MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER XVII

THE DUCHY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO (1207-1463)

To complete the history of Frankish Greece it only remains to describe the most romantic and also the most durable of all the creations of the Fourth Crusade: the island duchy of the Archipelago. Italian rule over the classic home of lyric poetry which the noble verses of Byron have immortalised, estab­lished by the swords of a handful of aristocratic freebooters, not only survived by more than a century the Latin states of the mainland, but continued to exist in isolated fragments down to the seventeenth and even to the eighteenth century.

We saw in the second chapter how, in 1207, the Venetian Marco Sanudo and his comrades made themselves masters of the isles of Greece, and how the bold adventurer fixed his residence at Naxos. The Byzantine capital had been in the south, where the ruins of the castle of Apaliri still mark the site. The conqueror founded the present city. There, on the hill above the sea, where the arches and tortuous lanes of the upper town still recall the picturesque rock-villages of the Italian Riviera, he built a strong castle, flanked with twelve large towers, and a great square donjon in the middle, a fragment of which stands today, a monument, like the tower at Paros, of Italian rule in the Archipelago. There, too, he erected a Catholic cathedral, on which, in spite of its restoration in the seventeenth century, his arms may still be seen; while below, the remains of a massive mole tell of his efforts to shelter the port which the little island of Palati protects on the other side. It was he, too, according to one authority, who made boat-houses for a small fleet of galleys, so neces­sary to the lord of an insular realm.

Sanudo, though a Venetian citizen and descended, so flattering genealogists afterwards pretended, from the historian Livy, had no intention of acknowledging the suzerainty of the republic and of becoming a mere republican governor, although the deed of partition had assigned Andros and most of the other Cyclades to the Venetians. He did homage to the Latin Emperor Henry, the overlord of the Frankish states in the Levant, who invested him with his islands “on a freer tenure than any baron who was then in all the empire of Romania”, and erected them into a duchy, then known by its old Byzantine name of “the Dodekanesos” (or “the Twelve Islands”), but soon called the “duchy of Naxos”, or, “of the Archipelago” —the form into which the Latins corrupted the Greek term “Aigaion Pelagos”. Duke Marco I remained true to his sovereign; one account represents him as being at the emperor’s side when he died at Salonika. Towards his mother country, however, he was not so loyal. When, in 1212, the Cretans, under the leadership of the Hagiostephanitai, rose against Venice, Tiepolo, then Duke of Candia, summoned Marco Sanudo to his aid, stimulating his patriotism by the promise of 30 knights’ fees in the colony. According to another account, Sanudo had already been promised broad lands in Crete as the reward of his services at the time of the sale of the island to Venice. At any rate, he came with a large body of men, speedily stamped out the rebellion, and claimed his reward. When Tiepolo delayed to carry out his part of the bargain, the Duke of Naxos listened willingly to the treacherous suggestion of a Cretan archon, named Skordili, that he should seize the island with the assistance of the Greeks. The idea appealed to his ambition, and his soldiers, discontented at the scarcity of bread in the market, were glad of an excuse for war; the Greeks fraternised with them; the town of Candia was soon theirs; the Venetian duke, disguised as a woman, was let down from the wall, and escaped to the neighbouring castle of Temenos, which the Byzantine conqueror Nikephoros Phokas had founded 250 years before on the double hill which is so prominent a landmark to the mariner. Marco, leaving his relative Stefano in charge of the town, then set out with his army of Greeks and Italians to conquer the other forts of the island. But his career of conquest was checked by the arrival of Venetian reinforcements at the port of Fair Havens, whereupon Tiepolo sallied forth from his stronghold, occupied and fortified a commanding position at Upper Sivriti, the modern Amari, while Marco was compelled to hide in a cave, waiting for help from his island duchy. Then Tiepolo by a brilliant coup de main recovered Candia without bloodshed, and put the commander in chains. Though the castle of Belvedere in the south and all the district from Mylopotamos as far west as cape Spada was still his, Marco saw that further resistance was useless; but he made, as might have been expected from so clever a diplomatist, most favourable terms for himself. On condition that he surrendered the seven castles which he held, he was to receive 2500 hyperperi, to take from the land which was still his 3000 bushels of corn and 2000 of oats, while twenty Greek archons who had been compromised in the rebellion were allowed to leave the island with all their property. Sanudo promised never to set foot in Crete again, unless the Duke of Candia summoned him to his aid, and in 1213 he returned to Naxos. But the failure of this attempt to make himself “ King of Crete ” did not in the least damp his ardour. He fitted out eight galleys, descended upon the coast of Asia Minor, and captured Smyrna; but the fleet of Theodore Laskaris, the Emperor of Nice, nearly four times larger than his own, defeated and captured him. He was forced to restore his conquests, but his valour and beauty appealed so strongly to the emperor, that he not only liberated his prisoner, but bestowed upon him the hand of his sister.

Thus allied by marriage with an Orthodox sovereign, the first Duke of Naxos, who, as a Venetian, was not likely to be a bigot, naturally showed a wise spirit of tolerance for the religion of his Greek subjects. Provided that their Church was not molested, they had little objection to being governed by an Italian; so, when they saw that he had no intention of banishing their metropolitan —a position twice offered to the exiled Michael Akomindtos of Athens by the patriarch of Nice— or of taxing their monasteries, his rule became popular in the Borgo and adjacent “Neochorio”, or new town, where the Greeks clustered at the foot of the castle hill. Many Catholics, however, doubtless flocked to the Cyclades to make their fortunes in the delectable duchy which he had founded, and a Catholic archbishopric was therefore established for their welfare at Naxos, with four suffragans at Melos, Santorin, Tenos, and Suda, as Syra was called in the Middle Ages, while the bishop of Andros was placed, as we saw, beneath the see of Athens. Such was the beginning of the Latin Church in the Archipelago, which has proved the most durable of all the Frankish institutions in the Levant; for even today Catholics are numerous there and a Catholic archbishop still resides in the town of Naxos. About the year 1227 the creator of the new state closed his successful career, the career of a typical Venetian adventurer, brave, hard-headed, selfish, and unscrupulous; in short, just the sort of man to found a dynasty in an age when a weak empire had been dismembered and in a part of the world where cleverness counts for more than heroic simplicity of character.

His son and successor, Angelo, though the child of a Greek mother, rendered loyal service to the decaying Latin Empire, doing homage successively to Robert, John of Brienne, and Baldwin II, and distinguishing himself —it is said— by his vigour in the defence of Constantinople against the Greeks of Nice and their Bulgarian allies in 1236, when his large contingent of ships did great execution, and he led the vanguard with Geoffrey II of Achaia. This incident had a profound effect upon the external relations of the duchy; for, as we saw in a previous chapter, it was out of gratitude to the Prince of Achaia that the Emperor Baldwin II conferred upon the latter the suzerainty over the Archipelago. Angelo received from the emperor a leaden bull setting forth this new feudal bond, by which the dukes of Naxos became vassals and peers of the principality of Achaia, and which, though occasionally disputed by Venice, was still in force at the close of the fourteenth century. In virtue of this arrangement, Angelo and the other lords of the Cyclades were summoned by their suzerain, Prince William of Achaia, to assist him at the siege of Monemvasia in 1247, and to aid him in his ill-starred campaign, which ended with the battle of Pelagonia in 1259. Both Angelo and the Grand-Duke of Lemnos were invited by Venice to join in maintaining the crumbling fabric of the Latin Empire in 1260; and, in the following year, when the fugitive Emperor Baldwin II landed at Negroponte and proceeded to Thebes, the Duchess of Naxos, a French dame of high degree who had been married in his palace at Constantinople in happier days, met him with grand presents. The penniless emperor had nothing substantial to give her in return; but he knighted her son Marco, the future duke, who had studied in the best school of chivalry, the court of William of Achaia, and bestowed upon her husband the empty title of “King”^. By his assistance to the Latin Empire, Angelo had, however, incurred the wrath of Vatatzes, the Emperor of Nice, who had revenged himself by capturing from him the island of Amorgos and bestowing it upon Geremia Ghisi, chief of a Venetian family related to the Sanudi, which already held all or part of no less than eight islands, and was therefore second to the ducal dynasty alone. Sprung originally from Aquileia, the Ghisi were more loyal to Venice than their independent cousins, and every St Mark’s day the offering of a large wax-candle in the great church signified that they remained true sons of the republic. Angelo behaved towards the Venetians much as his father had done. When a fresh rebellion broke out against their rule in Crete in 1229, he obeyed the summons of the Duke of Candia, and built, at his request, the castle of Suda. But when the Cretans implored the aid of Vatdtzes, and a Nicene fleet of thirty-three sail arrived off the island, Angelo abandoned the Venetian cause and returned to his duchy, bribed, it was said, by the money of the Greek emperor. He ended his long reign in 1262 “beloved by his people,” if we may believe a late panegyrist, and “worthy,” according to the same authority, “of the Empire of the East.”

