MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER I.

GREECE AT THE TIME OF THE FRANKISH CONQUEST

The history of Frankish Greece begins with the Fourth Crusade, that memorable expedition which influenced for centuries the annals of Eastern Europe, and which forms the historical basis of the Eastern question. We all know how the Crusaders set out with the laudable object of freeing the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, how they turned aside to the easier and more lucrative task of overturning the oldest empire in the world, and how they placed on the throne of all the Caesars Count Baldwin of Flanders as first Latin emperor of Constantinople. The Greeks fled to Asia Minor, and there, at Nice, the city of the famous council, and at Trebizond, on the shores of the Black Sea, founded two empires, of which the former served as a basis for the re­conquest of Byzantium, while the latter survived for a few years the Turkish Conquest of the new Rome.

At the time of the Latin Conquest, most of Greece was still nominally under the authority of the Byzantine emperor. The system of provincial administration, which had been completed by Leo the Isaurian early in the eighth century, was, with some alterations, still in force, and the empire was parcelled out into divisions called Themes, a name originally applied to a regiment, and then to the district where it was quartered. Continental Greece, from the Isthmus to the river Peneios in the north and to Aetolia in the west, composed the Theme of Hellas, which thus included Attica, Boeotia, Phokis, Lokris, part of Thessaly, and the islands of Euboea and Aegina; the Peloponnese gave its name to a second Theme, but at this time these two Themes were administered together by the same official. Nikopolis, the Roman colony which Octavian had founded to commemorate the battle of Actium, formed a third Theme, which included Akarnania, Aetolia, and Epiros. Of the islands, the Cyclades, or Dodekanesos, as they were then called, were included in the Aegean Theme, the Northern Sporades in that of Salonika, while Crete, since its restoration to the Byzantine Empire from the Saracens two-and-a-half centuries earlier, was governed by an imperial viceroy. But most of the Ionian Islands no longer formed part of the emperor’s dominions. Five years before the Latins conquered Constantinople, a bold Genoese pirate named Vetrano had made himself master of the then rich and fertile island of Corfù, which he may have still held; while Cephalonia, Zante, and Ithaka had been permanently severed from the empire by the invasion of the Normans from Sicily twenty years before, and had been occupied by their admiral, Margaritone of Brindisi. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, they were in the possession of a Count Maio, or Matthew, a member of the great Roman family of Orsini, who seems to have been a native of Monopoli in Apulia and to have married the daughter of the admiral, acknowledging the suzerainty of the king of Sicily. A considerable Italian colony from Brindisi had settled in Cephalonia under the auspices of these Apulian adventurers.

In Thessaly, too, the imperial writ no longer ran. Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled through Greece about forty years before the Latin Conquest, found a part of that province in the possession of the Wallachs, whose confines extended as far south as Lamia. Whatever may have been the origin of this mysterious and interesting race, which still dwells in summer on the slopes of Pindos and on the banks of the Aspropotamos, migrating in winter to the plains of Boeotia, they had firmly established themselves in Northern Greece by the middle of the twelfth century, and the district where they lived already bore the name of Great Wallachia. That the Wallachs are of Roman descent scarcely admits of doubt. At the present day the Roumanians claim them as belonging to the same family as themselves; but the worthy Rabbi of Tudela argued, from their Jewish names and the fact that they called the Jews “brethren,” that they were connected with his own race. They showed, however, their brotherly love by contenting themselves with merely robbing the Israelites, while they both robbed and murdered the Greeks, when they descended from their mountains to pillage the plains. A terror to all, the Wlachi would submit to no king; and, twenty years before the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the foolish attempt of Isaac II Angelos to place a tax upon their flocks and herds caused a general rising, which led to the formation of the second Bulgarian, or Bulgaro-Wallachian Empire, in the Balkans. Their dis­affection and readiness for revolt was further proved, only three years before the Conquest of Constantinople, when an ambitious Byzantine commander, Manuel Kamytzes, made himself master of Thessaly with the aid of a Wallachian officer, and disturbed the peace of both continental Greece and the Peloponnese, till the revolt was suppressed.

