour and assisted them in their necessity. The visit terminated in the middle of August, when two galleys, equipped by the Knights of Rhodes, transported them to that island, their next stage on the homeward voyage. Their generous host stood on the shore till the Rhodian galleys had sunk beneath the horizon[548]. A few hours earlier he had obtained the signature of a treaty which might confer a solid advantage upon his own family and give an illusory hope of future glory to his departing guests. His daughter Eugenia had just married John Palaiologos, Despot of Selymbria, the Emperor Manuel II’s nephew and rival. Through the agency of Francesco this potentate ceded his claims to the Empire to King Charles VI of France in return for a French castle and a perpetual annuity of 25,000 gold ducats[549]. Thus in Lesbos, on the morrow of Nikopolis, the French could dream of re-establishing the long extinct Latin Empire of Romania!

Francesco had not seen the last of the French prisoners. In the summer of 1399, Boucicault, sent by Charles VI to assist Manuel II in defending Constantinople from the Turks, arrived at Lesbos, which he had last visited two years before. Francesco received him with outward signs of joy, but told him that he had already informed the Turks of this new expedition, as he was bound to do by the treaties which he had with them. The position of the Lesbian lord was, indeed, of no small difficulty. It was his interest to stand well with Bayezid, while his son-in-law, John Palaiologos, who spent much of his time in the island, had received, as the son of Manuel’s elder brother, Turkish assistance in his blockade of the Imperial city. The diplomatic Levantine did not, however, wish to offend his powerful guest; he therefore offered to accompany him, and ordered a galley to be made ready to join the expedition. But the information which he had supplied to Bayezid had put the Turks upon their guard. A raid in Asia Minor was Boucicault’s sole military success; but he achieved, probably thanks to the influence of Francesco, the reconciliation of Manuel with his nephew, whom the French Marshal fetched from Selymbria to Constantinople. Manuel then departed with Boucicault to seek aid at the courts of Europe, while John acted as his viceroy on the Bosporos and received, in the presence of the Marshal, the promise of Salonika as his future residence[550]. Thus, during the absence of Manuel, Francesco’s daughter Eugenia sat upon the Byzantine throne as the consort of the Emperor’s representative, while her sister Helene married Stephen Lazarevich, Despot of Serbia, who had made her acquaintance during a visit to Lesbos on his return from the stricken field of Angora[551]. Francesco was at that time holding Foglia Vecchia on a lease from the maona of Chios, and his tact and presents saved the place in that crisis from the covetous hands of the victorious Timour and his grandson[552].

When Manuel returned to Constantinople in 1403, he refused to carry out his promised gift of Salonika. Before the battle of Angora had decided the fate of Bayezid, and the issue between the Turks and the Mongols was still uncertain, John Palaiologos had agreed—it was said—to surrender Constantinople and become a tributary of the Sultan, in the event of a Turkish victory. This was Manuel’s, excuse for refusing to allow his nephew to reside at Salonika and for banishing him to Lemnos. John thereupon appealed to his father-in-law for assistance, and Francesco, early in 1403, sailed with five vessels to attack Salonika. Hearing that Boucicault, then French governor of Genoa, whose interest in Lesbos had just been evinced by the despatch of an embassy thither, was once more in the Levant on a punitive expedition against King Janus of Cyprus, who had besieged the Genoese colony of Famagosta, Francesco despatched a vessel to meet the Marshal, reminding him that he had been a witness of the Emperor’s promise and begging him to aid in taking Salonika[553]. Boucicault did not accede to this request; on the contrary, two vessels from Lesbos and two from Ænos went to assist him in his operations against the King of Cyprus, and remained with him till shortly before he reached the Venetian colony of Modon on his homeward voyage. Manuel ended by bestowing Salonika upon John Palaiologos, but the attacks made by Boucicault upon Venetian trade in the Levant and the consequent hostilities cost Nicolò Gattilusio, owing to his Genoese origin, the loss of 3000 ducats in gold, seized by the Venetians at Modon[554].

In October of this eventful year of Boucicault’s cruise, there arrived at Lesbos a mission, sent by Enrique III of Castile to Timour, the victor of Angora, whose court was then at Samarkand. The narrative of the Castilian ambassador, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, gives us an interesting account of the island under the second Gattilusio. He found the town “built on a high hill near the sea,” and “surrounded by a wall with many towers,” outside of which was “a large suburb.” Besides the capital, Lesbos contained “several villages and castles,” while the neighbourhood of the city was well-cultivated and abounded in gardens and vineyards. At one time—probably before the earthquake—“very large houses and churches” had stood near the town, and at one end of the city were “the ruins of great palaces, and in the middle of the ruins about 40 blocks of white marble.” The local tradition was, that “on the top of these blocks there was once a platform, where those of the city met in council.” During the five days of their stay the envoys made the acquaintance of John Palaiologos, who was then residing in his wife’s old home, and heard the tragic story of the late lord’s death, of his successor’s marvellous preservation and of the recent expedition against Salonika[555]. Thus, in the reign of Francesco II, Lesbos was frequently visited by important personages from the West, and was their last stopping-place in Latin lands on their way to Constantinople or to Asia. Descended from the famous houses of Byzantium and Savoy, and connected with that of Austria, the lord of Mytilene and lessee of Foglia Vecchia was regarded by Western visitors as “a great baron”; Eastern potentates sought the hands of his daughters in marriage, and when one of them married the heir of the powerful Giovanni de’ Grimaldi[556], governor of Nice and usurper of Monaco, the dowry of 5000 gold ducats which she brought from Lesbos was considered a large sum on the Riviera. Although born in the Levant, he still kept up the family connexion with his paternal city. Both he and his uncle had financial transactions with Genoa[557], and Francesco was patron of the family church of San Giacomo at Sestri Ponente[558]. At the same time, while Latin archbishops held the see of Mytilene, his relations with the dignitaries of the Orthodox church were excellent. The Œcumenical Patriarch addressed him as “well-beloved nephew of the Emperor,” and his uncle Nicolò as the “Emperor’s kinsman by marriage[559], the most noble, glorious, and prudent archon of Ænos,” whose consent was sought for the appointment of a Metropolitan to that long vacant see[560]. With Venice the Gattilusj, as befitted Genoese, at times had difficulties. In 1398 corsairs, sallying forth from their dominions, did much damage to the Cretans who sailed under the Venetian flag; but the Republic none the less allowed the wax of Lesbos to be exported at certain seasons for sale in her dominions[561].

After an eventful reign of 20 years, Francesco II died, if we may believe an anonymous Greek chronologist[562], on October 26, 1404. His end was strangely similar to that of his father. On a journey through the island, while passing the night in one of the lofty towers then common in the Archipelago, he was stung by a scorpion. Alarmed at his cries, his attendants and nobles climbed up into his room in such numbers that the floor collapsed and he was killed on the spot leaving three sons, Jacopo, Palamede and Dorino, of whom the eldest Jacopo became his successor[563]. The heir was, however, still a minor, and accordingly once again Nicolò came and acted as regent. His friendly policy as regent and his support of her subjects in the Levant on more than one occasion called forth the warm praise of Venice; but his fortification of Tenedos provoked an indignant protest[564]. Moreover the Greeks of Lesbos can scarcely have been edified by the appointment of rival Latin bishops—the result of the schism in the Western Church—which occurred during his regency[565]. In the spring of 1409 he died[566], and Jacopo, then of age, assumed the government of Lesbos, while Francesco’s younger son, Palamede[567], succeeded his uncle and guardian at Ænos. Nicolò’s fame long lingered in the Levant. Kritoboulos[568] half a century later ascribed to him the achievements of Francesco I, the founder of the dynasty, whose wisdom, and education, whose courage and physical gifts he extols, whom all Syria and Egypt feared and propitiated with annual blackmail, for his numerous navy ravaged their coasts and even the Libyan littoral.

Jacopo’s policy was to favour Genoese interests where they conflicted with Venetian, but to co-operate with the two rival Republics when they showed signs of uniting against his dreaded neighbours, the Turks. Thus, he aided Centurione Zaccaria, the Genoese Prince of Achaia, in his campaign against the Tocchi of Cephalonia and Zante, who were thereby compelled to invoke the protection of Venice; while the Venetians threatened to sequestrate all Lesbian merchandise in Crete, unless he gave satisfaction for the seizure of a Cretan merchantman[569]. Venetian and Genoese subjects, however, suffered alike from the reprisals provoked by the attack of two Lesbian galleys upon the Saracens of Damietta; and Jacopo had a counter grievance in the illegal levy of toll upon his people by the Genoese of Chios[570]. Towards the Turks he was, from his position, obliged to be deferential, except when he saw prospect of common action against them. If the Knights of Rhodes complained that he had sheltered the Turks, and so saved them from destruction at the hands of those zealous champions of Christendom[571], he was ready, in 1415, to join the latter, the Genoese of Chios, and the Venetian Republic in an anti-Turkish league; while he did homage to Mohammed I and aided first that Sultan and then Murad II in the suppression of Djouneïd of Aïdin, when fortune smiled upon them[572]. In 1426, the threatened declaration of war by Venice upon Genoa, then under Milanese domination, caused him some embarrassment; but the Genoese Government bade him[573] not to be afraid of Venetian threats. Not long after this, probably in 1428, Jacopo died[574]. An anonymous Greek informs us that he had married Bonne, “the fair daughter of the lord of Nice near Marseilles” but this statement would appear to be due to a confusion with the marriage of his sister with Pietro de’ Grimaldi, for Bonne, the offspring of that union espoused Louis Cossa, lord of Berre, unless the Bonne mentioned was the daughter of Amedeo VIII of Savoy, in whose dominions Nice was then included[575]. In 1421, however, Valentina D’Oria is described as “lady of Mytilene[576].” At any rate, it seems probable that he left no issue, for his successor, Dorino I, is described in a Genoese document and by a traveller of this period as “brother” of Palamede, lord of Ænos[577], and therefore of Jacopo. Dorino, whose name was derived from the famous Genoese house of D’Oria, allied by marriage with many Gattilusj, had already had experience of ruling for several years over Foglia Vecchia as his appanage—a fact still commemorated by his coins and an inscription there[578], which describes him as its “lord” in 1423-4. This former possession of the Zaccaria is first mentioned as administered by the Gattilusj in 1402, and remained united with the Lesbian branch of the family till 1455.

Meanwhile, Ænos had prospered under the rule of Palamede. Six inscriptions, still extant there, proclaim the activity of the masons during the early years of his long reign—the erection of the churches of the Chrysopege and of St Nicholas by two private citizens and the completion of three other public works[579]. But Palamede not only embellished his domain; he also extended it. The neighbouring island of Samothrace, a Greek possession since the reconquest of Constantinople from the Latins, now owned his sway—for in 1433, when Bertrandon de la Brocquière[580] visited Ænos, he wrote that Samothrace also belonged to its lord. In that island, then known as Mandrachi and celebrated for its honey and its goats, Palamede erected on March 26, 1431, and extended in 1433, a new fortress for the protection of its numerous population, as two inscriptions in its walls, one in Greek, one in Latin[581] still remind us. The Genoese lord, we are told, was interested in the past history of his dominions; he “loved greatly to hear learned discussions,” and to him a contemporary scholar, John Kanaboutzes, applied the saying of Plato about philosophers and kings. To his desire to know what Dionysios of Halikarnassos had written about Samothrace we owe the brief commentary on that author, compiled at his command by that writer, a native of Foglia[582], whose family was connected with Ænos[583]—one of several instances, where Italian rulers of Greece showed a consciousness of that country’s great past. Like his brother Jacopo, Palamede was inclined to support the Genoese Prince of Achaia, and the Venetian admiral was ordered to remonstrate with him, should occasion require[584].

Although more than seventy years had by this time elapsed since Francesco I had left Genoa for the Levant, the connexion between the distant Republic and his descendants in the East was never closer than now. In 1428, and again in 1444, the Genoese Government, although it forbade the circulation of Lesbian ducats in Genoa and district, and repudiated responsibility for the harm done by the Gattilusj to the subjects of the Sultan of Egypt, specially consulted “the lords of Mytilene, Ænos and Foglia Vecchia” whether they desired to be included or no in the treaties of peace, which it had just concluded with King Alfonso V of Aragon. “The many services rendered to us and to the community of Genoa by you and your ancestors”—so runs one of these interesting despatches—“make us realise that in all treaties involving peace or war we ought to consider your honour and advancement. For your welfare, your misfortunes, are equally ours.” Dorino I replied that he wished to be so included, and his agents accordingly ratified the peace at Genoa on his behalf in 1429. When, two years later, Genoa was drawn into the war between her Milanese masters and Venice, the Archbishop of Milan, who was at that time the governor of Genoa, notified Dorino of the outbreak of hostilities, following the precedent set in the case of his father and grandfather, warned that “most distinguished of our citizens” to put his island in a state of defence and begged him to aid any Genoese colony that might require assistance[585]. So much importance was attached at Milan to his support, that Francesco Sforza, the Duke, accredited Benedetto Folco of Forlì to the Lesbian court, in order to urge Dorino against Venice[586]. At the same time, the Genoese Government, “remembering that in all its past victories the galleys of the Gattilusj had borne their part,” invited the lord of Lesbos to co-operate with Ceba, the Genoese commander who was to be despatched for the relief of Chios from the Venetians, and requested him to send a galley to that island. Dorino replied in a loyal strain, whereupon the Genoese Government thanked him for this display of fidelity, traditional in his family, and again urged him to equip his galley for the defence of Chios. Two other despatches, following in rapid succession, begged him to inform the Chians of the speedy arrival of the Genoese fleet and to see that his own galley was in Chian waters by the middle of May. Dorino was as good as his word, and gave orders that a Lesbian galley should join the expedition; but before the latter arrived, the Venetians had raised the siege. As a reward for his services, the commander of the Genoese fleet and the governors of Pera and Chios were instructed to provide for the safety of his little state, and the home government invited him to rely upon its unshakable affection in time of need. Influential Genoese marriages stimulated this feeling. Dorino had married a D’Oria; Palamede’s daughter Caterina now married another; while her sisters, Ginevra and Costanza, respectively espoused Ludovico and Gian Galeazzo de Campo-fregoso, relatives of the then reigning Doge, and the former soon to be Doge himself. Thus Lesbian interests were well represented at Genoa. In return, Genoa frequently requested Dorino to see that justice was done to her subjects in his dominions, even to the detriment of his own family[587].

Genoa found Dorino no less useful as a diplomatist than as an ally, for the lord of Lesbos and Foglia Vecchia had married his daughter Maria to Alexander, second son of Alexios IV, Emperor of Trebizond, in whose dominions the Genoese, owing to their Black Sea colonies, had important commercial interests, latterly greatly injured by the pro-Venetian policy of that sovereign. According to the Trapezuntine practice, Alexios had raised his eldest son John IV to the Imperial dignity in his own lifetime; but his unfilial heir conspired against him, was driven into exile, and replaced by his next brother Alexander. John IV was, however, as favourable to the Genoese as his father to the Venetians, and was restored with the assistance of a Genoese of Caffa. Alexios IV was murdered in 1429; but John IV was not allowed to reign undisturbed. His brother Alexander fled to Constantinople, where his sister was wife of the Emperor John VI, and contracted a marriage with Dorino’s daughter, in order that he might secure his support, and through him, that of Genoa, against the Emperor of Trebizond. When the Spanish traveller, Pero Tafur, visited Lesbos at this time he found Alexander there engaged in levying a fleet for his restoration. This did not, however, suit Genoese policy, and accordingly the Doge of Genoa requested Dorino in 1438 to act as peacemaker between the two brothers and to invite his son-in-law to reside at Constantinople or in Lesbos on an annuity chargeable on the revenues of Trebizond[588]. Another matrimonial alliance brought Dorino’s family into renewed relations with the Palaiologoi. In 1440, an old link between the two families had been snapped by the death of Eugenia Gattilusio, widow of the Emperor John VI’s cousin and namesake[589]—an event which was doubtless the occasion when the castle of Kokkinos on the coast of Lemnos, which had been her widow’s portion, passed into the hands of Dorino[590]. On July 27 of the following year, however, the Emperor’s brother, the Despot Constantine, afterwards the last Christian ruler of Byzantium, married Dorino’s daughter Caterina, a marriage arranged by the historian Phrantzes. This union did not last long; after a brief honeymoon in Lesbos, Constantine left his bride in her father’s care, and set out, accompanied by a Lesbian galley, for the Morea, nor did he see her again till his return in the following July. At Lesbos he took her on board his ship; but, when he reached Lemnos on his way to Constantinople, he had to take refuge behind the walls of Kokkinos from the attacks of a Turkish fleet. The Turks in vain besieged the castle of the Gattilusj for 27 days, and the strain and anxiety of the siege caused the death of his wife, which occurred at Palaiokastro in August. There the ill-fated second consort of the last hero of the Byzantine Empire was laid to rest[591].

Meanwhile, besides the acquisition of Kokkinos, thus courageously saved by his heroic son-in-law, Dorino had received from the Greek Empire the island of Thasos, which more than a century before had belonged to the Genoese family of Zaccaria. Indeed, if we may accept the two allusions to the Gattilusj in the Greek version of Bondelmonti[592] as the work of that traveller, Thasos, which was Byzantine in September, 1414, had been given to Jacopo as a fief before 1420. At any rate, a Thasian inscription of April 1, 1434, now preserved in the wall of the church of St Athanasios at Kastro, informs us that a tower was built there by Oberto de’ Grimaldi[593] a member of the well-known Ligurian family who is mentioned elsewhere[594] as a captain in the service of Dorino. Ten years later, the archæologist, Cyriacus of Ancona, upon visiting Thasos, found that Dorino had recently bestowed the island upon his son, Francesco III, who was still under the control of a preceptor, Francesco Pedemontano.

The indefatigable antiquary may have paid an earlier visit to Lesbos in 1431, but the accounts which he has left of the Gattilusj, their dominions, and the neighbouring islands of the Thracian Sea range from 1444 to 1447. In Lesbos he was well received by Dorino, who promised to aid him in exploring the whole island. He had, indeed, arrived at a fortunate moment, for the rumour of a threatened Turkish invasion had ceased, so that the lord of Lesbos had leisure for archæology, and his visitor could examine “the remains of the temple of Diana,” and “the baths of Jove,” whose name was carved in the midst of them[595]. With Dorino’s captain, Oberto de’ Grimaldi, he sailed to Foglia Vecchia, where the Gattilusj had a factory, as at Lesbos, for the production of alum, and made the acquaintance of “the Master Kanaboutzes,” probably the author of the commentary on Dionysios, who could tell him all about the Foglie, of which he was a native[596]. In Thasos, the third domain of the elder branch of the Gattilusj, he spent Christmas day, and composed a long Latin inscription as well as an Italian poem in honour of young Francesco. The enthusiastic guest prayed that the beginning of his host’s rule over Thasos might be of as good omen as “the yule log thrown on the fire in the turreted castle”; that the yoke of the barbarian Turks might be removed from Thrace, that the former dependencies of the island there might return to his sway, and that Francesco’s patron saint, St John the Evangelist, might protect this “native offspring of the Palaiologoi, this pride of the most noble Gatalusian race.” “What Thasian nymph,” he asks, “could have deprived Lesbos of her Francesco?” The attraction was the lordship of an island, which had been described by Bondelmonti as well-peopled, very fertile and containing three fair towns. Francesco had, indeed, begun well by restoring the principal city, thus earning a dedicatory inscription by the Thasian citizens and colonists, and by erecting at the entrance of the harbour some fine marble statues, which an ancient inscription showed to have represented the members of the Thasian council. At this time the island could boast of six other towns beside its “marble city,” whose walls attracted the admiration of the traveller. Under the guidance of Carlo de’ Grimaldi and “the learned Giovanni of Novara,” he inspected the numerous ancient tombs outside, the large amphitheatre with no less than 20 rows then standing intact, and the akropolis of the city[597].

The worthy Cyriacus was no less hospitably received by the junior branch of the Gattilusj. At Ænos he met Palamede with his two sons Giorgio and Dorino II, and was delighted to find there an old friend in the person of Cristoforo Dentuto, envoy extraordinary of Genoa in the Levant. Accompanied by “the prince of Ænos and Samothrace” as he calls Palamede, and by Francesco Calvi, the latter’s secretary, he was taken to see “the great tomb of Polydoros, son of Priam,” some five stadia beyond the walls, admired the sculptured figures of fauns and animals there, and copied an ancient Greek inscription from the marble base of a statue that stood before “the prince’s court.” Letters of introduction from Palamede and Francesco of Thasos secured for him a warm reception at the monastery of Hagia Laura on Mount Athos[598]. At Samothrace, Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, Palamede’s prefect of the island, personally conducted the antiquary to the old city, where he saw “ancient walls and the remains of a marble temple of Neptune” (known to modern archæologists as “the Dorian marble temple”), “fragments of huge columns, epistylia and bases, and doorposts, adorned with the crowned heads of bulls and other figures”—now identified with the remains of a round building built by Arsinöe, daughter of Ptolemy Soter. Thence he went to “the new castle, founded by Palamede” some thirteen years before, and built to protect his new town of “Capsulum.” Close to the tower he saw to his delight “several ancient marbles, with dances of Nymphs sculptured and inscriptions in Latin and Greek”—the two reliefs of dancing Nymphs now in the Louvre[599]. From his accounts of the neighbouring islands, we learn that Imbros, where his guide was a noble and learned Imbriote, Hermodoros Michael Kritoboulos, the historian, in 1444 was still Byzantine, and “governed for the Emperor John Palaiologos” by that same noble, Manuel Asan, of whom inscriptions have been found there, and who had lately restored two-thirds of the akropolis[600]. We find, too, that in 1447 Theodore Branas was Byzantine governor of Lemnos, where the Gattilusj as yet held only the castle of Kokkinos[601].

The visit of the antiquary of Ancona to the Gattilusj was the calm before the storm, which was so soon to burst upon them. Even while Cyriacus was their guest, the fatal battle of Varna made Murad II master of the Near East. For a few years, indeed, the Gattilusj went on marrying and giving in marriage, as if the end of their rule were not at hand. In 1444, Dorino’s daughter Ginevra married Giacomo II Crispo, Duke of the Archipelago[602]; five years later the lord of Lesbos sent the Archbishop of Mytilene, at that time the celebrated Leonardo of Chios, to Rome to obtain from the Pope a dispensation for the marriage of his eldest surviving son, Domenico, and a daughter of Palamede. As the two young people were first-cousins, Ludovico de Campo-fregoso, Palamede’s son-in-law and at that time Doge of Genoa, begged the Pope not to grant the dispensation, and as an example of the iniquity of such an alliance he instanced the case of Dorino’s firstborn (presumably Francesco III of Thasos), who had married another daughter of Palamede and had died less than six months afterwards. The Pope refused his consent, and the marriage did not take place[603].

Hitherto the Gattilusj, partly by tribute paid ever since the reign of Murad I[604], partly by tact, had managed to keep the Turks at a distance. On one occasion, when Constantinople had been threatened, the Pope had offered to pay the expenses of the Lesbian galley, if Dorino would agree to sent it thither; but the Genoese Government, while transmitting his Holiness’ offer and praising the services of the Gattilusj to Christendom, recognised their natural unwillingness to offend the Sultan and advised Dorino, if he did send aid, to pretend that he was merely protecting Genoese interests at Pera. The Greek Emperor was able to raise a loan, if he received no actual assistance, at Ænos[605]; but in 1450, at last, Lesbos was attacked. Murad despatched a large fleet under Baltaoghli, the first in the list of Turkish admirals, against the island, and his men carried off more than 3000 souls, slaughtered many cattle, destroyed the flourishing city of Kallone, and inflicted damage to the amount of more than 150,000 ducats. It was probably on this occasion that the lady of Lesbos, Orietta d’Oria, performed the prodigy of valour that won her a niche in the literary Pantheon of her native city besides the men of her father’s house. At the time of the invasion, she seems to have been in the town of Molivos, the ancient Methymna, whose inhabitants, exhausted from lack of food, were on the point of surrendering, when she appeared among them in full armour, and led them to victory against the astonished Turks. Thereupon Dorino was able to secure by a timely present and the increase of his tribute to 2000 gold pieces a renewal of the peace which he protested that he had never broken. He was, however, under no illusions as to the durability of this truce. He wrote to Genoa, asking for assistance, reminding the Republic that he was of Genoese origin and that he had often aided her to the best of his power with men, ships, and money. Unless, therefore, she could protect him, he would be reluctantly compelled to look elsewhere for help. At the same time, after the fashion of the Christian princes of the Levant on the eve of the Turkish conquest, he announced his intention of sending an expedition to obtain his rights from the Emperor John IV of Trebizond, who had also maltreated the Genoese of Caffa, and begged the Republic to receive and revictual his galleys in her Black Sea ports. This last request was granted[606].

The Turkish conquest of Constantinople, although it sounded the death-knell of the Latin states in the Levant, was of momentary benefit to the Gattilusj. They had been close relatives and good friends of the Greek Imperial family, and one of them, a certain Laudisio, had distinguished himself in the defence of the city[607]; but, when all was over, they hastened to profit by its fall. The two islands of Lemnos and Imbros, from their position near the mouth of the Dardanelles, have always possessed great strategic importance. Under the Latin Empire, Lemnos had been the fief of the Lord High Admiral, who bore the title of Grand-duke; under the Palaiologoi it had been either the appanage of an Imperial prince, or had been entrusted to the government of some great noble. So greatly was it coveted, that Alfonso V of Aragon had made it the price of his aid for the relief of Constantinople[608], while during the siege Constantine had promised it to Giustiniani, if the Turks were repulsed[609]. When the news of the disaster reached these islands, the Byzantine authorities fled on board Italian ships, while many of the inhabitants sought refuge in Chios or in the Venetian colonies. There was, however, one leading personage in Imbros, who was resolved to remain and make terms with the victors. This was Kritoboulos, the future historian of Mohammed II, who bribed the Turkish Admiral, Hamza, not to attack the islands and through his mediation managed to send representatives of the Greek church and the local nobility with a present to the Sultan’s court at Adrianople, begging him to allow them to be administered as before. It chanced that at this moment envoys of the Gattilusj were at Adrianople, for on the fall of Constantinople both Dorino and Palamede had hastened to placate and congratulate the terrible Sultan, and to crave the grant of Lemnos and Imbros. Dorino, although he was still lord of Lesbos in name and continued to sign state documents, had been bed-ridden since 1449, and his eldest surviving son, Domenico, governed as regent. Domenico and one of Palamede’s councillors were supported by the two emissaries of Kritoboulos, and the Sultan was pleased to confer Lemnos upon the lord of Lesbos, Imbros upon him of Ænos. At the same time Mohammed ordered the former to pay an annual tribute of 3000 gold pieces for Lesbos and 2325 for Lemnos; that of Imbros was assessed at 1200 gold pieces. Thus, by the irony of fate, only nine years before its annihilation, the dominion of the Gattilusj reached its greatest extent. Indeed, there was a party in Skyros also which advocated annexation to Lesbos, but there the majority wisely preferred the nearer and more powerful lion of St Mark, which waved over Eubœa[610].

The Gattilusj were now well aware that they only existed on sufferance, and they were more careful than ever not to offend their master. Domenico paid more than one visit of obeisance to the Turkish court; and when, in June, 1455, the Turkish admiral, on his way to Rhodes, anchored off Lesbos, the historian Doukas[611], the prince’s secretary, was sent on board with a handsome present of garments of silk and of woven wool six in number, 6000 pieces of silver, 20 oxen, 50 sheep, more than 800 measures of wine, 2 bushels of biscuit and one of bread, more than 1000 lbs. of cheese, and fruit without measure, as well as gifts in proportion to their rank for the members of the admiral’s staff. Under these circumstances, it was no wonder that Hamza treated the lord of Lesbos “like a brother,” and refrained from entering the harbour, for fear of alarming the islanders.

Scarcely had the Turkish fleet left, when, on June 30, 1455, Dorino I died, leaving his dominion of Lesbos, Foglia Vecchia, Thasos, and Lemnos to his eldest surviving son, Domenico, for whom the younger, Nicolò, acted as governor in the last-named island. Before a month had passed, the fleet hove in sight of Mytilene on its homeward voyage, and was invited to anchor in the harbour, where the serviceable Doukas again visited the admiral, whom he kept in good humour by a sumptuous banquet and sped on his way with a sigh of relief on the morrow. But the historian had before him a more delicate mission—that of paying the annual tribute for Lesbos and Lemnos to Mohammed II. Starting from Lesbos on August 1, he found the Sultan at Adrianople, kissed hands in token of homage and remained seated in his presence, till His Majesty’s morning meal was over. When, however, he went to hand the money to the Sultan’s ministers next day, they ingeniously asked him after the health of his master. The historian replied that he was well and sent his greeting, whereupon the Ottomans answered, that they meant the old prince. Doukas explained that Dorino had been dead 40 days, and that his successor had already been practically prince for six years, during which time he had once or twice come in person to do homage and congratulate the Great Turk. The ministers thereupon cut short the conversation with the remark that no one had the right to assume the title of lord of Lesbos (borne till his death by Dorino), until he had come and received his principality from the hands of his Most Mighty suzerain. “Go therefore,” they said, “and return with thy master; for if he come not, he knows what the future has in store for him.” The terrified envoy hastened back to Lesbos, and set out with Domenico and several leading men of both races in the island to do homage to Mohammed. The Sultan had, however, meanwhile changed his headquarters, for the plague was then ravaging Thrace, and it was not till the Lesbian deputation reached the Bulgarian village of Zlatica that they came up with him. After the usual bakshîsh to the influential Pashas, Mahmûd and Said Achmet, they were admitted to the presence, and Domenico humbly kissed the hand of his suzerain. But on the morrow a message was conveyed to Domenico, that the Sultan wished to have the island of Thasos. Argument was useless, and the island, which had belonged for some 20, or perhaps even 35, years to the Gattilusj, was ceded to Mohammed. This sacrifice only whetted the appetite of the Sultan; on the morrow a second message announced that the tribute for Lesbos would be doubled. At this Domenico plucked up courage to reply, that, if the Sultan wished to take the whole of Lesbos, it was in his power to do so; but that to pay twice the previous tribute was beyond its present ruler’s resources. At the same time, he begged the Sultan’s ministers to intervene on his behalf. They represented the facts to their master, and the latter agreed to a compromise, by which Lesbos should thenceforth pay 4000 gold pieces, instead of 3000. Then, at last they decked Domenico with a gold-embroidered robe and his companions with silken garments; the Lesbians signed the oath of allegiance and set out on their homeward journey, “thanking God, who had delivered them out of the hands of the monster.”

But the year was not destined to close without further losses to the Gattilusj. While the deputation was still at Philippopolis, a second Turkish fleet, under Junis, set out to attack the Genoese colony of Chios. Off the Troad a storm arose, in which several of the Turkish vessels perished, while the rest of the fleet, except the flagship, took refuge in the harbour of Mytilene, where Nicolò was then representing his absent brother. It had been one of the treaty obligations of the lords of Lesbos, ever since they had been vassals of the Sultan, to warn the Turks who inhabited the opposite mainland between the mouth of the Kaïkos and the town of Assos, of the approach of Catalan corsairs, and the Gattilusj were bound to pay compensation for any loss caused by negligence in performing this service. Now it chanced that the scout, employed on this business, sailed into the harbour while the Turks were there, followed by the missing Turkish flagship. The admiral, a very different man from his predecessor, requited Nicolò Gattilusio’s generous hospitality by demanding that this vessel with all on board should be given up to him as a prize, including the wife of a very distinguished member of the Chian Chartered Company, Paride Giustiniani Longo, with all her jewelry. The lady in question was none other than Domenico’s mother-in-law, whom he had invited to Lesbos to keep his wife company while he was away—for Domenico’s love for his wife was proverbial, and it is narrated of him that he could never bear to be out of her sight and even shared her bed when she was afflicted with leprosy. Nicolò protested that the vessel was his brother’s and that the wealthy Chian dame had not been on board but had already been long in the island. At this, the Turkish commander complained to the Sultan, and sailed for Foglia Nuova, of which Paride Longo was then governor for the Chian Company. Arrived there, he summoned the governor and the chief men of the place to appear before him. Such was their alarm, that even before his summons arrived they had started to meet him, only to hear the Sultan’s written orders that they should all be imprisoned and their city levelled with the ground, unless they surrendered the fort. The citizens, without attempting to argue or reply, at once admitted the Turks; the Genoese merchants were plundered and led on board; the names of all the citizens were taken down, about a hundred of their children carried off, and a Turkish guard placed in the fort. Thus on October 31, 1455, fell the Genoese colony of Foglia Nuova, the old possession of the Zaccaria and of the Cattaneo families, and then for a century a dependency of the maona of Chios.

