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MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARYA HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)
CHAPTER IIITHE ORGANISATION OF THE CONQUEST (1207-1214)
Having thus described the manner in which the Franks
occupied the various portions of Greece, let us see how they proceeded to
organise their conquests. The usual tendency of the desperately logical Latin
intellect, when brought face to face with a new set of political conditions, is
to frame a paper constitution, absolutely perfect in theory, and absolutely
unworkable in practice. But the French noblemen, whom an extraordinary accident
had converted into Spartan and Athenian law-givers, resisted this temptation,
nor did they seek inspiration from the laws of Solon and Lycurgus. They simply
transplanted the feudal system, to which, as we saw, the Greeks had not been
altogether strangers under the dynasty of the Comneni; and they applied the
legal principles, embodied a century earlier in the famous “Assizes of
Jerusalem”, and much more recently borrowed by Amauri de Lusignan for his
kingdom of Cyprus, to the new Frankish states in Greece. We have, however, a
detailed account of the political organisation of only one of these
principalities, that of Achaia, the largest and the most important at this
stage of Frankish history.
It was not the lot of Champlitte to do more than lay
the foundations of his principality. While he was engaged in this work of
organisation, he received the news that his eldest surviving brother Louis had
died without heirs, an event which necessitated his return to France to claim
his Burgundian inheritance. But before he set out, he appointed a commission,
consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and four or five leading
Greeks, under the presidency of Villehardouin, for the purpose of dividing the
Morea into fiefs, and of assigning these to the members of the conquering force
according to their wealth and the number of their followers. Champlitte
approved the commission’s report, and bestowed upon Villehardouin the baronies
of Kalamata and Arcadia (or Kyparissia) as compensation for the loss of his
original fief of Coron, now in the hands of the Venetians. He then appointed
his nephew Hugh as his deputy or bailie in Achaia, and sailed in 1209 for the
West. But on the journey through Apulia he died, and, as his nephew did not
long survive him, Villehardouin carried on the government as bailie till the
next-of-kin should arrive from France to claim it.
Villehardouin’s first act was to summon a parliament
at Andravida, then the seat of government, where the book, or “register” as the
chronicler calls it, containing the report of the commission was produced.
According to this Achaian Doomsday Book,
twelve baronies, whose number recalls the twelve peers of Charlemagne, had been
created, their holders, with the other lieges, forming a high court, which not
only advised the prince in political matters, but acted as a judicial tribunal
for the decision of feudal questions. In the creation of these twelve baronies,
due regard was paid to the fact that the Franks were a military colony in the
midst of an alien and possibly hostile population, spread over a country
possessing remarkable strategic positions. Later on, after the distribution of
the baronies, strong castles were erected in each, upon some natural coign of
vantage, from which the baron could overawe the surrounding country. The main
object of this system may be seen from the name of the famous Arkadian fortress
of Matagrifon (“Kill-Greek”, the Greeks being usually called Grifon by the French chroniclers), built
near the modern Demetsana by the baron of Akova, Gautier de Rozières, to
protect the rich valley of the Alpheios. The splendid remains of the castle of
Karytaina, the Greek Toledo, which dominates the gorge of that classic river,
which the Franks called Charbon,
still mark the spot where Hugues de Bruyères and his son Geoffrey built a
stronghold out of the ruins of the Hellenic Brenthe to terrify the Slavs of
Skorta, the ancient Gortys, and the special importance of these two baronies
was demonstrated by the bestowal of twenty-four knights’ fees upon the former,
and of twenty-two upon the latter. The castle-crowned hill of Passava, near
Gytheion, so called from the French war-cry “Passe Avant”, still reminds us how
Jean de Neuilly, hereditary marshal of Achaia and holder of four fees, once
watched the restless men of Maina; and, if earthquakes have left no medieval
buildings at Vostitza, the classic Aigion, where Hugues de Lille de Charpigny
received eight knights’ fees, his family name still survives in the village of
Kerpiné, now a station on the funicular railway between Diakophto and
Kalavryta. At Kalavryta itself, Othon de Tournay, and at Chalandritza, to the
south of Patras, Audebert de la Tremouille, scion of a family famous in the
history of France, were established, with twelve and four fiefs respectively.
Veligosti, near Megalopolis, with four, fell to the share of the Belgian
Matthieu de Valaincourt de Mons, and Nikli, near Tegea, with six, to that of
Guillaume de Morlay. Guy de Nivelet kept the Tzakones of Leonidi in check and
watched the plain of Laconia from his barony of Geraki with its six fiefs; and
Gritzena, entrusted to a baron named Luke, with four fiefs depending on it,
guarded the ravines of the mountainous region round Kalamata. Patras became the
barony of Guillaume Aleman, a member of a Provençal family, whose name still
exists at Corfù, and the bold baron did not scruple to build his castle out of
the house and church of the Latin archbishop. Finally, the dozen was completed
by the fiefs of Kalamata and Arcadia, which the bailie had received from
Champlitte. In addition to these twelve temporal peers, there were seven
ecclesiastical barons, whose sees were carved out on the lines of the existing
Greek organisation, and of whom Antelme of Clugny, Latin archbishop of Patras
and primate of Achaia, was the chief. Under him were his six suffragans of
Olena (whose bishop took his title from a small village near the modern Pyrgos,
but who resided at Andravida), Modon, Coron, Veligosti, Amyklai, and
Lacedaemonia. The archbishop received eight knights’ fees, the bishops four
a-piece, and the same number was assigned to each of the three great military
orders of the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St John, and the Templars. The
headquarters of the Teutonic Knights were at Mostenitsa, near Kalamata, while
the Knights of St John were established in the neighbourhood of Modon. When, a
century later, the Templars were dissolved, their possessions in Achaia and
Elis went to the Knights of St John. In Elis, too, was the domain of the
prince, and his usual residence, when he was not at Andravida (or Andreville),
was at Lacedaemonia, or La Crémonie, as the Franks called it. The knights and
esquires who received one fief each, were too numerous for the patience of the
chronicler. The serfs living on the baronies were assigned, like so many
chattels, to their new lords.
After the distribution of the baronies came the assignment
of military service. All the vassals were liable to render four months’ service
in the field, and to spend four months in garrison (from which the prelates and
the three military orders were alone exempted); and even during the remaining
four months, which they could pass at home, they were expected to hold
themselves ready to obey the summons of the prince, who could fix what months
of the year he chose for the performance of their military duties. After the
age of sixty (or, according to a less probable reading, forty), personal
service was no longer required, but the vassal must send his son, or, if he had
no son, someone else in his stead. Those vassals who held four fiefs, the
bannerets as they were called, had each to appear with one knight and twelve
esquires mustered beneath the folds of his banner, while the holder of more
than four was bound to equip, for every additional fief that he held, two
mounted esquires or one knight; every knight or esquire, “sergeants of the
conquest” as they were called, must render service with his own body for his
single fief. Thus, the Franks were on a constant war footing; their whole
organisation was military, a fact which explains the ease with which they held
down the unwarlike Greeks, so many times their superiors in numbers. This
military organisation had, however, as the eminent modern Greek historian
Paparregópoulos has pointed out, the effect of making the Greeks, too, imbibe
in course of time something of the spirit of their conquerors.