The population of Greece at this time was not exclusively Hellenic. Besides the Wallachians in Thessaly, another alien element was represented by the Slavs of the Arkadian and Lakonian mountains, descendants of those Slavonian colonists who had entered the Peloponnese several centuries before. No one now accepts the once famous theory of Fallmerayer, that the inhabitants of modern Greece have “not a single drop of genuine Greek blood in their veins”. No unbiassed historian can, however, deny the immigration of a large body of Slavs into the Peloponnese, where such names as Charvati (the village near Mycenae) and Slavochorio still preserve the memory of their presence. But the wise measures of the Emperor Nikephoros I in the ninth century and the marvellous power of the Hellenic race for absorbing and Hellenising foreign races, a power like that of the Americans in our day, had prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slav state, a Southern Servia or Bulgaria. At this time, accordingly, they were confined to the mountain fastnesses of Arkadia and Taygetos (called in the Chronicles “the mountain of the Slavs”), where one of their tribes, the Melings, is often mentioned as residing. In the Peloponnese, too, were to be found the mysterious Tzakones, a race which is now only existing at Leonidi, in the south-east of the peninsula, and in the adjacent villages, but was then apparently occupying a wider area. Opinions differ as to the origin of this tribe, which has, to this day, a dialect quite distinct from that spoken anywhere else in Greek lands, and which was noticed as a “barbarian” tongue by the Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, in the fifteenth century. But the first living authority on their language, who has lived among them, regards them as descendants of the Lakonians and calls their speech “New Doric”, and both Mazaris and the Byzantine historians, Pachymeres and Nikephoros Gregorys, expressly say that their name was a vulgar corruption of the word “Lakones”. Scattered about, wherever money was to be made by trade, were colonies of Jews. We read of Jews at Sparta in the tenth century, and I have myself seen numbers of later Jewish inscriptions at Mistra. Benjamin of Tudela found the largest Hebrew settlement at Thebes, where the Jews were, in his day, “the most eminent manufacturers of silk and purple cloth in all Greece”. Among the 2000 Jewish inhabitants of that ancient city there were also “many eminent Talmudic scholars”, indeed, the enthusiastic Rabbi says that “no scholars like them are to be met with in the whole Grecian Empire, except at Constantinople”. Next came Halmyros with “about 400 Jews”, Corinth with “about 300”, Negroponte with 200, and Crissa, now the squalid village of Chryso, on the way up to Delphi, with the same number, who “live there by themselves on Mount Parnassos and carry on agriculture upon their own land and property”, an example of rural Judaism to be paralleled today near Salonika. Naupaktos and Ravenika had 100 Jews apiece, Patras and Lamia, or Zetounion, as it was then called, about half that number, and there were a few in Aetolia and Akarnania. The present large Jewish colony at Corfù was then represented by only one man.

The Italian element had become prominent commercially long before the Latin Conquest made the Franks territorial masters of Greece. A century earlier, Alexios I had conceded immense, and, as it proved, fatal privileges to the Venetians, in return for their aid against the Norman invaders; and Manuel I, in order to counteract the embarrassing Venetian influence, gave encouragement to the trading communities of Pisa, Genoa, and Amalfi. The Genoese asked in particular for the same privileges as their Venetian rivals in the Theban silk market. Benjamin of Tudela had found Venetian, Pisan, Genoese, and many other merchants frequenting “the large commercial city” of Halmyros in Thessaly, and the commercial treaty of 1199 between Venice and Alexios III granted to the subjects of the republic free-trade not only at Halmyros, but at numerous other places in Greece. Among them we notice the Ionian islands of Corfù, Cephalonia, Zante, and Ithaka (called in the document by its classical name); the towns of Patras, Methone, Corinth, Argos, and Nauplia in the Peloponnese; Thebes and “the district of Athens” in continental Greece; the towns of Domokó, Larissa, and Trikkala in the north; and the islands of Euboea, Crete, and the Archipelago. But there cannot have been much love lost between the Greeks and these foreigners from the west. Old men would still remember the sack of Thebes and Corinth by the Normans of Sicily; middle-aged men would have heard of the horrors of the sack of Salonika by a later Sicilian force; and the children of the islands or coasts must have shuddered when they were told that the dreaded Genoese pirates, Vetrano or Caffaro, were coming. Moreover, ever since the final separation of the Greek and Latin churches in the middle of the eleventh century, a fanatical hatred had been kindled between west and east, which is not wholly extinguished today.

But even the rule of the Franks must have seemed to many Greeks a welcome relief from the financial oppression of the Byzantine Government. Greece was, at the date of the Conquest, afflicted by three terrible plagues: the tax-collectors, the pirates, and the native tyrants. The Imperial Government did nothing for the provinces, but wasted the money, which should have been spent on the defences of Greece, in extravagant ostentation at the capital. One emperor after another had exhausted the resources of his dominions by lavish expenditure, and Byzantine officials sent to Greece regarded that classic land, in the phrase of Nicetas, as an “utter hole”, an uncomfortable place of exile. The Themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese were at this time governed by one of these authorities, styled prator, protopraetor, or “general”, whose headquarters were at Thebes. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last metropolitan of Athens before the Conquest, and brother of the historian Nicetas, a vivid, if somewhat rhetorical, account of the exactions of these personages. Theoretically, the city of Athens was a privileged community. A golden bull of the emperor forbade the praetor to enter it with an armed force, so that the Athenians might be spared the annoyance and expense of having soldiers quartered upon them. Its regular contribution to the imperial exchequer was limited to a land-tax, and it was expected to send a golden wreath as a coronation offering to a new emperor. When the Byzantine Government, too, following a policy similar to that which cost our King Charles I his throne, levied ship-money on the Greek provinces, really for the purpose of its own coffers, nominally for the suppression of piracy, Athens expected to be assessed on a lighter scale than the far richer communities of Thebes and Chalcis, and the number of sailors whom it had to furnish was fixed by a special decree. But, in practice, these privileges were apt to be ignored. The Athenians were compelled to contribute more ship-money than either of those cities, not only to the praetor, but to Leon Sgourds, the powerful magnate of Nauplia; while the Thebans, who were less exposed to piracy, managed, no doubt by judicious bribery at Con­stantinople, to obtain a golden bull releasing them from naval service, and the reduction of their pecuniary contributions below those of Athens. The indignant metropolitan complains that the praetor, under the pretext of worshipping in the church of “Our Lady of Athens”, as the Parthenon was then called, visited the city with a large retinue. He laments that one of these imperial governors had treated the city “more barbarously than Xerxes”, and that the leaves of the trees, nay almost every hair on the heads of the unfortunate Athenians, had been numbered. The authority of the praetor, he says, is like Medea in the legend: just as she scattered her poisons over Thessaly, so it scatters injustice over Greece, a classical simile which had its justification in the hard fact that it had long been the custom of the Byzantine Empire to pay the governors of the European provinces no salaries, but to make their office self-supporting, a practice still followed by the Turkish Government. Thus, as we learn from the addresses of the worthy metropolitan, the sufferings of the Greeks depended very much upon the personality of the praetor. Worse, how­ever, than the presence of this high official was that of his underlings; so that the Athenians came to regard his coming in person as much the minor of two evils. Yet, we must make some deduction for the rhetorical and professional exaggeration of the ecclesiastical author. At that time the bishops were, as they still are in Turkey, the representatives of their flocks, and Akominatos was naturally anxious to make out as good a case as possible for his clients. He admits to his brother’s connections that the annual ship­money extracted from Athens amounted to no more than £320 of our money, which may be taken as a proof of either the poverty of the place or of the exaggeration of his complaints; and he boasts that he had “lightened, or rather eradicated, the taxes”. But, at the same time, taxation had become so oppressive in the Theme of Nikopolis, that the people arose and killed their tyrannical governor, and we are expressly told that the Corfiotes had welcomed the Normans half a century earlier because of the heavy taxation of their island.