When Domenico returned home and learnt from his brother what had occurred, he sent Doukas to plead the case at Constantinople. The Lesbian envoy’s arguments and appeals to justice were, however, all in vain; Mohammed gave Domenico the alternative of paying 10,000 gold pieces or of war; and, when Doukas resisted this monstrous ultimatum, secretly despatched one of his servants to take Foglia Vecchia, which had been held by the Gattilusj of Lesbos ever since 1402 at least. This, their sole possession on the Asian main, was seized on December 24, 1455. As soon as the Sultan received the news of its capture, he ordered Doukas to be sent away free and declared the question settled. Well might Domenico, after this experience, write urgently to Genoa for succour[612].

It was now the turn of the younger branch of the Gattilusj. Palamede of Ænos had died in 1455; and, as his elder son Giorgio had predeceased him[613] in 1449, he had bequeathed his dominions to his second son, Dorino II, and to Giorgio’s widow and her children. While Giorgio was still alive, his father had given him all his estates, except his Lesbian property, which was the share of Dorino II, and even after Giorgio’s death, his widow and family had a preference in the old lord’s will, as representing the first-born. No sooner, however, was Palamede dead than Dorino, defying the dictates alike of justice and prudence, seized the whole of the estate. In vain Giorgio’s widow and his own advisers implored him not to drive her to appeal to the judgment-seat of the Sultan, his suzerain. Finding her arguments useless, she begged her uncle to lay her case before Mohammed, and that undiplomatic envoy, anxious to punish Dorino even at the price of annexation to Turkey, depicted the usurper as a faithless vassal, who was conspiring with the Italians, collecting arms, hiring soldiers, and preparing to increase the garrisons of Ænos and the two islands with the object of proclaiming his complete independence. His advocacy found a willing hearer, for Mohammed coveted Ænos because of its favourable situation, on the estuary of the Maritza, then navigable for a considerable distance, opposite the islands, of which it was the natural mart, and in close proximity to the lake of Jala Göl. Thanks to these natural advantages, to the river and lake fisheries, and above all to its valuable salt-beds, which supplied all Thrace and Macedonia, Ænos was then a very rich city, from which Palamede had received 300,000 pieces of silver. It was true, that two-thirds of the proceeds of the salt-beds and of the other revenues were already handed over to the Sultan; but it was suggested by the people of the neighbouring towns of Ipsala and Feredchik that the Gattilusj did not administer the salt-works honestly, while they gave refuge at Ænos to fugitive Turkish slaves.

Mohammed resolved to act at once. Despite the terrible Balkan winter, which made havoc with his troops, he left Constantinople on January 24, 1456, and marched against Ænos, while Junis with the fleet menaced it from the sea. Dorino was absent in Samothrace, whither he had gone to spend the winter in Palamede’s castle; and his subjects, thus left to themselves, made no attempt at resistance. They sent a deputation of leading citizens to the Sultan’s headquarters at Ipsala, and surrendered the city on condition that no harm was done to its inhabitants. Mohammed received them kindly, granted some of their requests, and sent Mahmûd Pasha back with them to take over the town. On the next day he came in person, carried off all the silver, gold and other valuables, which he found in Dorino’s palace and plundered the houses of that prince’s absent suite. Then, after a three days’ stay, during which he organised the future administration of the place and appointed a certain Murad as its governor, he marched away, taking 150 children, the flower of the youth of Ænos, with him, and entrusting Junis with the annexation of Samothrace and Imbros, the maritime dependencies of that city.

The Turkish admiral, on his arrival at Imbros, summoned Kritoboulos the historian, whose personality and opinions were already well-known at the Turkish court, and made him governor in the room of Dorino’s representative, at that time apparently Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos, whom he carried off on board. Meanwhile, a vessel had been despatched to Samothrace to fetch Dorino. But the latter, mistrusting the admiral, as he well might, preferred to throw himself upon the mercy of the Sultan. He therefore manned his yacht, crossed over to Ænos, and thence proceeded to Adrianople. Mohammed received him, and promised to restore to him his islands; but the malicious admiral, indignant at what he considered a slight upon himself, persuaded his sovereign to give Dorino instead some place on the mainland, on the ground that the islanders would not tolerate him and that he would be less able to plot at a distance from the sea. The Sultan thereupon changed his mind, and granted to the dethroned prince the district of Zichna in Macedonia. Dorino did not, however, long remain there; after slaying the Turkish officials, who were his guard of honour, he fled to Lesbos, and thence to Naxos, where he married his cousin, Elisabetta Crispo, daughter of the late Duke, Giacomo II, and settled down at the ducal court[614].

The Turkish annexation of Samothrace and Imbros and the appointment of a native governor had an immediate effect upon the neighbouring island of Lemnos. The Lemnians had had little more than two years of Gattilusian Government, and the experience had been unfortunate, for Domenico had entrusted their island to his brother Nicolò, against whose tyrannical conduct they made secret complaint to the Sultan, begging him to send one of his servants to rule over them. Mohammed gladly consented, and ordered Junis’ successor, Ismael, to sail for Lemnos, and install the amiable Hamza as governor. Before the Turks arrived, Domenico despatched a small force under Giovanni Fontana and Spineta Colomboto with orders to induce the Lemnians by promises to return to their allegiance, and failing that to escort his brother, then encamped behind the walls of Palaiokastro, back to Lesbos. His emissaries, however, disobeying his orders, resorted to force, with the result that the islanders routed them with considerable loss, and those who escaped had to content themselves with conveying Nicolò home. When the Turkish admiral arrived, he commended the Lemnians, landed the new governor and returned, in May, 1456, with the Lesbian prisoners on board, to the Dardanelles. The news of what had occurred so infuriated Mohammed against Domenico, that when in August Doukas came with the annual tribute and begged for their release, he commanded their heads to be cut off, and only repented when they had actually mounted the scaffold, ordering that they should be sold, instead of being beheaded[615].

Of the seven possessions of the Gattilusj Lesbos now alone remained; and Genoa, which a few months earlier had been mainly concerned lest rebellious citizens of the friendly Republic of Ancona should find shelter in Domenico’s ports, now sent a ship with arms and 200 men to his aid, purchased cannon and powder on his behalf, and appealed to Pope Calixtus III and to Kings Alfonso V of Portugal and Henry VI of England to join in a crusade against the enemy which threatened him. Meanwhile, the Pope organised a fund for the redemption of the captives of the two Foglie[616], plans were laid for the reconquest of the places lost, and a certain George Dromokaïtes, a noble Greek of Lemnos, offered to deliver that island and Imbros to Venice[617]. In the autumn of 1456 a papal fleet under the command of Cardinal Scarampi, the Patriarch of Aquileia, appeared in the Ægean; and, after vain attempts to make Domenico refuse to pay his tribute and fight, annexed Lemnos without opposition, thanks to the influence of George Diplovatatzes[618], the Greek archon of Kastro, occupied Samothrace, and took Thasos after an assault upon the harbour fort. Imbros was, however, saved by the diplomacy of Kritoboulos, its governor, who bribed and flattered the Cardinal’s lieutenant, a certain “Count,” whom we may identify with the Count of Anguillara. Garrisons were left in the three conquered islands, and the papal commander appointed governors in the name of the Holy Father—for these former possessions of the Gattilusj were not restored to their lawful owners, but retained by the Holy See. Both the Venetians and the Catalans in vain begged the Pope to give them the three islands; but, in 1459, Pius II offered to consign them to the Bank of St George, which then managed the Genoese colonies, on condition that it would hold them as his vicar. The papal offer was, however, unanimously declined, from fear of offending the Sultan, who might then attack the Black Sea colonies, and from considerations of expense. Besides, Genoa could scarcely have accepted Lemnos, Thasos and Samothrace without a breach of good faith towards her own children[619].

The indignation which Mohammed felt at the capture of the Thracian islands, he vented upon Domenico. Although Doukas, the person most likely to know, expressly tells us that the lord of Lesbos had continued to pay his tribute, and he had certainly not profited by the losses of his suzerain, nevertheless the Sultan accused him of being entirely responsible for what had occurred and the Turcophil Kritoboulos insinuates that he and his brother Nicolò, now resident in Lesbos, refused to send the usual tribute and harboured corsairs who preyed upon the opposite coast and plundered Turkish merchantmen. Domenico was, however, himself a sufferer from these raids, and had begged the Pope to excommunicate the pirates who had injured his subjects. But Mohammed was doubtless glad of an excuse for attacking Lesbos, and in August, 1457, sent Ismael, his admiral, with a large fleet against it. Ismael landed at Molivos, the scene of a former Turkish defeat; and, after ravaging all the countryside, besieged the castle. Such was the terror, inspired by the Turks, that a detachment of the papal fleet, which had been sent under a certain “Sergius,” perhaps Raymond de Siscar, to the relief of Lesbos, at once weighed anchor for Chios. But the garrison of Molivos resisted with such courage, that the Turkish commander was forced to retire on August 9 with much loss, after venting his rage on the defenceless portions of the island. As soon as he had gone, the papal lieutenant returned, only to be greeted with reproaches by the justly indignant Gattilusj. The Pope, indeed, described Lesbos as “Our island” and calmly stated that he had only allowed its lord to retain it on condition that he recognised the authority of the Holy See. But Domenico wrote to the “Office of Mytilene”—a body which then existed in Genoa for the promotion of trade with Lesbos—stating frankly that he could hold out no longer unless Genoa helped him, and threatening, that, in case of her refusal, he must perforce submit to some other rule. Meanwhile, he sent envoys to the Sultan to pay his tribute and obtain peace. The Bank of St George assured him that it would not desert him, and decided to appoint a committee of four shareholders in the Chian Chartered Company and two other Chians, who should raise 300 soldiers for the defence of Lesbos at the Bank’s expense. A new duty on merchandise exported to Chios was to defray the equipment of these men; their pay was to be provided by Domenico, if possible; or, if he could not find the ready money, he was to mortgage his property as security. Genoa was none too generous to her outpost in the Levant; she calculated her Lesbian policy by the maxims of the counting-house[620].

Domenico did not, however, live to fall by the hands of the Turks. He had a more sinister enemy in his own household. So long as Nicolò had been able to gratify his love of power at the expense of the unhappy Lemnians, he was harmless to his brother; but, when his intractable disposition had estranged the sympathies of the governed and caused the loss of that island, the two brothers were both restricted to Lesbos, the sole fragment of the Gattilusian dominions that remained. Nicolò was quarrelsome and ambitious; he chafed at the inferior position which he occupied, and resolved to usurp Domenico’s place. Accordingly, with the assistance of his cousin, Luchino, and a Genoese named Baptista (possibly the Baptista Gattilusio, who is described as a very influential person at Lesbos 14 years earlier[621]), he deposed his elder brother towards the end of 1458, and threw him into prison, on the pretext that he was plotting to surrender the island to the Turks. Soon afterwards the usurper strangled his prisoner, having, according to one account, first cut off his arms so that he could no longer embrace the faithful wife who still clung to him[622]. Her father demanded from the murderer repayment of the sums which Domenico had received as her dowry and of those which he had subsequently borrowed; and the Doge of Genoa threatened the lord of Lesbos with the forcible intervention of the Republic unless he liquidated these debts[623]. The fate of the widow is unknown; more fortunate, however, in one respect than other ill-fated heroines of Frankish Greece, she has given her name to the only modern poem, based upon the mediæval history of Sappho’s island, while her bust by Mino da Fiesole is in the National Museum at Florence[624].

The fratricide’s position was, indeed, unenviable. The papal fleet had returned to Italy upon the death of Calixtus III in the summer of 1458, leaving the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes as vicar of the three Thracian islands, and the new Pope, Pius II, was too busy with the internal politics of that country to provide for their defence, which the Bank of St George did not think it prudent to undertake, but contented himself with founding a new Order of the Knights of St Mary of Bethlehem with its seat at Lemnos[625]. Thus inadequately defended by the Italians and terrified at the possible advent of the Turkish fleet, the islanders had no option but to submit to the Sultan. Lemnos set the example. In the winter of 1458-9, Kritoboulos, ever ready to do the work of the Turk, entered into secret negotiations with the Lemnian leaders for the surrender of their island. The Greeks were nothing loth, for they found the papal yoke irksome, as it must naturally have been to “schismatics,” and above all they feared the vengeance of Mohammed. The Imbriote diplomatist thereupon wrote to Demetrios Palaiologos, the Despot of Mistra, suggesting that this was the moment to crave Lemnos and Imbros from the Sultan, which the Despot had already coveted as a peaceful retreat, and offering to drive the Italians out of the former island. Demetrios at once sent Matthew Asan, his brother-in-law, whose family was, as we saw, connected with Imbros, to ask Mohammed for the two islands. The Sultan consented, on condition that Demetrios paid 3000 gold pieces as tribute for them, and it then devolved upon Kritoboulos to carry out his mission. Evading the Italian guard-ships, he landed in Lemnos; his confederates at Kastro opened the gates of that fortress; the townsfolk of Kokkinos shut up the small Italian garrison in the public offices, till it surrendered unconditionally, whereupon Kritoboulos told them that they could go or stay as they pleased, and sent their Calabrian commander with presents to Eubœa. The fort of Palaiokastro, the strongest in the island, alike by its natural position and its triple wall of huge stones, contained provisions for a year and was commanded by a young and resolute soldier, named Michele. When Michele received a summons to surrender, his sole reply was a sword, drawn in blood, and an invitation to Kritoboulos to come and take the castle by force, if he were a man. He could not, however, trust the Greeks in the town below, whose vines and fields Kritoboulos was careful to respect; and, when he saw the superior forces drawn up against him, he begged for three months’ grace, till he had time to communicate with the Grand Master at Rhodes, the papal vicar of the islands. Later on, he surrendered Palaiokastro for 1000 gold pieces, and in 1460, after the Turkish conquest of the Morea, Lemnos and Imbros were bestowed by the Sultan upon the dispossessed Despot, Demetrios.

The other two islands shared the fate of Lemnos. In the autumn of 1459, Zaganos, Ismael’s successor in the command of the Turkish fleet, captured both Thasos and Samothrace, cutting to pieces the Catalan garrison placed by Scarampi in the former, and removing Thasians and Samothracians alike to recolonise Constantinople. In the following year the Sultan bestowed these two islands also, together with Ænos, upon Demetrios Palaiologos, who thus became the heir of the Gattilusj in Thrace and the four maritime dependencies[626]. In vain, Pius II urged Rhyndakenos, the former prefect of the Gattilusj, to release Samothrace from its captivity. In vain, he gave Turkish Imbros to Alexander Asan[627].

About the time that Lemnos fell, the learned Leonardo of Chios, who had held the Archiepiscopal see of Lesbos since 1444 and was on very intimate terms with the reigning family, was sent to ask the aid of Christendom for that sole remaining island. The Genoese Government early in 1459 appealed to the Christian Powers and more especially to Charles VII of France, whose viceroy, the Duke of Calabria, was then administering Genoa, reminding them of the recent attack of the Turks upon Lesbos, of the exiguous resources of its lord, and of the impossibility in which the exhausted Genoese now found themselves of supporting him without external assistance, as they had done before, against another and more serious invasion. The fall of Lesbos, it was added, might encourage the Sultan to direct his arms against Italy. Unfortunately this appeal met with no response. Indeed, one of the Christian Powers, England, was at that moment greatly incensed with the Gattilusj, owing to the piracies of Giuliano, a celebrated corsair of that family, whose depredations on the merchants of Bristol had caused the arrest of all the Genoese in the country and the confiscation of their goods. Accordingly, the Genoese Government, which had been glad to make use of him as a cousin, when it seemed convenient, now repudiated him as a Greek and an alien. The proceedings of this illegitimate descendant of Francesco II formed the subject of letters to Henry VI, to the Chancellor and the Privy Seal, to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, to John Viscount Beaumont, the Great Chamberlain, and Humphry Duke of Buckingham. Indeed, it was owing to Giuliano Gattilusio, that “the office of English affairs” was founded at Genoa[628].

The new lord of Lesbos, as one Christian state after another fell, became more urgent in his requests for help, for he knew that even the payment of tribute would not save him. In 1460 he begged that the former practice might be revived of having a board of four commissioners in Chios, who could send 300 men to the relief of Lesbos, whenever the Sultan was preparing to attack it. It was decided to re-constitute this board, but not to impose any new duty for defraying the expense, and a certain number of men from Camogli on the Riviera di Levante were hired for the defence of Lesbos. Towards the close of 1461, he wrote imploring the Republic not to forget him in his distress. But, although the French had then been expelled from Genoa, and Lodovico de Campo-fregoso, husband of Nicolò’s first-cousin, Ginevra Gattilusio, was once more Doge, all the reply that he received was fair words, a futile assertion that in the season of 1462 the Turk would be occupied by land rather than at sea, and a promise to promote a good understanding between Lesbos and the Chartered Company of Chios, which was apt to forget the common danger in the private quarrels of its members—an allusion to the still outstanding dispute between Nicolò and Paride Longo. Weakened by faction at home, divided by rival interests abroad, the Genoese allowed Lesbos to succumb[629].

Mohammed’s conquest of Serbia, Greece, and Trebizond and his campaign in Wallachia had given Nicolò a brief respite, which he had wisely employed in strengthening the fortifications of his island-capital by deepening the moats and heightening the ramparts. To this may be referred his Latin inscription[630] in the castle, dated 1460. But on September 1, 1462, the long-threatened Turkish fleet hove in sight under the command of Mahmûd Pasha, himself a Greek, while the Sultan at the head of the land forces advanced across the plain of Troy, the sight of which is said to have inspired him with the belief that he was the chosen avenger of the Trojans upon the descendants of their conquerors. Mohammed had no difficulty in finding plausible excuses for his invasion of Lesbos. The island had become a receptacle of Catalan pirates, who issued thence to ravage the Turkish coast and returned thither to divide their prisoners, assigning a goodly proportion to their patron. A reluctance to pay his tribute and a secret understanding with the Italians formed further accusations against him, and Mohammed chose to regard himself as the instrument of the Almighty for the punishment of the Lesbian fratricide.

The great Turkish fleet, variously estimated at 67, 110, 125, 150, and even 200 sail, cast anchor in the old harbour of St George, whither Nicolò’s envoys went to enquire the justification of this attack upon an island, whose lords had paid, ever since the death of Dorino I seven years before, an annual tribute of 7000 gold ducats of Venice. Mahmûd replied, that his master wanted the castle and island of Mytilene—a demand repeated by the Sultan himself, when he crossed over from the mainland, with the addition that he would grant Nicolò a sufficient estate elsewhere. Nicolò replied, that he could not yield, except to force, whereupon Mohammed allowed himself to be persuaded by Mahmûd to return to the opposite coast, lest the Venetian fleet, then at Chios, to which Nicolò had appealed for help, should arrive and shut him up in the island. Thereupon the Greek renegade began the siege of the capital, whose walls contained more than 20,000 non-combatants, men, women and children, and were garrisoned by over 5000 soldiers, including 70 knights of Rhodes and 110 Catalan mercenaries from Chios.

After four days’ skirmishing, which resulted in a number of the Latins being cut off from the city and cut up by the Turks, the besiegers landed six large cannon, whose shot weighed more than 700 lbs. apiece, and planted them in favourable positions for bombarding the city—three at the soap works only a stone’s throw from the walls, one at St Nicholas’, another at St Bonne’s[631] near the place of public execution, and the sixth in the suburbs opposite a barbican tower, defended by a monk and a knight of Rhodes. Protected by a barrier of large stones from the fire of the besieged, the Turkish batteries did great execution. The tower of the Virgin and the adjacent walls were pounded till they were nothing but a mass of ruins; the cannon of St Nicholas’ riddled the tower of the harbour, built long before by a Gallego named Pedro de Laranda, so that no one durst defend it, and it fell on the eighth day into the hands of the Turks, whose red flags floated from its riven battlements. The besiegers then concentrated their efforts on the lower castle, called Melanoudion, and commanded by Luchino Gattilusio, who had helped Nicolò to the throne, and whose neglect caused the loss of this important position. It was proposed by the wiser members of his staff to set fire to the lower castle, as they had already burnt to the water’s edge their ships in the harbour, rather than that it should be taken by the Turks and used as a base for attacking the upper citadel. But Luchino boasted that he could hold the fort, and actually held it for five days, although the Turks once climbed the walls and carried off in triumph an Aragonese flag which had been planted there by the Catalan corsairs. At last a force of 20,000 men carried Melanoudion by storm, drove the defenders “like locusts” into the upper castle, and destroyed all that they found. Terrified and breathless, with his naked sword in his hand, Luchino rushed into the midst of the Italians, who had taken refuge in the upper castle, and his narrative struck them with such terror that they resolved to surrender. According to one account, Luchino and the commander of the city had intentionally made further resistance impossible by betraying to Mahmûd the weak points of the defences, and by then urging Nicolò to yield and to save their heads and property. The panic was increased by one huge mortar, whose heavy projectiles destroyed houses and the women inside and drove the terrified defenders from the walls to take shelter from a similar fate. Heavy sums had to be offered, to induce men to repair the breaches; while many, in their despair, flew to drink, and broke into the vast stores of wine and provisions, which, if the garrison had been properly led, would have enabled Mytilene to resist a whole year’s siege. But, though well provided with food and engines of war, the place lacked a brave and experienced soldier, who would have inspired the garrison with enthusiasm. Another council was held, and two envoys were sent to inform Mahmûd, that the inhabitants were ready to become his master’s vassals, if their heads and remaining property were guaranteed. The Turkish commander drew up a memorandum of the terms in writing, and swore by his girded sword and his sovereign’s head that no harm should befall them. The Sultan, on hearing the news, re-crossed to Lesbos, and a janissary was ordered to conduct Nicolò to his presence. Thither the last Latin lord of Lesbos proceeded with two horsemen, kissed the feet of his new master and tearfully handed to Mohammed the keys of the city, which the Gattilusj had held for well-nigh eleven decades. At the same time he pleaded that he had never violated his oaths, never harboured Turkish slaves, but had at once restored them to their owners; and, if he had perforce received pirates to save his own land from their ravages, he had never furnished them with the means of injuring that of the Turks. It was, he added, the fault of his subjects that he had not accepted the Sultan’s generous offer at once, and “I now,” he concluded with tears, “surrender the city and island, begging that my lord may reward me for my good disposition in the past towards him.” Mohammed censured him for his past ingratitude, but promised that it should not be remembered against him. Forthwith a subashi and two men took possession of the upper castle, whence the Frankish garrison was removed but no one else was allowed to issue. The conquerors celebrated their success by a Bacchanalian orgie and by burning the still standing houses of Melanoudion, while the Sultan, setting on one side the chief men among the Franks, bade saw asunder with exquisite cruelty some 300 of the others as pirates in one of the suburbs. Thus, it was said, he had literally carried out their conditions, that their heads should be spared.

The other fortresses in the island—Molivos (or Augerinos), the castle of the two SS. Theodores, and Eresos—now surrendered; for the wretched Nicolò, by the Sultan’s commands, sent a notary with instructions under his own seal, ordering his officers to open their gates. The countryfolk were left undisturbed, but any suspects found there were removed; and later on, one or two of these places were destroyed, and their inhabitants transported, like those of the Foglie, to Constantinople. On the second day after the occupation of the capital, a herald summoned all the citizens to file past the Sultan’s pavilion one by one. On September 17 the sorrowful procession took place; three clerks noted down the names of each, of the most pleasing maidens and the children several hundreds were picked out, and the rest of the population was divided into three classes—the worthless were left behind in the city, others were sold by public auction on the beach, and others again driven on board ship like so many sheep, to await slavery and fill the gaps at Constantinople. But of the 10,000 and more who were shipped from Lesbos a part perished on the overcrowded ships; and with brutal, if business-like precision, all disputes as to the ownership of these human cattle were obviated by cutting off the right ear of each corpse, before it was flung into the deep, and removing the victim’s name from the list. Some 200 janissaries and 300 infantry were left to garrison the city under Ali Bestami, a man of great courage and learning.

The fleet, bearing Nicolò, Luchino, the Archbishop Leonardo, and the rest of the captives, reached Constantinople on October 16, where some of them received houses, or sites in one quarter of the city. The two Gattilusj, however, were soon afterwards imprisoned in the “tower of the French.” Mohammed disliked Nicolò for what he had done in the past, and the chronique scandaleuse of the capital attributed his feelings to the fact that a lad attached to the Turkish court had fled to Lesbos, abandoned Islâm, and become the favourite of Nicolò. After the fall of Lesbos, this youth was sent as a present to the Sultan, and recognised by his comrades, who told their master and thus rekindled his indignation. The two prisoners, to save their lives and regain their freedom, offered to abjure Christianity, and were duly circumcised, gorgeously apparelled by the Sultan, and set free. But their liberty did not last long; they were again imprisoned, and executed, Nicolò being strangled with a bow-string, as he had strangled his own brother. His lovely sister Maria, widow of the Emperor Alexander of Trebizond, whom Mohammed had previously captured in Kolchis, entered the seraglio; her only son became one of the Conqueror’s favourite pages.

Thus ended the rule of the Gattilusj in Lesbos. Had Nicolò been bolder, had Genoa given more help, had Venice not played the part of a spectator, the island might have been saved, or at least its capture postponed. At the time of the siege, Vettor Capello was at Chios, and, in answer to Nicolò’s appeal, actually set out with 29 galleys towards Lesbos; but, although he could have burnt the Turkish fleet in the absence of its crews, he durst not disobey his instructions, which were to avoid giving any offence to the Sultan. Even after the capture of Mytilene, when the people of the castle of the two SS. Theodores begged him to accept them as Venetian subjects, he refused. Later on, when war broke out with Turkey, Venice repented her inaction, and tried in vain to make reparation for it. Even Genoa took the “calamity of Mytilene” with philosophy[632].

Christendom did not, however, abandon all hope of recovering what the Gattilusj had lost. The learned Archbishop of Lesbos, a second time the prisoner of the Turks, wrote to Pius II, as he had written to Nicholas V after the capture of Constantinople, a letter describing the sufferings of his flock and begging the Pope to make peace in Italy and war upon “the Cerberus” of the East. Pius responded by planning a new crusade, and the Genoese suggested that its first stage should be the recapture of Lesbos[633]. The Pope’s death ended his plans; but early in 1464 a Venetian fleet under Luigi Loredano occupied Lemnos with the assistance of a Moreote pirate, who bore the great name of Comnenos. This man had descended upon the island some time before with two galleys, had captured it from the officials who were governing it for Demetrios Palaiologos, and had established his authority over the citadel and the old city of Lemnos. But the pirate saw that he was not strong enough to hold his conquest single-handed, and therefore transferred it to the maritime Republic, which thence easily extended her sway over the rest of the island. Venice retained Lemnos for 15 years, and five Venetian nobles successively administered, with the title of “Rector,” this distant outpost[634]. In April of the same year Orsato Giustiniano, Loredano’s successor, laid siege to Mytilene, but, after six weeks spent before the walls and two battles, in which the Venetians sustained heavy losses, on the approach of the Turkish fleet withdrew to Eubœa with all the Christian islanders whom he could convey, only returning to SS. Theodores to remove a second cargo. Giustiniano died of grief at his failure, and the Turkish sway over Lesbos, despite three subsequent attempts, had never been broken till the Greek fleet took the island on November 22, 1912[635].

Two years later Vettor Capello obtained Imbros, Thasos, and Samothrace for Venice[636], and Bernardo Natale was sent as Rector to the last-named island. Imbros was, however, retaken by the Turks in 1470, owing to the unpopularity and incapacity of that official[637]. Lemnos resisted more than one Turkish attack; in view of its importance as a station for the fleet, Venice sent 200 stradioti to settle there, restored the walls of Kokkinos, and strengthened the fortifications of Palaiokastro, while Mohammed made its cession a condition of peace. At last this island, then inhabited by 6000 souls, or twice the population of Imbros, after having won romantic fame by the exploits of its heroic defender, the virgin Marulla, was ceded to Turkey by the peace[638] of 1479. At the same time, Samothrace with its 200 islanders, and Thasos, neither of them mentioned since their capture in 1466, were probably surrendered, and the whole of the Gattilusj’s former realm was thus irrevocably Turkish till 1912, with the exception of the Venetian occupation of Lemnos in 1656/7, and of the Russian occupation of part of that island in 1770—for Ænos, although laid in ashes by Nicolò da Canale in 1468, had not been occupied by the Venetians, and Foglia Vecchia had repulsed his attack[639].

Even after this apparently final Turkish conquest, one member of the family continued to cherish the remote hope that one day his ancestral dominions might be reconquered. Dorino II of Ænos was still alive at Genoa, and in 1488, as the sole representative of both branches of the Gattilusj—for Nicolò II had left no children—granted to his brother-in-law, Marco d’Oria, all his rights to their possessions in the Levant. It was agreed, that, should Lesbos be recovered—as was hoped, by the aid of the King of France—Dorino should nevertheless have his father’s former estates in that island, unless Ænos, Foglia Vecchia, Thasos and Samothrace were also recovered, in which case he should be entitled to Ænos, Thasos and Samothrace alone and have no claim to the Lesbian property[640]. Dorino II died childless, the last legitimate male of his race; but the pirate Giuliano, whose depredations continued to vex the Genoese Government[641], had progeny. Among his descendants were perhaps the Hector Gattilusio[642] whom we find receiving a small pension from Pope Innocent VIII, and the Stefano Gattilusio[643], who was bishop of Melos in 1563. Other Gattilusj occur at Naxos in the seventeenth century, and the name is reported to exist still not only there but at Smyrna and Athens[644], although the family is extinct at Genoa. Nine years ago a London lady claimed the Byzantine Empire as a descendant of the Palaiologoi through the Gattilusj. The family church at Sestri Ponente[645] was ceded by Dorino II to two other persons in 1483.

The rule of the Gattilusj has been described by a modern Greek writer as more favourable to his fellow-countrymen than that of other Frankish rulers. Chalkokondyles[646] praises the excellence of their administration, and one alone of them, the fratricide Nicolò, seems to have been unpopular. Hellenized by intermarriage with the Imperial houses of Byzantium and Trebizond, and proud to quarter the arms of the Palaiologoi with their own, they spoke Greek in the first generation, and thus early came to understand the feelings of their subjects, who scarcely regarded them as foreigners, certainly not as foreign conquerors. Two extant Greek letters of Dorino I and Domenico attest their familiarity with the language of their people. Moreover, they were not so much feudal lords as prosperous merchant princes, whose wealth is attested not only by the sums lent by Francesco II and Nicolò I, but by the extensive coinage of the Lesbian line. Coins of at least five of the lords of Mytilene are extant, while Dorino I, whose appanage was Foglia Vecchia before he succeeded to Lesbos, struck money for that emporium also[647]. Yet these Genoese nobles took an interest alike in history, literature, and archæology. Kanaboutzes wrote his commentary on Dionysios for Palamede; in 1446, the year of Cyriacus’ visit, Leonardo of Chios, the most famous of Lesbian divines, who owed his appointment to the patronage of Maria Gattilusio and was selected to accompany the papal legate, Cardinal Isidore, to Constantinople[648], wrote at the bidding of Dorino I’s brother, Luchino, his Treatise concerning true nobility against Poggio. This quaint tract took the form of a Platonic dialogue with Luchino in the presence of the Duke of the Archipelago, and gives us a pretty picture of Lesbian society at the time. “The prince,” we read, “protects religion; his senate is wise, his soldiers distinguished, and he lives in splendid state among his lovely halls, his gardens, his fish-ponds, and his groves.” The drama, if we may argue from the presence of an actor named Theodoricus, was patronised by Dorino[649]. Life in Lesbos must therefore have been pleasant, if it had not been lived on the edge of the Turkish volcano. But even in the last years of the Gattilusj the numbers of the Latins cannot have been large, for Calixtus III united the Archiepiscopal see of Methymna with that of Mytilene, and in 1456 the revenues which Leonardo derived from both together did not exceed 150 gold florins[650].

The Genoese sway over Lesbos and the Thracian islands has gone the way of all Latin rule in the Levant, of which it was so favourable a specimen. A few inscriptions, a few coats of arms, here and there a ruined fortress, still remind the now emancipated Greeks of their last Italian rulers.

Gattilusj.

I. Lesbos (1355-1462). Francesco I 1355, July 17. ” II 1384, August 6. [Nicolò I of Ænos regent 1384-7.] Jacopo 1404, October 26. [Nicolò of Ænos regent 1404-9.] Dorino I 1426/1428. [Domenico regent 1449-55.] Domenico 1455, June 30. Nicolò II 1458-62. [Turkish: 1462-1912; Greek: 1912, November 22.]

