MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER XI

FLORENTINE AND VENETIAN ATHENS (1388-1415)

The history of mediaeval Athens is full of surprises. A Burgundian nobleman founding a dynasty in the ancient home of heroes and philosophers; a roving band of mercenaries from the westernmost peninsula of Europe destroying in a single day the brilliant French civilisation of a century; a Florentine upstart, armed with the modern weapons of finance, receiving the keys of the Acropolis from a gallant and chivalrous soldier of Spain, such are the tableaux which inaugurate the three epochs of her Frankish annals. But the merchant prince, whom a successful policy of enlightened selfishness had made the founder of the third and last Latin dynasty of Athens, was in a much more difficult position than either of his predecessors. It was true that his dominions, on paper at any rate, were almost as extended as ever had been those of the Burgundians and Catalans in their palmiest days. If, unlike the former, he did not own the Argolid, he held the stately castle of Corinth, the key of the Morea, with its ring of dependent fortresses. Chalkokondyies tells us that he possessed most of Phocis, the outlying parts, no doubt, of the Catalan county of Salona, and that his northern frontier marched with the confines of Thessaly. The three most prosperous cities of ancient Hellas —Athens, Thebes, Corinth —were all his. But the handwriting was on the wall: the Turk was hovering on the Macedonian border. Under these circumstances the keynote of the new ruler’s policy was naturally conciliation of the Greeks. Now, for the first time since the day when Michael Akominatos had fled from his cathedral on the Akropolis before the Burgundian conquerors, a Greek metropolitan was allowed to reside at Athens. He did not, indeed, recover the time-honoured church of Our Lady on that sacred rock, for the Parthenon continued, as before, to be the Catholic minster of the city, but conducted his services in what is now the military bakery, but which was in Turkish times “the mosque of the conqueror.” This venerable edifice, now put to such base uses, was the metropolitan church of Athens during the rest of the Frankish period. Opinions differ as to the residence of the metropolitan; one archaeologist thought that he had discovered fragments of the building in the Stoa of Attalos; the more probable view is that it was near the church of Dionysios the Areopagite under the shadow of the Areopagos, where travellers visited the metropolitan in the seventeenth century, until a fragment of the rock, loosened by an earthquake, fell and destroyed his abode. Great was the surprise of the Holy Synod at Constantinople when the news arrived that, after nearly two centuries, an Athenian metropolitan could live in his see, instead of remaining, as most of his predecessors had done, merely a titular dignitary, who found occupation in attending the meetings of that august body. In the ecclesiastical docu­ments of the Catalan period we find frequent allusions to the metropolitans of Athens as members of the Holy Synod; and one of the exiled hierarchs died in Crete a martyr for his Church; but the local business had always been carried on in their absence by deputies, whose title was the more modest one of “first priest” or “Exarch”. The degradation of the Athenian see to a lower place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy by Andrdnikos II was therefore justified.

Throughout the Frankish period the Greek ecclesiastical organisation had subsisted, with a few changes; but its existence had been merely on paper, so far as most of the Latin states of the Levant were concerned. The twelve metropolitan sees, which we found at the time of the Latin Conquest, had been increased to fifteen or sixteen in the time of Andrdnikos II; but it is significant that he awarded all the sees of Greece a lower place in the hierarchical scale, with the notable exception of Monemvasia—a natural tribute to the great importance of that city to the empire after its recovery in 1262. The Venetians, always more indifferent to religious fervour than other Catholics, had allowed the Greek bishops to reside in their colonies of Coron and Modon. But there was no room found for a Catholic archbishop and a Greek metropolitan in the same town. Hence the custom had arisen at the oecumenical patriarchate of tacking suffragan bishoprics, which had from time immemorial belonged to the “enslaved” metropolitan sees, on to other sees which had been so fortunate as to escape from the clutches of the Franks. It had become the practice, too, for the bishop of a “free” diocese to lay hands on those persons of an “enslaved” diocese who desired to enter the ministry. But, as the Greeks had gradually recovered a large part of the Morea, two out of its five metropolitans— those of Monemvasia and Lacedaemonia—had been able to reside in their respective sees; while a third, his grace of Patras, though, of course, excluded from what was pre­eminently the Catholic city of the peninsula, had latterly resided, after a long homeless existence, in the splendid monastery of “ the Great Cave,” still the richest institution of the kind in Greece, which was a special dependency (or of the patriarchate. North of the isthmus the occupation of Thessaly by the orthodox Serbs, after a temporary attempt to form a separate Servian church, had naturally involved the return of the metropolitan of Larissa, “Exarch of Second Thessaly and all Hellas”, to that ancient city, and the capture of Lepanto from the Angevins by the Albanians had restored the metropolitan of Naupaktos, “Exarch of all Astolia”, to his old see in 1380, after long exile at Arta. At Salona, thanks, no doubt, to the influence of its Greek countess, we now hear for the first time of a Greek bishop, whose example, like those of the restored metropolitans of Athens, inspires doubts as to the wisdom of this tolerant policy, from the Frankish point of view. The conquerors had now, however, to face this dilemma: either they must continue to exclude the higher Greek clergy, in which case they would lose the sympathies of their numerous and more and more indispensable Greek subjects, or they must permit them to return, in which case the patriotic aspirations of the orthodox hierarchy, combined with its intensely political character, would certainly lead to conspiracies against the temporal authorities, who were at once aliens and —worse still— schismatics. This was exactly what happened. The Greek bishop at Athens or Salona, became a political agent of Hellenism, a leader, or at least a representative, of the national party, just as he is to-day in Macedonia; unable to secure the triumph of Greek independence, he was ready, as is his fellow in Macedonia, to seek the aid of the Turk, as a preferable alternative to the rule of a Christian of another Church. Thus, the restoration of the Greek metropolitan see of Athens was an event of the first importance to Hellenism, and the Holy Synod was able to report with pride that under the tactful administration of Dordtheos, “Exarch of All Hellas, and president of Thebes and Neopatras”, the Athenian Church, which had preserved the orthodox faith even without its hierarch, “seemed to have recovered its ancient happiness, such as it had enjoyed before the barbarian conquest”. As for the Catholic hierarchy, it continued as before, only that, instead of a Catalan, a Tuscan was archbishop at both Athens and Corinth.

But it was not the Greek Church alone which profited by the change of dynasty. Nerio’s philhellenic policy—and it was policy, not sentiment, which made this hard-headed Florentine favour the Greeks —was also extended to the laity. Greek for the first time became the official language of the Government at Athens; thirty years before, it had been employed by the bailie of the titular duke at Nauplia. Nerio and his accomplished daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, used it in their public documents; the countess, the most masterful woman of the Latin Orient, proudly signed herself, in the cinnabar ink of Byzantium, “Empress of the Romans”. This practice naturally necessitated the engagement of Greeks as secretaries and clerks. Nerio’s secretary was a certain Phiomlchos, the ever-useful Demdtrios Rendi continued to be notary of the city, and as his colleague we find another Greek, Nikolaos Makri. There is some evidence that Greek “elders” were allowed a share in the municipal government, as was the case under the Turks. Even Florentines settled at Athens assumed the Greek translations of their surnames. A member of the famous Medici family had emigrated to Athens in the Catalan days; possibly he was one of the Tuscan men-at- arms who took part in Walter of Brienne’s futile expedition; at any rate, a certain Pierre de Medicis “of Athens” held the office of bailie and captain-general of Argos and Nauplia for Walter, when the latter was tyrant of Florence, and we may conjecture that the titular duke was glad to employ as his deputy a Florentine and an old follower who had remained in Greece. This man’s son had now settled in Athens, doubtless attracted by the success of his eminent fellow-Florentine. The Medici had intermarried with Greeks, and had now become so Hellenised as to call themselves Iatros, instead of Medici. A century and a half later, their descendants still flourished at Athens and at Nauplia, and the family of Iatrdpoulos claims them as its ancestors.

Hitherto the career of Nerio Acciajuoli had been one of unbroken success. His star had guided him from Florence to Akrocorinth, and from Akrocorinth to the Akropolis; his two daughters, one famed as the most beautiful, the other as the most talented woman of her time, were married to the chief Greek and to the leading Latin potentate of Greece. These two alliances seemed to afford him protection against the only serious foe whom he had to fear, the vigorous and unscrupulous leader of the Navarrese Company. The King of Aragon, in his palace at Barcelona, was far away; but the Navarrese were near at hand. They had never shown much love for Nerio, even when he was only lord of Corinth; they had seized many of his family estates; they would be only too glad, as his confidant, the worldly Bishop of Argos, had complained, “to do him some great harm”. They had not forgotten their temporary occupation of the Athenian duchy, and they were now on excellent terms with the new King of Aragon, who still regarded himself as its lawful duke, and might at any moment employ their swords and their local knowledge against the usurper.The most elementary common-sense suggested that he should not place himself in the power of these astute enemies. But success had apparently blinded the wily Florentine to the obvious dictates of prudence. He was now destined, thanks to his ambition and his rashness, to experience one of those sudden turns of fortune so peculiarly characteristic of Frankish Greece.