Nearly half a century had now elapsed since the founda­tion of the duchy, and the Latin rule seemed to be well- established. A Venetian document of this period informs us that all the islands possessed fortresses, of which the picturesque ruins of the castle of Andros may be taken as a specimen. Situated on a rock at the mouth of the harbour, and approached by a stone bridge of a single span, which has defied the tremendous storms of seven centuries, and by three steps, it bore over the entrance a statue of Mercury. The statue has disappeared; but the castle of green stone, the work of Marino Dandolo, its first Venetian lord, still remains, though the sea has eaten away its face till it is as jagged as the teeth of a saw, and a vaulted roof inside one of the blocks of masonry may have been the baronial chapel. Sometimes, as in the case of the tower at Paros, the petty lords of the islands built their residences out of the marble fragments of some classical monument, and thus destroyed what had hitherto escaped destruction. But though each island baron needed one or more castles for his own abode or for the protection of his subjects against corsairs, he did not always reside there himself. While the dukes habitually lived in their picturesque duchy, not a few of their vassals, who had property or official posts in Crete, Negroponte, or in some other Venetian colony, preferred the more brilliant and amusing society of those places to the solitary splendour of a grim baronial castle on some rock in the Aegean which the ancient Romans, whose descendants they boasted themselves to be, had regarded as a dismal exile for traitors rather than an agreeable pleasaunce. Thus, Marino Dandolo of Andros, one of the pleasantest and most fertile of the Cyclades, an island of streams and lemon­groves and ferns, usually governed it from his palace in Venice, and the Barozzi of Santorin spent less time in their castle of Skards than on their Cretan estates. Besides, as time went on, the baronies of the Archipelago became a school for the governors and diplomatists whom the republic of St Mark required in the Levant, and iit was thence that she often selected her bailies of Negroponte and her captains of Modon and Coron.

Already, in the mouths of Venetian colonists and sailors, the nomenclature of the Cyclades had been strangely distorted. Delos had become “Sdili”; Syra was “Lasudha”; Patmos is scarcely recognisable under “Sanctus Joannes de Palmasa”; “Serfento” and “Sifanto” were the corruptions of “Seriphos” and “Siphnos”; “Fermene” had taken the place of Thermia, or Kythnos. Already, too, in the above-mentioned Venetian document, the name “Arcipelago” is used for the Aegean —Egeopelagus, as it figures in the Latin titles of the later dukes.

The rule of the Latins over the Cyclades received, however, a severe shock during the reign of Marco II, the third duke. The Greek cause was now everywhere in the ascendant, for not only had the Latin Empire fallen, but the Byzantine double-eagle now waved over the south-east of the Morea, whence Tzdkones and half-castes flocked to man the navy of Michael VIII, whose admiral, Philanthropends, was despatched against the Aegean islands. The native population of the Cyclades was naturally excited by these successes of its race, and the island of Melos, the nearest to the great Greek stronghold of Monemvasia and situated on the main route between that place and Constantinople, was specially affected by the national movement. A Greek monk placed himself at the head of the insurgents, who seized the castle and drove out the Latins. But Marco II possessed all the vigour of his family. He assembled a fleet of sixteen galleys, and, with the aid of some French adventurers from Constantinople, carried the fortress of Melos in less than a couple of hours, but wisely pardoned the rebels, with the exception of the ringleaders. The monk, however, he thought it necessary to punish, as an example to the others. He therefore had him bound hand and foot, and then thrown into the sea. This combination of clemency and cruelty had the desired effect.But a far more dangerous antagonist now appeared in the Archipelago. We have already described the career of Licario —the Italian of Euboea, who was driven by the aristocratic pride of the Lombard lords into the service of the Greek emperor, and who inflicted such immense damage upon his own countrymen. We saw how he took Skopelos, an island supposed to be impregnable, from the Ghisi; but this was only one of his exploits in the Archipelago. The rest of the Northern Sporades—Skyros, Skiathos, and Chiliodromia —were now all recovered for the Byzantine Empire; and Lemnos, the fief of the Navigajosi, shared their fate. The island was strongly fortified, and the principal castle was held by Paolo Navigajoso, who still bore the proud title of Grand Duke, or Lord High Admiral, of the fallen Latin Empire, with a garrison of 700 men. So desperate was his resistance, that the Greek emperor offered him 60,000 gold hyperperi for his castle—an offer disdainfully refused by that brave and wealthy noble. Even after Paolo’s death, the Grand Duchess, a sister of Duke Marco II of Naxos, still held out; till, when the siege had lasted three years, she departed with all the corn in the granaries, the lead off the palace roof, and the clothing and money in the castle. Thenceforth Lemnos, like the Northern Sporades, remained in Greek hands till the fall of Constantinople. Ten other islands were at the same time lost for twenty years or more, and their Latin lords were expelled. The Ghisi were driven from Amorgos, Seriphos, and Keos; the Barozzi fled from Santorin; the Duke of Naxos was deprived of Ios, Siphnos, Sikinos, and Polykandros; the Quirini, who vaunted that they were of even nobler origin than the Sanudi, belonging to the same family as the Roman Emperor Galba, were ousted from Astypalaia; and the terrible corsair Giovanni de lo Cavo freed his native island of Anaphe from the Foscoli. Two dynasties alone—the Sanudi and their vassals the Ghisi, remained in the whole Archipelago; and both were thankful to be included by the Venetians in the treaties of peace which the republic concluded with the Byzantine Empire in 1277 and 1285, on condition that they harboured no corsairs. In her earlier treaty of 1265 the republic had abandoned “all the islands which had been under the suzerainty of the Latin Empire or of the principality of Achaia" to the tender mercies of Michael VIII.; she now attached more importance to their preservation, and did not forget that their rulers were of Venetian origin and might further Venetian aims against her great commercial rivals, the Genoese. The latter had obtained from the Greek emperor by the treaty of Nymphaion in 1261 the right to establish commercial factories at Lesbos and Chios —the commencement of the famous connection between Genoa and the rich mastic island.

The growing desire of Venice to acquire direct authority over the duchy was now shown by her attempt to claim the suzerainty over it —a claim repudiated strongly and successfully by Duke Marco II. An excuse for the Venetian pretensions was afforded by the affairs of Andros. On the death of Marino Dandolo, the first baron of that island, without direct heirs, Duke Angelo, in strict accordance with the feudal code of Romania, had left half of the barony to the widow and had invested Geremia Ghisi with the other half. But Ghisi was a powerful man without scruples —in fact, the greatest filibuster in all the Archipelago; he made himself master of the whole island, and hoisted his pennant over the castle. The widow, in her despair, sought the aid of the gallant Jacopo Quirini of Astypalaia, an influential Venetian in whom she found both a second husband and a warm advocate. Quirini appealed to Venice, which peremptorily ordered Ghisi to surrender the island to a plenipotentiary of the republic. But Ghisi, too, had friends at court; for his daughter was married to a son of the doge; so matters were delayed in the usual dilatory style of Italian justice, till at last both Ghisi and the Lady of Andros were both dead. Upon this, Marco II, who was now Duke of Naxos, assumed possession of the whole island, as no claimant had made his appearance. Two days, however, before the period of two years and two days allowed by the feudal code had expired, there landed at Naxos Niccold Quirini, son of the Lady of Andros by her second marriage, and demanded his mother’s share. The duke might have imitated Geoffrey I of Achaia, and have dodged the claimant among the bays of his islands for a couple of days, till the full term was expired. But he was sufficiently conscientious not to avail himself of this quibble, and expressed his readiness to abide by the decision of the feudal court of Achaia, of which state he was the vassal. This did not satisfy the claimant, who, like his father, appealed to Venice, hoping that she would support the cause of one who had been her representative in the Holy Land. After a further long delay, Marco II was at last cited in 12S2 to appear before the doge. To this summons the duke replied in a very able state paper, in which he pointed out by irrefragable historical evidence that Venice was not his suzerain, and had therefore no jurisdiction over him. It was true that the deed of partition, upon which the Venetians based their claim, had assigned Andros to the republic. But his grandfather had conquered it and the rest of the duchy at his own cost; he had been invested with his island domain by the Emperor Henry, and that sovereign’s successor, Baldwin II, had transferred the suzerainty over the duchy to the Prince of Achaia. In 1267, by the treaty of Viterbo, Baldwin II had ceded the suzerainty over that principality and all its dependencies, of which the duchy was one, to Charles of Anjou, and had expressly bestowed upon that monarch “all the islands belonging to the Latin Empire” except four outside the limits of the Cyclades. Accordingly, on the death of Prince William of Achaia in 1278, Marco II had done homage to King Charles, who was his legal suzerain, and had commanded three galleys in the fleet which that sovereign despatched to attack the Greek Empire. It was, therefore, to the feudal court of the latter, and not to Venice, that an appeal from the ducal court should be referred. At the same time, he gave Venice a significant hint not to cross the path of so mighty a sovereign as the King of Naples, then at the height of his power. The republic thereupon dropped the matter; Marco was wise enough to pacify Quirini, who enjoyed great influence at Venice —it was he who built the still existing Palazzo Quirini-Stampalia in that city— by a money payment; no more was heard of a case which had lasted over half a century; the Sanudi retained possession of Andros as long as their dynasty existed, and they added its name to the ducal title, styling themselves “Lords of the duchy of Naxos and Andros”, and residing at times in Marino Dandolo’s wave-beat castle.

