MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER XIV

THE VENETIAN COLONIES (1462-1540)

After the fall of the duchy of Athens and the principality of Achaia, the only Latin possessions left on the mainland of Greece were the papal city of Monemvasia, the fortress of Vonitza on the Ambracian Gulf, and the Venetian colonies, composed of four distant and isolated groups—the Messenian stations of Coron and Modon with its dependency, Navarino; the castles of Argos and Nauplia, to which the island of TEgina was subordinate, and the frontier fortresses of Lepanto and Pteleon. It only remains, then, to complete the history of Frankish rule on the Greek continent by describing the fortunes of these lingering offshoots of Italy down to the capture of the last of them by the Turks in 1540. With them, for the sake of clearness, we may include the fate of the Venetian island of Negroponte and that of the insular domain of the Tocchi in the palatine county of Cephalonia.

However little the Venetians might desire it, a war between the republic and the sultan was clearly inevitable; they were convinced that the great conqueror intended to round off his Greek territories by the acquisition of their remaining colonies upon Greek soil, and they wisely availed themselves of the short breathing-space afforded by the sultan’s attack upon the empire of Trebizond to put their fortifications in order. An inscription on the ruins of Coron still commemorates the repair of that outpost,¹ while ALgina obtained money for her defences by the unwilling sacrifice of her cherished relic, the head of St George, which had been carried thither from Livadia by the Catalans after their expulsion from the Athenian duchy. The kings of Aragon had not abandoned the hope of obtaining possession of the coveted head. Alfonso V had sent an emissary to carry it off; but a great storm prevented his design, and the relic was restored to the church of St George, in the lofty town of what is now Palaiochora. In 1462, however, the Venetian Senate ordered the relic to be removed to S. Giorgio Maggiore at Venice, and this time, to the dismay of the Greeks, the saint wrought no miracle to prevent this act of sacrilege. On 12th November, it was transported from Aegina by Vettore Cappello, the famous Venetian commander, and placed in S. Giorgio, and the monastery and the Senate tried to soothe the feelings of the AZginetans by giving 100 ducats apiece towards fortifying the island.

The Turks soon found an excuse for hostilities. An Albanian slave, the property of the governor of Athens, had run away with some of his master’s property, and had sought refuge in the house of Valaresso, one of the councillors of Modon. The Venetian authorities of that colony refused to give him up, whereupon, in November 1462, Omar, son of Turakhan, the captor of Athens, marched upon Lepanto, and almost took that important fortress; while Isa, who had succeeded Zagan in the governorship of the Morea, occupied Argos without a blow, owing to the treachery of a Greek priest, and Turkish bands ravaged the country round Modon. The war-party in Venice then persuaded the Government to fight, and in 1463 a war began, which lasted, more or less continuously, till 1479. Bertoldo d’Este was appointed commander-in-chief of the Venetian land forces, and ordered to proceed to Nauplia and co-operate with the fleet under Loredano; while the heroic Albanian leader, Skanderbeg, was provided with subsidies, in order that he might create a diversion among the mountains of his native land. D’Este recruited his forces by opening the Cretan gaols and convert­ing the prisoners into soldiers. At the same time he issued a proclamation, calling upon the Greeks to rise and regain their freedom with his assistance. The long rule of the Franks had had the effect of making them far more warlike than they had been at the time of the Latin Conquest; and, provided that they were sure of foreign aid, they were ready to rise against the Turks. The Spartans took up arms under the leadership of Michael Rdlles, a primate belonging to a distinguished Lacedaemonian family of Norman or Albanian origin. The Arkadians found a chief in Peter Boua—the same Albanian who had headed a rising against the Greeks nine years earlier, and the Mainates, as ever, showed a spirit of independence. Monemvasia, weary, as was to be expected, of papal rule, begged the protection of a state which of all Catholic communities was notoriously the least bigoted; the pope was far off, the papal governor was helpless; and ere long a Venetian podesta, paid out of the treasury of the Venetian islands of Lemnos or Crete, was sent out to the great fortress.

At first, fortune smiled on the Venetian arms. Argos was speedily retaken; its castle, the famous Larissa, soon hoisted the lion-banner of St Mark; another old Frankish town, that of Vostitza, drove out the Turks; and D’Este was able to send home a long list of fortresses which had joyfully opened their gates to his men. Among them it is interesting to notice such familiar Frankish names as Karytaina, Santameri, and Geraki, which now reappears after a long silence. Several strong positions, however, remained in Turkish hands, chief among them Akrocorinth, whose fate was certain to determine that of the rest. Accordingly, D’Este and Loredano set to work to besiege it. But first, in order to encourage the Greeks, they rebuilt the famous wall across the isthmus, which had been destroyed by Murad II. The two commanders put the first stone in its place, and their example filled their men with such zeal that in fifteen days the restored Hexamilion, 12 feet high and flanked with 136 towers, stretched from sea to sea. A religious ceremony celebrated the completion of the work ; an altar was erected in the middle of the wall; mass was performed; and the flag of the Evangelist was hoisted over the ramparts. Such an achievement was thought worthy of a picture on the ceiling of the Doge’s Palace. Unfortunately the work had been too hastily done; the wall was too low, and the stones had no mortar to keep them together.

The success of the Venetians was now checked. D’Este, uncautiously removing his helmet in the heat of an attack on Akrocorinth, was struck by a stone, and died of the wound. The same day the news arrived that Mahmoud Pasha, the grand vizier, with the victorious army which had just ended for ever the ancient kingdom of Bosnia, was marching to the assault of the Isthmian wall. Its defenders, without a general, decimated by dysentery, and alarmed at the great numerical superiority of the enemy, abandoned the Hexamilion without striking a blow, and retreated to Nauplia. The Turks once more destroyed the rampart across the isthmus, reoccupied Argos, levelled that city with the ground, and sent its inhabi­tants to Constantinople, where they received lands and houses from the sultan at the Peribleptos monastery. A much worse fate was reserved for the loyal subjects of Venice in Messenia, many of whom were sawn asunder by the orders of Mohammed II. Finding that their Venetian allies were unable to defend them, the Spartans retired to the fastnesses of Taygetos, whence the Turks in vain endeavoured to lure them by promises of amnesty.

Venice was not, however, discouraged by the failure of her arms. Sigismondo Malatesta, the husband of Isotta and the builder of the cathedral in his native town of Rimini, was appointed as D’Este’s successor; but that most famous scion of his family gained little glory from his Peloponnesian campaign. He succeeded, indeed, in taking two of the three rings of walls which compose the old Byzantine capital of Mistrzi; but the splendid castle resisted his assaults, discord broke out in his camp, and he hurriedly returned home to defend his interests there against the pope, with no other prize than the bones of the philosopher Gemistos Plethon, whose neo-Platonic doctrines he had embraced, and whose remains he laid in the cathedral at Rimini, where the tombs of the Spartan sage and the Italian lord may still be seen.

Venice now sent one of her most distinguished sons to the front Vettore Cappello had had a large experience of Greek affairs, and the news of his appointment to the command of the fleet in the Levant inspired the troops with fresh hopes. Nor did his first achievements belie their expectations. Directing his course to the north of the Aegean, he completed the conquest, begun by his prede­cessors, of the group of islands which had once belonged to the Gattilusii, and then cast anchor at the Piraeus in the summer of 1466. For a brief moment Athens figured again in the pages of history. Cappello marched upon the city before dawn on 12th July, and captured the whole of the lower town. The sack yielded his men a large booty, but he spared the lives of the Greek inhabitants, and contented himself with firing the Turkish ships in the harbour. As the Acropolis was strongly fortified and well provisioned, he made no attempt to besiege it, and sailed away to Patras.

If this second Venetian capture of Athens had no practical results, it has at least afforded us a last glimpse of the city, for to this moment we may ascribe the anonymous descrip­tion, written by a Venetian, which was published a few years ago. The author tells us that almost all the rock on which the castle stood was then surrounded with houses; he alludes to the great strength of the Akropolis, and distinguishes between the “modern walls” of the city and the ancient circumvallation, which was “ larger than that of Padua.” The west portal of the Stoa of Hadrian then served as the gate of the town; the Tower of the Winds, later on a tekkeh of Dervishes, was then a Greek church; and near the Stadion there dwelt the fraticelli della mala opinione—an heretical sect, which, rooted out of Western Europe, had thus found a refuge under the tolerant rule of the Turks. Of the other ancient monuments, the cultured visitor describes the Temple of Olympian Zeus, which then had one column less than in the time of his predecessor, Cyriacus; the arch and aqueduct of Hadrian, the latter still locally known as “Aristotle’s Study”; the choragic monument of Lysikrates, the monu­ment of Philopappos, the west wing of which had partially collapsed since the visit of the antiquary of Ancona; the Theseion, or “temple of the Gods”; the Roman market-place with the gate of Athena Archegetis and the pillar of Hadrian inscribed with the regulations for the oil trade. He also mentions a Roman tomb to the north of the Olympieion, which has escaped the notice of other travellers. As the Turks were in possession of the Akropolis, he was, as he says,¹ “unable to approach” sufficiently near to examine the monument of Thrasyllos, and could only descry the west front of the Parthenon, which was still a church. That, and the “ancient palace” of the Acciajuoli in the Propylaea, are the only buildings which he could see clearly from below, and which he therefore mentions as standing there. Down at the Pirseus he admired the famous lion, from whose mouth—so he was told—water used to flow; and on the Sacred Way, he waxes enthusiastic over the marbles and mosaics of Daphni, “the most beautiful I have ever seen”. From this time forth, Athens disappeared from the ken of Europe for more than a century. A German traveller who passed by it in 1483 speaks of “the faint and almost obliterated vestiges of Athens”, which he did not deem worthy of a visit; and seven severe plagues and the tribute of Christian children decimated the scanty population.

Disasters now again befell the Venetian arms. Barbarigo, the governor of the Morea, weary of a year of inaction, resolved, against the better advice of Rdlles, to undertake the siege of Patras, and allowed himself to be enticed into an ambush by the Turks under the redoubtable Omar.

Both the Venetian and the Moreot chieftains were impaled by the brutal conqueror; Cappello’s efforts to take Patras failed; the land forces retreated to Kalamata, where, beneath the old castle of William de Villehardouin, they sustained a fresh defeat; and the admiral withdrew to Negroponte, where he died of a broken heart. For five months he had never been seen to smile. His kneeling figure, the hat, —his coat-of-arms—and an inscription commemorating his deeds at sea and his death in Euboea, adorn the portal of the church of S. Aponal in Venice.