Nerio was naturally desirous of rounding off his dominions by the acquisition of the castles of Nauplia and Argos, which had been appendages of the French duchy of Athens, but which, during the Catalan period, had remained loyal to the family of Brienne and to its heirs, the house of Enghien. It chanced that in the very same year, 1388, which witnessed the fall of the Akropolis, Marie d’Enghien, the Lady of Argos, lost her Venetian husband, Pietro Cornaro. Thus left a young and helpless widow, and fearing an attack upon her possessions by her two ambitious neighbours, Nerio and his son-in-law, the Despot Theodore of Mistra, whose dominions came up as far as Astros, on the Gulf of Nauplia, the Lady of Argos transferred her Argive estates to Venice, in return for a perpetual annuity of 500 gold ducats to herself and her heirs, and a further life annuity to herself of 200 ducats. In the event of her death without heirs, she was allowed to bequeath the sum of 2000 ducats, payable out of the Venetian treasury, to whomsoever she pleased. She was, however, to forfeit all claim to the above annuities, if she married anyone except a Venetian noble. The ancient Larissa of Argos, the twin castles of Nauplia, “the Frank” and “the Greek”, as they were still called, and the noble gulf whose waves then washed their base, were cheap at the price.Thus, Venice acquired the sole remaining dependency of the old French duchy of Athens, which remained in her hands for over one hundred and fifty years. Thus, the most shrewdly practical and least romantic of mediaeval republics began her long domination over the ancient kingdom of Agamemnon. Thus, in the selfsame year, a Florentine banker became the heir of Theseus, a Venetian magistrate the heir of Atrides.

Before, however, the Venetian commissioner, Malipiero, had had time to take over the Argolid, the Despot Theodore, instigated by his father-in-law, Nerio, had seized Argos by a coup de main. Nerio regarded himself, and not Venice, as the successor of the De la Roche and the Brienne in places which had once been theirs, and in which he himself had property. His plan was, however, only half successful, for Malipiero persuaded the people of Nauplia to admit him as the representative of the most serene republic. Already incensed with Nerio, whom she accused of still harbouring Turkish corsairs at Megara to the detriment of her colonies, Venice retorted by breaking off all commercial relations between them and the subjects of Nerio and his son-in-law. The Athenians were no longer allowed to export their figs and raisins to Negroponte, nor to import their iron and ploughshares from Modon and Coron. At the same time, Venetian diplomacy made use of the Navarrese Company to punish the chief culprit. San Superan was on good terms with Venice; he had promised to compensate her subjects for the damage done by his men at the time of their invasion, to favour her commerce, and to dispose of no portion of the principality to her foes. He now willingly offered his services; the Venetian Archbishop of Patras did the same. The shrewd Florentine showed on this occasion a childlike simplicity, remarkable in one who had lived so many years in the Levant. He accepted the invitation of the Navarrese commander to a personal interview on the question of Argos, relying on a safe-conduct which he had received. To the men of Navarre the law of nations was mere waste-paper; the opportunity of securing their enemy was too good to be lost. San Superan bade Asan Zaccaria, the great constable of the Morea, arrest him, and on ioth September 1389, the order was executed. At once the whole Acciajuoli clan set to work to obtain the release of their distinguished relative. His wife offered Theodore a large sum to surrender Argos. One of his brothers, Angelo, Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, sent a trusty emissary to the Despot, and implored the intervention of the pope; another, Donato, a Florentine Gonfaloniere, to whom Nerio’s wife specially appealed for aid, persuaded his Government to despatch envoys to Venice, offering the most liberal terms, if the republic would secure Nerio’s release. Donato was ready to place the cities of Athens and Thebes and part of the barony of Corinth in the hands of a Venetian com­missioner as a pledge of his brother’s sincerity, together with Nerio’s merchandise in the city of Corinth to the value of from 12,000 to 15,000 ducats, so as to defray any expenses incurred by the republic in obtaining his release. He offered to go in person to Greece and see that Argos was handed over to Venice before his brother was set free, and appealed for mercy to one who was an honorary citizen of the republic. On the same ground, he applied for aid to Genoa, which had lately conferred the freedom of the city upon Nerio’s daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, and invoked the assistance of Amadeo of Savoy. The fear of Genoese intervention, and the news that the Despot was preparing to release his father-in-law by force, decided Venice to give way. After nearly a year’s imprisonment near Vostitza and in the inland castle of Listrina (near Patras), Nerio obtained his release in the latter half of 1390 by sending his favourite daughter, the Countess of Cephalonia, as a hostage to Negroponte, and by consigning the city and castle of Megara and the value of his merchandise at Corinth to the Venetians, until they had obtained possession of Argos, which he promised to assist in securing for them, by force if necessary. If the Navarrese had hoped to annex his dominions during his captivity, they were mistaken, for. his wife could point with pride to the loyalty of both his old subjects at Corinth and his new subjects at Athens to their imprisoned lord —a fact which shows that his philhellenic policy had borne fruit. But the men of Navarre, as was well known, were fond of money, and they, too, were deter­mined to make their captive pay dearly for his liberty. In order to raise the money for his ransom, he stripped the silver plates off the doors of the Parthenon, seized the gold, silver, and precious stones which the piety of many generations had given to the ancient minster and to the cathedral of Corinth, and acquired, by lease or other means, various churches, including the Parthenon. The Despot was, however, in no hurry to surrender Argos. It was not till 1394 that Venice at last obtained possession of that coveted city, together with the castles of Thermisi and Kiveri. Then, at last, internal dissensions in his own dominions, where one of the hereditary archons of Monemvasia, a descendant of the Mamonas who had parleyed with William de Villehardouin one hundred and fifty years before, aimed at practical independence with Turkish aid or under Venetian suzerainty, forced him to yield. Venice thereupon restored Megara to Nerio, together with a large sum of his money which she had still in hand. The administration of the Argolid was then settled; in the days of the titular dukes of Athens, Nauplia and Argos had been governed by a bailie or captain-general, assisted by a council; each of the two cities now received apodesta, or “captain,” with a couple of governors under him, but the two administrations were to work in common, as at Modon and Coron; a deputation of Argives presented the capitulations of the towns at Venice, and received the ratification of their fiscal and feudal privileges. One of the first acts of the Venetian authorities was to erect a third fortress at Nauplia, on the north-west slope of Itsh- Kaleh, to which they gave the name of the Torrione. As at that time the site of the present lower town was covered by the sea, the place was extremely strong.

Nerio was not the man to forgive the Navarrese, the trick which they had played upon him, especially as they had seized most of his family estates in the Morea and insisted in maintaining the old fiction, that the duchy of Athens was a fief of Achaia, and its master merely “lord of Corinth.” He accordingly entered into relations with the pretender Amadeo of Savoy, who had been greatly moved at the news of his imprisonment, and was at this moment extremely active. Venice thought that the Savoyard might assist in capturing Argos for her, and undertook to transport him and his men to the Morea, and to make terms between him and the Navarrese when he arrived there. The Navarrese, on their part, alarmed by the approaching Turkish peril, offered to recognise his claims, provided that he would confirm them in the possession of the fiefs which they had won by their swords, with full right of sale if any of them wished to return to Navarre, would permit them to make certain gifts or bequests to the famous Minorite church at Glarentza, and would pay 20,000 gold ducats to San Superan. For Amadeo’s guidance, they sent him a list of the fiefs which existed in the Morea in 1391. From this list we see that the twelve peers now consisted of the three dukes of Athens, the Archipelago, and Leucadia; the Marquis of Boudonitza, the Count of Cephalonia, and the Countess of Salona; the three triarchs of Negroponte; the barons of Arkadia and Chalandritza; and the Archbishop of Patras. Three other ecclesiastical barons are enumerated —the bishops of Olena, Modon, and Coron; and the two military orders of the Teutonic Knights and those of Rhodes. Great, indeed, had been the changes since the Achaian peerage was founded nearly two centuries before. Arkadia, Chalandritza, and Patras were the only original baronies left, and they had all passed away from their original holders, for the two former now both belonged to the Genoese Asan Zaccaria, great constable of the principality, while Patras was practically an independent fief, held by the archbishop, who acknowledged no overlord but the pope. Moreover, nine of the peers resided out of the peninsula, whereas, even in the list preserved in the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania and composed somewhat earlier in this same century, there were only seven absentees. It is especially noticeable that the Ionian islands furnish two baronies, though Carlo I. Tocco was both Count of Cephalonia and Duke of Leucadia; but this is doubtless to be explained by the fact that on paper Amadeo had recently bestowed the former island, together with little Ithaka, upon a Greek supporter, one Ldskaris Kaloph6ros, who had thus succeeded in theory to the realm of Odysseus. We notice, too, that the vicar-general had managed to secure for himself the best of both the domanial and the baronial lands. Thus he held such celebrated places as Vostitza, captured from the Acciajuoli; Glarentza; Belveder, above Katakolo; the castle of St Omer, whose name is still preserved by the Santameri mountains; Androusa, or “Druse”, in Messenia, now the capital of the principality; Kalamata, the old fief of the Villehardouins, and many smaller castles—comprising altogether about 2770 hearths out of more than 4050. Next to him in importance came Asan Zaccaria; but most of the old castles were now in the hands of soldiers of the Company; the strong position of Navarino, “Port Jone” as it is still called in the document, was entrusted to two of those adventurers. Another personage, who figures largely in the transactions of this period, was Rudolph Schoppe, great preceptor of the Teutonic Knights, who resided at Mostenitsa. A century later, “the German house” at Modon was the usual stopping-place of German pilgrims to the Holy Land.