II. Thasos (c. 1434 or ? c. 1419-55) ? Jacopo c. 1419. Dorino I c. 1434. [Oberto de’ Grimaldi governor 1434.] Francesco III 1444-c. 1449. Dorino I c. 1449. [Domenico regent 1449-55.] Domenico 1455, June 30-October. [Turkish: 1455-6; 1459-60; 1479-1912; Papal: 1456-9; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-79; Greek: 1912, October 30.]

III. Lemnos (1453-6). Dorino I 1453 (castle of Kokkinos from 1440). [Domenico regent 1453-5.] Domenico 1455-6. [Nicolò II governor 1455-6.] [Turkish: 1456; 1459-60; 1479-1656; 1657-1912; Papal: (autumn) 1456-8; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-4; Comnenos 1464; Venetian: 1464-79; 1656-7; Russian (except Palaiokastro): 1770; Greek: 1912, October 22.]

IV. Foglia Vecchia (c. 1402-55). With Lesbos: c. 1402-1455, December 24. (For several years c. 1423-8 appanage of Dorino I.) [Turkish: 1455-1919; Greek: 1919- .]

V. Ænos (c. 1384-1456). Nicolò I c. 1384. Palamede 1409. Dorino II 1455-6. [Turkish: 1456-60; 1468-1912; 1913, July 15; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-8; Bulgarian: 1912, Nov. 29-1913, July 15; Turkish: 1913-20; Greek: 1920- .]

VI. Samothrace (c. 1431-56). Palamede c. 1431. [Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos governor 1444-55.] Dorino II 1455-6. [Turkish: 1456; 1459-60; 1479-1912; Papal: (autumn) 1456-9; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-79; Greek: 1912, November 1.]

VII. Imbros (1453-6). Palamede 1453. Dorino II 1455-6. [Joannes Laskaris Rhyndakenos governor.] [Turkish: 1456-60; 1470-1912; Demetrios Palaiologos: 1460-6; Venetian: 1466-70; Greek: 1912, October 30-1914; Turkish: 1914-20; Greek: 1920- .]

Genealogical Tree:

(The rulers of Lesbos are denoted by Roman, those of Ænos by Arabic numerals.)

Domenico | +------------------+----------------+ | | (I) Francesco I = Maria Palaiologina (1) Nicolò I | (II) Francesco II | +------------+--------------------+ | | | (III) Jacopo (2) Palamede (IV) Dorino I | | | +----------+------+--------------+ | | | | (3) Dorino II Francesco III (V) Domenico (VI) Nicolò II

V. TURKISH GREECE

1460-1684

From the second half of the fifteenth down to the close of the seventeenth century, a large portion of what now forms the kingdom of Greece formed an integral part of the Turkish Empire, and from the second part of the sixteenth century some of the Ionian Islands and a few of the Cyclades were alone exempt from the common lot of Hellas. Thus, for the first time since the Frank conquest, a dead level of uniformity, broken only by the privileges of certain communities, prevailed in place of the feudal principalities, whose fortunes occupied the annals of the previous two centuries and more. Greece, so often divided against herself, had found unity in the death of her independence; and the victorious Turks, like the conquering Romans, had obliterated the divisions and the liberties of the Greek States at the same moment. Once more the whole Greek world, with few exceptions, depended upon a foreign ruler, whose capital was at Constantinople, and whose officials, like those of the Byzantine Emperors, administered the affairs of his Greek subjects. There is, however, a considerable difference between the two periods into which the Turkish government of Greece was divided. During the first period, down to the Venetian conquest of the Morea, towards the close of the seventeenth century, Turkey was a flourishing and conquering Power—a danger to Europe, and a strong State. During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice.

The political organisation of Greece under the Turks was indeed comparatively simple. Before the conquest of the Ægean Islands all their Greek dominions were comprised within the jurisdiction of the beglerbeg (“lord of lords”) of Rumili, who resided at Sofia[651], and were divided into seven sandjaks, so called from the “flag” which was the emblem of each large territorial sub-division, and which recalled the essentially military character of all Turkish arrangements. These seven sandjaks, after the year 1470, when the capture of Eubœa rounded off the Greek conquests of Mohammed II, were Salonika, Negroponte, Trikkala, Lepanto, Karlili, Joannina, and the Morea. Negroponte included not only the island of Eubœa, but also Bœotia, and Attica. Its capital was Chalkis, and Athens, Thebes and Livadia, were among its principal cities. Karlili comprehended Ætolia and Akarnania, as well as Prevesa, and derived its name from Carlo II Tocco, whose dominions there had fallen to the Turks. The capital of the Morea fluctuated between Corinth, Leondari, and Mistra, down to 1540, when the capture of Nauplia from the Venetians made that place the residence of the Turkish Pasha. In 1574, when the conclusion of the war of Cyprus had practically extinguished Latin rule in the Levant, a different arrangement obtained. Salonika, Trikkala, Joannina, Patras and Mistra formed five sandjaks under the beglerbeg of Rumili; while the capitan pasha, in his capacity of beglerbeg “of the sea,” ruled over the seven insular sandjaks of Lemnos, Lesbos, Rhodes, Chios, the former Duchy of Naxos (except a few islands bestowed on the favourite Sultana), Santa Maura (with Prevesa), and Negroponte, besides the three maritime sandjaks of Nauplia, Lepanto and Kavalla. And, after the conquest of Crete, three more sandjaks, named from Candia, Rethymno, and Canea, were carved out of “the great Greek island[652].”

Each sandjak was in turn sub-divided into a number of cazas, or sub-districts, of which there were twenty-three in the Morea. It is now supposed that from 1470 to about 1610, Athens was the chief place of a caza of the sandjak of Negroponte. Just as each sandjak was governed by a Pasha or sandjak-beg, so each caza was administered by a lesser magnate known as a voivode or subashi, who was assisted by a judge, or cadi.

True to the Turkish feuded system, which had been organised in Thessaly at the end of the fourteenth century, and extended to Akarnania and Ætolia on the fall of the Tocchi, Mohammed II distributed Central Greece and the Morea in fiefs to his veteran warriors. These fiefs were of two sorts: the larger fief, known as a zaimet, entailed upon the holder the obligation to provide fifteen horsemen; the smaller, called a timar, involved the equipment of only two[653]. The standard of the sandjak-beg formed the rallying point of all these feudal chiefs and their horsemen in case of need. About the middle of the seventeenth century the whole area of the present Greek kingdom on the mainland, including Negroponte but without Macedonia and Thrace, was portioned out into 267 zaimets and 1625 timars, so that they would represent a force of 7255 horsemen.

Crete, after its conquest, was similarly parcelled out into seventeen zaimets and 2550 timars, which would produce 5355 cavalry. At first the timariot system was not in the nature of an hereditary aristocracy. The timars were originally life-rents only, conferred for services rendered to the Sultan upon veteran warriors, who might be called upon to appear with their retainers at the call of their liege lord. In the golden age of Turkish administration—if such a phrase can be applied to any Turkish institution—the son of timariot was entrusted with a large fief such as his sire had held only after he had proved his capacity as the holder of a small one. But, like all political systems, the Turkish began by making capacity the sole test of office, and ended by making office the reward of favourites. Gradually the beglerbeg was allowed to bestow these fiefs, which had formerly been in the Sultan’s gift, and that official naturally rewarded his own creatures, just as a British Prime Minister, allowed by weak or preoccupied monarchs to dispense patronage at his will, bestows the honours of the peerage and the baronetage upon subservient, or perhaps recalcitrant, supporters. Thus, in the second half of the seventeenth century, it was the custom of Romania that, if a holder of a zaimet or timar died in the wars, his fief was divided into as many portions as he had sons, unless the rent was no more than 3000 aspers, in which case the whole went to the eldest son. But if the holder died in his bed, his lands fell to the beglerbeg, who could bestow them upon the dead man’s heirs, give them to any of his own servants, or sell them, as he pleased[654].

The Turks did not interfere with the Greek municipal system, which had existed for centuries before the Ottoman conquest. As far back as the Byzantine times we find that the Hellenic communities employed representatives, not necessarily drawn from their own members, at the Imperial Court at Constantinople. Thus, in the eleventh century, Michael Psellos represented the Ægean Islands at the capital[655]; but, in some cases, instead of having a permanent representative, whose functions may be compared with those of the agents-general of our self-governing colonies, a local deputation occasionally visited Constantinople to lay its grievances before the central authorities. In the Venetian island of Tenos a similar practice prevailed; there a committee was selected from among the primates to watch over the administration of the Venetian officials. The Turks, like the Romans, were quite willing that their Greek subjects should continue to enjoy local self-government. Accordingly, they allowed the communes to promote commerce and found schools, while Greek naturally continued to be the official language of the communal authorities. There was no hard and fast rule for their election, and no stereotyped title by which they were known all over Greece. But, generally speaking, every town and even every hamlet had its own Greek officials, elected by the Christian inhabitants, or by some portion of them, in a more or less indirect fashion, and variously styled “elders of the parish,” “elders,” archontes, “primates,” or, in Turkish, khodja-bashis. Thus, at a late period of the Ottoman domination, in the island of Psara the whole community met annually for the election of forty electors, who in turn elected four “elders of the parish”; at the same period, in the island of Spetsai, the five “primates” were elected annually by the ships’ captains and the well-to-do citizens; while Hydra, during a large part of the eighteenth century, was administered by its priests, with whom two laymen were associated. The Morea had certain special municipal privileges. It was permitted to send two or three “primates” to Constantinople, who were able to mitigate the exactions of the Turkish Pashas by the influence which they acquired during their stay there. Moreover, each province of the peninsula used to send two prominent Greeks once or twice a year to the seat of the Pasha to confer with him upon the affairs of the Morea. Sometimes, both there and in Thessaly, municipal office descended as a heritage from father to son, and too often the feuds, which continued to distinguish the Moreote archontes, descended, with their dignities, to their descendants. Their duties were to administer the local affairs of their communities, to act as arbitrators in civil cases, to levy local rates, to manage the local treasury, and to act as protectors and advisers of the oppressed. Sometimes they carried out this last duty without flinching, sometimes, however, their conduct earned them the name of “a kind of Christian Turks[656].”

Both the law of Islâm and the laws of human nature forbade the wholesale conversion of the conquered to the faith of the conquerors. But Mohammed II, who spoke Greek and knew the Greeks well, recognised, like the wise statesman that he was, the possibility of managing his Christian subjects through the medium of their own Church. The Turks were a foreign garrison in a hostile country, and in the middle of the fifteenth century it was quite possible that some Catholic power might undertake a new crusade for the deliverance of the East. The bitter hatred of the Eastern for the Western Church provided the astute Sultan with a powerful incentive for the toleration and even patronage of the Orthodox religion. He saw that, if he favoured the one branch of Christendom, he would prevent its union with the other, and he made a most politic selection of an instrument for the accomplishment of his plan. One of the strongest opponents of the union had been Georgios Scholarios, a man of great influence with the Orthodox and of equal unpopularity with the Catholics. As soon as Constantinople had fallen, the Sultan caused diligent search to be made for this uncompromising champion of Orthodoxy, and about the end of the same year gave orders for his election as Œcumenical Patriarch, according to the time-honoured forms which the Byzantine Empire had recognised for centuries. Gennadios II, as the new Patriarch was styled, was invited to a banquet by the Sultan, who showed him the greatest attention, and accompanied him as far as the courtyard of the palace, where he assisted him to mount his horse. A berat of the Sultan determined the position, powers, and privileges of Gennadios and his successors. The Œcumenical Patriarch was declared to be “untaxable and irremovable,” and the document, of which only a summary has come down to us in the history of Phrantzes[657], is said to have prohibited the conversion of Christian churches into mosques. The loss of the original berat is of less importance because subsequent rescripts modified these notable concessions, while in practice the privileges of the Patriarch came to be far less respected than in theory. To him was assigned the supreme administration of all churches and monasteries, the right of deposing archbishops and bishops, and the highest criminal jurisdiction over all the clergy. He decided all matrimonial questions, and other suits, in which the parties, being both Christians, preferred his judgment to that of the Turkish courts. He could levy dues for the needs of the Church on laity and clergy alike, and it was provided that existing ecclesiastical property should be respected, and that no Christian should be forced to embrace Islâm. But in these respects, as well as with regard to the fiscal exemption and irremovability of the Patriarch, the ecclesiastical history of the Greeks under the Turks shows us a gradual falling off from the original intentions of Mohammed II. A later berat laid it down that the Patriarch could be deposed for one of three reasons—oppression of his flock, transgression of the ecclesiastical law, and treason towards his sovereign—elastic terms, capable of a wide interpretation. Mohammed II himself deposed the Patriarch Joseph I, for refusing to sanction the marriage of the widow of the last Duke of Athens with George Amoiroutses, the traitor who had been accused of handing over Trebizond to the Turks, and who had a wife still living. From the Turkish conquest to the present day 69 Patriarchs have been deposed, several more than once, 20 were thus removed in the seventeenth century, and the Sultans at times inflicted punishments on the Patriarchs, which recall the horrible mutilations of Byzantine times. From the moment of the conquest, Christian churches, beginning with St Sophia, were converted into mosques, and the seat of the Patriarchate, fixed by Mohammed II at the Church of the Holy Apostles, was successively moved, as church after church became a sacred place of Islâm, till it reached, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, its present home in the Phanar. All over Greece the same process went on, wherever the Mussulmans were numerous, and we have seen at Salonika, Livadia and Larissa buildings which have served first as churches and then as mosques. Certain dues, too, were fixed, which the Patriarch was expected to pay; and soon bakshîsh, the bane of Turkey, began to affect Patriarchal elections. This introduction of simony into the Greek Church was due to the intrigues of the Greeks themselves. After the fall of the empire of Trebizond in 1461 many of the Trapezuntine grandees sought careers at Constantinople. Among other posts they coveted that of the Patriarch, and as early as 1467 they conspired with that object against Markos II, the fourth successor of Gennadios[658]. They succeeded in securing his deposition and the election of one of their own party by promising that he would pay an annual sum of one thousand gold pieces and forego the allowance which his four predecessors had received from the government. The evil, thus soon introduced, spread apace. Two years later, an offer of double the sum paid by the Patriarch ensured his removal in favour of a wealthier candidate. Then the annual payment was raised to three thousand gold pieces, and large sums came to be spent in bribes to courtiers, eunuchs, janissaries and the female favourites of the Sultans, the money being ultimately raised out of the clergy and laity. Thus, the history of the Patriarchate resembles that of the mediæval Papacy in that the same means were employed to ensure an election. After the Reformation, Jesuits and Protestants, each anxious to have at the head of the Greek Church a man favourable to themselves, joined in the bidding, and between the years 1623 and 1700 there were about fifty Patriarchal elections, most of them won by bribery. The debts of the Patriarchate became enormous, as a consequence of this almost constant expenditure, and the necessity thus imposed upon the Patriarch of selling all the chief ecclesiastical offices in his gift was one of the main causes which made the Greek Church so unpopular in many parts of Turkey, where the population belonged to another race than the Hellenic. The history of Roumania abounds with examples of the exactions of Greek bishops, who sought to make the wretched people make up to them what they had spent on the purchase of their sees.

Another cause tended, in course of time, to make the Turkish Government less careful of the Patriarch’s privileges and dignities. He had been regarded by Mohammed II as a bulwark against the Catholic powers; but, a century after the fall of Constantinople, Rome, distracted by the Protestant secession, had become far less dangerous, and Venice had lost her last possessions in the Morea, while in the seventeenth century Spain was no longer an enemy to be feared. Moreover, France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” and the patroness of the Jesuits, had become the ally of Turkey, and supported her protégés, who first appeared at Constantinople in 1609, against the Œcumenical Patriarch. Thus, finding himself in little danger from a disunited Europe and an impotent Papacy, the Sultan could afford to modify his attitude towards the head of the Greek Church. After 1657, the Patriarch ceased to be installed by the Sultan in person, who was thenceforth represented by the Grand Vizier, and further restrictions were soon placed upon the honours paid to him. Still, the Œcumenical Patriarch enjoyed, throughout the Turkish domination, a great ecclesiastical and political position, such as some of his predecessors had not held under the Byzantine Empire, such as his successors have never held since the Church in Greece became autocephalous, and the Bulgarian Church became independent. In the Turkish days, he was the spiritual, and in many respects the political, head, not only of the Greek subjects of the Sultan, but of all the Orthodox Christians within his dominions, Bulgarians, Serbs[659], Albanians, and Armenians of the Orthodox rite, who, as well as Greeks, were all collectively described as Romaîoi—for in those days religion and not race was the mark by which Ottoman subjects were distinguished. Moreover, he was not only the accredited representative of the Orthodox with the Porte, but he was also the ecclesiastical superior of all the Orthodox communities in the Venetian dominions, and he was therefore permitted to correspond with all those foreign powers which had subjects of that religion. Thus, so long as Venice was a Levantine State, she had continual relations with the Patriarch, and the Venetian bailie at Constantinople conducted diplomatic business with him, no less than with the Turkish government. Mohammed II, in the treaty which he concluded with Venice in the year after the capture of Constantinople, specially provided for the preservation to the Patriarch of all the revenues which his predecessors had received from the Orthodox. We frequently find the Patriarchs intervening with the Venetians on behalf of the Orthodox inhabitants of the Venetian colonies, sometimes urging the claims of the Greeks of Koron, Modon and Crete, sometimes successfully deprecating the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in the Venetian possessions, and in one case rebuking the Orthodox Cretans for their persecution of the Jews. Nothing more clearly proves the peculiar position of the Patriarch as the head of an imperium in imperio, than the fact that the Turkish government conducted its business with him through the medium of the Reis-effendi, or Minister for foreign affairs. Not without reason did men address so powerful a personage as “master” and even “king.” We might, indeed, compare his situation with that of the Pope since 1870. Like the Pope, he had no territory, but his ecclesiastical sway ranged over and beyond the dominions of the sovereign, in whose capital his seat was fixed. Like the Pope, he negotiated with diplomatists, corresponded with foreign governments, and combined, or identified, politics and religion. And, like the Pope, he at times intrigued against the monarch who had ensured him the secure exercise of his privileges within his dominions.

Although the Koran forbade the forcible conversion of the Christians, there were various causes which swelled the ranks of Islâm. The Turks, being but a small body of men compared with the great numbers of the Christians, early saw that they could neither preserve nor extend their conquests without the aid of the latter. Accordingly, just as some Christian rulers of the East had enlisted young Turks to fight their battles, so the Sultan Orchan, more than a century before the capture of Constantinople, founded the terrible institution of the Janissaries, a corps entirely recruited from that time till the middle of the sixteenth century from Christian children who embraced the faith of the sovereign. At the outset the numbers of these children were not less than one thousand a year, and they were taken at the tender age of six or seven years at the most; but later on, perhaps in the reign of Mohammed II, a regular levy of children was ordered to be made throughout all the subject provinces of Turkey, with a few favoured exceptions. This tribute of Christian children, or παιδομάζωμα, as the Greeks called it, was subsequently erected into a complete system, and became one of the greatest engines of conversion. Every five years, or even oftener, for the tribute came at last to be levied annually, an officer of the Janissaries would descend with a clerk upon each district, and demand from the head man of the place a list of all the Christian families. Every Christian father was compelled to make a declaration of the number of his sons and to present them for inspection. At first, only one boy out of every five and only one out of every family were taken. Then no proportion was observed, but the government took as many children as it wanted, always selecting the strongest, and not even sparing the only son of a family. The age, too, was raised to ten, fifteen, and even more years. We can easily imagine the misery inflicted upon the unhappy parents by a system which recalled the fabled tribute paid by the Athenians to the Minotaur. We are told by an eye-witness that mothers sometimes prayed God to strike their sons dead in order to save them from enlistment. Others, in order to evade the law, would marry their children at nine years of age; but the authorities soon disregarded these infantile unions, and marriage was no excuse in the eyes of an arbitrary official. There were only two ways of avoiding the payment of this hideous blood-tax—bribery or flight into one of the Venetian colonies, and the latter means of escape became more difficult when Venice lost her last possessions on the mainland. It might have been thought that this tax would have been more likely to cause a rising. Yet in the long list of insurrections against the Turks we can recall one only, that of 1565, which is specially ascribed to this reason, and that was an Albanian and not a Greek agitation[660]. Moreover, as time went on, and the Janissaries became more pampered and more powerful, it was esteemed by many a blessing rather than a curse that their sons should serve in the corps. The Venetian bailie at Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century expressly says that the tribute of children had by that time come to be regarded as a special favour enjoyed by the Christians, who were thus able to provide their sons with an easy and comfortable profession! We even hear of Mussulman parents so anxious to share in this singular privilege that they lent their children to the Christians so that they might be enrolled as such among the Janissaries. But the loss to Hellenism and to Christianity through the tribute of children was enormous. If we remember that for two centuries the Janissaries were exclusively recruited from the Christians, and that the latter were chiefly to be found in European Turkey, and if we take into consideration that the tribute children were not only the strongest members of their respective families, but were also prohibited by the original constitution of the corps from marrying, for the Janissaries, like the Zulu army of Cetewayo, were a celibate body, we may form some idea of what a drain the παιδομάζωμα was upon the actual and possible resources of Eastern Christianity. A modern Greek historian[661] estimates at about a million the number of Christian children taken to serve in the corps during the first two centuries of its existence. At last, however, it fell into disuse, and in the seventeenth century ceased to exist. A variety of causes contributed to the decline of an institution which had so greatly strengthened the Turkish army at the expense of the Christian population. From the time when the Janissaries were allowed to marry, they naturally desired to have their own children taken into the corps, while others obtained admission to its privileges by bribery. On the other hand, the Sultans came to regard the Janissaries as dangerous to themselves, much as the Roman Emperors had found the Prætorians to be, and were thus less anxious to have the corps recruited. The number of conversions to Islâm had also narrowed the area of enlistment from among the Christians; and Rycaut, writing shortly after the custom had fallen into disuse, mentions the corruption of the officers and the carelessness in their discipline as the cause of its decay. Accordingly we last hear of the tribute being levied in 1676, though an isolated case is mentioned as late as 1703[662].

Besides the tribute of Christian children, there was a further reason for the conversion of the Greeks in the honours offered to those who apostatised. When the Turks found themselves masters of a great European Empire, they had neither the financial nor the diplomatic skill requisite for conducting it. The Turkish method of keeping accounts was cumbrous, the Turkish language is extremely difficult to write, and the Turks resembled the British in their absolute ignorance of foreign tongues, while treaties and diplomatic correspondence continued to be composed in Greek. But empires are not won by linguists but by men of character, who are easily able to find subtle intellects to do their office work for them. The precise qualities which the Turks lacked the Greeks possessed, and Mohammed II saw at once how useful the versatile talents of his new subjects would be in the administration of his dominions. But there was this difficulty, that nearly all the best educated Greeks had fled abroad after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, and it was owing to this reason that, during the two first centuries of the Turkish rule, the Greeks did not, as a rule, rise higher in the Turkish service than a clerkship in the Treasury or the Foreign Office. There was, however, even at that period, one notable exception, the office of Grand Vizier. Of the five Grand Viziers of Mohammed II, two were Greeks, the former of whom, Mahmûd Pasha, was the first Christian to hold that great position. Under Bayezid II we find two more Greeks as Grand Viziers. Suleyman the Magnificent gave that post to two others, and later on one Grand Vizier was the son of a Greek priest; while the terrible Barbarossa, the scourge of the Christians at sea, was of Greek origin. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Venetian bailie at Constantinople could write that the great places in the Sultan’s service usually fell to the Christians, and the Turks complained that the children of the poor rayah were put over their heads.

But for a long time these mundane advantages could only be obtained by apostasy, and thus the lukewarm Christian had strong incentives to turn Mussulman. But in Greece there were fewer conversions than among the Slavs of Bosnia and the Herzegovina; and when, about the middle of the seventeenth century, the Turkish Government relaxed the strictness of its policy, and abolished religious tests for certain important offices of state, the Greeks were able to gratify a laudable ambition without abandoning the religion of their fathers. By that time education had revived among the Greeks of the capital, so that the lack of qualified Hellenes, which had been felt so acutely immediately after the conquest, no longer existed. It was then that, for the first time, a Greek was appointed Grand Dragoman of the Porte in the person of Panagiotes Nikouses, who conducted the negotiations for the surrender of Candia on behalf of the Turks. From the close of that century down to the War of Independence most of his successors in that post were Greeks[663]. Similarly, the position of Dragoman of the Fleet was usually held by a Greek, and the island of Paros has still many monuments of the family of Mavrogenes, two of whose members conducted the naval negotiations of the Capitan Pasha. One of them, Nicholas Mavrogenes, rose from that rank to be Prince of Wallachia; and it is scarcely necessary to remind those who have studied Roumanian history, that in the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century the two thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia were occupied by Greeks, and the two Danubian principalities were regarded as the happy hunting-ground of the Phanariotes of Constantinople. There was even an idea of erecting the Morea into a Christian principality on similar lines; and, though this was never carried out, the Morea was entrusted to a native governor. But the advancement of the Greeks in the Turkish service, though always beneficial to the individuals concerned and sometimes to their employers, was of doubtful value to the Greek national cause. When their private and racial interests clashed, the Greek officials almost always sacrificed the latter, and, indeed, it would have been an Utopian idea to expect the virtues of heroes and saints from the descendants of men who for centuries had been under foreign domination. It is easy for English historians, belonging to a race which has never known what an alien yoke implies, to demand impossible qualities from a down-trodden people, and we are fond of trying foreign nations by an ideal standard—which fortunately we never apply to our own public affairs. But, after all allowances have been made, it must be confessed that some of the worst blows to Hellenism, such as the loss of Eubœa and that of Crete, were dealt by the Greeks themselves, just as the Bosnian, Cretan and Albanian apostates have ever been the bitterest enemies of the Christians, and the warmest supporters of Turkish rule, so long as it permitted them to tyrannise over their own fellow-countrymen. In other words, religion replaced all racial sympathies, and a Mussulman Slav or Cretan was first a Mussulman and then a Slav or Cretan. Even in our own time, at the crisis of the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a Greek was trying to counteract Greek interests in the capacity of Turkish ambassador in London; and the show statesmen of the Porte, whose virtues and culture are always exhibited for the edification of Europe, are invariably Greeks. Samos, too, with its Greek prince, was, till 1912, an interesting survival of the former practice of sending Greeks to rule beyond the Danube in the interest of the Sultan.

On two occasions, under Selim II, in 1514, and in the early days of the Candian war, in 1646, it was actually proposed to exterminate all the Christians of Turkey. But wiser counsels happily prevailed; and towards the close of the seventeenth century, as we saw, the policy of the Turkish government was to preserve, rather than further diminish, the numbers of its Christian taxpayers. By that time fears were felt lest the Christians should continue to dwindle away, and a taxable infidel seemed a more valuable asset than a less remunerative believer in the true faith of Islâm. Accordingly, in 1691, a first serious attempt was made to secure the Christians against exactions by the Nizam-djedid[664], or “new system,” which commanded the provincial governors to levy no other impost than the haratch, or “capitation-tax,” from them. Originally, the only fiscal disadvantages of the Christians, besides the blood-tax of their children, had been this haratch, which was payable by all unbelievers over the age of ten years, except priests, old men, and the blind, the maimed, and the paralytic. A Christian had also to pay on all imports and exports twice the duty levied upon a Mussulman. But, as is still the case in Turkey, the hardships of taxation arose not so much from its legal amount as from its illegal collection. Thus, in 1571, we hear of the incredible extortions suffered by the Christian subjects of the Sultan, who were mostly so deeply sunk in poverty and misery that they scarce durst look a Turk in the face, and who only cultivated their lands sufficiently for their own wants and for the payment of haratch, knowing that the Turks would seize any surplus that was over[665]. However, the Nizam-djedid represented, like the abolition of the tribute of children, a new and humaner policy, which resulted in the diminution of apostasy. From that time onward the Greeks had less temptation to become Mohammedans; the Venetian occupation of the Morea in the early part of the eighteenth century had the double effect of causing many re-conversions to Christianity, and of forcing the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, from fear of comparisons; while, a little later, the Russian claims to a protectorate over the Eastern Christians further checked the movement towards Mohammedanism.

But it was not only in the numbers, but also in the quality of their population, that the Greek provinces of Turkey suffered from the effects of the Turkish conquest. Almost all the men of learning, nearly all the chief families, in short the intellectual and political leaders of the people, went into exile immediately after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Mohammed II did, indeed, address a proclamation in Greek to the principal archontes of the Morea, in which he promised to respect their families and property and make them more prosperous than before[666]; but his promises had little effect in checking the general exodus of the great Moreote families. So universal was their emigration, that only four or five of the Peloponnesian clans, which had played the prominent part during the mediæval period, remained behind, and there were similar wholesale emigrations from continental Greece and Eubœa. As the leading men all went with their relatives and followers, the drain upon the Greek population was as serious a danger to the nation as the emigration of the Peloponnesian peasants to America, which has lately been robbing the land of its cultivators and causing widespread alarm in the Greek press. Most of the exiles went, as was natural, to the Venetian possessions in Greece, which thus became what in earlier times the Despotat of Mistra had been to the Franks—a thorn in the side of the Turkish conqueror. Thus, Michael Ralles, one of the most prominent of Spartan archontes, and the protagonist of the first Turco-Venetian war after the conquest, and the brothers Daimonoyannai, belonging to the great family of that name at Monemvasia, sought homes in the colonies of the Republic in the Morea; thus, too, Graitzas Palaiologos, the last defender of the peninsula, entered the Venetian service. Other Greek leaders accompanied Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, on her marriage with the Grand Duke Ivan of Russia, and the Russian Court soon became another favourite resort of the Peloponnesian magnates who had known her father, and whose descendants were recruited three centuries later by a further band of Greek refugees after the abortive rising in the Morea[667]. Many Greeks, anxious to fight against the foes of their own, or even those of their adopted country, became of their own free will Venetian light horsemen, or Stradioti, just as others were forced to enlist in the ranks of the Turkish Janissaries. The researches of a learned Greek historian have thrown a flood of light upon the constitution and exploits of that remarkable body of soldiers[668]. The name by which they were known is not derived from the Greek word στρατιῶται (“soldiers”) but from the Italian, strada, and signified that those who bore it were “always on the road”—wanderers, who had no fixed abodes. Composed of Greeks and Albanians, the corps was entirely recruited from the Morea, and mainly from Laconia, but the most valiant were the men of Nauplia. Among their leaders we find many historic Moreote names, such as those of Boua and Palaiologos, whose bearers were descendants or relatives of the men who had fought the good fight for the liberty of the Peloponnese. The sixteenth century was the golden age of the Stradioti, who demonstrated all over Europe that Greek valour was not extinct. One of them was even in the service of our Henry VIII, fighting in Scotland and acting as governor of Boulogne, at that time an English fortress. But they had their weaknesses, as well as their good qualities, and their inordinate vanity was the favourite theme of Venetian comedians, just as Plautus had satirised the boastfulness of the Miles Gloriosus for the amusement of the ancient Romans. Tasso has blamed their rapacity in the line:

Il leggier Greco alle rapine intento,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In spite of the depreciatory remarks on the culture of the sixteenth-century Athenians which Kraus permitted himself to make on the strength of his second-hand investigations, learning was even in that age not quite extinct in its ancient home. It was then that there flourished at Athens an accomplished nun, Philothee Benizelou, afterwards included, for her piety and charitable foundations, among those whom the Greek Church calls “blessed,” and buried in the beautiful little Gorgoepekoos church. But, though she founded the Convent of St Andrew on the site of what is now the chapel of the Metropolitan of Athens, within whose walls she established the first girls’ school of Turkish Athens, she has left a most uncomplimentary description of the Athenians of her day, with whom she had some pecuniary difficulties and upon whom she showers a string of abusive epithets in the best classical style[684]. Two other religious foundations also mark this period—that of the Church of the Archangels in 1577 in the Stoa of Hadrian, where an inscription still commemorates it, and that of the monastery of Pentele, built in the following year by Timotheos, Archbishop of Eubœa, whose skull, set in jewels, may still be seen there. The monks of Pentele had to send 3000 okes of honey every year to the great mosques of Constantinople[685]. We may infer from these facts that the Turkish authority sat lightly upon a town which was allowed the rare privilege of erecting new places of worship. The idea too then current in the West that Athens had been entirely destroyed, and that its site was occupied by a few huts, was obviously as absurd as the sketches of the city in the form of a Flemish or German town which were made in the fifteenth century. A place of “12,000 men” was not to be despised; and, if we may accept the statement of Kabasilas[686], the male population of the Athens of 1578 was twice as large as the whole population of the Athens which Otho made his capital in 1834, and about equal to the entire population estimated by Stuart, Holland, Forbin and Pouqueville in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It has sometimes been supposed, in accordance with the local tradition, that the city was placed, immediately after the Turkish conquest, under the authority of the chief eunuch at Constantinople; but it has now been shown that that arrangement was introduced much later. From the Turkish conquest to the capture of Eubœa from the Venetians in 1470 Athens was the seat of a pasha, and capital of the first of the five sandjaks, or provinces, into which the conqueror divided continental Greece. In that year the seat of the pasha was transferred to Chalkis, which then became the capital of the sandjak of the Euripos, of which Athens sank to be a district, or caza. In this position of dependence the once famous city continued till about the year 1610, being administered by a subordinate of the Eubœan pasha[687], who every year paid it a much-dreaded visit of inspection, which, like most Turkish official visits, was very expensive to the hosts.

