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MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARYA HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)
CHAPTER VTHE GREEK REVIVAL (1262-1278)
It was not to be expected that either Villehardouin or
the emperor would long desist: the one from the reconquest of his three lost
castles, the other from an extension of his power. On his return to the Morea,
the prince set out on a tour of inspection, accompanied by a brilliant retinue.
From the rock of MistrA the imperial garrison could see the tall Frankish
knights and their gallant lord pricking across the fertile plain of the Eurotas
to the prince’s favourite residence of Lacedaemonia. Not unnaturally, their
suspicions were aroused, and they regarded this brave display as a hostile
demonstration against themselves. Without delay they called upon the warlike
Melings to quit the gorges of Taygetos and rally round the double eagle of
Byzantium, and messengers were sent post-haste to apprise the imperial governor
of Monemvasia of what seemed to be a breach of the peace. Pope Urban IV, who,
as a Frenchman, felt special interest in the prosperity of the “New France”
which his countrymen had created oversea, and furnished William with money for
its defence,1 salved any qualms of conscience that the Prince of
Achaia might have felt, by telling him that his solemn oath to the emperor had
been wrung from him when he was a prisoner, and was therefore not binding; and
the Franks might pretend that the Greek garrisons had committed acts of pillage
and received the prince’s discontented Greek subjects. The news was speedily
communicated from Monemvasia to the emperor, who sent thither an army under his
brother Constantine, assisted by Philos and Makrends, two high officials.
He had engaged for the campaign a body of 1500 Turks and a number of warlike
Greeks from Asia Minor, and he strongly enjoined upon his commander to win as
many allies as possible in the Morea by the gift of privileges under the
imperial seal. Meanwhile, a fleet was despatched under Philanthropends, mostly
manned with Tzakonians from the Peloponnese and with the so-called Gasmouloi, or “bastards”, the offspring
of mixed marriages between Franks and Greek women, who were particularly
valuable soldiers, because they combined Greek caution with Latin courage.This fleet operated against the islands of the Aegean, of which the Prince of
Achaia was suzerain, and the south coast of the Morea. The Genoese, unmindful
of his services, assisted his enemies by landing a great number of the imperial
troops at Monem- vasia, and by joining in the attack upon the islands.
The arrival of the imperial force, and the prompt
secession of the Melings, the Tzakonians, and the restless inhabitants of the
two promontories of Malea and Matapan, whose chiefs were easily won by the
promise of privileges and the gift of high-sounding titles, had caused William
to summon his great vassals to his aid. They seem to have been somewhat slow in
responding to his appeal, but one of them, his old enemy, Guglielmo da Verona,
the richest and most powerful of the Euboean barons, rendered him such great
services, that the prince was inclined to reward him with the overlordship over
his fellow-triarchs and over the Duke of Athens. An Athenian contingent came to
aid in defending the Morea, but the fine flower of all the Achaian chivalry,
the doughty Geoffroy de Bruy&res, had been ensnared by the charms of a
beautiful woman, and had gone with his mistress to Apulia, under the pretext of
a visit to the famous shrines of St Nicholas at Bari and of St Michael, on one
of the spurs of Monte Gargano. No longer kept in check by the great castle of
Karytaina, in the absence of its master, the Slavs of Skortd soon joined those
of Taygetos against the Franks.