These negotiations with the Navarrese did not prevent Amadeo from adopting a policy dear to diplomatists in our own day—that of insuring his position by making terms with the adversary of his allies. He sent envoys to Athens, and there “in the chapel of the palace” on the Akropolis, now the residence of “the lord of Corinth, of the duchy of Athens and of Neopatras,” as Nerio styled himself, the latter pledged himself to aid Amadeo in taking the Morea from the Navarrese, and to induce his son-in-law, the Despot, to joinin the attack upon them. As his reward, he claimed the restitution of his family property. Thus, insured against all competitors, Amadeo might have been expected to act. But the death of his relative, the Count of Savoy, made his presence necessary at home; he wisely preferred to preserve what he possessed in Italy rather than make fresh acquisitions in Greece, and neither he, nor his brother and heir, Louis, did more than call themselves by the barren title of “Prince of Achaia”, which appears on their coins. With the death of Louis in 1418, the legitimate race of the Savoyard pretenders ceased, but as late as the last century a bastard of Savoy still styled himself “of the Morea.”

While the Latin rulers of Greece were thus intriguing against each other, the Turks were threatening the existence of them all. The overthrow of the Servian empire on the fatal field of Kossovo in 1389 had removed the last barrier between Hellas and her future masters, and then, as now, the dissensions of Greeks and Slavs had made them unable to combine against the Moslem. In 1387 and the following year Turkish bands had appeared in the Morea, and in 1391 the redoubtable Evrenosbeg, “Brendzes,” as the Byzantine historians call him, had been invited by the Navarrese into the Morea, to assist them in attacking the Despot of Mistra, and had occupied his capital, the new Greek town of Leondari, and the old Frankish castle of Akova. Next year it was the turn of Thessaly, Bceotia, and Attica. Nerio thought that he had found a traitor in the newly restored Greek metropolitan, Dordtheos, whose theological rancour against the Latin Church was a sufficient reason to make him welcome the Turkish commander. The accused fled, for his life was in danger, protesting his innocence and maintaining an active corre­spondence with his flock. Nerio thereupon complained of his conduct to the oecumenical patriarch, alleging that he had repaired to the Turkish camp, and had promised the infidels, in return for their aid against the Latins, the treasures of the Athenian Church. The Holy Synod, however, pronounced the metropolitan to be innocent, on the excellent canonical ground, that the statements of heretics and schismatics were not evidence against bishops of the true Church, and allowed him to retain his three dioceses of Athens, Thebes, and Neopatras. But a century later, when the Latins no longer ruled over Athens, we find another oecumenical patriarch accusing the worthy Dorotheos of corruption for having divided in two the hitherto united sees of Daulia and Atalante. Nerio, however, cared nothing for the decision of the Synod; he refused to permit Dordtheos to return to Athens, and strongly expressed his preference— on the principle of divide et impera—for having two Greek metropolitans instead of one—namely, one for Athens, and the other for Thebes and Neopatras.

The Boeotian raid of Evrenosbeg led to nothing more serious than the temporary loss of Livadia, which was recovered early in 1393 by Bertranet Mota, who is described as “one of the chief captains of the duchy of Athens”, and who played an important part in the politics of those years— now acting as Nerio’s gaoler in the castle of Listrina, now fighting for him against the Turks in Bceotia. But in 1393 Bajazet I, “the Thunderbolt”, resolved to annex permanently a large part of northern Greece. He was now arbiter of its fate, and to his camp came trembling magnates to hear his decisions. With the contemptible Despot Theodore in his train, he took Pharsala and Domokd, whence the Servian governor, Stephen Doukas Chiapen, viceroy for “King Joseph” of Meteora, fled to Nauplia, and then proceeded southward to Lamia. The Greek bishop betrayed that strong fortress, Neopatras fell, and many other castles surrendered on terms. Ecclesiastical treachery and corruption sealed the fate of Salona amid 'tragic surroundings, which a modern Greek drama has endeavoured to depict. The dowager-countess had allowed her paramour, a priest, to govern in her name, and this petty tyrant had abused his power to wring money from the shepherds of Parnassos and to debauch the damsels of Delphi by his demoniacal incantations in the classic home of the supernatural. At last he cast his eyes on the fair daughter and full money-bags of the Greek bishop Serapheim; deprived of his child and fearing for his gold, the bishop roused his flock against the monster, and begged the sultan to occupy a land so well adapted for his majesty’s favourite pastimes of hunting and riding as is the plain at the foot of Parnassos. The Turks accepted the invitation; the priest shut himself up in the noble castle, slew the bishop’s daughter, and prepared to fight. But there was treachery among the garrison; a man of Salona murdered the tyrant and offered his head to the sultan; and the dowager-countess and her daughter in vain endeavoured to appease the conqueror with gifts. Bajazet sent the young countess to his harem; her mother he handed over to the insults of his soldiery; her land he assigned to one of his lieutenants, Murdd Beg. When the latter showed signs of independence, he was deposed and beheaded by his autocratic sovereign. Ere long, another act of blood completed the grim tragedy. The story reached the people of Salona that the sultan had murdered their fair young countess, considering a descendant of Aragon and Byzantium unworthy of his embraces. Such was the end of the famous fief of the Stromoncourts, the Deslaurs, and the Fadriques. Thus, in the early weeks of 1394 a Turkish governor was, for the first time, established on the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf.

The blow had fallen very near Athens, and Nerio wrote to his brother on the fall of Salona, that the Great Turk was expected to advance, and that war was imminent. The Turkish troops, however, once more evacuated his dominions; Thessaly became a timar, or hereditary fief of the redoubt­able Evrenosbeg, but the hour of Athens was not yet come. The statesmanlike Florentine now reaped the reward of his politic treatment of the Greeks. When he had heard that the Turks were advancing, he had seized a number of women and children as hostages for the loyalty of the leading men in the small places, and had sent these hostages to Boeotia. When, none the less, the Greeks of those villages welcomedl the Turks, he abstained from visiting their dis­loyalty upon the hostages. He felt sure that when the Turks retired, the Greeks, if not driven to desperation, would return to their allegiance, and his surmise proved correct. Again he had found that humanity was the best policy.

Nerio had escaped for the moment by consenting to pay tribute to the sultan; but he hastened to implore the aid of the pope and of King Ladislaus of Naples against the infidels, who killed and tortured the Christians of Achaia and Attica. At the same time, like all usurpers, he desired to legitimise his position at Athens by obtaining formal recognition from an established authority. His family’s fortunes had originated at the Neapolitan court; the king still pretended that he was the overlord of Achaia, of which, according to the old legal fiction, Athens was a dependency, and he had already given Nerio a mark of his favour by creating him bailie of Achaia. He now rewarded the services of the faithful Florentine in having recovered the duchy of Athens “from certain of the king’s rivals,” by conferring upon him and his posterity in January 1394 the title of duke, so long borne by its former rulers. As Nerio had no legitimate sons, the king consented that the title should descend to his brother Donato and the latter’s heirs. Another of his brothers, Cardinal Angelo Acciajuoli, was entrusted with the duty of investing the new Duke of Athens with a golden ring, and was appointed in his stead bailie of Achaia. But it was expressly stated that the duke should have no other overlord than the King of Naples. Thus, the old theory that Athens was a vassal state of Achaia received its deathblow. The pope completed the fortunes of the Acciajuoli by nominating the Cardinal Archbishop of Patras. The news that one of their clan had obtained the glorious title of Duke of Athens filled the Acciajuoli with pride, such was the fascination which the name of that city exercised in Italy. Boccaccio, half a century before, had familiarised his countrymen with a title, which Walter of Brienne, the tyrant of Florence, had borne as of right, and which, as applied to Nerio Acciajuoli, was no empty flourish of the heralds’ college.

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

In making his final dispositions, the dying duke’s first care was for the Parthenon, “St Mary of Athens”, in which he directed that his body should be laid to rest. He ordered that its doors should once more be plated with silver; that all the treasures of the cathedral, which he had seized in his hour of need, should be bought up and restored to it; that besides the canons, who, as we saw, were twelve, there should always be twenty priests serving in the great minster day and night, and saying masses for the repose of his soul. For the maintenance of these priests and of the fabric of the church, he bequeathed to it the city of Athens with all its dependencies, and all the brood-mares of his valuable stud—for the Acciajuoli were good judges of horse-flesh. Seldom has a church received such a remarkable endowment; the cathedral of Monaco, built out of the earnings of a gaming­table, is perhaps the closest parallel to the Parthenon, maintained by the profits of a stud-farm. He also restored two sums of money owing to it, ordered the restitution of the treasures which he had taken from the church of Corinth, bequeathed a splendid cross to the cathedral of Argos and a sum of money for a weekly mass there, and directed that all cathedrals and other churches which had come into his hands by lease or other means should return to their prelates and patrons at the end of the lease. He bequeathed his Argive property to build a hospital for the poor at Nauplia, which, restored by Capo d’Istria, is still in use, and placed both that and the nunnery which he had built there under the administration of his faithful councillor, the Bishop of Argos. Nerio had treated the Latin Church with scant respect in his lifetime; he had seized its treasures, and had reinstated its hated rival; but he certainly made ample reparation on his deathbed.