From the conclusion of the war of Cyprus in 1573 to the outbreak of the Cretan war in 1645 there was peace between Venice and the Turks, so that Greece ceased for over seventy years to be the battle-ground of those ancient foes. But spasmodic risings still occurred even during that comparatively quiet period. Thus, in 1585, a famous armatolós, Theodore Boua Grivas, raised the standard of revolt in the mountainous districts of Akarnania and Epeiros, at the instigation of the Venetians. His example was followed by two other armatoloí, Drakos and Malamos, who took Arta and marched on Joannina. But this insurrection was speedily suppressed by the superior forces of the Turks, and Grivas, badly wounded, was fain to escape to the Venetian island of Ithake, where he died of his injuries[688]. Somewhat later, in 1611, Dionysios, Archbishop of Trikkala, made a further attempt on Joannina; but he was betrayed by the Jews, then, as ever, on the Turkish side, and flayed alive. His skin, stuffed with straw, was sent to Constantinople. Another Thessalian archbishop, accused of complicity with him, was offered the choice of apostasy or death, and manfully chose the latter, a choice which has given him a place in the martyrology of modern Greece[689].

The greatest disturbance to the pacific development of the country arose, however, from the corsairs, who descended upon its coasts almost without intermission from the date of the Turkish conquest to the latter part of the seventeenth century. The damage inflicted by these pirates, who belonged to the Christian no less than to the Mussulman religion, and who made no distinction between the creeds of their victims, led the Greeks to dwell at a distance from the seaboard, in places that were not easily accessible; and thus the coast acquired that deserted look which it has not wholly lost even now[690]. The worst of these wretches were the Uscocs of Dalmatia, whose inhuman cruelties have rarely been surpassed. Sometimes they would eat the hearts of their victims; sometimes they would chain the crew below the deck, and then leave the captured vessel adrift, and its inmates to die of starvation, on the blue Ionian or the stormy Adriatic sea. In addition to the common pirates there were organised freebooters of higher rank, such as the Knights of Santo Stefano, founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1560, and the Knights of Malta. The former, whose church at Pisa contains on its ceiling a picture of the taking and plunder of “Nicopolis Actiaca” (the modern Prevesa) in 1605, besides many Turkish trophies, were convenient auxiliaries of the Florentine fleet, because their exploits could be disowned by the government if unsuccessful. Towards the close of the sixteenth century the Florentines were able to occupy Chios for a moment; but the Turks soon regained possession of that rich island, and visited the sins of the Tuscans upon the inhabitants whom they had come to deliver. Years afterwards a traveller saw a row of grim skulls on the battlements of the fort, and the descendants of the Genoese settlers, who had hitherto received specially favourable treatment from the Sultan, were so badly treated that they mostly emigrated[691]. In emulation of the Knights of Santo Stefano those of Malta in 1603 sacked Patras, which had been burned by a Spanish squadron only eight years before, and occupied Lepanto, which in the seventeenth century bore the ominous nickname of “Little Algiers,” from the pirates of Algiers and Tripoli who made it their headquarters. When, in 1676, the traveller Spon visited it, he found a number of Moors settled down there with their coal-black progeny[692]. A few years later the Maltese, baffled in an attempt on Navarino, retaliated on Corinth, whence they carried off 500 captives. Finally in 1620 they assailed the famous Frankish castle of Glarentza, in the strong walls of which their bombs opened a breach; but the approach of a considerable Turkish force compelled them to return to their ships, after having attained no other result than that of having injured one of the most interesting mediæval monuments in Greece. Another Frankish stronghold, that of Passavâ, was surprised by the Spaniards when they ravaged Maina in 1601. The co-operation of that restive population with the invaders, whose predatory tastes they shared, led the Porte to adopt strong measures against the Mainates, who in 1614 were, in name at least, reduced to submission and compelled to pay tribute[693]. But though the capitan pasha was thus able to starve Maina into submission he could not protect the Greeks against the pirates, who so long preyed upon their commerce, burnt their villages, debauched their women, and desolated their land. Had Turkey been a strong maritime power, able to sweep piracy from the seas, Greece would have been spared much suffering and would have had less damage to repair.

It was at this time too that the classic land of the arts began to suffer from another form of depredation, that of the cultured collector. To a British nobleman belongs the discredit of this revival of the work of Nero. About 1613 the earl of Arundel was seized with the idea of “transplanting old Greece into England.” With this object he commissioned political agents, merchants, and others, chief among them William Petty, uncle of the well-known political economist, to scour the Levant in quest of statues. His example speedily found imitators, such as the duke of Buckingham, and King Charles I, who charged the English admiral in the Levant, Sir Kenelm Digby, with the duty of collecting works of art for the royal palace. Needless to say the rude sailors who were ordered to remove the precious pieces of marble often mutilated what they could not remove intact. They sawed in two a statue of Apollo at Delos, and they might have anticipated the achievements of Lord Elgin at Athens had not its distance from the sea and the suspicions of the Turkish garrison on the Akropolis saved it from the fate to which the Cyclades were exposed[694].

While the corsairs were devastating Greece a picturesque adventurer, who recalls the abortive scheme of Charles VIII of France, was engaged in planning her deliverance. Charles Gonzaga, duc de Nevers, boasted of his connection with the imperial house of the Palaiologoi through his grandmother, Margaret of Montferrat, a descendant of the Emperor Andronikos Palaiologos the Elder[695]. After having fought against the Turks in Hungary he conceived the romantic idea of claiming the throne of Constantinople, with which object he visited various European courts, and about 1612 entered into negotiations with the Greeks. His schemes received a willing hearing from the restless Mainates, who sent three high ecclesiastics to assure him of their readiness to recognise him as their liege lord if he would send them a body of experienced officers to organise a force of 10,000 Greeks. They even promised to become Roman Catholics, and arranged, on paper, for the division of the Turkish lands among themselves, and for the confiscation of all Jewish property in order to defray the expenses of the expedition. The pretender, on his part, sent three trusty agents to spy out the land and make plans of the Turkish positions; they came back with most hopeful accounts of the enthusiasm of the Mainates, who were only waiting for the favourable moment to raise the two-headed eagle on the walls of Mistra. Neophytos, the bishop of Maina, and Chrysanthos Laskaris, the Metropolitan of Lacedæmon, and namesake of the Manuel Laskaris whose tomb may still be seen in one of the churches at Mistra, addressed him as Constantine Palaiologos, and told him to hasten his coming among his faithful people, who in proof of their submission sent him some falcons.

But the duc de Nevers wasted in diplomacy time which should have been devoted to prompt action. He appealed to Pope Paul V, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the King of Spain, and the Emperor, who were all profuse in promises and some of whom furnished him with ships and money. An attempt was also made to stir up the other Christian nationalities of the East, and a meeting of Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbian leaders was held for the purpose of concerted action, while the two hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia promised their aid. Another adventurer, who styled himself Sultan Zachias and gave out that he was a brother of the Sultan Ahmed I, was admitted as an ally. Finally, in order to give a religious character to the movement, the duke founded and became chief of a body calling itself the “Christian army,” commissions in which were offered to the conspirators, among whom we find the name of a learned Athenian, Leonardos Philaras[696], who was patronised by Richelieu and to whom Milton addressed two letters. A date was fixed for the rising, and four memoranda were addressed to the duke, with full particulars of his future realm of Greece. From these we learn that in 1619 the Peloponnese could furnish him with 15,000 fighting men, while it contained 8000 Turks capable of bearing arms, of whom 800 formed the scanty garrisons of Koron, Modon, Navarino and Nauplia. At that time, we are told, there were 800 Turkish military fiefs in the Morea, and the population of Maina was estimated at 4913 families, spread over 125 villages and hamlets. These statistics are the most valuable result of the agitation.

After several years of correspondence and negotiation the pretender at last managed to equip five vessels for the transport of his crusaders; but a sudden fire, perhaps the work of an incendiary, laid them in ashes, and the jealousy of Spain and Venice prevented any effective political action. The “Christian army” still went on meeting and discussing its plan of campaign, and two more strange adventurers—a Moor who had become a Christian and styled himself “Infant of Fez,” and a Greek who, with even greater ambition, had adopted the title of “prince of Macedonia”—became the principal agents of the duke. At last, however, every one grew weary of his absurd pretensions, and the secession of the Pope from his side finally destroyed his hopes[697].

During the Cretan war between Venice and the Turks two risings were promoted by the Venetians in Greece for the purpose of diverting the attention of their enemies. In 1647 the Venetian admiral, Grimani, after chasing the Turkish fleet to Eubœa and Volo, blockaded it within the harbour of Nauplia. At this the Albanians of the Peloponnese, who were very favourable to the Republic, rose against the Turks, and after having done a considerable amount of damage to Turkish property, escaped punishment by fleeing on board the Venetian squadron. A Greek, more daring but less fortunate, conceived the idea of setting fire to the Turkish vessels as they lay in harbour, but paid for his audacity with his life[698]. In 1659 the Mainates, who had availed themselves of the war to throw off every shadow of subjection to the Sultan, but who plundered Venetian and Turkish ships with equal impartiality, were induced by the great Francesco Morosini to devote their abilities to the plunder of the Morea. At that time piracy was the principal profession of the Mainate population, who sold Christians to Turks and Turks to Christians. Priests and monks, we are told, joined in the business, and the fact that they lived in caves overlooking the sea made them valuable auxiliaries of the pirates, whom they informed of the approach of passing vessels. Some of them even embarked on board the pirate schooners, for the purpose of levying the tithe which was allotted by the pious freebooters to the Church[699]. These schooners sometimes sailed out among the Cyclades, and just as Lepanto was nicknamed “Little Algiers” so Vitylos in Maina was called “Great Algiers.” Well acquainted with the influence of the Church in eastern politics, Morosini worked upon the feelings of the Mainates by taking with him the deposed Œcumenical Patriarch, then living on the island of Siphnos. The pirates of Maina humbly kissed the hand of the eminent ecclesiastic, and 10,000 of them, with 3000 Greeks and Albanians, assisted the Venetian commander in an attack upon Kalamata, which was abandoned by its Mussulman and Christian inhabitants alike to its rapacious assailants. The Cretan poet Bouniales has left a graphic account of their proceedings in his poem on the Cretan war.

But no strategic result accrued from the sack of Kalamata; Morosini sailed off to the Ægean, advising the Mainates to reserve their energies for a more favourable opportunity of conquering the Peloponnese. The auxiliaries of the Venetian commander, pending that event, continued to prey upon Turkish vessels, and even attacked the fleet of the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Köprili, which was then engaged in the siege of Candia. The offer of double the pay of his own soldiers could not bribe the Mainates to desist from their at once patriotic and profitable piracies. Baffled by their refusal, the Grand Vizier ordered Hasân-Babâ, a pirate of renown and accounted the best seaman in the Turkish fleet, to reduce Maina to submission. But the women of Maina sufficed to strike terror into the heart of the bold Hasân. “Tell my husband,” said one of them, “to mind the goat, and hold the child, and I will go and find his weapons and use them better than he.” At the head of the population the women marched down to the shore, and the Turkish captain thought it wiser to remain on board. But in the evening experienced swimmers cut the cables of his ships, two of which were driven upon the rocks of that iron coast and became the prey of the wreckers, while Hasân was glad to escape on his sole surviving vessel.

Unable to subdue the Mainates by force, the Grand Vizier now had recourse to diplomacy. The hereditary blood feud had long been the curse of Maina, and its inhabitants were divided into the hostile factions of the Stephanopouloi and the Iatraioi—the Montagues and Capulets of that rugged land. At that time there was in Maina a certain Liberakes Gerakares, who, after an apprenticeship in the Venetian fleet, had turned his nautical experience to practical use as a pirate. In an interval of his profession he had become engaged to a daughter of the clan of Iatraioi, who boasted of their descent from one of the Florentine Medici, formerly shipwrecked there; but, before the wedding had taken place, a rival, belonging to the opposite clan, eloped with the lady. Smarting under his loss and burning for revenge upon the whole race of the Stephanopouloi, the disappointed lover was accidentally captured by the Turks at sea and carried off to prison. The crafty Köprili saw at once that Liberakes was the very man for his purpose. He not only released him, but provided him with money, and sent him back to Maina in the capacity of his secret agent. Liberakes at once distributed the pasha’s gold among his clansmen and proclaimed civil war against the Stephanopouloi. At the same time the Mainates were told of favours which the Grand Vizier had in store for them—the use of bells and crosses outside their churches, the abolition of the tribute of children, and the remission of half the capitation tax. No Turk, it was added, should live among them.

As soon as Crete had fallen Köprili devoted his attention to the accomplishment of his plan. He peremptorily summoned the Mainates, under penalty of extermination, to submit to his authority, promising them an amnesty and the remission of all arrears of tribute in case of prompt submission. At the same time he despatched 6000 men to Maina, with orders to treat the people well, but to build, under the pretext of protecting trade, three forts in strong positions. As soon, however, as the forts were finished, Liberakes and his men seized some of their most prominent foes, while the Turks preserved an air of complete indifference. After a mock trial the unfortunate Stephanopouloi were sentenced to death as disturbers of the public peace. Those of them who escaped emigrated to Corsica, where their descendants may still be found at Cargèse. More than a century later they furnished to Bonaparte agents for the dissemination of his plans of conquest in Greece. Other Mainates went into exile in Tuscany, where their descendants soon became fused with the Italian population, and in Apulia, while those who remained behind were for the second time placed under Turkish authority. Liberakes, as soon as his deluded countrymen had realised the device of which they had been the victims, became so unpopular that he took to piracy again. A second time captured by the Turks, he was again imprisoned till his captors once more found need for his services[700].

While Candia was the scene of the great struggle between Venice and “the Ottomite,” Athens was once more coming within the ken of Europe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the French showed much activity in the Levant, where they established consuls about that time. In 1630 the French ambassador at Constantinople, Louis des Hayes, had visited Athens[701], of which a brief mention is made in his travels, and in 1645 a very important step towards the “re-discovery” of the famous city was taken. In that year a body of Jesuit missionaries were sent thither, and though they subsequently removed to Negroponte, because that place contained more Franks, they were followed at Athens in 1658 by the Capuchins, whose name will ever be remembered in connection with the topography of that city. In 1669 they bought the choragic monument of Lysikrates, then colloquially known as “the Lantern of Demosthenes,” which henceforth formed part of their convent[702]. Over the entrance they placed the lilies of France, to which the monument still belongs, and by whose care it has twice been restored; but their hospitality was extended to strangers of all races and religions, and it is curious to hear that the Turkish cadi would only sanction this purchase of a national monument on condition that the Capuchins promised not to injure it and to show it to all who wished to see it. The monument itself was converted into a study, where Lord Byron passed many an hour during his visit to Athens in 1811, and where he wrote his famous indictment of Lord Elgin’s vandalism. The chapel of the convent was, till the capture of the city by Morosini, the only Frankish place of worship. But the worthy Capuchins did not confine themselves to religious exercises. About the same time that they purchased the choragic monument they drew up a plan of Athens, which was a great advance on the imaginary representations of that place, which had hitherto been devised to gratify the curiosity of Europe, and which had depicted Athens now as a Flemish and now as a German town. Nor did they keep their information to themselves. They communicated their plan and a quantity of notes to a French literary man, Guillet, who published them in the form of an imaginary journey, supposed to have been undertaken by his brother, La Guilletière. The sources of Guillet’s information render his narrative far more valuable than if he had merely paid a flying visit to Athens; and though he never saw the place about which he wrote he had at his command the best available materials, compiled by men who had lived there. About the same time Babin, a Jesuit who had also lived at Athens, drew up an account of it, which was published by Dr Spon[703], a physician and antiquary of Lyons, who visited Greece in 1675 and 1676 in the company of an Englishman, Sir George Wheler, and subsequently issued a detailed account of his travels, upon which his travelling companion afterwards based an English version. Two other Englishmen, Randolph and Vernon, also travelled in Greece at different times between 1671 and 1679, and have left behind records of their impressions. Besides these unofficial travellers Lord Winchelsea, the British ambassador at Constantinople, paid a visit, of which, however, he published no record, to Athens in 1675, while the previous year had witnessed the tour of his French colleague, the marquis de Nointel, through the Cyclades and Attica, in the company of the painter Jacques Carrey, who drew for him the sculptures of the Parthenon, and of an Italian, Cornelio Magni, who wrote an account of the great man’s journey[704]. Thus we have ample opportunities for judging what was the condition of Athens between the years 1669 and 1676, or shortly before the Venetian siege, while recent researches have greatly elucidated the statements of the travellers.

The population of Athens at that time is estimated by Guillet at between 15,000 and 16,000, of whom only 1000 or 1200 were Mussulmans, and by Spon at between 8000 and 9000, of whom three-quarters were Greeks and the rest Turks. A modern Greek scholar[705], while accepting Spon’s estimate of the proportion between the Greeks and the Mussulmans, puts the total population at the time of the Venetian siege at 20,000, which would better tally with the expression of a Hessian officer, Hombergk, who was among the besiegers, and who wrote home that Athens was “a very big and populous town.” Another German officer, a Hanoverian, named Zehn, even went so far in his journal as to state that Athens had “14,000 houses[706],” which must be an exaggeration. In 1822 there were only 1238. It is clear, however, from all these estimates that Athens was in 1687 a considerable place. Besides the Greeks and Turks there were also a few Franks, some gipsies, and a body of negroes. The negroes were the slaves of the Turks, living in winter at the foot of the Akropolis, in the holes of the rock, in huts, or among the ruins of old houses, and in summer, like the modern Athenians, spending their spare time on the beach at Phaleron. The gipsies were particularly odious to the Greeks as the tools of any Turk who wished to torture them. Among the Franks were the consuls, of whom there were two. At the time of Spon’s visit they were both Frenchmen and both deadly enemies, M. Châtaignier, the representative of France, and M. Giraud, a resident in Athens for the last eighteen years, who acted for England and was the cicerone of all travellers. A little later, in the reign of James II, we were represented by one of our own countrymen, Launcelot Hobson, one of whose servants, a native of Limehouse, together with two other Englishmen, was buried at that time in the Church of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock beneath a tombstone, now in the north wall of the English church, commemorating his great linguistic attainments. Besides the two consuls Spon found no other Franks at Athens, except one Capuchin monk, one soldier, and some servants; a little earlier we hear of a German adventurer as living there[707].

Our authorities differ as to the feelings with which at that period the Athenians regarded the Franks. Guillet, indeed, alludes to the excellent relations between the Greeks and Latins, and points, as a proof of it, to the remarkable fact that young Athenians were sent by their parents to be educated by the Capuchins. The consul Giraud’s wife was also a Greek. Spon, however, speaks of the great aversion of the Greeks to the Franks[708], and this is confirmed by an incident which followed the visit of the marquis de Nointel to Athens in 1674. During his stay the pious ambassador had had mass recited in the ancient temple of Triptolemos, beyond the Ilissos, which, under the title of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock, had served as a chapel of the Frank dukes[709]. After their time it had been converted into a Greek church, but had been allowed to fall into disuse. None the less it was considered by the Orthodox to have been profaned by the masses of the French ambassador[710]. A great number of satirical verses have been also preserved[711], which show that the Frank residents were the butt of every sharp-witted Athenian street boy, and their cleanly habits were especially suspicious to the Orthodox. Besides, as many of the pirates were Franks, the popular logic readily confounded the two, and visited upon the harmless Latin the sins of some of his co-religionists. It was manifest, however, at the time of the Venetian siege that the Athenians preferred the Franks to the Turks, and every traveller from the West praised the hospitality which the Greeks of Athens showed to the foreigner. Spon tells us that there was not a single Jew to be found in the city. Quite apart from the national hatred which they inspired, and still inspire, in the Hellenic breast, how could they outwit the Athenians[712]? Would they not have fared like their fellow countrymen who landed one day on Lesbos, but, on observing the astuteness of the Lesbian hucksters in the market-place, went off by the next ship, saying that this was no place for them? On the other hand a few Wallachs wandered about Athens, some Albanian Mussulmans were employed in guarding the entrances to the town, and in all the villages of Attica the inhabitants were of the Albanian race, as is still largely the case[713]. In Athens itself all the non-Turkish and non-Hellenic population did not amount at that time to more than 500.

A great change had taken place in the government of the city since the early years of the seventeenth century. We last saw Athens forming a district of the sandjak of Euripos, and dependent on the pasha of Eubœa, who was represented there by a lower official. A document in the Bodleian Library[714], dated 1617, gives us, from the pen of a Greek exile in England, an account of the exactions of a rapacious Turkish governor of Athens somewhat earlier. In consequence of this bad treatment the Athenians sent several deputations to Constantinople, and about the year 1610 the efforts of their delegates received strong support from one of those Athenian beauties who have from time to time exercised sway over the rulers of Constantinople. A young girl, named Basilike, who had become the favourite wife of Sultan Ahmed I, had been requested by him to ask some favour for herself. The patriotic Athenian, who had heard in her childhood complaints of the exactions of the pasha of Euripos and his deputy, and perhaps primed by one of the Athenian deputations which may then have been at Constantinople, begged that her native city might be transferred to the kislar-aga, or chief of the black eunuchs in the seraglio. The request was granted, and thenceforth Athens, greatly to its material benefit, depended upon that powerful official[715]. A firman, renewable on the accession of a new sultan, spared the citizens the annual visitation of the pasha of Euripos, who could only descend upon them when the issue of the precious document was delayed. The kislar-aga was represented at Athens by a voivode, or governor, and the other Turkish officials were the disdar-aga, or commander of the garrison in the Akropolis, which shortly before the Venetian war amounted to 300 soldiers; the sardar and the spahilar-aga, who directed the Janissaries and the cavalry; the cadi; and the mufti.

The Athenians enjoyed, however, under this Turkish administration an almost complete system of local self-government. Unlike the democratic Greece of to-day, where there is no aristocracy and where every man considers himself the equal of his fellows, Turkish Athens exhibited sharp class distinctions, which had at least the advantage of furnishing a set of rulers who had the respect of the ruled. Under the Turks the Greek population of the town was divided into four classes—the archontes; the householders, who lived on their property; the shopkeepers, organised, as now, in different guilds; and the cultivators of the lands or gardens in the immediate suburbs, who also included in their ranks those engaged in the important business of bee-keeping[716]. The first of these four classes, into which members of the other three never rose, had originally consisted of twelve families, representing—so the tradition stated—the twelve ancient tribes of the fourth century before Christ. Their number subsequently varied, but about this period amounted to rather more than sixty. Among their names it is interesting to find, though no longer in the very first rank, the family (which still exists at Athens) of the Athenian historian Chalkokondyles, slightly disguised under the form Charkondyles. More important were the Benizeloi, said to be descended from the Acciajuoli, whose Christian names occur frequently in their family, and the Palaiologoi, who boasted, without much genealogical proof, of their connection with the famous Imperial family. Some of the archontes went so far as to use the Byzantine double eagle on their tombs, of which a specimen may still be seen in the monastery of Kaisariane, and all wore a peculiar costume, of which a fur cap was in later Turkish times a distinctive mark. Their flowing locks and long beards gave them the majestic appearance of Greek ecclesiastics, and the great name of Alexander was allowed to be borne by them alone. This Athenian aristocracy is now all but extinct; yet the names of localities round Athens still preserve the memory of these once important families, and in Mount Skaramangka, near Salamis, and in Pikermi, on the road to Marathon, we may trace the property of archontes, who once owned those places, while in modern Athens the names of streets commemorate the three great families of Chalkokondyles, Benizelos and Limponas.

From this class of some sixty families the Christian administrators of Athens were selected. Once a year, on the last Sunday in February, all the citizens who paid taxes assembled outside St Panteleemon, which was in Turkish times the metropolitan church, after a solemn service inside; the principal householders and tradesmen and the heads of the guilds then exchanged their views, and elected from the whole body of archontes the chief officials for the ensuing year, the so-called δημογέροντες, or “elders of the people.” There is some difference of opinion as to their numbers, which have been variously estimated at two, three, four, eight and twenty-four. A recent Greek scholar has, however, shown from the evidence of documents that they were three[717]. After their election had been ratified by the cadi they entered upon the duties of their office, which practically constituted an imperium in imperio. They represented the Greek population before the Turkish authorities, watched over the privileges of the city, looked after the schools and the poor, cared for the widows and the orphans, and decided every Monday, under the presidency of the metropolitan, such differences between the Greeks as the litigants did not prefer to submit to the cadi. Their decision was almost always sought by their fellow Christians, and even in mixed cases, which came before the Turkish judge, they acted as the counsel of the Greek party. They had the first seats everywhere; they were allotted a special place in the churches, and when they passed the people rose to their feet. Each of them received for his trouble 1000 piastres during his year of office, and they were entitled to levy a tax upon salt for the expenses of the community. They sometimes combined the usual vices of slaves with those of tyrants, fawning on the Turkish officials and frowning on the Greek populace. But they often had the courage to impeach the administration of some harsh governor at Constantinople, and, like the rest of the class from which they sprang, they sometimes made sacrifices of blood and treasure for their native city. In addition to these “elders” there were eight other officials of less age and dignity, called “agents,” or ἐπίτροποι, and elected from each of the eight parishes into which Athens was then divided. These persons, who were chosen exclusively from the class of archontes, acted as go-betweens between the latter and the Turkish authorities.

Thus the English traveller Randolph was justified in asserting that “the Greeks live much better here than in any other part of Turkey, with the exception of Scio, being a small commonwealth among themselves[718]”; or, as a modern writer has said of his countrymen, “the Athenians did not always feel the yoke of slavery heavy[719].” The taxes were not oppressive, consisting of the haratch, or capitation tax, which in Spon’s time was at the rate of five instead of four and a half piastres a head, and of a tithe, both of which went to the voivode, who in turn had to pay 30,000 crowns to the chief eunuch. There was also the terrible tribute of children, from which Athens was not exempt, as has sometimes been supposed, for the above-mentioned Lincoln College manuscript, which had belonged to Sir George Wheler and was first published by Professor Lampros, expressly mentions the arrival of the men to take them[720]. But on the whole the condition of the Athenians, owing to the influence of their powerful protector at Constantinople, was very tolerable. When some of the principal Turkish officials of Athens meditated the imposition of a new duty on Athenian merchandise, two local merchants were sent to the then chief eunuch, with the result that they obtained from him the punishment of their oppressors[721]. When the Œcumenical Patriarch ordered the deposition of their metropolitan, the Athenians persuaded the kislar-aga to get the order quashed[722]. We do not know whether they felt with Gibbon that this august patronage “aggravated their shame,” but it certainly “alleviated their servitude.” At times, however, even the long arm of the chief eunuch could not protect them from the vengeance of the enemies whom they had denounced to him. Thus in 1678 the local Turks murdered Michael Limponas, the most prominent citizen of Athens, who had just returned from a successful mission, in which he had complained of their misdeeds at Constantinople. A Cretan poet celebrated his death for his country, and this archon of the seventeenth century may truly be included among the martyrs of Greece[723]. It was noticed that, even in that age, the old Athenian love of liberty had not been extinguished by more than four centuries of Frankish and Turkish rule; the Attic air, it was said, still made those who breathed it intolerant of authority. Babin remarked that the Athenians had “a great opinion of themselves,” and that “if they had their liberty they would be just as they are described by St Paul in the Acts[724].” Athens, he wrote, still possessed persons of courage and virtue, such as the girl who received sixty blows of a knife rather than lose her honour, and the child who died rather than apostatise.

The Athenians were very religious under the Turkish sway, and then, as now, there were frequent pilgrimages to the Holy Land[725]. Sometimes this religious feeling was prone to degenerate into superstition; for example, Greeks and Turks alike believed that various epidemics lay buried beneath the great marble columns of the ruined temples. In short, the Athenian character was much what it might have been expected to be. Industrious, musical, and hospitable, the Greeks of Athens were admitted to be, and the virtue of the Athenian ladies was no less admired than their good looks. But the satirical talents of Aristophanes had descended to the Athenians of the seventeenth century; no one could escape from the barbed arrows of their caustic wit, sometimes poisoned with the spirit of envy; they ridiculed Turks, and Franks, and Wallachs, and their own fellow-countrymen alike, and they delighted in inflicting nicknames which stuck to their unhappy object. Their love of money and astuteness in business may have given rise to the current saying, “From the Jews of Thessalonika, the Turks of Negroponte, and the Greeks of Athens, good Lord, deliver us.” In striking contrast to the proverbial Turks of Eubœa, those resident in Athens were usually amiable[726]. They generally agreed well with their Greek neighbours, whose language they spoke very well. In fact, like the Cretan Mussulmans of to-day, they knew only a few words of Turkish, barely sufficient for their religious devotions, while some of the Greeks were acquainted with the latter language. Sometimes the Turkish residents would aid the Greeks to get rid of an unpopular governor; and, when Easter and Bairam coincided, they would take a fraternal interest in each other’s festivals. The Athenian Moslem drank wine, like his Christian fellow, and his zeal for water and his respect for trees were distinct benefits, the latter of which modern Athens has now lost. There was, however, one notable exception to the general amiability of the Turkish residents. The Greek population of Attica, as distinct from the town, was much oppressed by the Turkish landlords, and despised by the Greek townsfolk. One part of Athens, and that the holy of holies, the venerable Akropolis, was exclusively reserved to the Turks, and no rayah was allowed to enter it, not because of its artistic treasures, but because it was a fortress. Archæological researches there were regarded with grave suspicion[727].

Education was not neglected by the Athenians of the seventeenth century. From 1614 to 1619 and again in 1645 a wayward Athenian genius, named Korydalleus, was teaching philosophy to a small class there. A Greek, resident in Venice, founded a school there in 1647, and in Spon’s time there were three schoolmasters—among them Demetrios Benizelos, who had studied in Venetia—employed in giving lectures in rhetoric and philosophy, while many young Greeks went to the classes of the Capuchins. Babin tells us, however, that Benizelos (whose father, Angelos, and younger brother, Joannes, were also teachers) had “only two or three hearers, everyone being now occupied in amassing a little money.” We hear of a Greek monk who was acquainted with Latin; but Spon could find only three people in Athens who understood ancient Greek[728]. A century earlier, as we saw, correspondents of Kraus had commented on the badness of the Attic Greek of their day. Yet, according to Guillet, it was by this time “the purest and least corrupt idiom in Greece,” and “Athenian phrases and a Nauplian accent” were commended as the perfection of Greek. Externally too Athens was no mere barbarous collection of huts. The houses were of stone, and better built than those of the Morea; and a picture which has been preserved[729] of an archon’s house of the later Turkish period, constructed round a court with trees and a fountain in the middle, shows the influence of Mussulman taste on the Athenian aristocracy. The solid construction of the houses, and the name of “towers” (πύργοι) given to the country villas of the archontes, as in the island of Andros to the present day, were both due to the prevalence of piracy, then the curse of Athens. But the streets were unpaved and narrow—an arrangement better adapted, however, to the fierce heat of an Attic summer than the wide thoroughfares of the modern Greek capital. The town was then divided into eight parishes, or platómata, the name of one of which, Plaka, survives, and contained no fewer than fifty-two churches and five mosques. Among the latter were the Parthenon, or “Mosque of the Castle,” the minaret of which figures conspicuously in the contemporary plans, and the “Mosque of the Conqueror,” now used as the military bakery, which had been converted from a church by Mohammed II[730]. The most important of the former was the metropolitan church, the Καθολικόν, as it was then called, usually identified with the small building which still bears that name, but supposed by Kampouroglos to have been that of St Panteleemon[731]. Although the clergy had less influence at Athens than in some other parts of Greece, the metropolitan, as we have seen, was a personage of political importance; he received at that time 4000 crowns a year, and had under his jurisdiction the five bishops of Salona, Livadia, Boudonitza, Atalante and Skyros. The monastery of Kaisariane, or Syriane, on Hymettos, or “Deli-Dagh” (the “Mad Mountain”), as the Turks called it, still paid only one sequin to the voivode in consideration of the fact that its abbot had presented the keys of Athens to Mohammed II at the time of the conquest[732]. The Catholic archbishopric of Athens had, however, ceased to exist on the death of the last Archbishop in 1483, and the churches and monasteries which had belonged to it in Frankish days had been recovered by the Orthodox Greeks.

