MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER XIII THE TURKISH CONQUEST (1441-1460)

The Frankish principality of Achaia being now extinct, it might have been expected that common-sense and the common danger from the Turks would have convinced the Greeks that union and disinterested endeavours were needed to consolidate and defend against the Turks what had been so slowly and laboriously won back from the Latins. But that nota inter fratres inimicitia, which Tacitus had remarked as a characteristic of human nature in his time, was intensified in the case of the four surviving brothers of the Emperor John VI : Theodore, Constantine, Thomas and Demetrios. The Peloponnese, as we saw, was now divided amongst the three former, while the fourth had not yet obtained an appanage in the peninsula. Unhappily, the prospect of the imperial succession was an apple of discord among them, and the Byzantine court became a hot-bed of fraternal intrigues, which were naturally continued in the residences of the three Despots in the Morea. The emperor, who wished Constantine to succeed him, was desirous of keeping the trio in Greece; while Constantine and Thomas wanted to have the peninsula to themselves, and the former did not hesitate to seek the consent of the sultan to this scheme through the mediation of the ever-useful Phrantzes, his unfailing emissary in all dubious, or diplomatic, trans­actions. Civil war accordingly broke out between Theodore and his two brothers, which it required all the efforts of two imperial embassies to assuage. It was agreed that Con­stantine should go to live in Constantinople, leaving the Morea to Theodore and Thomas, and there he remained as regent for the emperor, while the latter, accompanied by Demetrios and the oecumenical patriarch, set out to achieve the union of the Eastern and Western churches at the councils of Ferrara and Florence. On his journey to Italy, the emperor landed at Kenchreai, traversed Greece on horseback, preached the blessings of brotherly love to the two Despots, and ordered the philosopher Gemistos to accompany him to the council. Then he took ship at the Venetian harbour of Navarino. The insecurity of the Greek seas at that period may be judged from the fact that the emperor and his ship­load of learned theologians ran imminent risk of being captured by a Catalan corsair who was lurking behind the island of Gaidaronisi, near Sunium.¹ Their sufferings and labour were in vain; and on their return journey, wherever they stopped in Greece, at Corfu, Modon, and Chalcis, the Greek clergy indignantly remonstrated with them on the concessions which they had made. The Greeks of Corfii, who had no bishop of their own, bitterly remarked that the Latin archbishop would now press his claim to ordain their priests; those of Chalcis, where the returning theologians took part in a service in a Catholic church, declared that henceforth they could no longer exclude the Latin clergy from performing mass in the Greek churches.

During the six years between 1437 and 1443, during which Constantine was mainly absent at Constantinople, the Morea enjoyed the blessing of having practically no history. We find Thomas administering justice and confirm­ing sales of property at Patras, and Theodore ratifying the ancient privileges of the inhabitants of Monemvasia. All the Despot’s subjects, whether freemen or serfs, were permitted to enter or leave that important city without let or hindrance, except only the dangerous denizens of Tzakonia and Vatika, whose character had not altered in two hundred years. The citizens, their beasts, and their ships, were exempt from forced labour; and, at their special request, the Despot con­firmed the local custom, by which all the property of a Monemvasiote who died without relatives was devoted to the repair of the castle; while, if he had only distant relatives, one-third of his estate Was reserved for that purpose. This system of death-duties was continued by Theodore’s successor, Dem6trios, by whom Monemvasia was described as “one of the most useful cities under my rule”. The prosperity of Patras, on the other hand, must have suffered by the transference of the Venetian trade to Lepanto, previously only a cattle-market, which, in consequence, began to pay its expenses. To the eye, however, of a literary observer, the Humanist, Francescus Philelphus, there was “nothing in the Peloponnese worthy of praise except George Gemistos”, or Plethon, as he now’ called himself, who had returned from Florence, and was holding a judicial post at Mistra. “The Palaiologoi princes themselves”, added the critic, “are oppressed by poverty, and even their own subjects ridicule and plunder them. The language is depraved, the customs are more barbarous than the barbarians.” Yet it is to these barbarians that we owe those beautiful Byzantine churches, the Pantanassa and the Peribleptos, at Mistra.

In 1443 a fresh distribution of the Moreot Governments took place. In view of the succession to the throne of all the Caesars, both Constantine and Theodore were anxious to obtain the city of Selymbria, on the Sea of Marmara, which was close to the capital. Finally, an arrangement was made by which Theodore received Selymbria, where he died of the plague five years later, and ceded his province in the Morea to Constantine. An inscription in the chapel of Our Lady of Brontochion, at Mistra, still commemorates Theodore’s temporary aspirations for the peace of the cloister, and a feeble monody has been preserved in remembrance of this feeble ruler.

Thus, Constantine now held the larger portion of the peninsula, including Patras, Corinth, and Mistra, in each of which he was represented by a governor, in the case of Mistrai the faithful Phrantzes, whose jurisdiction included not only the capital, but the village of Jewish Trype, at the mouth of the Langada Gorge, Sklavochorio (the ancient Amyklai), and several other villages in the neighbourhood. Phrantzes received on his appointment strict injunctions to abolish a number of offices and to establish one-man rule at Mistral, while a single minister in attendance was attached to the person of the sovereign wherever he went. Con­stantine’s first act after his arrival was to rebuild the Isthmian wall, which Turakhan had destroyed a second time during a raid into the Peloponnese in 1431 ; the next was to renew, this time by force of arms, the attempt which he had made by diplomacy nine years before, to recover the Athenian duchy for himself and the cause of Hellenism, which he personified. The moment seemed singularly favourable, for a weak man held sway at Athens, and the Turks, hard pressed by the Hungarians and Poles, whom Pope Eugenius IV. had marshalled against them, defied by Skanderbeg in Albania, defeated by John Hunyady at Nish, threatened by the appearance of a Venetian fleet in the yEgean, were unable to protect their Athenian vassal. He, therefore, cheerfully responded to the appeal of the papal envoys, marched into Bceotia early in 1444, occupied Thebes, ravaged the country to the gates of Livadia and as far north as Lamia and Agrapha, and compelled Nerio II to pledge himself to pay tribute. The Wallachs of Pindos now descended upon the Turks of the great Thessalian plain, and received from the victorious Constantine a governor whose seat was at Phanari; one of the Albanian clans in Phthiotis, to which the sultan had granted autonomy, joined his standard; 300 Burgundian auxiliaries arrived to swell his forces, and he was so flushed with success that he did not scruple to arouse the wrath of Venice by seizing the port of Vitrinitza, on the Gulf of Corinth, which had been ceded by the Turks to the governor of Lepanto. Thus, for a moment, almost all the Morea and the greater part of continental Greece acknowledged the sway or the suzerainty of a Greek prince. Never, since the time of the Frankish Conquest, had the Hellenic cause been so successful. The news spread to Italy; Cardinal Bessarion hastened to congratulate Con­stantine on the fortification of the isthmus, and urged him to transfer his capital from MistrS to Corinth. At the same time, he bade him become the Lycurgus of the new Sparta— lightening taxation, checking extravagance in dress and servants by strict sumptuary laws, preventing the export of corn, building a navy from the wood of the Peloponnesian forests, and searching for iron in the folds of Taygetos. Above all, the cardinal advised him to send a few young Spartans to learn letters and arts in Italy and so qualify as literary and technical instructors of their fellow-countrymen. While the patriot churchman dreamed of a revival of ancient Hellas by the genius of Constantine, the court of Naples heard that he had actually occupied Athens; and Alfonso V of Aragon, who had never forgotten that he was still titular duke of Athens and Neopatras, wrote at once demanding the restitution of the two duchies to himself, and sent the Marquis of Gerace to receive them from the conqueror’s hands. But, before the letter was despatched, the fate of Greece had been decided on the shores of the Black Sea. The perjury of the Christians, who had broken their solemn oaths to keep peace with the sultan, had been punished by their crushing defeat at Varna in November 1444. Venice made peace to save her colonies; the rest of Greece lay at the mercy of the victor.

Nerio II was the first sufferer for his compulsory alliance with the Greek Despot. Omar, the son of Turakhan, governor of Thessaly, ravaged Boeotia and Attica, as a punishment for his weakness. Nerio now saw that his only hope lay in obsequiousness to the Turks, whose star was again in the ascendant, and sent an envoy to the sultan, expressing his willingness to pay the same tribute as before. On these conditions he purchased safety from the Turks, but at the same time called down upon himself the vengeance of Constantine, who marched against Athens, and endeavoured to take it Nerio now called upon the sultan to protect him ; his appeal was supported by Turakhan, whose Thessalian province had suffered from Constantine’s recent successes; and Murad, true to the traditional Turkish policy of support­ing the weaker of two rival Christian nationalities, accordingly sent an ultimatum to Constantine, demanding the evacuation of the Turkish territory which he had occupied. As Constantine refused, the sultan resolved to chastise the bold Greek who dared to disobey him.

In 1446 all Murad’s preparations were made, and he set out from Macedonia to invade Greece, with a commissariat so splendidly organised as to call forth the enthusiastic praise of the Athenian historian. North of the isthmus he met with no opposition, for Constantine, with his brother Thomas and the whole force of the Peloponnese, amounting to 60,000 men, had retired behind the newly restored walls of the Hexamilion. At Thebes an Athenian con­tingent joined the sultan under Nerio, who had thus the petty satisfaction of assisting his present against his late master. After encamping for a few days at a place called Mingiai to prepare his cannon and fascines, Murad drew up his forces in front of the Isthmian wall. A spy, who was despatched from the Greek headquarters, came back with an alarming report of the strength of the Turkish army, which stretched from sea to sea, and implored the Despot to send an embassy to the sultan with all speed, and so avert, if possible, the evils which his rashness had brought upon the Peloponnese. Constantine ordered the spy to be thrown into prison for his frankness, and rejected his advice. He had, indeed, sent Chalkokondiles, father of the historian, as an envoy to the sultan, but his instructions were to claim the isthmus and the Turkish possessions recently captured in continental Greece—a claim which, as the historian admits, was excessive, and so irritated Murzad that he threw the ambassador into prison. When, however, the sultan came to examine the imposing walls of the Hexamilion, he remonstrated with old Turakhan for having advised him to attack such apparently impregnable lines so late in the season —for it was now 27th November. But the veteran, who knew his Greeks and had already twice taken the Isthmian wall, maintained that its defenders would not resist an attack, but would flee at the news of his arrival at the isthmus. In this expectation the sultan waited several days before ordering the attack; but, as Constantine showed no sign of surrender; he ordered his cannon to open fire on the wall. On the evening of the fourth day, the fires in front of the Turkish tents, and the strains of the martial hymns which rose from the Turkish camp, warned the Greeks that, according to their custom, the besiegers would begin the assault on the next day but one. On the following evening the sutlers dragged the siege engines into position, and at dawn next day, ioth December, the band sounded the signal for the attack. While some endeavoured to undermine the wall, and others placed scaling ladders against it, the Turkish artillery prevented the defenders from exposing themselves over the battlements. The honours of the day rested with a young Servian janissary, who was the first to scale the wall right in the centre under the eyes of the sultan—a sad but characteristic example of the manner in which the Turks in all ages have used the Slavs against the Greeks and the Greeks against the Slavs. Others followed him, the Greeks were driven down from that point of the battlements, a panic seized them, and they fled in disorder, followed by the troops near them. The two Despots in vain endeavoured to rally their panic-stricken men; then, finding their efforts useless, and suspect­ing the Albanians of treachery, they fled also; while the Turkish soldiers poured over the fatal battlement, through a breach in the wall, and finally through the gates. Some fell upon the ample plunder which they found in the Greek camp, others slew or captured the fleeing Greeks; the whole isthmus, laments a Greek poet, was strewn “with gold-winged arrows, jewelled swords, and the heads and hands and bodies of men”. The sultan stained his laurels by two hideous acts of cruelty. Three hundred Greeks, who had fled to Mount Oneion, above Kenchreai, he induced to surrender, and then butchered in cold blood; six hundred of his soldiers’ captives he purchased, in order to sacrifice them as an acceptable offering to the Manes of his father.