Besides the twelve barons and the other lieges, the
ecclesiastical peers had the right of taking part in the proceedings of the
High Court, except when it was sitting to try cases of murder; and the bishop
of Olena, in particular, as being nearest to the capital of Andravida, whither
his residence was ere long transferred, is mentioned by the chronicler as being
present at its deliberations. According to the usual Frankish system, there was
a second court of burgesses, presided over by the prince’s nominee, who bore
the title of viscount. We hear on several occasions of an assembly of the
burgesses in the Chronicle of the Morea, and towards the close of the
Burgundian dynasty at Athens, the viscount is specially mentioned. Before this
lower court came the legal business of plain citizens; and, at least in the
fourteenth century, the prince had two tribunals, at the important towns of
Glarentza and Androusa. Each of the great baronies seems also to have had a
court of its own; we are specially told, on one occasion, how “the elders” of
the barony of Akova were summoned, and how they were bidden to bring “the
minutes” of their proceedings with them. Round the prince there grew up a
hierarchy of great officials, with high-sounding titles, to which the Greeks
had no difficulty in fitting Byzantine equivalents. We hear of the hereditary
marshal; of the chancellor, who presided over the High Court when the prince
wished to argue a case before it, and who represented his master as a plenipotentiary
abroad and signed treaties on his behalf; of the chamberlain; of the great
constable; of the treasurer; and of the inspector of fortifications. The prince
himself bore a sceptre as the insignia of his office, when he presided over the
sessions of the High Court.
We learn from the Book
of the Customs of the Empire of Romania (a codification of the Assizes made
apparently in the first quarter of the fourteenth century under Angevin
auspices and still extant in a Venetian version of a century later) something
about the way in which the feudal system worked in the principality of Achaia.
Society was there composed of six main elements: the prince, the holders of the
twelve great baronies, or bers de terre in feudal parlance; the greater and the lesser vassals (called respectively ligii and homines plani homagii), among whom were some members of the
conquered race; the freemen; and the serfs. The prince, at his accession, had
to swear on the gospels to observe all the franchises and usages of the Empire
of Romania, to which the barons tenaciously held, and then he received the
homage of the barons and the lieges, signified by a kiss, and the oath of his
inferior subjects. The prince and his twelve peers (who, at the time when the
Assizes were codified, consisted of the Dukes of Athens and of Naxos, the
triarchs of Negroponte, the Marquis of Boudonitza, the Count of Cephalonia, and
the Moreote barons of Karytaina, Patras, Matagrifon, and Kalavryta, together
with the hereditary marshal of the principality) alone possessed the power of
inflicting life and death; but not even the prince himself could punish one of
his feudatories without the consent of a majority of the lieges. If he were
taken prisoner, as happened to the third Villehardouin, he could call upon his
vassals to become hostages in his place until he had raised the amount of his
ransom. No one, except the twelve peers, was permitted to build a castle in
Achaia without his leave; and any vassal who quitted the principality and
stayed abroad without his consent, was liable to lose his fief. Leave of
absence was, however, never refused, if the vassal wished to claim the
succession to a fief abroad, to contract a marriage, or to make a pilgrimage to
the Holy Sepulchre, to the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome, or to that
of St James at Compostella; but in such cases the absentee must return within
two years and two days. On the other hand, the prince could neither demolish
nor surrender a frontier fortress without the consent of the lieges, a clause
which we shall find invoked by Guillaume de Villehardouin in 1262. It was his
bounden duty to provide for the support of a feudatory whose fief had been
captured by the enemy; and his powers were further restricted by the provision
that he could arrest one of his lieges for homicide or high treason alone. Nor
could he levy any taxes on the feudatories, the freemen, or their serfs,
without the consent of the lieges, feudatories, and freemen. A liege could in
theory, and did in practice, bring what we should call a petition of right
against the crown. In such cases, of which we have a striking example, it was
the duty of the prince to leave his seat as president of the High Court, and to
hand his sceptre to a substitute, in order that he might argue the case for the
crown in person, a remarkable proof of the equality of the sovereign before the
feudal law. Again and again we shall see in the course of this history that a
prince of Achaia was not an autocrat, but merely primus inter pares, whose will was limited by the feudal code and
by the proud and powerful barons, its living personification. One further
provision tended above all else to weaken the central authority. Except in the
duchy of Naxos, under the Crispo dynasty, the Salic law did not obtain in the Latin
states of the Levant, and, by an unfortunate freak of nature, many of the most
important baronies, and the principality itself, passed into the hands of
women. There are few other periods of history in which they have played so
prominent a part, and this participation of the weaker sex in the government of
a purely military community, while adding immensely to the romance of the
subject, had disastrous effects upon the fortunes of the Latin orient and
especially of Achaia. Nor was it the princely dignity alone which suffered by
being entrusted to a weak woman, whose sex and position made her the object of
dynastic and matrimonial intrigue, and whose husband was always a foreigner and
therefore exposed to the contempt which a proud aristocracy usually feels for a
prince consort. It happened on one occasion that almost the entire baronage of
Achaia was annihilated on the field of battle or detained in the prisons of the
enemy, and the fate of the principality was accordingly decided by the votes of
its ladies. Most of the misfortunes of that warlike state may be traced
directly or indirectly to the remarkable lack of male heirs in most of the
great Frankish families, and to the absence of the Salic law, a law admirably
suited to the government of a purely military community, surrounded by enemies.
It was vital to the success of the feudal system that
the feudatories should be persons well-affected to the prince, and great care
was accordingly taken to prevent fiefs falling into the hands of strangers. The
greater vassals could not sell their fiefs without the prince’s consent; but if
the liege were a widow, she might marry whom she pleased, on payment of
one-third of a year’s income, provided that her intended husband were not an
enemy of the prince. On the death of her husband, she was entitled to a moiety
of his fiefs and castles, as well as one-half of all the property which he had
acquired during their marriage. When a fief fell vacant, the successor must
needs appear to advance his claim within a year and a day if he were in Achaia,
within two years and two days if he were abroad. Failure to put in such an
appearance cost him his prospective fief. All freemen enjoyed the right of
testamentary disposition, and everyone was allowed to sell his produce in, or
out of the principality. But no feudatory, however eminent, might give his land
to the church, to a community, or to a villain, without the leave of the
prince, who was alone entitled to make such a grant to the ecclesiastical
establishment. This salutary rule, intended to ensure the maintenance of feudal
land in the possession of those able and liable to render the full feudal
services, came, however, to be seriously infringed at an early period in the
history of Achaia.
THE SERFS
The lower ranks of this feudal society were composed
almost entirely of the Greeks, for on the one hand the number of French
soldiers and camp-followers who had entered Achaia at the conquest was not numerous,
and on the other, the “Greek feudatories,” of whom the Book of the Customs speaks, must have formed a small class, as
compared with the vast mass of their countrymen. The Greek archons of Elis and
Arkadia, as we saw, had made special terms with Champlitte, that they should
retain their ancient privileges, their lands, and their serfs; and similar
concessions were obtained by the citizens of places which surrendered, such as
Coron, Kalamata, Arcadia, Nikli, and Lacedaemonia; but the bulk of the native
population lived and died in a state of serfdom.