Although the Ilissos even then, as now, contained very little water, there were a number of gardens along its banks above the town, with country houses at Ambelokepoi, and the excellent air and its freedom from plague at that period made Athens a healthy residence, where doctors could not make a living[733]. There were still some rich merchants; but the trade of Athens was mainly limited to the agricultural produce of the neighbourhood, to the export of oil, and to a little silk, imported from other parts and woven in private houses. Randolph mentions that, in 1671, an inspector from Constantinople found about 50,000 olive trees in the plain, and some of the olives were esteemed so delicious that they were reserved for the Sultan’s table. The oil was excellent, and was exported every year to Marseilles. Athens also supplied cotton sail-cloth to the Turkish navy[734]. As for the wine, though good, it was voted undrinkable by all the travellers of that period, owing to the resin with which it was impregnated[735]. Honey was still as famous a product of Hymettos as in classic ages, and the monks of Kaisariane were specially renowned for their hives. Trade being thus small, it is not surprising that few Franks resided at Athens. Such as it was, it was entirely in Greek hands.

The monuments of Athens had not then suffered from the havoc so soon to be wrought by the bombs of Morosini. When Des Hayes was there the Parthenon was as entire and as little damaged by the injuries of time as if it had only just been built. The Turks, whatever their faults may have been, had shown great respect for the venerable relics of ancient Athens, which had now been in their power for two centuries. When a piece of the frieze of Phidias fell they carefully placed it inside the Parthenon, the interior of which was at that time entirely whitewashed[736]; the external appearance of that noble temple, as it then was, can be judged from the published drawings of Carrey. The Akropolis was fortified, and occupied by the garrison, whose houses, about 200 in number, covered a portion of its surface, and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus (then called Serpentzes) was joined by a wall with and formed a bulwark of it. The Propylæa served as the residence of the commander, the disdar-aga, whose harem was in the Erechtheion[737], and the Temple of Wingless Victory had been converted into a powder magazine. Unfortunately the Turks had also stored their ammunition in the Propylæa, and in 1656 a curious accident caused it to explode. At that time Isouf Aga, the commander of the Akropolis and a bitter enemy of the Greeks, had vowed that he would destroy the little church of St Demetrios, on the opposite hill. One evening, before going to bed, he ordered two or three pieces of artillery to be put in position to fire on the church in the morning. But in the night a thunderbolt ignited the powder magazine. The Aga and nearly all his family perished by the force of the explosion, and—what was a more serious loss—part of the roof was destroyed. The Greeks ascribed the disaster to the righteous indignation of the saint, whose church was thenceforth, and is still, called St Demetrios the Bombardier[738]. On another occasion, so it was said, when a Turk fired a shot at an eikon of the Virgin in the Parthenon his arm withered, while another Mussulman was reported to have dropped dead in the attempt to open two great cupboards, closed with blocks of marble and let into the walls[739]. For the great Temple of Olympian Zeus the Turks had a becoming regard, and at the solemn season of Bairam they used to meet near its columns to pray. The Areopagos, from the spring of “black water” still to be found there, they called Kara-su. Less scrupulous than the Turks, De Nointel took two workmen about with him on his tour, and carried off several pieces of marble, just as the Jesuits had taken with them to Chalkis some of the marble fragments of Athens to serve as monuments in their cemetery[740].

The Piræus, which had played so great a part in the life of ancient Athens, consisted at that time of only a single house—a magazine for storing goods and levying the duties on them[741]. Its classical name had been lost, and while the Franks called it Porto Leone the Greeks styled it Porto Drako[742], from the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, upon which Harold Hardraada had once scrawled his name, and which attracted the attention of all travellers. The foundations of the famous Long Walls were still visible almost all the way, and on the road to Eleusis there was another fine marble lion, which can be traced in the Capuchins’ plan. The monastery of Daphni had been almost entirely abandoned, owing to the ravages of corsairs, Christians as well as Turks, and the former had driven away all the inhabitants of Eleusis; but the monastery of Phaneromene, in Salamis, had just been restored by Laurentios of Megara in 1670, and a little later, in 1682, the church at Kaisariane was decorated with fresh paintings by a Peloponnesian artist at the expense of the Benizeloi who had fled thither for fear of the plague, and to whom the monastery and the present summer pleasaunce of Kephissia formerly belonged. All along the shore near Phaleron stood towers, where men watched day and night to give the alarm against the pirates. Such was the terror inspired by those marauders that not a single Turk resided at Megara, and there was only one house between that place and Corinth. The Kakè Skála maintained its classic reputation as a haunt of robbers, and descendants of the fabulous brigand Skiron were in the habit of lurking there, so that the Turks were afraid to travel along that precipitous road where the railway now passes above the sea. Akrocorinth, in spite of its ruinous condition, was, however, a sure refuge of the Mussulmans against the corsairs, while Lepanto, on the other hand, was a perfect nest of pirates[743].

Of the Greek provincial towns at that period Chalkis, with a population of about 15,000, was the most important. It was the residence of the capitan pasha and the scene of the Jesuits’ missionary labours. They had established a school there, after their departure from Athens, and the children of the seven or eight Frank families who still resided in the old Venetian town gave them more occupation than they had found at their former abode. The castle was entirely given over to the Turks and Jews, and the traveller Randolph mentions in his day the rich carving of some of the houses, which I have myself seen there. Patras, famous for its citrons, contained some 4000 or 5000 inhabitants, one-third of whom were Jews, and the latter had three synagogues at Lepanto, which had the whole trade of the gulf, though they were less numerous there than at Patras. Corinth was then, like the modern town, a big village with a population of 1500, and it was noted for the numbers of conversions to Islâm which had taken place there. Like Athens, it had no Jews. Nauplia, the residence of the pasha of the Morea, was a large town, but Sparta was “quite forsaken[744].” Delphi, then called Kastri, was the fief of a Turk, and produced cotton and tobacco. The neighbouring town of Salona contained seven mosques and six churches, and at the splendid Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas there were about 150 monks. Thebes was then about the same size as at present, and had no more than 3000 or 4000 inhabitants, while its rival, Livadia, provided all Greece with wool, corn and rice. Somewhat earlier it had furnished sail-cloth for the Ottoman navy[745], and in the Turkish period it enjoyed considerable liberty, being administered by a δημογέρωον, or elder, who, with the assistance of the leading citizens, successfully resisted any intervention from outside in the affairs of his native city[746]. In the Morea, where there were only 30,000 Turks, and nearly all those Greek-speaking, each town was managed by its own Greek elders, who levied the taxes. Spon found there four metropolitans, whose sees were respectively Patras, Nauplia, Corinth and Mistra, and he remarks, as every modern traveller in the country districts of Greece cannot fail to do, on the strict fasts observed by the Orthodox. He found that the sole exception was in the case of those who were subjects of Venice and who had imbibed the laxer ideas of Roman Catholicism; as for the others, they would rather die than dine in Lent[747]. The value of the Peloponnesian trade may be judged from the fact that an English consul, Sir H. Hide, had lately resided at Glarentza and had built a church there[748].

The former duchy of Naxos, then a Turkish sandjak, had been lightly treated by the Turks since their final conquest of the islands. In 1580 Murad III had given the islanders many privileges, permitting them to build churches and monasteries and to use bells, while forbidding the Turks to settle among them, a provision which has done much to keep the Cyclades free from all traces of Mussulman rule. Once a year, and once only, came the capitan pasha to levy the tribute of the islands at Paros; but the tribute was raised by the insular municipalities, whose powers of self-government were not disturbed by the Turkish conquerors. The inhabitants of some islands were, however, bound to send a fixed quantity of their produce to Constantinople every year[749]. These privileges were confirmed by Ibrahim in 1640, and we may form some idea of the state of the Cyclades from the amount of the capitation tax levied upon them at the date of Spon’s tour. Naxos was then assessed at 6000 piastres, out of which the governor had to provide one galley to the Turkish fleet; Andros paid 4500, with which one galley was equipped, while Eubœa paid 100,000 piastres, and the Morea was bound to furnish three vessels[750]. At that time the Venetian island of Tenos was the best cultivated, the most prosperous, and the most densely populated of all the Cyclades, because the banner of St Mark protected it from the Christian corsairs, whose chief rendezvous was at Melos, and who captured, among others, the English traveller Vernon. Tenos then contained twenty-four villages, the inhabitants of which, 20,000 in number, speaking Greek, but almost entirely of the Catholic religion, were exclusively employed in the manufacture of silk. Randolph, who visited this island in 1670, found it to have “ever been a great eyesore to the Turks,” especially during the Candian war, when a certain Giorgio Maria, a Corsican privateer in the Venetian service, had manned his ships with the islanders of Tenos, and had plagued the enemies of the Republic as none had done since Skanderbeg. Tenos had quite recovered from the raid which the Turks had made upon it in 1658; but since the war its inhabitants had thought it prudent to offer the capitan pasha a douceur of 500 dollars, in addition to the regular tithe which they paid to Venice[751]. The only thing on Delos was the colony of rabbits. Mykonos, which Venetian ships still frequented, had not a single Turk, and the chief profession of its inhabitants was piracy, which kept so many of the men engaged at sea that there was an enormous disproportion between the females and the males.

Corsairs were indeed the terror of the Ægean, as was natural now that the Candian war was over and they had no more scope for the legitimate exercise of their talents. Thus in 1673 a Savoyard, the marquis de Fleuri, set out to take Paros, but was captured by the Venetians in pursuance of their pledge, given to the Turks at the late peace, not to tolerate piracy in the Archipelago. Another freebooter, a Provençal, named Hugues Creveliers, who served as the original of Lord Byron’s Corsair, and had roamed about the Levant from boyhood, succeeded in making Paros his headquarters, after a futile attempt upon a Turkish fort in Maina, and scoured the Ægean with a fleet of twenty ships for two whole years, levying blackmail upon Megara and defying capture, till at last he was blown up in his flagship by a servant whom he had offended. Another pirate, a Greek, named Joannes Kapsi, made himself master of Melos in 1677, but was taken and hanged by the Turks in 1680. Nevertheless the lot of the Melians was so hard that a party of them, together with some Samians, emigrated to London, under the guidance of their Archbishop Georgirenes of Melos, author of A Description of the present state of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos, and Mount Athos. It is to this colony that Greek Street owes its name, for the Duke of York, the future King James II, assigned that site to them as a residence, and in Hog Lane, afterwards called Crown Street, Soho, they built a Greek church—the first in London[752]. Even where the privateers did not come the Turks took care to “hinder the islanders from becoming too rich.”

The Latin population of the Cyclades had not diminished, though a century had elapsed since the last of the Latin dukes had fallen; on the contrary, it had increased, in consequence of the emigration thither after the Turkish conquest of Crete. Naxos and Santorin were the chief seats of these Latin survivors, who were sedulously guarded by the Roman Church. Down to the seventeenth century a Latin bishopric was maintained in Andros, and one still exists at Santorin, another at Syra, and a third at Tenos. In 1626 the Jesuits, and nine years later the Capuchins, obtained a convent in Naxos, which was placed under the protection of France; and after the fall of Rhodes the Latin archbishopric was removed to the same island[753], where the Catholics held much property. But this concentration of Catholicism in Naxos had some most unfortunate results, which were happily lacking in the less strenuous atmosphere of Santorin. The Latins of the upper town of Naxos looked down contemptuously upon the Greek inhabitants of the lower city; they refused to intermarry with the Orthodox; and if a Catholic changed his religion for that of the despised Greeks he was sure of persecution by his former co-religionists. In the country, where old feudal usages still prevailed, the Latin nobles oppressed the Greek peasants; while, like truly oriental tyrants, they were as servile to the Turks as they were haughty to the Greeks. Worst of all, their feuds became hereditary, and thus this little island community was plunged in almost endless bloodshed. For example, towards the close of the seventeenth century the leader of the Latin party in Naxos was Francesco Barozzi, whose family had come thither from Crete about the beginning of the same century, and whose surname I have found still preserved in the monuments of the Catholic church in the upper town. Barozzi had married the daughter of the French consul, who was naturally a person of consequence among the Catholics of Naxos. But the lady was one day insulted by Constantine Cocco, a member of a Venetian family which had become thoroughly grecised. Barozzi, furious at the slight, took a terrible vengeance, and not long afterwards Cocco was murdered by his orders, and his body horribly mutilated. Cocco’s relatives thereupon murdered the French consul; the consul’s widow persuaded a Maltese adventurer, Raimond de Modène, who had recently arrived on a frigate belonging to the Knights of St John, and who was in love with her daughter, to bombard the Cocco family with the ship’s cannon in the monastery of Ipsili, where they had taken refuge. At last the vendetta ended as a dramatist would have wished. The daughter of the murdered Cocco, who was only one year old at the time of her father’s assassination, married the son of her father’s murderer. For many years the couple lived happily together, and the wife was the first woman in the Archipelago to wear Frankish dress. But, though the fatal feud was thus appeased, poetic vengeance, in the shape of the Turks, fell upon the assassin’s son. His riches attracted their attention; he was thrown into prison, and died at Naxos a beggar[754].

Such was the condition of Greece when, in 1684, the outbreak of war between Venice and Turkey led to the temporary re-conquest of a large part of the country by the soldiers of the West and the reappearance of the lion of St Mark in the Morea.

VI. THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE

1684-1718

In 1684, after the lapse of 144 years, Venice once more began to be a power upon the Greek continent. She had long had grievances against the Porte, such as the non-deliverance of prisoners and the violation of her commercial privileges, while the Porte complained of the raids of the Dalmatian Morlachs. Excuses for war were not, therefore, lacking, and the moment was favourable. Sobieski, the year before, had defeated the Turks before Vienna, and the Republic knew that she would not lack allies. A “Holy League” was formed between the Emperor, Poland, and Venice under the protection of Pope Innocent XI, and the Tsar was specially invited to join. Accordingly, the Republic declared war upon the Sultan, and appointed Francesco Morosini captain-general of her forces.

Morosini, although sixty-six years of age, possessed an experience of Turkish warfare upon Greek soil which compensated for his lack of youth. He had served for twenty-three years in the armies and fleets of his country, and had commanded at Candia till he felt himself compelled to come to terms with the Turks, for which skilful piece of diplomacy he was put upon his trial at home and, although acquitted, left for fifteen years in retirement. Now that his countrymen needed a commander, they bethought them of the man who had been so severely criticised for the loss of Crete.

The Republic at this time still retained a considerable insular dominion in Greek waters—six out of the seven Ionian islands, Tenos, and the three Cretan fortresses of Grabusa, Suda and Spinalonga—but on the Greek mainland only Butrinto and Parga, the two continental dependencies of Corfù. She possessed, therefore, at Corfù, a base of operations, and thither Morosini repaired. The huge mortars on either side of the gate of the “old fortress” still bear the date of his visit—1684. His first objective was the seventh Ionian island of Santa Maura, particularly obnoxious to the Venetians as a nest of corsairs. Warmly supported by Ionian auxiliaries, among whom are mentioned the countrymen of Odysseus, he speedily obtained the surrender of Santa Maura, which carried with it the acquisition of Meganisi, the home of the Homeric Taphians, which was given as a fief to the Cephalonian family of Metaxas, Kalamos, and the other smaller islands lying off the coast of Akarnania, and the submission of the Akarnanian population of Baltos and Xeromeros, as his secretary and historiographer, Locatelli[755], informs us. Mesolonghi, not yet famous in history, was next taken. The surrender of Prevesa, which followed, gave the Venetians the command of the entrance to the Ambrakian Gulf, and completed the first season’s operations. During the winter a treaty[756] with the duke of Brunswick, father of our George I, for the supply of Hanoverian soldiers, was concluded; other small German princelings sold their soldiers at 200 francs a head, and when Morosini took the field in the following summer the so-called Venetian army, in which Swedish, German and French were as well understood as Italian, consisted of 3100 Venetians, Prince Maximilian William of Brunswick and 2400 Hanoverians, 1000 Maltese, 1000 Slavs, 400 Papal and 400 Florentine troops. We may compare it with the composite Austro-Hungarian army of our own time, in which many different races received orders in a language, and fought for a cause, not their own. Morosini also entered into negotiations with two Greek communities noted for their intolerance of Turkish rule—the people of Cheimarra in northern Epeiros, of whom we have heard much of late years, and the Mainates, who presented an address to him. The former defeated a Turkish force that was sent against them, the latter were temporarily checked by the fact that the Turks held their children as hostages for their good behaviour[757]. Morosini succeeded, however, in forcing the Turks to surrender the old Venetian colony of Koron, whence an inscription of its former Venetian governors dated 1463 was sent in triumph to Venice[758], and his success encouraged the Mainates to assist him in besieging the fortresses of Zarnata, Kielapha and Passavâ. All three, together with the port of Vitylos and the town of Kalamata, surrendered or were abandoned by their garrisons, but a historian of Frankish Greece cannot but deplore the destruction of the two famous castles of Kalamata and Passavâ. Morosini visited that romantic spot, and by his orders the strongest parts of the fortifications were destroyed. In the campaign of 1686, Morosini, assisted by the Swedish field-marshal, Otto William von Koenigsmark, as commander of the land forces, was even more successful. Old and New Navarino opened their gates to his soldiers, who found over the gate of the old town a reminiscence of the days when it had been a dependency of the Venetian colony of Modon in the shape of two coats-of-arms, those of Morosini and Malipiero[759], the latter belonging to the governor of 1467 or to his namesake of 1489. Modon thereupon surrendered, and, although Monemvasia, the Gibraltar of the Morea, held out, the season closed with the capture of Nauplia, at that time the Turkish capital of the peninsula and residence of the tax-farmer, who collected the rents paid to the Sultan Valideh, or queen-mother, from that province. The Greek inhabitants expressed joy at returning, after the lapse of 146 years, under Venetian rule, and Father Dambira, a Capuchin, arrived on a mission from the Athenians, offering to pay a ransom, if they might be spared the horrors of a siege. Morosini asked for 40,000 reals annually for the duration of the war; but a second Athenian deputation, headed by the Metropolitan Jacob, and comprising the notables Stamati Gaspari, whose origin was Italian, Michael Demakes, George Dousmanes, and a resident alien named Damestre, succeeded in persuading him to accept 9000. He sailed to the Piræus, collected the first annual instalment and returned to Nauplia. In view of the prominent part played by General Dousmanes during the late war, it is interesting to find a member of his family among the Athenian deputies. It was not, however, of Athenian origin. Dushman in Serbian means “enemy,” and in 1404 the family is described as owning the Albanian district of Pulati, where a village, named Dushmani, still exists[760]. The Turkish government compelled the Œcumenical Patriarch to depose the Metropolitan Jacob for his participation in this mission and his philo-Venetian sentiments. But the Athenians refused to accept his successor, Athanasios, whereupon the patriarch excommunicated them and their favourite metropolitan.

The next year completed the conquest of the Morea, with the exception of Monemvasia. The Turks abandoned Patras; the two castles at either side of the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth and the former Venetian stronghold of Lepanto on the north of it were occupied; the Moslems burnt the lower town of Corinth, where the Venetians found “the great statue of the god Janus, not, however, quite intact, and some architraves of fine stone[761].” No attempt was made to defend the magnificent fortress of Akrocorinth, and Morosini was able to examine undisturbed the old wall across the isthmus and to consider the possibility, realised in 1893, of cutting a canal which should join the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs[762]. The surrender of Castel Tornese, the mint of the mediæval Morea, and of Mistra, the former capital of the Byzantine province, justified his secretary[763] in saying that by August, 1687, Venice was “possessor of all the Morea, except Monemvasia.” His successes had been partly due to the fact that the best Turkish troops were engaged in the war in Hungary, and his losses from disease had been fearful. But such was the joy of his government, that a bronze bust, with the proud title of “Peloponnesiacus,” was erected to him in his lifetime in the Doges’ Palace, where, like the monument to him at Corfù, it still remains to remind the visitor of the Republic’s last attempt to establish herself in the Morea.

But the conquest of the Morea no longer satisfied the usually cautious Venetians. Leaving Monemvasia behind him, Morosini held a council of war at Corinth, in which it was decided that, as it was too late in the season to attack the old Venetian island of Negroponte, Athens should be the next objective, as an Athenian deputation suggested. Morosini himself was opposed to this plan. He pointed out the drawbacks of even a successful attack upon Athens; it would be necessary, he argued, to provision his army entirely from the sea, as the Turkish commander at Thebes could intercept his communications by land; it would be impossible from Athens to protect the entrance to the Morea, as long as the Turks could occupy Megara; while, if it were necessary to abandon Athens, not only would the Greek inhabitants suffer at the hands of the Turks, but the Venetian exchequer would lose the annual contribution which the Athenian notables had promised to pay. His proposal was to keep a considerable force at Corinth, where food was plentiful, and to send the rest of his army into winter quarters at Tripolitsa in the centre of the Morea, where there was plenty of forage and whence the Venetian domination over the peninsula—the main object of the expedition—could be best established upon solid foundations. Events proved Morosini’s forecast to have been accurate. The council, however, decided upon a compromise: the army was to go into three separate winter quarters—at Corinth, Tripolitsa, and Nauplia—but first an attempt was to be made upon Athens, unless that city would pay a ransom of 50,000 to 60,000 reals[764]. No time was lost in carrying out this decision. Most of the fleet under Venier was sent to the channel which separates Negroponte from the mainland, with the object of deluding the Turks into the belief that that island was the aim of Morosini’s forces. Meanwhile Morosini, with 9880 men (including one or two Scottish volunteers) and 870 horses, on September 21, 1687, cast anchor in the Piræus, Porto Leone, as it was then called from the statue of a lion which stood at its mouth. Thither a deputation of Athenian notables, the brothers Peter and Demetrios Gaspari, Spyridon Peroules, the schoolmaster Dr Argyros Benaldes, and others hastened to make submission to Venice[765]. Although Sir Paul Rycaut, as the result of eighteen years’ diplomatic experience in Turkey, wrote in that very year, that “the Greeks have an inclination to the Muscovite beyond any other Christian prince,” there was a special reason for the popularity of Venice at Athens. Many young Athenians had been educated at the Flangineion at Venice, and the recent outrage of the Turks upon the Athenian notable, Limponas, made the Greeks eager to welcome any Christians who would free them from their Moslem rulers.

The Turks were not unprepared for the Venetian invasion. They had taken down the beautiful temple of Nike Apteros and out of its materials raised the walls of the Akropolis and built a battery. Fortunately, although there was a powder magazine underneath it, the venerable stones of this temple received no damage during the siege. When, in 1836, the Bavarian architects reconstructed it, they found not a single block missing (except what Lord Elgin had carried off) nor a bullet-mark upon it[766]. Within the Akropolis, thus strengthened, the Turkish inhabitants of Athens took refuge with their effects and ammunition, hoping that “the castle” would hold out until relief could arrive from Thebes. The Venetians were, therefore, able to occupy lower Athens unmolested. Col. Raugraf von der Pfalz with a body of Slav and Hanoverian troops was stationed in the town; Koenigsmark encamped in the olive-grove near the Sacred Way, along which the Turkish force might be expected to march through the pass of Daphni from Thebes. As the garrison of the Akropolis refused to surrender, it was decided to bombard that sacred rock. Archæologists and historians cannot but be horrified at this act of vandalism. But in our own day we have seen the “cultured” Germans bombarding the cathedral of Rheims, and the “gentlemanly” Austrians dropping grenades close to St Mark’s at Venice, while “military necessities” involved the firing of projectiles over the Parthenon by the Allies in the crisis of December, 1916. The Venetian engineers accordingly placed their batteries on the Mouseion hill, upon which stands the monument of Philopappos, on the Pnyx, and at the foot of the Areopagos, and on September 23 the bombardment began[767].

The officer in charge of the batteries, Mottoni, Count di San Felice, was a notoriously incompetent gunner, as he had already proved at Navarino and Modon, and on this occasion his aim was so high that the bombs flew over the Akropolis and fell into the town beyond it, whose inhabitants claimed compensation for the damage to their houses. A fresh battery of two mortars was accordingly placed on the east and closer to the rock, while the miners attempted to drive a tunnel under the north wall and above the grotto of Aglauros. This attempt was, however, frustrated by the hardness of the rock, the fire of the besieged and the fatal fall of the miner’s captain from a cliff. The bombardment now, however, began to damage the buildings on the Akropolis. On the 25th a bomb exploded a small powder magazine in the Propylæa, and a deserter betrayed to the besiegers the fatal secret that the Turks had put all the rest of their ammunition in the Parthenon, then a mosque. Upon the receipt of this news the gunners concentrated their fire upon the famous temple; and, on the evening of the 26th, a lieutenant from Lüneburg fired a bomb into it. The explosion was so violent that fragments of the building were hurled into the besiegers’ lines, whence cries of joy in various languages rose at the destruction wrought in a moment to a masterpiece that had survived almost intact the vicissitudes of over twenty centuries. But even among the besiegers there were some who mourned the havoc wrought by the German gunner’s too accurate aim. Morosini, in his official report to his government, merely alludes to it as a “fortunate shot,” and his secretary remarks that the “ancient, splendid and marvellous temple of Minerva” was “ruined in some parts”; but a Swedish lady, Anna Akerhjelm[768], who accompanied Countess von Koenigsmark to Greece and was then at Athens, has told in her interesting correspondence “how repugnant it was” to Koenigsmark “to destroy the beautiful temple,” which “can never in this world be replaced.” So much did von Ranke feel this act of vandalism committed by one of his countrymen, that he tried to discredit the diary of the Hessian lieutenant, Sobiewolsky, which mentions the Lüneburg gunner’s fatal shot. For the moment it failed to attain even the practical effect of ending the siege. The Turks, expecting the arrival of their deliverer from Thebes, still held out; but when Koenigsmark went to meet the advancing army and its commander retired without a blow, when the fire, caused by the explosion, had blazed for two days on the Akropolis, where over 300 putrifying corpses, including those of their commander and his son, lay beneath the ruins of the Parthenon, they hoisted the white flag and sent five hostages to ask for a cessation of hostilities. Morosini’s official dispatch informs us that he was inclined to insist upon their unconditional surrender, but that Koenigsmark pointed out the importance of having possession of the Akropolis and the proved difficulty of taking so strong a position by force. Accordingly, he unwillingly granted them five days, at the end of which all the Turks were to evacuate the fortress with only what they could carry on their backs, leaving to the victors their horses, arms, Christian slaves, and Moors. To prevent their joining their comrades at Negroponte, they were to proceed to Smyrna at their own expense on board an English pink, then in the Piræus, three Ragusan, and two French vessels. These terms were settled on the 29th, the lion-banner of St Mark was at once hoisted on the Propylæa, and punctually, on October 4, about 3000 Turks, including 500 soldiers, embarked. More than 300 others remained behind and were baptised Christians. Despite Morosini’s and Koenigsmark’s express orders the exiles were insulted by the officers and soldiers of the auxiliaries on their way down to the Piræus, and some of their women and children, as well as their bundles, were taken from them. Count Tomaso Pompei[769] was appointed governor of “the castle” with a Venetian garrison, while the rest of the Venetians and the auxiliaries were quartered in the town below. Morosini himself was anxious to attack Negroponte at once, while the Turks were still dismayed at the loss of Athens; but Koenigsmark argued that they had not sufficient forces to take that island. As the Morea was visited by a serious epidemic, it was decided to go back upon the plans fixed in the council at Corinth, and to pass the winter at Athens. To ensure communications with the sea, part of the famous Long Walls was sacrificed to build three redoubts on the way down to the Piræus, and a wall and ditch were drawn from Porto Leone to the bay of Phaleron, to serve as an entrenched camp in case of need. During these excavations ancient copper coins, vases, and lamps were discovered.

Athens had, therefore, become for the third, the Akropolis for the second time, Venetian, for Venice had occupied both town and castle from 1394 to 1402 and the town in 1466, and it is interesting to see what impression the famous city made upon the captors. One of Morosini’s officers wrote that he “fell into an extasy” on gazing upon the magnificence of the Parthenon even in its ruin, and his secretary, Locatelli, devotes ten pages to the antiquities of Athens. Both he and two other officers mention some of the classic buildings by the popular names current for centuries—for we find some of them at the time of the Turkish, some even at that of the Frankish conquest. These descriptions, evidently based on the tales of the local guides, allude to the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which then had seventeen columns standing, under the name of the “Palace of Hadrian,” the monument of Philopappos under that of the “Arch of Trajan,” the gate of Athena Archegetis under that of the “Temple of Augustus or Arch of Triumph,” the adjacent Porch of Hadrian under that of the “Temple of Olympian Zeus,” and the Pinakotheke under that of the “Arsenal of Lycurgus.” The Tower of the Winds figures as the “Gymnasium of Sokrates,” the choragic monument of Lysikrates as the “Lantern of Demosthenes.” The marble lion at the Piræus, they tell us, had been “transported there in honour of Leonidas,” while the statue of the tongueless lioness which stood towards the sea, commemorated Leaina, the mistress of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who had bitten out her tongue rather than betray them under torture[770]. These accounts are a curious contribution to the Mirabilia of Athens; but, despite this casual display of popular erudition, the army was not archæologically minded, the Germans less so than the more cultured Venetians. A Hessian ensign[771] wrote home to his mother mainly about food, regretting that the excellent fresh vegetables were over, wishing that he had a cask of German beer instead of a cask of Athenian wine, and telling her that he had drunk her health in “the temple of the celebrated Demosthenes” (the choragic monument of Lysikrates), which the Capuchins had bought eighteen years earlier and in which his colonel was lodged. He added that he had often dined at Corinth in the temple in which St Paul preached, and that Athens produced grapes of the size described in the Old Testament. Nor do we obtain much archæological information from the observant companion of Countess von Koenigsmark. She wrote that her mistress’s bad attack of measles had prevented her from making notes in her journal of the antiquities which she had seen. “Besides,” she added, “there are several descriptions of them,” and she specially alluded to the recent work of Spon and Wheler. As for the archæological knowledge of the Greek inhabitants, she wrote that “you cannot find any of them who know as much about their ancestors as foreigners do[772].” In justice to the Athenians it must be said that Romans are not always specialists upon the Forum, nor Londoners upon the Tower. She found, however, a local doctor to conduct her round the town: he told her that he belonged to the family of Perikles. Those of us who have travelled in Greece have been introduced to other descendants of the great Athenian statesman. The Swedish lady liked Athens. “The town,” she wrote, “is better than any of the others. There are some very pretty houses, Greek as well as Turkish.” She remarked upon the hospitality of the Greeks, who regaled her mistress in their homes upon orangeade, lemonade, fresh almonds, pomegranates, and jams, just as their descendants do still. Our Hessian officer, too, liked the Athenians; “they are very respectable, good people,” he wrote, “only one cannot understand them, because they speak Greek.” The English consul, however, the same Frenchman, Giraud, who had acted as cicerone to Spon, spoke German and Italian, as well as Greek and Turkish, and hobbled about with the distinguished Swedes[773]. Despite his trouble in his feet, he seems to have been still an active man, who sent two dispatches on the Venetian conquest to his ambassador at Constantinople before his French colleague had written a word about it. A Protestant from Lyons, but married to a daughter of the Athenian Palaiologoi, he was closely connected with the town.

Morosini had converted into churches the mosques of every place that he had taken. At Athens he turned two mosques into Catholic churches, in addition to the already existing chapel of the Capuchins, and made his naval chaplain, D. Lorenzo Papaplis, priest of the church of Dionysios the Areopagite[774]. For the use of his Lutheran auxiliaries he founded out of another mosque, that “of the Column,” near the bazaar, the first Protestant place of worship in Greece, which was inaugurated under the name of Holy Trinity on October 19 with a sermon by the minister Beithmann. While to the Venetian commander non-Catholics thus owe the introduction of their liturgy into Hellas, to his conquest of Athens military history is indebted for two views of the Akropolis and a general view of Athens at the moment of the explosion in the Parthenon, all sketched by the Venetian engineer, Verneda, another unofficial view of Athens, a plan of the Akropolis also by Verneda, and a plan of the town designed by him under the direction of Count di San Felice[775]. This last work has been called “the first serious plan of the town of Athens,” but its object was military rather than archæological—to explain to the council of war and the home government the extent and cost of the works necessary for the defence of Athens.