Nerio’s wife had died only three months before, so that he had not to provide for her; but made his favourite daughter, the Duchess of Leucadia, his principal heiress. While he left his other child nothing more than 9,700 ducats owed him by her husband the Despot, he bequeathed to her sister the castles of Megara and Sikyon (or Basilicata), all his other lands not specially left to others, and a large sum of money. She was to have Corinth also, despite the fact that it was to have belonged to the Despot after Nerio’s death, so long as the children of Angelo Acciajuoli, who were its legal owners, did not repay the sum which their father had borrowed from Nerio. Besides these two daughters, Nerio had an illegitimate son, Antonio, by Maria Rendi, daughter of the ever-handy Greek notary. To this son he bequeathed the government of Thebes, the castle of Livadia, and all that lay beyond it, for Livadia, as we saw, though it had been annexed by the Sultan Bajazet, had been recovered by the Gascon free-lance Bertranet for the duchy in 1393. As for his mistress, Nerio directed that she should have her freedom and retain all her property, including perhaps the spot between Athens and the Piraeus which still preserves the name of her family —a provision all the more curious because Pedro IV had, as we saw, conferred the full franchises and privileges of the conquerors upon her father and his family. To his brother Donato, who should have succeeded him in the title, the duke left his Florentine property and 250 ducats; he gave small legacies to his servants, and ordered that his cattle should be sold and the proceeds invested in Florence for religious and charitable purposes. As his executors he appointed the Duchess of Leucadia, his sister Gismonda (so long as she was in Greece), the Bishop of Argos, the governor of the Akropolis, and three other persons, two of them members of the Acciajuoli clan. Finally, he recommended his land to the care of the Venetian republic, to which his executors were to have recourse in any difficulty. He specially begged the republic to protect his heiress, the Duchess Francesca, and to see that his dispositions concerning the cathedral of Athens were carried out.

Donato Acciajuoli, Gonfalionere of Florence and Senator of Rome, made no claim to succeed his brother in the duchy of Athens, in spite of the natural desire of the family that one of their name should continue to take his title from that celebrated city. He had already had some experience of Greece, where he had acted as Niccold’s representative thirty years before, and he preferred his safe and dignified positions in Italy to the glamour of a ducal coronet in the East. But it was obvious that a conflict would arise between the sons-in-law of the late duke, for Nerio had practi­cally disinherited his elder daughter in favour of her younger but abler sister. Theodore Palaioldgos, who con­tended that Corinth had always tbeen intended to be his after Nerio’s death, besieged it with a large force, and took all the smaller castles of the Corinthian barony. Nerio’s bastard, Antonio, and Bertranet Mota, the victor of Livadia, who had also profited under Nerio’s will, threw their powerful aid on Theodore’s side. On the other hand, Carlo Tocco, Duke of Leucadia, demanded from the executors the places bequeathed to his wife, and invited the Turks to assist him. Some 40,000 of those fatal auxiliaries obeyed his call; a sudden night attack upon the Despot’s camp proved completely successful; 3000 of Theodore’s cavalry were captured, and Theodore himself only just escaped. Carlo then signed a document, promising, on receipt of Corinth, to carry out all the testamentary dispositions of his late father-in-law. The executors, who had no option in the matter, thereupon handed over the great fortress to him. Leaving his brother Leonardo in charge of Corinth, and another official in command of Megara, he inveigled two of the Florentine executors into visiting him in his island of Cephalonia on their way home. As soon as he had them safe in the castle of St George, he told them that they should never leave the island alive, unless they restored him the compromising document. They replied that they had already sent it to Donato, whereupon he compelled them to sign another, stating that he had carried out the terms of Nerio’s will. Against this act of violence they protested at both Florence and Venice, whose citizenship and protection against his obligations to Genoa he had recently asked. Well might that tried friend of the Acciajuoli family, the Bishop of Argos, urge the Archbishop of Patras to mediate between the rival kinsmen. For some months longer the civil war between them rendered the isthmus unsafe to travellers. An Italian notary has left us a graphic picture of the perils of a journey at this critical time from Athens to Corinth, how the Turks infested the Sacred Way, how all admission to the town of Megara was refused, for fear of the Despot’s men, and how Nerio’s elder daughter lay in wait to intercept her younger sister on her way to take ship at the port of Corinth for Cephalonia. The man of law was not sorry to find himself in the castle of Corinth under Carlo Tocco’s protection, though the houses in that city were few and mean, and the total population did not exceed fifty families, or thirty fewer than that of Megara. The place did not boast a single inn, there was no bread to be had for love or money, but the excellent figs of the place and the hospitality of the Arch­bishop of Athens, an Italian, like himself, consoled the notary for his hardships. Such was life in the duchy of Athens in 1395.

Not long afterwards the two sons-in-law of Nerio, frightened perhaps at the increasing audacity of the Turks, came to terms, and Tocco handed over the great fortress of Akrocorinth to the Despot Theodore. Its walls had struck the Italian notary as poor, and the donjon as insignificant; but the natural position of the citadel made it almost impregnable, and its acquisition by a Byzantine prince was regarded as a national triumph, commemorated by the erection of his statue over the gate. Theodore hastened to ask the co-operation of Venice in repairing the Hexamilion, or six-mile rampart of Justinian across the isthmus, a part of which was still standing, while the rest was in ruins. Thus, after the lapse of nearly two centuries, the isthmus once more acknowledged the Greek sway. The metropolitan of Corinth, so long an exile, at once returned to his see; one of his first acts was to demand, and obtain, the restitution by his brother of Monemvasia of the two suffragan bishoprics of Maina and Zemend, which had been given to the latter’s predecessor after the Latin Conquest of Corinth.³ Such ire was common in celestial minds at this critical period, when all Greeks should have been united. Unhappily, the ecclesias­tical literature of the fourteenth century shows us metro­politan arrayed against metropolitan, bishops persecuted by their superiors, and the Despot of MistrjL, who should have been the recognised leader of Hellenism, thwarted by the Greek hierarchy.

While Nerio’s children had thus been quarrelling over Corinth, the Greeks of Athens had not been idle. It was not to be expected that the race, which had latterly recovered its national consciousness, and which had ever remained deeply attached to its religion, would quietly acquiesce in the extraordinary arrangement by which the city of Athens was to be the property of the Catholic cathedral. Sanudo, an excellent judge of Eastern politics, had truly said that no power on earth could make the Orthodox Greeks love the Roman Church, and at Athens the professional jealousy of two great ecclesiastics embittered the natives against the alien establishment. Despite the warning which he had received from the treachery of Dordtheos, Nerio had felt obliged to permit another Greek metropolitan, Makdrios, to reside at Athens. This divine, thinking that the rule of a Mussulman pasha would be preferable to that of a Catholic archbishop, summoned Timourtash, the redoubtable Turkish commander, to rid Athens of the filioque clause, and his strange ally occupied the lower town. The Akropolis, how­ever, held out under its brave governor, Matteo de Montona, one of the late duke’s executors, who sent a messenger to the Venetian bailie of Negroponte asking for his aid, and offering to hand over Athens to the republic, if the bailie would promise that she would respect the ancient franchises, privileges, and customs of the Athenians. The bailie gave the required promise, subject to the approval of his Govern­ment; he sent a force which dispersed the Turks, and before the end of 1394, for the first but not the last time in history, the lion-banner of the Evangelist waved from the ancient castle of Athens.

The republic decided, after mature consideration, to accept the offer of the Athenian commander. No sentimental argument, no classical memories, weighed with the sternly practical statesmen of the lagoons. The romantic King of Aragon had waxed enthusiastic over the past glories of the Akropolis, and sixty years hence the greatest of Turkish sultans contemplated his conquest with admiration. But the sole reason which decided the Venetian Government to annex Athens was its proximity to the Venetian colonies and the consequent danger which might ensue to them if it fell into Turkish or other hands. Thus, Venice took over the Akropolis in 1395, not because it was a priceless monument, but because it was a strong fortress; she saved the Athenians, not, as Czesar had done, for the sake of their ancestors, but for that of her own colonies, “the pupil of her eye”. From the financial standpoint, indeed, Athens could not have been a valuable asset. A city which had complained of its poverty to the King of Aragon, and whose revenues Nerio had assigned to support the cathedral chapter, could not have been great or rich, nor can we well believe the statement of a much later Venetian historian that in his short reign he had found time to build “sumptuous edifices” and “spacious streets”. The Venetians confessed that they did not know what its revenues and expenses were; on this point their governor was to send them information as soon as possible; meanwhile, as the times were risky and the city would consequently require additional protection, involving extra expenditure, whereas some of Nerio’s famous brood mares had been stolen and the available revenues consequently diminished, it was directed that only eight priests should for the present serve “in the church of St Mary of Athens.” Upon such accidents did the maintenance of the Parthenon depend in the Middle Ages! The Government informed Montona’s envoy, Leonardo of Bologna, that its officials would be instructed to preserve all the ancient rights, liberties, and customs of “our faithful Athenians,” whose capitulations he had presented, as they had been presented fifteen years before to Pedro IV. Montona was to have 400 hyperperi a year, and his envoy 200, out of the city revenues, as their reward, but five years later we find the former complaining that this annuity had not been paid. That official Greeks were favourable to Venice is shown by the fact that the city notary, Makri, was also awarded a sum of money.