Piracy was then, as so often, the curse of the islands and the deeply indented coast of Greece. We learn from the English chronicle ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, which gives a graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, that many of the islands were uninhabited from fear of pirates, and that others were their chosen lairs. Cephalonia and Ithaka, which now appears under its mediaeval name of Vai di Compare, (first used, so far as I know, by the Genoese historian Caffaro, in the first half of the twelfth century), had a specially evil reputation, and bold was the sailor who dared venture through the channel between them. Near Athens, the islands of Aegina, Salamis, and Makronesi, opposite Lavrion, were strongholds of Corsairs, before whom most of the Aiginetan population had fled, while those who remained had fraternised with the pirates. Attica was full of persons mutilated by these robbers, who feared neither God nor man. They injured the property of the Athenian church, and dangerously wounded the nephew of the metropolitan, who found it almost impossible to collect the ecclesiastical revenues of Aegina. The dangers run by the venerable Akominatos himself on an ecclesiastical visitation to Naupaktos long remained celebrated, and we find allusions to that venturesome journey years after his death. The remedy for piracy was, as we have seen, almost worse than the disease. The Lord High Admiral, Michael Stryphnós, protected by his close relationship with the Empress Euphrosyne, sold the naval stores for his own profit; and a visit, which he paid to Athens for the ostensible purpose of laying an offering in the church of Our Lady, was regarded by Akominatos with ill-concealed alarm. Well might the anxious metropolitan tell his unwelcome guest that the Athenians regarded their proximity to the sea as the greatest of their misfortunes.

Besides the Byzantine officials and the pirates, the Greeks had a third set of tormentors, in the shape of a brood of native tyrants, whose feuds divided city against city, and divided communities into rival parties. Even in those parts of Greece where the emperor was still nominally sovereign, the real power was often in the hands of local magnates, who had revived, on the eve of the Latin Conquest, the petty tyrannies of ancient Greece. Under the dynasty of the Comneni, who imitated and introduced the usages of western chivalry, feudalism had made considerable inroads into the east. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, local families were in possession of large tracts of territory, which they governed almost like independent princes. We find a great part of fertile Messenia belonging to the clans of Brands and Cantacuzene; Leon Chamaretos, whom a modern Greek writer has made the hero of an historical novel, owned much of Lakonia; the impregnable rock of Monemvasia, the Gibraltar of Greece, which had enjoyed special liberties since the time of the Emperor Maurice, belonged to the three great local families of Mamonas, Eudaimonoyannes, and Sophianós, the first of which is not yet extinct in Greece, and Leon Sgourós, hereditary lord of Nauplia, had extended his sway over Argos of the goodly steeds, and had seized the city and fortress of Corinth, proudly styling himself by a high-sounding Byzantine title, and placing his fortunes under the protection of St Theodore the Warrior. North of the Isthmus, the family of Petraleiphas, of Frankish origin, hailing, as its name Petrus de Alpibus implies, from the Alps, held its own in the mountains of Agrapha; while in Crete, the scions of those Byzantine families which had gone there after its reconquest, had developed into hereditary lords, whose fiefs were confirmed to them by the emperor’s representative. In addition to these local magnates, members of the imperial family owned vast tracts of land in Greece. The extravagant Empress Euphrosyne, wife of Alexios III, had huge estates in Thessaly, and Princess Irene, daughter of Alexios III, owned property near Patras. The manners of these local magnates were no less savage than those of the western barons of the same period. Sgourós, the most prominent of them, on one occasion invited the metropolitan of Corinth to dinner, and then put out the eyes of his guest, and hurled him over the rocks of the citadel of Nauplia. The contemporary historian Nicetas, who was no friend of the Franks, has painted in the darkest colours the character of the Greek archons, upon whom he lays the chief responsi­bility for the evils which befell their country. He speaks of them as “inflamed by ambition against their own fatherland, slavish men, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of fighting the Latins”. Thus, on the eve of the Frankish Conquest, Greece presented the spectacle of a land oppressed by the Central Government, and torn asunder by the jealousies of its local aristocracy.

