MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER II.

THE FRANKISH CONQUEST (1204-1207)

When, in October 1204, the Crusaders and their Venetian allies sat down at Constantinople to partition the Byzantine Empire, they paid as little heed as any modern congress of diplomatists to the doctrine of nationalities, or to the wishes of the peoples whose fate hung upon their decisions. It had been agreed by a preliminary compact, that a fourth part of the Byzantine dominions should be first set aside to form the new Latin Empire of Romania, of which Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was elected Emperor. The remaining three-fourths were then to be divided in equal shares between the Venetian Republic and the Crusaders, whose leader was Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, the rival of Baldwin for the throne of the East. The Greek provinces in Asia and “the isle of Greece”, as the French chronicler calls the Peloponnese, had originally been intended as the portion of the unsuccessful competitor, who was to do homage to the emperor for his dominions. But this arrangement did not suit the plans of the crusading chief, who wished to exchange the promised land of Asia Minor for a compact extent of territory nearer home. His marriage with the Dowager Empress Margaret, widow of Isaac II, and daughter of the King of Hungary, made him the more desirous to be established somewhere in the Balkan peninsula, within easier reach of her native land. His brother, Rainer, had received from Manuel I, twenty-five years before, the title of King of Salonica, after his marriage with that emperor’s daughter Maria, and the marquis now sought to convert his dead brother’s empty title into a living reality. Baldwin I was, however, in no mood to accept an arrangement which effectually severed the connection between the Empire of Romania and Greece proper at the very outset. He had actually occupied Salonica, and civil war menaced the Latin dominion in the Levant before its foundations had been securely laid. But the intervention of the old doge Dandolo, assisted by influential nobles of the crusading army, men like Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona, the Burgundian Othon de la Roche, the Fleming Jacques d’Avesnes, and Guillaume de Champlitte, styled “of Champagne”, who are described as being “most highly esteemed in the councils of the marquis”, succeeded in preventing this catastrophe. Boniface took an oath of allegiance to the Latin emperor for his kingdom of Salonica, which was to include a large part of Greece, as yet unconquered. “I am your man in respect of it”, he said, “and I hold it from you”.

The deed of partition, which was obviously based on the last commercial treaty between Venice and the Emperor Alexios III, assigned to Boniface and his army of Crusaders in Greece “the district of Larissa, the province of Wallachia (i.e. Thessaly), with the private and monastic property which they contained, the estates of the ex-Empress Euphrosyne, viz., Vessena (near Pelion), Pharsala, Domokó, Ravenika, Upper and Lower Halmyros, and Demetrias”. It also awarded them “the territory of Neopatras” (the modern Hypate), Velestino, the village near the modern battlefield, and “the district of Athens with the territory of Megara”. But the Venetians, with their shrewd commercial instincts and their much more intimate knowledge of the country, had secured in the partition treaty all the best harbours, islands, and markets in the Levant. Their share included in the Peloponnese “the province of Lacedaemonia, Kalavryta, the districts of Patras and Methone with all their appurtenances, viz., the territory of the Branas family, the territory of the Cantacuzene family, and the towns belonging to Princess Irene, daughter of Alexios III”. In Epiros the republic had obtained “Nikopolis, with the territory of Arta”; in Aetolia “Acheloos and Anatoliko”. The Ionian islands of Corfù, Cephalonia, Zante, and Leukas had also fallen to her share. Oreos in the north, and Karystos in the south, of Euboea were to belong to Venice; in the Saronic Gulf, Aegina and “Culuris”, as Salamis was described in the partition treaty, were marked as hers; and finally, “the province of Sunium with the Cyclades”, among which Andros, and perhaps Naxos, are specially mentioned, rounded off the Venetian possessions. In addition, the Marquis of Montferrat, by a solemn “deed of Refutation”, signed August 12, 1204, had sold Crete, which had been “given or promised” to him by Alexios IV during his stay at Corfù fifteen months earlier, to the Venetians for 1000 marks of silver down and the promise of possessions in the western part of the empire sufficient to bring him in an income of 10,000 gold hyperpers (£4480). The only items of the emperor’s share which concern our subject are the islands of Lemnos, Tenos, and Skyros; the rest of his portion was outside the limits of Greece proper.