The two Despots retreated into the far south of the peninsula, for they knew that the citadel of Akrocorinth had neither provisions nor munitions sufficient to resist a long siege; they had staked and lost their all at the isthmus, and they had to face a revolt headed by a Greek archon, who proclaimed Centurione’s bastard son, Giovanni Asan, as legitimate Prince of Achaia. If hard pressed by the Turks, they were resolved to quit the country. Meanwhile, leaving old Turakhan, who knew the Peloponnese well, to pursue them, the sultan marched along the south shore of the Corinthian Gulf with such rapidity that, on the same day on which he captured the isthmus, he surprised Basilicata, the ancient Sikyon, whose entire male population had gone to defend the Hexamilion, with the exception of a few who had taken refuge with the women and children in the Akropolis. This small garrison soon surrendered; the sultan set fire to the town, and then continued his march to the wealthy city of Vostitza, which met with a like fate at his hands. When he reached Patras, he found that all the inhabitants, except some 4000 who had occupied the castle and the palace, had fled across the gulf to the Venetian colony of Lepanto, which had secured immunity by continuing to pay him tribute. The occupants of the palace surrendered, and were enslaved; but the people in the splendid old castle, even though a breach was made in the walls, hurled blazing resin and pitch on to the heads of the janissaries, and so maintained their position. The sultan had to content himself with burning and destroying the town, whose wealth had made it the “purse” of Constantine, and with ravaging the country as far as Glarentza. Meanwhile, Turakhan had returned from his raid; and, as the season was far advanced and the Despots were willing to make peace on his terms, and pay him a tribute, Murad withdrew to Thebes, leaving the Hexamilion a heap of ruins, and taking more than 60,000 captives with him. On his approach, the terrified Thebans abandoned their homes, only to fall into the clutches of the Turkish army at the isthmus. The news of the fall of the Hexamilion had been at once followed by the submission of all Constantine’s recent conquests in continental Greece; and the Bey of Salona swore on the Koran that no harm should befall the revolted people of Loidoriki and Galaxidi, if they would return to their allegiance.

On the death of his brother, the Emperor John, in 1448, Constantine succeeded, in spite of the intrigues of his younger brother Demetrios, to the imperial title. It is a picturesque fact, which the Greeks should not forget when they raise their contemplated monument to him, that the last emperor of Constantinople was crowned at Mistra, where his first wife, Theodora Tocco, like Cleopa Malatesta, the wife of his brother Theodore, lay buried in the Zoodotou monastery. After the coronation on 6th January 1449, the new emperor sailed on board a Catalan ship for the imperial capital, where he met his two surviving brothers. Thomas he confirmed in the dignity of a Despot, upon Dem£trios he bestowed his previous government, with the exception of Tatras, which was added to that of Thomas. Before the two Despots left for the Morea, they solemnly swore, in the presence of their aged mother, their brother the emperor, and all the leading members of the Senate, to live in unity and brotherly love.

Shortly after the accession of Constantine to the imperial throne, his great adversary, Murad II, rounded off his Greek conquests by annexing practically all that remained of the former Despotat of Epiros. For many years Carlo II Tocco had remained at peace with his cousins and with the Turks. When the antiquary, Cyriacus of Ancona, visited the “ King of the Epirotes”, as he styles him, in 1435 and 1436, the latter gave him a letter of introduction, which ensured him a warm welcome at a marriage festivity in the family of the Despot’s cousin Turnus. In 1444, however, when the fortunes of the sultan seemed to be waning, and his brother-in-law, the Despot Constantine, made his brilliant but short-lived conquests in nothern Greece, Carlo also threw off the Turkish suzerainty. In this bold step he was advised and assisted by his father-in-law, Giovanni, the above-mentioned Marquis of Gerace, a member of the great Sicilian family of Ventimiglia. Landing with a small body of cavalry, the marquis routed with great loss a large army of Turks which was besieging his son-in-law. On his return home, however, shortly afterwards, Carlo was captured by treachery or a Turkish stratagem, and reduced to his former state of vassalage. Unfortunately, he died on 30th September 1448, before his eldest son, Leonardo III, had reached man­hood, so that there was no one strong-enough to protect his continental dominions. The four governors, whom the late Despot had appointed guardians of his children, thought that the only way to save their threatened heritage was to invoke the protection of Venice; Zante hoisted the banner of St Mark; the captain of Sta. Mavra offered his island to the republic; while others of the islanders sent to Alfonso V. of Naples, mindful of the connection between the ducal family and the Neapolitan crown. But while Venice was negotiating, the sultan acted. On 24th March 1449, the Turks took Arta, and annexed all the continental dominions of the house of Tocco, except the three points of Vonitza, Varnazza, and Angelokastro, which thenceforth, under the name of Karl-ili, or “Charles’s country”, formed a part of the Turkish Empire, still preserving in its Turkish name the memory of Carlo Tocco.

Venice was now more than ever anxious to prevent the loss of the island county of Cephalonia or its occupation by another Christian power, such as the King of Naples. She really wanted absolute possession of the central Ionian group, such as she had long enjoyed in Corfu, and she actually ordered Vettore Cappello, her admiral, afterwards famous as the captor of Athens, and whose effigy still adorns the portal of Sant’ Aponal at Venice, to take steps for the annexation of Zante. Pensions, it was thought, would reconcile any of the chief inhabitants who now enjoyed offices—and such were numerous under the Tocchi—to the change of ruler. But it soon became evident that neither the “Despot of Arta,” as Leonardo III. still styled himself, nor his brothers wished to surrender their heritage. Another proposal, that Venice should occupy the islands during his minority, was rejected, and ultimately the negotiations terminated by the republic, with the advice of “the Councils of Cephalonia and Zante,” taking him, his brothers, and successors under her protection. Henceforth Leonardo III. was included in Venetian treaties, though the kings of Naples continued to regard him as their vassal.

While the Italian rule in continental Greece was thus drawing to a close, an antiquary, for the first time since the Conquest, visited the country. This mediaeval Pausanias, Cyriacus of Ancona, has left us, together with numerous ancient inscriptions and not a few sketches of classical monu­ments, some brief notes on the distinguished personages whom he met in the course of his extended travels. A merchant by profession, like Schliemann, whom in some respects he resembled, he taught himself Greek, and was consumed by a burning enthusiasm for the memorials of classic Hellas. As his notes often contain no indication of the year in which they were written, an exact chronology of his Greek journeyings is extremely difficult; but he seems to have first visited the Levant in 1412, and we find him reading daily the Greek, Latin, and mediaeval historians to Mohammed II during, or immediately after, the siege of Constantinople, that is to say, in 1452 or 1453. His preserved fragments refer, however, mainly to three Greek journeys, the first of which extended from the end of 1435 to about the middle of 1436, the second took place in 1437, and the third and longest lasted from 1443 to 1449, when the Genoese Government describes him, in a letter of recommendation, as “now return­ing west,” after “having visited Epiros, Aetolia, Akarnania, the Morea, Achaia, Athens, Phokis, Boeotia, Crete, and the Cyclades.”

The worthy antiquary, on the first of these journeys, arrived in Greek waters towards the end of December 1435. The plague then raging at Corfu prevented-him from touching at that island, where, during one of his previous voyages, he had acquired some Greek manuscripts. He accordingly spent Christmas at the Corfiote dependency of Butrinto, on the opposite coast, and thence proceeded to Arta, where Carlo II Tocco received him most hospitably. “The King of the Epirotes,” as Cyriacus calls him, gave the traveller every facility for seeing the sights of his dominions. His majesty’s secretary, Giorgio Ragnarolo of Pesaro, assisted his fellow­countryman; and, thus supported, the antiquary was able to visit Rogus, where he found “the head of the Virgin’s mother, the body of St Luke, and the foot of St John Chrysostom”; the ruins of the old Roman colony of Nikopolis, founded to commemorate the victory of Actium; and the remains of Dodona. He then travelled southward through Acarnania and Aetolia, stopping at Vonitza, so important in the medieval history of the country, gazing across at Ithaka from the coast of the mainland, and finally arriving at the ancient Kalydon, whence he set out for Patras. Before, however, he had left “the Royal city of Akarnania”, he had prudently submitted, in a letter still preserved, the manuscript account of his journey in Epiros to the “King of the Epirotes”, in case any of his observations should fail to please the royal eye! From Patras he crossed over to the Venetian colony of Lepanto, and ere long we find him at Kirrha, the ancient port of Delphi, then called “Ancona” (from the “elbow” of land on which it stood), or “the Five Saints” (from some church of that name). At Salona he mentions the church of the Transfiguration, but he has little or no regard for what is post-classical. He scornfully remarks, in the narrow spirit of the archaeologist for whom contemporary Greece has no interest, that Delphi “is called Castri by the foolish Greek populace, which is quite ignorant where it was”; but he inspected with keen interest the ruined walls, the remains of the round temple of Apollo, the amphitheatre, and the hippodrome, wandered among the broken statues which covered the ground, and admired the large and richly orna­mented tombs. Thence he proceeded to Livadia by way of the noble Byzantine monastery of Hdsios LoukSs, where the monks showed him a very ancient collection of sacred books. At Livadia he noted a large temple of Hera in the ruined city; and, after a digression to Orchomenos, arrived at Thebes, which, though no longer the capital of the duchy, was still the occasional residence of the Duke of Athens, for our traveller specially mentions the “royal court” there. A brief visit to Chalkis and Eretria concluded this part of his tour, and on 7th April 1436 he reached Athens, where he stayed for fifteen days, the guest of a certain Antonelli Balduini. On this occasion he does not seem to have been presented to Nerio II, nor does he tell us much about the con­temporary state of the city at the beginning of the new reign. His days are entirely devoted to visiting the antiquities, to making sketches, and to copying the inscriptions which he finds on the monuments. Many of them relate to the Emperor Hadrian, the great philhellene, who, as the inscrip­tion on his arch reminded the traveller, founded a new Athens, which began where that of Theseus ended. He noted down the emperor’s celebrated edict at the gate of Athena Archegetis regulating the oil-trade; he transcribed the inscription commemorating the completion by Antoninus Pius of Hadrian’s aqueduct, which, like the Capuan notary forty years earlier, he was informed by the local ciceroni to have been “Aristotle’s Study ; he, too, alludes to the statue of the Gorgon on the south of the Acropolis; he, too, describes the temple of Olympian Zeus, of which he counted one more column than his prede­cessor had done, as the “house”, or “palace of Hadrian.” Similarly, he mistook the choragic monument of Lysikrates for the marble seats of a theatre. The perfect “temple Of Mars”, as he calls the Theseion, “with its thirty columns”, and “the fifty-eight columns and noble sculptures on the pediments, frieze, and metopes of the Parthenon” naturally aroused his admiration. But, unlike the pious notary, he tells us nothing of its condition as the cathedral of Athens, beyond two casual allusions to the recent restora­tion of a pillar, and to an inscribed ancient marble urn inside, which may perhaps have served either as a font or for holy water. He alludes, however, to the church of St Dionysios under the Areopagos. His general impression of Athens is striking. “Everywhere”, he writes, “I saw vast walls decayed with age, and inside and outside the city in­credible marble buildings, houses, and temples, all kinds of sculptures executed with marvellous skill, and huge columns—but all these things a mass of great ruins.”

Down at the Piraeus the antiquary could trace the huge foundations of the ancient walls, part of two round tuwers was still standing, and the entrance of the harbour was guarded by the huge marble lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice. Phaleron, or Porto Vecchio, he ignores.

Of contemporary Athens he gives us the barest glimpses. He tells us that it possessed a “north” and a “west gate”, as well as “the gate of the new city”, and that of the castle— the same number which the Jesuit Father Simon enumerates more than two centuries later; that it had “new walls”, a statement, corroborated by that of another traveller thirty years afterwards, which might indicate the so-called wall of Valerian as the work of the Acciajuoli; and that the Theseion lay outside the town. Of the inhabitants he says nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an archaeologist?

After a day at Eleusis, where, like the Capuan, he noted the ruins of an aqueduct, Cyriacus journeyed by way of Megara to the isthmus, still strewn with the walls erected by Manuel II and destroyed by the Turks five and thirteen years earlier. Rapidly visiting Corinth and the amphitheatre and brick baths of Sikyon, he made an excursion up to Kalavryta, where he met a kindred soul, one George Cantacuzene, a scholar learned in Greek literature who possessed a large library, from which he lent the wandering archaeologist an Herodotos and several other books—an interesting proof of the existence of culture in the Morea at this period. On the way down the valley, the traveller stopped to see the image of the Virgin, attributed to St Luke and still preserved in the monastery of Megaspelaion, and thence returned by way of Patras, at the beginning of May, to the dominions of his friend, the “ King of the Epirotes”, who gave him the above­mentioned letter of introduction to his cousin Turnus. The Tocchi were interested in literary matters; Orlando, the brother of Turnus, is known to have employed a Greek priest to copy manuscripts of Origen and Chrysostom for him, and Turnus heartily welcomed Cyriacus at his daughter’s wedding at Orionatium in the middle of May. Two days later his guest crossed over to Corfii, saw part of the old walls and the remains of the ancient city of Palaiopolis, and then returned with his sketches and a goodly collection of inscriptions to his native land.