The position of the serf was not to be envied. He
could neither marry, nor give his daughter in marriage, without the consent of
his lord; if he died without heirs, his lord succeeded to all his possessions;
during his lifetime, he had no motive to be industrious, for his lord was entitled
to take all his goods and give them to another serf, provided that he was left
with just enough to keep body and soul together. Even his body was regarded as
a mere chattel, for, if a liege killed his neighbour’s serf by mistake, he must
give the dead man’s master another serf as compensation, and he could at all
times give away his own serfs to whomsoever he pleased. If a female vassal
married a serf, not only she, but her children also, descended into the rank of
serfdom. There were only two ways in which the serf could become a freeman: by
the act of the prince; or, in the case of a female serf, by marrying a freeman.
No serf might receive a gift of feudal land without the prince’s leave; and, if
the serf were a Greek, his evidence could not be tendered in criminal cases
against a liege. Still, even in feudal Achaia, the serf had some rights. He
could sell his animals, if he chose; he could pasture his pigs on the acorns
that covered the ground of the oak-forests, where, like everyone else, he might
cut firewood indiscriminately, to the great detriment of the country; and his
lord could not imprison him for more than a single night. In practice, too, if
we may believe the Aragonese version of the Chronicle of the Morea, the
conquerors did not disturb the serfs in the possession of their goods. But,
save for some few privileges, the serf was almost a slave, who worked for the
prince, for the prince’s vassals, or for the alien church of the Franks, in the
pregnant words of Pope Innocent III, “without pay and without expenses”.
Having thus established the feudal constitution of the
principality, Villehardouin proceeded, with the assistance of the Greeks, to
attack Veligosti and Nikli, which, though already granted as fiefs, were still
unconquered. The low hill of Veligosti was soon taken; the high walls of Nikli
proved a more serious obstacle; but, when the besieger vowed that he would put
the garrison to the sword, their Greek relatives in his camp urged them to
surrender on terms. These two places were then handed over to their appointed
feudal lords. The large walled town of Lacedaemonia now yielded after a five
days’ siege, and became one of Villehardouin’s favourite residences. Thence a
raid was effected into the country inhabited by the Tzakones, and the French
troops penetrated as far as the causeway which leads to the impregnable
fortress of Monemvasia. At the request, however, of the Lacedaemonian archons
who had lands in that district, Villehardouin recalled the raiders, and set
about the conquest of those places which still refused him homage. With his
usual tact, he called the leading Greeks to his councils, and consulted with
them how he could reduce to his authority the strong Peloponnesian
quadrilateral of Corinth, Argos, Nauplia, and Monemvasia. They pointed out what
the Franks had already discovered, that those four strongholds were difficult
to take by force; but they expressed their willingness to assist him, on
condition that he swore in writing that neither they nor their children should
be forced to change their faith and their ancient customs. The French conqueror
willingly consented, for, like the other Frankish rulers of Greece, he was not
a religious enthusiast. It was true that the invaders had seized the Greek
bishoprics, that the metropolitan of Patras had disappeared in nameless exile,
that a Latin prelate occupied his see, and that more than a century elapses
before we hear of another Greek metropolitan of that diocese, and then only in
name. But, fortunately for the success of the Frankish settlement, these
extremely shrewd crusaders were neither bigots nor fanatics. The greatest of
the popes might desire the union of the churches; but he received little
assistance from the mundane barons who had founded “a new France” in the Levant.
On the contrary, they were usually more disposed to oppress the Latin Church
than to help it in the hopeless task —hopeless then as now —of proselytising
among a people, so wedded, at least to the forms of their own religion, as the
Greeks, whose leaders cared far more for their religious freedom than for their
political independence, and were willing to barter the latter for the former.
Thus, aided by the Greek archons, and seconded by Othon de la Roche of Athens,
Villehardouin proceeded to resume the siege of Akrocorinth, now held by
Theodore, brother of the Despot of Epiros. But a summons to attend the
parliament which the Emperor Henry had convened at Ravenika in the spring of
1209, temporarily interrupted the siege. The two friends, attended by sixty
well-appointed knights, appeared at the gathering; Villehardouin became “the
man of the Emperor,” and received as the reward of his allegiance the office of
Seneschal of Romania.
His next step was to come to terms with Venice, which
he saw that he could not dislodge from the two Messenian stations of Modon and
Coron. The republic had just sent out a new governor of her Peloponnesian
colony, and Villehardouin, hastening back from Ravenika, met him in the summer
on the island of Sapienza off Modon. The two high contracting parties there
executed a deed, by which Villehardouin relinquished all claim to Modon and
Coron, whose territory was to extend as far north as the little stream which
falls into the bay of Navarino exactly opposite the classic islet of Sphakteria.
The two bishoprics were, however, still to remain under the jurisdiction of the
primate of Achaia. He further did homage to the republic for all the land which
had been assigned to her in the treaty of partition as far as Corinth, “without
prejudice, however, to his fealty to his lord, the Emperor of Romania”; and in
token thereof, he undertook to send three silken garments to Venice every year,
one for the doge, the others for the church of St Mark. He promised to conquer
all that portion of Lakonia which was not already his, to hand over one-quarter
thereof to the doge, and to do homage for the remaining three-fourths. Finally,
he pledged himself to grant to all Venetian citizens free-trade throughout the
land, and a church, a warehouse, and a law-court of their own in every town,
while he himself and his successors were to become Venetians, and own a house
at Venice. By these wise concessions, he secured the support of the republic
for his scheme of making himself lord of “Maureson”, as the deed quaintly
styles the Morea. It was not long before he required it.
The news soon reached the Morea, that a cousin of
Champlitte, Robert by name, was on his way to claim the succession. It had been
stipulated on the departure of Champlitte for France, that any lawful claimant
must appear to put forward his claim within the term of a year and a day,
otherwise the claim would lapse. Villehardouin, accordingly, resolved to place
every obstacle in the way of young Robert’s arrival. He wrote to the doge,
asking his assistance, and that crafty statesman managed to detain the passing
guest on one excuse or another for more than two months at Venice. When at last
Robert put to sea, the ship’s captain received orders to leave him on shore at
the Venetian colony of Corfu, and to apprise Villehardouin of what had
occurred. With difficulty Robert obtained a passage on board an Apulian brig
from Corfu to the port of St Zacharias, in the Morea, the usual landing-place
from Europe, better known by its later name of Glarentza. In spite of the time
thus wasted on the journey, he had not yet exceeded the term appointed, for he
had twelve days still to spare. He at once enquired where the bailie was, and,
on being informed that he was at Andravida, sent a messenger thither to request
that horses might be sent for his journey. The messenger found the crafty
Villehardouin absent, but the captain of the town, with the leading citizens,
came down to the coast in person to escort the claimant to his capital. There
Robert was told that the bailie was at Vlisiri, or La Glisiere, a castle near
Katakolo. His suspicions were now aroused, and before proceeding thither, he
obtained from the captain of Andravida a certificate showing the date of his
arrival in the country. But Villehardouin, by moving from one place to another,
managed to avoid meeting him until the full period had elapsed. Then at last he
awaited Robert at Lacedaemonia, where a parliament was summoned to examine into
the claimant’s title. The parliament reported that the term had expired a
fortnight before, and that Robert had accordingly forfeited his claim. The
latter had no course open to him but to acquiesce in this decision; his wounded
pride prevented him from accepting his rival’s flattering offers, if he would
remain in the country; and he returned to France, leaving Geoffrey, to the
great joy of his subjects, lord of the Morea. Thus, according to the Chronicle
of the Moreaf did Villehardouin obtain the principality for himself by fraud
and legal quibbles. But behind these quibbles lay the hard fact that the
barons, who had borne the burden and heat of the conquest, were reluctant to
receive as their prince an inexperienced youth accompanied by a horde of needy
followers. In the beginnings of all dynasties a prince must be able; and
Geoffrey possessed that combination of courage and craft, which both the bold
barons and the wily Greeks admired. Moreover, his tact and his fairness towards
them had particularly endeared him to the latter.