Besides these territorial acquisitions, the careful republic had stipulated that all the commercial privileges which she had enjoyed in the time of the Byzantine Empire should be continued to her. Thus, the Venetian lion had secured the lion’s share. Well might the doge describe himself, as he did for the next century and a half, “ruler of one quarter and half a quarter of the whole Empire of Romania”. Long after that ephemeral empire had fallen, the Venetians kept their hold on the Levant, and today many a fortress, from Candia to Chalcis, from Nauplia to Corfù, preserves on its walls the winged lion of the evangelist. But, for the moment, the lion had obtained more than he could digest. Imposing as the Venetian share looked on paper, much of it required to be conquered. Besides the places which were still occupied by the Byzantine garrisons or by local Greek magnates, Corfù was in the hands of the Genoese pirate Vetrano, while Zante and Cephalonia belonged to Count Maio, or Matteo, Orsini. In short, it soon became evident, that the allies had partitioned the empire much as mediaeval popes drew lines of demarcation on the map of Africa.

Having settled his differences with the Emperor Baldwin, Boniface set out in the autumn of 1204 to conquer his Greek dominions. The new King of Salonica belonged to a family which was no stranger to the ways of the Orient. One of his brothers, as we saw, had married the daughter of the Emperor Manuel I. Another brother and a nephew of Boniface were kings of Jerusalem, a vain dignity which has descended from them, together with the marquisate of Montferrat, to the present Italian dynasty. Married to the affable widow of the Emperor Isaac II, Boniface was a sympathetic figure to the Greeks, who had speedily flocked in numbers to his side, and several of them accompanied him on his march through Greece, among them his stepson, Manuel Angelos, and a much more dangerous member of the same family, the bastard Michael, first cousin of Isaac II. With the King of Salonica there went, too, a motley crowd of Crusaders in quest of fiefs, men of many nationalities, Lombards, Flemings, Frenchmen, and Germans. There were Guillaume de Champlitte, Viscount of Dijon, who derived his name from the village of Champlitte in Franche-Comté, but who was surnamed le Champenois after his grandfather, the Count of Champagne; Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble, Ponce de la Roche-sur-Ognon, a castle which still commands the rolling plains of the Haute-Saône; Jacques d’Avesnes, son of a Flemish Crusader who had been at the siege of Acre, and his two nephews, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer; Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, a Rhenish warrior who had given the signal for setting fire to Constantinople; the Marquis Guido Pallavicini, youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma who had gone to Greece because at home every common man could hale him before the courts; Thomas de Stromoncourt, and Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona. To record his deeds, the king of Salonica took with him Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a troubadour from Provence, who afterwards boasted in one of the letters in verse, which he addressed to his patron, that he “had helped to conquer the empire of the East and the kingdom of Salonica, the island of Pelops, and the duchy of Athens”.

There was one man still left in Greece who might have been expected to offer a determined resistance to the invaders. Léon Sgourós, the proud lord of Nauplia, Argos, and Corinth, was the strongest of the native archons, but he showed more desire to profit by his country’s misfortunes than to fight against its enemies. He had long cast covetous glances at Athens, whence he had once already levied blackmail, and he availed himself of the general confusion, consequent on the invasion of the capital by the Franks, to attack the Athenians by land and sea. The noble metro­politan proved himself at this crisis a worthy representative of those classic heroes whose lives he had so carefully studied; and his brother, the historian Nicetas, might well interrupt his stilted narrative to express his pride at being the near kinsman of such a man. From the sacred rock of the Acropolis he solemnly warned the selfish magnate of the double iniquity of a Greek fighting against Greeks, a Christian against Christians. He made a personal appeal to an assailant, whom he had counted among his spiritual children, who had never refused him the titles of father and pastor. But the archon of Nauplia was unmoved by these spiritual arguments; he cynically replied that, at the time when the capital of the empire was in the hands of the foe, it behoved everyone to look after his own interests; and, as an excuse for his attack, demanded the surrender of an Athenian youth of notoriously bad character. The metropolitan refused to give up even the least worthy of his flock, and defended the walls of the Acropolis with engines of war. His material proved better than his spiritual weapons, and Sgourós had to content himself with setting fire to the houses of the town, and carrying off a nephew of the metropolitan as a page, whom he afterwards murdered in a fit of passion for his clumsiness in breaking a glass cup. From Athens he marched upon Thebes, which, though a stronger position, afforded an instance of the truth of Thucydides’ saying, that it is not walls, but the men who man them that make a city. The chief town in Greece yielded to the first attack, and the victor continued his march unchecked to Larissa. There he met the fugitive Emperor Alexios III, who bestowed upon him the hand of his daughter Eudocia, a lady who had already been thrice married to one monarch after another.