The Church still occupied an important place in Greek society. Greece at this time was ecclesiastically under the jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarch, and contained twelve metropolitan sees, of which Corinth and Athens were the two most important, while Patras, Larissa, Naupactos, Neopatras, Thebes, Corfù, Naxos, Lacedaemonia, Argos, and the Cretan see of Gortyna completed the dozen. Besides these, the islands of Leukas and Aegina, and the town of Arta were archbishoprics, and each metropolitan see had numerous bishops under it. Such was the arrangement which, with a few alterations, had been in force since the days of Leo the philosopher, three centuries earlier. There were still among the higher clergy distinguished men of learning, who bore aloft the torch of literature, which the Greek Church had received from the last writers of antiquity. Of these the most eminent then living was Michael Akominatos, the metropolitan of Athens, to whom allusion has already been made. Brother of the statesman and his­torian, Nikitas of Chonae, or Colossae, he had sat at the feet of the great Homeric scholar, Eustathios, afterwards arch­bishop of Salonika, from whom he imbibed that classical culture which inspires all his numerous productions. In the year 1175, or, according to others, in 1180 or 1182, he was appointed to the see of Athens, and from that time to the Frankish Conquest he never ceased to plead the cause of the city, to write to influential personages in Constantinople, and to address memorials to the emperor on its behalf. But he was not the only literary light of the Church in Greece. Among his contemporaries were Euthymios, the metropolitan of Neopatras, the modern Hypate, near Lamia, who wrote on theology; Apokaukos of Naupactos, who composed tolerable iambics and better letters; George Koupharas of Corfù, whose letters to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and other eminent personages of his day have been preserved in translation, and the latter’s successors, the controversialist, Pediadites, and the theologian and poet, George Bardanes. Somewhat earlier, Nicholas, bishop of Methone in Messenia, had issued a refuta­tion of neo-Platonism, two polemics against Catholic doctrines, and a life of Meletios, the reviver of monasticism in Greece; a Lacedaemonian abbot had written a biography of St Nikon, the evangelist of Crete and the patron of Sparta, where his memory is still held in honour; and Gregory, metropolitan of Corinth, had published a grammatical work, which still survives. But Akominatos has left us a sordid picture of the Athenian clergy of his time, and it is to be feared that the priests of the great church on the Akropolis were but little inspired by the majesty of their surroundings. The metropolitan found the keeper of the sacred vessels both blind and illiterate, while another of these divines had cheated his brother out of his property, and allowed him to starve. If such was the state of the clergy, “the wicked Athenian priests”, as he calls them, it was not to be supposed that the monks were much better. The number of monastic houses in Greece had greatly increased under the dynasty of the Comneni. It was then, according to tradition, that the still existing Chozobiótissa monastery was founded on the island of Amorgos; it was then, too, that the Boeotian monastery of Sagmatas received a piece of the true cross and the lake of Paralimni, into which the waters of the Copais now drain. A Cappadocian monk, Meletios, whose monastery may still be seen from the road between Athens and Thebes, had revived monasticism by his miracles in Greece towards the end of the eleventh century, and had enjoyed the patronage of the Emperor Alexios I, who assigned him an annuity out of the taxes of Attica. To him was largely due the plague of monks, often robbers in disguise, of whose ignorance Eustathios, the learned archbishop of Salonika, drew up such a tremendous indictment. Then, as now, the thoughts of the Greek monks centred mainly on mere externals; obeisances in church, the care of their gardens, and such political questions as arose, occupied their ample leisure; while scandals were no less frequent then than at the present day. Akominatos rebukes the abbot of the famous monastery of Kaisariané, at the foot of Hymettos, for misappropriating other people’s bees. Yet the same Akominatos has left a funeral oration over an Athenian archimandrite of that period, which shows that, even on the eve of the Frankish Conquest, there were men of conspicuous piety and self-sacrificing life in the Athenian monasteries. The Athenians of that day, however, seem to have taken their religion lightly, comparing unfavourably with the pious folk of Euboea, though nowhere else in Greece was the service so elaborate. Their spiritual pastor found them irregular in their attendance at church, even though that church was that “heavenly house”, the Parthenon, a cathedral of which any bishop and any congregation might have been proud. Even when they did attend, they spent their time in unseasonable conversation, or in thinking about the cares of their daily lives. Moreover, the metropolitan himself had mundane cares in plenty. Besides his task of defending his flock against rapacious governors, whom he addressed on behalf of the city at their arrival, besides missions and memorials to Constantinople, he had to guard the revenues of the see from the clutches of the imperial treasury officials, whom its agent at the capital, the so-called mystikós, could not always keep at a distance.