The campaign of Licario in the Archipelago had another effect, more disastrous even than the loss of the islands. Piracy has in all ages been the curse of the Aegean, and at this time the corsairs of every nation infested that beautiful sea. Skopelos and Kea, the volcanic bay of Santorini, and the fine harbour of Ios, were favourite lairs of the pirates; they infested the terrible Doro channel between Andros and Euboea, and robbed one of the island barons in the haven of Melos. The Greek governors, who were appointed to administer the conquered islands, connived at the doings of the corsairs, who might even fly the imperial flag and style themselves “Lord High Admiral”, like Giovanni de lo Cavo of Anaphe, while the reduction of the imperial navy by Andronikos II converted swarms of half-breed sailors into pirates. The exploits of these men have already been described, and the terrible devastation which they wrought on the smaller and more defenceless islands may easily be imagined. Sometimes the more remote consequences of their raids were worse than the raids themselves. Thus, in 1286, on one of these expeditions, some corsairs carried off a valuable ass belonging to one of the Ghisi, and sold it to Duke Marco II’s son William, who was baron of Syra. The purchaser was under no illusions as to the ownership of the ass, for it was marked with its master’s initials, but was perfectly aware that he was buying stolen goods. Seeing this, Ghisi invaded Syra, and laid siege to the castle. But the fate of the ass had aroused wide sympathies, and was agitating all the small world of the Archipelago. Just at this moment it chanced that the admiral of Charles II of Naples, who was now the suzerain of the Sanudi, had put into Melos for provisions. Feudal law compelled him to assist the son of his master’s vassal; the prayers of the fair chatelaine of Melos, Donna Cassandra Sanudo, conquered any hesitation that he might have felt; so he set sail for Syra, and with the aid of the ducal troops, forced Ghisi to raise the siege. The great ass case was then submitted to the decision of the Venetian bailie in Euboea, who reconciled the two great families of the Archipelago and restored the peace of the duchy, but only after “more than 30,000 heavy soldi” had been expended for the sake of the animal, which had probably died in the interval.

A fresh disaster fell upon the Archipelago in 1292, when the Aragonese admiral, Roger de Lluria, arrived on his punitive expedition against the Greek Empire. Latin or Greek was all the same to this licensed freebooter, when plunder was to be had. Andros, Tenos, Mykonos, and Thermia were all ravaged by his sailors, who thus gave Greece a foretaste of Catalan cruelty. Yet, if we may credit a later historian, even at this very period, Naxos was a flourishing island. We are told that the fertile plain of Drymalia then “contained twelve large villages, a number of country houses, and more than 10,000 inhabitants” —a total doubtless partly due to the immigration of the population of Amorgos half a century earlier. Yet towards his orthodox subjects Marco II was by no means so conciliatory as his two predecessors. There was in the island an altar dedicated to a portly man of God, St Pachys, or “the fat”, who was believed by the superstitious Naxiotes to possess the power of making their children stout, and consequently comely, according to Levantine ideas. Fond mothers accordingly flocked to his altar with their skinny offspring, and pushed their children’s bodies several times through a perforated stone still preserved as a curiosity in the seventeenth century, and similar to those which have been found in Cyprus and Ireland. If Marco II. had been a wise statesman, he would have allowed the Naxiote matrons to offer up prayers to the “fat” saint as long as they pleased. But he was either too bigoted, or too sceptical, to tolerate this harmless exercise, which savoured of paganism and had doubtless originated in classical times. He smashed the altar, and thereby so greatly excited the Greeks, that he had to build a fortress to keep them in order. The double walls and the round tower of this stronghold, Castel d’Alto, or Apanokastro, as it was called, still stand on a mountain commanding the plain of Drymalia —a warning to those who would interfere with the beliefs of the people.

Towards the end of his long reign, Marco II had the satisfaction of seeing the recovery of several of the lost islands. During the seven years war between Venice and Andronikos II, supported by the Genoese, which began in 1296, the republic of St Mark repeated the tactics of ninety years earlier, and let loose a new swarm of privateers upon the Archipelago. The bailie of Negroponte was ordered to fit out vessels to prey upon the Greeks, and as that official happened to be one of the Barozzi, the dethroned barons of Santorin, he naturally carried out his orders with the utmost zeal. Other dispossessed island lords joined in this filibus­tering expedition, the Ghisi, the Michieli, and the Giustiniani, while a new and bourgeois family from Venice, the Schiavi, recaptured the island of Ios for the Duke of Naxos and received it as a fief from his hands. The patrician exiles were equally successful; the Barozzi recovered Santorin and Therasia, the Ghisi and their fellows Amorgos, Keos, and Seriphos, and these five islands were specially confirmed to the conquerors in the treaty which Venice concluded with the Greek emperor in 1303. But the feudal relations of these barons no longer remained on the old footing. It was under Venetian auspices and by Venetian diplomacy that they had regained and retained their lost islands, and it was thenceforth Venice, and not the Duke of Naxos, whom they regarded as their suzerain. Such an attitude of independence naturally provoked ill-feeling and led to disputes between him and them, and thus destroyed the unity of the Latin duchy. Moreover, the long war, successful though it had been, had added yet another scourge to the Archipelago, and all the islanders were not so fortunate as those of Keos, who received compensation from the Genoese republic for the damage inflicted by its subjects upon that most convenient maritime station, where galleys could obtain provisions on their way to the East. But the Catalans were less scrupulous than the Genoese; their leader, Roger de Flor, ravaged Keos in 1303, carried off many of the islanders, and inflicted damage, against which remonstrances were idle.

Marco II seems to have died in that year, and was buried in the church of St Catherine in the plain outside the town of Naxos, which served as the ducal chapel, and in which his tomb was afterwards found, marked by an inscription and the arms of his family. William I, his eldest son, the hero of the famous War of the Ass, followed him as fourth duke, and endeavoured to compel the reinstated barons of the other islands to return to their old allegiance to the duchy. As might be inferred from his former exploit, he was not likely to be hampered by scruples. Accordingly, when Jacopo Barozzi, lord of Santorin, was traversing the Archipelago, he had him seized by corsairs and flung him into the dungeons of Naxos. This was, however, more than Venice could stand, for the kidnapped baron had been her bailie at Negroponte and her governor in Crete. An ultimatum was, therefore, sent to the duke, bidding him send his captive to Negroponte within a week, under pain of being treated as an outlaw. This message had the desired effect; the duke let his prisoner go, and men saw that the name of Venice was more powerful than that of Sanudo in the Aegean. But William was not easily baffled. He despatched his faithful vassal and admiral, Domenico Schiavo of Ios, against the Ghisi’s island of Amorgos in an unguarded moment and reunited it with his duchy. Thanks, too, to the feeble policy of Andronikos II, the Greeks continued to lose the ground which they had acquired under the energetic rule of his predecessor. In 1307 a whole batch of islands was recovered by the Latins. John, or Januli I da Corogna, whose name indicates that his family had come originally from Coruna, and who belonged to the Knights of St John, seized Siphnos, threw off his allegiance to his Order, and declared himself a free and independent sovereign, in spite of the protests of the Sanudi, who still considered the island theirs. At the same time, his namesake, Januli Gozzadini, a member of that ancient and only just extinct family of Bologna, a branch of which had been settled in Greece for the past half century, recaptured the distant island of Anaphe, or Namfio, of which he became the petty sovereign. Thus, exactly a century after the Latin Conquest, two new Latin families, one Spanish, one Italian, established themselves in the Archipelago. The Gozzadini still ruled there in the seventeenth century, while the ruined “chancery” of the castle of Siphnos still bears a Latin inscription of Januli II da Corogna, dated 1374, and the family still flourishes in Santorin. Finally, in 1310, the Quirini, aided by another Venetian family, the Grimani, recovered their lost island of Stampalia, for which they did homage to Venice and which was too remote from Naxos to be molested by the jealous duke. Thus, Greek rule had once more been eliminated from the islands, but the place of the Byzantine governors had been taken by Venetian vassals or independent lords.