It was at this moment that Boniface and his army traversed the classic vale of Tempe and entered the fertile plain of Thessaly. At the news of his approach Sgourós —“Lasgur,” as the Franks called him— retreated to Thermopylae, allowing the invaders to occupy Larissa. The king of Salonica bestowed that ancient city upon a Lombard noble, who henceforth styled himself Guglielmo de Larsa from his Thessalian fief, and who also received the important town of Halmyros where the Venetian and Pisan colonies continued to flourish. Velestino, the ancient Pherae, the scene of the legend of Admetos and Alcestis, fell to the share of Count Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, whose name must have proved a stumbling-block to his Thessalian vassals. The army then took the usual route by way of Pharsala and Domokó (names familiar in the ancient and modern history of Greek warfare), down to Lamia, and thence across the Trachinian plain to Thermopylae, where Sgourós was awaiting it. But the memories of Leonidas failed to inspire the archon of Nauplia to follow his example. Niketas tells us that the mere sight of the Latin knights in their coats of mail sufficed to make him flee straight to his own fastness of Akrocorinth, leaving the pass undefended. Conscious of its strength,for Thermopylae must have been far more of a defile then than now, Boniface resolved to secure it permanently against attack. He therefore invested the Marquis Guido Pallavicini, nicknamed by the Greeks “Marchesopoul”o, with the fief of Boudonitza, which commanded the other end of the pass. Thus arose the famous marquisate of Boudonitza, which was destined to play an important part in the Frankish history of Greece, and which, after a continuous existence of over two centuries, as guardian of the northern marches, has left a memory of its fallen greatness in the ruins of the castle and chapel of its former lords, of whose descendants, the Zorzi of Venice, there are still living some thirty representatives in that city. Following the present carriage-road from Lamia to the Corinthian Gulf, Boniface established another defensive post at the pass of Gravia, so famous centuries afterwards in the War of Independence, conferring it as a fief on the two brothers, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer. At the foot of Parnassos, on the site of the ancient Amphissa, he next founded the celebrated barony of Salona, which lasted almost as long as the marquisate of Boudonitza. Upon the almost Cyclopean stones of the classic Acropolis, which Philip of Macedon had destroyed fifteen centuries before, Thomas de Stromoncourt built himself the fortress, of which the majestic ruins, perhaps the finest Frankish remains in Greece, still stand among the corn-fields on the hill above the modern town. According to the local tradition, the name of Salona, which the place still bears in common parlance, despite the usual official efforts to revive the classical terminology, is derived from the King of Salonica, its second founder. The lord of Salona soon extended his sway down to the harbour of Galaxidi, and the barony became so important that two at least of the house of Stromoncourt struck coins of their own, which are still preserved.

Boniface next marched into Boeotia, where the people, glad to be relieved from the oppression of Sgourós, at once submitted. Thebes joyfully opened her gates, and then the invaders pursued their way to Athens. The metropolitan thought it useless to defend the city, and a Frankish guard was soon stationed on the Acropolis. The Crusaders had no respect for the great cathedral. To these soldiers of fortune the classic glories of the Parthenon appealed as little as the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. The rich treasury of the cathedral was plundered, the holy vessels were melted down, the library which the metropolitan had collected was dispersed. Unable to bear the sight, Akominatos, like his colleague of Thebes, quitted the scene of his long labours, and after wandering about for a time in Salonica and Euboea, perhaps in the hope of coming to terms with the Papal Legate, finally settled down in the island of Keos (modern Kea), one of the eleven suffragan bishoprics, which had, in happier times, owned his benevolent sway. From there he could at least see the coast of Attica, that Attica which he had once described as “a Scythian wilderness”, but which he now lamented as “a garden of Eden”.

Thebes with Boeotia, and Athens with Attica and the Megarid were bestowed by the King of Salonica upon his trusty comrade in arms, Othon de la Roche, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle the dispute between him and the Emperor Baldwin, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between Boniface’s daughter and Baldwin’s brother and successor on the throne. Thus, in the words of a monkish chronicler, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans”. The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had thus succeeded to the glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself Sire d’Athenes, or Dominus Athenarum, in official documents, which his Greek subjects magnified into “the great Lord”, and Dante, who had probably heard that such had been the title of the first Frankish ruler of Athens, transferred it by a poetic anachronism to Pisistratos. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to the Lord of Athens on the part of the Greeks. Later Venetian writers, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story, that the Athenians sent an embassy to offer their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated, “not without bloodshed, by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche”.