For the next three years a desultory struggle was waged in the Morea, with results unfavourable to the republic. The death of Pius II at Ancona had prevented the crusade which his zeal and the tireless eloquence of Bessarion had organised; his successor, Paul II, though a Venetian, lacked enthusiasm; and the selfish policy, for which Venice was distinguished, had prevented the other Italian states from rallying to her aid against the Turks. Skanderbeg alone of her allies remained in arms, and with his death, in 1468, she would gladly have come to terms with the sultan on the basis of uti possidetis. Of the 122 castles of the Morea, only 26 were now in Venetian hands ; more than 40 castles lay in ruins; over 50 flew the Turkish flag, among them the old Frankish stronghold of Geraki. Still Venice retained all her old colonies except Argos; her rectors held sway over Maina and Lemnos; her podesta governed the sheer rock of Monemvajia; the Greeks of Mitylene had gone to cultivate the waste lands of her cherished Negroponte.

Mohammed II had long coveted that splendid island, and the moment had now arrived for the realisation of his cherished plan. So well-informed a Government as that of Venice could not be in any doubt of what was intended, nor was it forgotten that the sultan had once already inspected Negroponte. From all sides, from Cyprus, Rhodes, and Cephalonia, from Naples and from Burgundy, the republic sought aid in the defence of her prized possession; but of all these allies, one alone, the Count of Cephalonia, sent a galley to join the Venetian fleet. “The princes of Christendom”, it was said, “looked on as if in a theatre”.

Early in June 1470, the Turkish fleet of 300 sail, with 60,000 or 70,000 men on board, issued from the Dardanelles; and, after taking Imbros, and making a futile attempt to capture the strong castles of Lemnos and Skyros, traversed the Doro channel at the south end of Euboea, and proceeded up to Negroponte. On the way, the Turkish admiral occupied the castle of Styra and the great square tower, which still stands in the village of Basiliko, near Chalkis, and on 15th June cast anchor in the bay of Burchio, the modern Bourkos; there his men disembarked and planted their tents on the shore of Millemoza, as the inmost recess of that bay was called, within a short distance of the land walls of the city. The next two days were occupied in skirmishes, but on the 18th the ardour of the garrison was checked by the spectacle of a long line of Turkish troops descending through the pass of Anephorites along the road from Thebes,¹ headed by the great sultan himself. For two hours Mohammed II. stood at the head of the bridge over the Euripos and carefully examined the enchanted castle, which stood in the middle of the stream till a wanton and useless act of Vandalism in our own time removed it. Then, judging that mode of entry into the city impracticable—for the stream is a mill-race and the drawbridge was up—he moved to the Punta, or Bocca di S. Marco, as the narrow entrance of the small bay to the south of the Euripos was then called, and ordered a bridge of boats to be constructed across to the island. Over this, at the Ave Maria, a third of the army passed ; next morning the sultan, his son, and the bulk of the army followed. Mohammed established his headquarters at Sta. Chiara, half a mile from the city, and his lines extended past the Nun’s Mountain, as the eminence of Veli Baba behind Chalkis was then called from a convent of the Virgin which stood there, past the suburb of S. Francesco and as far as the fountain of Arethusa, on the road to Eretria. On the mainland of Boeotia, at the Forks, as the present fort of Kara Baba was then described, a battery was placed, so that the city was completely invested except on the north. On that side, however, the sultan constructed a second bridge of boats, which were dragged over land from the bay of Burchio to the Atalante channel.

The condition of the place, as its defenders well knew, was not satisfactory. The walls had been, indeed, repaired forty years before; and on every battlement of the sea-wall the lion of the Evangelist bade defiance to the infidels; a moat washed the walls on the land side, so that it was com­pletely surrounded by water; but the republic had strangely omitted to fortify the two heights which commanded the town, that of the Forks and that of the Nun’s Mountain, trusting to her fleet to save Negroponte in her hour of need. Unfortunately, the fleet was under the command of Niccold da Canale, a better lawyer than seaman, who, instead of giving battle to the Turkish armada, had dallied off the island of Skiathos, and then sailed away to Candia, to the great surprise of the Cretan authorities.

At the time of the siege, the bailie was Paolo Erizzo, who had actually completed his two years’ term of office, but who had remained on at his post in the hope that his presence might be of use. For a similar reason, Giovanni Bondumier, the ex-provveditore—for in view of the Turkish peril, a provveditore as well as a bailie had latterly been sent to Negroponte —was still in the city, though his successor, Alvise Calbo, had actually arrived. These men were the soul of the defence of Negroponte, and were bravely supported by the numerous Venetian colony. The city contained 2500 souls, besides fugitives, and the garrison had recently been strengthened by 700 men from Candia and a force of 500 foot soldiers under the leadership of a Dalmatian named Tommaso, who was in charge of all the engines of war. Against them was the vast host of the Turks, variously estimated at 120,000 and 300,000 men, exclusive of the naval forces.

On 25th June, when he had made all his preparations, the sultan, through an Italian interpreter, summoned the bailie to surrender, saying that he was resolved to have the city, but that, if the bailie would yield at once, he would exempt the inhabitants from all taxes for ten years, would give to every noble who had a house two, and would allow the bailie and the provveditore to live in comfort at Negroponte, or else would assign them a liberal allowance at Con­stantinople. To this the bailie ordered his aide-de-camp to reply, that Venice had made Negroponte her own, that ten or twelve days at the most would decide her fate, and that, with God’s help, he would burn the sultan’s fleet and root up his tents, so that he would not know where to hide his diminished head. At this bold reply all the men on the wall shouted aloud, and the interpreter was bidden go tell his master to eat swine’s flesh, and then try to storm the moat. This insult was faithfully reported to Mohammed, who from that moment resolved that the garrison should have no mercy.

The same evening the bombardment began. The sultan had twenty-one (according to another account, forty- two), powerful pieces of artillery, which he had placed in commanding positions, both on the island and at Kara Baba, and which kept up a continuous fire day and night. None of the 120 huge stones which they fired failed to fall into the doomed city, and to this day they may be seen piled up in one of the squares of the town, a memento of the great siege. Meanwhile, a first assault was made upon the walls. The Turks threw fascines into the moat; but the defenders succeeded in setting fire to them, and the besiegers were forced to retreat with heavy loss. On 30th June a second assault was made with still more disastrous results, but the day witnessed two serious catastrophes for the Christians. The Turkish cavalry scoured the island as far north as Oreos, killing every one above the age of fifteen; the castle of La Cuppa was betrayed, and the 3000 Greeks, who had fled there for safety, were butchered in cold blood before the walls of Negroponte. The same fate overtook the crew of a vessel, laden with troops and munitions of war, which unwittingly fell into the midst of the Turkish fleet in the bay of Burchio.

There was a traitor, however, in the capital as well as at La Cuppa. A Dalmatian named Luca, from the island of Curzola, was found missing, and the story of an old Greek woman, who was intimate with the mistress of the Dalmatian captain, Tommaso, aroused the suspicion of the bailie. The missing man’s brother was arrested, and, under threat of torture, confessed that Luca had been sent by Tommaso’s orders. The latter’s trumpeter, he added, could tell the reason. The trumpeter, confronted with the bailie, at once made a complete disclosure of the plot. “We are all foes of Christendom”, he said, and then went on to accuse a certain Albanian, employed in the governor’s palace, of having been in Turkish pay for the last seven years. This man’s house was searched, and three arrows with compromising inscriptions were discovered there. The first, in Greek, ran as follows : “I am thy servant; what I have promised is ready”; the other two, in Turkish, came from the sultan’s camp, and bade the traitor perform his promise, for the sultan had come at his words, and could tarry no longer. The news that the plot was out soon reached the arch-traitor, Tommaso. The Dalmatian resolved to brave it out; he mounted his horse, and, at the head of a hundred of his men, rode towards the piazza, vowing that he would cut off the nose of the fellow who had arrested his friends. But the bailie had meanwhile made his preparations; the square was lined with troops, and in the centre Erizzo himself was walking calmly up and down with a number of Venetian nobles, as if nothing had happened. On seeing the traitor, the bailie asked him why he had come with such a retinue, thus leaving the walls unguarded. Disarmed by Erizzo’s innocent air, Tommaso dismissed his men, and followed the bailie into the latter’s palace, to discuss some question of repairs to the ramparts. But scarcely had he crossed the threshold than Alvise Dolfin stabbed him in the neck. Fifty swords flashed through his body, as many of his company were put to death, and their captain with his secretary and trumpeter hung by one foot from the pillars of the bailie’s palace. Their corpses were then taken down, quartered, and fired from the guns into the Turkish camp. So savage was the vengeance which the Venetians took upon the Dalmatian’s men, that the bailie lamented the loss of so many marksmen.

The sultan, ignorant of the traitor’s death, made a third assault on the land walls at the Burchio ravelin, which Tommaso had promised to surrender. To keep up the deception, the Venetians hoisted the Turkish flag—the signal agreed upon—over the tower of the Temple, and the Turks, rushing on “like pigs”, went to the slaughter, instead of to the sack of the city. Moreover, the able-bodied lads of the town now took the place of the executed marksmen on the walls, and they made such excellent practice that the sultan sent to ask who they might be. He was told that they were reinforcements from Nauplia, who had crossed the Euripos despite the vigilance of his guards at the bridge, a fable which cost those unhappy men their heads. For three more days and nights the sultan continued to bombard and demand the surrender of the city, and on the morning of nth July prepared to make a more vigorous assault than ever on the damaged line of wall between the tower of the Temple and the Porta di Cristo, the chief land-gate, while his fleet directed its attack against the ruined ramparts of the ghetto. Suddenly, however, Canale’s fleet of 71 sail was seen coming down the Atalante channel. In a moment, the situation was changed. The sultan expected the Venetian admiral to break the northern bridge of boats, fire the other and shut him up in the island. According to one account, he shed tears of rage; according to another, he actually mounted his horse to recross the bridge, and was only held back by his most trusted pasha. Modern expert opinion agrees with the sultan ; had Canale done his duty, he could have saved Negroponte and ruined the great conqueror.