Outside the frontiers of the duchy the Latin cause in the Levant was at this time strengthened by two important conquests. In 1304, Benedetto Zaccaria, the rich Genoese who already owned the valuable alum mines of Phokaia and had married a sister of the late Emperor Michael VIII, occupied the island of Chios, nominally as a vassal of the Greek Empire, really as an independent prince. Five years later, the Knights of St John, in quest of a new home, now that they had been driven from the Holy Land, conquered Rhodes from the Turkish corsairs, who had made themselves its masters. We are specially told by the elder Sanudo that the Duke of Naxos sent his dashing son Nicholas with a fleet of galleys to assist them in this conquest. It was perhaps at the duke’s suggestion that they occupied the classic island of Delos, where the Emperor Cantacuzene describes them as settled twenty years later, and where the remains of their castle have been traced by some archaeologists on the top of Mount Kynthos, by others on Rheneia. The duke was naturally pleased to see the warrior Knights established at Rhodes, and the Zaccaria at Chios, for they were likely to defend the Archipelago against the Turkish pirates from the coast of Asia Minor, who had now begun to make their appearance. In 1318 we find them ravaging the rich island of Santorin, and already some of the Cyclades had been almost depopulated by their raids. Yet Marin Sanudo wrote in 1321 that Melos could provide mill-stones and the other Cyclades plenty of large and small cattle, as well as wood and straw for his projected crusade.

Both William Sanudo and his eldest son Nicholas were adventurous men, leading figures in the critical period which saw the establishment of the Catalans in the duchy of Athens. William was one of those invited to the grand tournament on the isthmus of Corinth in 1305; and, as we saw in a former chapter, his heir, who was married to the half-sister of Walter of Brienne, commanded a Naxian contingent at the great battle of the Kephisses, where he received two wounds in the face and hand, and was among the few Latin nobles who were taken alive, while another magnate of the Archipelago, George Ghisi of Tenos, was among the slain. Undeterred by this experience of Catalan warfare, he went to the aid of his father’s suzerain, Princess Matilda of Achaia, in 1316, when that principality was invaded by the Infant of Majorca, and at the battle in Elis he was again taken prisoner. In revenge for these two acts of hostility against the Company, Alfonso Fadrique overran the island of Melos, and carried off about 700 captives; and, when the Venetians remonstrated with King Frederick II. of Sicily at this invasion, the latter replied with perfect correctness, that in feudal law the Duke of the Archipelago held his islands as a fief of the Princess of Achaia, so that “the republic had no jurisdiction” in any of them. Duke Nicholas, who succeeded his father in 1323, continued scrupulously faithful to this feudal tie, and we find him assisting John of Gravina, his suzerain, in his campaign against the Greeks of the Morea. Together they attempted in vain to capture the strong castle of Karytaina, and when the Prince of Achaia returned to Italy, the warlike Duke of the Archipelago was left behind as commander-in-chief of all his forces. In that capacity he routed the Greeks with great loss in the plain of Elis below the castle of St Omer, not far from the place where he had once been taken prisoner. Old Marin Sanudo was horrified at these proceedings; he pleaded his kinsman’s youth as an excuse for what he had done, and promised to persuade him to be a good servant of the Greek emperor, as his father had been before him, and at the same time to give him some good advice for the preservation of his duchy.

So restless a personality could not be expected to acquiesce in the continued independence of the former vassals of the duchy. Like his father, but with more success, Nicholas attacked the Barozzi of Santorin and Therasia, in spite of their appeals to Venice and their high-sounding title of “Lord High Admiral” of the paper Empire of Romania, extracted a reluctant pledge of homage, and in 1335 wrested their two valuable islands from them and united them with his own possessions. The Barozzi never regained the barony of their forefathers, which remained united with the duchy for over a century; they retired to Crete, and thence emigrated, after the Turkish conquest of that island, to Naxos, where the author has seen their tombs and where they were still extant at the close of the eighteenth century. The Sanudi did not neglect their new acquisition; they encouraged cotton-planting on the volcanic soil of Santorin, they strengthened the fortifications; and, for the greater security of the island, Nicholas, in 1336, conferred the fortress of “La Ponta,” or Akrotiri, as it is now called, upon the Gozzadini, who had recently established themselves with his consent in the island of Kythnos, or Thermia, which formed a portion of the duchy. So strong was this castle, as its ruins still testify, that it remained in the hands of the Gozzadini long after the Turkish Conquest. It was not till 1617 that it at last succumbed to the crescent. As the plebeian Schiavi, of Ios, had been induced to resign it to their lord, the duchy was now more important than it had been since the early days of Marco II, and for the first time had a currency of its own. The duke now had in his immediate possession the richest and largest islands—Naxos, Andros, (where he sometimes resided), Paros and Antiparos, Melos and Kimolos, Santorin, Syra, and Ios, while the Gozzadini of Thermia and the Schiavi and Grimani, upon whom the late duke had bestowed the island of Amorgos (the latter a Venetian family engaged in the alum trade), were his vassals. His hereditary rivals, the Ghisi, however, still held Tenos and Mykonos under Venetian suzerainty ; the Quirini and Grimani looked to the republic to protect their island of Stampalia; newcomers, like the Premarini of Kea and the Bragadini of Seriphos, were Venetian by race, and as much bound to their old home as the Giustiniani and Michieli, who divided those islands with them; the Knights of Rhodes had a garrison at Delos; while at Anaphe the Gozzadini, and at Siphnos the Da Corogna, asserted their independence, alike of Venice and of the duke.

At such a critical period, when the Turks were rapidly advancing, it was most important that the minor luminaries of the Archipelago should rally round the duke. The historian, Sanudo the elder, considered that his ambitious relative ought to sink his ancient feud with the Ghisi and unite with them in keeping up one galley, while the Genoese barons of Chios should maintain another, against the common foe of Christendom. “The Turks,” he wrote in 1326, “specially infest these islands, which are appurtenances of the principality of the Morea” (that is to say, the duchy of Naxos); “and if help be not forthcoming, they will be lost. Indeed, if it were not for the Zaccaria of Chios, and Nicholas Sanudo of Naxos, and the Holy House of the Hospital, who have hitherto defended and still defend them, those islands could not exist. Nor do I believe,” concludes the pious Venetian, “that they will continue to exist, without the help of God and the pope”. Two years earlier the Turks had ravaged Naxos during the absence of the duke in Achaia; two years later the Venetian bailie of Negroponte wrote that the whole Archipelago threatened to fall into the hands of these corsairs, who had dragged away from the islands some 15,000 men in a series of raids; on one of these terrible visitations, no less than 380 Turkish vessels with 40,000 hands on board plied their deadly trade in the fair Aegean, and carried off more than 10,000 souls. But even these severe lessons failed to make any permanent impression on the jealous Latins of the Levant. At one moment we find Nicholas Sanudo joining Ghisi and the Knights of Rhodes in a league against the Turks; at another we hear that he has attacked Mykonos in his colleague’s absence, and carried off his wife. He even sends six vessels and 100 horsemen to assist the Greek Emperor Andronikos III in capturing Chios from the bold Genoese, Martino Zaccaria, titular “King of Asia Minor,” in the heraldry of the phantom Latin Empire, who had killed or captured no fewer than 10,000 Turks in his fifteen years’ tenure of that island, and he showed his friendship to the emperor by appearing in person to pay his respects, and to offer him gifts. His relative, Marin, explains that he had been compelled to act thus by the apathy of those from whom he had a right to expect aid in recovering and preserving his dominions, an excuse usually made for unnatural alliances in the Near East today. Yet the duke was quite ready to join the Knights of Rhodes and Cattaneo, the lord Phokaia, in attacking the Greek island of Lesbos when opportunity offered. On this occasion, however, Nicholas was well served by Cattaneo, who prevented his allies from plundering and dividing the island between themselves. The result of these animosities among the Christians was seen in 1341, the last year of the duke’s reign, when Omarbeg of Aidin, the same satrap who was pleased to style himself “Prince of Achaia”, or Morbassan, ravaged the islands of the Archipelago with a large fleet, and forced them for the first time to pay an annual tribute.