Meanwhile, the soldierly Fleming, Jacques d’Avesnes, leaving the main body of the Franks, had received the submission of Euboea, an island where they had already stopped on their way to Constantinople. After building a fortress in the middle of the Euripos and garrisoning the place, d’Avesnes hastened to join the King of Salonica and the Lord of Athens in their attack upon the strongholds of Sgourós in the Peloponnese. The Franks routed the Greek army at the Isthmus, and, while Boniface marched on to besiege Nauplia, Jacques d’Avesnes and Othon de la Roche attacked Corinth. The lower town, though strongly fortified, was taken by escalade, but Akrocorinth proved, in the hands of Sgourós, an impregnable fortress. In vain the Franks built two castles to coerce it into submission, one on the hill to the south of Akrocorinth, which they called Montesquiou, a name now corrupted into the modern Penteskouphia (“Five Caps”), the other to the north. Sgourds succeeded in making a night sortie and in surprising the Franks in the lower town; many of the besiegers were slain, and their leader, d’Avesnes, was wounded.

But the Greek archon’s resolute defence of Akrocorinth could not prevent the conquest of the Peloponnese, for the attack upon that peninsula came from a wholly unexpected quarter. It chanced that, a little before the capture of Constantinople, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, nephew of the Marshal of Champagne and quaint chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, had set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine. On his arrival in Syria, he heard of the great achievements of the Crusaders, and resolved without loss of time to join them at Constantinople. But his ship was driven out of her course by a violent tempest, and Geoffroy was forced to take shelter in the harbour of Methone on the coast of Messenia. During the winter of 1204, which he spent at that spot, he received an invitation from a local magnate to join him in an attack on the lands of the neighbouring Greeks. Villehardouin, nothing loth, placed his sword at the disposal of the Greek traitor, and success crowned the arms of these unnatural allies. But the Greek archon died, and his son, more patriotic, or more prudent than the father, repudiated the dangerous alliance with the Frankish stranger. But it was too late. Villehardouin had discovered the fatal secret that the Greeks of the Peloponnese were an unwarlike race, and that their land would fall an easy conquest to a resolute band of Latins. At this moment tidings reached him that Boniface was besieging Nauplia, and he at once set out on a six days’ journey across a hostile country to seek his aid. Boniface endeavoured to detain him in his own service by the offer of lands and possessions, but in the camp Villehardouin found an old friend and fellow-countryman, Guillaume de Champlitte, who was willing to assist him, for Villehardouin came from a village of Champagne, in the domain of Champlitte’s ancestors, a place between Bar and Arcis-sur-Aube. He described to Champlitte the richness of the land which men called “the Morea”—a term which now occurs for almost the first time in history, and which seems to have been originally applied to the coast of Elis and thence extended to the whole peninsula, just as the name Italy, originally confined to a part of Calabria, has similarly spread over the whole country. He professed his willingness to recognise Champlitte as his liege lord in return for his aid, and Boniface finally consented to their undertaking. With a hundred knights and some men-at-arms, the two friends rode out from the camp before Nauplia to conquer the ancient land which had once given birth to Spartan men.