But the love of travel did not allow him much repose. In July of the following year he is sketching the walls of Kythera and admiring those of Epidauros Limera, near Monemvasia. In August he is at Zante, “the island of Epiros” as he calls it, in allusion to its union with the continental dominions of the Tocchi, and it was probably there that he received a letter of introduction to Carlo II’s ambitious cousin, the bastard Memnon, who seems at this time to have been governor of Charpigny in the Morea, the old feudal castle of Hugues de Lille. He gives us a pretty picture of his meeting with Memnon “at the clear springs of the Alpheios”, where the bastard was surrounded by his huntsmen, some bearing a straight-horned stag, others a huge she-bear, and others again a haul of fish fresh from the river. Memnon not only gave him a warm welcome, but presented him with the skin of the bear, and escorted him to Mistra, where he arrived a week later. There he visited Theodore II, then the reigning Despot, examined the statues, the columns, and the marble stage of the gymnasia on the site of classic Sparta, and speculated on the origin of the name of its mediaeval successor, which he believes to have been due to the cheese-like shape of the hill of Mistra. Of the beautiful Byzantine churches of the Moreot capital he is as silently disdainful as any classical archaeologist of our own day. Yet this very period was the golden age of architecture at Mistra. The Florentine arcades (due, no doubt, to the influence of the Despots’ Italian wives) and the Peribleptos church belong to the first half of the fifteenth century; only a few years before Cyriacus’s visit, Joannes Frangopoulos, the marshal of the Morea, had presented the charming Pantanassa as “a small thank-offering” to the Virgin.

In 1443 Cyriacus returned once more to Greece with letters for the two Despots of the Morea, and, apparently in February 1444, he revisited Athens. An extremely interesting letter, which he wrote from Chios on 29th March of that year, describes his second impressions of the place. After mention­ing the Tower of the Winds, the “Temple of Aiolus”, as he calls it, he goes on to say how, accompanied by the duke’s cousin and namesake, he went to pay his respects to “Nerio Acciajuoli of Florence, then Prince of Athens”, whom he “found on the Acropolis, the lofty castle of the city.” Again, however, the archaeological overpowered the human interest; of the living ruler he tells us nothing; his attention, as he says, was rather attracted by the Propylaea, in which was the ducal residence. He describes in enthusiastic language the splendours of the architecture—the marvellous portico of four polished marble columns, with ten marble slabs above, and the court itself, where two rows of six huge columns three feet in diameter supported the marble ceiling, and where the walls on either side, composed of polished pieces of marble all of equal size, were approached by a single large and splendid entrance. After sketching the building, he hastened on with even greater eagerness to reinspect the Parthenon; again he enumerates its fifty-eight columns, twelve on each front and seventeen on each side; he alludes to the battle of the Centaurs and the Lapithae sculptured on the metopes, to the sculptures of the pediments, and to the frieze of the cella, which he supposed to represent the victories of Athens in the time of Perikles. During the next five years he continued his journey in the Levant; he had an audience of Murad II at Adrianople before the disastrous battle of Varna, and describes a hunting party near Con­stantinople, at which the Emperor John VI and the ex­Despot Theodore II, who had then, left the Morea, were present. At the Dardanelles he spoke with some of the Greek captives, whom Murad II had carried off from the Peloponnese. In his repeated visits to the islands of the Archipelago, he received assistance from the Latin rulers, themselves in some cases men of culture, interested in the classic treasures of their diminutive dominions. Thus, Crusino I Sommaripa of Paros took a pride in showing him some marble statues, which he had had excavated, and allowed him to send a marble head and leg to his friend, Andriolo Giustiniani-Banca of Chios, a connoisseur of art and a writer of Italian verse, to whom many of his letters are addressed. So deeply was Cyriacus moved by Crusino’s culture and kindness, that he too burst out into an Italian poem, of which happily only one line has been published. Dorino I Gattilusio of Lesbos aided him in his investigation of that island, nor was Francesco Nani, the Venetian governor of Tenos and Mykonos, any more backward in paying him attention, escorting him to Delos and back in his state galley with fourteen rowers. In another Venetian island, that of Crete, Cyriacus attended a shooting match, held at Canea, in which the archers were dressed as heroes of different nations and the winner received a eulogy from the pen of the archaeologist. Early in 1448, he revisited Mistra; on the road, the site of Sparta with its ruins inspired him with an Italian sonnet, in which he contrasted the classic city of heroes with the mediaeval capital over which Constantine Palaiologos then ruled. At least, however, the Spartans of the fifteenth century had not lost their physique, for a tall youth of immense strength carried the worthy antiquary across a stream under his arm, and then broke an iron rod to show his power. The poem, too, though not flattering to Mistra, was translated into Greek, and this rendering, still extant, has been attributed to Gemistos Plethon. There is nothing improbable in this meeting of the archaeologist and the philosopher, who may have already made one another’s acquaintance at Florence, for in 1450, just before his death, the latter composed a complimentary letter to the Despot Demetrios on his reconciliation with his brother, and wrote a funeral oration on the death of their mother, the dowager empress. While at Mistra, Cyriacus seems to have been the guest of Constantine, for we find him writing, on 4^th February 1448, at the latter’s court, an account of the Roman calendar in Greek, which he dedicated to the Despot. From Mistra he made excursions to Coron, where the Venetian officials, aided by a Cretan scholar, one of the Calergi, showed him the antiquities, and to Vitylo, where Constantine’s governor, John Palaioldgos, entertained him and showed him the ancient materials, of which the castle was constructed. The last stage of this long journey was another visit to Epiros, in October 1448. Cyriacus found his old host, Carlo II, just dead, and Leonardo III reigning in his stead. Here the antiquary revisited his old haunts of Dodona and Rogus, and composed three Italian sonnets for the repose of Carlo’s soul. The results of his long archaeo­logical investigations he embodied in three large volumes, of which only fragments have come down to us. His original drawing of the west front of the Parthenon³ and those of other Athenian monuments have been preserved in a manuscript formerly belonging to the Duke of Hamilton, but now in the Berlin Museum, and are the earliest extant reproductions of those buildings. Sketches of the same front of the Parthenon, of the Tower of the Winds, of the Monument of Phildpappos, showing the king in a four-horse chariot, of “a round temple of Apollo at Athens” (perhaps that of Augustus), and of the noble lion of “the port of Athens” facing the two round towers, may be seen in the Barberini manuscript of 1465, now at the Vatican, which contains the diagrams of San Gallo. As that eminent architect took the explanatory text almost verbatim from Cyriacus, he has been assumed to have copied the latter’s drawings, and this is all the more probable because the sketch of “the temple of Apollo” was drawn and given to its owner, as is expressly stated, by “a Greek in Ancona,” the residence of the antiquary. Copies of the traveller’s sketches of the Cyclades exist in a manuscript at Munich, whereas we have not a trace of his contemporary, Francesco Squarcione of Padua, who is said to have “ travelled all over Greece.”

The fall of Greek rule in the Morea was now fast ap­proaching, hastened by the fraternal quarrels of the two Despots, Thomas and Demetrios. Neither their solemn oaths at Constantinople, nor the imminent Turkish peril prevailed over their mutual selfishness and ambition. The only point on which they were unanimous was their desire to extend their dominions at the cost of the Venetian colonies, especially Nauplia and Argos, which complained loudly to the mother-country for protection, and demanded a copy of the privileges granted it after its capture by the Turks in 1397. Thomas managed to obtain a start of his brother, and, reaching the Morea first, seduced the subjects of Demetrios from their allegiance. The latter, destitute of national feeling, sent his brother-in-law, Matthew Asan, to call in the aid of the Turks, and thus compelled Thomas to come to terms and submit their dispute to the arbitration of their brother, the emperor. As the two Despots, however, still continued to quarrel, Mohammed II ordered old Turakhan to assist Demetrios, and at the same time, in view of the future conquest of the peninsula, to destroy all that remained of the Hexamilion. Thomas then made peace with his brother, surrendering to him Kalamata in exchange for the Arkadian district of Skorta, which he had taken. So great was the joy of the old philosopher and patriot Plethon, that he took up his pen for the last time to congratulate Demetrios on this reconciliation. Then he died, full of years, fortunate in escaping the disgrace of seeing the country a Turkish province. “Sparta,” cried his friend Hieronymos Charitonymos in his funeral oration, “is no longer famous ; we lovers of learning shall soon be scattered to the ends of the world”—a prophecy only too true, and too soon fulfilled.

In October 1452, when Mohammed II was ready for the attack on Constantinople, he sent Turakhan back to the Morea to keep the two Despots busy there with their own defence, so that they might not send assistance to their imperial brother. Accompanied by his two sons, Achmet and Omar (the future conqueror of Athens), and at the head of the European army of the Turkish Empire, the old commander again arrived at the isthmus. The walls had been repaired, and the resistance offered by their defenders was such that the capture of the rampart cost many lives. When the Greeks fled, Turakhan marched through the centre of the peninsula by way of Tegea and Mantineia as far as Ithome and the Messenian Gulf, plundering and taking prisoners as he went. Neokastron, presumably the “Chastel-Neuf” mentioned in the feudal list of 1364, fell before him; but Siderokastron in Arkadia justified its name and defied all his efforts. Nor was that the only Turkish reverse. As Achmet was retiring through the Pass of Dervenaki, between Mycenae and Corinth, that death-trap of Turkish armies, where 370 years later another Ottoman force met a similar fate, he was surprised by Matthew Asan, brother-in-law of Demetrios, defeated and taken as a captive to Mistra. The victory was the last ray of dawn before the darkness of centuries. King Alfonso of Naples, who had long been intriguing with Deme­trios, sent his congratulations, and talked of invading Turkey; but the Turks had achieved their object, and the besieged of Constantinople applied in vain to the Despots for corn and soldiers.

The news that the city was taken, and the emperor slain, fell like a thunderbolt upon his wretched brothers, who naturally expected that they would be the next victims. Their first impulse, and that of their leading, archons, was to rush down to the nearest port and take ship for Italy— an act of cowardice which had the worst effect upon their already discontented Albanian subjects. But as, one after another, important Greeks arrived from Constantinople— men like Cardinal Isidore, who had played a prominent part at the Council of Florence and had been taken prisoner by the Turks, and Phrantzes, whose loyalty to his master had exposed him to a similar fate—the two Despots plucked up sufficient courage to remain, and sent envoys to the sultan’s court at Adrianople, in the hope that the conqueror would leave them the shadow of sovereignty so long as they paid the annual tribute of 10,000 or 12,000 ducats which he imposed upon them.¹ Some of the Greek nobles wished, indeed, to proclaim Demetrios emperor, but this was too much for the fraternal jealousy of Thomas, and the idea was dropped. Meanwhile, the smouldering discontent of the Albanians, ill-treated by the Greek officials and fired by the great exploits of their countryman, Skanderbeg, in Albania, had burst out into one of those rare efforts for independence which that strange race has occasionally shown. Some 30,000 of these nomads rose against the Despots, at the instigation of one of their native chieftains, Peter Boua, nicknamed “the lame”, a member of the family which had once held Arta and Lepanto. Various dissatisfied Greek archons joined the movement, for the greedy Byzantine officials who held the chief posts at the petty courts of Patras and Mistra were extremely unpopular with the natives of the peninsula. Among these Greek rebels the most prominent was Manuel Cantacuzene, who was lord of all Braccio di Maina, and could not forget that his ancestors were of imperial lineage and had once ruled at Mistra. Thomas had in vain tried to arrest him, as a dangerous pretender; he was now proclaimed Despot by the Albanians, whose national vanity he flattered by taking the Albanian name of “Ghin,” and calling his wife “Cuchia.”

In the pitiable condition of Greece at that time it was obvious to both parties that they could only obtain, or retain, the government of the Morea by foreign aid. Accordingly, they both applied to the only two foreign Powers which were strong enough to assist them—Venice and the sultan. The republic was at first not disinclined to listen to the proposals of the Albanians to submit to Venetian rule. Venice had been constantly harassed by the Despots, and on one occasion had plainly told the Emperor Manuel II, that the members of his family were “worse neighbours than the Turks”; in this very year of the rebellion, Demdtrios had been molesting the Venetian colonies. The first impulse of the Venetian Government was, therefore, to instruct its officials in the Morea to encourage the insurgents until it had had time to decide upon its policy. More cautious counsels, however, prevailed—for Venice did not want to embroil herself with the sultan—and it was proposed that Vettore Cappello should proceed to the Morea, to urge the desirability of unity on the contending parties, and to negotiate for the peaceful acquisition of such maritime places as Glarentza, Patras, Corinth, and Vostitza, but only in the event of a possible Genoese or Catalan occupation of the peninsula. He was to protest, and the protest was perfectly genuine, that the republic did not seek these territorial acquisitions from motives of ambition, but simply in order to save the country. The news that a Genoese fleet was hovering off the Morea and that the Albanians were negotiating with that rival republic, naturally alarmed the statesmen of the lagoons.