Nicholas’s brother and successor, John I, took an active part in all the stirring events of a period which saw the Turks cross over into Europe and the Genoese establish themselves in the Aegean. He contributed a galley to the allied fleet, which, under the auspices of Pope Clement VI, attacked and took Smyrna in 1343. In the following year, a body of Turks, led by a Genoese pirate, occupied the lower town of Naxos, plundered the island, and carried off 6000 of his subjects into slavery. Two years later, the “Black Death” traversed the Archipelago in its course across Europe, and animals as well as human beings perished in its embrace. His fidelity to Venice, which had assisted him with arms against the Turks, involved him in the great war between the Venetian and Genoese republics, of which the Levant was the theatre in the middle of the fourteenth century. So zealous was he to aid his old home, that he at once joined his flotilla to the Venetian fleet, and was about to proceed in person to Venice to offer his aid, when the Genoese squadron of fifteen galleys appeared off his capital. The town of Naxos surrendered, and, in 1354, the duke was taken away as a captive to Genoa. Keos was ravaged; Melos and other islands fell a prey to the Genoese; but at the peace of 1355 the duke was released, and they were restored to him.The critical circumstances of the time taught him the wisdom of securing unity in his island domain; he, therefore, pacified the Ghisi by conferring upon them the island of Amorgos, which his father had taken from them, as a fief of his duchy, and bought off any claims of the Barozzi to Santorini by a money payment. The Ghisi did not, however, long retain the island of fair women ; the baron of Amorgos was so rash as to take part in the great insurrection of the Venetian colonists of Crete against the mother country in 1363; he atoned for this act of treason on the scaffold, and Venice took possession of his island. But the Cyclades were no longer desirable acquisitions, for there was a complete dearth of labour to cultivate the land. We are told at this time that the serfs had fled from Anaphe, Amorgos, and Stampalia to Crete, because they did not think it worth while to sow, in order that Turks and Catalans might reap. The one exception to this general state of desolation was the island of Seriphos, a rugged rock, possessed, however, of mineral wealth, which is still exploited. A large share of this island had passed to Ermolao Minotto, a Venetian noble, who worked the iron mines and made it one of the richest spots in the Archipelago. The serfs had saved enough money to purchase their enfran­chisement, and the importance of the place may be judged from the fact that Gregory XI included Minotto among the dignitaries whom he summoned to the congress at Thebes in 1373-12

John I of Naxos died in 1361, leaving an only daughter, Fiorenza, an extremely eligible young widow, for she was not only Duchess of the Archipelago, but had been married to one of the great Dalle Carceri clan, who owned two of the three big baronies of Euboea, and by whom she had had one son, still a mere child. It was the first time that this romantic duchy had been governed by a woman, and needless to say, there was no lack of competitors for the hand of the fair Fiorenza. Over her second marriage there now raged a diplomatic battle, which was waged by Venice with all the unscrupulousness shown by that astute republic whenever its supremacy was at stake. The first of this mediaeval Penelope’s suitors was a Genoese, the most important of the merchant adventurers, or maonesi, who held the rich island of Chios much as modern chartered companies have held parts of Africa under the suzerainty of the Home Government. Venice had viewed with alarm the recent establishment of Genoese influence at Chios and Lesbos, and she was resolved that no Genoese citizen should be installed at Naxos and in Eubcea as Fiorenza’s consort The lady was therefore solemnly warned not to bestow her hand upon an enemy of the republic, when so many eligible husbands could be found at Venice or in the Venetian colonies of Crete and Eubcea. At the same time, the bailie of Negroponte was instructed to hinder the Genoese marriage by fair means or foul. The beauteous Fiorenza’s mother meekly replied that her daughter had never dreamt of marrying anyone unacceptable to the most serene republic; but soon afterwards the young widow showed a desire to accept the suit of Nerio Acciajuoli, the future Duke of Athens, whose family had long had her in view as a desirable match for one of its members. This alliance the republic vetoed with the same emphasis as the former; but the Acciajuoli had much influence at the Neapolitan court, and Nerio was therefore able to obtain the consent of Robert of Taranto, who, as Prince of Achaia, was suzerain of the duchy. To his letter requesting Venice not to interfere with the matrimonial arrangements of his vassal, the Venetians replied that Fiorenza was also a daughter of the republic, that her ancestors had won the duchy under its auspices, had been protected by its fleets, and owed the continued existence of their dominions to its diplomacy. Simultaneous orders were sent to the com­mander of the Venetian fleet in Greek waters to oppose, by force if necessary, the landing of Nerio in the Cyclades.

The Venetian agents in the Levant had, however, no need of further instructions. They knew what was expected of them, and were confident that their action, if successful, would not be disowned. Fiorenza was kidnapped, placed on board a Venetian galley, and quietly conveyed to Crete. There she was treated with every mark of respect, but was at the same time plainly informed that, if she ever wished to see her beloved Naxos again, she must marry her cousin Nicholas Sanudo “Spezzabanda” the candidate of the republic and son of a large proprietor in Euboea. The daring of this young man, which had gained him his nickname, “the disperser of a host,” may have impressed the susceptible duchess no less than the difficulties of her position. At any rate, she consented to marry him; the republic expressed its complete satisfaction, and pledged itself to protect the duchy against all its enemies. “ Spezza­banda” showed his gratitude to his Venetian patrons-by going with a flotilla to assist in suppressing the great Cretan insurrection of this period, and loyally administered, with the title of duke, the dominions of his wife till her death in 1371. As his stepson was still not of age, he continued to govern the duchy in his name, as avogier, or tutor. It was to his influence in this capacity that we may attribute the grant of Andros, the second island of the Archipelago, as a fief to his little daughter Maria Sanudo, an act which weakened the state at a moment when it needed a centralised administration. Andros had been an immediate possession of the dukes for over a century; it never again enjoyed personal union with Naxos.

When young Niccolo dalle Carceri came of age, he proved to be the worst ruler who had ever reigned over the Archipelago. Hitherto, the dukes had had no interests outside their duchy, and had always resided in it, either at Naxos or at Andros. But their successor was, unfortunately, a great baron in Euboea as well, and lived most of his time in the latter island, for which he cared more than for his ducal throne. Leaving one of the Gozzadini of Anaphe to act as regent for him at Naxos, he schemed to extend his possessions in Euboea, and in 1380, while Venice was at war with Genoa, he plotted the capture of the city of Negroponte with the assistance of the Navarrese Company, which had then entered Attica. While this act of treachery irritated Venice, which had helped him with a galley against the Turks, he aroused the strongest resentment among his subjects by his extortion, and they found a ready leader in an Italian who had recently become connected by marriage with the Sanudo family. This man, Francesco Crispo —a name which suggested to biographers of the late Italian Prime Minister a possible relationship— belonged, like the Dalle Carceri, to a Lombard family from Verona, which had settled in Negroponte, where Francesco, or Franguli, as the Greeks called him, held the barony of Astrogidis. A few years before he had married the daughter of Marco Sanudo, brother of Duke John . and baron of Melos, which would seem to have prospered greatly under his rule. Crispo had succeeded his father-in-law as baron of that island, but aimed at being something more than a vassal of the young Duke of Naxos. He sounded the discontented in several of the islands, and set out for Naxos, where Niccolo chanced to be. According to one story, the duke met his fate in his capital; according to another, a ducal hunting-party in the interior of the island gave Crispo an opportunity for carrying out his plan. The merry band of huntsmen set out for the lovely valley of Melanes, a paradise of oranges and lemons, where the duke had a villa, still called “the lord’s domain.” After the luncheon, they proceeded to a spot where game was plentiful, Crispo leading the way with the duke’s most trusty friends, so that his unsuspecting host was left with his own minions. Suddenly, on the mountain-side the duke’s companions fell upon him; in vain he tried to defend himself; a sword-cut laid him dead on the ground. The murderers, carefully instructed by their employer, hastened after him, and told how the duke had been attacked by a body of strange horsemen, who had either killed or carried him off —which of the two they had not stopped to enquire. Crispo feigned amazement and indignation at his kinsman’s fate; he was for returning at once to the scene of the murder, but allowed himself to be dissuaded by his partisans, who begged him not to expose his life also to an ambuscade. Two horsemen, sent back to investigate, reported that they had found the duke lying in his blood; one of Crispo’s intimates urged him to seize the fortresses of the island at once, in order to prevent the designs of the mysterious assailants of the unfortunate Niccolo. Crispo at once occupied the ducal castle of Naxos; and the Naxiotes, glad to be freed from their tyrant, unanimously accepted him as their duke, for, in virtue of his wife, he was the next-of-kin to the late ruler, with the exception of Niccold’s two step-sisters. Thus, in 1383, a new dynasty arose in the Archipelago, which lasted for nearly two hundred years. The Sanudi disappeared from Naxos; but illegitimate descendants of the Dalle Carceri lingered on there as late as the seventeenth century, and their arms still adorn the pavement before the door of the Greek cathedral.