Whether Athens could be defended, that was the question which its conquerors now had to decide. At a council of war, held at the Piræus on December 31, it was pointed out that it was impossible for the small Venetian forces to fortify the town, or even to leave a garrison there to defend its inhabitants, for all the available troops would be needed for the attack upon Negroponte in the spring; while, even if it could be fortified, Athens, situated so far from the sea, could not be revictualled while the Turks were still about. The destruction of Athens was actually mooted, but the council decided to postpone that for the present, and to remove the Greek population, estimated at over 6000, besides the Albanians, into the Morea and grant to them lands in the new Venetian territory there as compensation for the loss of their old homes. A further council, held on January 2, 1688, decided, in view of the spread of the plague from the Morea to continental Greece and some of the islands, to accelerate the departure of the Athenians, so as to remove the army, and in the meanwhile to organise a sanitary administration of the town. The decision to remove the Athenians filled them with dismay; the “elders,” the vecchiardi, as they were styled in Italian, in vain offered to contribute 20,000 reals and to maintain the garrison at their own cost, if they were allowed to remain and men were left to defend “the castle[776].” The plague and Turkish raids continued to harass the Venetians and the auxiliaries, while those mutual recriminations, usual among allies of various nationalities, so greatly disturbed the harmony of the expeditionary force that Morosini formed five companies of Albanians, who might enable him to dispense with his grumbling German troops. Koenigsmark on January 30 made another proposition—to leave a garrison of 300 men on the Akropolis with provisions for sixteen months, but Morosini calculated that this would involve the presence of another hundred servants, and that for all this force a large quantity of biscuit and wine would be needed. But the argument which weighed most with the decisive council of February 12 was the water-supply. The sixteen cisterns of the Akropolis, it was said, held water for only three months, and of these the great cistern under the Parthenon had probably been damaged by the explosion, and the still larger one in the theatre of Dionysos could easily be cut off, and the water-supply of “the castle” thereby reduced to what would suffice for only fifty days. It was, therefore, unanimously decided to leave “the castle” of Athens for the present as it was, with its walls intact, but to remove all the guns and munitions, trusting to Providence for its ultimate re-capture. The council justified its resolve to abandon the place by stating that the only object of attacking Athens had been to push back the enemy from the neighbourhood of the isthmus of Corinth.

Morosini determined, however, to carry off to Venice some memorial of Athens which could vie with the four bronze horses, carried thither after the capture of Constantinople. He ordered the removal from the western pediment of the Parthenon of the statue of Poseidon (whom Morosini thought to be Zeus) and the chariot of Victory (whom the Venetians mistook for Athena); but the recent explosion had disarranged the blocks of marble, so that the workmen no sooner touched them than these beautiful sculptures fell in pieces upon the ground. Morosini, coolly announcing this disaster in a dispatch to the senate, expressed satisfaction that none of the workmen had been injured, and announced his decision to carry off instead a marble lioness without a head; but the head, as he added in a sentence worthy of Mummius, “can be perfectly replaced by another piece.” His secretary, San Gallo, took away, however, the Victory’s head, which Laborde purchased in 1840 from a Venetian antiquary, while other fragments were picked up from the ruins by other Venetian, Danish and Hessian officers. Morosini did not content himself with the headless lioness alone; he carried off the great lion, which had given to the Piræus its mediæval name, and a third lion which had stood near the temple of Theseus, where it was seen by Babin and Spon; a fourth, a lioness, which bears the inscription Anno Corcuræ liberatæ, did not reach Venice till 1716, the year of Schulenburg’s deliverance of Corfù, and, therefore, does not figure in Fanelli’s[777] previous plate of the lions before the arsenal, where they may still be seen. This done, the Venetian forces abandoned Athens on April 4 and five days later the last detachment set sail for Poros. The nett result of the Venetian capture of Athens had been disastrous. It had done irreparable damage to the Parthenon without any permanent military or political gain; it had injured the inhabitants, who had been forced to leave their homes; it had spread disease and discontent among the allies. To set against these disadvantages Venice acquired four marble lions and Morosini the fame of having temporarily held the famous city. To us Verneda’s plans are the only satisfactory result of its siege.

It remains to describe the fate of the exiled Athenians and of the conquerors of Athens. The unhappy natives had left on March 24, and some even earlier. Three boat-loads went to the Venetian island of Zante, others to the Venetian possessions in the Morea, especially to Nauplia, but most (under the leadership of the brothers Gaspari) to Ægina and, like their ancestors at the time of the Persian invasion, to Salamis (“Culuris,” as it was still called), where, as the famous Fragments from the monastery of the Anargyroi (SS. Cosmas and Damian) at Athens inform us[778], they built houses and churches at Ambelaki, while “Attica remained deserted for about three years” except for a few stragglers on the Akropolis and in some towers of the town. This is the passage upon which Fallmerayer based his theory of the desertion of Athens for nearly 400 years from the time of Justinian! The poorest went to Corinth, while the leading families were scattered about the Morea, the Benizeloi at Patras, the Limponai at Koron, Peroules at Nauplia, and Dousmanes at Gastouni in Elis. The last-named received for his services to Venice several grants of land and the title of Cavaliere di San Marco; his family subsequently became counts and migrated to Corfù, where fifty years ago one of them published an Italian account of Gladstone’s famous mission. To other Athenian notables, who had been specially useful to them, the Venetians also gave money or titles—a pension to the ex-metropolitan Jacob as compensation for his punishment by the patriarch, the title of count to the schoolmaster, Benaldes, to another scholarly Athenian, Joannes Macola, the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Justin’s History, to Taronites for his subsequent services at the siege of Nauplia, and to Venizelos Rhoïdes. Indeed, so well were these Athenian refugees treated, that a geographical shibboleth was devised to discriminate between the genuine and the pseudo-exiles from Athens[779]. To the 662 Athenian families which entered the Morea, the Venetian authorities assigned lands, vineyards, olive-trees, houses, shops, and gardens in proportion to the supposed requirements of the four classes into which Athenian society was then divided. An official Venetian report of 1701 praises their industry in trade, but remarks that “not even the common folk among them were inclined to work on the land,” and extols their “subtle intelligence,” adding that they desired to return to Athens, although the town was once more under Turkish rule, while at the same time retaining their Moreote property[780].

Athens was the climax of Morosini’s Greek career. On board his galley at Poros he received the news of his election as doge, but his first ducal enterprise, the siege of Negroponte, not only failed, despite the rising of northern Greece against the Turks, but cost the lives of Koenigsmark by fever and of Peter Gaspari, leader of the Athenian volunteers. This was the last big event of the war. The German auxiliaries left Greece; Morosini, recalled home by fever and the duties of his new office, left to his successor, Cornaro, the task of completing the conquest of the Morea by starving out the impregnable rock of Monemvasia in 1690; meanwhile a military revolution at Constantinople had placed a weak Sultan on the throne and a strong minister, the third of the Kiuprili dynasty, in power. The latter’s first act was to conciliate the Christians, and to appoint a Mainate, Liberakes Gerakares, then a prisoner in the arsenal, as bey of Maina and leader against the Venetians. The “first Christian prince of Greece” had served as a youth in the Venetian fleet; he had then turned pirate, and had during the Cretan war acted as a Turkish instrument in his native land. He now addressed a proclamation to the Athenian exiles in Salamis and Ægina, bidding them return to their homes and telling them that he was authorised by the Sultan to grant them an amnesty, at the same time threatening those who disobeyed his orders with condign punishment at his hands[781]. Under these circumstances they thought it best to come to terms with their former masters. The superstitious among them attributed the plague, the famine, the drought, and the Turkish raids upon their vineyards on the continent opposite Salamis, to the curse of the Œcumenical Patriarch. To him, therefore, they addressed an appeal, drawn up by the schoolmaster, Argyros Benaldes, describing in high-flown language their pitiable condition and imploring with deep humility his forgiveness[782]. The patriarch relented, and, probably owing to his mediation, the Athenian refugees were allowed, in 1690, to return. Several of the principal families, however, remained in voluntary exile, and their property was put up to auction and bought by a group of leading Athenians; many Athenian Greeks stayed at Nauplia till its recapture by the Turks in 1715; nor did all the Athenian Turks, who had gone to Asia Minor, return; in 1705 the town contained only 300 Turkish families. The population was, therefore, smaller and the material prosperity less than before the Venetian conquest. Great damage had been done during the “three years” of exile in Salamis; most of the houses had fallen, the raiders had burned the trees, and to their fires is attributed the blackening of Hadrian’s Porch. In order to facilitate the economic recovery of Athens, the Sultan allowed it to be free from taxes for three years; the fortifications of the Akropolis were repaired, as a pompous Turkish inscription on the old Turkish entrance, dated 1708, long testified, while a small mosque (which collapsed in 1842) was erected within the Parthenon out of the ruins caused by the besiegers’ bomb[783]. Greek education, which had languished at Athens since Benaldes had been appointed schoolmaster at Nauplia and then at Patras, was revived by the opening of a school in 1714, while the appointment of the learned geographer, Meletios, as metropolitan, gave to Athens a patron of culture. But the reinstated exiles fell to intriguing and quarrelling among themselves to such a degree over their metropolitan, that the Patriarch of Jerusalem—for the Holy Sepulchre had many possessions in Attica during the Turkish period and still possesses property near the so-called Anaphiótika at Athens—wrote to them, congratulating them on having so wise and noble a hierarch, and bidding them for the honour of their famous city cast out scandals from their midst[784]. Meletios was specially anxious to keep out of a quarrel between his flock and the representative of the voivode, at that time an absentee, whose exactions provoked an Athenian deputation to Constantinople in 1712, headed by Demetrios Palaiologos, a local notable skilled in Turkish—a rare accomplishment among the Athenian Christians, for most of their Turkish fellow citizens spoke Greek. The chief of the black eunuchs, to whom Athens still belonged, not only deposed his voivode, but, taking from his secretary’s girdle his silver ink-horn, handed it to Palaiologos with the words, “Take this ink-horn and from to-day I appoint thee voivode of Athens.” This was the first and last occasion on which a rayah was made voivode of Athens. The local Turks and the local Christian notables alike were furious at being governed by a Christian, and the former assassinated him in the house of his kinsman, Palaiologos Benizelos[785].

Monemvasia was the last durable acquisition of Venice during the war. In 1691 the island fortress of Grabusa, off the north-western extremity of Crete, was betrayed by two Neapolitan officers in the Venetian service; next year an attempt to take Canea was frustrated by the old Venetian fortifications, once erected against the Turks. Liberakes raided the Morea, but the Moreote Greeks did not rise, as he had led his Turkish patrons to expect, and the fear of being cut off by the disembarkation of a Venetian force at the isthmus made the raiders soon retire. In 1693 Morosini resumed the command, but his only acts were to re-fortify the castle of Ægina, which he had demolished during the Cretan war in 1655, the cost of upkeep being paid, as long as the war lasted, by the Athenians, and to place it and Salamis under Malipiero as governor[786]. This led the Athenians to send him a request for the renewal of Venetian protection and an offer of an annual tribute. His death at Nauplia in 1694 caused the appointment of Zeno, then governor of the Morea, as his successor. Zeno easily accomplished the capture of the rich island of Chios, but in the following year the island was abandoned. The Greek population was more favourable to the Moslems than to the Catholic Venetians, especially as the presence of the Archbishop of Naxos on board the fleet was interpreted as an intention to interfere with the Orthodox Church. Those Catholic Chiotes, on the other hand, who did not emigrate to the Morea, were dismayed at the departure of the Italians, and paid dearly for their brief triumph when the Turks returned. Four were hanged, their religion was prohibited, and their cathedral (whose Archbishop was compensated by the Venetians with the titular see of Corinth) turned into a mosque[787]. This was the last important event of the war in Greece. A series of naval battles was fought in the Ægean; and, even after the Venetians had abandoned the idea of operations north of the Morea, the continental Greeks kept up a guerilla warfare on their own account with the aid of Slavonian troops. Unable to make head against their combined efforts, Liberakes went over to the Venetians, who showed their distrust of the “Bey of Maina” by imprisoning him at Brescia, where he ended his days. In 1699, thanks to English mediation, the war ended with the peace of Carlovitz, by which Venice retained possession of the Morea, Santa Maura, and Ægina, and ceased to pay tribute for Zante, but restored to the Sultan her continental Greek conquests, such as Lepanto. The castles of Prevesa and Rumeli, the classic Antirrhion, were to be demolished, but Venice did not recover Grabusa. Thus the end of this fifteen years’ costly war found her with a Greek dominion consisting of the seven Ionian Islands, Butrinto and Parga in Epeiros, the two Cretan forts of Spinalonga and Suda, Tenos and Ægina, and the “kingdom” of the Morea, the whole of which, in the Middle Ages, had never been hers.

When the Venetians set to work to re-organise the Morea, they found their new conquest devastated and depopulated[788]. Much of the land had gone out of cultivation, for there were not hands enough to till it, and the war and the plague had aggravated the evils engendered by the long period of Turkish rule. As early as 1687 they took the first step to improve the condition of their new colony by sending three commissioners with instructions to make a survey of the country, its mills, fisheries, mines and other resources, and in 1688 sent Cornaro as its first governor, or provveditore generale. He estimated the total population, exclusive of Maina and the district of Corinth, to be only 86,468, as against 200,000, exclusive of garrisons and foreigners, before the war; Michiel, one of the three commissioners, puts it, without Maina, at 97,118, of whom 3577 were Turks converted to Christianity from interested motives, who required careful watching. Out of 2111 villages the war and the plague had laid desolate 656, and Cornaro could not find a living soul between Patras and Kalavryta. Under the Venetian rule the population gradually rose to more than it had been in the Turkish time—to 116,000 in 1692, to 176,844 in 1701, to over 250,000 in 1708. These figures were probably below the mark, owing to the characteristically oriental dislike of the natives to be numbered—a proceeding regarded as the prelude to that accurate taxation which has never been popular in the Near East. The increase was partly due to emigration from the neighbouring Turkish provinces and the Ionian Islands. Besides the Athenians, mostly congregated at Nauplia, there were the Chiote exiles at Modon, Thebans and Lepantines (after the peace), Cretans from Canea and even Bulgarians. Cornaro alone in his two years of office was successful in inducing 6000 emigrants to enter the Morea, where he gave them lands between Patras and Aigion and at Kalavryta, and promised them exemption from taxes. Ere long there was no one in the Morea who had not his house, his mill, and his bit of land—a thing very rare among the Christians of Turkey—and even the Athenians, the flower of the emigrants, were admittedly much better off than they had been at home. Only material welfare does not satisfy the whole nature of man, else ubi bene, ibi patria would have been an easy solution of many Balkan questions.

The population during the Venetian occupation was mixed. The majority was, of course, overwhelmingly Greek, but there was considerable difference between the Greeks of the various districts, as in classical times. The Moreotes did not like “foreigners,” in which designation, like the modern Italian peasants, they included people of their own race from other parts of Greece. The natives of Elis were specially hostile to “strangers,” whereas their neighbours in Achaia, from their commerce with the Ionian Islands, tolerated “foreigners.” The Venetians did not give the Moreotes in general a very good character, but the faults which they attributed to them were not due to a double dose of original sin, but to the effects of long years of Turkish rule. They are described in the Venetian reports as suspicious, lazy, and inclined to speak evil of each other. Suspicion is a common quality of southern nations, and laziness was excusable under the Turkish system, when the industrious man was punished by being heavily mulcted in the fruits of his industry. With the Turkish dress the Greeks retained the Turkish maxims, but it was noticed that the women of Monemvasia had preserved from the previous Venetian occupation the old Venetian dress. The Arkadians were “rustics and truly Arkadian, but full of wiles,” and there was considerable polish at Kalamata. The Cretans were an exception; brought up under Venetian rule for centuries, they were very industrious. The Ionians were restless, but more cultured than the Moreotes, of whom the most civilised were the townsfolk of Mistra, who “dressed and lived with more splendour than the others, boasting to be the remnant of the true Spartan blood.” All the people of the country round Mistra were pure Greeks, but the town contained over 400 Jews, whose descendants Chateaubriand[789] found there in 1806, and whose compatriots’ funeral inscriptions I noticed in the museum there. The Jewish element in the Morea was, however, small—it was a poor country—and the only other Hebrew colonies were at Nauplia and Patras. Truth was not the strong point of the Naupliotes, but they were loyal to Venice, as were from the first the Mainates, who abhorred the very name of the Turks, of whom the other Greeks stood in awe, but had a rooted objection to paying taxes, always went armed, and “professed to observe still the institutes of Lycurgus,” of which the chief was apparently the blood-feud. Besides the Greeks and the Jews, both chiefly occupied with trade, there were the Albanians, mostly agriculturists and specially numerous in the province of Romania, men of fine physique but hating war. Indeed, with the exception of the Mainates and some of the emigrants from Northern Greece, the population was essentially pacific and relied upon its foreign rulers to defend it. It was, however, litigious, and this natural tendency was increased by a “hungry crowd of small lawyers, partly from the Ionian Islands, partly from the Venetian bar,” who became the curse of the Morea.

The Venetians divided the peninsula at first into six provinces and seven fiscal boards, but the number of the provinces was reduced to four, viz. Romania (capital Nauplia), Lakonia (capital Monemvasia), Messenia (capital Navarino Nuovo), and Achaia (capital Patras). Each province had a provveditore for its administration and defence, a judicial official known as rettore, and a treasurer, or camerlengo. There were also provveditori in seven places which were not provincial capitals, viz. Mistra, Kalavryta, Phanari, Gastouni, Koron, Modon and Zarnata. Above them all stood the provveditore generale. None of these officials, as we see from Hopf’s lists[790], held office for more than two or three years, according to the usual Venetian system; but they were not new to the task of governing Greeks. The government was, therefore, experienced, but still wholly in foreign hands, although Morosini allowed a few communities to manage their local affairs, and Maina enjoyed practical independence. This liberal concession was not, however, altogether successful. “Every castle, almost every village, aspired to erect itself into a republic,” wrote one of the governors-general, and these petty communes begged Venice to send them a Venetian noble, in order that they might pose as the equals of the provincial capitals, even offering to pay his salary for the advantage conferred by his presence. Moreover, persons suddenly promoted from the status of Turkish rayah to be local magnates, were not always disposed to treat the Greek peasants upon democratic principles, but rather upon those by which they had been treated themselves. An emancipated slave is apt to be a slave-driver.

One important privilege was granted to the communities from political motives—the election of the Orthodox bishops. Of all the difficulties, which Venice had to face, the greatest was the Œcumenical Patriarch, an official, who, being resident in the Turkish capital, was perforce a Turkish agent, and who, before this reform, had named the nineteen Moreote bishops and the abbots of the stavropégia—monasteries directly dependent upon him. These, in 1701, formed 26 out of the total of 158 (with 1367 monks). The Patriarch’s patronage had, therefore, been considerable, and his influence, even apart from Turkish pressure, was unlikely to be used in favour of a Catholic government. But this was not his only loss. Before the Venetian conquest, one-half of the Epiphany and Easter offerings of the priests and people—3 reals for every priest in the diocese and ¼ real for every household—had gone to the bishop, and one-half to the Patriarch. Morosini reduced these offerings, the philótimo as it was called, by about one-half, at the same time ordering that the whole of it should be given to the local bishop and nothing to the Patriarch. The Patriarch, thus injured in both his powers and his purse, threatened to excommunicate such communes as elected their own bishops. To this the Venetian governor-general, Grimani, retorted by forbidding the entry of the patriarchal exarch into the Morea; but his duties, mainly those of a tax-collector, were quietly undertaken by the Metropolitan of Patras, while the Patriarch became as anxious as the Turks to turn the Venetians out of the country. Unfortunately, these disadvantages of a well-meant reform were not accompanied by corresponding benefits. Simony continued to be rife, and unsuitable persons were often chosen as bishops by the communities. Nor was the Patriarch the only external influence over the Moreote church, for there were some twenty-four metóchia, or “monastic farms” belonging to monasteries in Turkish territory, which not only sent money out of the country to swell the enemy’s revenues, but were centres of political propaganda and smuggling. These difficulties were not peculiar to the Venetians: they likewise faced the Bavarian regency. The Venetian official reports show a consciousness of the policy of conciliation towards the church of the vast mass of the people. For the Catholics, outside the Venetian garrison, were few, except at Nauplia and among the Chiote exiles at Modon. Indeed, the former Archbishop of Chios was the first Catholic Archbishop of the Venetian Morea; and his successor, Mgr. Carlini, whose see was Corinth but who resided at Nauplia, was the only Catholic prelate in the whole kingdom; even as late as 1714 the Morea contained only one Catholic bishop. We find, however, the Greeks sending their children to the friars’ school to learn Italian and the rudiments of Latin, and there was a scheme for founding a college at Tripolitsa. Unfortunately the ministers of religion, as Cornaro epigrammatically wrote, seemed sometimes to be sent to the Morea “rather as a punishment for their own sins than to correct the sins of others.”

Materially, the Venetian administration marked an advance, as the foreign occupation of Turkish territory always does, but trade was handicapped by the selfish colonial policy of Venice. Upon the Morea, “a poor country without industries or manufacture,” the Turks had imposed thirteen taxes, of which five (the haratch, a further local capitation-tax, called spenza, the duty on horses’ shoes, the tax on absentee landlords, and the burden of providing and transporting food for the army at half price) fell upon the Christians alone, while the others (such as the tithe and the taxes on animals) were common to both them and the Turks. Thus, out of a total of 1,699,000 reals, the Christians paid 1,350,300, besides what was illegally extorted from them. The Venetians raised their revenue from tithes of all agricultural produce, taxes on wine, spirits, oil and tobacco, the usual Italian system of a salt monopoly, customs dues, and the Crown lands. Careful management and increased prosperity increased the revenue, only 280,000 reals in 1689, to 500,501 in 1711. The farming of the tithes was entrusted to the communes, but the Mainates refused to pay tithes, consenting, however, to pay, although reluctantly, a fixed tribute called mactù. The salt monopoly was a hardship, because, although the price was low, a peasant living near the chief salt-pans at Thermisi was not allowed to buy his salt on the spot, but had to make a long journey to some distant magazine. Agriculture improved after the peace of Carlovitz and the fortification of Nauplia, when it became clear that Venice intended to stay and security of tenure was thus assured. But the customs dues yielded little, because the Republic forbade the creation of industries likely to compete with those of Venice, and compelled the Moreotes to send every article to that city. English merchants, therefore, found it cheaper to trade with Turkey, and the governors-general in vain pointed out the folly of this commercial policy, which caused the decline of such industries as that of silk at Mistra, until it was revived by the Chiote exiles at Modon. As the foreign garrison could not stomach the resinous wine, and began to import foreign vintages, efforts were made to extend and improve the local vineyards. The currant, which is now successfully cultivated along the Moreote shore of the Corinthian Gulf, had, indeed, been known in the peninsula as far back as the fourteenth century, when it is mentioned by Pegalotti[791]; but it was not till after the Turkish reconquest that it was grown and exported in large quantities for the consumption of northern races. Even with these drawbacks, however, and the burden of having to contribute to the maintenance of Cerigo and Ægina, both united administratively with the Morea since the peace, the peninsula not only paid all the expenses of administration but furnished a substantial balance to the naval defence of the Republic, in which it was directly interested. Land defence was a more difficult question. Of the natives only the Mainates wanted to be soldiers, nor could the Greeks be trusted with arms, while French consuls, anxious to weaken Venice, encouraged French mercenaries, as at Suda and Spinalonga[792], to desert her service.

The fact was that, like Great Britain in the Ionian Islands and Cyprus, and Austria-Hungary in Bosnia and the Herzegovina, Venice had improved the administration, without winning the love of her alien subjects. Foreign domination, even under the most favourable circumstances, never succeeds in satisfying the Balkan races, whose national feelings are keenly developed. The Venetian governors, as their reports show, were well-meaning men, but they were aliens in race and religion to the governed. Even had their administration been perfect, that fact alone would have rendered it unpopular after the first feeling of relief at the expulsion of the Turkish yoke was over. Liberated peoples, especially in the Near East, expect much from their western administrators, while, as we know in Egypt, the evils of the old corrupt rule are soon forgotten. It was so in the Morea. Thus, in 1710, the French traveller, De La Motraye[793], found the Greeks of Modon “praying for their return under Turkish domination, and envying the lot of those Greeks who still lived under it.” This was partly due to the lightness of the Turkish capitation-tax, and they added: “Venetian soldiers are quartered on us, their officers debauch our wives and daughters, their priests speak against our religion and constantly urge us to embrace theirs, which the Turks never did.” Besides, the Greeks had a feeling, justified by the result, that Turkey was stronger than Venice, and therefore desired to be on the winning side, and thus avoid reprisals. Even the rough-and-ready Turkish justice, which was administered with the stick, seemed to one Venetian governor to be more suited to the people than the interminable Venetian procedure, presided over by ignorant young nobles, assisted by venal clerks. Thus the poor suitor fared badly, for the governor-general could not be ubiquitous. Public safety, however, improved; as the local policeman was often a brigand, a local militia was organised by the communes, and a notoriously dangerous pass, like that of Makryplagi, through which the railway now descends to Kalamata, was guarded by the men of the neighbouring villages, who were authorised to levy a small toll from the travellers. Crime diminished, and it rarely became necessary to apply the penalty of death. With the Mainates, in particular, mildness and diplomacy were the only possible methods. Luxury, however, and moral depravation crept into Nauplia, the Venetian capital of the Morea, and the historian, Diedo[794], wrote that “in magnificence and pomp it had no cause to envy the most cultured capitals.” Sternly practical people, the Venetians did nothing for the classical antiquities of the Peloponnese; indeed, Grimani turned the amphitheatre of Corinth into a lazaretto; but the Venetian occupation spread abroad the names of the classic sites, and the various illustrated books upon the Morea and other parts of Greece, which were rapidly turned out from Coronelli’s “workshop,” were at once the result and the cause of the popular curiosity about this once famous land, which had emerged, thanks to Morosini’s victories, from Turkish darkness into the light of day.

As early as 1711 the Venetian government had been warned that Turkey was eager to recover the Morea, the loss of which was severely felt; yet no preparations were made to meet the coming storm, but most of the fortresses were left in a bad condition. Nothing had been done since 1696 to protect the isthmus, and Palamedi at Nauplia alone had been fortified at immense cost with those splendid works which still remain, with an occasional abandoned cannon of 1685 on the “Fig Fort,” a memorial of the Venetian occupation. Each of its bulwarks bore the name of a famous Venetian—Morosini, Sagredo and Grimani—and an inscription over the gate contains the date—1712—of its completion[795]. There were not, however, sufficient men to defend it; indeed, when war was declared the total army in the Morea consisted of only 10,735 men, while the fleet consisted of only eleven galleys and eight armed ships. In 1714, after having defeated Russia and renewed their treaty with Poland, the Turks had their hands free to attack the enemy, against whom their own desire for revenge and French commercial jealousy urged them. The moment seemed favourable, with Russia not yet recovered from her late Turkish war and pledged not to make an alliance with Venice, with the Moreote Greeks “desirous to return” (so the war-party argued) “to their old obedience.” Both sides could rely, it was true, on spiritual help; but the support of Pope Clement XI was less valuable than the threat of the Œcumenical Patriarch to excommunicate all Greeks who fought for the schismatic Republic, which had curtailed his revenues and privileges. An excuse for war was easily found: Venice, it was pretended, had supplied the Montenegrins with arms and money and received their bishop, Danilo I, at Cattaro. In vain the Republic hoped for the Emperor’s mediation, and hastily sent munitions and provisions to the Morea. It was decided to abandon all places except Nauplia, Argos, Monemvasia, Modon, Koron, Kielefa, Zarnata, and the castle of the Morea—the corresponding castle on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf had been re-fortified by Turkey in defiance of the treaty of Carlovitz—and to demolish both Navarinos. It was, however, too late.

The campaign of 1715 was an unbroken series of striking successes for the Turkish army of over 100,000 men and the large fleet. The first blow was the loss of Tenos, a Venetian colony since 1390, whose cowardly commander, Balbi, capitulated at the first summons of the Turkish admiral, subsequently expiating his conduct by imprisonment for life. Its naturally strong fortress of San Nicolo, which Tournefort[796] fifteen years before had found garrisoned by “fourteen ragged soldiers, of whom seven were French deserters,” contained abundant food and ammunition; the Teniotes, so predominantly Catholics, that the place was called “the Pope’s island,” were loyal to Venice and formed an excellent militia, which had repulsed the Turkish admiral, Mezzomorto, in the late war; and this solitary Venetian island had been regarded as “a thorn in the centre of the Turkish empire.” The Turkish army, under Ali Kamurgi, aided by many Greek militia-men from the northern shores of the gulf, crossed the isthmus and besieged Corinth. Minotto, who “held in Corinth’s towers the Doge’s delegated powers,” resisted a five days’ bombardment, although the Greek non-combatants desired to save their property by surrender, before he capitulated on condition that the garrison was transported to Corfù. But an explosion in the fortress, ascribed by Byron in The Siege of Corinth to Minotto himself, but perhaps due to accident, led the Janissaries to massacre the Venetians and Greeks. Minotto was carried off as a slave to Smyrna, where he was ransomed by the wife of the Dutch consul[797]; the Greek prisoners were sold “like cattle.” This frightened the Moreotes into submission and encouraged the Æginetans to invoke the aid of the Turkish admiral, to whom the commander, Bembo, surrendered the island without resistance. The fact that the Turkish general paid for provisions, while the Venetians had commandeered them, enlisted the interests, and therefore the sympathies, of the Moreote peasantry, and excited the surprise of the French interpreter, Brue, who has left a diary of his experiences in this campaign. Nauplia was the next objective of the invaders. The poet Manthos of Joannina, who was there when it fell, expressed the current belief of the Greeks (of whom, however, few could be induced even by high pay, to aid in the defence) that the strongly fortified capital of the Venetian Morea was betrayed by De La Salle (or Sala), a French officer in the Venetian service, who had sent the plans of Palamedi to Negroponte. Over a century later the traitor’s ruined house was pointed out to Emerson, the historian[798]. It had been pulled down and an “anathema” of stones raised on the site, upon which no one dared to build till 1859; it was called “Sala’s threshing-floor” and used for drying clothes. After a brief resistance Palamedi, on which so much had been spent, was stormed, and the storming-party thence entered the town. The captors showed special fury against the Catholics, whose Archbishop, Carlini, was among the slain. The capture of Nauplia so greatly delighted Ahmed III, that he came to see the place, visiting Athens on his way—the first and last time that a Sultan set foot there since Mohammed II—and, according to a legend, presenting the gardens of Phaleron to his body-guard[799]. The garrisons of Modon and the castle of the Morea mutinied, and refused to defend those fortresses; worse still was the “ignominious surrender” of the strong and well-provisioned rock of Monemvasia by its boastful governor, Badoer, without firing a shot, at the first summons of the Turkish admiral, who subsequently admitted that he could not have taken it. Meanwhile the Venetian fleet remained inactive off Sapienza, because, as its admiral pleaded, he did not wish to add a defeat on sea to that on land! The Morea was now lost; even Maina submitted. But the commanders of the two surviving Cretan forts of Suda and Spinalonga were resolute men. Under the circumstances—for Suda’s defences were judged defective, and the French consul at Canea aided the Turkish admiral with his advice and local knowledge[800]—the small garrison did well to hold out till September 25, when it honourably capitulated. Spinalonga then surrendered without a siege, and the last fragment of Venetian rule in Crete was gone. The Sultan was as much pleased at the taking of these two places as at the reconquest of the Morea. Cerigo and Cerigotto next hoisted the white flag, and Venice was so much alarmed for the safety of Corfù, that she blew up the recent fortifications of Santa Maura and temporarily abandoned that island. The Turks occupied Butrinto and threatened Corfù; but the bravery of Schulenburg defended the latter and recovered the former and Santa Maura in 1716, and took Prevesa and Vonitza in 1717. An alliance with the Emperor, alarmed at the effect of the Turkish successes upon his Hungarian subjects, saved Venice from further losses; Great Britain offered her mediation, and the peace of Passarovitz in 1718 gave her back Cerigo and Cerigotto, and allowed her to keep Butrinto, Santa Maura, Prevesa and Vonitza. The nett result of the two wars, in which she had kept and lost the Morea, was that, as against the loss of Tenos and the three Cretan forts, which she held in 1684, she had to set off the possession of Santa Maura and the two places on the Ambrakian gulf in 1718. She had “consolidated” her Levantine dominion: Cerigo was now her farthest possession. But in her case, as in that of Turkey in our own time, “consolidation” meant decline. From that date she ceased to count as a factor in Greek affairs, except in the Ionian Islands and their continental dependencies.