The sultan acted, however, while the Venetians debated. He saw that a strong Albanian principality in the Morea would be less to his interest than the maintenance of the two weak Byzantine states of Patras and Mistra. He therefore resolved to aid the Despots in suppressing the revolt, without, however, utterly annihilating the revolted; he chose, in other words, that policy of making one Christian race balance another, so skilfully followed by his successor in Macedonia at the present day. Omar, son of old Turakhan, was de­spatched to carry out these instructions ; he inflicted a slight defeat on the Albanians, and obtained from the grateful Demetrios the release of his brother Achmet as his reward. Another pretender, however, now appeared on the scene, in the person of Centurione’s son, Giovanni Asan. The so-called “Prince of Achaia” had been imprisoned with his eldest son since his ineffectual rising in 1446 in the castle of Chloumoutsi, and it had been rumoured that Thomas had allowed these dangerous representatives of the old dynasty to die of hunger. They were, however, still alive, and had eagerly listened to the plans of a fellow-prisoner, a Greek agitator of obscure origin, named Loukanes, who had received preferment from Theodore II, but had strongly opposed the influence of Byzantine officialdom in his own, and his countrymen’s interest. These prisoners of state now persuaded their gaoler to release them, whereupon they threw the weight, Centurione of his name, Loukanes of his ability, on the side of the insurgents. There must still have been many Franks who regarded the only son of the last Frankish ruler of Achaia as their legitimate sovereign, and even Venice and Alfonso of Naples thought it desirable to con­gratulate “Prince Centurione” on his release, and to give him and his wife their coveted title. Phrantz£s, who knew Peloponnesian politics well, and who had just entered the service of the Despot Thomas, considered his escape so serious that he interrupted a mission to the Servian court as soon as he heard the news, and Matthew Asan, the brother-in-law of Demetrios, was despatched to the sultan to ask for further assistance. This time Mohammed II sent old Turakhan himself to the aid of the Despots, whose two capitals of Mistra and Patras were besieged by the insurgents. Turakhan, with his two sons and a large force, arrived in October 1454, and told the two Despots, who had in the meanwhile compelled the enemy to raise the siege of those towns, that the presence of one or other of them with his troops was essential to the success of his plans. First, accompanied by Demetrios, he attacked the Albanians at a place called Borbotia, which they strongly fortified, but from which they fled by night, leaving about 10,000 men and women prisoners of the allies. Next it was the turn of Thomas, who took part with the Turkish commander in the capture of Ithome and Aetos—a place which had recently hoisted the flag of Centurione, and which added another 1000 to the ranks of the captives. At this the rest of the Albanians submitted, on condition that they should keep the lands which they had taken and the cattle which they had plundered—an arrangement which well suited the sultan’s policy of playing off the two races against one another. The pseudo-despot, Cantacuzene, disappeared, till four years later he returned as the decoy of the sultan, while Centurione found a refuge among the Venetians at Modon, where he remained for some two years. It was then thought desirable to confirm his devotion to Venice by the grant of a small pension, lest he should lend his name to some Turkish or other enterprise for the conquest of the Morea ; especially as, early in 1456, we find him a pensioner of King Alfonso at Naples; accordingly, in 1457, the republic granted him an annuity, on condition that he continued to reside at Modon, or “wherever else he could be most useful” to her. Seven years later he settled, like his enemy Thomas, in Rome, and thenceforth drew a monthly pittance from Paul II till 1469, when he died, the last of his famous race to claim the title of “Prince of Achaia”. As for the Albanian chief, Peter Boua, he was confirmed by the Turks in his privileges, and, nine years later, headed another rising of his countrymen. Having thus re­stored the authority of the two Despots, old Turakhan gave them, before he departed, the excellent advice to live as brothers, to reward their loyal subjects, and to repress at once the germs of sedition. Needless to say, his advice was not taken.

The sultan was now the real master of the Morea. The two Despots were his tributaries, and the Greek archons, degenerate scions of old Moreot families such as those of Sophianos and Sgouromallaios, hesitated as little as Albanian chiefs like Peter Boua or Manuel Raoul to acknowledge him as their sovereign on condition that he took none of their property and spared their children from the blood-tax. Two of them even offered to hand over to Venice Mouchli, between Argos and the modern Tripolitza, and the three castles of DamaU, Ligourid, and Phanari in Argolis—an offer which the Venetian Government found very tempting, as the three Argive castles were near the sea-coast. Meanwhile both Thomas and Demdtrios went on intriguing as before.

Both had tried to negotiate a matrimonial alliance between their children and the family of Alfonso V of Aragon and Naples, who sent an envoy to examine the Isthmian wall, and report on the defences of the country, while Thomas invoked the aid of Venice to prevent his brother from thus re-introducing Spanish influence into the Morea to the detriment of both the republic and himself. While Demetrios appointed the scholar Argyrdpoulos as his envoy, and told him to seek the aid of the pope and of Charles VII of France, Thomas sent the serviceable Phrantzes to smooth over his disputes with the Venetians, and obtained a safe conduct for himself and his family for the Venetian colonies and the loan of both a Venetian and a Neapolitan galley, on which he could flee in case of need. Nevertheless, the two brothers might, perhaps, have preserved the shadow of authority for the rest of their lives, had they abstained from any act which could offend their all-powerful suzerain, the sultan. But the old intriguer Loukdnes could not rest from attempting to stir up Byzantine officials and native Pelopon­nesians alike to revolt; and, in spite of the wise refusal of Matthew Asan, the governor of Corinth, who knew his Turks only too well, to join in these schemes, the tribute to the sultan was allowed to fall into arrears. So long as there was any danger from the Albanians, the Despots had been willing enough to pay what their deliverer asked as the price of his assistance. But after the revolt had been suppressed, they omitted to remit their annual ransom. Their excuse was that neither their Albanian nor Greek subjects would pay their respective quota unless the land of the peninsula were divided in equal portions. The Turkish view, however, was that the Despots received the amount regularly, but spent it on themselves.

The sultan sent frequent embassies to demand payment, and at the same time to report on the state of the country He was afraid that the constant quarrels of the Despots would end in a Venetian or Aragonese occupation of the Morea, which he thought would make a good base for his projected attack upon Italy and which he had no wish to see in the hands of a strong Western power. When, therefore, some three years’ tribute was in arrears,he despatched an ultimatum to the Despots, giving them the alternative of peace with payment, or the loss of their dominions. Emboldened by the appearance of the fleet sent out by Pope Calixtus III to the Aegean, Thomas, the more energetic of the two brothers, refused to pay; this refusal led to his own and his brother’s ruin.

In the spring of 1458, at the head of an army of 80,000 cavalry and a large body of infantry, Mohammed II arrived in Thessaly, where he halted to rest his men and to give the Despots a last chance of payment. It was currently reported at the time, that had they done so, the sultan, who had other pressing business on hand, would have abandoned his expedi­tion at that eleventh hour. But when no envoy arrived from the Morea, he ordered his army to advance through Thermopylae into Boeotia, and encamped on the classic field of Plataea at the river Asopos, till his scouts had examined the mountain passes leading to the isthmus. While he was there, messengers arrived from Thomas, begging for peace and bringing a part of the tribute, 4500 gold pieces. But it was too late; the sultan took the money, and told the trembling emissaries that he would make peace when he was in the Peloponnese. Then, as his scouts reported the passes to be unoccupied, he proceeded to the isthmus, where he arrived on 15th May. He met with no resistance at the Hexamilion; but a short experience of the natural and artificial fortifica­tions of Akrocorinth convinced him that it could only be taken by surrender or starvation. There is only one approach to the citadel, and the steepness of the ground would not permit him to plant his batteries near enough to the walls to have any effect upon them; while, even if he could have succeeded in battering down the triple line of walls, an assault would have been most difficult. Accordingly, he left half his forces under the command of Mahmoud Pasha, a Greek renegade and the first Christian who ever occupied the post of Grand Vizier, to invest the place, and proceeded to reduce the neighbouring fortresses by force or threats. He then marched into the interior of the peninsula, devastating and destroying as he went. At Nemea he turned westward, and besieged Tarsos, a place to the north of Lake Pheneos, which surrendered and furnished some 300 youths to the janissaries. But Doxies, the Albanian chieftain of the district, occupied a very strong position on a high hill with a band of Greeks and Albanians, and prepared to defy the great sultan. Unfortunately the besiegers cut off the water supply, and thus compelled the heroic defenders, who had been constrained to bake their bread with the blood of their slaughtered cattle, to sue for peace. Mohammed treacher­ously seized this unguarded moment to attack the place, which thus fell into his hands. The ancient feudal castle of Akova was taken by storm ; the fortress of Roupele, in which a number of Albanians and Greeks had taken refuge with their families, after two days’ desperate fighting, during which the Turkish losses were such that the sultan ordered a retreat, surrendered just as he was departing. Mohammed sent the inhabitants to colonise Constantinople, with the exception of some twenty Albanians who had surrendered at Tarsos and had broken their parole not to fight against him again. As an awful example he ordered their ankles and wrists to be broken —an act of cruelty commemorated by the Turkish name for the place —“Tokmak Hissari”, or “the castle of ankles”. Thence he marched into the territory of Mantineia, accompanied by Ghin Cantacuzene, the leader of the Albanian insurrection of 1453, whom he had summoned to join him, thinking that his influence with the Albanians would be useful. The ex-Despot was sent to try his persuasive powers on the people of Pazanike; but his mission only made them more obstinate; his Turkish companions accused him of treachery, and he was driven from the sultan’s camp. Alarmed for his safety, he fled to Hungary, where he died.

Finding that the enemy had occupied a strongly fortified position, Mohammed encamped near Tegea, and held a council of war. The two Despots had meanwhile fled to the sea-coast—Thomas with his family to the Lakonian Mantineia, Demetrios to Monemvasia. The sultan’s ardent desire was to see and capture that famous fortress, “the strongest of all cities that we know,” as Chalkokondiles justly called it. But his advisers represented to him the difficult nature of the country which he would have to traverse, so he prudently decided instead to attack Demetrios Asan in Palaio-Mouchli, then one of the most important places in the peninsula. Here again, the sultan cut off the water supply, and after three days, Asan surrendered on favourable terms, receiving the town of Loidoriki as a fief for his son. The sultan now marched across country by a difficult route to Patras, the abandoned capital of Thomas, whose citizens he found fled to Lepanto and other Venetian colonies, except the garrison of the castle. The latter made no resistance, their lives were spared, and the conqueror was so struck with the fertility and situation of the town at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, that he offered freedom, immunity from taxation for several years, and the restitution of their property to all the inhabitants who would come back. After garrisoning the castle, he despatched a portion of his forces to overrun Elis and Messenia, and then returned along the coast of the gulf to Corinth, occupying Vostitza on the way.

Although it was now July, he found Akrocorinth still untaken, for Matthew Asan, who had been absent at Nauplia, had succeeded in entering the fortress by night with seventy men and partially revictualling it. As Asan boldly refused to surrender, and there was no longer pro­vender for the beasts of burden in the Turkish camp, Mohammed resolved to bombard the entrance with stone balls made from the ruins of the ancient city of Corinth. At last a breach was made in the outermost of the three walls; but when, after a hand-to-hand fight, the Turks assailed the second rampart, they were greeted with such volleys of large stones that they had to retire with heavy loss. So powerful, however, for that period was the Turkish artillery, that a stone ball weighing nearly 900 lbs. and fired at a range of about a mile and a half destroyed the bakery of the citadel and the arsenal. At this juncture, the Turkish detachment which had been sent to plunder Elis and Messenia arrived at Corinth with some 15,000 head of cattle, so that the besiegers had ample supplies for a long blockade, while the small stock of provisions which Asan had brought with him was now all but exhausted. The Greeks complained to their metropolitan, who treacherously informed Mohammed of the state of affairs. The sultan then again called upon Asan to surrender, and the latter, seeing that the majority was opposed to further resistance, went forth under a flag of truce, together with Loukdnes, who had been in command during his absence, and made terms with the sultan. On 6th August, Corinth, “the star castle,” as the Turks called it, surrendered; the inhabitants were left unmolested, but ordered to pay tribute; while the conqueror demanded from the Despots an annual tribute of 3000 gold pieces and the cession of the city and district of Patras, Vostitza, Kalavryta, and all the country which he had traversed with his army—about one-third of the whole peninsula—and threatened a renewal of hostilities in case of refusal. Asan proceeded to Trype at the mouth of the Langada Gorge where the two Despots were waiting, and laid these hard terms before them. But, hard as they were, there seemed to be no option but to accept them. True, the patriotic Phrantzes sneered at the men who had sur­rendered the key of the Morea and complained that Thomas had given away valuable cities “as if they were of no more account than the vegetables in his garden”. Mohammed left a garrison of 400 picked men of his own bodyguard in Corinth, thoroughly provisioned all the fortresses which seemed to be in good condition, destroyed the others and sent their inhabitants to Constantinople, where he settled the skilled workmen in the city and the peasants in the surburban villages. Then, appointing Omar, son of Turak- han, governor of the new Turkish province in the Morea, he set out in the beginning of the autumn of 1458 for Athens, the city which that warrior had captured.