Even in our own time, the assassination of a sovereign has not prevented Christian Europe from recognising his successor, and the Venetians were avowedly politicians first and Christians afterwards. They had no reason to love the murdered duke, who had plotted against them, while his assassin was a man of energy, who could defend the duchy against the Turks, and, being an usurper, would be more amenable to Venetian influence than the legitimate dynasty. Like his modern imitator, Francesco Crispo found a high ecclesiastic to act as his apologist; the bishop of Melos went as his envoy to obtain the consent of Venice to his usurpation, and to prepare the way for a visit from himself Everyone wrote in his favour —the Latin nobles of the Archipelago and the Duke of Candia alike; of all the barons of the Cyclades, Januli Gozzadini, the late duke’s viceroy, alone had the chivalry to protest against him. By a clever stroke of diplomacy, the usurper won the bailie of Negroponte to his cause by depriving Maria Sanudo, the late duke’s half-sister, of her island of Andros, and bestowing it, combined with Syra, upon the bailie’s son, Pietro Zeno, together with the hand of one of his own daughters. A proposed matrimonial alliance between one of his sons and a daughter of the doge, gained over the chief magistrate. Two voices alone were raised against him, those of Maria Sanudo and of the late duke’s widow. The latter, who had trumped Crispo’s cards by herself marrying a son of the doge, was ultimately pacified by a widow’s portion near the hot baths of Aidepsos in Euboea; the former, whom Crispo hypocritically pretended to “treat as his own child”, received as compensation the marble island of Paros, on condition that she married Gasparo di Sommaripa, a member of a family which still flourishes in the Archipelago. Originally descended from the Marquis de Sommerive, in Languedoc, they had emigrated to Verona, whence, like the Dalle Carceri and the Crispi, they had come to seek their fortune in Greece. Various motives seem to have operated with Crispo in the choice of the man. The Sommaripa may very likely have been connected with the Dalle Carceri, in which case he would think it desirable to pacify a dangerous rival; or else he may have considered that a man who had hitherto held no position in the feudal world of Greece, would feel gratitude to his benefactor; a third reason, we are expressly told, was to neutralise the claims of Maria Sanudo by marrying her to one who was regarded in the exclusive circles of the Archipelago as a parvenu. In this, however, he was disappointed; she did not abandon her claim, and, though her husband appealed in vain to his relative, Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, after a long and wearisome litigation their son regained, half a century later, his mother’s island of Andros.

The Venetians had every reason to be content with the usurpation of Francesco Crispo. It gave them a free hand in Euboea, for he prudently made no claim to succeed the late duke in the two great baronies of that island, which thus passed under Venetian influence; it made the Archipelago much more dependent upon the good will of the republic, which henceforth took a keener interest in its preservation. In the person of Pietro Zeno, the new baron of Andros, she found the most useful diplomatist of the age, a man perfectly familiar with every phase of the Eastern question, whom she employed in all her delicate negotiations in the Levant. Moreover, in 1390, the Ghisi family, the second most important dynasty in the Cyclades, came to an end in Tenos and Mykonos, and those islands, with Delos, passed by will into her hands. There are still Ghisi in Greece —the author has met them at Athens— proud of their genealogical trees, conscious of their aristocratic past; but they never held sway again in their ancestral islands. Thus, Venice became paramount in the Archipelago; in the very year of Crispo’s usurpation, Jacques de Baux, the last Angevin Prince of Achaia had died, so that the new duke had nothing to hope for from the old feudal overlords of the duchy. Venice, on the other hand, assisted him with vessels against the privateers of the Sultan Bajazet, and included him in her treaties with that sovereign and other Levantine powers, only protesting when he himself indulged in piratical expeditions as far as the Syrian coasts. There can be no doubt that the Greeks preferred the rule of Venice in the Archipelago to that of the petty barons. When Tenos and Mykonos became Venetian, the islanders implored the republic not to dispose of them, and declared that they would emigrate into some other Venetian colony rather than remain in their own island, if it were bought by Pietro Zeno of Andros. “No lordship under heaven,” they protested, “is as just and good as that of Venice,” and this was not altogether an exaggeration, as an incident which occurred at that time in the Archipelago showed.

In the flourishing island of Seriphos, the wise rule of Ermolao Minotto had been followed by the grinding tryanny of a perfect fiend in human shape, a Venetian noble, Niccolo Adoldo. Fortunately for the Seriphians, their lord was usually an absentee, preferring the delights of Venice to residence in the island, which the ancient Greeks and Romans alike had regarded as the abomination of desolation, and which the fifteenth century traveller, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, calls Serfeno de la calamitate. But from time to time Adoldo descended upon Seriphos for the purpose of wringing more money from his unhappy subjects. On one of these occasions, he landed with a band of Cretan mercenaries —the worst species of cut-throats— invited various leading Seriphians to dinner in his castle, and then had them arrested. The most awful tortures failed to make them disclose the spot where they had concealed their money, whereupon the baffled tyrant hurled them from the castle battlements to death on the stones below. Seriphos was a remote island in 1393 —it is not very accessible now— but in course of time the news of this massacre reached Venice, for the Venetian families of Michieli and Giustiniani had also shares of Seriphos, and Adoldo had encroached upon their rights. He was accordingly put on his trial for cruelty and murder, sentenced to two years’ confinement “in the lower prisons,” and forbidden ever to revisit his island, his share of which was sequestered by the republic. Thus, the islanders had an object-lesson in the vengeance which Venice meted out to tyrants who happened to be her citizens. As for Adoldo, he died at a ripe old age in the odour of sanctity; his remains were interred in the church of S. Simeone Piccolo, which he endowed, and a splendid tomb was erected over his unworthy ashes.

Francesco Crispo died in 1397, leaving a large family of sons, and the necessity of providing for them led to the further sub-division of the duchy into baronial fiefs. Thus, while his eldest son, Giacomo I, succeeded him as Duke of Naxos, another of his children received Melos and Kimolos, a third Anaphe, a fourth Syra, and a fifth Ios. Giacomo, though he gained the epithet of “the Pacific,” was none the less ready to join the other Christian powers of the Levant in defending their common interests against the Turks, whose great defeat by the Mongols at Angora had given the Archipelago a merely temporary respite from attack. Thus, he was a member of the Christian League, on whose behalf his brother-in-law and vassal, Pietro Zeno of Andros, concluded the very advantageous treaty of 1403 with the new Sultan Suleyman. A year later he even visited England to invoke the aid of Henry IV. Our enterprising sovereign was not able to assist him, though he had at one time intended to lead an army “as far as to the sepulchre of Christ”; but, when Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1418, he was conveyed back to Venice on one of Pietro Zeno’s galleys —the only connection, so far as we have been able to discover, between England and the duchy. The duke was ready, too, to join his galley to those of the Venetian colonies in a campaign against the Turks on the coast of Asia Minor, and Venice not only described him as her “good and dear friend,” but used her friendly offices with the sultans Musa and Mohammed I, and with Elias Bey, the ruler of Caria, to preserve the Archipelago from depredations, besides allowing her protege to buy arms from her arsenal and to export cypress wood from Crete for the fortification of his islands. None the less, however, did the duchy suffer from the raids of the inevitable Turks, which, as Zeno told the Venetian Government, were of daily occurrence. In 1416, the tactless omission of the duke to salute Mohammed I at Smyrna brought a large Turkish fleet down upon the Cyclades, which carried off many of the inhabitants of Andros, Melos, and Paros, and did a vast amount of damage. Venice avenged this attack upon one who, in the words of the Byzantine historian, “had long been her vassal and flown her flag,” by the naval victory of Gallipoli, but the injury inflicted on the islands was so great, that some of them were almost depopulated. The Florentine priest Buondelmonti, who spent four years at this time, “in fear and great anxiety,” travelling among the Cyclades, of which he has left us one of the earliest accounts composed by any writer during the Frankish domination, depicts life in the Archipelago in gloomy colours. At both Naxos and Siphnos there was such a lack of men, that many women were unable to find husbands; in fact the small and wretched population of the latter island, still the absolute property of the Da Corogna, who had a tower there in a lovely garden, was mainly composed of females, who were zealous Catholics, though they did not understand a word of the Latin language, in which their services were held. At Seriphos, so rich forty years earlier, the cultured Florentine found “nothing but calamity”; the people passed their lives “like brutes”, and were in constant fear, day and night, lest they should fall into the hands of the Infidels, though Venice had the island included in her treaties with the Turks, like so many others of the Cyclades. Syra, destined in modern times to be the most flourishing of all the islands, was then “comparatively of no account”; the islanders fed on carobs and goats’ flesh, and led a life of continual anxiety, though a strong sense of clannishness bound them to their poverty-stricken home. The people of Paros were in the same plight, the principal town of Paroikia had few citizens, while pirates frequented the big bay of Naoussa. Antiparos and Sikinos were abandoned to eagles and wild asses, and most of the islets were deserted. Compared with the other islands, Andros had suffered least, owing no doubt to the energetic personality of Zeno, the “Duke of Andros,” as he was sometimes called, and the vigour of Januli della Grammatica, his henchman. But even Zeno found it politic to harbour the dreaded foes of Christendom in his island, just as the duke of Naxos gave shelter to corsairs from Cataluna and Biscay. The one place in the Aegean which the Mussulmans never molested was the monastery of Patmos, whose monks were on the best of terms with them. In order to repair the ravages made by the Turkish raids, several of the island barons took steps at this time to repopulate their desolate possessions. Thus, Marco Crispo colonised Ios with Albanians from the Morea, and strengthened the defences of the place by building a castle and a town at its foot, the remains of which may still be seen. To this castle the peasants used to climb up every evening from their plots of land in the rich plain below, nor did they dare to open the gates in the morning and sally forth, till the old women whom they had sent out as spies before dawn, reported that the coast was clear and no pirate craft was careening in the fine harbour. In 1413 Giovanni Quirini of Stampalia, who was also administering Tenos and Mykonos for the Venetians, proceeded to repopulate his own island, which had never recovered from the great raid of Omarbeg Morbassan seventy years before, at the expense of the two Venetian colonies committed to his charge. This wholesale emigration of Teniotes to Stampalia attracted great notice throughout the Archipelago. An inscription, together with a stone escutcheon quartering the three lilies of the Quirini, and his wife’s nine counters, in the chapel of the castle at Stampalia which he restored, still reminds us that the “ Count of Tenos,” as he styled himself, began the importation of the colonists on 30th March 1413, the feast of the translation of his patron saint, S. Quirinus, and almost every successive traveller in the Cyclades alludes to it. But Venice naturally objected to the depopulation of her two islands ; Quirini was ordered to return thither with all the people whom he had transported, and not to move more than twenty-five miles from his office. Similarly, the Gozzadini repopulated the town of Thermia, which the Turks had taken by treachery, and it was probably at this period that the Albanians crossed over from Euboea to settle in the north of Andros—the only island of the Cyclades which still retains an Albanian population. Under these circumstances, the mineral resources of the islands, except the Parian marble quarries, could not be exploited. The gold found in some parts of Naxos was left unworked, and the emery mines of that island, which Buondelmonti mentions, and which are now so profitable to the Greek Government, do not seem to have been a source of revenue to the duke, who was obliged to raise money for the payment of his liabilities by the sale of horses and mules at Candia, just as, even then, the cattle of Tenos were highly esteemed. Buondelmonti mentions the Sulphur springs and the millstones of Melos, and alludes to an unsuccessful experiment made by Duke Giacomo to plumb the unfathomable depths of the crater which forms the harbour of Santorini.