The collapse of her power in the Morea in a hundred and one days proved that Venice was unable to defend the Greeks, whom she had never won over to her rule. But, although she had not gained their love, her administration had not been without some lasting benefits to them. The example of Venice, despite the venality of her judges, forced the Turks to treat their Greek subjects better, and agriculture and wine growing were improved. The Venetian occupation of the Morea had the same effect upon the Greeks as the twenty-one years’ Austrian occupation of Serbia from 1718 to 1739 upon the Serbs; it spread a higher degree of material civilisation. But even the most benevolent and most efficient government by foreigners—and a modern Greek historian has attributed both good intentions and efficiency to the Venetians—is bound to fail when national consciousness begins to awaken. After the Venetians went, the Greeks prepared to fight, not to substitute the rule of one foreign power for that of another but for independence, not for Venice, or Turkey, or Russia, but for Greece. The younger generations, which had grown up under Venetian auspices, were manlier and better than those which had only known Turkish rule. If Venice contributed thereby to preparing the way for the war of independence, it was her greatest service to the Greeks.

VII. MISCELLANEA FROM THE NEAR EAST

1. VALONA

The late Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters.

The name αὐλών, “a hollow between hills,” was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form “Valona,” or, as the Venetians often wrote it, “Avalona.” In antiquity there were, however, few allusions to this particular αὐλών, the probable date of its foundation being, therefore, fairly late, although the pitch-mine of Selenitza, three hours to the east, was worked by the Romans in the time of Ovid[801], and Pliny the Elder[802] knew the now famous island of Saseno, to which both Lucan[803] and Silius Italicus[804] allude, as a pirate resort. But there is no mention of Valona till the second half of the second century A.D., when Ptolemy[805] describes it as “a city and harbour.” It subsequently occurs several times in the Antonine, Maritime and Jerusalem Itineraries[806], and in the Synekdemos of Hierokles[807]; whereas Kanina, the little town on the hill above it, which may have been its akropolis, was “built,” according to Leake[808], “upon a Hellenic site,” and identified by Pouqueville[809] with Œneus, the fortress taken by Perseus during the third Macedonian war, and probably destroyed by Æmilius Paullus, which would thus explain its long disappearance from history.

Despite the importance of its position as a port of transit between Rome and Constantinople, Valona is rarely named even by Byzantine historians before the eleventh century. Bishops of Valona, who were at different times suffragans of Durazzo or Ochrida, are mentioned in 458, in 553, and in 519, when the legates sent by Pope Hormisdas to Constantinople were received by the then occupant of the See[810]. It was there that Peter, Justinian’s envoy, met those of Theodatus, the two Roman Senators, Liberius and Opilio, and learnt what had befallen Amalasuntha, the prisoner of Bolsena[811]. Constantine Porphyrogenitus[812] merely enumerates it as one of the cities comprised in the Theme of Dyrrachium. Possibly it was one of the Byzantine harbours between Corfù and the Drin, which escaped temporary absorption in the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon (c. 917). But Kanina was included in that of the other great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel (976-1014), until Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” overthrew that powerful monarch[813], and it is, therefore, probable that Valona too was for a brief space a Bulgarian port. The Sicilian expeditions against Greece in the eleventh and twelfth centuries naturally brought Valona into prominence as a landing-place for troops. Anna Comnena[814] frequently mentions it. Thus, in 1081, Bohemund, son of Robert Guiscard, took and burnt Kanina, Valona, and Jericho, as the ancient harbour of Eurychos (the Porto Raguseo of the Italians) was then called; Robert was nearly shipwrecked in a storm off Cape Glossa, and later on spent two months in the haven of Jericho. When he left Albania in 1082 he bestowed Valona upon Bohemund, and when he made his second and fatal expedition in 1084 it was to Valona that he crossed from Otranto. Trade privileges at Valona (renewed by subsequent Emperors in 1126, 1148 and 1187) formed part of the price which the Emperor Alexios I paid for the assistance of the Venetian fleet in this contest[815]. It was there that the Greek Admiral Kontostephanos watched for Bohemund’s return, and shortly afterwards we find Michael Kekaumenos, Imperial governor of Valona, Jericho and Kanina. In 1149, after the capture of Corfù, Manuel II went to Valona, and encamped there several days before sailing for Sicily to punish King Roger for his attack upon Greece. He landed on the islet of Aeironesion (identified by Pouqueville and Professor Lampros with Saseno); but storms prevented his “punitive expedition,” so he left Valona by land for Pelagonia[816].

The fourth crusade, which led to the dismemberment of the Greek Empire, consequently affected the Adriatic coast. The partition treaty of 1204 assigned to Venice the province of Durazzo, which included Valona, as well as Albania, and in the following year the Venetian podestà at Constantinople formally transferred these possessions to the Republic, which sent Marino Valaresso with the title of “Duke” to govern Durazzo. But meanwhile Michael I Angelos had established in western Greece the independent Hellenic principality known as the Despotat of Epeiros, which included both “Old” and “New” Epeiros (in the latter of which was Valona), extending from Naupaktos to Durazzo, and which he agreed in 1210 to hold as a nominal fief of Venice, from the river Shkumbi, south of Durazzo, to Naupaktos, paying a yearly rent, and promising to grant to the Venetian merchants a special quarter in every town of his dominions, freedom from taxes, and assistance in case of need against the Albanians[817]. Thus Valona for fifty-three years formed an integral part of the Greek Despotat of Epeiros.

The mutual rivalry of the two Greek states which had arisen out of the ruins of the Byzantine Empire—the Empire of Nicæa and the Despotat of Epeiros—suggested to the ill-fated Manfred of Sicily that he might recover the ephemeral conquests of the Sicilian Normans on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. In 1257, while Michael II of Epeiros was at war with the Nicene troops, he occupied Valona, Durazzo, Berat, the Spinarza hills (near the mouth of the Vojussa, or perhaps Svernetsi on the lagoon of Valona), and their appurtenances; and Michael, desirous of securing Manfred as an ally against his Greek rival, made a virtue of necessity by conferring these places together with the hand of his daughter Helen upon the King of Sicily on the occasion of their marriage[818] in 1259. Manfred wisely appointed as governor of his trans-Adriatic possessions a man with experience of the East, Filippo Chinardo, a Cypriote Frank, and his High Admiral. Indeed, when Manfred fell in battle at Benevento, fighting against Charles I of Anjou, in 1266, Chinardo, who married Michael II’s sister-in-law and received Kanina as her dowry, continued to hold his late master’s Epeirote dominions, but later in the same year was assassinated at the instigation of the crafty Despot[819]. The latter had doubtless hoped, now that his son-in-law was no more, to re-occupy the places which had been his daughter’s and his sister-in-law’s dowries. But a new claimant now appeared upon the scene. The fugitive Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, by the treaty of Viterbo in 1267 ceded to Charles I of Anjou “all the land which the Despot Michael gave, handed over and conceded as dowry or by whatsoever title to his daughter Helen, widow of the late Manfred, formerly Prince of Taranto, and which the said Manfred and the late Filippo Chinardo (who acted as Admiral of the said realm) held during their lives[820].” The Sicilian garrisons of Valona, Kanina and Berat held out, however, against both Michael II and Charles I, the latter of whom was for some years too much occupied with Italian affairs to intervene actively beyond the Adriatic. Accordingly, a devoted follower of Chinardo, Giacomo di Balsignano (near Bari), remained independent as castellan of Valona; but in 1269 Charles, having made this man’s brother a prisoner in Italy, declined to release him at the request of Prince William of Achaia, unless Valona were surrendered. Although he actually named one of his own supporters to take Balsignano’s place, that officer held out at Valona for four years more, when he handed over Valona, but was at once re-appointed castellan of both Valona and Kanina by Charles. Thus, in 1273, began the effective rule of the Angevins over Valona. In the following year, the Italian castellan received fiefs in Southern Italy in exchange for Valona and Kanina, and a Frenchman, Henri de Courcelles, was appointed in his stead[821]. Chinardo’s heirs, who had at first been allowed to live on at Valona, were imprisoned at Trani.

The Angevins attached considerable importance to Valona, especially from a military point of view. Frequent mention is made of the castle in the Angevin documents; Greek fire was deposited there, its well is the subject of several inquiries, and it served as a base for Charles I’s designs upon the Greek Empire, which were cut short by the Sicilian Vespers. The chief Angevin officials were a castellan (usually a Frenchman, e.g. Dreux de Vaux), a treasurer, and more rarely a “captain” of the town, who was subordinate to the castellan, who was in his turn under the Captain and Vicar-General of Albania. The garrison sometimes consisted of Saracens from Lucera, and its fidelity could not always be trusted, for a commission was on one occasion sent over to inquire whether it had sold munitions to the Greek enemies of the Angevins. Nor was the harbour, which the Venetians frequented, free from pirates[822]. After the death of the vigorous Despot Michael II, it was not so much from his feeble successor, Nikephoros I of Epeiros, as from the able and energetic Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, that the Angevins had to fear attacks upon Valona, especially after the defeat of their army and the capture of its commander at Berat in 1281. There is no documentary evidence of the presence of any Angevin governor after 1284 at Valona, which, between that date and 1297, when we find a certain “Calemanus” described as “Duke” of the Spinarza district, and, therefore, almost certainly of Valona also, must have been occupied by the Byzantines[823]. Nevertheless, the Angevins continued to regard the Epeirote lands of Manfred and Chinardo as theirs on paper. They are mentioned in the ratification of the treaty of Viterbo by the titular Latin Empress Catherine in 1294, by which they were confirmed to King Charles II, who in the same year transferred them to his son Philip of Taranto[824], then about to marry Thamar, daughter and heiress of the Despot Nikephoros I of Epeiros.

The Byzantines evidently attached considerable importance to Valona and its district, for the successive Byzantine governors were men of family and position: Andronikos Asan Palaiologos, subsequently governor of the Byzantine province in the Morea, who was son of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Asên III, connected with the reigning imperial family, and father-in-law of the future Emperor John Cantacuzene; Constantine Palaiologos, son of Andronikos II; and a Laskaris[825]. Under these exalted personages were minor officials, such as George Ganza, a friend of the Despot Thomas of Epeiros, and his son Nicholas, who successively held the office of Admiral of Valona for over twenty years, while the latter on one occasion grandiloquently styles himself protosevastos et protovestiarius et primus camerlengus of the Emperor; the sevastos Theodore Lykoudas, and Michael Malagaris, prefect of the castle of Kanina[826]. During this second Byzantine period, when Valona was civitas Imperatoris Grecorum (as a document styles it), there was a considerable trade with both Ragusa and Venice, and a colony of resident Venetian merchants there. Occasionally, however, serious quarrels arose between the Ganza family and the Ragusans and Venetians, who demanded satisfaction from the Emperor, and on one occasion Ganza’s son was killed. That there was likewise traffic with the opposite Italian coast is clear from King Robert of Naples’ repeated orders to his subjects to export nothing to a place which belonged to the hostile Byzantine Empire, and to which the Angevins still maintained their claims. For as late as 1328 Philip of Taranto named a certain Raimond de Termes commander of Berat and Valona[827], and death alone prevented him and his brother, John of Gravina, who in 1332 received the kingdom of Albania with the town of Durazzo in exchange for the principality of the Morea, from prosecuting the Angevin claims. The Albanians, however, rose and attacked Berat and Kanina in 1335, but were speedily suppressed by Andronikos III, the first Emperor who had visited Albania since Manuel I[828].

But a more formidable enemy than Angevins or Albanians now threatened Valona. The great Serbian Tsar, Stephen Dushan, was now making Serbia the dominant power of the Balkan peninsula, and the value of the harbour of Valona and the castle of Kanina could scarcely escape the notice of that remarkable man. An entry in a Serbian psalter informs us that the Serbs took Valona and Kanina[829] in the last four months of 1345 or in the early months of 1346, and Serbian they remained till the Turkish conquest. Dushan, like the Byzantines, showed his appreciation of these places by appointing as governor of Valona, Kanina and Berat his brother-in-law, John Comnenos Asên, brother of the Bulgarian Tsar, John Alexander. This Serbian governor, a Bulgar by birth, married Anna Palaiologina, widow of the Despot John II of Epeiros, and mother of the last Despot of Epeiros, Nikephoros II, and became so far Hellenised as to take the name of Comnenos (borne by the Greek Despots of Epeiros, whose successor he pretended to be, and whose title of “Despot” he adopted), and to sign his name in Greek in the two Slav documents which he has bequeathed to us[830]. Although, like his predecessors, he preyed upon Venetian and other shipping at Valona, for which the mighty Serbian Tsar paid compensation, he became a Venetian citizen[831], and was allowed to obtain weapons in Venice for the defence of Cheimarra and its port of Palermo from Sicilian pirates[832]. After the death of Dushan and in the confusion which ensued he embraced the cause of the latter’s half-brother, the Tsar Symeon, who had married his step-daughter, Thomais, against Dushan’s son, and he is last mentioned in 1363, when nearly all the Venetians at Valona died of the plague, and he perhaps with them[833]. Alexander, perhaps his son, followed him as “Lord of Kanina and Valona,” and allied himself with Ragusa[834], of which he became a citizen. The name of Porto Raguseo (Pasha Liman of the Turks), at the mouth of the Dukati valley on the bay of Valona, still preserves the memory of this connection, and was the harbour of the “argosies” of the South Slavonic Republic, whose merchants had their quarters half-way between Valona and Kanina.

In 1371 those places came into the possession of the family of Balsha, of Serbian origin, which a few years earlier had founded a dynasty in what is now Montenegro. Balsha II, who with his two brothers had already taken Antivari and Scutari (“their principal domicile”), killed a certain George, perhaps Alexander’s son—for Alexander is thought to have perished by the side of Vukashin at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—and in a Venetian document of the next year is described as “Lord of Valona.” In consequence of his usurpation the inhabitants of Valona fled for refuge to the islet of Saseno in the bay, and placed themselves under the protection of Venice[835]. Under Balsha II Valona formed part of a considerable principality, for on the death of his last surviving brother, in 1378, the “Lord of Valona and Budua” had become sole ruler of the Zeta—the modern Montenegro—and then, by the capture of Durazzo from Carlo Topia, “Prince of Albania,” assumed the title of “Duke” from that former Venetian duchy. By his marriage with Comita Musachi, he became connected with a powerful Albanian clan[836]; but his ambition caused his death, for Carlo Topia begged the Turks to restore him to Durazzo, while Balsha, like other Christian rulers of his time, instead of concentrating all his forces against the Turkish peril, wasted them in fighting against Tvrtko I, the great King of Bosnia, for the possession of Cattaro. Consequently, when the Turks marched against him, he could raise only a small army to oppose them; he fell in battle on the Vojussa in 1385, and his head was sent as a trophy to the Sultan.

Upon his death his dominions were divided; Valona with Kanina, Saseno, Cheimarra, and “the tower of Pyrgos[837]” alone remained to his widow. Left with only a daughter, Regina, she felt unable to defend all these places from the advancing Turks; so, in 1386, she offered “the castle and town of Valona” to Venice on “certain conditions[838].” The cautious Republic replied that her offer would be accepted, if she would hand over freely “the castle of Kanina with its district and the town of Valona with its district.” This shows that the Venetians, like their recent Italian representatives, realised that Valona required Kanina for its defence, as well as a certain Hinterland. The reply went on to add that, in case she declined to accept this condition, Venice would be content to take over these places, paying her half their rents for her life, while she paid half their expenses. Under those circumstances, she could remain at Valona, or come to Venice, as she chose. But, if she would accept neither proposition, then Venice would be willing to take Kanina and the other places, giving her all the rents for her life, on condition that she paid all the expenses of their maintenance. Nothing came of this negotiation; but in 1389 her envoy agreed to furnish three rowers annually to the captain of the Venetian fleet in recognition of Venetian dominion over the islet of Saseno, which commanded the bay. Thus Venice, like the late Admiral Bettòlo, considered that the occupation of that islet was sufficient. In 1393 Dame Comita Balsha made Venice a second offer of Valona. But, in the meantime, the battle of Kossovo had been fought; the Serbian Empire had fallen, and it was obvious that the Turks had become the most powerful Balkan state. Thus, although Comita was ready to give Venice the men whom she had promised in recognition of Venetian rights over “the towers of Pyrgos and Saseno,” and disposed to cede Valona, her offer was declined with thanks, because “we Venetians prefer our friends to remain in their own dominions and govern them rather than we.” Two years later her envoy, the Bishop of Albania, made a third offer of all the four places which she held: Valona, Kanina, Cheimarra, and the tower of Pyrgos, provision being made for her and her son-in-law that they might go where they liked and live honourably there. This meant in cash 7000 ducats for their lives out of the 9000 which the bishop estimated as the total revenue of the above places. The Venetians ordered their Admiral to inquire into the state of the places and the amount which they produced, before deciding, and ere that Comita died[839].

She was succeeded by her son-in-law, “Marchisa” (or Merksha) Jarkovich, “King of Serbia,” a near relative of her own by blood and a cousin of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II. He must, therefore, have been a relative of the latter’s Serbian wife, who was a daughter of Constantine Dragash, Despot of part of Macedonia[840]. He at once, in 1396, offered to cede Valona, Cheimarra, Berat, and the tower of Pyrgos to Venice, but was told that his offer could not be accepted till the Venetians had accurate information about them. He then turned to Ragusa, of which he became an honorary citizen with leave to deposit all his property there for safety. In 1398 he again applied to Venice, because he did not see how he could defend his lands against the Turks. Venice thought it undesirable that they should become Turkish, but decided first to send her Admiral to inquire into their revenues, cost, and condition, expressing a preference for leaving them in their present ruler’s hands. In 1400, as this inquiry had not yet been made, another envoy was sent from Valona to Venice, only to receive the same answer. Upon Merksha’s death, his widow sent yet another envoy to Venice in 1415, with a like result, and was reminded of her late husband’s and her subjects’ debts to the Republic. Then the end came; a document of July 21, 1418, informs us that Valona had fallen into the hands of the Turks[841]. Consequently, lest they should attack the Venetian colony of Corfù or passing Venetian ships, the Venetian bailie, who was about to proceed to Constantinople, was instructed to endeavour to obtain its restitution with that of Kanina and its other appurtenances to Regina Balsha, whose husband had been, like herself, a Venetian citizen. If the Sultan refused, then the bailie was authorised to offer up to 8000 ducats for Regina’s former possessions, and another offer was made in 1424[842]. The Turks, however, retained Valona continuously for 273 years, and, with one brief interval, for 495.

There is little record of its history in the Turkish period. In June, 1436, Cyriacus of Ancona spent two days there, and copied a Greek inscription which he found on a marble base at the Church of Georgios Tropæophoros[843]. In 1466 Venice was alarmed at the repairs executed there by its new masters, which endangered Venetian interests owing to its proximity to the Republic’s colonies in that part of the world—Corfù and its dependencies, in the south, and Durazzo, Alessio, Dulcigno, Antivari, Dagno, Satti, Scutari and Drivasto, in the north—and to the quantity of wood for shipbuilding which it could furnish. Accordingly, the Republic suggested to Skanderbeg to attack it with his own forces, and with Venetian and colonial troops[844]. Nothing came of this suggestion, but in 1472 a Corfiote, John Vlastos, offered to consign Valona and Kanina to Venice on condition of receiving a fixed sum down and an annuity; and the Republic instructed the Governor of Corfù to enter into negotiations with him[845]. This also failed, and Valona, in Turkish hands, became, as had been feared, a base for attack against the Ionian Islands and even Italy. Thence, in 1479, the Turks moved against the remaining possessions of Leonardo III Tocco, Count of Cephalonia; thence, in the following year, they sailed to take Otranto[846]. In 1501, during the Turco-Venetian war, Benedetto Pesaro entered the bay of Valona with a flotilla of light vessels, but a sudden hurricane caused the death by drowning of all his men except those taken prisoners by the Turks[847]. In 1518 the Governor of Valona, a renegade Cheimarriote, succeeded, with the aid of Sinan Pasha, the Turkish Admiral, in compelling Cheimarra to accept Turkish suzerainty by the concession of large privileges. Sinan was so greatly pleased with Valona that he became its governor. In the same year two Turkish subjects attempted from Valona a coup de main upon Corfù, and it was there that the former of the two great Turkish sieges of that island, that of 1537, was decided upon by Suleyman I[848]. In 1570 a further descent was made from Valona, where the Turks had established a cannon-foundry, upon Corfù[849]. In 1638 the attack by the Venetian fleet upon certain Tunisian and Algerian ships off Valona nearly provoked war with Turkey, and led to a temporary prohibition of trade between the inhabitants of that and of other Turkish possessions and Venice[850].

The Turco-Venetian war towards the close of the seventeenth century led at last to the Venetian occupation of Valona, then a place of 150 houses surrounded by a low wall. The motives were the fertility of the district and the desire to expel the Barbary corsairs. Morosini’s successor, Girolamo Cornaro, accompanied by many Greeks, after being delayed two days by a storm off Saseno, landed at Kryoneri, a little to the south of the town, early in September, 1690, where he was joined by 500 Cheimarriotes and Albanians. A Turkish attempt to prevent his landing was repulsed; Kanina, weakly fortified by crumbling walls, was forced to surrender, and its fall had as a natural consequence the capitulation of Valona without a blow. Cornaro, leaving Giovanni Matteo Bembo and Teodoro Cornaro as provveditori of Valona and Kanina, proceeded to attack Durazzo, but was forced by a storm to return to Valona, where, on October 1, he died[851]. Venice intended at first to keep these two acquisitions. Carlo Pisani was ordered to remain at “Uroglia” (Gervolia opposite Corfù) with four galleys for their defence, while the fortifications of Kanina were repaired and cisterns made. But when the Capitan Pasha encamped on the banks of the Vojussa to intimidate the Albanians, many of whom wished to join Venice, the garrisons began to suffer from lack of food and consequent desertions. Thereupon, Domenico Mocenigo, the new Venetian Captain-General, proposed and carried out the demolition of Kanina by mines, and wrote to the home government advocating the destruction of Valona on the ground that its preservation would cripple the campaign in the Morea. A debate upon its fate followed in the Senate. Francesco Foscari urged its retention on account of its geographical position at the mouth of the Adriatic and on a fine bay, well supplied with fresh water from Kryoneri (or “Acqua Fredda”). He alluded to the valuable oak forests in the neighbourhood, whose acorns furnished the substance known by the topical name of valonea to dyers, to the ancient pitch-mines, the salt-pans, and the fisheries. To these material considerations he added the loss of prestige involved in the surrender of a place whose capture had been celebrated with joy by Pope Alexander VIII and announced as an important event to the King of Spain, because it signified the destruction of the corsairs, so long the terror of the Papal and Neapolitan coast of the Adriatic. Besides, “Valona,” he concluded, “opens for us the door into Albania.” To him Michele Foscarini replied, proposing to leave the decision to the naval council, and this proposal was adopted. Mocenigo’s first idea had always been to abandon the place, and his resolve was confirmed by the advance of the Turkish troops under Chalil Pasha; but General Charles Sparre, a Swedish baron, who was sent to execute his orders, found that the rapid approach of the enemy made such an operation too dangerous. The Venetians accordingly burnt the suburb, but prepared to defend the town. But at the outset both Bembo and Sparre were killed by the Turkish artillery fire, and, though the garrison made a successful sortie, the Captain-General repeated his order to blow up Valona. Four cannon and one mortar were left there to deceive the Turks, and on March 13, 1691, after a siege of forty days, they too were removed and Valona evacuated and destroyed. The Turks offered no opposition to the retreating Venetians, and the opinion was freely expressed that the place could have been defended. Thus, after six months, ended the Venetian occupation of Valona[852]. When Pouqueville[853] visited it rather more than a century later, he saw the remains of the two forts blown up by the Venetians, and found that one street with porticoes recalled their former residence. In his time the population was 6000, including a certain number of Jews banished from Ancona by Paul IV. The place was then, as now, very unhealthy in summer, but he foretold a brilliant future for it, if the marshes were once drained.

The Turks neglected Valona, as they neglected all their Albanian possessions. Sinan Pasha had been so good and popular a governor that, although a native of Konieh, he was nicknamed “the Arnaut,” and his descendants long held the appointment as almost a family fief; indeed, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, the natives of Valona besieged and cut to pieces a certain Ismail Pasha, who had endeavoured to wrest the governorship of the town from one of Sinan’s descendants[854]. A generation later, however, a sanguinary feud, which broke out between the members of this governing family, led the other notables of Valona to invoke the intervention of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, who had already cast covetous eyes on the place, then ruled by Ibrahim Pasha. But the treacherous “Lion of Joannina” carried off not only Ibrahim but also the notables of Valona to the dungeons of his lake-fortress, where they were subsequently put to death. Ibrahim, however, lingered on, and was forced to address a petition to the Turkish government begging it, in consideration of his age and infirmities, to bestow the governorship of Valona and Berat upon his gaoler’s eldest son, Mouchtar Pasha, who appointed a Naxiote Christian, Damirales, as his representative in the former town. In 1820 the Turkish authorities, resolved to crush the too-powerful satrap of Joannina, easily induced the people of Valona to drive out Mouchtar’s partisans. But the population repeatedly gave the Turks cause for alarm, and in 1828 Rechid Pasha treacherously executed a powerful Bey of Valona, who had come to pay his respects to him at Joannina. Nevertheless the local people continued to resist any obnoxious Turkish authority[855].

During the first Balkan war, on November 28, 1912, Albanian independence was proclaimed at Valona, and an Albanian government formed, of which Ismail Kemal Bey was President[856]. But when an Albanian principality was created in the following year, and Prince William of Wied was chosen as its ruler, Valona recognised Durazzo as the capital. Meanwhile, Italy had intimated that she could not consent to the inclusion of Valona, to which she attached special importance, within the new Greek frontier; and insisted on the islet of Saseno, which had formed part of the Hellenic kingdom since 1864, being ceded to the Albanian principality. Greece complied with this demand, and on July 15, 1914, the Greek garrison abandoned Saseno at the order of the Venizelos Cabinet. When the European war broke out, Italy took the opportunity, on October 30, to occupy Saseno by troops under the command of Admiral Patris, who found it inhabited by twenty-one persons, and re-christened the highest point “Monte Bandiera” from the Italian flag which was hoisted there[857]. She had sent a sanitary mission to Valona itself and, on December 25, occupied that town. Then, as in 1690 and as in the days of Manfred and his successors, Kanina was likewise in Italian hands, while for the first time in its long history Valona has been connected with Great Britain, for the new jetty there was the work of the British Adriatic Mission, sent to rescue the retreating Serbian army. But, by the Tirana agreement of August 3, 1920, Italy renounced Valona (assigned to her by the treaty of London in 1915), and now holds Saseno alone.

RULERS OF VALONA

Byzantine Empire -1081 Normans of Sicily 1081-4 Byzantine Empire 1084-1204 Despotat of Epeiros 1204-57 Manfred 1257-66 Chinardo 1266 Giacomo di Balsignano 1266-73 Angevins of Naples 1273-(?)97 Byzantine Empire (?) 1297-1345/6 Serbs 1345/6-1417 Turks 1417-1690 Venetians 1690-1 Turks 1691-1912 Albanians 1912-14 Italians Dec. 25, 1914-Aug. 3, 1920 Albanians 1920-

2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE

The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history is not, as it is apt to be in some western countries, primarily a subject for examinations, but is, thanks to the popular ballads, an integral part of the national life and a powerful factor in contemporary politics. The glories of the Byzantine Empire exercise a continual fascination upon the Greeks; the conquests of the Tsar Stephen Dushan in Macedonia have been invoked as one of the Serbian claims to that disputed land; whereas no Englishman of to-day has been known to demand a large part of France on the ground that it belonged to the English Crown in the reign of Dushan’s contemporary, Edward III.

But there is a further reason for the study of Balkan history by practical men. Our judgments of the Balkan peoples are often harsh and unjust, because we do not realise the historic fact that they stepped straight out of the fifteenth century into the nineteenth (and in some cases into the twentieth), like Plato’s cave-dwellers who emerged suddenly from darkness into the full light of day. For the centuries of Turkish rule, interrupted in the case of Northern Serbia by the twenty-one years of Austrian rule between the treaties of Passarovitz and Belgrade in the eighteenth century, left them much as it found them—with their material resources undeveloped, their roads reduced to mule-tracks, their harbours undredged, their education neglected. Consequently, it was manifestly unfair to expect those who were practically contemporaries of our Wars of the Roses to enter the nineteenth century with the same ideas and the same culture as the gradually evolved states of Western Europe. The wonder rather is that so much progress has been accomplished in so short a time, especially when we remember that the eminent personages who direct the affairs of this world are apt to regard the Balkan peoples, with their deeply-rooted historical traditions and aspirations, and their extraordinarily keen sense of nationality, immensely stimulated by the victories of 1912-13, as pawns in a game, to be moved about the board as its exigencies demand. Let us Western Europeans, then, who have had no personal experience of Turkish rule, be less censorious of those who have lived under it for nearly four centuries at Semendria and for five at Skopje.

In the following pages I propose to give a general sketch of mediæval Serbian history, emphasising those points which may help us to understand the events of the last few years, and referring those who desire further details to the great (if unpolished and unfinished) work of the late Constantin Jireček, who for the first time has placed the history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages upon the impregnable rock of contemporary documentary evidence.

The Serbs, like the Bulgars, are not original inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula, where, at the dawn of history, we find three principal races—the Greeks, the Illyrians (who are perhaps the ancestors of the Albanians), and the Thracians. But a continuous residence of thirteen centuries qualifies the Serbs to be considered a Balkan people. The usually received account of their entry into the peninsula is that given by the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in his treatise “De Administrando Imperio,” written some three centuries later. He tells us that the Emperor Herakleios (610-41) gave them the territory which was later called “Serblia”—a country bounded in the time of Porphyrogenitus by Croatia on the north, Bulgaria on the south, the river Rashka near Novibazar on the east, and the present Herzegovina on the west. But a chain of historical facts proves that Herakleios merely gave to the Serbs what they had already taken. About a century before his time the Slavs, whose oldest home was in Poland, had begun to cross the Danube, and about 578 had actually appeared before Salonika. Herakleios, occupied with the war against the Persians in the East, could not defend the Western Balkans. So he made a virtue of necessity, just as, in our own day, governments have granted autonomy to lost provinces which they could no longer protect. The Danubian principalities, Bulgaria, Eastern Roumelia, Crete, and the Lebanon are examples.

This arrangement suited both parties. The Byzantine Court could keep up a formal suzerainty, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus could point in proof of it to the quite unscientific etymology of the word “Serboi” from the Latin servi, because they had become the “slaves” of the Byzantine Emperor. This national name, which first occurs in the ninth century, when we find Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, describing in 822 the “Sorabi” as “said to occupy a large part of Dalmatia,” is still applied not only to the Balkan Serbs but to those of Saxony, whose language, however, is so different that a Serb of Bautzen cannot understand a Serb of Belgrade. The later Byzantine historians, full of classical lore, sometimes call the Serbs Τριβαλλοί after the Thracian tribe, which occupied in antiquity part of modern Serbia, and the king of which is brought on the stage and made to talk broken Greek in the Birds of Aristophanes. Yet, despite this false etymology of their name, Constantine Porphyrogenitus himself admits what was doubtless the fact, that the Croats and Serbs were “subject to none.” “Thus,” in the words of Finlay[858], “the modern history of the eastern shores of the Adriatic commences with the establishment of the Sclavonian colonies in Dalmatia.” Of the two pre-existing elements in the population, the Romans, as Constantine Porphyrogenitus says, retired into the coast-towns, while the Illyrian aborigines were pushed southward into the country which since the eleventh century has borne the name of Albania from the district of Albanon near Kroja. Under the name of Ἀρβανῖται the Albanians are first mentioned in 1079.

The history of mediæval Serbia falls naturally into three sections: (1) from the entry of the Serbs into the Balkan peninsula to the close of the twelfth century—a period during which the Byzantine Empire, after finally crushing the Bulgarians, dominated the Near East, and the Serbs, divided into two separate states, played a subordinate but restive part; (2) from the rise of the Nemanja dynasty towards the close of the twelfth century to the battle of Kossovo in 1389—a period which saw Serbia rise to be for a brief space by far the greatest state in the peninsula; (3) the decline, when Danubian Serbia existed at the pleasure of the Turks, till in 1459 she received her death-blow.