Meanwhile, William was waiting for his great vassals
at Corinth, and the imperial commander, who had so far met with no opposition,
and had taken Lacedaemonia and other towns, boasted to the emperor that a third
of the Morea was already his, and that if he had more men, he could conquer the
whole. Michael VIII sent him reinforcements, and a distinguished soldier,
Michael Cantacuzene, grandfather of the subsequent emperor and historian, and
member of an old family which we saw settled in Messenia at the time of the Frankish
Conquest, also arrived in the Morea. The imperial commanders had now 6000
cavalry and a large force of infantry at their disposal; they accordingly
divided the cavalry into eighteen squadrons, and ordered a march on Andravida,
the Frankish capital. Leaving the mart of Veligosti a smoking ruin, they
marched past Karytaina, and, guided by some of the Slavs of Skortd, reached
Prinitsa, not far from Olympia, having burnt on the way the Latin monastery of
Our Lady of Isova, whose Gothic windows still survey the valley of the
Alpheios, the Charbon, as the Franks called it. At Prinitsa they were met by a
small body of 312 Franks, under the command of Jean de Catavas, husband of the
lady with whom Geoffroy de Bruyères had eloped, and a valiant but rheumatic warrior
whom the prince had left in charge during his absence at Corinth. Despite the
smallness of his forces and his own physical infirmity, which prevented him
from holding sword or lance, he ordered the prince’s standard —the anchored
cross of the Villehardouins— to be tied fast to his hand, and, reminding his men
that they were Franks and their enemies men of many nations, bade them win fame
which would endure “so long as the ark remains on Ararat”. The little band of
Franks seemed lost among the Greeks, but they cut down their foes with their
swords, “as a scythe mows the meadow grass”, while their leader, as he made
straight for the tent of Constantine Palaioldgos, dressed all in white, seemed
to the superstitious Greeks to be none other than St George, guiding the Franks
to victory. Some cried that this was the vengeance of the Virgin for the
sacrilege at Isova, others that it was retribution for the perjury of the
emperor, and Constantine was glad to mount his swift Turkish horse and ride for
his life by devious paths to MistrA, leaving his men to escape to the woods.
The season of 1263 was now far advanced, and it was
not till the following spring that Constantine re-assembled his Slav and
Tzakonian allies, and marched again upon Andravida. Near the chapel of St
Nicholas at Mesisklin, a spot not far from the Frankish capital, the two armies
met. A Frank had warned the Byzantine general, that one horseman of Achaia was
worth twenty Greeks, and that he must use artifice rather than force if he
wished to conquer. Despite this warning, Cantacuzene, who was possessed of that
boastful spirit which the Greeks usually regarded as a peculiarly Frankish
characteristic, insisted upon showing off his horsemanship in front of the
enemy’s line, and paid with his life for his rashness. At this disaster the
Greeks retired without giving battle, and the Prince of Achaia was persuaded to
act with prudence and refrain from pursuing them. Dissensions now broke out
between Constantine and his Turkish mercenaries. Six months’ pay was already
owing to them, and as he refused to give it to them, they offered their
services to William, whom they believed to be a man of his word. On the banks
of the river of Elis the first unholy alliance was made between a Frank ruler
of Greece and its future masters. Ancelin de Toucy, a great noble who had
settled in the Morea after the fall of Constantinople, and who spoke
Turkish, acted as go-between, and William gladly accepted the offer of the
Turkish chiefs, Melik and Salik, who were eager to punish their late employers.
The Franco-Turkish forces accordingly marched southwards in the direction of
Kalamata, and then ascended the beautiful pass of Makryplagi, “the broad
hillside”, up which the present railway climbs. When Ancelin, who was in command
of the van, reached the ridge, the Greeks sprang up from their ambuscade, and
fell upon him. Twice the Franks were beaten back, but their commander bade them
cease “playing hide-and-seek” with their enemies; they stormed the ridge; the
Turks, coming up behind, completed the discomfiture of the Greeks, and the
Greek commanders, who had sought refuge in the grotto of Gardiki—a place
celebrated two centuries later for two appalling massacres—were discovered by
the Turks, and led prisoners before the prince. The emperor’s brother had,
fortunately for him, returned home before the battle, but his two surviving
colleagues, Makrends and Philos, and many of their followers, were now at
William’s mercy. The two principal captives were sent to the strong castle of Chloumoutsi,
where Philfis died, and his fellow-prisoner, though subsequently exchanged, was
accused on his return to Constantinople of collusion with William, who was said
to have promised him, as the reward of his treachery, the hand of the widowed
daughter of the late Emperor Theodore II, Laskaris, who was living on her
Moreot barony of Veligosti. The suspicions of the usurper, Michael VIII, were
easily aroused, and he put out the eyes of a general, who might have espoused
the claims of the dethroned dynasty.
The victory of Makryplagi had removed all fear of a
further attack by the Greeks, and William was able to proceed to his beloved
Lacedaemonia, the Greek population of which had fled to Mistra. He supplied
their places with trusty Franks, whom he bade restore the deserted town, sent
his forces to ravage Tzakonia and the country round Monemvasia, and ordered the
Turks to plunder the Slavs of Skorta, who, though lately pardoned, had again
risen in the absence of the baron of Karytaina. Soon after, Geoffroy de Bruyères,
stung by the reproaches of King Manfred, returned penitent to the Morea. He
flung himself down before the prince, with his girdle round his neck, in the
church of Santa Sofia at Andravida, and, thanks to the good offices of Manfred
and the intercession of the nobles, he was a second time forgiven. From that
time to his death he loyally served his uncle and prince.