The Venetian Government next arranged for the future administration of its new colony. The governor was styled podesta and captain, and was appointed for two years at an annual salary of £70, out of which he had to keep a notary, a Venetian assistant, four servants, two grooms, and four horses. Four months elapsed before a noble was found, in the person of Albano Contarini, ambitious of residing in Athens on these terms. Two artillery officers, or castellani, were appointed at 6 ducats a month each to guard the castle, where one was always to be in the daytime and both were to sleep at night. Twenty men were to be engaged at 12 hyperperi a month each, for the garrison; if more men or money were wanted, Contarini was to ask the bailie of Negroponte or the castellani of the two Messenian colonies. Together with two ecclesiastical commissioners, he was to receive the revenues of the Church, so that the republic might not be out of pocket; later on he also had the appointment of the castellani.

We are fortunately in a better position than was the Venetian Government to judge of the contemporary state of Athens. At the very time when its fate was under discussion, an Italian notary, Niccold de Martoni, spent two days in that city, and his diary is the first account which any traveller has left us from personal observation of its condition during the Frankish period. “The city,” he says, “which nestles at the foot of the castle hill, contains about a thousand hearths,” but not a single inn, so that, like the archaeologist in some country towns of modern Greece, he had to seek the hospitality of the clergy. He describes “the great hall” of the castle (the Propylaea), with its thirteen columns, and tells how the churchwardens personally conducted him over “the church of St Mary,” which had sixty columns without and eighty within. On one of the latter he was shown the cross, made by Dionysios the Areopagite at the moment of the earthquake which attended our Lord’s passion; four others, which surrounded the high altar, were of jasper, and supported a dome, while the doors came —so he was told— from Troy. The pious Capuan was then taken to see the relics of the Athenian cathedral —the figure of the Virgin, painted by St Luke, the head of St Maccarius, a bone of St Denys of France, an arm of St Justin, and a copy of the Gospels, written by the hand of St Elena—relics which Queen Sybilla of Aragon had in vain begged the last Catalan archbishop to send her fifteen years before.

He saw, too, in a cleft of the wall, the light which never fails, and outside, beyond the castle ramparts, the two pillars of the choragic monument of Thrasyllos, between which there used to be “a certain idol” in an iron-bound niche, gifted with the strange power of drowning hostile ships as soon as they appeared on the horizon—an allusion to the story of the Gorgon’s head, mentioned by Pausanias, which we find in later mediaeval accounts of Athens. In the city below he noticed numbers of fallen columns and fragments of marble; he alludes to the Stadion; and he visited the “ house of Hadrian,” as the temple of Olympian Zeus was popularly called, from the many inscriptions in honour of that emperor which were to be seen there. Twenty of its columns were then standing. He completed his round by a pilgrimage to the so-called “Study of Aristotle, whence scholars drank to obtain wisdom”—the aqueduct, whose marble beams, commemorating the completion of Hadrian’s work by Antoninus Pius, were then to be seen at the foot of Lykabettos, and, after serving in Turkish times as the lintel of the Boubounistra gate, now lie, half buried by vegetation, in the palace garden. But the fear of the prowling Turks was a serious obstacle to the researches of this amateur archaeologist. At Port Raphti, where he landed, he had been able, indeed, to admire the two marble statues, male and female, one of which still remains and has given the place its name of “the tailor’s harbour.” The more picturesque mediaeval legend was that the woman, hotly pursued by the man, had prayed that they might be both turned into stone. At Eleusis, already called Levsina, he could see in the gloaming the marble columns and the arches of the aqueduct. But he tells us that both these places were infested by Turks, so that it was necessary to travel by night. On his way to Negroponte, he was only saved from falling into their hands by the characteristic unpunctuality of his muleteers —not a horse was to be had in Athens, and mules then, as now, were the sole means of conveyance in the country districts. Even so, he narrowly escaped being attacked by the Knights of St John, who held the castle of Sykaminon and who saw a Turk in every traveller, while the Albanians of Oropos were even worse marauders than the Turks. Yet our traveller notes that these gentry had spared the fair olive-grove of Athens.

Such was the state of affairs which confronted the first Venetian governor of Athens. He had, indeed, no easy task before him. He found Turkish pirates infesting the coast of Attica, and the land so poor that he had to ask his Govern­ment for a loan of 3000 ducats. The Metropolitan Makdrios, a born intriguer, who had been plotting against the Despot in the Morea, as well as the Latins at Athens, was now in prison at Venice, but found means to continue his schemes in favour of the Turks. The Athenian duchy was now terribly exposed to their attacks. By the fall of Salona she had lost her western bulwark: the warden of her northern marches, the Marquis of Boudonitza, had managed to retain his castle at Thermopylae by payment of a tribute and by virtue of his Venetian citizenship. But, in 1395, his marquisate and the Venetian station of Pteleon, in Thessaly, were the sole re­maining Christian states of north-eastern Greece. All else was Turkish, as far south as Thebes, as far west as Lepanto. Even the Northern Sporades temporarily succumbed.

The Ottoman advance was fortunately, however, checked for a moment by the news that Sigismund, King of Hungary, had responded to the appeal of the Emperor Manuel II, and was marching on the Danube with the chivalry of the West to save the Byzantine Empire. Bajazet hastily retired from Greece to meet this new foe, whom he utterly routed in the great battle of Nikopolis. The defeat of this fresh crusade left Greece at the mercy of the conqueror. Marching himself against Constantinople, he despatched two trusty lieutenants, Jakub Pasha and Evrenosbeg, with an army of 50,000 men to continue his interrupted Greek campaign. On crossing the isthmus, the forces divided: Jakub marched upon Argos, Venice’s recent acquisition, which surrendered, in 1397, without a blow, burnt the castle, and carried off 14,000 (some say, even more than 30,000) Argives into slavery—a number considerably superior to the present population of the town—while Evrenos harassed the Venetian colonies in Messenia. After an attack on Leondari, the Turks recrossed the isthmus, and would appear to have made themselves masters of the lower city of Athens. Neither Venetian documents nor Byzantine historians tell us of this capture of “the city of the sages” in 1397, of which Turkish writers boast. But the Turkish account receives confirmation from a document of 1405, discovered at Zante and recently published,which describes how Athenian families fled to that island before the Turks, and from a passage in the Chronicle of Epiros, which states that Bajazet subdued Athens. It is possible, too, that the above mentioned “Lament for the taking and captivity of Athens” — a prosaic poem in sixty-nine verses of the “political” metre— also refers to this capture, though some critics have supposed the “captivity” to be that which the city suffered from Omar in 1456, or that the allusion is to the visit of Mohammed II two years later. The writer, a priest, tells us how “the Persians,” as he calls them, “first enslaved the region of Ligourio” between Epidauros and Nauplia —“the feet of Athens”— an allusion to the days when Argolis was a dependency of the duchy, and then came to Athens and “slew the priests, the elders, the wise, and all their council”. Above all, he makes Athens mourn the enslavement of the husbandmen of the suburb of Sepolia, who will no longer be able to till the fields of Patesia.

Another enemy was ever on the watch for an opportunity to make himself master of Athens. The bastard Antonio Acciajuoli was not content with the cities of Thebes and Livadia, which his father had left him, but soon began to harry Attica with his horsemen, and to hound on the Turks, who readily responded to his exhortations. Successive Venetian governors depicted the pitiful state of the country and asked for reinforcements; the Home Government re­sponded by raising the garrison to fifty-six men and the cavalry to fifty-five, and by authorising Vitturi, who was podesta in 1401, to spend 200 hyperperi on restoring the walls of the Akropolis. In order to pacify those Athenians who were discontented with the Venetian rule, he was ordered to issue a proclamation bidding them lay their complaints before the commissioners at Negroponte or Nauplia. But these measures were inadequate to save Athens. In the middle of 1402, the bad news reached Venice that the lower city, thanks to the treachery of its inhabitants, naturally favourable to one who was half a Greek, was in the hands of the bastard, but that the Akropolis still held out. The Senate ordered the bailie of Negroponte to proclaim Antonio an “enemy of the Christian faith,” and to offer a reward of 8000 hyperperi to whosoever should deliver him up alive, or of 5000 to whoso­ever could prove that he had killed him. It also commanded him to relieve the Akropolis, and, if possible, lay Thebes, the lair of the enemy, in ashes. At the head of 6000 men, the bailie set out to perform the second of these injunctions. The bastard had only a tenth of that number at his disposal, but he placed them in ambush, we may assume in the Pass of Anephorites, which the Venetians were bound to traverse, took the enemy at the same moment in front and rear, and made the bailie his prisoner. Having nothing more to fear from Venice, he returned to the siege of the Akropolis.

The republic received the news of his victory with alarm, not so much at what might befall Athens, as at the possible loss of her far more important colony of Negroponte. Com­missioners were hastily despatched to make peace with Antonio; but the bastard, sure of being undisturbed by the Turks, calmly continued the siege of the small Venetian garrison of the Akropolis. Vitturi and Montana held out for seventeen months altogether, until they had eaten the last horse and had been reduced to devour the plants which grew on the castle rock. Then they surrendered and were allowed to retire penniless to Negroponte, which the Venetian councillors had put into a state of defence.

Antonio was master of Athens; the half-caste adventurer had beaten the proud republic.