During the first of these periods the only serious resistance to the Byzantine hegemony of the Balkan peninsula was offered by the Bulgarians—a Finnish, or, according to others, Tartar tribe, which entered it in 679, and became gradually absorbed in the Slavonic population, which it had conquered. The vanquished imposed their language upon the victors, but the victors, like the Angles in England, imposed their name upon the vanquished. Two powerful Bulgarian monarchs, Krum and the Tsar Symeon, in 813 and 913 threatened the very existence of Constantinople, as did the Tsar Ferdinand in 1913; and Krum was wont to pledge his nobles out of the silver-set skull of the Greek Emperor Nikephoros I, whom he had slain in battle. The Serbs, however, maintained friendly relations with these powerful neighbours till about the middle of the ninth century, when history registers the first of the long series of Serbo-Bulgarian wars, of which we have seen three in our own time. When the Serbs were united, they were able to defeat the Bulgars. But the rivalry of the hereditary princes, whom we find ruling over them at this period, led to the formation of pro-Bulgar and pro-Byzantine parties, so that the native ruler tended to become a Bulgarian or Byzantine nominee, while there was a pretender in exile at Prêslav or Constantinople only awaiting the opportunity to be restored by foreign aid. About 924, however, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, instead of placing a puppet of his own on the throne, carried away almost the whole Serbian people captive into Bulgaria. Serbia thus remained barren; and when, after Symeon’s death, the Serbian prince, Tchaslav, escaped from the Bulgarian court to Serbia, he found there only fifty men, and neither women nor children. By submitting to the Byzantine Emperor and with the latter’s help, he restored the scattered Serbs to their own country.

For the rest of the tenth century Serbian history is a blank, save for the survival of the leaden seal with a Greek inscription belonging to a Prince of Diokleia, the country called after the town of Doclea, whose ruins still stand near Podgoritza. This was the time of the great Bulgarian Tsar Samuel, under whom Bulgaria stretched to the Adriatic; and Durazzo, the key of the Western Balkans, as Byzantine statesmen considered it, became a Bulgarian port. In his days there lived on the lake of Scutari a saintly Serbian prince, John Vladimir. Samuel carried off this holy man to his own capital on the lake of Prespa. But the Tsar’s daughter, according to the story, was so greatly moved by his pious speeches and his beauty while engaged in washing his feet, that she begged her father to release him. The saint escaped prison but not matrimony; he married the love-sick Bulgarian princess; but not long after was murdered as he was leaving church by an usurper of the Bulgarian throne. His remains repose in the monastery of St John near Elbassan; his cross is still preserved in Montenegro and carried every Whitsunday in procession at dawn.

The complete destruction of the first Bulgarian Empire by the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, “the Bulgar-slayer,” in 1018, removed the danger of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and made the Danube again the frontier of the Byzantine dominions, which surrounded on three sides the Serbian lands. Manuel I added Σερβικός to the Imperial style; Serbian pretenders were kept ready at Constantinople or Durazzo, in case the Serbian rulers showed signs of independence, while high-sounding court titles rewarded their servility. The internal condition of the Serbian people favoured Byzantine policy. For them, as in our own day, there were two Serb states, and two national dynasties, one ruling over the South Dalmatian coast, the present Herzegovina, and Dioklitia, modern Montenegro, with Scutari and Cattaro for its capitals; the other governing the more inland districts from a central point in the valley of the Rashka (near Novibazar), whence Serbia obtained the name of “Rassia,” by which she was largely described in the West of Europe during the Middle Ages. Of these two dynasties the former assumed the royal title—Hildebrand addressed a letter to “Michael, King of the Slavs”—but the latter became the more important, although its head contented himself with the more modest designation of “Great jupan,” that is, the first among the jupani, or Counts (Serbian jupa = county).

Whenever opportunity offered, however, the Serbs endeavoured to emancipate themselves from Byzantium. Kedrenos informs us that “after the death of the Emperor Romanos III (in 1034) Serbia threw off the yoke of the Greeks”; Stephen Vojislav, ruler of Dioklitia, not only seized a cargo of gold, which was thrown up on the Illyrian coast, but saw a Byzantine army perish in the difficult passes of his country. A second Imperial invasion, which started from Durazzo, met with the same fate as that which befell the Austrian “punitive expedition” in December 1914. The Serbs allowed the invaders to penetrate into the Zeta valley, occupied the heights and utterly routed them as they returned, laden with booty, through a narrow gorge. Michael, Vojislav’s son, made peace with the Emperor, and received the title of protospathários, or “sword-bearer,” at the Byzantine court, while he assumed at home the title of king. But, after the crushing defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuks in Asia at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, the temptation to rise was too strong for the Balkan Slavs to resist. Accordingly, at the invitation of the Bulgarians, Michael sent them a leader in the person of his son, Constantine Bodin, who was proclaimed at Prizren “Peter, Emperor of the Bulgarians.” Bodin was, however, captured by the Byzantines, but escaped and married the daughter of a citizen of Bari—the first example but not the last of a Serbo-Italian union. At his request Pope Clement III confirmed the rights of the Archbishopric of Antivari, the ancient See, which is mentioned as an Archbishopric so early as 1067, and on the holder of which Leo XIII in 1902 conferred the title of “Primate of Serbia.” But Bodin, bellicose and crafty as Anna Comnena describes him, fell again into the power of the Byzantines. Our countryman, Ordericus Vitalis, describes him as “treating in a friendly fashion” the Crusaders who passed through his territory. Usually, however, the Crusaders had difficulty with the Serbs; and William of Tyre tells how at Nish, then a “fortified town, filled with a valiant and numerous population,” certain “Germans, sons of Belial,” set fire to the mills, thus provoking the retaliation of the natives.

The excellent Archbishop, who was sent in 1168 on an embassy to Monastir, remarks that Serbia was a country “of difficult access”; and that the Serbs, whose name he also derives from their supposedly original state of servitude, were “an uncultured and undisciplined people, inhabiting the mountains and forests, and not practising agriculture, but possessed of much cattle great and small.... Sometimes their jupani obey the Emperor: at other times all the inhabitants quit their mountains and forests ... to ravage the surrounding countries.” Yet the oldest piece of Serbian literature—a book of the Gospels in Cyrillic letters[859]—dates from this very period; and a priest of Antivari composed in Latin a history of the rulers of Diokleia, who were gradually ousted by the “Great jupani” of Rascia, who in their turn were forced to submit to the chivalrous Byzantine Emperor, Manuel I. A court poet of the period, Theodore Prodromos, represents the Serbian rivers Save and Tara, red with blood and laden with corpses, addressing the conqueror, and the Serbian jupani trembling at the roar of the lion from the Bosporus.

The death of Manuel I, in 1180, freed the Southern Slavs from Byzantine rule; and the following decade saw the foundation of the great Serbian state, which reached its zenith in the middle of the fourteenth century, and then fell before the all-conquering Turk. As has usually happened in Balkan history, this national triumph was the work of one man—Stephen Nemanja, the first great name in Serbian history.

The founder of the Serbian monarchy was a native of what is now Podgoritza, whence he built up a compact Serbian state, comprising the Zeta (modern Montenegro), and the Land of Hum (the “Hill” country, now the Herzegovina), Northern Albania and the modern kingdom of Serbia, with a sea-frontage on the Bocche di Cattaro, whose municipality in 1186 passed a resolution describing him as “Our Lord Nemanja, Great jupan of Rascia.” Of the Serbian lands Bosnia alone evaded his sway, forming a separate state, which, first under bans, and then under kings, survived the Serbian monarchy till it, too, fell before the Turks; while in the land of Hum he set up his brother, Miroslav, as prince. Thus, he substituted for the aristocratic Serbian federation a single state, embraced the Orthodox faith, which was that of the majority of his people, and strove to secure its religious as well as ecclesiastical union by extirpating the heresy of the Bogomiles, or Babuni (whence the name of the Babuna pass near Monastir, so famous in the fighting of 1915), then rife in the Balkans. At the same time he sent presents to St Peter’s in Rome and St Nicholas’ at Bari.

When Frederick Barbarossa stopped at Nish on the third Crusade in 1189, Nemanja met him with handsome gifts; but we may doubt the statement of a German chronicler that he did homage for his lands to the Teutonic ruler. No German Emperor ever set foot in Nish again till the recent visit of the Kaiser to King Ferdinand, when a modern chronicle, the Wolffbureau, revived the memory of Barbarossa’s presence there. In 1195 Nemanja retired from the world, at the instigation of his youngest son, who is known in Serbian history as St Sava; and he died in 1200 as the monk Symeon in the monastery of Chilandar on Mount Athos. He, too, received the honours of a saint; his tomb is still revered in the monastery of Studenitza, which he founded; and his life was written by his eldest son and successor Stephen, and by Stephen’s brother St Sava—the beginning of Serbian historical biography.

Nemanja had never assumed the title of king, continuing to style himself as “Great jupan”; but Stephen won for himself the title of “the first-crowned king,” by obtaining, in 1217, a royal crown from Pope Honorius III. There were diplomatic reasons for the assumption of this title. The Byzantine Empire had now fallen before the Latin Crusaders; Frankish principalities had arisen all over the Near East; and the Latin ruler of Salonika had assumed the royal style. Bulgaria had arisen again, and her sovereigns had revived the ancient title of Tsar; and the King of Hungary had presumed to call himself king of “Rascia” also. To show his connection with the former kings of Diokleia, Stephen added that country to his style; to complete the independence of his kingdom, he obtained through his saintly and diplomatic brother from the Œcumenical Patriarch at Nice the recognition of a separate Serbian Church under Sava himself as “Archbishop of all the Serbian lands.” Sava was buried in the monastery of Mileshevo in the old sandjak of Novibazar, whence his remains were removed and burned by the Turks near Belgrade in 1595. Many a pious legend has grown up around the name of the founder of the national Church; but, through the haze of romance and beneath the halo of the saint, we can descry the figure of the great ecclesiastical statesman, whose constant aim it was to benefit his country and the dynasty to which he himself belonged, and to identify the latter with the national religion.

While Stephen’s successor was a feeble character, the second Bulgarian Empire reached its zenith under the great Tsar John Asên II, who boasted in a still extant inscription in his capital of Trnovo, then the centre of Balkan politics, that he had “conquered all the lands from Adrianople to Durazzo.” The next Serbian King Vladislav was his son-in-law; St Sava died as his guest. But the hegemony of Bulgaria disappeared at his death in 1241; there, too, the national resurrection had been the work of one man. The Greeks regained their influence in Macedonia, and in 1261 recaptured Constantinople from the Latins.

We have an interesting description of life at the Serbian court in the time of the next King, Stephen Urosh I[860] (c. 1268), from the Byzantine historian Pachymeres. There was a project for a marriage between a daughter of the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, and a son of Stephen Urosh. First, however, two envoys were sent to report, and the Empress specially charged one of them to let her know what sort of a family it was into which her daughter was about to marry. The pompous Byzantines were horrified to find “the great King,” as he was called, living the simple life in a way which would have disgraced a modest official of Constantinople, his Hungarian daughter-in-law working at her spindle in an inexpensive gown, and his household eating like a pack of hunters or sheep-stealers. The lack of security for travellers deepened the unfavourable impression of the envoys, and the marriage was broken off. Stephen Urosh II (1281-1321), surnamed Milutin (“the child of grace”), greatly increased the importance of Serbia. We have different pictures of this monarch from his Serbian and his Greek contemporaries. One of the former extols his qualities as a ruler, one of the latter portrays him as anything but an exemplary husband. But these characters are not incompatible, as we know from the case of Henry VIII, whom Stephen Urosh II resembled not only in the number of his wives, but in his opportunist policy. His chief object was to enlarge his dominions at the expense of Byzantium; he occupied Skopje, and established his capital there—the Serbian residence had hitherto fluctuated between Novibazar, Prishtina and Prizren—and so greatly impressed the Emperor Andronikos II with his advance towards Salonika that the latter sacrificed his only daughter, Simonis, to the already thrice-divorced monarch, giving as her dowry the territories which his son-in-law had already taken from him. Simonis, however, when she grew up—she was only a child at the time of her engagement—preferred Constantinople to the society of her husband; and nothing but his threat to come and take her by force induced her to return.

Behind this marriage of convenience there lay the project of uniting the Greek and Serbian dominions under a Serbian sceptre—a project to which the national party was resolutely opposed. At the same time, he not only had—what all Serbian rulers have coveted—an outlet on the sea, but actually occupied for a few years the port of Durazzo, that much-debated spot, which during the Middle Ages was alternatively Angevin, Serbian, Albanian and Venetian, till in 1501 it became Turkish. Nor was this astute ruler only a diplomatist and a politician; he offered the Venetians to keep open and guard the great trade route which traversed his kingdom, and led across Bulgaria to the Black Sea. A munificent founder of churches, his generosity is evidenced in Italy by the silver altar, bearing the date 1319, which he gave to St Nicholas’ at Bari, and on which he described himself as ruling from the Adriatic to the Danube; but his name is better known by the verses of Dante, who has given him a place in the Paradiso among the evil kings for his issue of counterfeit Venetian coin[861]—a common offence in the Levant during the Middle Ages:

e quel di Rascia Che male ha visto il conio di Vinegia.

A disputed succession soon ended in the enthronement of the late King’s illegitimate son, Stephen Urosh III, known in history by the epithet “Detchanski” from the famous monastery of Detchani which he founded. He had been blinded for conspiring against his father; but on his father’s death he recovered his sight, which perhaps he had never entirely lost. His reign is one of the most dramatic in Serbian history, for it affords an example of those sudden alternations of triumph and disaster characteristic of the Balkans, alike in the Middle Ages and in our own day. On June 28, 1330, he utterly routed the Bulgarians at Velbujd, as Köstendil was then called. Bulgaria became a vassal state of Serbia, which had thus won the hegemony of the Balkan peninsula. Next year, he was dethroned by his son, the famous Stephen Dushan, and strangled in the castle of Zvetchan near Mitrovitza. A contemporary, Guillaume Adam, Archbishop of Antivari, has left a description of Serbia during this period. The palaces of the King and his nobles were of wood, and surrounded by palisades; the only houses of stone were in the Latin coast-towns. Yet “Rassia” was naturally a very rich land, producing plenty of corn, wine and oil; it was well watered; its forests were full of game, while five gold mines and as many of silver were constantly worked.

The reign of Stephen Urosh IV, better known as Stephen Dushan (1331-55), marks the zenith of Serbia. As a conqueror and as a lawgiver, he resembled Napoleon; and his Empire, like that of Napoleon, crumbled to pieces as soon as its creator had disappeared. In the former capacity, he aimed at realising the dream of his grandfather, Stephen Urosh II, of forming a great Serbian Empire on the ruins of Byzantium. The civil war between the young Emperor John V Palaiologos, aided by his Italian mother, Anne of Savoy, and the ambitious John Cantacuzene, whose history is one of the most interesting sources for this period, was Dushan’s opportunity. Both parties in the struggle made bids for his support at the unfortified village of Prishtina, which had been the Serbian capital. His price was nothing less than the whole Byzantine Empire west of Kavalla, or, at least, of Salonika. Anne of Savoy, less patriotic than her rival, offered him what he asked, if he would send her Cantacuzene, then his guest, either alive or dead. But the Council of twenty-four great officers of state, whom the Serbian Kings were wont to consult, acting on the Queen’s advice, repudiated the suggestion of assassinating a suppliant. Dushan allowed the rival Byzantine factions to exhaust themselves; and, while they fought, he occupied one place after another, till all Macedonia, except Salonika, was his.

With little exaggeration he wrote from Serres to the Doge of Venice, which had conferred her citizenship upon him, styling himself “King of Serbia, Diokleia, the land of Hum, the Zeta, Albania and the Maritime region, partner in no small part of the Empire of Bulgaria, and lord of almost all the Empire of Romania.” But for the ruler of so vast a realm the title of King seemed insignificant, especially as his vassal, the ruler of Bulgaria, bore the great name of Tsar. Accordingly, on Easter Sunday 1346, Dushan had himself crowned at Skopje, whither he had transferred his capital, as “Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks.” Shortly before, he had raised the Archbishop of Serbia to the dignity of Patriarch with his seat at Petch; and the two Slav Patriarchs, the Bulgarian of Trnovo and the Serbian of Petch, placed the crown upon his head. At the same time, on the analogy of the Western Empire with its “King of the Romans,” he had his son, Stephen Urosh V, proclaimed King. Byzantine emblems and customs were introduced into the brand-new Serbian Empire; the Tsar assumed the tiara and the double-eagle, and wrote to the Doge, proposing an alliance for the conquest of Constantinople. In the papal correspondence with Serbia we read of a Serbian “Sebastocrator,” a “Great Logothete,” a “Cæsar,” and a “Despot”; the governors of important Serbian cities, such as Cattaro and Scutari, were styled “Counts”; those of minor places, like Antivari, “Captains.” Thus it is easy to see why the whole Serbian world was thrilled when, in the first Balkan war of 1912, the Crown Prince Alexander entered Skopje, the coronation-city of Dushan—at the invitation of the Austrian Consul, “to restore order”!

Dushan next extended his Empire to the south by the annexation of Epeiros and Thessaly; and assigned Ætolia and Akarnania to his brother, Symeon Urosh, and Thessaly and Joannina to the “Cæsar” Preliub. His dominions now stretched to the Corinthian Gulf, and he thought that it only remained to annex the independent Serb state of Bosnia, and to capture Constantinople, establishing what a poetic Montenegrin ruler of our day has called an “Empire of the Balkans.” This would have embraced all the races of the variegated peninsula, and perhaps kept the Turks—who, in 1353, had made their first permanent settlement in Europe, by crossing the Dardanelles and occupying the castle of Tzympe—beyond the Bosporus, and the Hungarians beyond the Save. On St Michael’s day, 1355, he assembled his nobles, and asked whether he should lead them against Byzantium or Buda-Pesth. To their answer, that they would follow him, whithersoever he bade them, his reply was “to Constantinople.” But on the way he fell ill of a fever, and at Diavoli, on Dec. 20, he died, aged 48. No Serbian ruler had ever approached so near the Imperial city; had he succeeded, and had another Dushan succeeded him, the Turkish conquest 98 years later might have been averted.

Great as were his conquests, the Serbian Napoleon was no mere soldier. His code of law, the “Zakonik,” like the “Code Napoléon,” has survived the vast but fleeting Empire of its author. Dushan’s law-book is, indeed, largely based on previous legislation, such as the canon law of the Greek Church, the statutes of Budua and other Adriatic coast-towns, and, in the case of trial by jury, on an enactment of Stephen Urosh II. For us, however, its chief value is the light which it throws upon Serbia’s political and social condition in the golden age of the Empire.

Mediæval Serbia resembled neither of the Serb states of our day. It was not, even under Dushan, an autocracy, like Montenegro before 1905, nor yet a democratic monarchy, like the modern Serbian kingdom; but the powers of the monarch were limited by the influence of the great nobles—a class stamped out at the Turkish conquest and never since revived. Society consisted of the Sovereign; the ecclesiastical hierarchy, ranging from the Patriarch to the village priest; the greater and lesser nobles; the peasants, some free, others serfs bound to the soil; slaves, servants for hire; and, at Cattaro and in a few inland places, small communities of burghers. But the magnates were the dominant section; on two occasions even Dushan had to cope with their rebellions, and they formed a privy council of twenty-four, which he consulted before deciding important questions of public policy. Their lands were hereditary; and they enjoyed the privilege of killing their inferiors with comparative impunity, for a graduated tariff (as in Saxon England) regulated the punishment for wilful murder—hanging for that of a priest or monk, burning for parricide, fratricide, or infanticide, the loss of both hands and a fine for that of a noble by a commoner, a simple fine for that of a commoner by a noble. But the law secured to the peasant the fruits of his labour; no village might be laid under contribution by two successive army-corps; but, if the peasant organised or even attended a public meeting, he lost his eyes and was branded on the face, while for theft or arson, the culprit’s village was held collectively responsible. Next to the nobles the Orthodox Church was the most influential class; indeed, the early Archbishops of Serbia were drawn from junior members of the Royal family, and their interests were consequently identical with those of the Crown, of which they were the apologists in literature, like the “official” journals of to-day.

While the great Serbia of Dushan, like the smaller Serbia of our days, was pre-eminently an agricultural state, it possessed the enormous advantage of a coastline, which facilitated trade. Dushan allowed foreign merchants to circulate freely, and showed special favour to those of Ragusa whose argosies (or ragusies) were welcomed in his ports. He allowed a Saxon colony to work the silver-mines of Novo Brdo, and to burn charcoal. His bodyguard was composed of Germans, whose captain, Palmann, obtained great influence with him. He sent missions to foreign countries to obtain information; with Venice, of which he was a citizen, his relations were particularly close—as those of Italians and Serbs ought by nature to be; while foreign ambassadors were favourably impressed with his hospitality by receiving free meals in every village through which they passed. Already—so Nikephoros Gregoras tells us—the Serbs had begun to commemorate the great deeds of their champions in their national ballads, which attained their full development after the fatal battle of Kossovo and have inspired the Serbian soldiers in their three last wars. We hear, too, of architects from Cattaro, which was the Serbian mint in the reigns of Dushan and his son. The Queen of Italy possesses a collection of the coinage of the mediæval Serbian monarchy.

Dushan’s Empire crumbled away at his death. Like that of Napoleon, it had been made too fast to weld together the four races which it contained—Serbs, Greeks, Albanians and Koutso-Wallachs. The creation of a Serbian Patriarchate alienated the Greek Church, just as the creation of a Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 sowed the seeds of disunion between Greeks and Bulgarians in Macedonia. Thus to the four different races there were added four different creeds—the Serbian Patriarchists, the Greek Patriarchists, the Albanian Catholics, and the Bogomile heretics, these last always ready to invoke a foreign invader against domestic persecution, even though that foreigner were a Mussulman. Even this strongest of Serbian monarchs, whose foot every one who entered his presence must kiss and who was “of all men of his time the tallest, and withal terrible to look upon,” as the papal legate called him, was barely equal to the task of checking the great nobles; and it was doubtless distrust of them which led him to surround himself with a foreign guard. The eminent Serbian historian and statesman, the late M. Novakovich, sums up the failure of Dushan to found a permanent state in the judgment: “Everything about his Empire was personal; the Serbian creations were only personal.”

The dying Tsar had made his nobles swear to maintain the rights of his son, Stephen Urosh V, then a boy of nineteen. But the lad’s uncle, Symeon Urosh, the viceroy of Akarnania and Ætolia, disputed the succession; some nobles supported him, while others, availing themselves of the family quarrel, set up as independent princes in their particular satrapies. Symeon made Trikkala the capital of a brief Greco-Serbian Empire; and his son ended as abbot of the famous monastery of Meteoron. After four decades Serbian sway over Thessaly and Epeiros ceased to exist. An inscription at Trikkala and a church at Meteoron are now almost its only memories. Of the independent satraps the most important were the brothers Balsha (by some erroneously connected with the French house of Baux), who established themselves in the Zeta, the present Montenegro, with a seaboard on the Adriatic at Budua and Antivari, and with Scutari as their “principal residence”—“principale eorum domicilium,” as a Latin document of 1369 says. This is the historical basis of the Montenegrin claim to Scutari, where the Balsha family remained till (in 1396) it sold that city to Venice. The rest of Albania was occupied by native chiefs, the most famous of them being Carlo Topia at Durazzo, who boasted his descent from the Angevins—a fact commemorated by the French lilies on his still extant tomb near Elbassan—and from whom Essad Pasha Toptani derived his origin.

Still more famous was Vukashin, guardian and cup-bearer of the young Tsar, who drove his master from the throne in 1366, and assumed the title of king, with the government of the specially Serbian lands and Prizren as his capital. A later legend makes the usurper murder his sovereign during a hunting-party on the plain of Kossovo. But it has now been proved that Stephen Urosh V survived his supposed murderer, who fell by the hand of his own servant, fighting against the Turks at the battle of the Maritza in 1371—the first great blow that Serbia received from her future conqueror. His son, Marko Kraljevich, “the King’s son, Marko,” that great hero of South Slavonic poetry, whose exploits were portrayed by M. Meshtrovich in the Serbian pavilion of the Rome exhibition in 1911, retained Prilip; and it is recorded that, when in 1912 the Serbian army attacked that place, their officers appealed to them in the name of the national hero to liberate his residence from the Turks. Two months after Vukashin Stephen Urosh V died also, and Lazar Grbljanovich, a connection of the Imperial family, ascended the throne of an Empire so diminished that he preferred the style of “Prince” to that of Tsar, which was conferred upon him in the ballads. Serbia was no longer the leading Slav state of the peninsula—for the great Bosnian ruler Stephen Tvrtko I (1353-91) had won the hegemony of the Southern Slavs, and in 1376 had himself crowned on the grave of St Sava at Mileshevo as “King of the Serbs, and of Bosnia, and of the coast.” To secure the latter, he founded the present fortress of Castelnuovo at the entrance of the Bocche di Cattaro; and in 1385 Cattaro itself was his.

Meanwhile the nation destined to destroy both the Serbian and the Bosnian Kingdoms was rapidly advancing. The Turks took Nish in 1386, and in 1389 Lazar set out, attended by all his paladins, from his capital of Krushevatz—for the Serbian royal residence had receded within the limits of Danubian Serbia—to do battle with Murad I on the fatal field of Kossovo.

A Serbian ballad tells how on the eve of the battle the prophet Elijah in the guise of a falcon flew with a letter from the Virgin into Lazar’s tent, offering him the choice between the Empire of this world and the Heavenly kingdom, and how he chose the latter. The armies met on St Vitus’ day, June 15 (O.S.), 1389. Seven nationalities composed that of the Christians; at least one Christian vassal helped to swell the smaller forces of the Turks. While Murad was arraying himself for the fight, a noble Serb, Milosh Kobilich[862], presented himself as a deserter and begged to have speech of the Sultan. His request was granted, he entered the royal tent, and stabbed Murad to the heart, paying with his own life for this act, but gaining thereby immortality in Serbian poetry. None the less, the Turks went undismayed into battle. At first, the Bosniaks drove back one Turkish wing; but Bayezid I, the young Sultan, held his own on the other, and threw the Christians into disorder. A rumour of treachery increased their confusion; whether truly or no, it is still the popular tradition that Vuk Brankovich, Lazar’s son-in-law, betrayed the Serbian cause at Kossovo. Lazar was taken prisoner, and slain in the tent where the dying Murad lay, and with him fell the Serbian Empire.

At first Christendom believed that the Turks had been defeated. A Te Deum was sung in Paris to the God of battles; Florence wrote to congratulate the Bosnian king, Tvrtko, on the supposed victory. But Lazar’s widow, Militza, as a ballad beautifully tells the tale, soon learnt the truth in her “white palace” at Krushevatz from the crows that had hovered over the battlefield. The name of Kossovo is remembered throughout the Serbian lands, as if it had been fought but yesterday. Every year the anniversary is kept, in 1916, for the first time in England; and it was the fact that the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose this day of all days to make his entry into Sarajevo, which perhaps contributed to his assassination. Although the battle of Kumanovo in 1912 avenged Kossovo, yet the Montenegrins still wear a black band on their caps in sign of mourning for it; in many a lonely village the minstrel sings to the sound of the gusle the melancholy legend of Kossovo. On the field itself Murad’s heart is still preserved, while the Hungarian Serbs treasure in the monastery of Vrdnik the shroud of Lazar.

A diminished Serbian principality lingered on for another seventy years. Bayezid recognised the late ruler’s eldest son, Stephen Lazarevich, with the title of “Prince” (exchanged in 1404 for that of “Despot,” thenceforth borne by the Serbian princes) on condition that he paid tribute and came every year with a contingent to join the Turkish troops, and gave him the hand of his youngest sister; while Vuk Brankovich received the reward of his treachery by holding the old capital of Prishtina as a vassal of the Sultan. For a time the Turkish defeat at Angora by the Tartars in 1402 enabled the Serbian Despot to play off one Turkish pretender against another, while he purchased domestic peace by making Brankovich’s son George his heir. Thus he could devote himself to organising his country and patronising literature in the person of Constantine “the Philosopher,” who repaid his hospitality by writing his biography. He appointed a species of Cabinet, with which he discussed affairs of state, founded the monastery of Manassia, obtained Belgrade by diplomacy from the Hungarians, fortified it and adorned it with churches. In his time Venice began her colonies in Albania and what is now Montenegro—at Durazzo in 1392, Alessio in 1393, Drivasto and Scutari in 1396, Antivari and Dulcigno in 1421 (the former, however, not definitely till 1444), while in 1420 Cattaro placed herself under the protection of the Lion of St Mark, then master of most of the Dalmatian coast, save where the Ragusan Republic formed an enclave in his territory.

Serbia under George Brankovich, who succeeded as “Despot” in 1427, was thus practically a Danubian principality. The new Despot, a man of sixty years, was an experienced diplomatist; but there are times in the Balkans when force is more valuable than the subtlest diplomacy. A warlike Sultan, in the person of Murad II, sat on the Turkish throne; and he soon showed his intentions by demanding the whole of Serbia, and invading that country. Brankovich had to move his capital from Krushevatz to the bank of the Danube, where at Semendria he built the fine castle with the red brick cross in its walls which is still a memorial of Serbia’s past, while in order to secure himself an eventual refuge in Hungary, he handed over Belgrade to the Hungarian monarch, notwithstanding the protests and tears of its citizens. Brankovich in vain tried to purchase peace by giving his daughter with a regal outfit to the Sultan. Ere long, however, the Sultan, incited by a fanatic who accused him of sinning against Allah by allowing the Serbian unbeliever to bar the way to Hungary and Italy, demanded the surrender of Semendria. Brankovich fled to Hungary, thence to his last maritime possessions of Antivari and Budua, and thence to Ragusa; but the victories of John Hunyady, “the white knight of Wallachia,” induced Murad in 1444 to restore to the Despot the whole of Serbia, on payment of half its annual revenue.

Brankovich by his “enlightened egoism” managed to maintain a precarious autonomy till after the capture of Constantinople (1453). Then, Mohammed II resolved to end what remained of Serbian independence, and to capture the famous silver mines of Novo Brdo, which, as his biographer, Kritoboulos, remarked, had not only largely contributed to the splendour of the Serbian Empire, but had also aroused the covetousness of its enemies. Indeed, the picture which the Imbrian writer draws of Serbia on the eve of the Turkish conquest is almost idyllic, with her “cities many and fair,” her “strong forts on the Danube,” her “productive soil, swine and cattle, and abundant breed of goodly steeds.” But the flower of the Serbian youth had been drafted into the corps of Janissaries to fight against their fellow-Christians, the prince was a man of ninety and a fugitive, while Mohammed, like the Germans of to-day, had marvellous artillery. Still Belgrade, then a Hungarian fortress, resisted, thanks to the skill of Hunyady and the fiery eloquence of the Franciscan Capistrano. But the nonagenarian Despot was wounded in a quarrel with the Hungarian governor, and on Christmas-eve, 1456, died. Of his sons the two elder had been blinded by the late Sultan, so that his third son, Lazar III, succeeded him. His speedy death resulted, at this eleventh hour of Serbian history, in the union of both Serbia and Bosnia by the marriage of one of his daughters with the Bosnian Crown Prince, Stephen Tomashevich—an arrangement which even Dushan, in all his glory, had never achieved. The Bosnian Despot of Serbia took up his abode at Semendria; but the inhabitants, regarding their new master with disfavour, as a Catholic and a Hungarian nominee, opened their gates to the Turks; before the summer of 1459 was over, all Serbia had become a Turkish pashalik, except Belgrade, which remained a Hungarian fortress till 1521. Four years after the fall of Serbia her last Despot, then King of Bosnia, was beheaded at Jajce, and his kingdom annexed by the Turks. Twenty years after Bosnia, the Duchy of St Sava, the modern Herzegovina, met with the same fate.

Thus the history of mediæval Serbia was closed. But members of the Brankovich family continued to bear the title of Despot in their Hungarian exile, whither many of their adherents had followed them, till the extinction of their house two centuries ago; the Serbian Patriarchate, abolished in 1459, but revived by the Turks in 1557, existed till 1767; but from the time of Mohammed II to that of Black George in 1804, when Danubian Serbia rose from her long enslavement, the noblest representatives of the Serbs maintained their freedom in the Republics of Ragusa, “the South Slavonic Athens,” and Poljitza, “the South Slavonic San Marino,” and among the barren rocks of free Montenegro.

AUTHORITIES

1. Geschichte der Serben. Von Constantin Jireček, Erster Band (Bis 1371); Zweiter Band, erste Hälfte (1371-1537). Gotha: Perthes, 1911, 1918.

2. Serbes, Croates et Bulgares. Par Louis Leger. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1913.

3. Les problèmes serbes. Par Stojan Novakovich. In Archiv für slavische Philologie, Bände XXXIII.-IV. Berlin, 1912.

4. Listine. By S. Ljubich. In Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium. Eleven vols. Agram, 1868-93.

5. Acta et Diplomata Res Albaniæ mediæ ætatis illustrantia. Ed. L. de Thallóczy, C. Jireček, E. de Sufflay. Vol. I. (344-1343); Vol. II. (1344-1406). Vindobonæ, 1913-18.

6. Poésies populaires serbes. Tr. by A. Dozon. Paris, 1877.

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