No attempt was made to dispute the decision of the
Achaian parliament, and the family of Champlitte henceforth vanishes from the
history of Greece. Innocent III, who usually recognised accomplished
facts, hastened to style Villehardouin “Prince of Achaia”; but the prince
considered himself unworthy of the title, so long as he was not master of the Peleponnesian quadrilateral.
Accordingly, with the assistance of the Greek archons, whom his tolerance had
won to his side, he now resumed the long-drawn siege of Corinth. Othon de la
Roche of Athens again supported him; and, in 1210, the citadel at last
surrendered, though its defender, Theodore Angelos, succeeded in conveying the
treasures of the Corinthian Church to Argos, while many of the inhabitants
sought and found a home on the impregnable rock of Monemvasia, which now became
a metropolitan see and a place of exceptional importance as the last refuge of
Hellenism. For the other two Greek strongholds did not long survive the fall of
Corinth. Thanks to the maritime assistance of his Venetian friends at Coron,
Villehardouin was able to reduce Nauplia, on condition that the lower and
westernmost of the two castles on Itsh Kaleh remained in the hands of the
Greeks—an arrangement which gave rise to the local names of “Greeks’ castle”
and “Franks’ castle”, still current in the seventeenth century. Finally, in
1212, the Larissa of Argos was taken, and the Athenian and Moreot rulers, with
a disregard for ecclesiastical property which scandalised the pope, seized
the treasures of the Corinthian Church, which they found there, and divided its
goods among their followers. As a still more
substantial reward for his aid, Othon de la Roche received Argos and Nauplia as
fiefs of the principality of Achaia, and an annual charge of 400 hyperperi upon the tolls of Corinth.
The capture of Corinth led to the completion of the
ecclesiastical organisation of the principality. That city now became the see
of a second Latin archbishop, whose cathedral bore the name of St Theodore the
warrior, the patron of its late defender, and under whom Innocent III placed
the seven bishoprics of Argos, Damalii (near the ancient Trcezen) Monemvasia,
“Gilas” (or Helos), “Gimenes” (or Zemeno) —both former Greek bishoprics, the one in Lakonia, the
other near Sikyon—and the two Ionian dioceses of Cephalonia and Zante. But this arrangement was largely theoretical, and was
soon modified. Monemvasia was still, and long remained, in the hands of the Greeks; Helos was so poor that a
bishop was never appointed, and in 1223 was fused with the diocese of
Lacedsemonia; Zemend, a year earlier, was amalgamated with Corinth; and at the
same time, Damas, which had never had a Latin bishop because it contained no
Frankish settlers, was divided between Corinth and Argos; while Cephalonia and Zante, which had been transferred
in 1213 to the nearer archbishopric of Patras, were made into a single diocese.
In 1222, also, Honorius III, by the light of the experience which he had then
gained, reorganised the suffragan bishoprics of Patras, dividing the diocese of
Veligosti, or Christianopolis, as it was called in ecclesiastical parlance, by
an adaptation of the classic name Megalopolis, between the Messenian sees of
Modon and Coron, and amalgamating Amyklai with Lacedaemonia—an arrangement
confirmed by Innocent IV. Meanwhile, Lacedaemonia had been transferred to the
jurisdiction of Corinth, and a new bishopric, that of Maina, arose in the place
of Helos, so that in the middle of the century,
when the Frank principality was at its zenith, the Roman Church in Achaia
consisted of the archbishopric of Patras, with its suffragans of Olena,
Cephalonia, Coron, and Modon (the last exempted, however, by Alexander IV from
the jurisdiction of the primate), and of that of Corinth, with its suffragans
of Argos, Monemvasia, Lacedaemonia, and Maina.
The organisation of the Church was a fruitful source of quarrels. The Venetians had
obtained the right to the newly-created Latin patriarchate of Constantinople,
and the patriarch, as the representative of the pope in the Empire of Romania,
had the right of conferring the pallium upon archbishops. But the primate of
Achaia, a Frenchman, fretted at being placed under the jurisdiction of a
Venetian patriarch, who had promised his government to appoint none but
Venetians to archbishoprics. He was not satisfied till his assertion of independence,
which Innocent III refused to sanction, was at last ratified by that great
pope’s successor. His suffragans had inherited from their Greek predecessors
time-honoured but tiresome quarrels as to the boundaries of their dioceses; the
clergy disputed with the bishops, the Templars with the primate. Most of the
French canons, whom Champlitte had installed in the cathedral church of St
Andrew at Patras, where the relics of the saint were then preserved, soon began
to experience the usual French malady of home-sickness, and sailed for “Europe”.
Many of the Latin priests were absentees who drew the incomes, without doing
the work, of their livings; many more were mere adventurers who tried to obtain
benefices under false pretences. The primate himself was suspended by Honorius
III for squandering the goods of the Church, and Archbishop Walter of Corinth
sent back to his monastery for misconduct by Innocent III. The correspondence
of Innocent, who took the keenest interest in the establishment of Catholicism
in the realm of Romania, is full of complaints against the hostile attitude of
the Franks towards the Latin clergy. Nowhere were his complaints better
grounded than in Achaia, and nowhere was the Catholic Church in so pitiful a
plight. The primate was not safe even in his own palace. Aleman, who, as we
saw, had received Patras as a fief, considering the archiepiscopal plan of
fortifying the town against pirates amateurish, carried the archbishop off to
prison, cut off the nose of his bailie, and hastily converted his residence and
the adjacent church of St Theodore into the present castle, using the drums of
ancient columns and pieces of sculpture with all the Franks’ scorn for
archaeology. Fragments of ecclesiastical architecture, and what was apparently
once the archiepiscopal throne, may still be seen built into the walls.
Villehardouin himself was not much better. He neither paid tithes himself, nor
compelled his Greek and Latin subjects to pay them, though he and his barons
had sworn on the Holy Sacrament to do so, if they returned safe from battle
against the Despot of Epiros; he forced the clergy to plead disputed cases before
his secular tribunals, “making no difference between the priests and the laity”,
as the pope exclaimed in horror; he not only curtailed the ancient possessions
of the metropolitan see of Patras, but forbade the pious to grant it more, and,
in pursuance of his philhellenic policy, he relieved the Greek priests and
monks from the jurisdiction of the archbishop, bidding them pay dues to him
alone, while the Greek serfs were not allowed to show due obedience to the
Latin Church. Moreover, most of the Greek bishops who had been placed under the
archbishop’s jurisdiction, had fled at the outset from fear of the conquerors,
and declined to return. The archbishop’s suffragans told much the same story,
though things were better in the Venetian possessions in Messenia. Yet even
there, the governor of Coron forbade the bishop to enter his cathedral or to
reside in the castle. Innocent III might well write that “the new plantation of
Latins, which the hand of God has transported to the parts of Achaia, seems to
have less firm roots in consequence of the recent change”.