There was some excuse for the preoccupation of the Athenians with their worldly affairs, when we consider the material condition of their city at this period. From the silence of almost every authority, it would seem that the Norman Invasion of 1146, which fell with such force upon Thebes and Corinth, had spared Athens. The Athenians, perhaps, owed their immunity on that occasion to their insignificance. Their only manufactures at the time of the Frankish Conquest were soap and the weaving of monkish habits. They were no longer engaged in the dyeing trade, of which traces have been found in the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, but the ships of the Piraeus still took part, with those of Chalcis and Karystos, in the purple-fishing off the lonely island of Gyaros, the Botany Bay of the Roman Empire. There was still some trade at the Piraeus, for when the Byzantine admiral, Stryphnós, visited Athens, he found vessels there, and Akominatos tells us of ships from Monemvasia in the port; while we may infer from the mention of Athens in the commercial treaties between Venice and the Byzantine Empire, that the astute republicans saw some prospect of making money there. But the “thin soil” of Attica was as unproductive as in the days of Thucydides, and yielded nothing but oil, honey, and wine, the last strongly flavoured with resin, as it still is, so that the metropolitan, wishing to give a friend some idea of its flavour, wrote to him that it “seems to be pressed from the juice of the pine rather than from that of the grape”. The harvest was always meagre, and famines were common. On one occasion, only two or three of the well-to-do inhabitants could afford to eat bread; on another, the Emperor Andronikos I ordered a grant of corn to be distributed among the starving people, and we find Alexios II remitting arrears of taxation to Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, so great was their distress. Even ordinary necessaries were not always obtain­able in the Athens of the last years of the twelfth century. Akominatos could not find a good carriage-builder in the place; and, just as most Athenian coaches are now built at Thebes, so he had to beg the bishop of Gardiki, which Benjamin of Tudela had described as a “ruined place”, to send him some coach-builders. In his despair at the absence of blacksmiths and workers in iron, he was constrained to apply to Athens the words of Jeremiah: “The bellows are burnt”. The general poverty of the city was made more striking by the selfishness of the few who were comfortably off, who composed a “rich oligarchy”, and who ground down the face of the poor. Under these circumstances, it is not remarkable that emigration was draining ofif the able-bodied poor, so that the population had greatly diminished, and the city threatened to become what Aristophanes had called “a Scythian wilderness”.

Externally, the visitor to the Athens of that day must have been struck by the marked contrast between the splendid monuments of the classic age and the squalid surroundings of the new town. The walls were lying in ruins; the houses of the emigrants had been pulled down, and their sites had become ploughed land; the streets, where once the sages of antiquity had walked, were now desolate. Even though Akominatos had built new houses, and restored some of those that had fallen, Athens was no longer the “populous city, surrounded by gardens and fields” which the Arabian geographer Edrisi had described to King Roger II of Sicily half a century before the coming of the Franks. But the hand of the invader and the tooth of time had, on the whole, dealt gently with the Athenian monuments. Although the Odeion of Perikles had perished in the siege of the city by Sulla, it had been restored by the Cappadocian king, Ariobarzanes II, and his son; but Sulla had carried off a few columns of the temple of Olympian Zeus, while the pictures of Polygnotos, which the traveller Pausanias had seen in the Painted Porch, had excited the covetousness of an imperial governor under Theodosius II. The temple of Asklepios had fallen a victim to Christian fanaticism; the gold and ivory statue of Athena, the work of Phidias, had long ago vanished from the Parthenon, and Justinian had adorned the new church of the Divine Wisdom at Con­stantinople with pillars from Athens. Akominatos laments that the closest investigation could not discover a trace of the Heliaea, the Peripatos, or the Lyceum, and found sheep grazing among the few remains of the Painted Porch. “I live in Athens”, he wrote in a poem on the decay of the city, “yet it is not Athens that I see”. But still Athens possessed many memorials of her former greatness at the close of the twelfth century. The Parthenon, converted long before into the cathedral of Our Lady of Athens, was then almost as entire, and as little damaged by the injuries of time, as if it had only just been built. The metopes, the pediments, and the frieze were still intact. On the walls were the frescoes, traces of which are still visible, executed by order of the Emperor Basil II, “the slayer of the Bulgarians”, when he had offered up thanks at that shrine of the Virgin for his victories over the great enemies of Hellenism, nearly two centuries earlier. Within, in the treasury, were the rich gifts which he had presented to the church. Over the altar was a golden dove representing the Holy Ghost, and ever flying with perpetual motion. In the cathedral, too, was an ever­burning lamp, fed by oil that never failed, which was the marvel of the pilgrims. Every year people flocked thither from the highlands and islands to the feast of the Virgin, and so widely spread was the fame of the Athenian minster, that the great folk of Constantinople, in spite of their supercilious contempt for the provinces and dislike of travel, came to do obeisance there: personages of the rank of Stryphnós, the Lord High Admiral, with his wife, the sister of the empress, and Kamaterós, brother-in-law of the emperor; while, as we saw, the praetor made a pilgrimage to St Mary’s on the Akropolis an excuse for raising money out of the city. Akominatos was intensely proud, as well he might be, of his cathedral. He tells us that he “further beautified it, provided new vessels and furniture, increased its property in land and in flocks and herds, and augmented the number of the clergy”.