But the legal mind, and perhaps the paternal affection, of the Venetian admiral, for his son was on board, hesitated till it was too late. In vain two Cretan gentlemen begged permission to charge with their galley against the bridge of boats. The commander replied that he must wait till all his vessels had come up. Corruption was rife in the fleet; no one stirred; the tide in the Euripos turned; and, Canale quietly cast anchor in the bay of Politika, six miles up channel. Meanwhile, the great man of action who commanded the besiegers acted. He lined both the Boeotian and the Euboean shore with soldiers to prevent Canale from landing; he posted marksmen on the northern bridge to repulse an attack, and offered the whole booty of the city to his men. Early on the morning of the next day, seeing that Canale was still inactive, he made his final assault upon the town. He had previously filled the moat with casks, dead bodies and fascines, so that the heap of material thrown into them overtopped the broken walls. Over this improvised road, which emitted a fearful stench, the Turks rushed to the attack. The garrison, weary and worn, raised black flags of distress as a signal to Canale, but in vain; still, though abandoned by the fleet, it gallantly held its ground till two hours after daybreak, when the besiegers carried the Burchio ravelin; a few moments later all the walls were in the possession of the enemy. Even then the fighting continued in the narrow streets, which were barricaded with beams, casks, and chains, while the women hurled boiling water, quick-lime, and pitchers on the heads of the Turks. Forcing their way, foot by foot, the invaders at last, at mid-day, gained the square. There Calbo, the provveditore, fell, sword in hand ; his predecessor, Bondumier, was butchered in the house of Paolo Andreozzo, who himself survived to write the story of the siege. The bailie and a number of gentle ladies and children found refuge in the castle in the Euripos, and pulled up the drawbridge, hoping that the fleet would even now come to their rescue. Canale did, indeed, make a show of attacking the bridge of boats, but when he saw the Turkish flag waving over the city, he turned and left the poor wretches in the castle of the Euripos to their fate.

That fate was, indeed, terrible. Mohammed had vowed to avenge the insults levelled at him from the walls, and he kept his vow. But the castle was strong, and his emissaries, Mahmoud Pasha, the Turkish admiral, and the Italian interpreter, found it necessary to promise the lives, but not the liberty, of the inmates. The sultan was furious at being thus baulked of his prey. He issued instant orders that every living soul, down to the very children at the breast, should be cut in pieces on the bridge. For Erizzo he reserved an even worse fate. Sarcastically remarking that he had promised to spare the bailie’s neck, but not his body, he ordered him to be placed on two planks and sawn asunder—a fiendish act commemorated by one of the paintings on the ceiling of the Doge’s Palace. According to one account, which has been eagerly accepted by a host of Venetian dramatists, but for which there is little historical evidence, Erizzo’s only daughter, Anna, refusing to yield to the desires of her father’s murderer, was killed before the sultan’s eyes. In his thirst for blood, the conqueror rode through the streets to see if the cupidity of his janissaries had spared the lives of his victims, and massacred all he could find before the church of the Holy Apostles, on the shore of the bay of Burchio, at his own headquarters, and at San Giovanni Bocca d’Oro; to make assurance doubly sure, he ordered his galleys to be searched, and issued a proclamation that any of his men who was guilty of con­cealing a Frank should be beheaded. His special vengeance fell upon the lads who had made such excellent practice from the walls. One of the fairest cities in Greece was converted into a charnel-house; the heads of the slain were heaped up in the Piazza di S. Francesco, in front of the official residence of the Latin patriarch; the Euripos ran red with the blood of the corpses thrown into it. It was calculated that 77,000 (other estimates give 25,000 or 30,000) Turks and 6,000 Christians had perished in the siege. It was said that every male in Negroponte over the age of eight years was cut in pieces.

The rest of the great island now surrendered. Historic castles, like Karystos, the fief of the Zorzi; Aidepsos, the property of the Sommaripa of Paros; Oreos, the third of the three original baronies, then a Venetian stronghold, all yielded. Pteleon, with its dependency of Gardiki, succumbed three days after the fall of Negroponte, despite the heroic efforts of its rector to save the last outpost of Christendom in northern Greece. Its site was left desolate; its inhabit­ants were sent to swell the Christian population of Con­stantinople. Thither the sultan himself set out, after presenting the fallen city of Negroponte to his son and leaving a garrison behind him, while his fleet, laden with booty and captive women and children, set sail for the Dardanelles. Once again, the irresolute Canale allowed it to pursue its way unmolested, “courteously escorting it,” as the Turkish admiral sarcastically said, “alike on its outward and its homeward voyage.”

When the news of the fall of Negroponte reached Venice, great was the lamentation. Many nobles fell ill of grief and shame—grief at the death of their relatives and friends who had been engaged in trade there, shame at “the worst tidings ever received by the State.” Their indignation demanded a scapegoat, and in the person of their incom­petent admiral one was ready to hand. Pietro Mocenigo was appointed to take his place, with orders to send Canale home in irons. That pitiful officer, conscious of his approaching disgrace, made a half-hearted attempt to recover the lost city. With 94 sail he cast anchor in the bay of Aulis, where once the Greek fleet had waited on the way to Troy. A blunder in strategy cost him the lives of some of his most valuable men; and, before he had had time to repair it, Mocenigo arrived. Canale hastened to meet him and to yield him the honour of recapturing the city. Mocenigo sarcastically bade him keep for himself the credit of the undertaking; and, when Canale declined, ordered his arrest. Placed on his trial at Venice, the miserable man was banished to Porto Gruaro, where he died; his successor abandoned all hope of regaining Negroponte, and since 1470 the island has owned no master save the Turk and the Greek.

The Lombard and Venetian families, so long settled there, have left no descendants in Euboea. One doctor in the island still bears the name of Venezianos; but of the offspring of the three barons and of the Venetian merchants, who had once enlivened the shores of the Euripos with their festivities or enriched them with their trade, not a trace remains there. Hard, indeed, was the lot of most survivors of the siege. Many had lost all that they possessed, and noble ladies, who had lived as local magnates in Euboea on estates which had belonged to their ancestors for centuries, were compelled to subsist on charity as pensioners of the Venetian Government in the convent of St Philip and St James. Twenty-seven of these ladies, “most unhappy of mortal women”, appeared before the doge and begged for bread. Twenty years later they received the house of a pious lady, which became the monastery of the Holy Sepulchre, as their abode. One high-born dame of the great family of Sommaripa was carried off into slavery with her daughter, and recovered by the Venetians at Smyrna, when they took that city. The Government, indeed, ordered that Canale should be made to refund the amount of his salary during the time that he had been admiral, and that this sum should be devoted to ransoming the prisoners. One of them used his eyes to such good purpose during his imprisonment at the Dardanelles, that he set fire to the naval arsenal of the Turks at Gallipoli. Special grants were made to the children of Alvise Calbo and Bondumier, and the last baron of Karystos was appointed governor of Lepanto; but most of the refugees ended their days in poverty.¹ The Latin patriarch of Constantinople, who for more than a century and a half had held the see of Negro­ponte, and whose possessions in the island had been so great, had already ceased to reside there; but the Catholic bishoprics of Euboea now ended their career. For the second time, Archbishop Protimo of Athens, who had been living in the island, found himself an exile, and wrote pitifully to the pope that he must either beg or starve.^{1 2} Thus closed the long Lom­bard and Venetian history of Negroponte—a history which is still commemorated, despite modern Vandalism, by the winged lions on the walls, which Erizzo so bravely defended, and by the fine escutcheons in the little museum at Chalcis.

Despite the heavy blow which she had received, Venice manfully continued the struggle against the great sultan. Further losses were incurred in the Morea; Vostitza surrendered; Belveder, or Pontikokastro, above the harbour of Katakolo, followed its example, and the Turks set fire to its deserted walls, and left it the ruin which it still remains. The Venetians themselves burnt the old castle of Kalamata, the birthplace of William of Achaia, rather than that it should fall into Turkish hands; thousands of Greeks from the ancient episcopal see of Olena and two other places in Elis, upon which the republic had bestowed special privileges, emigrated to Zante, where the Tocchi were better able than the republic to protect them. Nauplia was almost driven to yield from lack of food, but was relieved in time. As the sea still washed the base of the rock, and at that time not a single house stood in what is now the lower town, it had nothing to fear from an assault.¹ The war dragged on for some nine years more, despite efforts to make peace, which were bound to fail, because the republic asked for the restitution of Negroponte. The operations were, however, for the most part outside of Greece. Pope Sixtus IV succeeded in inducing the kings of Naples and Cyprus and the grand master of the Knights of Rhodes to join Venice in a holy league ; the Shah of Persia was incited to attack the Turks in Asia and claim the fallen empire of Trebizond ; the Grand Duke Ivan III. of Russia offered to invade Constantinople, as son-in-law of Thomas Palaioldgos, and therefore heir of Byzantium. For a time the fortunes of war turned; Mocenigo bombarded Smyrna; Loredario saved Lepanto. The Turks were naturally eager to capture this last Venetian fortress of northern Greece, and its neglected walls and dwindling population seemed to favour the enterprise. But, though in 1477 a large army besieged it for three months, and the Turkish artillery battered down a large part of the ramparts, the bravery of Antonio Zorzi, its rector, and the prompt arrival of Loredano’s fleet forced the Turks to retire with no other success than the capture of the outlying forts of the colony. But the republic had had enough of fighting.

The King of Naples, who had designs upon Cyprus which clashed with her own, had not only broken up the league against the sultan, but had even made an alliance with him— the first instance of those unnatural, but by no means uncommon, unions. The Turks were pressing hard the Venetian possessions in Albania, and Skutari was doomed. So, after sixteen years of warfare, peace was concluded in 1479. Venice restored to the sultan all the castles in the Morea taken during the war and the island of Lemnos, on condition that the garrisons were granted an amnesty and allowed to depart if they so desired. Thus, after the peace of 1479, Venice still retained the fortress and territory of Lepanto north of the Corinthian Gulf, and the colonies of Nauplia, Monemvasia, Coron, Modon, and Navarino in the Morea. A boundary commission was appointed to delimitate their frontiers ; after much discussion, the “impregnable” fortress of Thermisi, on the coast opposite Hydra, with its valuable salt-pans, the adjacent Kastri, and the ruined fortress of Kiveri, opposite Nauplia, were included in the territory of the latter, and Monemvasia was allowed to retain Vatika. Aigina remained subject to the governor of Nauplia. The Ionian islands of Corfu, Paxo, and Cerigo, with their dependencies ; the northern Sporades; two of the Cyclades— Tenos and Mykonos; and Crete, completed the diminished dominions of the republic in the Levant.