Meanwhile, the Burgundian Lord of Athens had been
engaged in transplanting the feudal system to his classic state. But there was
a considerable difference between feudal society in Attica and in the Morea.
While in the latter principality the prince was merely primus inter pares among
a number of proud and powerful barons, at Athens the “Great Lord” had, at the
most, one exalted noble, the head of the great house of St Omer, near his
throne. It is obvious from the silence of all the authorities, that the
Burgundians, who settled with Othon de la Roche in his Greek dominions, were
men of inferior social position to himself—a fact farther demonstrated by the
comparative lack in Attica and Boeotia of those baronial castles, so common in
the Morea. He had, therefore, less necessity for providing important fiefs for
personages of distinction than had the princes of Achaia. Indeed, it is
probable that in one respect the court of Athens under the De la Roche
resembled the present court of King George, namely, that there was no one,
except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on
equal terms. But, as in modern, so in Frankish Athens, the family of the
sovereign was soon numerous enough to form a coterie of its own. Not only did
Othon marry, soon after his arrival in Greece, Isabelle, heiress of Guy de Ray,
in Franche-Comté, by whom he had two sons, but the news of their adventurous
relative’s astounding good fortune attracted to Attica several members of his
clan from their homes in Burgundy. They doubtless received their share of the
good things which had fallen to Othon; at any rate, we know that one of his
nephews, Guy, who had undergone with him the risks of the Crusade, divided with
his uncle the lordship of Thebes, and that a little later the other half was bestowed
upon a niece named Bonne, who, after marrying young Demetrios, King of
Salonika, brought her share of the Boeotian barony to her second husband, Bela
de St Omer. Another nephew, William, settled in Greece, and ultimately became
by marriage Baron of Veligosti; a sister of Othon became the mother of the
future Baron of Karystos, Othon de Cicon; while a more distant relative, Peter,
was appointed governor of the Castle of Athens. Other Burgundians will have
followed in their wake; for in the thirteenth century Greece was to the younger
sons of French noble houses what the British Colonies were fifty years ago to
impecunious but energetic Englishmen.
There was yet another marked distinction between
Attica and the Morea. Niketas mentions no great local magnates as settled at
Athens or Thebes in the last days of the Byzantine Empire, and those were the
most important places of the Frankish state. We hear, indeed, of Theban archons
in 1209; but, with that exception, during the whole century for which the Frankish
sway existed over Athens, not a single Greek of eminence is so much as named by
any writer. Thus, whereas Crete, Negroponte, and the Morea still retained old
native families, which, in the case of Crete, furnished leaders for constant
insurrections against the foreigner, and in that of Negroponte showed a
tendency to emigrate to the court of Nice, nothing of the kind occurred in
Burgundian Athens. It is only at a much later period that we hear of a Greek
party there. That the sway of Othon was mild, may be inferred from the fact
that friends of Michael Akominatos, and even his own nephew, returned from
their exile to Athens, and were quite content to remain there under the Latin
sway. As for the peasants, their lot must have been the same as that of their
fellows in Achaia.
Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small
standard of classical Greece. Burgundian Athens embraced Attica, Boeotia,
Megaris, the fortresses of Argos and Nauplia, and the ancient Opuntian Lokris.
The Marquis of Boudonitza on the north, the Lord of Salona on the west, were
the neighbours, and the latter, later on, the vassal, of the Sire of Athens,
his bulwarks against the expanding power of the Greek Despot of Epiros. Thus
situated, the Athenian state had a considerable coast-line and at least four
ports—the Piraeus, Nauplia, the harbour of Atalante opposite Euboea, and
Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of
Corinth, the usual port of embarkation for the West. Yet the Burgundian rulers
of Athens made little attempt to create a navy, confining themselves to a
little amateur piracy. The strictly professional pirate availed himself of this
lack of sea-power to ply his trade in the early Frankish, as in the late
Byzantine days; Latin corsairs, named Capelletti, regardless of the fact that
Attica was now a Latin state, rendered its coast unsafe, a sail down the
Corinthian Gulf was called “a voyage to Acheron,” and the bishop of Thermopylae
had to move his residence farther inland to escape these sea-robbers.
We are not told where Othon resided; but it is
probable that, like his successor, he held his court at Thebes, the most
important town of his estates. Both the Akropolis at Athens, the “Castle of
Sathines”, as it came to be called, and the Kadmeia at Thebes, were under the
command of a military governor, and both places were the residences of Latin
archbishops. In the room of Akomindtos, in the magnificent church of Our Lady
of Athens, a Frenchman, Bérard, perhaps Othon’s chaplain, was installed as archbishop,
with the sanction of Innocent III, who took the church and chapter of Athens
under his protection. “The renewal of the divine grace,” wrote the enthusiastic
pope to Bérard, “suffers not the ancient glory of the city of Athens to grow
old. The citadel of most famous Pallas has been humbled to become the seat of
the most glorious Mother of God. Well may we call this city ‘Kirjathsepher,’
which, when Othniel had subdued to the rule of Caleb, ‘he gave him Achsah, his
daughter to wife’.” Cardinal Benedict, the papal legate who was sent to arrange
ecclesiastical affairs in the East, fixed the number of the canons, and the
pope granted the request of the archbishop and chapter, that the Athenian
Church should be governed by the customs of the Church of Paris. He also
confirmed the ancient jurisdiction of the archbishop, derived from the days of
the Greek metropolitans, over the eleven sees of Negroponte, Thermopylae,
Daulia, Avlonari, Oreos, Karystos, Koronea, Andros, Megara, Skyros,
and Keos, an arrangement which was modified by his successor, who merged the
three Euboean sees of Avlonari, Oreos, and Karystos, with that of Negroponte,
and placed Salona and Asgina under Archbishop Conrad of Athens.