Giacomo I died of a flux at Ferrara in 1418 on his way to meet Pope Martin V at Mantua. He had played a considerable part in the Levantine politics of his time; he had been instrumental in arranging the retrocession of Corinth to the Greeks by the Knights of St John; his possession of his father’s usurped throne was little disturbed by the continual appeals for pecuniary compensation, which the widow of the last legitimate duke made against him at Venice, and to which he opposed the usual dilatory tactics of Italy, supported by the normal impecuniosity of the Levant. By his will he appointed his brother John as his successor, thus for the first time in the history of the duchy setting aside the usual custom of the Empire of Romania, according to which one of his daughters should have succeeded him. It might have been well for the rest of Greece, had this frank recognition of the advantages of the Salic law in troublous times been generally accepted; certainly the history of the Frankish states would have been more pacific, if less picturesque. At any rate, Giacomo I. thus set a precedent, which was subsequently followed; no woman sat again on the sea-girt throne of the Archipelago.

The Venetian Government, long anxious to obtain a hold over the duchy, thought that the time had come for a decisive step. It was accordingly proposed to occupy the late Duke’s dominions in the name of his widow and her mother, and to confirm all his brothers in their respective fiefs, on condition that they paid the same homage as before. In that case, the republic would be willing to put the castle of Naxos into thorough repair. A Venetian ambassador was to convey these proposals to Niccold Crispo of Syra, who was acting as regent in the absence of the late duke. But more prudent counsels prevailed. Niccold, it was pointed out, was not only an adversary of Venetian rule, but had a Genoese wife —according to another account she was a Princess of Trebizond— while his brother John, the late duke’s heir, was fond of Venice. He was in the habit of residing there for months at a time; he was at that moment staying with his sister-in-law at the convent of S. Maria delle Vergini, now used as a magazine; and he chose his wife, not from Genoa or Trebizond, but from among the daughters of the republic. It was therefore decided to recognise him as duke, provided that he took an oath of obedience to Venice and acknowledged his duchy to be a Venetian dependency. A Venetian galley was accordingly made ready to conduct him either to his capital or to his own island of Melos. He had the sense to meet any possible opposition from his brothers by increasing their already considerable appanages, bestowing Santorin, which had been united with Naxos for over eighty years, upon Niccold of Syra, and Therasia upon Marco of Ios—an arrangement which, though doubtless inevitable, tended to weaken the unity of the State. But where there was a large ducal family, subdivision was the only alternative to civil war.On the other hand, the new duke acted with a complete lack of chivalry towards his sister-in-law and her mother, Maria Sanudo, reducing them to penury and exile by depriving them of their islands of Paros and Antiparos, valuable possessions which each furnished thirty sailors to the ducal galleys, and restoring them to the unfortunate ladies only after strong and repeated remonstrances from Venice, backed by force.

John II, though he had succeeded to the duchy with the full approval of Venice, found that, in that time of stress, she was not always able to protect her distant nominee. Occasionally she would give him a galley for his defence against the Turks; and in her treaties with Mohammed I. and Murad II in 1419 and 1430, she inserted a clause to the effect that he and his brothers should be included in the terms of peace, treated as Venetians, and exempted from tribute and other molestation. Indeed, in a schedule of the former treaty, the sultan expressly stated that he reckoned “Santorin, Anaphe, Therasia, Astypalaia, Thermia, Amorgos, Ios, Paros, Naxos, Syra, Melos, Siphnos, Keos, Seriphos, Tenos, Mykonos, and Andros” as all Venetian. But, in 1426, the proud republic frankly confessed that she could not help him, and was content that he and Zeno of Andros should make the best terms they could with the Turks, so as to save their islands, provided only that they neither received nor victualled Turkish ships, nor in any way aided those foes of Christendom. The duke, however, not only agreed to pay tribute and to open his ports to the Turks, but inflicted an even greater injury on Venetian interests by omitting from that time to light the usual signal fires to warn the bailie of Negroponte of the approach of an Ottoman fleet.His connection with Venice proved, at times, to be an actual source of danger to himself; for, when the Venetians ravaged the Genoese colony of Chios in 1431, the Genoese admiral, Spinola, took revenge by seizing Naxos and Andros, and all the diplomacy of the Crispi was required to prevent their islands from becoming Genoese possessions. Great was the disgust of Venice when she heard that her “dear friends” had made a treaty with, and paid blackmail to, her deadliest rival; none the less, they continued for some years to be adherents of Genoa.But then, as now, the small states of the Levant could retort with some truth that, if their natural protectors in Europe neglected them, they must fend for themselves.

John II would seem to have died in 1433, leaving an only son, Giacomo II, still a minor, under the guardianship of a masterful woman, the dowager Duchess Francesca; while the child’s three uncles, Niccold of Syra and Santorin, Marco of Ios, and William of Anaphe, were appointed their brother’s executors, and the first of the trio regent of the duchy. Giacomo II’s reign was chiefly remarkable for the final settlement of the claims of the Sommaripa family to the island of Andros. Maria Sanudo had never abandoned her rights to that valuable island, which the first of the Crispi dukes had bestowed, as we saw, upon Pietro Zeno. That famous diplomatist, so long the leading figure of the Latin Orient, who, if his lot had been cast on a bigger stage, might have left a great name in history, had died in 1427; and, as his son and successor, Andrea, was delicate, and had an only daughter, Venice early made preparations to occupy Andros on his death, lest it should fall into undesirable hands, and decided that his daughter should be under the tutelage of the republic till her marriage. News of these plans, however, leaked out; and, when Andrea really died in 1437, the Venetian bailie of Negroponte, who had been ordered to seize the island in the name of the republic, found himself forestalled and his envoy refused admittance by the young duke’s uncles, who had imprisoned the late baron’s widow in the old castle at Andros and forced her to sign a document, promising the hand of her little daughter, still a mere child, to their nephew within the next five years, together with Andros as her dowry. The Venetian Government was naturally indignant at this frustration of its long-cherished scheme by the petty lords of the Archipelago; a Venetian noble, Francesco Quirini, was sent to Naxos; backed by a Cretan galley, and the threat that the duke would be treated as the enemy of the republic, he obtained the cession of the island to himself, as Venetian governor, pending the decision of the question. For three years he and his successor administered Andros in the name of the republic, which protested that she merely wanted to assert her jurisdiction in the Archipelago, while all the claimants were being heard at Venice. Finally, in 1440, the Venetian court decided that the lawful baron of Andros was Maria Sanudo’s son, Crusino I. Sommaripa, lord of Paros and triarch of Euboea; Crusino agreed to pay indemnities to the members of the Zeno family, and thus, after more than half a century, Andros returned to its legal possessor.

Installed in this valuable island, which it retained till the Turkish Conquest, the Sommaripa clan now occupied the position formerly held by the Ghisi —that of the second most important family in the duchy. Crusino was, moreover, a man of culture as well as a man of affairs. He had exca­vated marble statues at Paros, and was delighted to show them to Cyriacus of Ancona, who visited him more than once and inspected the quarries of that island, whence marble was still exported. The antiquary found a ship laden with a cargo of the polished Parian stone lying in the harbour ready to sail for Chios, whose rich Genoese colonists had ordered the material for their villas, and Crusino allowed him to send the head and leg of an ancient statue to one of his friends there. When, therefore, archaeologists blame the Latin rulers of the Cyclades for destroying classical temples in order to build their own castles out of the marble fragments —an example of which may be seen at Paros itself— it is well to remember that some of them, like Crusino, did something for archaeology —more, perhaps, than archaeologists have ever done for the remains of the Middle Ages. Cyriacus himself mentions that he saw at Mykonos marble fragments of statues, which had been brought from Delos.Buondelmonti, a quarter of a century earlier, had noticed more than a thousand scattered on the ground of the sacred island, whence he had in vain tried to raise the colossal statue of Apollo.