The fighting was now over, and the Turks asked permission
to return to their homes in Asia. In vain William pressed their chief to stay;
but some of his followers consented to settle in the Morea. All who remained
there were baptised; the prince knighted two of them, and gave them fiefs and
wives; one of them seems to have married a noble damsel, the lady of Pavlitsa
(near Bassae); and, when the Chronicle of the Morea was composed, their
posterity was still living at two places in the peninsula. Thus a new element
was added to the mixed population of the Morea. The land, indeed,
was in danger of becoming desolate, owing to the loss of life in the war; Urban
IV received from the prince and the barons a gloomy picture of its depopulation;
and one woman, so Sanudo informs us, lost seven husbands, one after the other,
all of whom died in battle.
Disappointed of winning the Morea by force, Michael
VIII now proposed to William that his son and heir, the future Emperor Andrdnikos
II, should marry the prince’s elder daughter, Isabelle, and that Andronikos
should succeed as Prince of Achaia. This arrangement would have not only
re-united the Morea with the Greek Empire, and thus spared it much bloodshed,
but, by welding Moreot Greeks and Franks closely together, might have so
strengthened the principality that it could have offered a better resistance to
the Turks later on. But the Frank barons, proud of their nationality, were not
willing to accept a Greek as their future sovereign. In spite of the prince’s
marriage with a Greek princess, the Frank nobles continued to select their
wives from the best families in France, and the difference of religion combined
with the pride of race to make them disdainful of the connection with
Byzantium. As the historian Nikephoros Gregoras remarked, they
despised marriages with Greeks, even with those of imperial blood. Isabelle was
destined to make a marriage which united the principality to the fortunes of
the great house of Anjou.
Charles of Anjou, the most ambitious prince of his
time, had now appeared upon the stage of Italian politics. Summoned by Urban
IV to the throne of the Two Sicilies, he routed Manfred at the historic battle
of Benevento; and, not content with having seized the Italian possessions of
the Hohenstaufen, he considered himself the heir of those places beyond the sea
which Manfred had received as his wife’s dowry from the Despot of Epiros.
Though the fair Helene of Epiros was now languishing with her children in an
Italian dungeon, Filippo Chinardo continued to hold Corfu and the Epirote
fortresses, either for her or for himself, a few months longer. But the
treacherous Despot, who had first tried to conciliate the bold Frank by giving
him his sister-in-law in marriage, together with Corfu, which he was pleased to
regard as once more his own to bestow, had him assassinated in 1266, intending
to seize Helene’s former dowry and reunite it with his dominions. But Chinardo,
short as his rule in Corfù had been, had granted fiefs there to brave knights,
such as the brothers Thomas and Garnier Aleman, members of a Provencal family,
already settled at Patras, and whose name is still borne by one of the Corfiote
deputies. Garnier Aleman undertook the defence of the island against the
Despot, till he was able to invoke the aid of his countryman and
co-religionist, Charles of Anjou, who, as a reward for his services, named him
his vicar and captain-general. Thus, in 1267, the finest of the Ionian islands
became a possession of the Angevins of Naples, under whom it remained for more
than a century.
Charles was anxious to make Corfù and Epiros a
steppingstone to the conquest of the rest of Greece, and desired, like most
conquerors, to have some legal claim to his proposed conquests. There was at
that time in Italy the deposed Latin Emperor of Romania, Baldwin II, who, after
in vain besieging the reluctant ears of western potentates, thought that he had
found in the victor of Benevento the man who would assist him. The exiled
emperor and the king of the Two Sicilies met on May 27, 1267, in the presence
of Pope Clement IV, in a room of the papal residence at Viterbo — a building
recently restored— and there concluded a treaty, which gave the house of Anjou
the legal right to intervene in the affairs of Greece. Baldwin II ceded to
Charles the suzerainty held by himself and his predecessors over
“theprincipality of Achaia and Morea, and all the land which William de
Villehardouin holds by any title whatsoever from the Latin Empire”. William,
who was represented by his chancellor, Leonardo of Veroli, one of the witnesses
to the treaty, was pledged to recognise Charles and his heirs as his lords, and
the famous knights of Achaia were to form part of the 2000 horsemen whom
Charles promised to provide for the recovery of the Latin Empire within the
space of six, or, at the most, seven years. Baldwin also considered himself
entitled to bestow upon Charles the lands which had formed the dowry of Helene
of Epiros, and “which had been held by Manfred and Filippo Chinardo”, and
transferred to him, on paper, all the islands which had belonged to the Latin
Empire, except the four most important. The alliance between them was to be
cemented by the marriage of Charles’s daughter Beatrice and Baldwin’s son
Philip, which was celebrated six years later. The other provisions of the
treaty are of no importance, because the course of Italian politics frustrated
the hopes of the high contracting parties that the Empire of Romania would be
restored by the strong arm of the Angevin.