While Venice had thus lost Negroponte and Argos by the war, the long struggle had been even more disastrous to the Greeks. The Venetians, whose navy was far superior to that of the Turks, gained most of their successes at the expense, not of the sultan but of his Greek subjects, just as, in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897, a bombardment of Smyrna or Salonika would have mainly injured the Hellenic popula­tion of those two great Turkish towns. The Turks, likewise, carried off numbers of Greeks from the places which they captured, and thus the unhappy natives were the chief sufferers from the victories of their friends or the successes of their enemies. Yet the war had shown that the Hellenic race could produce splendid fighters, and the name of Maroiila, the heroine of Lemnos, might well rank with the ancient Spartans or the modern women of Souli. At a critical moment during the siege of that island, the girl seized the sword and shield of her dying father and charged the Turks at the head of the wavering garrison. As a reward for her services, she was allowed to choose a husband from among the noblest officers of the Venetian army, while the republic provided the marriage portion.¹ It was then, too, that the Venetians first employed the Greeks and Albanians of the Morea as light horsemen against the Turks. Thus arose the famous corps of stradioti, who in the sixteenth century demonstrated all over Europe even as far as Scotland, that Greek valour was not extinct. According to the learned Greek historian, whose researches have thrown a flood of light upon their organisation and exploits, their name is not derived from the Greek word u-rparmTat (“soldiers”), but from the Italian strada, because they were “always on the road,” and had no fixed abodes. They were mainly recruited from Lakonia; but the most valiant were the men of Nauplia and Thermisi. Among their leaders we find many historic names, such as those of Boua and Palaioldgos, whose bearers were descendants or relatives of the men who had fought the good fight for the liberty of the Peloponnese. But they had their weaknesses as well as their good qualities, and their inordinate vanity was the favourite theme of Venetian comedians, just as Plautus had satirised the boastfulness of the Miles Gloriosus for the amusement of the ancient Romans. A Venetian historian said that they were “fonder of booty than of battle”, and Tasso has blamed their rapacity in the line:

“Il leggier Greco alle rapine intento”

but other poets have sung of their triumphs. Indeed, there were bards in the ranks of the “wanderers” themselves, and a whole literature of their poems has been published, mostly written in a peculiar dialect resembling that now spoken in Calabria, where many Greek songs are still sung by the descendants of the numerous Epirote families settled there after the Turkish Conquest—the third time that Magna Graecia had received a large Greek population. One of their number, Marullus, of whom it was said that he “first united Apollo to Mars”, wrote Latin alcaics and sapphics, which, if not exactly Horatian, are, at any rate, as good as the ordinary product of the sixth-form intellect. Another, Theo­dore Spandounis, or Spandugino, more usefully employed his pen in the composition of a work on the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, with the patriotic object of arousing the sympathy of sixteenth century statesmen for the deliverance of Greece. The stradioti, were, however, mightier with the javelin and the mace—their characteristic weapons—than with the pen. The long javelin, which they carried on horseback, was a particularly formidable weapon. Shod at both ends with a sharp iron point, it could be used either way with equally deadly effect; and if it failed, the agile horseman could seize the mace which hung at his saddle bow, and bring it down on the skull of an opponent.¹ Unfortunately, the blow was rarely struck for Greece, and the skull was usually that of a Christian, against whom the stradioti had no personal or national quarrel.

The base ingratitude of Venice sacrificed by the peace of 1479 one of the last independent Latin rulers of Greece. Leonardo III Tocco had still preserved his islands of Cephalonia, Zante, Sta. Mavra, and Ithaka, with the solitary fortress of Vonitza on the Ambrakian Gulf. During the war he had acted as an intermediary between the two combatants, had sent a galley under his brother to the relief of Negro­ponte, and had been included in the alliance between the republic and the King of Naples against the Turks in 1471. During this sixteen years’ struggle, his islands had been the refuge of many thousands from the mainland. No less than 15,000 had fled to Sta. Mavra, and 10,000 Greeks and Albanians had emigrated from the west of the Morea to Zante, where they made unfruitful lands blossom like the rose, and where they formed an almost independent community under a Venetian official, called by the name of consul, much as did the Albanian colonies of Sicily in later times.

Thus, while the continent was being devastated with fire and sword, the islands flourished. When Phrantzes visited the court of Sta. Mavra, where the duke resided, he found all well there and Leonardo his own master—for he had put to death the four governors whom his predecessor had appointed over him. Qurita tells us that at the time of the Turkish Conquest Cephalonia was most fertile: in its two large harbours big vessels could lie; and it contained more than 6000 houses, with a population of 40,000 souls. Zante, at the same time, had 25,000 inhabitants, and the Spanish historian remarks that Leonardo’s state brought him in more than 12,000 ducats a year, and was large enough to entitle it to the rank of a kingdom. The administration of the islands was well organised; in Zante and in Cephalonia there was a vice­regent, or captain, who represented the duke, and who exercised judicial powers, and we hear of financial officials of the ducal court, of procurators, and of treasurers. The Catholics of Zante had their cathedral of the Redeemer in the castle, not far from the Franciscan monastery; in the Catholic monastery of the Prophet Elias were the tomb and escutcheon of Carlo I. It was at this period that the church of St Nicholas on Mount Skopos was founded, and that Leonardo made various grants to the Latin bishopric of Cephalonia and Zante, and directed the bishop to reside in the latter, and more Italian, island. But he did not limit his favours to the Catholics; he saw that the Greeks, if harshly treated, might “prefer the mufti’s turban to the cardinal’s hat”, and he therefore revived in 1452, the ancient orthodox bishopric of Cephalonia, which had been a “widowed see” since the early days of the Orsini, and gave the bishop jurisdiction over both Zante and Ithaka. He was to be elected from each of the two larger islands in turn, and was to be, as of old, a suffragan of the Metropolitan of Corinth. With his sanction, too, a noble lady named Kleopa endowed the convent of St John Baptist in Zante.¹ But though he made these concessions, and though he was. sufficiently Hellenised as to use Greek in his documents, he is said to have been regarded by the islanders as a tyrant. Their disaffection naturally facilitated the Turkish Conquest, Leonardo III had married, in 1463, Militza, the grand­daughter of Thomas Palaiologos; but, after her death, he sought to contract a politic alliance which would ensure him that protection which Venice seemed unable or unwilling to afford him. In 1477 he therefore wedded a Neapolitan lady of high degree, who was niece of King Ferdinand I. But the effect of this stroke of policy was the very opposite of what he had expected. Venice had no desire to see the old Neapolitan influence re-established in the Ionian islands, and had disregarded Ferdinand’s protest that the Tocchi were his vassals. Accordingly, she revenged herself for this rapprochement with Naples by leaving Leonardo out of the treaty of peace. This act of omission cost him his sceptre.

Leonardo was bound by treaty, not only to pay an annual tribute of 4000 ducats to the sultan, but to make a present of 500 more every time that a Turkish Sandjakbeg or provincial governor came to Joannina or Arta. It chanced at this moment that one of these personages arrived, who was not yet sixteen years of age, and who had been degraded from the superior rank of pasha. The Duke of Leucadia treated this juvenile official, who chanced to be a relative of his own, with scant consideration, sending him a gift of fruit, instead of money. The young governor’s pride was injured, and he lodged a complaint at Constantinople, that during the late war Leonardo had harboured Venetian light cavalry in Zante, at the same time recalling the fact that he had not been included in the recent peace. Mohammed was only too glad of an opportunity to round off his conquests by the annexation of almost the last Christian state in Greece, which would serve as a base for his intended attack on Italy. He therefore ordered Ahmed Pasha of Valona to attack Leonardo with twenty-nine ships. The duke did not await the Turkish invasion. He knew that the Venetians would not, and the Neapolitans could not, help him, and that his own subjects detested him. So, long before the pasha appeared, he collected all his portable valuables, hired a Venetian merchantman, and fled from Sta. Mavra to the strongest of his castles, Fort St George, in Cephalonia. But he did not trust the garrison ; the Turks who were approach­ing got sight of his treasure-ship, so he hastily embarked on board another Venetian vessel that lay in the harbour with his wife, his son Carlo, and his two brothers for Taranto, whence he proceeded to Naples. Ahmed, saluted by the Venetian admiral as he sailed down the channel of Corfu, easily captured Vonitza, the last vestige of the old Despotat of Epiros, and the islands of Santa Mavra, Cephalonia, and Ithaka, cutting to pieces all the ducal officials, burning the castle of Cephalonia, and carrying off most of the peasants to Constantinople; there the sultan separated the husbands from their wives, and mated both sexes with Ethiopians, in order that they might produce a race of grey slaves. The pasha then proceeded to attack Zante, but here he was met by the Venetian admiral, who protested that the island was inhabited by a colony of Venetian subjects from the Morea— the recent immigrants—who had hoisted the lion-banner of St Mark, and who were protected by 500 light horse under the redoubtable Peter Boua. The matter was referred to Constantinople—and, meanwhile, the Albanian condottiere twice defeated the treacherous invaders—but with no other result than that those islanders who chose were allowed to leave—a permission of which some thousands availed them­selves. Then the pasha ravaged “ the flower of the Levant ” with fire and sword, and destroyed most of its churches and all its habitations. Thus, in 1479, after an existence of well-nigh three centuries, the county palatine of Cephalonia, the picturesque realm of many a mediaeval Odysseus, dis­appeared in the dull monotony of the Turkish Empire. In Zante, in Ithaka, and in Cephalonia, the Turkish sway was of very brief duration ; nor was it unpopular with the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the Turkish officials to their own bishop ; but in Sta. Mavra, with one scanty interval, it lasted for over two centuries. The Turks converted the church of the saint into a mosque; the island was governed by a bey, who, after the capture of Lepanto, in 1499, depended on the pasha of that place; and Ottoman families immigrated to take the place of those unhappy Leucadians, whom Ahmed Pasha had sold as slaves for no more than ten soldi apiece.