The installation of the Sommaripa at Andros was not the only dynastic change in the Archipelago at this period. Crusino’s son-in-law, a Loredano, received from him the island of Antiparos, and thus a fresh great Venetian family obtained a footing in the Cyclades. This infusion of new blood was of great benefit to the island, which had long been uninhabited: for the energetic Venetian repopulated it with new colonists, and built and resided in the castle, whose gateway, now fallen, still preserved, in the eighteenth century, his coat of arms. At the same time, another Venetian coloniser, Giovanni Quirini of Stampalia, acquired the whole of Amorgos, and this increased stake in the Levant might perhaps warrant the title of “Count,” which he and all his descendants bore. A third Venetian family, the Michieli, now owned all Seriphos, and set up their arms with the date of 1434 over the castle gate. Even non-Venetian dynasties, such as the Gozzadini of Thermia and Kea, and the Spanish Da Corogna of Kea and Siphnos, were glad to be regarded as Venetians, whenever the republic concluded a treaty of peace with the Turks, although Januli da Corogna proudly asserted that he owned allegiance to no man for his rock of Siphnos, over which the Dukes of Naxos still claimed a shadowy suzerainty, and of which their vassals, the Grimani, long pretended to be the rightful lords.

The fourteen years’ reign of Duke Giacomo II was a period of peace for the Archipelago. The energies of the Turks were temporarily diverted to Hungary, and their crushing defeat by John Hunyady at Nish emboldened the Venetians to send a fleet to the Aegean under Luigi Loredano, father of the new baron of Antiparos. In these circumstances, we are not surprised to find the islands of Andros and Naxos, which had just strengthened its flotilla, contributing galleys to the Venetian squadron; but the overthrow of the perjured Christian host in the great battle of Varna led Venice to make peace with the sultan in 1446, including the Naxian duchy in the provisions of the treaty. The following year the duke died, leaving his wife enceinte with a son, who was born six weeks after his father’s death, and received the name of Gian Giacomo. The two strongest members of the family, Niccolo of Syra and Santorin and William of Anaphe, the same who had acted as regents of the late duke, once more assumed the government with the assent of Venice, and imprisoned the child’s grandmother, the dowager Duchess Francesca, who had exercised great influence during the late reign, and who claimed the regency. Niccold soon died, and we then find the Duchess Francesca, the archbishop, and the citizens of Naxos, electing his son Francesco in his place, and begging the Venetian Government to ratify their choice—an interesting fact, which shows that the people had a voice in the selection of a regent, and that the duchy was more than ever dependent upon Venice. The republic accordingly again included the two regents in the treaties of peace which she made with Alfonso I of Naples and Mohammed II in 1450 and 1451 —the last agreement which she concluded with the Turks before Constantinople fell.

In 1452 the little duke died, and a disputed succession at once ensued. Had females been allowed to succeed, the next-of-kin was the boy duke’s aunt, Adriana, wife of Domenico Sommaripa, son of the baron of Andros, and it had been stipulated in her marriage-contract, that if her brother Giacomo II died without heirs, she should succeed him. But there was already a precedent in the Crispo dynasty for the exclusion of women, and this afforded a pretext to the two regents, old William Crispo of Anaphe, the late duke’s great-uncle, and Francesco of Santorin, his cousin, for claiming the duchy as the nearest agnates. At first, the Venetian Government, by a decree of March 1452, excluded both these rival candidates, and it might have been possible for the Sommaripa family, had they taken the trouble to canvass at once in person at Venice, to secure the succession. But William Crispo, though he was old, was ambitious; he had twice acted as regent of the duchy, and was in no mood to end his days in the castle which he had built on his island of Anaphe, the most remote of all the Cyclades. He came to terms with his nephew Francesco, which seemed to be favourable to both of them. He was to be duke for the rest of his life; and, as he had only one legitimate child, and that a daughter, the duchy was to pass at his death to his nephew, his daughter was to inherit distant Anaphe, while lands and female serfs in Naxos were the portion of his bastard Giacomo. Civil war was, above all else, to be avoided, for by this time the Turks were masters of Constantinople, and a scare of Turkish arid Catalan corsairs had lately frightened the islanders, who fled in numbers at the bad news from the great city. Accordingly, before the end of 1453, William II was proclaimed duke: and though Venice cited him to appear before the senate to answer the plaint of the Sommaripa, she at last wisely acquiesced in the succession of so experienced a man, who was ready to place his naval resources at her disposal, and allowed his chancellor to accompany her fleet. The domineering dowager, Francesca, who had so long exercised influence in the affairs of the duchy, had now retired to her native lagoons, so that there was no one at the ducal court to dispute his supremacy. The memory of the Duchess Francesca is, however, still preserved at Naxos by the little church of S. Antonio on the shore, part of the monastery which she had built, and which she bestowed on the Knights of St John in 1452, in order that she might obtain the jubilee indulgence of the anno santo, which Pope Nicholas V had proclaimed two years before. From that time Naxos became one of the bailiwicks of the Order, paying no less than 51,000 florins a year to the grand­master at Rhodes. The arms of the Knights still adorn the little church; on the right of the altar are the tomb and escutcheon of Giovanni Crispo, who was commander of the Order; and hard by are the remains of the arsenal, where they kept some half-dozen galleys. It was, indeed, the era of pious foundations in Naxos. This was not the only church built by the Duchess Francesca, and the piety of her son, Duke Jacopo II and his wife is said to have been recorded by their armorial bearings on the church of St Elias.

During the reign of Duke William II. occurred one of those tremendous phenomena which have conferred world­wide notoriety upon an island of the Cyclades. For more than seven centuries, ever since the year 726, the volcano of Santorini had been silent, though the lava rocks and the strong wine may have reminded the islanders of its origin. But, in 1457, the sea murmured as if in agony, the rocks of Old Kaymdne, “the Burnt Island” which had arisen in the harbour 200 years before Christ, were cleft asunder with a groan, and a fresh mass of rock, black as a coal, was thrown up from the deep to fill the gap. The “birth of this memorable monster”, the third accretion to the islet, was commemorated in a set of detestable Latin hexameters inscribed on a slab of marble at the castle of Skaros and addressed to Francesco Crispo, “true descendant of heroes” who was at that time baron of Santorin and who was soon to be Duke of Naxos, and two centuries later the offspring of this upheaval could be clearly distinguished by its burning sand from the older portions of the “burnt” rock. For more than a hundred years no further eruption disturbed the “magnanimous” rulers of Santorini.

But the political cataclysms of the time were more serious than those of nature. It was reserved for old William of Naxos to witness the disappearance of one Christian state after another before the advancing Moslem. In the year of his accession the Byzantine Empire had fallen; in his reign fell, too, the Byzantine principality in the Morea, the Florentine duchy of Athens, and, still nearer home, the island state which the Genoese Gattilusii had ruled for over a century in Lesbos. Of all these calamities, the fall of the Gattilusii must have affected him most, for his family was connected with them by ties of matrimony, and when Dorino Gattilusio was driven by the Turks from Aenos, he settled in exile at Naxos, and married the grand-niece of the duke.

It was now, too, that the islands of Skyros, Skopelos, and Skiathos offered themselves to the Venetians. More clearly even than their fellows of the Northern Sporades, the islanders of the Cyclades saw that Venice was now their only possible protection against the Turk —for what would the 2000 horsemen of the duchy avail against the hosts of Islam? On her side, Venice did not forget “the Duke of Naxos, his nobles and their men, with their places and all that they have”, in the treaty which she made with Mohammed II in 1454, and which specially exempted them from “tribute or any other service,” and gave them the status of Venetians,with the right to hoist the lion banner of St Mark from their castles. Yet the duchy was only saved by one of those sudden storms so common in the Aegean from an attack by a large Turkish fleet under Junis Beg in the very next year—an attack justified in the eyes of the irate sultan by the hospitality and shelter which pirates had received in the harbours of Naxos, Paros, and Rheneia. Warned by the fate of the Lesbians, and by a fresh Turkish raid, the duke thought it advisable to ensure his possessions by paying tribute to the all-powerful Mohammed. He felt himself terribly isolated from the rest of Christendom since the Turkish conquest of the Greek continent; he must have realised that sooner or later a similar fate awaited his own dominions, and that the highest form of practical statesmanship was to supplement the paper safeguards of Turco-Venetian treaties by the more durable cash nexus with the sultan.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE DUCHY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO (1463-1566)