The end of the Italian rule at Athens had been marked by a domestic tragedy which might have attracted the dramatic genius of her great classic writers. In 1451—the same year that had witnessed the death of Murad II.—died Nerio II. We catch a last characteristic glimpse of him in the middle of that year, when the Venetian envoy to the new sultan was directed to ask that potentate to urge upon his vassal, “the lord of Sithines and Stives”, the necessity of settling the pecuniary claims of two Venetians. After the death of his first wife, Maria Melissene, Nerio, like his brother Antonio, had married one of the daughters of Niccolo Zorzi or Giorgio of Karystos, titular marquis of Boudonitza. The Duchess Chiara —such was the name of this passionate Venetian beauty— bore him a son, Francesco, who was unfortunately still a minor at the time of his father’s death. The child’s mother possessed herself of the regency and persuaded the Porte, by the usual methods, to sanction her usurpation. Soon afterwards, however, there visited Athens on some commercial errand a young Vene­tian noble, Bartolomeo Contarini, whose father had been governor of the Venetian colony of Nauplia. The duchess fell in love with her charming visitor, and bade him aspire to her hand and land. Contarini replied that, alas! he had left a wife behind him in his palace on the lagoons. To the Lady of the Akropolis, a figure who might have stepped from a play of Aischylus, the Venetian wife was no obstacle. It was the age of great crimes. Contarini realised that Athens was worth a murder, poisoned his spouse, and returned to enjoy the embraces and the authority of the duchess.

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

The legend goes on to tell how her husband, “the Admiral”, had come with many ships to the Piraeus to rescue her, but arrived too late. Unable to save, he resolved to avenge her, and laid the grim facts before the sultan. Mohammed II, indignant at the conduct of his protégé, but not sorry, perhaps, of a pretext for destroying the remnants of Frankish rule at Athens, ordered Omar, son of Turakhan, the governor of Thessaly, to march against the city. The lower town offered no resistance, for its modern walls had but a narrow circumference, and its population and resources were scanty. Nature herself seemed to fight against the Athenians. On 29th May, the third anniversary of the capture of Constantinople, a comet appeared in the sky; a dire famine followed, so that the people were reduced to eat roots and grass. On 4th June 1456, the town fell into the hands of the Turks. But the Acropolis, which was reputed impregnable, long held out. In vain the constable of Athens and some of the citizens offered the castle to Venice through one of the Zorzi family; the republic ordered the bailie of Negroponte to keep the offer open, but took no steps to save the most famous fortress of Christendom; in vain he summoned one Latin prince after another to his aid. From the presence of an Athenian ambas­sador at the Neapolitan court, we may infer that Alfonso V of Aragon, the titular “Duke of Athens”, was among their number. Demetrios Asan, lord of Palaio-Mouchli, who was Franco’s father-in-law, was also endeavouring to dispose of his city to Venice at this time, so that he could not help his kinsman; and the papal fleet, which was despatched to the Aegean, did not even put into the Piraeus. Meanwhile, Omar, after a vain attempt to seduce the garrison from its allegiance, reminded Franco that sooner or later he must restore Athens to the sultan who gave it. “Now, there­fore,” added the Turkish commander, “if thou wilt surrender the Acropolis, His Majesty offers thee the land of Boeotia, with the city of Thebes, and will allow thee to take away the wealth of the Akropolis and thine own property”. Franco only waited till Mohammed had confirmed the offer of his subordinate, and then quitted the castle of Athens, with his wife and his three sons, for ever. At the same time, his uncle, Nerozzo Pitti, was deprived by the Turks of his Athenian property, his castle of Sykaminon, and his island of Panaia, or Canaia, the ancient Pyrrha, opposite the mouth of the Maliac Gulf, and retired penniless to a Theban castle, with his wife and eleven children. As compensation for these losses, the Florentine Government allowed him to sell his house in Florence, which was all that he had left; many others, like him, were ruined and exiled. The last Latin Archbishop of Athens, Niccolb Protimo of Euboea, quitted the Akropolis with the duke; he was assigned the possessions of the Latin Patri­archate in his native island; in 1461 he was consoled for the loss of his see by the archbishopric of Lepanto, which he held to his death in 1483, and even then the popes continued to confer the phantom title of Archbishop of Athens on absentees. It was not till 1875 that a Catholic archbishop again resided at Athens.

Such was the state of affairs when Mohammed II, having punished the Despots of the Morea, arrived at Athens in the early autumn of 1458. His biographer, the Greek Kritoboulos, who became governor of his native island of Imbros under the Turkish dispensation, tells us that this cultured sultan, who knew Greek, and whom he audaciously describes as “a philhellene”, was filled with desire to behold “the mother of the philosophers”, as a Turkish historian calls Athens. Mohammed had heard and read much about the wisdom and marvellous works of the ancient Athenians; we may surmise that Cyriacus of Ancona had told him of the Athenian monuments when he was employed as a reader to His Majesty at the siege of Constantinople. He longed to visit the places where the heroes and sages of classic Athens had walked and talked, and at the same time to examine with a statesman’s eye the position of the city and the Condition of its harbours. When he arrived at the gates, if we may believe a much later tradition, the abbot of Kaisariano handed to him the keys of the city, in return for which he ordered that the famous Byzantine monastery at the foot of Hymettos, which had enjoyed complete fiscal exemption under the Latins, should never pay more than one sequin to the Turkish governor. There is nothing improbable in the tradition, for the abbot was probably the most important Greek ecclesiastic left at Athens, the Metropolitan Isidore, a friend of Phrantzes, having fled to the Venetian island of Tenos, where his tomb was discovered near the foundations of the famous Evangelistria church some sixty years ago. The sultan spent four days in admiring the monumentsand in visiting the harbours of this new possession, “of all the cities in his Empire the dearest to him”, as the Athenian Chalkokondiles proudly says. But of all that he saw, he admired most the Akropolis, whose ancient and recent buildings he examined “with the eyes of a scholar, a philhellene, and a great sovereign”. Like Pedro IV of Aragon before him, he was proud to possess such a jewel, and in his enthusiasm he exclaimed: “How much, indeed, do we not owe to Omar, the son of Turakhan!”

The conquered Athenians once again were saved by their ancestors. Like his Roman prototype, Mohammed II treated them humanely, though he carried off many of their women and children to his seraglio, he granted all their petitions, and gave them many and various privileges. The contemporary historians do not tell us of what these privileges consisted; but there were Athenians in the seventeenth century who could show patents of fiscal exemption, granted to their ancestors by the conqueror. It is not improbable that the local Greek authorities, the so-called “elders of the people”, of whom we found a trace under the rule of the Acciajuoli, and who are often mentioned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were recognised by Mohammed. It is probable, too, that the same statesmanlike sovereign, who converted the oecumenical patriarch into a useful instrument of his far-sighted policy, favoured the re-establishment of the Orthodox Church in the position of the leading Christian denomination at Athens. At any rate, while the Uniate Archbishop shared the fate of his Catholic colleague, we find a metropolitan of Athens resident there a generation after the Turkish Conquest, and another is men­tioned as taking part in ecclesiastical business at Constantinople in 1465. But, if the last Latin Archbishop of Athens was turned out of his noble cathedral as soon as the Turks became masters of the Akropolis, the Parthenon was not for long restored to the Greek Church. It has, indeed, been assumed from the practice of the Turks at Constantinople and elsewhere, that the most important church of Athens was immediately devoted to the worship of Allah. But two writers subsequent to the capture of Athens, the anonymous author of 1458 and the anonymous author of 1466, both distinctly allude to the Parthenon as still a church. Possibly it may have been part of the wise policy of Mohammed to conciliate the Greeks and further estrange them from the Latins by allowing them to resume, for a time at least, the use of their noble cathedral. However that may be, ere long it was converted into a mosque, called in the early part of the seventeenth century, the Ismazdi, or “house of prayer”, and soon from the tapering minaret, which rose above it, the muezzin summoned the faithful to worship. A like fate befell the church which had served as the orthodox cathedral during the Frankish domination. This church, now the military bakery, received in honour of the sultan’s visit, the name of Fethijeh Jamisi, or “mosque of the conqueror”, and still preserves the traces of the purpose to which it was put. In its place the orthodox adopted as their “Katholikon”, or metropolitan church, that of St Panteleimon, which stood in the square where the public auctions are now held. It was a tradition in the seventeenth century that Mohammed II had also ordered, as a mark of his special favour for Athens, that the city should not be made the capital of a sandjak, or province, so as to spare it the usual exactions of the provincial governor’s retinue. But in 1462 there is mention of a subassi of Athens, and it has therefore been assumed by modern Greek historians, that from the time of the Conquest down to about 1610 or 1621, the city was governed by that official, who, after the capture of Negroponte in 1470, was the subordinate of the pasha of that province. His konak was at the Stoa of Hadrian, while the disdar-aga, or commander of the garrison, occupied a part of the palace of the Acciajuoli in the Propylaea, and the Erechtheion served as his harem.

The anonymous treatise on “The Theatres and Schools of Athens”, which was probably composed by some Greek at this moment, perhaps to serve as a vade mecum for the sultan, whose eager enquiries about the meaning and history of the monuments it may have endeavoured to satisfy, gives us an interesting, if unscientific, idea of Athens as she was after two and a half centuries of Frankish rule. The visitor could glean from this curious guide-book, apparently the work of a local antiquary, the popular names bestowed by the natives upon the classical monuments. Thus, the choragic monument of Lysikrates was then, as in the time of Michael Akomindtos, “the lantern of Demosthenes”, a name still current in 1672; the Tower of the Winds was supposed to be “the school of Sokrates”, just as the caverns at the foot of the hill of Philopappos are still known as the philosopher’s prison; the gate of Athena Archegetis was transformed in common parlance into “the palace of Themistokles”; the Odeion of Perikles, restored in Roman times, was shown to visitors as “the school of Aristophanes”, and that of Herodes Atticus as “the palaces of Kleonides and Miltiades”. Near “the lantern of Demosthenes” the natives pointed out to the curious stranger the spots where once had stood the houses of Thucydides, Solon, and Alkmaion. “ The school of Aristotle” was placed among the ruins of the theatre of Dionysios, and above it our author mentions the sun-dial and the two pillars of the choragic monument of Thrasyllos, and repeats the story that a Gorgon’s head was formerly to be seen in an ironbound niche between them—all of which statements are confirmed by the similar “Description of Attica”, probably composed about the year 1628. Another “school”, that of Sophocles, was supposed to have occupied a site to the west of the Akropolis, while outside the city the anonymous author alludes to the Academy, which he supposes to have been at Basilika, on the left as one goes down to Phaleron, and not at Kathemia, near Kolokynthou; to the Eleatic school at Ambelokepoi; to the Platonic at Patesia (or “Paradeisia”), and to those of a certain Polyzelos and Diddoros, on Hymettos, whose name the Italians had corrupted to “Monte Matto”, or “the Mad Mountain”. Wild as these statements are, they yet contain important topographical facts. They prove that the ancient deme of Alopeke had already received its modern designation of Ambelokepoi; that Patesia, whose name has been erroneously derived from the fact of the “Padishah” having pitched his headquarters there, was still known by its picturesque name of “Paradeisia”; and that the old tradition that two of the monasteries on Hymettos—probably Kaisari- and and Astdri—had once been schools of philosophers, which seems to have actually been the case at the close of the fourth century, was still preserved. For the anonymous writer, as for Cyriacus, the Olympieion was the ruins of a palace, and, like the traveller from Ancona, he mentions three gates of the city. On the Akropolis he mistook the temple of Nike Apteros for “a small school of musicians, founded by Pythagoras”; he mentions the Propylaea as the ducal palace, with the former chancery adjoining it; and he elaborately describes the “Church of the Mother of God”, the foundation of which he attributes to Apollos and Eulogios, both patriarchs of Alexandria in the sixth century. Allusion has already been made to his mention of the ducal villa of the Acciajuoli at the spring of Kallirrhoe, and to the neigh­bouring chapel, where they were wont to pray. This chapel had now been converted by “the pious” Greeks into an orthodox church of St Mary’s on the Rock. Perhaps the most curious tradition preserved in this pamphlet is the incident taken from the apocryphal “Acts of St Philip”. The apostle — such was the legend — had spent two years at Athens, whither the scribe of the Chief Priest of Jerusalem followed him to controvert what he said. At last, the apostolic patience failed, and in the midst of the Athenian Agora the saint caused the earth to open and swallow up his irreverent adversary. A church of St Philip was founded to commemorate the event, and this church, completely restored in our own generation, still preserves, together with the quarter to which it has given its name, the quaint mediaeval legend of the apostle and the scribe. Thus, at the close of the Frankish domination, the ciceroni of Athens had identified their city with some of the most famous names, alike of pagan and of Christian story.