Leonardo III and his family had meanwhile met with a friendly reception from King Ferdinand I of Naples, who bestowed on him an annuity of 500 florins and the lands of Briatico and Calimera in Calabria; in 1480 he arrived with his son and his brothers in Rome to beg an annuity from Sixtus IV, who gave him 1000 gold pieces and promised him 2000 a year—an event still commemorated by one of the paintings in the Santo Spirito Hospital. After a short stay in Rome, he returned to Naples and proceeded to plan the recapture of his dominions. The Tocchi were an enter­prising family, not likely to abandon the idea of reigning in Greece at the first rebuff. The Roman diarist Volaterranus tells us that he once heard a bastard son of Leonardo, a daring young fellow of two-and-twenty, say: “ Though we have lost our rings, we have still got our fingers entire,” and this youth is mentioned as being at Zante in 1481. In the same year his father Leonardo and a Neapolitan fleet in vain summoned the Turkish subassi of Cephalonia and Zante to surrender;¹ but Leonardo’s brother Antonio and a band of Catalan mercenaries about the same time easily recovered the two islands—for the garrison of the former was weak, and that of the latter had fled in alarm at his approach. But Antonio’s success aroused the jealousy of Venice, which had no desire to see the islands in the possession of the King of Naples or his vassals. The governor of Modon in 1482 dislodged Antonio and his Catalans from Zante, but he managed to retain Cephalonia till the following year. His exactions, however, irritated the natives; his connivance with corsairs, who made the island their rendezvous, alarmed the Venetians; and, in 1483, after a futile attempt to buy him out, the republic, aided by many of the islanders, pre­pared to attack him. Thereupon, the garrison of the castle slew him, and opened their gates to the Venetian commander, who then without opposition made himself master of the whole island and appointed its first Venetian governor. But, while Leonardo III asked for the restitution of the two islands from the sultan, the latter demanded them for himself. Venice in vain strove to retain Cephalonia, which in 1485 she had to cede to Bajazet II, till it finally passed into her hands in 1500. But she succeeded in keeping Zante, on condition of paying an annual tribute of 500 ducats, and the “flower of the Levant” thenceforth remained Venetian down to the fall of the republic. The Tocchi made no further efforts to recover their island domain, for the kings of Naples were now threatened by France, and had no wish to irritate the sultan into a second attack upon Otranto. Leonardo III, after going as Neapolitan ambassador to Spain, where he was welcomed with royal honours, received the Apulian town of Monopoli, the home of the first palatine count of Cephalonia, from Charles VIII of France in 1495, when the latter invaded Naples, and perished beneath the ruins of his house in Rome, under the pontificate of Alexander VI. His eldest son, Carlo, whom Ferdinand I had promised to treat as his own child, and who received both Neapolitan and papal pensions, after fighting in the armies of the Emperor Maximilian I, died at his house in the Via S. Marco, in Rome, under Leo X Leonardo’s two sons by his second marriage naturally received favours from the Spanish dynasty, alike at Naples and in Spain itself. One of them, Ferdinand, or Don Ferrante, obtained the Lombard castle of Refrancore from Maximilian I, acted as Spanish ambassador to the court of Henry VII of England in 1506 in the affair of the Duke of Suffolk, and tried to keep the peace between Francois I and the Emperor Charles V in 1535, an event commemorated on his tomb in Madrid. Carlo’s descendants claimed to be treated as princes of the blood, on the ground that they represented both the Byzantine and Servian dynasties. They continued to style themselves Despots of Arta until, in the seventeenth century, they substituted for this title that of Prince of Achaia, perhaps on the ground that Thomas Palaiologos, whose representatives they were by the female line, had married the heiress of the last Frankish Prince of Achaia. At Naples they built a palace in the present Corso Vittorio Emanuele, now known as the Palazzo Troise, but formerly called by the people the Palazzo del Santo Piede, from the foot of St Anna, which Leonardo III. had brought with him from Greece, and which was there preserved. The family has only recently become extinct, but a room of the palace still contains a collection of the portraits of the former palatine counts of Cephalonia, while the family titles and the sacred foot have passed to Carlo Capece Galeotta, Duke of Regina, the head of the Neapolitan Legitimists.² But it has never been suggested that the Albanian question should be solved by the restoration of this estimable nobleman to the seat once occupied by the family at Joannina.

In their islands the Tocchi have left but few memorials behind them. Their arms, three blue waves on a silver shield, surmounted by a head of Pegasus, can no longer be seen on the castle walls and on the bells of the Panagia Anaphonetria church at Zante,³ while one coin alone still commemorates their sovereignty in the Ionian Sea.

The twenty years’ peace between Venice and the Turks, which followed the conclusion of this war, was by no means a period of repose for the Greeks. Scarcely had the late war ended than a national insurrection broke out in Maina under the auspices of a guerilla leader, Korkodeilos Kladas, the prototype of the chieftains who played so great a part in the War of Independence more than three centuries later. Kladas had been one of the last of the Peloponnesian warriors to submit to Mohammed II at the time of the Conquest, and the conqueror had thought it politic to bestow upon him the rich plain of Helos, near Sparta, as a military fief. Helos, according to one theory, had in old times given to the Helots their name; but Kladas had more of the Spartan than of the Helot in his composition. The Venetians, recognising his abilities during the war, had appointed him captain of the Greeks in their service, the so-called stradiotil But the Venetian politicians soon found, as many governments have discovered since, that a dashing leader of irregulars, however useful in time of war, is apt to be an embarrassment in time of peace. Kladas did not acquiesce in the cession of the region known as “the arm of Maina” (Brazzo di Maina) to the Turks. He escaped from Coron to Maina and raised the standard of revolt, round which several thousand outlaws and irregulars speedily gathered. The Venetian authorities, afraid lest Mohammed should suspect them of having instigated the movement, at once arrested the family of Kladas, and bade the Mainates hand over the rebel chief to the Turkish governor of the Morea. In order to secure the performance of this command, they put a heavy price upon the head of their former captain. But the Mainates showed no desire to sell their leader, who signally routed a Turkish force which was despatched against him. Dis­sensions, however, broke out between him and another insurgent captain of stradioti, Theodore Boua, and a fresh Turkish army succeeded in penetrating into parts of Maina which no Mussulman foot had as yet ever trodden. But Kladas, though at bay, was not taken. Some Neapolitan galleys chanced to be lying off the coast, and the outlawed chieftain, after a last gallant and successful attack upon the Turks, escaped on board and sailed to Naples, where he received a warm welcome from the king, who was anxiously expecting the descent of the Turkish fleet upon the Adriatic coast of his kingdom. KladAs figures no more in the history of Greece; but we find him fighting by the side of Skanderbeg’s son for the Neapolitan cause in Epiros, and King Ferdinand I. thought so highly of his services that he granted him, and bade his son continue, a yearly allowance out of the treasury.

A fresh insurrection broke out in 1489; but a far more imposing movement now occupied the attention of Europe. Andrew Palaioldgos, the elder son of the last Despot of the Morea, and nephew of the last Emperor of Constantinople, after endeavouring to persuade the Neapolitan court to aid him in the reconquest of his father’s province, found a readier hearing from the ambitious King of France, Charles VIII. In 1494, a solemn meeting took place between him and the king’s representative, Cardinal York, in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, at Rome, where the former transferred all his imperial rights and claims to the most Christian king, on consideration of an annual payment of 4300 gold ducats and a grant of lands yielding a further annual income of 5000 gold ducats, the cardinal also pledging King Charles to restore Palaioldgos to the Despotat of the Morea, for which the Despot should yield “ a fair, white steed ” on St Louis’ Day to the king, in token of homage. In the same year Charles VIII. set out on his famous expedition to Naples, preceded by a grandiose proclamation, announcing his intentions against the Turks, and heralded by the verses of a courtly poet who foretold that he would “pass beyond the sea, then enter Greece, and by his prowess be acclaimed King of the Greeks.” The news of his plans spread across the Adriatic, and Thessaly and Epiros awaited the advent of the conqueror of Naples. The Turks quitted the coasts in alarm, and the sultan prepared to retire bag and baggage into Asia.^{1 2} In Monemvasia a plot was organised with the connivance of Andrew Palaioldgos, whose name was still popular there, for delivering that strong Venetian fortress to his French ally.³ But the triumphs of the French king had excited the jealousy of Europe ; Venice arrested one of his principal agents, and forbade all ships to sail from the Venetian ports for Greece; and Charles retreated to France, leaving the unhappy Greeks to pay the penalty of their credulity with their lives. Such has been the usual result of foreign intervention in the affairs of Greece. Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi.

These recent services of Venice to the sultan did not for long retard his designs upon her possessions in the Levant. Excited by her Italian enemies, of whom Lodovico il Moro of Milan was the worst, he began a fresh Turco-Venetian war in 1499. Lepanto, her last scrap of territory in continental Greece, was the objective of both his land and his sea forces. The population of the Venetian colony on the Corinthian Gulf had considerably increased, owing to the immigration of people from Zante, when the Turks had taken that island; and, though many had doubtless returned, now that “the flower of the Levant” was in the hands of Venice, there were nearly 7000 persons in the town shortly before it fell. The Lepantines had, however, received little attention from the Home Government, though their envoys occasionally journeyed with petitions to the metropolis. For thirty years no Venetian commissioner had been sent to hold an enquiry into the administration of this outlandish place ; and when, at the eleventh hour, in the very year of its capture, one of those officials at last arrived, he found that the poor had been much oppressed by the nobles and citizens, who formed a class apart from the people, and had established a council of thirty for the management of public affairs. The colony, as delimitated after the last war, contained, besides Lepanto itself, four other castles, all in bad repair, and so carelessly guarded that the garrison of one of them was represented by one old woman ! Something had, however, been done for the fortifications of the town. The late rector had died of his exertions on the defences, and Sanudo has preserved a contemporary plan of the place, with its triple ring of walls and the castle at the summit, which gave it then, as now, the appearance of the papal tiara. Such was the condition of the city, which a Venetian historian has called “the strongest bulwark of the Christian peoples”.