Innocent mentions among the possessions of the Church
of Athens, and confirms to its use, Phyle, Menidi, and Marathon; the
monasteries of Kaisariane {Sancti Siriani), St John (the Hunter), St Nicholas
of the Columns (probably near Cape Colonna or Sunium), St Mary of Blachernai,
St Nicholas of Katapersica, St Kosmas and St Damian, St George of the Island,
and St Luke. To the Athenian Church belonged, too, “the markets of Negroponte
and Athens, and the rivers”, not very full of water, it is to be feared, “whence
the gardens are watered”. The Church was to enjoy its ancient exemption from
all exactions of the secular authorities; no man was “to lay rash hands upon it
or its possessions”, no one was “to harass it with vexations of any kind.” Such
was the privileged position of the Church of Athens, which Innocent confirmed,
obviously from the documents of the former Greek metropolitan see, in 1208. But
the theory was very dififerent from the reality. Othon de la Roche was, indeed,
at times inclined to further the interests of the Church. Thus, we find him
begging the pope to appoint a Catholic priest in every castle and town of his
estates where twelve Latins had fixed their abodes, and he was willing to hold
the important Boeotian fortress of Livadia as a fief of the Holy See, and to
pay two silver marks a year as rent for it.3 But, when it suited his
purpose, he did not hesitate to infringe the privileges of his Church. Soon
after his marriage, possibly to provide a place for one of his wife’s
relatives, he compelled Berard to give him the appointment to the post of ecclesiastical
treasurer—an appointment which the pope revoked. Both he and other feudal lords
of continental Greece, like Villehardouin in the Morea, forbade their subjects
to give or bequeath their possessions to the Church, levied dues from the
clergy, and showed no desire either to pay tithes themselves, or to make the
Greek and Latin population pay them. At Thebes matters were worse than at
Athens. Othon and his nephew Guy, the joint owners of that city, seized the
greater part of the archbishop’s revenue under the guise of land-tax, so that
the Theban Church found its income thus arbitrarily reduced from 900 to 200
hyperperi; later on, however, the lords of Thebes relented, and contented
themselves with an annual contribution of 272 from the Theban chapter. But out
of his income the archbishop was requested by the pope to assist his two
wretchedly poor suffragans of Zaratoria and Kastoria —places which have been
identified with Zagora on Helicon and Kastalia. Instead of doing so, the dean
and canons of Thebes, assisted by the captain of the Kadmeia and other laymen,
broke into the house of the bishop of Zaratoria, and carried off a man from his
very arms. In short, the domestic quarrels of the Latin Church, whose best
representatives did not come to Greece, must have been edifying to the Greeks.
Now we find the Theban archbishop harassing and excommunicating his canons; now
it is the canons of Athens, who are too proud to serve personally in the
noblest of all cathedrals —the majestic Parthenon, where, later on, a
descendant of Othon himself was glad to find a modest stall.
As in the Morea, so in continental Greece, the
military orders and the monks from the west obtained lands and monasteries. The
splendid monastery of the Blessed Luke between Delphi and Livadia, the gem of
all Byzantine foundations in Greece, was given to the prior and chapter of the
Holy Sepulchre. The Knights of St John held property near Thebes, and seized
the goods of the Thessalian bishopric of Gardiki, and even the episcopal residence,
heedless of its inmate’s thunders. The Templars held “the church of Sta.
Lucia,” outside Thebes, Ravenika, and the neighbouring town of Lamia, where
they built a castle, probably that which still stands on the hill there. Othon
de la Roche gave the beautiful Athenian monastery of Daphni, which still bears
the marks of his followers’ lances on its splendid cupola, to the Cistercians
of the Burgundian Abbey of Bellevaux, to which he was devotedly attached, and
at Dalphino, or Dalphinet, as the Franks called it, the last Athenian duke of
his house found his grave. The Cruciferi,
or “Crutched Friars”, of Bologna had a hospice at Negroponte. The Minorites
followed Benedict of Arezzo to Greece in 1216, and established their
monasteries in various parts of the country. A century later their abbey near
Athens, probably “the Frankish monastery” at the foot of Pentelikon, figured in
the will of Duke Walter of Brienne, and in 1260 their “province of Romania”
embraced the three districts of Negroponte, Thebes, and Glarentza, where their
church of St Francis is mentioned in the Chronicle
of the Morea as a place where the High Court of the principality met. At
the end of the fourteenth century they had twelve monasteries in Greece, two of
which still survive under another form —the church of Sta. Maria delle Grazie
at Zante, and the orthodox monastery of Sisia in Cephalonia, which still bears
the emblem of the Franciscans and preserves in its name the memory of Assisi,
whence St Francis came.
The Greek Church had been better treated than might
have been expected from the way in which St Mary’s minster on the Akropolis had
been seized. It is true that from the time of Akominatos no Greek metropolitan
of Athens fixed his residence in that city till the close of the fourteenth
century, but the titular metropolitan resided at Constantinople, after its
recapture by the Greeks, and is often mentioned in the fourteenth century as a
member of the Holy Synod. But the Greek bishop of Negroponte, who had done
obeisance to the Latin archbishop of Athens, was allowed by Innocent III to
retain his see. Akominatos himself even ventured over once from Keos to the
scene of his former labours, but he hastened his return, “from fear of becoming
a morsel for the teeth of the Italians”, as he calls the Burgundians of Athens.
Yet, though he was too honest or too proud to
recognise the authority of the
Frenchman who sat on his metropolitan throne, he recommended the abbot of
Kaisariané, who had come to terms with the Franks, to render obedience to the
powers that be. Even in his island
he was not long free from Latin rule, for the brothers Ghisi and their allies
occupied Keos soon after his arrival, and suspected him of secret intrigues
with the Greek Despot of Epiros. Age crept on, one after another his old
friends died; worst blow of all, his brother, Nikitas, the historian, died
also, commemorated by the exile in a touching monody, still preserved, which
is, however, a less enduring monument than his own valuable history. A few
books, saved by friends from the wreck of his library, occasional presents from
his old admirers at Athens, now and then a letter from one of his former flock,
may have cheered a little the long days of his solitude. Above all, he found
distraction in the theorems of Euclid. More than once a message came from the
imperial court of Nice, bidding him join the Greek patriarch there, and
offering him the vacant post of metropolitan of Naxos. At another time the
Despot Theodore of Epiros invited him to his court at Arta; but he was
practically a political prisoner in his cell; his strength was failing; he
could not, in that uncivilised spot, carry out the treatment prescribed by his
doctor; he could scarcely cross his own threshold. He had but one pleasure
left—to gaze across the sea at the coast of Attica. At last the end came, and
about 1220 the grand old ecclesiastic died, alone in his humble cell of the
monastery of St John the Baptist, founded by one of the Comneni. One of his
nephews pronounced a monody over him, which has survived. The monastery,
however, has disappeared, but a modern Greek geographer found that its church
had become a public school. It is to be hoped that the
pupils learn something of the life of the last metropolitan of Byzantine
Athens, a man worthy to take his place beside the patriots of classical days.
Meanwhile, the Franks of Northern Greece were by no
means unitedly striving to develop their newly-won dominions. After the death
of Boniface, the relations between the kingdom of Salonika and the empire of
Romania, which had been strained in his lifetime, had become hostile in the
extreme. The Count of Biandrate and the Lombard nobles of Salonika were
resolved to shake off the feudal tie which bound them to the empire, and most
of the great lords of northern Greece, the baron of Larissa, the Marquis of
Boudonitza, Ravano dalle Carceri of Euboea, and two brothers from Canossa, who
seem to have owned lands near the skála of Oropos, joined their party. Their attempt to secure the aid of Othon de la
Roche failed, but his espousal of the emperor’s cause cost him the temporary
loss of Thebes, which Albertino of Canossa attacked, and of which that Italian
rebel styled himself “Lord”. The Count of Biandrate now openly claimed in the
name of the infant king of Salonika, or of his half-brother, William, Marquis
of Montferrat, all the land from Durazzo to Megara, the Peloponnese, and the
suzerainty over Epiros. The emperor replied by marching into Salonika to
suppress the revolt. Biandrate was imprisoned in the castle of Serres, which
was bestowed upon his gaoler, the loyal Count Berthold von Katzenellenbogen of
Velestino; but the other Lombard leaders withdrew to the castle of Larissa,
whither Henry followed them. Like the Greeks in the war of 1897, they had
neglected to destroy the bridge over the Peneios, the font de l’Arse, as the chronicler calls it; the imperial force
crossed it, and forced the adjoining castle on the old Akropolis to surrender.