Venice attempted to recover by diplomacy what she had lost by arms. She possessed in the person of Pietro Zeno, lord of Andros, a diplomatist of unrivalled experience in the tortuous politics of the Levant. Zeno’s skill had contributed to the cession of Argos; it was now hoped that he might be equally successful with Athens. In spite of the capture of Bajazet by Timur at the battle of Angora in 1402, and the divided state of the Turkish Empire, both he and Antonio knew that the fate of Athens depended upon Suleyman, the new ruler of Turkey in Europe, and to his court they both repaired, armed with those pecuniary arguments which are usually found most convincing in all dealings with Turkish ministers. The diplomatic duel was lengthy; Antonio was already favourably known as a suppliant of the late sultan, while Zeno worked upon the Turkish fears of the Mongol peril, and pointed out that the Christian league, which had been formed by the two republics of Venice and Genoa, the Greek Emperor, the Knights of St John, and the Duke of Naxos, was not to be despised. He also spent his employers’ money to good purpose, and finally gained one of those paper victories, so dear to ambassadors and so worthless to men of action. The sultan promised to Venice the restitution of Athens and the grant of a strip of territory five miles wide on the coast opposite the whole length of the island of Euboea; he ceded the Northern Sporades to the emperor, ratified the recent transfer of Salona by Theodore Palaioldgos to the Knights of St John, and consented not to increase the tribute paid by the Marquis of Boudonitza, although the latter had been caught conspiring against his Thessalian governor. But Suleyman took no steps to make Antonio carry out his part of the treaty, while the latter had powerful friends in Italy —Pope Innocent VII, Ladislaus of Naples, and Cardinal Angelo Acciajuoli— working on his behalf. Accordingly, Venice, nothing if not practical, reconciled herself to the loss of a place which it would have been expensive to recover. To save appearances, Antonio, in 1405, was per­suaded to become her vassal, holding “the land, castle, and place of Athens, in modern times called Sythines”, on condition that he sent every year a silk pallium worth 100 ducats to the church of St Mark. He was to make peace or war at the bidding of his suzerain, to give no shelter to her foes, to join in repelling attacks on adjacent Venetian colonies. He undertook to compensate Venetian subjects for their possessions seized during the war, to pay the value of the munitions which he found in the Akropolis, and to restore the goods of the late governor of Athens to his heirs. He was also to banish for ever the mischievous Greek metropolitan Makarios, who had apparently escaped from his Venetian dungeon. On these terms the republic agreed to pardon the erring Antonio for all the harm which he had done her, and to receive him under her protection. He was, however, in no hurry to carry out his promises. He had to be sharply reminded that he had not sent the pallia, and had not evacuated the strip of territory opposite Euboea, which the sultan had ceded to Venice, “the continent”, or “Staria” (Srepea), as the Venetians called it. Unless he mended his ways, the republic warned him that she would retract her promise to let him retain Athens. A compromise was made, by which he was allowed to keep the fortresses in the coveted piece of land, such as Sykaminon and Oropos, provided that he built no more. Nine years later, he was still trying in vain to obtain further concessions from the Venetians.

The latter consoled themselves for the loss of Athens by two fresh acquisitions in Greece. The fortress of Lepanto— one of the most famous names in the history of Christendom— was still in the possession of the Albanian family of Bona Spata, but seemed likely to fall ere long into the hands of the Turks, with whom its lord was in agreement. Ever since the Turkish Conquest of Salona with its admirable harbour of Galaxidi, corsairs had preyed upon Venetian commerce in the Gulf of Corinth, and it was feared that the Venetian island of Corfu would be damaged, if the Turks were able to convert Lepanto into what it became in the seventeenth century—a “little Algiers.” Rather than that this should happen, Venice resolved to acquire the place. As far back as 1390, a daring Venetian captain had hoisted the lion­banner on its walls; but he had not been supported by the Venetian admiral, and had paid for his premature act by the loss of his eyes. Four years later, the inhabitants, alarmed by the Turks, had offered their town to the republic, but the offer was cautiously declined. At last, in 1407, Venice made up her mind that the psychological moment had arrived. Two versions exist of the way in which she attained her object. According to the official story, the then lord of Lepanto, Paul Boua Spata, sold it for the sum of 1500 ducats; but a more probable account informs us that a Venetian detachment suddenly landed, and that its commander inveigled the ingenuous Albanian under promise of a safe-conduct to his camp, and then threatened to cut off his head, unless he gave up the town. A capitano or rettore was appointed, who was dependent on the governor of Corfu, except during the temporary occupation of the much nearer town of Patras. The cost of keeping up the fortifications, which are still one of the most picturesque sights of the beautiful gulf, was defrayed out of the valuable fisheries of Anatoliko. For ninety-two years Lepanto remained in Venetian hands, and its “triple tiara” of walls was called by a Venetian historian “the strongest bulwark of the Christian peoples.” But Venice was wise enough to supplement this defence by an annual tribute of 100 ducats to successive sultans.

A year later, in 1408, the republic rented Patras for five years from its archbishop, Stephen Zaccaria, at an annual rent of 1000 ducats. The archbishop was harassed by the Turks, and wanted to spend three years in study at Padua, while the Venetians were glad to acquire a place where they had so much trade. He retained his spiritual jurisdiction, while they appointed their own podesta, who decided all temporal matters in the archbishop’s name, and was assisted, according to the custom of the place, by a certain number of citizens. The Venetians took over the serfs, received the revenues of the Archbishopric —the duties on wine, corn, oil, silk, and cotton, which, though much diminished, still amounted to some 15,000 ducats, and raised the tribute of 500 ducats, which the city had already been compelled to pay to the Turks, and which was remitted to the sultan by the Prince of Achaia together with his own contribution. Both Patras and Venice benefited by these arrangements. The latter now held the two keys of the gulf in her hands; the former experienced the good effects of a practical administration, which spent the balance of the revenues on the defences, repaired the walls and the palace, whose noble hall was adorned with frescoes of the destruction of Troy, and stationed an “admiral” at the mouth of the gulf to keep off corsairs. The numerous Venetian mercantile colony naturally felt safer under the flag of the republic than under the crozier of a spiritual prince. Unfortunately, the archbishop desired to return, and at the end of the five years’ lease, he received back his dominions. But the fear of a new foe, the Greeks of Mistra, soon drove him to place Patras, with the seven fortresses dependent on it, once more in the power of the republic, and in 1417 a Venetian governor again took up his abode in the old castle of the Franks. The pope, however, objected to this alienation of ecclesiastical property; Venice had to restore it two years later to the feeble rule of the archbishop, with the natural result that, a few years after­wards, the Roman Church lost Patras for ever. By clutching at the shadow, she had lost the substance.

Further Venetian attempts at territorial expansion in the Morea were not successful, the offer of Megara had no attractions, as the place was too remote, but in Epiros the famous rock of Parga had, in 1401, become a dependency of Corfu, with which it remained connected till the memorable cession by the British in 1819; while in 1390 the two islands of Mykonos and Tenos had been bequeathed to the republic. The islanders petitioned the Venetian Government not to dispose of them, “seeing that no lordship under Heaven is so just and good as that of Venice”, whereupon the latter farmed them out, after a public auction, to a Venetian citizen, who agreed to pay an annual rent of 1500 hyperperi out of the 1800 which represented the insular revenues, and who was dependent on the bailie of Negroponte. With them went the classic island of Delos, “le Sdiles”, then a favourite lair of Turkish pirates, who drew their water from the sacred lake, of which Callimachus had sung. Of all the Venetian acquisitions in the Aigean, this was the most durable.

Thus, in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the Venetian dominions in the Levant were increasingly important —a fact fully recognised by the Home Government. The documents of the period are full of provisions for the colonies, inspired by the Turkish peril, and of concessions to the natives. Commissioners are sent to enquire into their condition, with power to examine Greeks as well as Latins; in Negroponte, all the inhabitants, except the Jews, whose taxes are doubled, are to have privileges, the oppressive hearth-tax is temporarily removed, and the barons are ordered to arm their serfs with bows and arrows, and see that they practice them. The Home Government grants a humble petition of the islanders, praying that their good old customs may be observed, pluralities prevented, local offices made annual, and limited to those who have lived five years in the island, and the serfs exempted from the duty of acting as beaters at the bailie’s hunting-parties. Still, the island was not prosperous; there was a large deficit in the annual budget of the colony; the vassals complained of their poverty, their ineptitude for trade, and their struggle to live on their rents.

About this time the total population consisted of 14,000 families, and the city of Negroponte, though much smaller than it once had been, could boast of a fine church, a rich Franciscan monastery, and a nunnery. But what most struck travellers was the picturesque castle—now alas! no more— in mid-stream, approached by a wooden draw-bridge on either side. The local legend made it the abode of fairies, the enchanted fortress where the Lady of the Lake had held Gauvain captive. The beauty of the Lombard and Venetian damsels of Negroponte, who dressed in Italian fashion, seemed to be due to their descent from these fairy mothers.