The fate of Lepanto was decided, however, not by land, but by sea. The Venetian fleet, which should have pre­vented the Turkish admiral from entering the Gulf of Corinth, was commanded by Antonio Grimani, a man who owed his position to his wealth and his connections rather than to his skill as a seaman. He now repeated the timorous tactics which, twenty-nine years before, had cost the republic Negroponte. He allowed the Turkish fleet to creep up the west coast of the Morea beneath the walls of the Venetian castle of Navarino, or Zonchio, as the Venetians still called it. When the Turkish admiral moved thence to the islet of Prodano, a battle became inevitable. But in this conflict, which has taken its name from Zonchio, the Venetian commander, blinded by jealousy of his much abler colleague, Loredano, took the part of a spectator. In vain Loredano and Alban d’Armer, another Venetian captain, boarded the biggest of the Turkish vessels. The intrepid Turk set fire to his ship ; the flames spread to theirs also ; all three perished, and the island of Sapienza long preserved the name of Borrak Reis, the author of this heroic suicide. According to a less pro­bable story, Armer escaped the fire, only to be sawn asunder by the Turks. At that time the French were the allies of Venice; but not even the arrival of a French fleet could stir the dilatory Venetian admiral into activity. After three futile engagements, the Turkish galleys entered the Gulf of Corinth, and the fate of Lepanto was sealed. The garrison had already repelled seven attacks, and when the vessels were first sighted, the bells were rung in a joyful peal, for they thought that it was Grimani, coming to their relief. The fatal truth turned their rejoicing to despair; next day, the Albanians in the town sent seven envoys to treat with the Turks. These emissaries returned, clad in cloth of gold, and laden with promises of fiscal exemption for ten years, and with the guarantee that the lives and property of all the inhabitants should be spared. Thereupon the city surrendered, and on the next day, 29th August, the castle hauled down the lion-banner, which for ninety-two years had floated over Lepanto. The Turkish soldiers were forbidden to sack the town; a careful inventory was made of everything that it contained; and the patriotic Archbishop Saracco, who had stayed to comfort the besieged, was allowed to go free and tell the sad tale at Venice. Great was the indignation of the Venetians when the news arrived. Public opinion at once recognised that Grimani, and not Moro, the governor of Lepanto, was responsible for its loss. Street­boys went about singing doggerel verses against “Antonio Grimani, the ruin of the Christians”; the Government ordered his arrest; his enemies demanded his head. Mean­while, the wretched man, after a feeble attempt to take Cephalonia, had retired to Corfu, whence he was brought as a prisoner to Venice and put upon his trial. Family influence was used to the utmost to procure his acquittal; the proceedings were protracted until public indignation had somewhat cooled; and in the end his punishment was banishment to the island of Cherso in the Quarnaro. Twenty-one years later the man who had lost Lepanto became Doge of Venice. A smaller culprit, the commander of the castle, found to have taken a bribe, was hanged between the red columns of the Doge’s Palace—a striking example of Juvenal’s saying, that one scoundrel obtains the gallows, another the diadem.

The sultan now held the key of the Corinthian Gulf, and he at once gave orders to secure the entrance by the erection of two forts on either shore, at Rhion and Antirrhion, where little more than a mile of sea, the so-called “little Dardanelles,” separates Roumeli from the Morea. In three months’ time these forts were finished, and, though damaged by the fortunes of war, have ever since remained—a picturesque memorial of Bajazet II. But he was not satisfied with this conquest; when Venice sued for peace, he demanded nothing less than the cession of Nauplia and her two Messenian colonies; and when she refused, he resolved to take them by force. In the following year, 1500, he entered the Morea at the head of a large army, and ordered an attack upon Nauplia. Though Palamidi was still un­fortified, the place was defended by four castles, the two old “fortresses of the Franks and the Greeks,” as they were still called, the Venetian Torrione, and the Castel dello Scoglio, on the islet of St Theodore, the modern Bourtzi; the popula­tion of the colony had increased since the Turkish Conquest of the Morea, for seven years’ residence conferred local citizenship; and the stradioti, if at times a source of anxiety to the governor and a cause of friction with the Turks of Argos, were first-class fighting men. Accordingly, the Turkish cavalry were defeated, nor was an attack on the strong castle of Navarino more successful. Bajazet therefore decided to concentrate his efforts on Modon, the Port Said of Frankish Greece, the important half-way house between Venice and the Holy Land, at which every traveller stopped on his way to the East. A pilgrim who visited it in 1484 was struck by its thick walls, its deep ditches, and its strong towers ; ten years later it was being further fortified. The cathedral of St John, though a mean structure, contained the venerated remains of St Leo, and the head of St Athanasius; the “German House” of the Teutonic Knights is mentioned by every visitor. The Venetian Government found, indeed, that the budget of the colony always showed a deficit; but Modon was none the less a flourishing place, where a number of Jewish silk-workers found employment. It possessed a fine artificial harbour, and an enthusiastic traveller of this period exclaims that you can find vessels there “for every part of the world, for Modon is, as it were, half way to every land and sea”. It boasted a busy market in the suburb, where a colony of gypsies had settled, and where the Turks of the country made their fortunes by selling pigs to the Giaours, whom it was worth their while, therefore, not to harass. No less than 5000 of these animals were exported to Venice, and much of the wine which passed for Malmsey in the West really came from Crete or Modon —for the Turks who now owned the vineyards round Monemvasia had ceased to plant vines. “The mere thought of the muscat of Modon delights me”, writes worthy Father Faber, while as for oranges, they were dirt cheap. Such was the condition of the ancient Venetian colony on the eve of its capture.

Cabriel, the governor, had made preparations for the Turkish siege. Immediately after the fall of Lepanto, he had written home for supplies, and the republic had at once ordered the despatch of men, munitions, and money for the defence of a place which was so very dear to her heart. Many small houses outside the town were burned, so as not to give cover to the enemy, and a dam was built across the mouth of the harbour, so that only a single ship could enter at a time. Most of the women were sent to Crete, and the garrison of 7000 men was in excellent spirits. For a month Bajazet in vain besieged the town by land and sea, while 500 cannon played upon its walls. The sultan was on the point of abandoning the siege, when an unfortunate act on the part of the garrison delivered the place into his hands. Four Venetian and Corfiote galleys suddenly appeared with supplies at the mouth of the harbour; the delighted inhabitants rushed down to the beach to greet their deliverers; the walls were temporarily deserted; and the janissaries seized this opportunity of entering at the tower of the governor’s palace, where their continuous cannonade had destroyed the fortifications. The people rushed back to the defence of the town, but it was too late: in despair, they set fire to their own homes, and more than half the city was laid in ashes. The sultan showed no mercy to those who had so bravely withstood his armies for a month; the Catholic bishop was slain as he was addressing his flock; all the males of twelve years and upwards were beheaded; but the governor was spared to serve as a decoy-duck elsewhere. The rest of the women and children fled in panic to the Turkish fleet, and were sold as slaves to every quarter of the Mussulman world. Thus, on Sunday, 9th August 1500, Modon fell, after having belonged to Venice for nearly 300 years. Delighted with his prize, Bajazet promoted the janissary who had first mounted the walls to be a sandjak, or provincial governor, and on the first Friday after the capture, when the fire was at last spent, rode to the desecrated cathedral, there to offer up his thanksgivings to the God of battles, to whom, as he confessed when he gazed at the deep moat, he owed the conquest of this strong city. No time was lost in repairing the walls, and every village in the Morea was ordered to send five families to repopulate Modon.

The fall of Modon brought with it the loss of Navarino and Coron. Contarini, the commander of Navarino, as soon as he was convinced that Modon had really been taken, sur­rendered that strong fortress—an act of cowardice which cost him his head. The punishment was not undeserved, for the place had provisions for three years, and 3000 men to defend it. The authorities of Coron wished to hold out; but they were overruled by the terrified inhabitants, who were promised favourable conditions if they yielded, and death if they resisted. Their lives were indeed spared, but they were driven into exile, and the revenues of both Coron and Modon were thenceforth dedicated to Mecca. At Coron, too, the sultan prayed in what had so long been the Catholic church to Allah, and then set out to besiege Nauplia, taking with him the governor of Modon as a proof that that colony had succumbed. Cabriel, however, escaped, and another Venetian from Coron, who had held office at Nauplia, fled on horseback into that city and urged the citizens, whom he had been sent to convince of the folly of resistance, to resist to the last. A brave messenger from Monemvasia, at the risk of impalement, which had befallen two of his com­rades, stripped off his clothes and swam across the harbour with letters announcing the speedy arrival of the Venetian fleet. The mettle of the garrison and the strength of the forti­fications caused Bajazet to desist from the difficult enterprise and retire, content with the capture of Vatika, to Adrianople.

The Venetian colony in the Argolid was saved, but great was the grief of the metropolis when the news of Modon’s loss arrived. The Council of Ten burst into tears when the sad tidings were announced to them, and the whole city was overcome with sorrow. Nor was this remarkable; for Modon, as the republic informed the Princes of Europe, had been “the receptacle and special nest of all our galleys, ships, and vessels on their way to the Levant.” Together with Coron, it had been the earliest acquisition of the republic on the mainland of Greece, and the Venetian archives contain a whole literature concerning the administration of these two Messenian colonies. The dependent castle of Navarino was, indeed, almost immedi­ately recaptured by a clever ruse, but retaken by Kemal Reis in the following year; and both Modon and Coron, thirty years later, succumbed for an instant to Christian fleets. But the flag of the Evangelist never waved again from their towers till the day when Morosini, imitating Bajazet II., went in state to attend a thanksgiving service in the consecrated mosque of Modon. Zante took its place as a port of call, while the survivors found a home in the newly-won Venetian island of Cephalonia.

The republic had several times attempted to recover that island, which she had been forced to surrender in 1485. Thanks to the efforts of Pope Alexander VI., King Ferdinand of Spain was induced to send his famous captain, Gonzalo de Cordoba, to her aid. The Spanish and Venetian fleets, the latter under Pesaro, were designed for the recovery of Modon ; but, as timber was required for the necessary siege engines, they sailed to Cephalonia, an island now singularly barren but then covered with forests, which have given its name to the Black Mountain. To provide useful employment for the soldiers while the timber was being cut, the two commanders resolved to attack the fortress of St George, which had been the favourite residence of the Tocchi, and was still the capital of the island. The castle stands upon a steep and high mountain, and was defended by 300 men. But the besiegers erected a rampart high enough to enable them to command the position ; a friendly Greek kept them supplied with provisions, and on 24th December 1500 the capital of Cephalonia fell. An inscription was immured over the main entrance to commemorate an event which placed the island for well-nigh three centuries under Venetian rule, and the loyal Cephalonian and his descendants were rewarded with perpetual exemption from all dues.