The kindly, tactful emperor showed a wise clemency to the rebels, and allowed
the baron of Larissa to retain his fiefs. The Greeks, whom Henry had “treated
as his own people”, everywhere received him with enthusiasm; at Halmyros, his
next stopping-place, they met him with the eikons, and wished him “many years”
of life. But the rebellion was not yet quelled. The Marquis of Boudonitza,
Albertino of Canossa, and Ravano dalle Carceri were still up in arms, and the
triarch of Euboea, who as an island-baron could dispose of a flotilla, tried to
capture a vessel from before the emperor’s eyes in the harbour of Halmyros.
Henry’s advisers prudently suggested negotiations, with the object of stopping
the fratricidal war. Summonses were issued to a parliament, to be held in May
1209, in the valley of Ravenika, near Lamia, which, as we saw, Othon de la
Roche and Villehardouin attended, and at which the latter became the emperor’s
vassal, and received as the reward of his allegiance the office of Seneschal of
Romania. But if the ambitious bailie of Achaia had good reasons for supporting the
emperor, who might be expected in turn to sanction his projected usurpation of
the principality, the Lombard barons, instead of attending the parliament,
remained defiantly behind the walls of the Kadmeia at Thebes. Thither Henry now
set out by way of Thermopylae, sleeping a night at the rebel castle of
Boudonitza on the way. The native population bowed before him; at Thebes, Greek
priests and archons came out to greet him with such a glad sound of drums and
trumpets that the ground shook, while the Latin archbishop and clergy escorted
him to the minster of Our Lady, where he fell on his knees and returned thanks
to God for his past successes. The castle was, however, strong, and its
defenders stubborn, so that it was not till he had ordered long scaling ladders
to be applied to the walls, that Ravano and Albertino asked for an armistice.
Once again the emperor was merciful; Thebes, indeed, he restored to his trusty
Othon de la Roche, its legal owner; but he ordered Biandrate to be released,
and allowed the rebels to retain their fiefs. Then Henry was able to proceed to
Athens, the first emperor who had visited the city since Basil, “the
Bulgar-slayer”, nearly two centuries earlier, had come there in triumph. Like
Basil II, Henry ascended to the Akropolis, and “offered up prayers in the
minster of Athens, which men call Our Lady, and Othon de la Roche, who was lord
thereof —for to him the Marquis (of Montferrat) had given it, paid him every
honour in his power”. After two days’ stay, he set out for Negroponte,
accompanied by the “Great Lord”; on the way he was warned that his arch-enemy,
Biandrate, had preceded him thither, and was plotting to have him assassinated
in his bed. The plot, however, failed, owing to the chivalry of the emperor’s
late foe, Ravano. “The city of Negroponte”, quoth the triarch, “is mine; my
head shall answer for your safety there.” The gentleman of Verona was as good
as his word; he bitterly reproached Biandrate with his treachery; the emperor
spent three days in Negroponte as his guest, enthusiastically welcomed by the
Greeks, who even escorted him to the Latin church of Notre Dame, and then
returned safe and sound to Thebes. The Lombard rebellion was at an end. So
great was his prestige at this moment, that the crafty Despot of Epiros did him
homage. The silvery eloquence of the emperor’s envoy, Conon de Bethune, one of
the most distinguished poets of the day, as well as one of the best fighters in
the crusading army, had such an effect on the Greek ruler, that he presented
his daughter’s hand and a third of his lands to the emperor’s brother.
We have seen how constant were the conflicts between
the Frankish barons and the Latin clergy. During his progress through Thessaly
and his visit to Euboea, the emperor must have heard much about the question,
for the two Thessalian archbishops of Larissa and Neopatras had both caused
public scandals, the one by unjust exactions from his suffragans and the
monasteries in his diocese, the other by helping Sgouros to defend Corinth and
by slaying his fellow-Latins. Moreover, in both Thessaly and Eubcea, the barons
maltreated the Church, occupying monasteries and churches and molesting the
religious orders. Henry accordingly thought it a favourable moment to come to
an agreement with the Roman hierarchy, and therefore summoned a second
parliament at Ravenika in May 1210, for the purpose of arranging ecclesiastical
affairs. All the chief feudal lords of Northern Greece were present: Othon de
la Roche and Ravano dalle Carceri; the Marquis of Boudonitza and Thomas de
Stromoncourt of Salona; Nicholas de St Omer and Albertino of Canossa; the two
great Thessalian barons, William of Larissa and Count Berthold of Velestino;
and Rainer of Travaglia, owner of the spot where the parliament met, to whom
the emperor had also transferred the Templars’ castle of Lamia. There came,
too, three out of the four archbishops of the north, their graces of Athens,
Neopatras, and Larissa, with eight of their suffragans, a thoroughly
representative assembly of Church and State. A concordat, subsequently approved
by Innocent III, was then drawn up, by the terms of which all churches,
monasteries, and other ecclesiastical possessions, “from the boundary of the
kingdom of Salonika to Corinth”, were entrusted, free of all feudal services,
to the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, as representing the pope. On the
other hand, it was stipulated that the clergy, whether Greek or Latin, should
pay the old Byzantine akrtistichon, or land-tax, to the temporal authorities;
and that, in default of payment, their goods might be siezed; but the family of
a Greek priest could not be imprisoned, if he failed to pay. His sons, if
unordained, were, however, liable to render feudal services; but after
ordination they were to enjoy the same privilege as the Roman clergy.1 The concordat of Ravenika was not,
however, signed by the ruler of the Morea, who continued to pursue his anticlerical
policy, seizing the goods of the Archbishop of Patras, and annulling all gifts
to his see. Even in continental Greece, to which it specially applied, the concordat often remained a dead letter.
Thus, both Othon de la Roche and Villehardouin were subsequently excommunicated
by their respective archbishops for appropriating church property, and also
placed under an interdict by the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, who laid
claim to the monasteries and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the diocese of
Thebes.
The Lombard rebellion had a more lasting result than
the summoning of the parliaments at Ravenika: the introduction of Venetian influence
into the island of Euboea. Ravano dalle Carceri, before he had made his peace
with Henry, had been so much alarmed at his isolated position, that he had
offered, through his brother, the bishop of Mantua, to become the vassal of
Venice. His offer gave the Venetians the opportunity of making good their
claims to the island, which the partition treaty had given them, but which they
had not yet advanced. Ravano accordingly, in 1209, recognised the republic as
his suzerain, promising to send every year 2100 gold hyperperi and a silken
garment woven with gold to the doge, as well as an altarcloth for St Mark’s.
The Venetians were to have the right of trading wherever they wished, and a
church and a warehouse in all the towns of the island. With their usual care
for the interests of the natives, of which we have already seen an instance at
Corfu, they made Ravano promise to keep the Greeks in the same state as they
had been in the time of the Emperor Manuel. The republic of St Mark thus obtained,
without trouble, most of the practical advantages which would have accrued from
a conquest of the island. A Venetian bailie was soon appointed to govern the
Venetian settlements in the island of Negroponte, and the history of Euboea
from that date till the Turkish Conquest shows the gradual spread of his
authority over the whole of it. The first step in this direction was taken
after the death of Ravano in 1216. The Venetian bailie, acting on the system of divide et impera, then intervened
between the six claimants to the island, Ravano’s widow and daughter, two
nephews whom he had adopted, and the two sons of Giberto, the former triarch.