The fate of the Morea, like that of Saxon England, was decided by a single pitched battle. The city of Patras was captured at the first assault, whereupon the castle at once surrendered on terms; from the defenceless town of Andravida, the capital of Elis, the magnates and the com­munity issued forth, with the priests bearing the cross and the sacred icons, and did homage to Champlitte on condition that he respected their property; the archons of the rest of Elis and of Mesarea, “the middle land”, as Arkadia was then called, followed the example of Andravida; the low-walled fortress of Pontikokastro, or “Mouse Castle”, the ruins of which still stand on the hill above the harbour of Katakolo, was easily taken and garrisoned. The tower of “the giants” at Arkadia (or Kyparissia) and the castle of Kalamata did indeed hold out for a time; but of the two forts on either side of the Messenian promontory, Modon was after all these years still lying deserted, while the garrison of Coron soon surrendered when their houses and property were guaranteed to them. The more patriotic and energetic of the natives did, indeed, succeed in collecting an army some four to six thousand strong, consisting of the Greeks of Nikli, Veligosti, and Lacedaemonia, the warlike Slavonic tribe of Melings, who had been so troublesome to the old Imperial Government, and a detachment under Michael Angelos, who had quitted Boniface and had established himself as Lord, or Despot, of Epiros, and who crossed over the Gulf of Corinth to attack the common enemy. The Hastings of the Morea was fought in the olive-grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia. The little Frankish force, numbering between five and seven hundred men, completely routed the over-confident Greeks; the Despot retired to his mountains, and one place after another fell into the hands of the Franks. One heroic warrior, Doxapatres, seems to have held manfully the small but strongly situated castle of Araklovon, which commanded a defile of the Arkadian mountains, and his rare heroism, dismissed in a few lines of the Greek Chronicle, made a lasting impression on romantic minds. The compilers of the Aragonese version say that no man could lift his mace, and that his cuirass weighed more than 150 pounds; a local legend has kept alive the splendid courage of his daughter, who allowed herself to be hurled to death from the castle tower rather than become the conqueror’s mistress; and a modern Greek dramatist has made Maria Doxapatre the heroine of one of his tragedies. Though the three strongholds of Sgourós, Corinth, Nauplia, and the Larissa of Argos, still held out; though Veligosti, Nikli, and Lacedaemonia were unconquered; though the isolated rock of Monemvasia, whose sailors had often manned the imperial navies, whose soldiers had repelled a Latin host before, still preserved its traditional liberties; though the Tzakones of Leonidi and the Slav tribe of Melings in the fortresses of Taygetos as yet acknowledged no master, Innocent III, not without reason, already styled Champlitte “Prince of all Achaia”.

The new prince rewarded Villehardouin, the real author of this daring scheme of conquest, with the town of Coron. But, at this point, a new competitor appeared on the scene. It will be remembered, that, by the deed of partition, large portions of the Peloponnese, including the haven of Modon, had fallen to the share of Venice. So vast were the dominions which had been assigned to the republic, that she had been slower than the other parties to the deed in occupying her portion of the former Byzantine Empire. Many places, indeed, she never effectively occupied at all. But the twin stations of Modon and Coron were valuable stepping-stones on the way to Crete and Egypt, while there was always danger that the former, in foreign hands, might once more become a refuge of corsairs. Accordingly, in 1206, a fleet was despatched under Premarini and the son of Dandolo, which, after a struggle captured both places from the weak garrisons left there by the Franks. Opinions were divided as to the policy of maintaining the two places; but Dandolo’s son offered to keep them up at his own cost, and thus saved them for the republic. The walls of Modon were again destroyed, as a measure of precaution; but Coron seems to have been made a provisioning station, where all passing ships could receive a month’s rations, a custom maintained, we are told, when the place became a regular Venetian colony. Thus began the long Venetian occupation of these two spots, the first territorial acquisition of the republic in the Greek peninsula, which came to be “the receptacle and special nest of all our galleys, ships, and vessels on their way to the Levant”, as a Venetian document quaintly says, and about which there is a whole literature in the Venetian archives.

Thus, almost without effort, a small body of Lombards, Burgundians, and Germans had overrun continental Greece and the Morea. The local leaders had, with one or two exceptions, preferred to cringe to the conquerors rather than to fight; there was no hope of succour from other nations; the people were disused to warfare, oppressed by burdens, and indifferent, or even agreeable, to a change of masters. It was remarked by a Byzantine historian that the European Greeks were weak defenders of fortresses, and ready to fall at the feet of every tyrant, and in the Morea fortresses were few. Moreover, the conquerors seem to have shown a great amount of tact towards the conquered, when once they had convinced the latter that they had come to stay. Thus, Champlitte promised the magnates of Elis and Arcadia to respect the privileges which they had received from the Byzantine Emperors and to recognise their titles to their estates, while the residue, consisting of the old imperial domains and other vacant lands, should be divided among the Franks. Six Greek archons were accordingly invited to join the same number of Franks in a preliminary commission for the purpose of defining these lands and liberties of the native and the Frankish aristocracy. Still, the poet of the Conquest, Rambaud de Vaqueiras, was scarcely exaggerating, when he wrote that neither Alexander nor Charlemagne had achieved such feats as the men of the Fourth Crusade.