Another of the Ionian islands, that of Sta. Mavra, now passed, but only temporarily, into the possession of the republic. The Spanish captain had sailed back to Sicily after the capture of Cephalonia, and Pesaro had contented himself for the moment with burning the Turkish arsenal at Preveza; but in the following summer, aided by a papal fleet under the command of his namesake, the Bishop of Paphos, he attacked the sole Ionian island which was still Turkish. Sta. Mavra had recently received a considerable number of Jewish refugees from Spain, who were always welcomed by the Turks,² and it was a lair of corsairs who preyed on the shipping of the Venetian islands. Leonardo Tocco had strengthened the old fortifications, which were defended by a considerable Turkish garrison. But the papal commander occupied the shallows which separated the town from the mainland, and the Venetian admiral bombarded the castle with such vigour that, after six days, the Turks con­sidered the desirability of surrendering. While they were deliberating, the besiegers entered, and thus, on 30th August 1502, Sta. Mavra fell. At first sight it seemed to be a valuable prize; a large sum of money belonging to the sultan was found in the treasury, a number of captive Mussulmans became slaves, and strategically it was “a beam in the Turk’s eye”, “the key of Corfu, Cephalonia, and Zante”. But its loss so infuriated Bajazet II that he refused to make the peace which Venice was anxious to obtain, unless it were restored to him, and a party in the island was intriguing with the Turks, with whom the natives had intermarried. The republic reluctantly consented to sur­render a place which she had begun to fortify, and a year and a day after its capture the first Venetian governor handed over Sta. Mavra to the Turks. Nearly two centuries were to elapse before the lion-banner again flew from the old castle of the palatine counts.

The results of the war had been disastrous to Venice; the tomb of her victorious admiral, in the church of the Frari still magniloquently records his Greek triumphs, and portrays the two captured Ionian castles; but her sole gain was Cephalonia; and the peace of 1502-3 left her nothing but Nauplia and Monem vasia, with their respective appurten­ances, in the Morea. She failed to retain Maina, which the son of Klad&s had won for her; and against the sack of Megara by the men of Nauplia she had to set the temporary capture of the castle of Aegina by the redoubtable Kemal Reis and the carrying off of 2000 TEginetans—a foretaste of what that fair island was to suffer a generation later.

For more than thirty years Greece ceased to be the battlefield between Venice' and the sultans, for both parties were occupied elsewhere ; the treaty of 1502-3 was renewed in 1513 and 1521, and the Venetian colonies were thus able to enjoy a long period of repose before their final catastrophe. From the petitions of those communities and the reports of their governors we are able to form a clear idea of their condition during this last generation of Venetian rule. Peace did not bring them plenty, for both Nauplia and Monemvasia bitterly complained that the restriction of their respective territories after the last war had deprived them of the lands which they had been wont to sow. All their supplies of corn had now to be imported from the Turkish possessions, and it was thus in the power of the Turks to starve them out by simply closing the frontier, while corsairs rendered dangerous all traffic by sea, and many a fisherman of Nauplia was carried off and put up for ransom at the old Frankish castle of Damalfi, now included within the Turkish boundary. The total population of the town of Nauplia was nearly 10,000, while the whole colony, which comprised the castles of Thermisi and Kastri, contained 13,299 souls. In 1519, its government was reformed; the system of having two rectors was found to lead to frequent quarrels; and the republic thenceforth sent out a single official styled “bailie and captain”, assisted by two councillors, who performed the duties of camerlengo by turns. The bailie’s authority extended over the rector of Aegina, whereas Kastri had been granted to two families, the Palaiologoi and the Alberti, whose administration was the cause of much discontent. Early in the sixteenth century a democratic wave passed over the colony. Society at Nauplia was divided into three classes —nobles, citizens, and plebeians ; and it had been the ancient usage that the nobles alone should hold the much-coveted local offices, such as that of judge of the inferior court and inspector of weights and measures. The populace now demanded its share of these good things, and the Home Government ordered that one at least of the three inspectors should be a man of the people. The democracy managed, too, to make its influence felt on the Municipal Council of Thirty, which met with closed doors, to the no slight scandal of the governor, who complained to Venice of such irregular proceedings. In order to spare the pockets of the community, it was ordered that appeals from his decision should lie to Crete, instead of Venice. Economically, the colony paid its way, though for twenty years the inhabitants were granted exemption from local dues as the reward of their fortitude in the late war; an octroi duty on all foreign animals, a tax on donkeys, and a duty on the salt-pans of Thermisi, were the chief imposts; but a serious drain on the budget was the bakshish paid to the Turkish governor of the Morea and to the voivode who was stationed at the frontier.³ The fortifica­tions, too, were allowed to fall into disrepair, and were inadequately guarded. The low sea-wall had never been completed; the hill of Palamidi was still unenclosed; the “castle of the Greeks” on Itsh Kaleh was unguarded and almost in ruins; and it was difficult to get men to garrison the island fortress where the executioner now resides. The peasant-soldiers of Nauplia used sometimes to leave the “castle of the Franks” with only half a dozen men in it, while they went out to earn their living, for they were badly paid; and racial jealousies divided the stradioti, Greeks refusing to serve under Albanians, and Albanians under any chief who was not of their own clan. The fact that both races had their own “chief priest,” or protopapas, would not tend towards greater union, while the presence of a Catholic bishop—for Nauplia now figured as an episcopal see—must have increased the causes of discord. Worst of all, the Turks were always in and out of the town, and knew perfectly well all the weak points of a strategic position, which a high Venetian officer had declared to be “most important not only to Venice but to all Christendom.”

Aegina had always been exposed to the raids of corsairs, and was cursed with oppressive governors during these last thirty years of Venetian rule. The island was remote and lonely; Venetian nobles were as little anxious to go there as are modern Italian officials to go to Sardinia; and we may thus explain the high proportion of bad rulers at this period of its history. Three rectors of zEgina were severely punished for their acts of injustice, and we have a graphic account of the reception given by the suffering zEginetans to the captain of Nauplia, who came to hold an enquiry into the administra­tion of one of these delinquents. We are told how all the people came out on to the square of Palaiochora with loud shouts of “Justice! Justice! Marco! Marco!”; how they had given a sack full of documents, setting forth their privileges, to the rector, and how he had returned the precious papers all mice-eaten and in pieces; how he had spurned their ancient right to elect an islander to keep one key of the money-chest; and how they threatened to leave the island in a body with the commissioner, unless he avenged their wrongs. A Latin inscription over the door of the Latin church of St George at Palaiochora, the arms of the visiting councillor of Nauplia, and a jug below, still record the last of these enquiries, in 1533. The inscription has a pathetic interest, for it is the last memorial of mediaeval Aegina. Four years later the mountain capital was a smoking mass of houses and ruined churches.

Monemvasia had suffered a long blockade during the last war; she had lost her outlying castles of Rampano and Vatika, her famous vineyards and her cornfields were in Turkish hands. But she remained what she had been for centuries, an impregnable fortress, the Gibraltar of Greece. The Venetians renewed the system, which had prevailed under the Despots of the Morea, of devoting one of the local imposts to the repair of the walls; the Venetian podesta. seems to have been a popular official; and the republic had wisely confirmed the special privileges granted by the Byzantine emperors to the church and community of this favoured city. Both a Greek metropolitan and a Latin archbishop continued to take their titles from Monemvasia, and the most famous of these prelates was the eminent scholar, Marcus Mousohros. In 1524, however, despite the thunders of the cecumenical patriarch, the Greek and the Italian arranged between them­selves that the former should retain the see of Monemvasia and that the latter should take a Cretan diocese.² The connection between the great island and this rocky peninsula was now close. The Greek priests of Crete, who had formerly gone to Modon or Coron for consecration, after the loss of those colonies came to Monemvasia; the Cretan exchequer contributed to the expenses of the latter, and judicial appeals from the podestd. of Malmsey lay to the colonial authorities at Candia, instead of being remitted to Venice; for, as a Monemvasiote deputation once plaintively said, the expenses of the long journey had been defrayed by pawning the chalices of the churches. Even now Monemvasia is remote from the world; in those Venetian days she was seldom visited, not only because of her situation, but because of the fear which ships’ captains had of her inhabitants.¹

The long peace was interrupted in 1531 by a sudden descent upon Modon by the Knights of St John. Driven from Rhodes by the Turks eight years earlier, the Knights had not abandoned the idea of settling in the Levant, and the Venetian island of Cephalonia, and the Turkish fortress of Modon were alternately suggested as suitable places of abode. Even when Malta had been granted to them by the Emperor Charles V., they continued to plan the capture of the former Venetian station in Messenia, which in their hands would have become an outpost of Christendom. Two Greeks, who had formerly been servants of the Order in Rhodes, but who now held posts at the harbour of Modon, entered into the plot; a flotilla was equipped under the command of Fra Bernardo Salviati, prior of Rome and nephew of Pope Clement VII.; and two schooners were laden with planks in such a manner as to conceal a number of armed men below. One of these innocent-looking vessels was entrusted to Ydnni Skanddles, a Greek from Zante and son of the friendly customs’ official at Modon; and its Greek crew was disguised as janissaries. While the rest of the squadron remained behind the island of Sapienza, the schooners went on in advance to Modon. The two confederates kept their word ; the harmless merchants and the false janissaries were allowed to land, and the latter spent the night in the tower on the mole, of which Skanddles’s father was governor, pledging the garrison in the excellent local vintage. To secure or slay the sleepy and drunken Mussulmans was easy; the tower was captured; the soldiers landed from the two schooners; and the town was soon entirely in their possession, except the former palace of the Venetian governor above the land gate, whither the rest of the garrison had hastened. The Knights were, however, slow in arriving from Sapienza to complete the capture ; so that, before their cannon had made the least impression on the palace, a large Turkish force was reported to be approaching. Accordingly, after sacking the place, they sailed away with 1600 captives. Their adventure, reported to the pope, it is interesting to note, by one of the Acciajuoli, was welcomed in Rome, but caused much annoyance to Venice, anxious not to provoke the anger of the sultan, who might hold her responsible for the acts of her Ionian subjects. Accordingly, as a measure of precaution, Skanddles was banished from Zante.

In the following year the Greek coasts were exposed to a much more serious visitation. War broke out between Charles V and the sultan, and the former, more anxious to damage the Turks than to benefit the Greeks, the exploits of whose ancestors left him cold, despatched the famous Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, to the Levant. Doria gained a series of rapid successes. The allied imperial, papal, and Maltese squadron, with the aid of the Greek inhabitants, speedily captured Coron; a Te Deum of triumph was sung in the reconsecrated cathedral, and at the moment of the elevation of the Host the standards of the three confederates were run up on the walls. Mendoza, a Spaniard and a Knight of Malta, was left behind with a garrison of his countrymen, Acciajuoli was appointed civil governor, and Doria sailed away to Patras, whose garrison capitulated and whose inhabitants he pillaged. He completed his cruise by an attack on the two castles which Bajazet II. had built on either side of the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth; the castle of the Morea surrendered; but the garrison of the other fired the powder-magazine and perished beneath the ruins of the fortress.