On the fifth day after his arrival, the heir of these great men left Athens for Boeotia, examining with his usual minute care all the places of interest, and obtaining information about them. From Thebes—the abode of his vassal Franco—he sent a message to the terrified bailie of Negroponte that he proposed to visit that city on the following day. When he reached the summit of the Pass of Anephorites, he paused for a quarter of an hour, as many a traveller has done since, to admire the magnificent situation of the great island. Spread out like a map at his feet —the narrow channel of the Euripos, with its oft-changing tide, more like a river than an arm of the sea, the picturesque fortress, which then stood in midstream, and the bridge which connected the city of Negroponte with the continent. The islanders, alarmed at the force of a thousand cavalry which accompanied him, thought that their last hour had come; they picked up sufficient courage, however, to go out to meet him with rich gifts in their hands; the sultan received them affably, rode across the bridge, and spied out for himself the possibilities of capturing the place. The information which he then gleaned was put to good use when, twelve years later, he besieged the city. Then, the same day, 2nd September, he returned to Thebes, whence he departed on the morrow for Macedonia. His trembling vassal must have heaved a sigh of relief when this terrible visitor was gone.

Scarcely, however, had he left Greece than disturbances again broke out in the Morea. In October, the sultan had sent one of his officials to complete the formalities of the recent peace, to receive the oaths of the two Despots, and to demand from Demdtrios the hand of his only child, Helene, and from Thomas the cession of the castles which he had not yet transferred to the sultan’s commissioner. Thomas complied with this demand; Demdtrios sent Matthew Asan to ask Mohammed for the islands of Lemnos and Imbros in return for his daughter and his principality. According to another account, Asan was instructed to ask the sultan for aid against Thomas, who seemed to be constitutionally incapable of learning by experience, and who, early in 1459, committed the double mistake of attacking his brother and revolting against his suzerain.

The crafty and ambitious officials who infested the two petty courts of the Morea, among them the veteran intriguer, Loukanes, “the curse of the Peloponnesians”, as Phrantzes calls him, fanned the smouldering embers of fraternal hatred; some of the Albanian chiefs, impatient of Turkish rule and anxious to imitate the deeds of their great countryman, Skanderbeg, joined with these Greek counsellors in inciting Thomas to “eat his oaths, as if they were vegetables”. The connivance of Omar, the Turkish governor, was suspected, and the sultan suspended him from both his Peloponnesian and Thessalian commands, and despatched Hamsa Zenevisi, “the carrier of falcons”, a renegade Albanian, to succeed him in the Morea. Hamsa’s first act was to arrest Omar and the latter’s father-in-law Ahmed; his next to relieve the Turkish garrison of Patras, which was besieged by Thomas’s men. The successes of the latter at the expense of the Turks were confined to the capture of Kalavryta, for Corinth and the other places which Loukanes had promised to win by treachery remained true to the sultan. Demetrios, however, lost one strong place after another: Karytaina and St George in Arkadia, Bordonia and Kastritza, near Sparta, Kalamata, Zarnata, Leuktron, and most of Maina; but the commanders of some of these castles, instead of taking the oath to his rival, simply proclaimed their own independence, thus yet further weakening the unhappy country, while the Albanians, bent on plunder, increased the confusion by changing sides “thrice a week”, and deserting now Thomas, now Demetrios, as it suited their purpose. Thomas, however, continued to hold his own; he forestalled his less active brother in an attempt to capture the important town of Leondari, and the latter withdrew to his capital of Mistra. But the Turkish troops now arrived at Leondari from Patras, easily threw into confusion the forces of Thomas, who was more skilled at palace intrigues than at strategy, and blockaded the Despot in the town, where fever and famine soon made their appear­ance. Hampered, however, by the number of his captives, the Turkish commander raised the siege, and, leaving one of his lieutenants to support his ally Demetrios at Mistra, repaired to the sultan to ask for reinforcements. Thus, Thomas was free to resume the offensive against the Turkish garrisons. A gleam of common sense or a pang of conscience prompted him to desist, at least for a little, from attacking his brother; in the church at Kastritza he met Demetrios; the Metropolitan of Lacedaemonia, clad in his episcopal cope, the symbol of justice, celebrated the Holy Eucharist with all the impressive rites of the Orthodox Church; and when, in the noble language of the liturgy of St Chrysostom, he bade the people “draw nigh in the fear of God, and with faith and love”, the two brothers approached together, and swore on the Holy Sacrament to keep the peace.

But even the most solemn oaths had long ceased to bind the consciences of the two Palaiologoi. They were soon engaged in a fresh fratricidal war, the one relying on Turkish aid, the other on a body of 300 Italian foot soldiers sent by Bianca Visconti, Duchess of Milan, and by Pius II, who wrote to the rulers of Europe that “almost all the Morea had risen against the Turks”, and pointed out that the peninsula was the bulwark of Christendom against the infidels. The sultan ordered Zagan Pasha, a Christian renegade of marked ability, whom he had promoted to be governor of the provinces of Thessaly and the Morea, to attack Thomas. Zagan entered the peninsula in March 1460, raised the siege of Achaia, near Patras, which the Despot was bombarding, and compelled him to retreat to the south of Messenia. Finding his military operations unsuccessful and his Italian mercenaries dispersed, Thomas now begged for peace, which Mohammed, anxious to chastise the Turkoman chief, Usun Has&n, in Asia, was willing to grant, on condition that the Despot restored any Turkish forts which he had taken, that he withdrew his troops from any which they were besieging, that he agreed to pay at once a tribute of 3000 gold pieces, and promised to appear in person before the Turkish envoy at Corinth within twenty days’ time. Thomas was prepared to accept these terms, but, as his subjects declined to contribute the money, he was unable to pay. This final breach of his engagements so infuriated Mohammed, that he postponed his intended expedition into Asia, and set out in May 1460 to make short work with both Despots. He waited three days at Corinth for the arrival of Demetrios; but the latter, who had been blockaded with his family by his brother in Monemvasia, sent his brother-in-law, Matthew Asan, in his stead with valuable presents to pacify the sultan, to whom he had omitted to send his daughter Helene, as stipulated. Mohammed, however, was not to be pacified; he ordered Asan under arrest, and, instead of entering the territory of Thomas, his open enemy, he despatched Mahmoud Pasha with all speed to Mistra, whither Demetrios had gone in consequence of the hostilities which his brother was carrying on from Kalamata. Demetrios, on finding his capital sur­rounded by the Turks, resolved to shut himself up in the fine old castle; but when he learnt that his brother-in-law was a prisoner, he agreed to obey the summons to surrender, if he received a written guarantee by the hand of the latter. Mahmoud at once released Asan and sent him, as desired, together with Hamsa Zenevisi, in whom the Despot had confidence, to accept his surrender. One Greek historian suggests that the whole affair was a comedy carefully arranged beforehand, and that Demetrios was not sorry of an excuse for getting rid of his irksome sovereignty in the Morea in return for compensation elsewhere. But, however that may be, Mohammed, who arrived on the morrow, received him with the honour due to a descendant of emperors, rose from his seat as the trembling Despot entered his tent, offered him his right hand, gave him a place at his side, and endeavoured to reassure his fears by splendid gifts and still more splendid promises. But none the less he treated him as a prisoner, he gave him clearly to understand that Greek rule at Mistra was now at an end, and appointed Hamsa Zenevisi governor of that famous city, which had for all but two hundred years been the capital of the Byzantine province. At the same time, the sultan reiterated his claim to the hand of the Despot’s daughter, who, with her mother, was still sheltering at Monemvasia. Isa, son of the Pasha of Uskub, and Matthew Asan, were accordingly sent to demand the surrender of the city and of the two princesses. The Monemvasiotes handed over the imperial ladies to the envoys of the sultan and the Despot; but, relying on their immense natural defences, animated by the sturdy spirit of indepen­dence which had so long distinguished them, and inspired by the example of their governor, Manuel Palaiologos, they bade them tell Mohammed not to lay sacrilegious hands on a city which God had meant to be invincible. The sultan is reported to have admired their courage and wisely refrained from attacking the impregnable fastness of mediaeval Hellenism. On 30th May, he placed the daughter of Demdtrios in his seraglio, and despatched her with her mother, under charge of an eunuch, to Boeotia, whither Demetrios himself was shortly sent to join them. Meanwhile he accompanied his captor. At this the governor of Monemvasia transferred his allegiance to Thomas; but the latter, himself a fugitive and soon an exile, was incapable of maintaining his sovereignty. A passing Catalan corsair, one Lope de Baldaja, was then invited to occupy the place; but the liberty-loving inhabitants soon drove out the petty tyrant whom they had summoned to their aid ; and, with the consent of Thomas, placed their city under the protection of his patron, the pope. Pius II. gladly appointed both spiritual and temporal governors of the rock which had so long been the stronghold of orthodoxy.

Having thus wiped the province of Demdtrios from the map, the sultan turned his arms against Thomas. Bordonia was abandoned at his approach by its cowardly archons; but the strong fortress of Kastritza, built on a sheer rock, and approached by a single entrance, and that fortified by a triple wall, for a time defied the assault of the janissaries. Urged on by promises of plunder, they returned to the attack, drove the garrison back into the Akropolis, and forced them from sheer exhaustion and lack of water to surrender on terms. In flagrant violation of this solemn convention, Mohammed beheaded or impaled all the male survivors, to the number of 300, ordered the local chief, Proinokokkos, to be flayed alive, enslaved the women and children, and levelled the castle with the ground. Leondari he found deserted by its inhabitants, who had taken refuge in the almost impregnable stronghold of Gardiki. After in vain offering them terms, he ordered his men to attack the place, which resisted for no more than a single day, for the heat was intense and the crowd of fugitives was so great that both water and provisions ran short. Here, again, Mohammed violated his oath to spare the lives of those who surrendered; he collected the men, women, and children together in a small plain to the number of 6000, bound them hand and foot, and then ordered them to be massacred in cold blood, The chief men of the place, who belonged to the family of Bochales, escaped the general fate, thanks to the intercession of the Beglerbeg Mahmoud, who was connected with them by marriage, and made their way to Naples. The surrender of Gardiki was promptly followed by that of the castle of St George, whose governor, Korkodeilos Klados, lived to head an insurrection against the Turks some years later. One place after another now opened its gates to the invaders— Kyparissia, till lately the residence of the Despot Thomas; Karytaina; Androusa and Ithome; from the first of these cities and its fertile neighbourhood, the garden of Greece, no less than 10,000 people were dragged off to Constantinople. Meanwhile, Thomas had made no attempt to defend his dominions. On the news of the sultan’s advent at Mistra, he had shut himself up in the sea-coast town of Mantineia on the Messenian Gulf, whence he could easily escape in case of need. Seeing that all was lost, and that Venetian territory alone remained safe, he now set out for Navarino. But Mohammed began to inspect the Messenian colonies of Venice, as he had inspected Negroponte ; as he drew nearer, the Venetian authorities urged Thomas not to involve them in diplomatic difficulties by remaining defiantly in their station of Navarino, and offered him two ships on which to make his escape. The terrified Despot thereupon fled to Marathos, and on the same day that the sultan came in sight of Navarino, set sail with his wife and family and with some of his nobles from the neighbouring harbour of Porto Longo for Corfu. There he arrived on 28th July, where, five days later, the faithful PhrantzSs joined him. Neither ever saw the Morea again.