But fortune, so favourable to the Franks in Greece, had already deserted them in Macedonia. The first Latin emperor, within a year of his coronation, had fallen into the hands of the Bulgarian Tsar, whose aid the Macedonian Greeks had invoked, and vanished in the dungeons of the Bulgarian capital. Boniface, on hearing the news, had abandoned the siege of Nauplia to defend his Macedonian dominions from this new enemy, and had endeavoured to strengthen the Frankish cause by doing homage for his kingdom to the new Emperor Henry and by bestowing upon him the hand of his daughter, a union arranged by his trusty friend, Othon de la Roche, Lord of Athens. But the chivalrous King of Salonika shortly afterwards met his fate in an obscure skirmish with the Bulgarians, and his kingdom passed, at this critical moment, to his infant son Demetrios, under guardianship of Oberto, the ambitious Count of Biandrate, a town between Vercelli and Novara.

Meanwhile, in three other directions, the Byzantine monarchy had shown signs of revival. At Nice, the scene of the famous council, Theodore Liskaris, son-in-law of the Emperor Alexios III, founded an empire which, fifty-five years later, absorbed the ephemeral Latin realm of Romania; at Trebizond, on the shores of the Black Sea, another Alexios, the grandson of the Emperor Andronikos I, established another empire, which survived the Turkish capture of Constantinople; while in Europe, the bastard Michael Angelos, first cousin of the Emperor Isaac II, created a Greek principality, the Despotat of Epiros, Hellas, or Arta, as it was variously called, which played a great part in the history of Frankish Greece. The founder of this new Greek dynasty in Epiros was no ordinary man; son of a former governor of that province, he had been given as a hostage in earlier life to the Emperor Barbarossa, when that monarch was on his way to the Holy Land, and he had received the post of governor of the Themes of Hellas and the Peloponnese shortly before Constantinople fell. After that catastrophe, he had attached himself, as we saw, to Boniface in the hope of obtaining some advantage from him. The discontent of the Greeks of the province of Nikopolis, which included Acarnania, Aetolia and Epiros, with the tyranny of their Byzantine governor, Senacherim, at this moment reached his ears; he slipped away from the Frankish camp, went to Arta, and, finding the governor dead, married his widow, a daughter of the great family of Melissenos, and established himself as an independent Greek sovereign, whose sway extended from his capital of Arta to Joannina in the north, to Naupaktos on the Gulf of Corinth in the south, and apparently included the island of Leukas in the Ionian sea. Ere long, Durazzo became his northern, and part of Thessaly his eastern, boundary, and he succeeded in enlisting the sympathies of the three different races: Greeks, Albanians, and Wallachians, who formed the population of his dominions. The Greeks naturally welcomed a man whose wife was a native of the country and whose father had been its governor. The Albanians were ready to serve a ruler who paid them well and regarded their predatory habits as a positive benefit when they were exercised at the cost of his foes. The Wallachians of Thessaly sought protection against the Franks, and all three races recognised his ability and experience. Moreover, the machinery of the Byzantine administration lay ready to his hand. There was merely a change of name but not of system, except in so far as the taxes were now expended in the country instead of being sent to the distant capital. The configuration of Epiros has always made it a difficult land to conquer; and in the first years of his reign, Michael’s enemies were busy elsewhere. He felt so secure, that he crossed into the Peloponnese to assist the Greeks in their stand against the Franks at Koundoura, as we saw above; even though he was defeated with considerable loss, he accepted the damnosa hereditas of Nauplia, Argos, and Corinth, when, in 1208, Sgourós at last in despair leapt on horseback from Akrocorinth and perished a formless mass of broken bones on the rocks below. Henceforth, Michael was the sole champion of Hellenism in Europe; he was styled “the lord of Corinth”, and his brother Theodore governed the heritage of Sgourds in his name.