The bailie divided the island into sixths, giving two-sixths to each pair of
claimants, with the proviso that if one hexarch, or sestiere, died, his fellow, and not his heir, should succeed to his
share. This system left the bailie the real arbiter of the island. Though its
capital remained common to all the hexarchs, who usually resided there and had
their own judge, “the Podestà of the Lombards”, and only the part near the sea
was subject to Venetian jurisdiction, the bailie’s
authority became predominant, and Ravano’s former palace was soon converted
into his official residence. The hexarchs and the Greek magnates swore fealty
to him as the representative of the republic, and the value of his services may
be estimated from the amount of his salary—at first 450 gold hyperperi, and then, after the capture
of Constantinople by the Greeks, increased, as his position became more
important, to 1000 hyperperi (£448)—as compared with the 250 hyperperi (£112), paid to each of the
castellani, or captains, of Coron and Modon. Venetian weights and measures were
introduced into all the towns of the island, two Venetian judges and three
councillors (afterwards reduced to two, and entrusted with levying the dues)
had already been appointed, and the church of St Mark at Chalkis, which
belonged to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, was endowed by the
hexarchs, and was subsequently supported by death-duties of 2’5 per cent, on all the property of deceased
members of the Venetian colony. A considerable number of Venetian settlers now
arrived, and there also flocked to the island impecunious “gentlemen of Verona”,
relatives of the feudal lords, so that it soon contained quite a large and
fairly harmonious western society, for the Lombard character harmonised better
than that of the warlike French with the mercantile Venetians. Castles rose all
over the long island, the imposing ruins of which still remain to tell of the
days of Lombard rule. On the way to Eretria the traveller passes at the village
of Basilikd a large, square tower, whose only entrance is a hole 25 feet from
the ground; on a hill behind the village stands the large castle of Filla,
while two tall towers, close together on another eminence, dominate the
Lelantian plain, no less fertile now than in the days of Theognis, and still
called Lilanto in the Lombard times. A large medieval castle still
rises to the right of Aliveri, and the author has seen another between
Achmetaga and Limne. We often hear of La Cuppa, near Avlonari, of Larmena, near
Styra, and of La Clisura, which commanded the gorge or clisura, between Chalkis and Achmetaga, while, if little remains of
the once famous fortress of Oreos in the north, Karystos in the south still
boasts its Castel Rosso. From these strongholds the Lombard barons would issue
forth to scour the seas in quest of rich booty; and, in the intervals of
piracy, met in each others’ palaces in the common capital, where brilliant
balls were often held. There, too, besides Lombards and Venetians, was the
Jewish colony, which Benjamin of Tudela had found there, and which naturally
continued to exist under the auspices of Venice. A large proportion of the
taxation was placed upon it; in 1355 it was confined in a ghetto on the
southern side of the town, and the public executioner was selected from its
ranks. It was, however, attracted to the island, as to Thebes, by the
manufacture of silk, from which the Venetian bailie was expressly not
debarred. Otherwise Venice, unlike Great Britain, did not wish her Levantine
consuls to be men engaged in business. Hence she was well served and well
informed.
In yet another part of the Greek world the Venetians
succeeded in gaining substantial advantages without the expense of annexation.
We have seen how the crafty Despot of Epiros had done homage to the Emperor
Henry, then at the summit of his good fortune. But that “most potent traitor”,
as the emperor called him, aided by Franks whom he had taken into his pay,
again and again broke his solemn vows to his suzerain, and in 1210 recognised
the overlordship of Venice over all his dominions, from Durazzo to “Nepantum”
or Naupaktos, promising to give the Venetians a quarter in every town and the
right of exporting corn, to protect their young colony in Corfu against
Albanians or Corfiotes, and to pay to the republic a tribute of 42 lbs. of hyperperi every year. Thus the republic
became the suzerain of those territories in Epiros and Aetolia which had been
assigned to her in the partition treaty, while the Despot felt at liberty to
carry out his ambitious designs in other directions. The fall of the Argive
fortresses, which his brother held for him in the Peloponnese, ended, however,
any plans which he might have had for the extension of his rule to the south of
the Gulf of Corinth; but he penetrated eastward into the territory of the
French Lord of Salona. With the aid of the men of Galaxidi, the little town
which the traveller passes as he steams into the bay of Itea, and which
rendered such noble services to the Greek cause in the War of Independence, the
Despot routed the Franks in a pitched battle at Salona, in which Thomas de
Stromoncourt was slain. Faithless to all his engagements, the victor next
turned westward, and, in spite of his solemn pledges, conquered the fine island
of Corfù, where the Venetian colony had scarcely taken root, and where the
natives gladly welcomed a ruler of their own race and religion. The local
tradition ascribes to him the castle of Sant’ Angelo, built to repel the
attacks of Genoese pirates, which still stands, an imposing ruin, high above
the western shore of the island, near the monastery of Palaiokastrizza. The
Greek clergy long afterwards cited his golden bull confirming their privileges.
Possessed of such wide dominions, he might well coin his own money. A bronze
coin, attributed to him, bearing his effigy and that of St Demetrios on one
side, and the figure of the Archangel Michael on the other, has been found in
Epiros; one of his leaden seals, also showing the Archangel Michael, was
discovered in Corfù. But his triumph was not for long. He was murdered in bed
by a slave in 1214, and it was reserved for his brother Theodore, an abler
general, and an even more unscrupulous statesman, to prosecute his policy of
expansion. Partisan hatred still obscures the history of these two reigns. The
latest Greek historian of Epiros regards the first two Despots as patriots
Laurentius de Monacis (we find “Neopantum” and “and heroes; the Latin
authorities, and the Byzantine historians, who drew their inspiration from the
rival Greek court at Nice, describe them as monsters and barbarians. The truth
probably lies between the two extremes.
We have thus described the conquest and organisation
of Greece by the Franks. We have seen a Lombard kingdom established at
Salonika, a Burgundian nobleman invested with Athens, a French principality
carved out of the Peloponnese. The Venetians have founded and lost a colony at
Corfù, occupied Crete, sent forth a swarm of adventurers to seize the Cyclades,
made themselves the real masters of Euboea, and gained a footing at two
valuable stations in Messenia. Over the Morea and Epiros they have acquired a
shadowy suzerainty, with the practical advantages of free trade. But the Greek
flag still waves over Monemvasia, and the tribes of Leonidi and Taygetos still
own no lord. In the mountains of Epiros and the plains of Bithynia two independent
Greek states have arisen out of the ashes of Byzantium, to keep alive the torch
of Hellenic freedom. We shall see in the next chapter how the ephemeral Lombard
kingdom fell before the vigorous attack of the Epirote Greeks, how Thessaly
felt the force of the same strong arm, how the Latin Empire of Constantinople
began to shake, as the generation of the bold crusaders passed away and the
power of its rivals revived, and how, after reaching its zenith, the
principality of Achaia received its first shock.
CHAPTER
IV
THE ZENITH OF FRANKISH RULE (1214-1262)
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