The Venetians had good cause to fear that the anger of the sultan would now fall upon their colony. They were, it is true, at peace with Mohammed, but he had just shown his disregard of international law by killing some of the people of Modon who had come out to him with a flag of truce, and by annexing some Venetian villages on the ground that they had belonged to the Greeks and were therefore his. The authorities of Navarino accordingly hastened to renew the treaty with the conqueror and endeavoured to mollify him by the offer of hospitality—an offer which did not restrain his horsemen from making an incursion into the town and slaying a number of Albanians from the surrounding districts. Then the sultan marched away to the North, accompanied by Matthew Asan, while Demdtrios, for whom Mohammed had no further use, was sent to join his family in Bceotia. Meanwhile, Zagan Pasha had been busily occupied in the west of the peninsula. Chloumoutsi fell; and Santameri, the famous castle of Nicholas III de St Omer, which was held by some Albanians, and in which most of the neighbours had deposited all their valuables, surrendered on terms. Next day, however, the Illyrian apostate broke the convention, slew many of the inhabitants, and enslaved the rest—an act of treachery which was also a political blunder, for it inspired the other garrisons, which still held out, with the courage of despair. Zagan might plead that he was only imitating his master, for Mohammed had ordered the flaying of his old Albanian opponent Doxas, or Doxies, now captain of Kalavryta, who had played fast and loose with both Greeks and Turks. But the sultan saw his officer’s mistake, and at once tried to undo it by depriving Zagan of his command, and by ordering the release of the captives of Santameri. This politic act had the desired result; most of the forts round Patras hastened to surrender; and when the sultan arrived there almost the only place which still held out was Salmenikon, a very strong mountain fortress between Patras and Vostitza defended by Graitzas Palaioldgos, who if not a genuine son of the imperial race, proved himself far worthier of the name than the two miserable Despots. This courageous soldier paid no heed to the sultan’s summons to capitulate; in vain the Turkish gunners bombarded the place, in vain the janissaries marched to the assault. After a seven days’ siege, the enemy, however, cut off the water supply, and the lower town, crowded with Greek and Albanian fugitives, then surrendered; some 6000 captives swelled the train of the conqueror, who set aside the promising boys for his corps of janissaries, and distributed the others among his captains. Still Palaiologos held the Akropolis of the town, and declined to yield unless the sultan would move a stage away from it. Mohammed agreed, and marched down to Vostitza, leaving Hamsa Zenevisi, whom he had appointed in Zagan’s room, to take over the place. But, after the lesson of Santameri, the Greek commander had little confidence in Turkish oaths; he therefore resolved to make a preliminary trial of Hamsa’s sincerity, and sent out a detachment of the garrison laden with baggage, to see whether the Turks would allow them a free passage. The temptation to attack and plunder them proved too strong for the Pasha; he broke his sovereign’s pledge, with the result that Palaioldgos refused to surrender. The angry sultan now re-appointed Zagan governor of Thessaly and the Morea, but Salmenikon still held out. At last, in 1461, after a year’s siege, the gallant commander capitulated, and made his way, with all the honours of war, into Venetian territory at Lepanto. Such was the admiration which he inspired in his opponents, that the Grand Vizier Mahmoud was heard to exclaim: “I found many slaves in the Morea, but this was the only man.” The Venetian senate received with gladness so courageous a soldier, and appointed him commander of all the light horse of the republic. It is from him that the Athenian Palaiologoi, of whom we hear a century later, were perhaps descended.

From Vostitza the sultan set out to Corinth, by way of Lake Pheneos and Phlious. Treacherous to the last, he issued a proclamation granting a full pardon to all who would lay down their arms and provide his soldiers with provisions, and then seized those who trusted him. Phlious he thought it necessary to overrun, because the Albanians had collected all their belongings there, and had been followed by many kindred spirits, who were ready to revolt at a signal from them. Then, leaving Zagan behind him to make a tour of the conquered Morea and to re-organise a government, Mohammed recrossed the isthmus in the late summer of 1460. His campaign had been a complete success. He had finally destroyed the last vestiges of Greek rule in the peninsula, and had annexed the whole of it to the Turkish Empire, save where the Venetian banner still waved over the colonies of Nauplia, Argos, and Thermisi, Coron, Modon, and Navarino, and where Monemvasia acknowledged the sway of the pope. His Greek biographer tells us that nearly 250 forts had fallen before him, and he had carried off. thousands of the inhabitants, including many of the men of wealth, to Constantinople—the adults to repopulate his capital, the boys to serve in the corps of janissaries. The rest of the leading men fled to the Venetian colonies, and thus the country, deprived of its natural leaders, lay at the feet of the conqueror.

The fate of the Palaiologoi deserves the notice which mankind usually bestows upon sovereigns in exile. Demetrios received from Mohammed the islands of Imbros and Lemnos, which his friend, the historian Kritoboulos, had been the means of securing for the Turks, together with a portion of Thasos and Samothrace, and the valuable mart and salt-mines of Aenos. These possessions, which had belonged to the great Genoese family of Gattilusio, brought in 600,000 aspers a year, in addition to which Demetrios received an annuity of 300,000 more from the mint at Adrianople. He was thus able to spend his time in riotous living and hunting till he was so unfortunate as to incur the sultan’s anger. If we may believe the story of Phrantzes, a bitter enemy of Matthew Asan, that individual, who had accompanied his brother-in-law to Aenos, was accused of embezzling money from the salt-works by the sultan, who not only threatened him with impalement, but suspected Demetrios of being his accomplice, and deprived him of all his allowance, except just sufficient to keep body and soul together. A later writer, however, considers Demetrios to have been the culprit, and says that he was only saved from execution by the intervention of Mahmoud Pasha. One day, however, when Mohammed was hunting, he met the poor exile on foot, and was so deeply moved at the sight that he gave him a sum of 50,000 aspers from the proceeds of the corn­-tax, much less than what he had enjoyed, but still enough to live on. In 1470 the Despot ended his pitiable career as a monk, David by name, at Adrianople, and as his daughter never married Mohammed after all —for the sultan feared that she might poison him— this branch of the family became extinct.

The sultan was naturally anxious to get Thomas as well as Demetrios into his clutches, in order to prevent him intriguing with the Western Powers against the Turkish Empire. He therefore sent an agent to Corfu with a request that the Despot would depute one of his archons to treat of peace and to arrange for an appanage, on which Thomas could live. But when the Despot’s emissary arrived at the sultan’s headquarters with a proposal to exchange Monem- vasia for another sea-coast place, the latter flung him into prison, and only released him in order that he might convey to his master Mohammed’s command that either Thomas or one of his sons should appear in person. Meanwhile, Thomas had despatched George Raoul to seek the aid of Pope Pius II, and on 16th November, 1460, set out for Ancona, accompanied by most of his magnates, and bearing the head of St Andrew, which had so long been preserved at Patras. The relic was a valuable asset, for many princes offered large sums for it, and its possessor had no difficulty in disposing of it to the pope in return for an annuity. The precious relic was deposited for safety in the castle of Narni, while Thomas proceeded to Rome, where Pius II bestowed on him the Golden Rose, the symbol of virtue, a lodging in the Santo Spirito Hospital, and an allowance of 300 gold pieces a month, to which the cardinals added 200 more—a sum which his followers considered barely enough for his maintenance, and certainly not enough for theirs. Venice, indeed, contributed a sum of 500 ducats to his treasury, and concluded a treaty with him against the Turks, but there were no practical results of this alliance. Meanwhile, on 12th April, 1462, the day after Palm Sunday, Pius II. received the head of St Andrew at the Ponte Milvio, on the spot where the little chapel of that Apostle with its commemorative inscription now stands. Cardinal Bessarion handed the case containing it to the pope, who bade the sacred skull welcome among its relatives, the Romans, “the nephews of St Peter” —a ceremony depicted on the tomb of the Pontiff in Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Shortly afterwards, the Despot’s wife, who had remained with her family at Corfu, died and was buried in the church of SS. Jason and Sosipater, whereupon Thomas summoned his two sons and his daughter Zoe to join him. But before they arrived, he died, on 12th May 1465, and was buried in the crypt of St Peter’s; but so completely has this scion of an imperial race been for­gotten that no one knows his grave; yet every visitor to Rome unconsciously gazes on his features, for on account of his tall and handsome appearance he served as a model for the statue of St Paul, which still stands at the steps of St Peter’s.

The family of Palaiologos was now represented by his two sons and his two daughters. The elder daughter, Helene, widow of the last Despot of Servia, resided at the court of her son-in-law, Leonardo III, at Sta. Mavra, and a local legend, devoid of historical accuracy, ascribes to her the erection of the church whence the town received its name, in gratitude for the deliverance of herself and her daughter from ship­wreck on 3rd May, the day of Sta. Mavra. There she died as the nun Hypomone in 1474, leaving two other daughters, one of whom died childless, while the third married the son of the Albanian hero, Skanderbeg, in whose descendants, and in those of the Tocchi, there thus flowed the blood of the Palaiologoi. Thomas’s younger daughter, Zoe, or Sophia, was married first to a Caracciolo, and then to the Grand Duke Ivan III of Russia, to whom she brought a dowry of 6000 gold pieces, provided by Pope Sixtus IV, —an event com­memorated by one of the paintings in the Santo Spirito Hospital. With her daughter, the wife of Alexander Jagellon of Poland, the female line came to an end. The two sons do not seem to have profited much by the strict injunctions which Bessarion had laid down for their education. The elder, Andrew, who bore the empty title of Despot, which we find on his seals,³ and continued to draw his father’s allowance from the pope, fell into dissolute habits, and married a woman, named Catherine, off the streets of Rome, by whom he had no children. In such company, and with scarcely a rag to clothe his limbs, he aroused the pity or contempt of the Romans. His annuity was reduced; he had to take a back place at papal ceremonies. Once he was seized with the idea of recovering the Morea with Neopolitan aid, and induced Sixtus IV to give him 2000 gold pieces for the purpose; but in 1494 he ceded all his rights to Charles VIII of France, and in his last will and testament in 1502, he left Ferdinand and Isabella of Castille his heirs. In that year he died in Rome in such great misery that his widow had to beg his funeral expenses from the pope. His younger brother, Manuel, a man of more spirit, preferred the risk of death at the hands of the sultan to the prospect of starv­ing at the papal court. But to his surprise Mohammed gave him an establishment and a daily sum for its maintenance. He remained a Christian, as did his elder son, who died young; but his second son, Andrew, became a Mussulman and is last heard of as Mohammed Pasha in the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent. Though the family of the Despots of the Morea would thus appear to have been long extinct, a Cornish antiquary announced in 1815 that the church of Landulph contained a monument to one of Thomas’s descendants. But this claim is genealogically unsound, for there is no historical proof of the existence of the supposed third son of the Despot, mentioned in the brass plate at Landulph. But after all, the world has not lost much by the extinction of the race, which, if it vainly tried to save Constantinople by an act of heroism, foolishly lost the Morea by its dissensions.

The faithful retainers of the Palaiologoi, disgusted at the prospects offered them in Rome, scattered all over Europe. Many followed the Grand Duchess Sophia to Russia, where they became absorbed in the Muscovite nobility ; some went to France; others to Venice or Palermo; others again, like Nicholas Melissends, the fiance of Phrantzes’s daughter, to Crete. The historian had declined to accompany his master to Rome; he remained in Corfu, moving from one village to another, till he finally settled down in the monastery of SS. Jason and Sosipater. A visit to the Despot Andrew in Rome at the time of his sister’s first engagement, and a summons from the widowed Princess of Servia to the court of Leonardo Tocco at Sta. Mavra, broke the monotony of his life. At last, the busy diplomatist, his career closed, became a monk, under the name of Gregorios, and in his silent cell occupied himself with composing, at the request of some noble Corfiotes, the story of his troublous times, till at last he was laid to rest by the side of his master’s consort in the quiet church at Kastrodes. Phrantzes did not write without anger or bias; but he has given us a living picture of the leading actors in the tragic drama in which he too had played a part. And to-day, beside the tomb of mediaeval Greece’s last contemporary historian, the friend of the young Greek kingdom may meditate on the causes which for nearly four centuries placed the Greeks beneath the sway of the Turks.