The Greek islands had been, for the most part, allotted to Venice by the partition treaty, the Cyclades among them. But the Venetian Government, with its usual commercial astuteness, soon came to the conclusion that the conquest of that large group of islands would too severely tax the resources of the state. It was therefore decided to leave the task of occupying them to private citizens, who would plant Venetian colonies in the Aegean, and live on friendly terms with the republic. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that generation, and it so happened that at that very moment the Venetian colony at Constantinople contained the very man for such an undertaking. The old doge Dandolo had taken with him on the crusade his nephew, Marco Sanudo, a bold warrior and a skilful diplomatist, who had signalised himself by negotiating the sale of Crete to the republic, and was then filling the post of judge in what we should now call the Consular Court at Constantinople. On hearing the decision of his government, Sanudo quitted the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, to whom he promised fiefs in the El Dorado of the Aegean, equipped eight galleys at his own cost, and sailed with them to carve out a duchy for himself in the islands of the Archipelago. There was no one to dispute his claim, though Léon Gabalas, the Greek archon of Rhodes and Karpathos, styled himself “Lord of the Cyclades”, and even “Caesar.” Seventeen islands speedily submitted, and at one spot alone did Sanudo meet with any real resistance. Naxos has always been the pearl of the Aegean: poets placed there the beautiful myth of Ariadne and Dionysos; Herodotos describes it as “excelling the other islands in prosperity”; even today, when so many of the Cyclades are barren rocks, the orange and lemon groves of Naxos entitle it, even more than Zante, to the proud name of “flower of the Levant”. This was the island which now opposed the Venetian filibuster, as centuries before it had opposed the Persians. A body of Genoese pirates had occupied the Byzantine castle before Sanudo’s arrival; but that shrewd leader, who knew the value of rashness in an emergency, burnt his galleys, and then bade his companions conquer or die. The castle surrendered after a five weeks’ siege, so that by 1207 Sanudo and his comrades had conquered a duchy which lasted between three and four centuries. His duchy included, besides Naxos, where he fixed his capital, the famous marble island of Paros; Antiparos, with its curious grotto; Kimolos, celebrated for its fuller’s earth; Melos, whose sad fortunes had furnished Thucydides with one of the most curious passages in his history; Amorgos, the home of Simonides, Ios or Nio, the supposed tomb of Homer: Kythnos, Sikinos, and Siphnos; and Syra, destined at a much later date to be the most important of all the Cyclades. True to his promise, Sanudo divided some of the islands among his companions; thus Marino Dandolo, another nephew of the great doge, who had captured Andros, held that fine island, the second largest of the group, as a sub-fief of his cousin’s duchy; Leonardo Foscolo received on similar terms the distant island of Anaphe; the volcanic island of Santorini, as the classic Thera was called in the Middle Ages, from the martyrdom on its rocks of one of the many St Irenes in the Greek calendar, fell to the share of Jacopo Barozzi, and Astypalaia, or Stampalia, to that of the Quirini with whose name it is still associated in that of a street, a bridge, and a palace at Venice. The brothers Andrea and Geremia Ghisi, both enterprising men, not only acquired Tenos and Myconos, but extended their conquests to the northern Sporades, occupying Skyros, Skopelos, and Skiathos, regardless of the fact that two of these islands Tenos and Skyros, belonged to the Emperor of Romania, according to the deed of partition. With the aid of Domenico Michieli and Pietro Giustiniani, they added to their island domain little Seriphos, the Botany Bay of the early Roman Empire, and Kea, the refuge of Akominatos, which a few years earlier had repulsed the Italian tax-gatherers from Euboea. Patmos, doubtless by reason of its religious associations, was not only allowed to be independent, but the monks received many privileges from the Venetians. Lemnos, which had been included in the imperial share at the partition, became the fief of the Navigajosi, who received from the emperor the title of Grand Duke, borne in Byzantine days by the Imperial Lord High Admiral. The remote island of Kythera, in later times strangely reckoned as one of the Ionian group, was claimed by Marco Venier, on the ground that the birthplace of Venus belonged of right to a family which boasted its descent from her, while the Viari became marquises of tiny Cerigotto.

The long island of Euboea, which belongs rather to continental Greece than to the Archipelago, had various vicissitudes. It had been taken in 1205, as we saw, by Jacques d’Avesnes, who was too much occupied with the siege of Corinth to concern himself greatly with the island, and as he died without heirs a few years later, he founded no dynasty in Negroponte, merely bestowing lands there upon the Templars for the repose of his soul. Boniface, however, divided Euboea into three large fiefs, which were granted to three gentlemen of Verona: Ravano dalle Carceri, his relative Giberto, and Pegoraro dei Pegorari. The Dalle Carceri family, long ago extinct, was at that time influential at Verona. One of the two town councillors in 1178 was a member of the clan; and, of Ravano’s two brothers, Redondello was Podestà in 1210, and built the old wooden Casa dei Mercanti, as a modern inscription on the later building still reminds the traveller, while Henry was bishop of Mantua. Ravano himself had rendered signal service to the King of Salonika by assisting Marco Sanudo in arranging the sale of Crete, while the names of the other two appear as witnesses to the deed of sale. Ignoring the assignment of Oreos and Karystos to Venice by the treaty of partition, Boniface invested Pegoraro with the north, Giberto with the centre, and Ravano with the south of the island, and the three lords assumed the name of terzieri, terriers, or triarchs, of Euboea. With the southern barony of Karystos seems to have been united the island of Aegina, likewise on paper a Venetian possession. Ere long, by the return of Pegoraro to Italy and the death of Giberto, Ravano became sole lord of Euboea.