In order to prevent the growing danger of the acquisition of landed property in the island by the Jews, the latter were forbidden to purchase real estate beyond the Ghetto, and the Cretan system of letting land on long leases of twenty-nine years was introduced so as to give the tenants more interest in the soil; finally, any “Albanians or other equestrian people,” who would emigrate to Euboea, were given full freedom and grants of uncultivated land, provided that they brought, and kept, horses for the defence of the island. Albanians, too, were induced to settle at Argos, Astros on the Gulf of Nauplia was occupied, and the fortifications of Nauplia were ordered to be repaired. So greatly did that colony prosper under its new rulers, that soon a considerable annual surplus was remitted out of its revenues to the Cretan administration. In view of the increasing peril of invasion, the cautious republic was ready to give favourable consideration to the Despot Theodore’s plan of rebuilding the “six-mile” rampart across the isthmus, while by treaties with successive sultans in 1406 and 1411 she secured that her Greek colonies should not be molested.

During the brief Venetian occupation of Athens, the Peloponnese had been a prey to those jealousies which had distracted it at the time of the Frankish Conquest. The Despot, though he was the brother of the reigning Emperor Manuel II, had never succeeded in imposing his authority upon the proud and stubborn archons, whose ancestry was as ancient as his own. If we may believe the iambic poem inscribed on the door ’of the former church at Parori, near Mistri, during the first five years of his reign they had thwarted him in every way, striving either to drive him out of the country or to murder him, the veritable “gift of God”. One of these local magnates, a MamonAs of Monemvasia, a descendant of the man who had handed over that great fortress to Villehardouin, held the office of “Grand Duke,” or Lord High Admiral, and comported himself as an independent princelet. When Theodore had asserted himself and expelled him, MamonSs had not hesitated to submit his hereditary right to tyrannise over his native city to the arbitrament of the sultan, who ordered his restoration. Whenever the Despot tried to make his authority respected, his rebellious Greek subjects found allies in the Navarrese, and Theodore was thus forced in self-defence to look elsewhere for support. At this time some 10,000 Albanians had emigrated from their homes in Thessaly and Akarnania before the invading Turks, and had encamped with their wives and children on the isthmus. Thence they sent spokesmen to the Despot, asking permission to settle in his dominions. Most of his advisers opposed the idea, on the ground that the manners and customs of these strangers were not those of the Greeks. Theodore saw, however, as his predecessor Manuel Cantacuzene had done, that these highlanders should furnish him with splendid fighting material, with which he might keep his archons in order. He admitted the Albanians to the peninsula; they occupied uninhabited spots, planted trees in places whence brigandage had driven the pacific natives; while, when it came to fight­ing against the rebels and their Navarrese allies, they and their leader, Demetrios Rai, or Raoul, an ancestor of the great family of Ralles, undaunted by San Superan’s mail­clad horsemen, succeeded in capturing that proud warrior and his brother-in-law, the Constable Zaccaria, the former captor of Nerio. Nothing but the fear of the Turks and the good offices of Venice secured their release. Imitating the example of Nerio, San Superan obtained in 1396 from Ladislaus of Naples the title of hereditary Prince of Achaia, to which Pope Boniface IX, without encroaching on the rights of the Neapolitan king, added that of “standard­bearer” of the Church. Soon afterwards, in 1402, he died, the type of a successful adventurer, who had never scrupled to use the Turks when it suited his purpose. His widow Maria succeeded him as Princess of Achaia and regent for his eldest child; but the real power was vested in her nephew, Centurione Zaccaria, the ambitious baron of Kyparissia.

The Despot Theodore had soon convinced himself that the Albanians alone would not suffice to save his land from the Turks. He could not appeal for aid to his brother, the Emperor Manuel II, for the latter had gone to London to crave the help of Henry IV, leaving his wife and children in charge of the Venetians at Modon. Indeed, it seemed as if Theodore himself might have to seek a refuge in some Venetian colony. In this dilemma, he bethought him of the Knights of St John, who had previously held Achaia, and were known to be bold and experienced soldiers. He accordingly went to Rhodes in 1400 and sold Mistri, Kalavryta, and Corinth, to the Knights. When the news reached Greece, great was the indignation of the natives; even the laboured funeral oration, which the Emperor Manuel subsequently delivered over his brother, fails to justify this craven act. The panegyrist strove, indeed, to show that his brother had conferred a greater benefit upon Hellenism by ceding Akrocorinth than by regaining it five years before; in vain, he quoted Solomon in proof of his brother’s wisdom, and pronounced the admirable maxim—utterly disregarded by the Greeks in practice—that, after all, it was better to give Corinth to one’s fellow-Christians than to let it fall into the hands of the infidels. This was not the opinion of the people. The Knights, indeed, occupied Corinth, where the Greek party had not had time to take firm root, and where they strove to make their rule popular by all manner of concessions; but at Mistra, the capital and the seat of the metropolitan of Lacedsemonia, the Greeks rushed with sticks and stones to slay the envoys of the Order. The metro­politan intervened to save their lives, and gave them three days to quit the district, whereupon the fanatical people entrusted him with the supreme temporal power, and refused to receive back the Despot, until he had repaid the purchase­money to the Knights and vowed never to dream of such a monstrous transaction again. He saw that what he had regarded as a masterpiece of diplomacy had well-nigh cost him his dominions. Moreover, the defeat and capture of the dreaded Sultan Bajazet removed for a time the prospects of a fresh Turkish invasion. Theodore thought that the Knights, having served their turn, were no longer needed; and successfully applied his diplomatic talents to the task of ejecting them with the least possible amount of friction. A money payment, and the cession of the old county of Salona, with the barony of Lamia, which Theodore, as the representative of the last countess, had occupied on the news of the Turkish defeat at Angora, but which he was too weak to hold, settled the claims of the Knights, and both parties separated on the best of terms. In 1404, Theodore re-entered Corinth, and the Knights crossed the gulf to take possession of Salona. But there, too, they found the Greeks fanatically opposed to “the French priests”. When they tried to bribe the mountain folk to rise against the Turks, who had re­occupied the country, the crafty Greeks took their money and then laughed at them, and the monkish chronicler naively justifies his countrymen’s conduct towards the Frankish “Antichrists,” who got no more than they deserved. All that they accomplished was the building of a church at Galaxidi, the ruins of which still disguise, in a corrupted form, the name of St John of Jerusalem. Even the formal acquiescence of the new sultan in their occupation of Salona availed them nothing in the face of this Greek opposition, and the old Frankish barony was soon all Turkish again.

Theodore did not long survive his diplomatic triumph. In 1407 he died, and, as he left no heirs, the Emperor Manuel II appointed his own second son, Theodore II, who was still a minor, as his brother’s successor. Over the remains of the late Despot the emperor delivered, a few years later, a pompous funeral oration, still preserved, in which he lauded his brother to the skies in faultless Greek and with great wealth of classical allusion, attributed to his wise policy in calling in the Knights the revival of prosperity in the peninsula, and exclaimed that the Peloponnese was his brother’s monument—“a monument, too, not dead, but alive!”

The Despot’s last act before his death had been to attempt what his predecessors had been compassing for a century and a half—the conquest of the Frankish principality, now in the hands of a new and energetic ruler. Centurione Zaccaria, son of the former constable and nephew of the last prince, was not the man to be content with governing in the name of his aunt and her infant children. He had the effrontery to ask Venice, to whose care San Superan had committed his heirs, for assistance in his ambitious design of setting them aside, just as, two centuries before, the first Villehardouin, with Venetian aid, had deprived Champlitte’s successor of his heritage. Then he applied to King Ladislaus of Naples, who still posed as overlord of Achaia, and obtained from him, in 1404, the coveted title of Prince of Achaia. The Neapolitan monarch salved his conscience for thus depriving San Superan’s children of their birthright by pretending that they had not notified their father’s death within the time prescribed by the feudal law. Thus, the great Genoese family from which Centurione sprang had reached the summit of its ambitions by a quibble similar to that by which the first Villehardouin had won Achaia. But the handwriting was on the wall. He was the last of the long series of Frankish Princes of Achaia; weakened by internal dissensions, the diminished state was destined to succumb ere long to the brief revival of Hellenism at Mistra. Mean­while, Centurione’s most pressing foes were those of his own race. One of his most important peers, Carlo Tocco, Count of Cephalonia, at once obtained from the King of Naples the abolition of the feudal tie, which had united his island county to Achaia for 170 years — an event commemorated on the only coin of his dynasty, now in the British Museum. Not content with that, he and his brother, Leonardo of Zante, seized Glarentza, from which they were finally dislodged by the united efforts of the Zaccaria clan and the Albanian troops of the prince. The latter, feeling himself insecure, begged his ancestral city of Genoa to look upon him as her son and citizen.

The Tocchi were at this time among the most ambitious and able of the Latin dynasties in the Levant. We have seen how Carlo I., Duke of Leucadia and Palatine Count of Cephalonia and Zante, had married the favourite daughter of Nerio Acciajuoli, and had played an active, if devious, part in the execution of his father-in-law’s will. His wife, the Duchess Francesca, one of the ablest and most masterful women of the Latin Levant, in which her sex had played so prominent a part, was the ruling spirit in his councils. To her influence was due the restoration of the Greek arch­bishopric of Leukas; she was sufficiently Greek and sufficiently proud to sign her letters in Greek, and with the cinnabar ink of Byzantium: “Empress of the Romans”; and she possessed all her father’s brains, and inherited his political ideas. In her castle of Santa Mavra —the irregular, hexagonal buildihg which is still preserved— and in her court at the castle of St George in Cephalonia, which served as barracks during the British occupation, but which now remains a deserted land­mark of foreign rule, she presided over a bevy of fair ladies. Old Froissart tells us, how the Comte de Nevers and the other French nobles, whom the sultan had taken prisoners at the battle of Nikopolis, were received there by her with splendid hospitality oh their way home. The ladies were exceeding glad, he says, to have such noble society, for Venetian and Genoese merchants were, as a rule, the only strangers who came to their delightful island. He describes Cephalonia as ruled by women, who scorned not, however, to make silken coverings so fine that there were none like them. Fairies and nymphs inhabited this ancient realm of Odysseus, where a mediaeval Penelope governed in the absence of her lord. Events were soon to extend his rule over the neighbouring continent, where we last saw his uncle, Esau Buondelmonti, holding sway.