The Angevin connection could not fail to please the
Prince of Achaia. Charles of Anjou was a Frenchman, and Achaia was practically
a French colony; he was the brother of the saintly Louis IX, whom Villehardouin
had met in Cyprus, and to whose decision the punishment of Guy of Athens had
been deferred, and he was King of Naples, and therefore a powerful neighbour,
whose troops could reach Glarentza from Brindisi in three days. Venice, too,
ever an uncertain ally, had recently, for selfish reason's, concluded an
armistice with the Greek emperor, who had thus a free hand against the Franks
of Achaia and the Lombards of Euboea. The wily Palaiologos swore to observe a
“pure and guileless truce” with the Venetians, to confirm them in
their existing possessions at Coron and Modon, in Crete and Eubcea, while they
promised not to help the Lombards of the latter island, but to remain neutral
while the Greeks invaded it, and to allow Michael to retain temporarily the
Thessalian port of Halmyros, so that he might prevent the export of provisions
for the use of the islanders. As a further reward for this absolutely selfish
policy, eminently characteristic of Venetian statesmanship and worthy of modern
German diplomacy in the near East, the republic was to receive that valuable
Thessalian port and to keep her quarters in Negroponte after the war was over,
while the Genoese were to be expelled the Greek Empire, which was to be thrown open
to Venetian trade. Those Aegean islands which had acknowledged the suzerainty
of the Prince of Achaia during the latter years of the Latin Empire, were now
to be transferred to Michael. The armistice, originally made in 1265, was in
1268 confirmed, with one or two modifications, for the term of five years. Thus
Venice, in order to checkmate her Genoese rivals and recover her Levantine
trade, calmly sacrificed the French and the Lombards.
Before the Prince of Achaia had received assistance
from his new suzerain, the latter summoned him to his aid against the luckless
Conradin, who had crossed the Alps to claim the heritage of the Hohenstaufen.
In spite of the fact that Manfred’s widow was his wife’s sister, William
hastened in response to the appeal of her gaoler. The feudal tie was stronger
for him than that of sentiment, and a prince so fond of fighting for fighting’s
sake was probably not sorry to exhibit his prowess before the most successful
sovereign of southern Europe. Together with his two nephews, the redoubtable
Geoffroy de Bruyeres and Jean de Chauderon, grand constable of the
principality, and other barons and knights, 400 in number, the fine flower of
the renowned Achaian chivalry, William was present at the fatal battle of
Tagliacozzo
“ Ove senz’ arme vinse il vecchio
Alardo.”
Indeed, the defeat of Conradin, which Dante ascribed
to the craft of Erard de Valeri, is by the author of the Chronicle of the
Morea, attributed to the Prince of Achaia. According to him, the prince advised
Charles of Anjou to use cunning, after the fashion of Greeks and Turks, against
an enemy numerically his superior. The King of Naples allowed himself to be
guided by William’s unrivalled experience of Eastern warfare; and the latter’s
plan of alluring Conradin’s predatory Germans into the king’s richly furnished
camp, and then closing in upon them while they were intent on plunder, proved
to be completely successful. But an unprejudiced authority, the Florentine
historian Villani, records how “William de Villehardouin, a knight of great
importance”, was with Charles and Erard on that memorable day, while Clement IV
urged the appointment of so seasoned a soldier as commander against the
rebellious Saracens of Lucera.
After the battle, William accompanied his suzerain to
Naples, whence he returned, laden with gifts, to the Morea. He had now been a
quarter of a century on the throne; and, as he had no son, he was anxious that
his elder daughter, Isabelle, should marry Philip, the second son of Charles of
Anjou, and thus strengthen the connection which had existed since the treaty of
Viterbo between the Angevins of Naples and the French principality of Achaia.