Of the other ancient buildings on the sacred rock, the graceful temple of Nike Apteros had been turned into a chapel; the Erechtheion had become a church of the Saviour, or a chapel of the Virgin; while the episcopal residence, which is known to have then been on the Akropolis, was probably in the Propylaea, where the discovery of a fresco of St Gabriel and St Michael seventy years ago indicates the existence in Byzantine times of a chapel of the archangels. The whole Akropolis had for centuries been made into a fortress, the only defence which Athens then possessed, strong enough to have resisted the attack of a Greek magnate like Sgourós, but incapable of repulsing a Latin army.

Like the Parthenon, the Theseion had become a Christian church, dedicated to St George. Akominatos calls it “St George in the Kerameikós”, and at the time of the Frankish Conquest it was entrusted to the care of a monk named Luke. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries a monastery and a nunnery seem to have stood there, for the names of various abbots and nuns with dates of that period have been scratched on some of the pillars, just as we learn the names of AkominAtos’s three immediate predecessors, Nicholas Hagiotheodorites, George Xerós, and George Bourtzes, from similar scrawls on the pillars of the Par­thenon. Under the splendid ruins of the temple of Zeus Olympios had grown up a chapel of St John, surnamed “at the columns”, and Byzantine inscriptions on some of the huge pillars still preserve the prayers of the priests. On one of them in the Middle Ages an imitator of St Simeon Stylites had taken up his aerial abode. Already strange legends and new names had begun to grow round some of the classical monuments. The choragic monument of Lysikrates was already popularly known as “the lantern of Demosthenes”, its usual designation during the Turkish domination, when it became the Capuchin convent, serving in 1811 as a study to Lord Byron, who from within its walls launched his bitter poem against the filcher of the Elgin marbles, and the credulous West was told that Jason had founded the Propylaea. But even at the beginning of the thirteenth century, many of the ancient names of places, sometimes names and nothing more, lingered in the mouths of the people. The classically cultured metropolitan was gratified, as a good Philhellene, to hear that the Piraeus and Hymettos, Eleusis and Marathon, the Areopagos and Kallirrhoe, Psyttaleia, Salamis, and Aegina were still called by names which the contemporaries of Perikles had used, even though Eleusis and Aegina were devastated by pirates, the Areopagos was nothing but a bare rock, the plain of Marathon yielded no corn, and the “beautifully-flowing” fountain had ceased to flow. But new, uncouth names were beginning to creep in; thus, the partition treaty of 1204 describes Salamis as “Culuris” (or, “the lizard”), a vulgar name, derived from the shape of the island, which I have heard used in Attica at the present day.

Besides the remains of classical antiquity, Athens was then rich in Byzantine churches, of which not a few have still survived the storms of the War of Independence and the Vandalism of those who laid out the modern town. Tradition has ascribed to the two Athenian Empresses of the East, Eudocia and Irene, the foundation of many churches in their native city, and the modern inscription inside the curious little Kapnikaraea church embodies the popular belief that the former had been its founder. The charming little Gorgoepékoos church, wrongly called the Old Metropolis, may have been the work of the latter, and was probably standing at this period. We know for certain, however, from the inscription over the door of St Theodore’s, that that church had been erected a century and a half before the Frankish Conquest, and there then lay just outside the city the church of the Athenian martyr Leonidas, who had died upon the cross. Attica possessed, too, many monasteries, built in pleasant spots, as Greek monasteries always are. There was the beautiful abbey of Kaisariané, with its plenteous springs of water, in a leafy glen at the foot of Hymettos; there was the monastery of St John the Hunter, still a white landmark on the spur of the mountain visible from all parts of Athens, and founded or restored by the above-mentioned monk Luke at this very time. Finer than all, there was that gem of Byzantine art, the monastery of Daphni in the pass between Athens and Eleusis, of which we find mention about the end of the eleventh century, and which a later popular tradition connected with the romantic story of the fair Maguelonne and her lover, Pierre de Provence.