The Florentine ruler of Joannina was anxious to secure immunity for his people from the attacks of the great Albanian clan of Spata, which had its capital at Arta. Accordingly, on the death of his beloved wife, he had contracted a second marriage with a daughter of old Ghin (or John) Boua Spata, its chieftain. But this act of policy had the very opposite effect of what had been expected, for it brought Evrenosbeg and a Turkish army upon Epiros, and made the Albanians more jealous than ever of the Italian interloper. Buondelmonti proved a match for the Turks in that difficult country; but in his new brother-in-law, Ghin Zenevisi, Lord of Argyrokastron, he found a more dangerous antagonist. During an expedition to punish this treacherous chieftain, he was taken prisoner, and only released, thanks to the good offices of his influential Florentine relatives, and of the Venetian governor of Corfu, on payment of a large ransom. We last hear of him in 1408, when he died with­out offspring, and, in the ordinary course, his nephew, Carlo Tocco, should have succeeded him. But, no sooner was Esau dead, than another Albanian chief, Maurice Boua Sgourds, who had seized the succession of his brother Ghin at Arta, made himself also master of Joannina, whence Tocco was unable to dislodge him. Both parties appealed for aid to Venice, which, after her acquisition of Lepanto, was not at all desirous to see a vigorous Italian princelet establish himself on the mainland. Sgouros, when hard pressed, called in the Turks, which had the effect of frightening all parties into peace. But, though Tocco temporarily relinquished the places which he had taken on the mainland, he did not abandon his claim to the old Despotat of Epiros. The various races of Epiros seem to have grown weary of the Albanian ascendancy; already another rival had endeavoured to obtain as many diverse racial sympathies as possible by describing himself as a “Serbo-Albano-Boulgaro-Wallach”— a name worthy of Aristophanes himself. Tocco and his consort were doubtless popular with the Greek element; supported by them and with his own right arm, he would appear to have at last vanquished his enemy in a battle, which was fatal to the latter; early in 1417, he had already made himself master of “the land of Arta,” and in 1418 he was able to style himself “Despot of the Romans”. His dominions embraced, besides his islands, Epiros, Astolia, and Akarnania; he resided now at Arta, now at Joannina, and now in his insular castles, while the relatives of his fallen rival emigrated to the Morea, where they and their descendants, later on, played a prominent part. Thus he and his masterful wife had established in North-west Greece, a com­pact dominion, broken only by the Venetian castle of Lepanto. That, too, he offered to buy; but he received the haughty answer, that the republic had “ never been accustomed to sell her fortresses, and is quite capable, even if they were not remunerative, of supporting their cost.”

The ten years’ fratricidal struggle between the four sons of Bajazet I. had given Greece as a whole a welcome respite from Turkish invasions, and a Byzantine governor actually ruled, for the first time for generations, in Lamia. But the two surviving fragments of Latin rule in North-east Greece-— the Venetian marquisate of Boudonitza and the Venetian station of Pteleon — were, from their isolated position, peculiarly exposed to attack. Suleyman, as we saw, had guaranteed the independence of the Marquis Giacomo on continued payment of a tribute, which was also claimed from Pteleon; but the Turks none the less became so threatening that he removed his vassals and cattle to the safer castle of Karystos in Euboea, which his brother now held from the Venetians. The danger increased when Suleyman’s brother, Musa, seized the Turkish throne in 1410. The new sultan’s victorious troops marched straight, like a new army of Xerxes, against the historic fortress which, for two centuries, had guarded the Pass of Thermopylae. The marquis defended it, like a second Leonidas, but he was assassi­nated by a traitor within the walls. Even then, his sons, aided by their uncle, the baron of Karystos, held the castle for some months longer, in the hope that Venice would send aid to her children in distress. Aid was, indeed, ordered to be sent; but, before it arrived, Boudonitza had fallen—surrendered at last by its gallant defenders on condition that their lives and property were spared. The Turks violated their promise, robbed their prisoners of all that they possessed, and incorporated the marquisate with the Pashalik of Thessaly. Young Niccold Zorzi, the late marquis’s heir, and his uncle, Niccold of Karystos, were dragged off as captives to the sultan’s court at Adrianople, where Venice did not forget them. In the treaty of 1411, between Musa and the republic, the sultan promised to release the young marquis, for love of Venice, seeing that he was a Venetian, to vex him no more, if he paid the tribute agreed upon, and to allow his ships and merchandise to enter the Turkish Empire on payment of a fixed duty. But young Niccold, after what had occurred, felt insecure in his ancestral castle at the northern gates of Greece. In 1412 we find him sending the Bishop of Thermopylae to ask for archers from Negroponte and the protection of the Venetian admiral, in case the Turks, or their vassal, Antonio of Athens, should attack him. His request was granted; but his marquisate was doomed.

Mohammed I had indeed promised on his accession in 1413, to be a son to the Greek Emperor Manuel, who had helped him to the throne; and he had told the envoys of the Despot Theodore, the Prince of Achaia, and the Despot of Joannina, that he wished to be at peace with their masters. But he did not spare the Venetian Lord of Boudonitza. His fleet sailed to Euboea, and, after ravaging the island, crossed over to the mainland. On 20th June 1414 the castle fell, its fortifications were destroyed, numbers of the marquis’s subjects were dragged off as slaves, and the historic mar- quisate which had lasted over two hundred years, disappeared from the face of Greece. Young Niccold fled to Venice, which afforded him shelter and endeavoured to recover for him his lost dominions. When the republic, after a brilliant victory over the Turkish fleet, forced upon Mohammed the treaty of 1416, one of the conditions was that the marquis should be restored, if he did homage and paid tribute to the sultan. But his castle was now in ruins, and he was glad to cede the vain honour of bearing the title to his uncle, the baron of Karystos, receiving for himself the rectorship of Pteleon, as the reward of the services of his father, “killed by the Turks in the cause of Venice”. From that time we hear of him no more; but his uncle, Niccold of Karystos, was prominent in the diplomatic negotiations of the period. He went as Venetian ambassador to both the Emperor Sigismund and Pope Martin V, and it was on an embassy to Murad II at Adrianople that he died, it was said, of poison administered by the sultan’s orders. The title of Marquis of Boudonitza and the barony of Karystos lingered on for two generations in his family, and at the present day his descendants, the Zorzi of S. Giustina still exist in Venice. Such was the tragic end of the marquisate, which Boniface of Montferrat had conferred upon the Pallavicini, and which had passed from them to the family of Zorzi. A picturesque ruin still marks the spot where the Italian marquises held their court.

With the fall of Boudonitza, the brief restoration of Byzantine rule in Lamia passed away, and the whole of continental Greece, from Olympos to Bceotia, was Turkish, except where the Euboean governor of Pteleon kept the Venetian flag still flying. Despite the late sultan’s promise not to molest the Venetian colonies, every year the Turks descended in smaller or larger numbers upon Euboea, and on one of these raids some 1500 of the islanders were carried off into captivity, and the town of Lepso, the modern Asdepsos, where the Greeks go to take the hot baths, was destroyed. So wretched was existence in the island at this time, that the inhabitants petitioned Venice for permission to become tributaries of the Turks. This request the proud republic refused; but it was obvious, as the petitioners pointed out, that Negroponte was now, like Lepanto, “on the frontier of all her Levantine possessions,” and had therefore to bear the brunt of every Turkish invasion. Attica was still more exposed to these dreaded enemies, and in 1415 Antonio Acciajuoli applied to Venice for munitions from Negroponte and leave to deposit his animals and property there in case of attack. A year later the Turks ravaged his duchy and forced him to pay tribute. Happily the great Venetian naval victory over the Turks in 1416 checked for a time the Ottoman advance, and the subsequent treaty, which the sultan made with the victors three years later, procured a breathing space for the Latins of the Levant. Mohammed I. even went so far as to threaten with condign punishment, Antonio Acciajuoli, who had maltreated some Venetian sub­jects, or anyone else who should dare to lay a finger on any Venetian colony. Thus, Greece enjoyed a welcome respite from the Turkish peril. Had her rulers been wise, they would have availed themselves of it to consolidate their forces against the common enemy, who was so soon to destroy their dominions. But when have the Eastern Christians been united against the Crescent? Yet few moments were more favourable than this, when the Turkish ruler was pacific, when his Empire was just emerging from a long civil war, and when, by a curious irony of fate, Hellenism was displaying a consciousness of its past and a concern for its future such as it had not shown since the Frankish Conquest. It was, alas! the last flicker of light before the long centuries of Turkish darkness.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREEK RECONQUEST OF ACHAIA (1415-1441)