The fall of the two Greek principalities in the Morea was closely followed by the destruction of the fragments that remained of the duchy of Athens. On his way back from the peninsula in 1460, Mohammed II revisited Athens and reinspected the old city and the harbours. Unfortunately, the janissaries stationed on the Acropolis told him that some Athenians had conspired to restore Franco. The sultan not only arrested ten of the richest citizens and took them away to Constantinople, but resolved to rid himself of his former favourite. Franco, as the man of the Turk, was at the moment serving with his Boeotian cavalry in Mohammed’s camp, and received orders from his suzerain to join in the attack which was about to be made on Leonardo III Tocco in western Greece. The “Lord of Thebes” so strongly objected to being compelled to fight against his fellow-Christians, that, though he received as large revenues from Thebes and Livadia as he had ever had from Athens, he had written to Francesco Sforza of Milan offering his services as a condottiere for the sum of 10,000 ducats a year. He was forced, however, to obey the sultan’s orders, and, after defeating Tocco, repaired to the headquarters of Zagan, the governor of the Morea. Zagan had meanwhile been told by Mohammed to kill him. The Pasha invited him to his tent, and detained him in conversation till nightfall; then, as the unsuspecting Franco was on his way back to his own tent, the Pasha’s guards strangled him. Such was the sorry ending of the last “Lord of Thebes”. Thereupon, Moham­med annexed Thebes and all Boeotia, and thus obliterated the last trace of the Frankish duchy of Athens from the map. Franco’s three sons, Matteo, Jacopo, and Gabriele, with their mother, were taken to Constantinople and enrolled in the corps of janissaries, where one of them afterwards showed military and administrative ability of so high an order as to win the favour of his sovereign. Their mother, a daughter of Demetrios Asan of Mouchli, and famed for her beauty, became the cause of a terrible tragedy, which convulsed alike court and church. George Amoiroutses, the former minister and betrayer of the last Emperor ofTrebizond, fell desperately in love with the fair widow, to whom he addressed impas­sioned verses, and swore, though he had a wife still living, to marry her or die. The oecumenical patriarch forbade the bans, and lost his beard and his office rather than yield to the sultan. But swift retribution fell upon the bigamist, for he dropped down dead, a dice-box in his hand.

Though the Acciajuoli dynasty had thus fallen for ever, members of that great family still remained in Greece. An Acciajuoli was made civil governor of the old Venetian colony of Coron, in Messenia, when the Spaniards captured it from the Turks in 1532. When they abandoned it, he accom­panied them, but was captured by an Algerine pirate, who sold him as a slave to a Greek. Eventually he was resold to a Spaniard, only to die in poverty at Naples, where his race had first risen to eminence, and where it became extinct. At the beginning of the last century the French traveller, Pouqueville, was shown at Athens a donkey-driver named Neri, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Florentine dukes; and the modern historian of Christian Athens, Neroutsos, used to contend that his family was descended from Nerozzo Pitti, lord of Sykaminon and uncle of the last duke of Athens. In Florence the family became extinct only so recently as 1834; and the Certosa and the Lung’ Arno Acciajuoli still preserve its memory there. In the Florence gallery, too, are two coloured portraits of the dukes of Athens, which would seem to be those of Nerio I. and the bastard Antonio I. In that case, the Florentine dukes of Athens are the only Frankish rulers of Greece, except the palatine counts of Cephalonia, whose likeness has been preserved to posterity.

Thus ended the strange connection between Florence and Athens. A titular duke of Athens had become tyrant of the Florentines, a Florentine merchant had become Duke of Athens ; but the age when French and Italian adventurers could find an El Dorado on the poetic soil of Greece was over.

The Turkish conquest of continental Greece was com­pleted by the campaign against Leonardo III Tocco, in which the unhappy Franco had been forced to take part. For several years, in spite of an occasional dispute with his Venetian protectors, the Duke of Leucadia had enjoyed peace in his islands, while the three points which he still held on the mainland remained unmolested by his Turkish neigh­bours. But he was so patriotic or so impolitic as to second Skanderbeg in his rising against the Turks, and this brought down upon him the vengeance of the sultan. According to one account, he was taken prisoner at Corinth, whence he escaped by the aid of a corsair to Sta. Mavra; but he lost the last of his continental possessions, except the strong fortress of Vonitza on the Ainbrakian Gulf. When, three years later, he heard that Venice was preparing to recover the Morea from the Turks, he begged the aid of the republic, whose honorary citizen he was, in reconquering the old Despotat of Arta, where he still possessed many adherents. This scheme, however, came to nothing.

To complete the picture of continental Greece as she was at the date of the Turkish Conquest, it remains to describe the condition of the Venetian colonies. North of the isthmus, Lepanto, for which the republic continued to pay an annual tribute of 100 gold ducats to the sultan, had increased in population owing to the immigration of fugitives from the Despotat of Arta and from the Morea. These immigrants, mostly Albanians, had their own chief, and obtained exemp­tion from obnoxious corvies on their boats and beasts of burden. But an earthquake and the cost of repairing the fortifications unfortunately made it necessary to reduce the garrison and thus diminished Venetian influence in Epiros.¹ Both Lepanto and Pteleon, the Venetian station at the entrance of the Gulf of Volo, were now surrounded by the Turkish empire, so that their position was naturally precarious. It had been decided that the garrison of Pteleon should be Italian, and that a citizen of Eubcea who knew Greek and was acquainted with Thessaly should be its rector, and, as we saw, the post was held for seven years by Niccold Zorzi, son of the last Marquis of Boudonitza; but after his time, the old system of appointing a governor direct from Venice was adopted. The five-mile frontage on the mainland opposite Euboea is mentioned as still belonging to Venice in 1439, but its cultivation was of doubtful advantage to the islanders, because, though corn could now be exported in large quantities, their peasants were constantly surprised while at work by the Turks.

Of the great island itself the republic had been practically absolute mistress ever since the disappearance of the Dalle Carceri and Ghisi families towards the end of the last century. When the three great baronies then became vacant, the Venetian bailie disposed of them as seemed most to the interest of his Government, bestowing the third of the Ghisi upon a number of small holders, and the two- thirds of the Dalle Carceri upon Januli d’Anoe, whose family retained its share till the Turkish Conquest, and upon Maria Sanudo, whose share descended to the Sommaripa of Paros. But all these feudal lords, like the Zorzi of Karystos, were the creatures of the republic, and the real governor of the island was the Venetian bailie. All the fortresses in D’Anoe’s barony, for example, were garrisoned by Venetian troops; it was to Venice that his vassals appealed for justice, and every four months the baron himself was bound to present himself at Negroponte with two good horses and an esquire. Next to the republic, the most important person in the colony was the titular patriarch of Constantinople, a dignity still connected with the see of Negroponte. In 1426, we are told that he owned a quarter of the island and that he had many serfs, but that he shirked his share of the public burdens. After the peace of 1430 between Venice and the sultan, the island enjoyed a brief revival of prosperity, and the lamentations of the colonists were less loud. A pro­tective measure to encourage the local wine trade proved most beneficial, and the famous plain of Lilanto, which a special official, the potamarch, was bound to keep irrigated, was then called “the life of this island, the eye and garden of Negroponte”, as it still is. Care, too, was taken to humour the Jews, who were the chief merchants and who bore the chief burden of taxation, and their ghetto at the capital was enlarged. Originally, they had lived outside the city; but they had entered the walls for greater security; in 1358 the ghetto had been assigned to them, and finally, in 1440, their numbers had so much increased that its boundaries were extended, with the proviso that if they dwelt beyond a certain tower they would forfeit their houses and be banished for ever. Orders, too, were given that the ghettos at Karystos and Oreos were to be repaired, that the law should be equal for them and the Christians, and that the public hangman should no longer be chosen from among them. But there were signs that the island was declining. The harbours of Negroponte and Karystos became choked with sand; the walls needed repair; the plague made such havoc, that the vassals of Karystos were reduced to between two and three thousand; Catalan corsairs still infested the coasts; the Albanian immigrants were becoming restive; and the Turks, after a long interval, resumed their operations, so that the captain of the bridge was ordered to pass the night there. Then came the alarming news of the destruc­tion of Christian rule in Constantinople and on the mainland, and the scare of Mohammed II’s visit. Taxes were hastily remitted to pacify the islanders, and the Home Government became seriously alarmed about the island, “on the possession of which depends the maintenance of our sea-power”, as they wrote to the bailie.

It is to the closing years of Venetian rule in Negroponte that we owe the copy of the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania, to which allusion was made in the third chapter. In 1421 a commission of twelve citizens was ordered to be elected for the purpose of drawing up in a single volume the laws and customs prevalent in the Latin Orient. The work was not finished till thirty years later, when the last Latin Archbishop of Athens, Niccold Protimo, himself a native of the island, was entrusted with the collation of the completed copy sent from Negroponte with that preserved in the chancery at Venice. It was then found that the Eubcean code contained 147 more articles than the Venetian, and of these only 37 were approved. The code, as we have it, consists of 219 articles with 8 extra articles added by Nicholas de Joinville, bailie of Achaia more than a century earlier, and is written in the Venetian dialect.

South of the isthmus, the two groups of Venetian colonies in Argolis and in Messenia had suffered considerably, as we saw, from the disturbed state of the peninsula, now from the Despots and now from the Turks. The population of Nauplia had been increased by a settlement of Albanians, and a band of gypsies had been encamped there as far back as the end of the fourteenth century under a chief, or drungarius, to whom special privileges were granted. But the local aristocracy claimed the exclusive right to hold the various offices, as of yore, and complained of the condition of the walls and the riotous behaviour of the light horsemen in the suite of the governor.² At Modon and Coron the treatment of the serfs was the most important question at this period; they complained that they had to provide straw and grass for the horses of the governor, and to lend their own animals for his hunting-parties; and they were subject to a corvee, or parapiasmo, as it was called, of two days a month; but they seem to have prospered under Venetian rule, for there were rich peasants among them who were willing to pay a large sum for enfranchisement. The Greek bishop was now allowed to live in the town of Coron, instead of some miles outside, and twice a year the Greek priests and monks paid a tax to the republic. Emigration, however, was such an evil, that the taxes were lowered in order to encourage people to live in the colony.

While, all around, principalities were falling, Venice had, at this eleventh hour, added to her Greek colonies. In 1451, the classic island of ^Egina, which she had long coveted, became hers. It had been arranged, twenty-six years before, as we saw, that, when the Caopena family became extinct, the republic should take their inheritance. In 1451, Antonello Caopena, son-in-law of the Duke Antonio I of Athens, died without heirs, after having bequeathed the island to Venice. The islanders welcomed Venetian rule; the claims of Antonello’s uncle Arna, who had lands in Argolis, where a mountain still bears his name, were satisfied by a pension, and a Venetian governor, or rettore, was appointed, who was dependent on the authorities of Nauplia. After Arne’s death, his son Alioto renewed his claim to the island, but was told that the republic was firmly resolved to keep it. He and his family were pensioned, and one of them loyally aided in the defence of TEgina against the Turks in 1537, was captured with his family, and died in a Turkish dungeon. Venice, however, ransomed his wife and children, who came and settled as poor and simple citizens on the lagoons. There they remained till, in 1648, the last of the race died, as priest of S. Giovanni in Bragora. Such was the end of the Catalan lords of Aegina.

Two years after the annexation of Aegina, the Venetian admiral occupied the Northern Sporades —Skyros, Skiathos, and Skopelos— the original fief of the Ghisi, which had belonged to the Byzantine Empire for nearly two centuries. Now that that empire had fallen, the islanders were ab­solutely defenceless against the attacks of pirates. One party preferred the mild rule of the Gattilusii of Lesbos, another that of the maona, or Genoese Company, which ruled over Chios, but the majority favoured a Venetian protectorate, of which their neighbours in Eubcea had had so long an experience. Accordingly, they offered their island home to the Venetian admiral, on condition that he would confirm their ancient privileges and preserve their episcopal see. At first he hestitated, for three of the four castles of Skyros were now in ruins, and such an acquisition seemed therefore to be more of an expense than a profit to his Government. An embassy sent by the natives to the Genoese forced him, however, to consent, for he knew that Venice would not tolerate her great rival so near her most important colony. Two Venetian rectors, dependent on the bailie of Negroponte, were sent to govern the islands, the republic granted their privileges and heard their petitions, and they remained in her possession till 1538.

Finally, as we saw, two of the Cyclades, Tenos and Mykonos, had been under Venetian authority since the extinction of the Ghisi family in 1390, and had been farmed out to a Venetian citizen, who was dependent on Negroponte. But the islands were so poor and so thinly inhabited, that the rent was reduced. Turkish depredations were frequent, and the islanders complained to the Senate, to which they were faithful even when misgoverned. In 1430 a governor was accordingly sent direct from Venice, the two islands were declared independent of Euboea, and the privileges of the people were confirmed. Still, the most ample franchises could not keep off Catalan and Turkish corsairs. Thus, in 1460, the dull uniformity of Turkish rule spread over the land, save where the dukes of the Archipelago and the Venetian colonies still remained the sole guardians of Western culture, the only rays of light in the once brilliant Latin Orient.

CHAPTER XIV

THE VENETIAN COLONIES (1462-1540)