The republic adopted in the case of Corfù much the same plan as that which she employed in the Cyclades. It was, however, first necessary to dislodge the Genoese pirate, Leone Vetrano, who had made the island his headquarters a few years before the Crusade. It is not clear whether his men were actually occupying the castle, or whether the islanders had temporarily reverted to the Byzantine Empire at the time when the Crusaders halted there on their way to Constantinople. But in either case the hardy Genoese captain, as his compatriots called him, had no intention of abandoning an island at once so rich and so splendidly situated for the purposes of his profession. To the Venetians, on the other hand, Corfù was naturally a position of import­ance, the first link in the chain of their newly-acquired Greek possessions; least of all did they desire it to fall into the hands of a pirate who was, what was worse, a Genoese. Accordingly, the fleet which bore the first Latin patriarch to Constantinople in 1205 formally took possession of Corfù in the name of the republic, after considerable resistance on the part of the inhabitants. A Venetian bailie was left in the island, which was placed at first under the direct authority of the Commune of Venice. But scarcely had the fleet sailed than Vetrano reappeared upon the scene; the Corfiotes gladly gave him provisions and admitted his men, thereby calling down upon themselves a second Venetian visitation. In 1206, a large fleet under the command of the old doge Dandolo’s son arrived in the harbour; the castle, in spite of a spirited defence, was taken by escalade, and the capture of Vetrano on the high seas and his execution at Corfù, together with some sixty of his partisans, was intended as a salutary lesson to the rest of the islanders. The castle, whose twin summits gave the island its mediaeval and modern name, was fortified and a governor appointed. But the republic realised, as in the case of the Cyclades, that she had not the requisite strength for the direct government of so troublesome a possession. Accordingly, in 1207, Corfù, together with the islets belonging to it, was transferred to ten Venetian nobles, for themselves and their heirs, on consideration that they maintained the defences and made an annual payment of “500 good gold pieces of the Emperor Manuel”. The republic reserved special trade privileges to her subjects in the colony, and great care was taken to protect the Greeks, who were to be made to swear fealty to her. The colonists were enjoined to exact from the natives no further dues than they had been accustomed to pay in Byzantine times, and pledged themselves to respect the existing rights of the Greek Church. This arrangement, it was fondly hoped, would secure the possession of the island. At any rate, the fate of Vetrano was not without its effect in other parts of the Ionian group. Alarmed at his fellow-pirate’s end on the gallows, Count Maio, or Matthew, Orsini, who ruled over Cephalonia and Zante, discovered that he had qualms about the state of his soul, and, in 1207, placed his territories under the authority of Pope Innocent III, whose interest in Greek affairs strikes every reader of his correspondence. Two years later, however, the count thought it wiser to acknowledge the overlordship of Venice, which accordingly left him in undisturbed possession of his islands, although they were hers by the letter of the partition treaty.

Lastly, there remained to be occupied the largest of all the Greek islands, that of Crete, which Boniface had sold so cheaply to the Venetians. Even before that transaction, the great rivals of Venice, the Genoese, had established a colony there, so that it was clear from the outset that the island would be an apple of discord between the two commercial commonwealths. The Venetians began their occupation by landing a small garrison at Spinalonga in the east of the island; but, before the rest of it could be annexed, a Genoese citizen, Enrico Pescatore, Count of Malta, and one of the most daring seamen of that adventurous age, set foot in Crete, at the instigation of Genoa, and received the homage of the Cretans and the submission of the helpless and isolated Venetian garrison. A larger force was then despatched from Venice, which drove out the Maltese corsair, and appointed Tiepolo as the first Venetian governor, or duke, as he was styled, of Crete. But Venice was not yet to have undisputed possession of her purchase. The Count of Malta appealed, as a faithful son of the Church, to Innocent III; Genoa espoused his cause as her own, and five years elapsed before the count was finally defeated and an armistice with Genoa permitted the Venetians in 1212 to make the first comprehensive attempt at colonising the island and organising its administration. Thus early the merchants of San Marco began to learn the lesson that Crete, though it cost little to buy, was a most expensive possession to maintain.

CHAPTER III

THE ORGANISATION OF THE CONQUEST (1207-1214)