Of the intellectual condition of Athens we should form but a low estimate, if we judged entirely from the lamentations of the elegant Byzantine scholar whom fate had made its metropolitan. Akominatos found that his tropes and fine periods and classical allusions were far over the heads of the Athenians who came to hear him, and who talked in his cathedral, even though that cathedral was the Parthenon. He wrote, like Apollonios of Tyana before him, that his long residence in Greece had made him a barbarian. Yet he was able to add to his store of manuscripts in this small provincial town, where a copyist of theological treatises was probably then working. Moreover, that Athens still produced persons of some culture, is evident from the fact that one of Akominatos’s own correspondents, John, metropolitan of Salonika, was an Athenian; while the future metropolitan of Corfù, Barddnes, if not an Athenian by birth, may have owed his surname of Atticus to the Attic eloquence which he had learned from Akominatos, a surname already applied to the scholarly Kosmas of Aegina, who half a century earlier had mounted the patriarchal throne at Constantinople. There is, too, some evidence to prove that, even at this late period, Athens was a place of study, whither English came from the West to obtain a liberal education. Matthew Paris tells us of Master John of Basingstoke, archdeacon of Leicester in the reign of Henry III, who used often to say that whatever scientific knowledge he possessed had been acquired from the youthful daughter of the Archbishop of Athens. This young lady could forecast the advent of pestilences, thunderstorms, eclipses, and earthquakes. From learned Greeks at Athens Master John professed to have heard some things of which the Latins had no knowledge; he found there the testaments of the twelve patriarchs, now in the Cambridge University library, and he brought back to England the Greek numerals and many books, including a Greek grammar which had been compiled for him at Athens. The same author tells us, too, of “certain Greek philosophers”, that is, in mediaeval Greek parlance, monks, who came from Athens at this very time to the court of King John, and disputed about nice sharp quillets of theology with English divines. The only difficulty about these statements is that Akominatos expressly says that he had no children, while he might have been expected to mention any adopted daughter of such talent. An eminent Paris doctor of this period, John Aegidius, is also reported to have studied at Athens; but it is possible that this is merely a repetition of the story that a much earlier Aegidius, or Gislenus, had imbibed philosophy in its ancient home during the seventh century. One is tempted to believe the romantic story that the Georgian poet, Chota Roustavéli, together with others of his countrymen spent several years there at the end of the twelfth century; and that, two or three generations earlier, the enlightened Georgian monarch, David II, prompted by his Greek wife, Irene, founded a monastery “on a mountain near Athens”, and sent twenty young people every year to study in the schools there. But neither the thirteenth century Armenian historian, Wardan, nor Tschamtschian makes any mention of Georgians at Athens, and the story seems to have arisen through a confusion between Athens and Mount Athos, where there were many Iberian monks two hundred years earlier, and where the “Monastery of the Iberians” still preserves their name.

While such was the material and the intellectual condition of Athens, there were other places in Greece far more prosperous. Thebes, the residence of the Byzantine governor, had recovered from the ravages of the Normans from Sicily half a century before, when they had ransacked the houses and churches, and had dragged off the most skilful weavers and dyers to Palermo. Benjamin of Tudela, as we saw, had found the Theban silk manufacture still flourishing even after the Norman invasion; Akominatos specially says that the luxurious inhabitants of Constantinople obtained their silken garments from Theban and Corinthian looms; and the forty pieces of silk, with which Aldxios III purchased the friendship of the Sultan of Angora, were made by his Theban subjects. Even today though there are no silks manufactured there, I have seen mulberry-trees growing in the little Boeotian town, and the memory of the silk-worms, which fed upon their leaves, lingers on in the name of morókampos (“the mulberry plain”) still applied by the peasants to the flat land near Thebes. The population of the city was numerous, and the castle, the ancient Kadmeia, was strong, if resolutely defended. Nor was Thebes the only important commercial town in Northern Greece. Both Benjamin of Tudela and Edrisi describe Halmyros as a big emporium; Larissa produced figs and wine; the fertile plain of Thessaly to which Horace had alluded in his day, and which now yields splendid harvests, provided the capital of the empire with bread; and the even richer Lelantian plain of Euboea, and the vineyards of Pteleon at the entrance of the Pagassean gulf sent it cargoes of wine. Negroponte, as the Italians called first the town of Chalcis and then the island of Euboea, from a corruption of the word Euripos, the fitful channel which separates the island from the mainland, was “a large city to which merchants resorted from all parts”, and whose seamen were engaged in the purple-fishery of the Aegean. Thirty-five years before the Conquest, the island was rich enough to equip six galleys for the imperial fleet, and the fortifications of Chalkis strong enough to resist the attack of the Venetians. Akominatos pays a tribute, which every modern visitor must endorse, to the beauty of its situation, and he contrasts the strength of the island capital, united to the continent by a narrow bridge, which could easily be defended, with the defenceless condition of the city of Athens. “I admired”, he told the islanders, “your numbers and your devotion to your spiritual pastor”, who was one of his suffragans.

 The Peloponnese, half a century before the Conquest, had contained thirteen cities and many fortresses, but we are told that the Franks found only twelve castles in the whole peninsula. At the time of the Norman raid, the strength of Akrocorinth had excited the wonder of the Sicilian admiral, and the lower town, “the emporium” as it was then called, had yielded him an even richer booty than Thebes, for its two harbours made it doubly prosperous, while the ancient tramway was still used for dragging small ships across the isthmus. Its silk manufactories still existed, and, at the date of the Frankish invasion, it was defended by walls and towers. The noble citadel was held by the dread archon of Nauplia, Léon Sgourós, whose enormities Akominatos, his deadly enemy, has depicted with all the resources of Byzantine eloquence. Of the other two cities which owned the tyrant’s sway, Argos lay spread out “like a tent” in the rich plain at the foot of the imposing castle, the mighty Larissa on the hill above; while Nauplia, across the beautiful bay, was strongly protected against attack, though the lofty eminence of Palamidi, where the convict-prison now stands, was then unfortified; the modern town was then covered by the shallow water, and the city consisted of the rocky peninsula of Itsh Kaleh alone. Farther to the south, and stronger still, lay the “sacred city” of Monemvasia, the Malmsey of our ancestors, accessible by the narrow causeway alone) to which it owed its name. Thanks to its natural position, to the wisdom of its three archons, and to the liberties which its inhabitants enjoyed, it had repelled the Norman attack; its trading vessels were seen in the Piraeus, and its chief artistic treasure, the famous picture of Christ being “dragged,” which gave its name to the Elkoménos Church, had attracted the covetous­ness of the Emperor Isaac II. On the west of the Pelopon­nese, Patras, whose wealth had been almost fabulous three centuries before, must still have had considerable commerce to attract a Jewish colony and to make it worth while for the Venetians to secure trading facilities there in their last treaty with the Byzantine Empire. In the fertile plain of Elis the finest place at the time of the Conquest was the unwalled town of Andravida, now only a squalid village which the traveller passes on the railway to Olympia. On the west coast, farther to the south, Kyparissia, then called Arkadia, was in Edrisi’s time a large place with a much-frequented harbor, a position which it is now recovering since the new railway has connected it with Kalamata and Patras. The Franks considered the anchorage bad; but on the hill, which commands the whole rich plain of Triphylia, and enjoys a prospect of the sea as far as Zante, Cephalonia, and the islands of the Harpies, “the giants”, so the country­folk said, had built the strong Hellenic tower, which forms the nucleus of the present castle.