Nothing but harm accrued to the Greeks from Doria’s expedition, and they had, indeed, good reason to pray for deliverance from their deliverers. Deluded by his promises and elated at his victories, they rose and slaughtered their Turkish masters, who retaliated upon them as soon as the Genoese admiral had set sail. Charles V soon realised that he could not permanently keep an isolated station in Messenia, far from his own dominions and exposed to continual Turkish attacks. So, after once relieving the beleaguered garrison, he endeavoured to transfer to Venice or to the Knights of Malta the responsibility of its defence, The former, with characteristic prudence, declined to accept her former colony, just as she had refused the offer of the castles formerly dependent upon Monemvasia. The latter knew that they could never maintain it without Venetian aid, and they knew, too, that the selfish republic would never tolerate the intrusion of another Christian power in the Morea, and had refused to co-operate in the capture or support of Coron. Meanwhile, the Turks were keeping up a con­tinuous blockade, and hunger and plague were reducing the strength of the garrison. At last, in 1534, the emperor resolved to abandon it and remove its inhabitants to his own dominions. This compulsory emigration of the people, mostly Albanians—for the Greeks had been transferred to Cephalonia thirty years before—recalls the cession of Parga by Great Britain three centuries later. They sought refuge in the churches, and implored the Divine Providence to avert from them the miseries of exile ; but they found that they must either submit to the Turk or obey the commands of the emperor. Many died of plague on the voyage to Sicily, while the survivors were attacked by the terrified population of Messina on landing, and driven into the lazzaretto like pariahs. So wretched was their condition, that the emperor granted to those of them who took up their abode in Naples a yearly allowance and valuable fiscal exemptions, as well as the possession of the Greek church of SS. Peter and Paul, which had been founded at Naples by one of the Palaiologoi more than twenty years earlier. In return, they entered his service as stradioti, and displayed in other lands a valour which might, under better auspices, have saved their beloved home from the Turk. Others settled in Calabria and the Basilicata, others again in Sicily, and an Albanian monk at the Greek monastery of Grotta Ferrata, near Rome, told the author that most of the Albanians from his part of Sicily were the descendants of these exiles from Coron. One Greek, who had specially distinguished himself in the siege and defence of the place, received from the emperor the barren honour of knighthood, and a grant of the villages of Leondari and St George of Skortd, “whensoever it should please God to drive out the Turks.”

In 1537 Suleyman the Magnificent declared war upon Venice, and the Turkish fleet, under Khaireddin Barbarossa, after a vain attempt to take Corfu, and after ravaging the Ionian islands, in October fell upon Aigina, then well inhabited. No considerations of sentiment stayed the hands of the red- bearded pirate. His men scaled the high rock in the interior of the island, which resembles the Akropolis of Athens, and on which, from fear of corsairs, the mediaeval capital was built. On the fourth day, Palaiochora fell; the town was destroyed ; but the Latin church, which we saw mentioned four years earlier, was spared; the grown-up men were butchered, and the governor with one of the Caopena, who had come to the rescue of his ancestors’ island, and more than 6000 women and children were carried off as slaves. So thoroughly did the Turks accomplish their hideous work, that when Baron de Blancard touched at Aigina with a French fleet soon afterwards, he found not a single soul on the island.^{1 2} Few now set foot in the abandoned streets of this town of churches, where the scanty inhabitants of the scattered hamlets still worship, save when, once a year, the pious islanders assemble round the marvellous spring in the church of Our Lady to keep the festival in honour of the Virgin’s birth. From below, the mountain side seems covered with buildings, and the castle stands out from the flat summit of the rock, just as if the Venetian sentinels were still on the watch for pirates in the Saronic Gulf below. Remains of frescoes still cover the crumbling walls of the old Venetian chapel within the castle walls, where the last Venetian governor, warned that Barbarossa’s pennant had been sighted, flung himself down on his knees and prayed the preoccupied saints to save this outpost of the republic from the enemy. No site in Greece is more lovely, none more mediaeval. Palaiochora belongs to a world very different from ours; it tells us of what life—and death—must have been like in the last years of Venetian rule in the small Greek islands.

Meanwhile, the Turks, acting under orders from Kassim Pasha, were striving to capture the last two Venetian colonies in the Morea. The operations before Nauplia began on 14th September, and it was soon obvious that the Greek and Albanian stradioti intended to make a desperate defence. Two successful sorties as far as Argos adorned the walls of Nauplia with many a Turkish head, and even when Kassim himself arrived, his men made little impression on the stout hearts of the garrison. At the two outlying fortresses of Kastri and Thermisi he was more successful; the defenders of Kastri preferred slavery to being burned alive inside the castle, and the four Palaiologoi, whose fief it was, were beheaded at Argos. Upon this Thermisi surrendered; but neither of these disasters diminished the heroic courage of the men of Nauplia. Fresh supplies were thrown into the town, but the lack of water began to be severely felt—for the cisterns were running dry—and a party which sallied forth to fetch water from the wells near Mount Elias, was surprised by the Turks, and Vettore Busichio, the bold captain of the light Albanian horse, was mortally wounded. Kassim now occupied the hill of Palamidi, which the Venetians had neglected to fortify, and which commanded the town, and moved his headquarters from Argos to Tiryns, and thence to the church of St Friday, only a thousand paces from Nauplia. But, in spite of the heavy missiles discharged from the heights of Palamidi, where the convict prison now stands, by a big Turkish gun, which the besieged nicknamed “bone-breaker” with a humour worthy of Ladysmith, the place held out, and further reinforcements arrived. Kassim next dug trenches close up to the edge of the moat; but the men whom he placed there fell victims to a bold night attack. At last, when the siege had lasted fourteen months, he retired with the bulk of his army to Argos, leaving a small garrison on Palamidi, which was speedily captured by the Venetians and its newly-erected bastions destroyed. Desultory skir­mishes went on during the spring of 1539, but Nauplia, like Monemvasia, proved too strong for the Turks to take.¹

Venice was no longer alone in her struggle against the sultan, for Pope Paul III. had at last succeeded in forming a league between the Emperor Charles V., the republic, and himself. The fleet of the three allies assembled at Corfu, and sailed to Preveza, where Barbarossa had taken up his position. There, at the mouth of the Ambrakian Gulf, where, sixteen centuries before, the fate of the Roman world had been decided, the hostile navies met. Unfortunately, the command of the imperial vessels had been entrusted to Andrea Doria, who showed, as was natural in a Genoese, little enthusiasm in the cause of Venice. Owing to his timorous tactics, the victory rested with Barbarossa, and the rapprochement between Charles V and the French monarch broke up the league. Venice had no option but to make such terms with the sultan as she could obtain. Humiliating, indeed, was the peace of 1540; Venice ceded Nauplia and Monemvasia, her two last possessions in the Morea; and Admiral Mocenigo was sent to break as best he could to her loyal subjects the sad news that the republic for whom they had fought so well and had endured so many privations had abandoned their homes to the Turk. The Venetian envoy, if we may believe the speech which Paruta puts into his mouth, repeated to the weeping people the ancient adage, ubi bene, ibipatria, and pointed out to them that they would be better off in a new abode less exposed than their native cities had been to the Turkish peril. In November a Venetian fleet arrived in the beautiful bay of Nauplia and off the sacred rock of Monemvasia, to remove the soldiers, the artillery, and all the inhabitants who wished to live under Venetian rule. Then the banner of the Evangelist was lowered, the keys of the two last Venetian fortresses in the Morea were handed to Kassim Pasha, and the receipts for their transfer were sent to Venice.

The inhabitants of the two cities had been loyal to Venice, for not only had the stradioti fought like heroes, but no less heroic had been the conduct of the 7000 Nauplians who had died of hunger and enteric rather than surrender, and Venice was loyal to them. The first idea of transporting the Monemvasiotes to the rocky island of Cerigo was abandoned, in deference to the eloquent protests of the metropolitan, and lands were assigned to the exiles in the more fertile colonies of the republic. A commission of five nobles was appointed to consider the claims and provide for the settlement of the stradioti from Nauplia and Monemvasia, and this commission sat for several years; for the claimants were numerous, and not all genuine. Some, like the ancient Monemvasiote family of Daimonoyannes, former lords of Cerigo, received lands in Crete, where the last “chief priest” of Nauplia and some of the Athenian De’ Medici, who had so long been settled there, also found a home; one of the latter clan returned to the land of his ancestors, and was glad to accept a small post at Verona. The Caopena, whose father, captured at Aigina, perished in a Turkish dungeon, settled at Venice, where a century later the family became extinct. Others were removed to Corfu, where they formed an integral part of the Corfiote population, and where the name of the stradioti is still preserved in a locality of the island ; while others again were transplanted to Cephalonia, Cyprus, or Dalmatia. Not a few of them were soon, however, smitten with homesickness; they sold their new lands, and returned to be Turkish subjects at Nauplia and Monemvasia.

Thus fell the last Latin colonies in the Morea. For nearly a century and a half the Lion of St Mark did not own a single inch of soil on the mainland of Greece, where since the early years of the thirteenth century he had constantly retained a foothold. But the Venetian fortifications of Nauplia, with here and there a winged lion or a dated tablet, remained to remind the rayah of the Venetian days; and the pictures and churches of Monemvasia, the encircling walls, the quaint Italian chimneys, and the well-head up in the castle, which bears the date of 1514, the arms of the republic and of her last podestct, Antonio Garzoni, and the initials and escutcheon of Sebastiano Renier, who had also her representative, still speak to us of this first Venetian occupation.

With the disappearance of the Venetian flag from the mainland, the Greeks lost the refuge which they had been accustomed to find since the Turkish Conquest in the Venetian settlements. Most of their leaders had, like Michael Ralles, found a shelter beneath the banner of St Mark, and it was there that the klephts, who afterwards played so great a part in the liberation of Hellas, first organised their raids. That the Greeks at that period, whatever might have been the case in the eighteenth century, preferred Venetian to Turkish rule, seems obvious from the alacrity with which they flew to arms at the bidding of their Latin allies. Up to 1540 the republic was always at hand to suggest, if not to urge, the possibilities of a successful rising, and the Venetian settlements maintained the Western standard of culture in the midst of the general stagnation which fell upon Turkish Greece. At the same time, the flight of the winged lion from the Morea meant for that sorely-tried land a respite from the almost constant turmoils, to which it had been exposed since the removal of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s strong hand first plunged the peninsula into anarchy. Under the Turks there was at last a dull uniformity, which was not without the advantage that it consolidated the various elements of the nation.

CHAPTER XV

CORFU (1214-1485)