The Messenian port of Methone, or Modon, destined to play so important a part in Frankish times as a half-way house between Venice and the East, then lay deserted, for in 1125 the Venetians had destroyed this nest of corsairs who had preyed on their merchantmen homeward-bound from the Levant, and the Sicilian admiral had again made it a heap of ruins. The other Messenian station of Korone, or Coron, which we shall find always associated with it under the rule of Venice, produced such a quantity of olive oil that no other place in the world, so it was said, could compare with it. In the far south of the peninsula, the people of Maina had a bad reputation among the Crusaders, whom the waves cast on their iron-bound coast; while the fertility of the rich Messenian plain, in which Kalamata lies, was no less extraordinary than now, though the fortress which should have defended the place was weak. At the other end of the picturesque Langada gorge, on the low hills near the right bank of the Eurotas, stood the large city of Lacedaemonia, the Byzantine town which had succeeded the classic Sparta; in the tenth century Venetian merchants had frequented this prosperous mart, and the efforts of St Nikon to expel the Jews from the community afford a further proof of its commercial importance at that period. The excavations of the British school have brought to light curious pieces of Byzantine pottery and Byzantine coins, and the traveller may still see the remains of the fine walls and towers, which, as the Chronicle of the Morea tells us, surrounded Lacedaemonia at the time of the Frankish Conquest. Towards the centre of the peninsula, “the middle land”, or Mesarea, as Arkadia was then called, there had arisen near the site of the classic Tegea the important and well-fortified Byzantine town of Nikli, a trace of which may still be found in a Christian font in the little museum of the squalid village of Piali; while, due south of Megalopolis, the city of Veligosti, now a mere name, was then sufficiently flourishing to be coupled by the chronicler with Nikli as one of the “chief places in all the Morea”.

Of the islands, Corfú is described as “rich and fertile” by everyone who visited it at that period. We are told in 1191 that it paid “15 quintals” (or 1500 lbs.) “of the purest gold” into the imperial treasury every year, the equivalent of about 9,000,000 drachmai, or more than the total amount raised by the present Greek exchequer from all the Ionian islands. Dotted about the beautiful hillsides were various towns and many strong castles. But what most interested returning Crusaders was the local legend that the deserted castle of Butentrost, or Butrinto, on the opposite coast of Epiros, which scholars associate with the voyage of Aeneas, was the birthplace of Judas Iscariot, a legend which we find at Corfú centuries later, and which may have arisen out of a popular etymology, connecting the surname of the traitor with Scheria, the Homeric name of Corfù, still enshrined in the Corfiote village of Skaria. The Cyclades, or Dodekanesos, had suffered so much from pirates, that many of them had been abandoned, while in some fortified positions, like the Byzantine castle of Apaliri at Naxos, corsairs had established themselves. The “Queen of the Cyclades”, however, even then raised cattle, as she still does; Andros, the second island of the group, was very populous, though it had been recently overrun by the Crusaders on their way to Constantinople, and the ancient Panachrántou monastery, ascribed by tradition to Nicephoros Phocas, the conqueror of Crete, together with the beautiful little Byzantine church of the Archangel Michael at Messaria, the Byzantine capital of the island, which dates from the time of Manuel I, are evidence of its importance in the last two centuries before the Conquest. Its geographical position on the direct course of ships on their way from Italy to Constantinople made it also a good place for hearing news. But the school of philosophy for which Andros had been celebrated much earlier, and which was revived within the memory of many now living in the person of Kaïres, had long ceased to exist. Another island, then populous, was Amorgos, the ancient home of Simonides; while Keos, the birthplace of his namesake, was, as we shall presently see, by no means a luxurious exile for an educated man accustomed to live even in the Athens of the twelfth century.

Such was the condition of Greece when the Latin conquerors of Constantinople entered the land which the strangest of accidents had placed at their mercy. Such was the El Dorado which was to provide principalities and duchies, marquisates and baronies, for the adventurous younger sons of the Western nobility.

CHAPTER II

THE FRANKISH CONQUEST (1204-1207)