The proposed alliance met with the approval of both the Neopolitan court, which
saw that it might favour its designs upon Greece, and the leading men of the
Morea, who were glad that the husband of the young princess should be of their
own race and speech. But the marriage-contract was extremely favourable to the
Angevins, for it stipulated that whether the Prince of Achaia left heirs or
not, the principality should belong to the house of Anjou. William also
undertook to make all the barons and commanders swear to hand over their
castles peaceably to his successor, and to obtain from the Princess Agnes a
ratification of these conventions. Thus Charles had secured no mere phantom
suzerainty, but the real possession of Achaia after the prince’s death, and
thereby a convenient basis for the prosecution of his schemes against the Greek
Empire. Isabelle was still a mere child, but she was torn from her home, a
sacrifice to the raison d'état. Four
noble ladies and the son of her old nurse, who had probably been her playmate
in the castle of Kalamata, went with her; and amidst the greater glories of
Naples, they must often have talked of her native land of Achaia. In 1271 the
wedding took place in the beautiful cathedral at Trani, and Isabelle and her
husband went to live in the Castel dell’ Uovo at Naples, the selfsame spot
where, sixty years later, her daughter was destined to die a prisoner.
Michael VIII had meanwhile renewed his attempt to
conquer the Morea. A fresh expedition, largely composed of Turkish and Cuman
mercenaries, under a commander closely connected with the emperor, landed at
Monemvasia, and William was obliged to invoke the aid of his suzerain. Charles
sent him corn, money, and men, and appointed his marshal, Dreux de Beaumont, to take command of them. But the operations on both sides were
unimportant. The Greeks had learnt wisdom from their defeats at Prinitsa and
Makryplagi, and abstained from giving battle in the open, while the Franks had
not sufficient supplies for a prolonged blockade of Mistra. Thus, after a
punitive expedition against the rebellious Tzakonians, the campaign closed,
arid the emperor was in no hurry to renew it. The artful Michael, alarmed at
the marriage of Baldwin II’s son with Charles’s daughter, was at this time
endeavouring to gain the support of the papacy and so avert the danger of a
fresh attack upon Constantinople by professing his willingness to accept the
union of the Eastern and Western Churches. The Prince of Achaia was requested
by Gregory X. to allow the imperial delegates to pass through his dominions on
their way to attend the Council of Lyons; but the plenipotentiaries, of whom
the historian Akropolita was one, were so rash as to make the journey round,
instead of across, the Peloponnese in the month of March. Off Cape Malea, one
of the storms so common at that place and season, a fortuna, as the sailors call it, got up; one of the two ships
foundered with all hands, and the other, which contained Akropolita, with
difficulty managed to put into the Venetian port of Modon. The much-suffering
historian thence continued his journey to Lyons, and the services which he
there rendered to the cause of ecclesiastical union were rewarded, when
fanaticism gained the ascendency after the death of Michael VIII, with a second
term of imprisonment, which must have reminded him of his previous confinement
in the dungeons of Epiros.
Nowhere did the cause of orthodoxy find warmer
defenders than in that rival Greek state. In 1271, the Despot of Epiros,
Michael II, had ended his long and stormy reign. Amidst all the vicissitudes of
fortune, he had contrived to hold his heritage in the mountain fastnesses of
his native land against the Greek Empire of Constantinople. Despite the
vagaries of his married life, the builder of three monasteries and churches was
invested by monkish chroniclers with the odour of sanctity, and the memory of
his pious wife, the Blessed Theodora, still lingers in Epiros, where her
religious foundations perhaps compensated for some of the misery which her
husband’s restless ambition had brought upon his country. After his death, she
became a nun, and her tomb, with her effigy and that of her husband, is still
shown in the monastery of St George, which she founded at Arta, and which now
bears her name. Many were the miraculous cures ascribed to her relics, and it
was not unnatural that one who had healed a case of cancer should be beatified
by a grateful Church.
The death of Michael led to a complete division of the
Despotat. His eldest son, Nikephoros I, succeeded to Old Epiros and the island
of Leukas. Corfù, as we saw, had already passed into the hands of the house of
Anjou, and its history is henceforth separate from that of the mainland. In
Epiros itself, the same strong house had acquired, by the treaty of Viterbo,
the former possessions of Manfred; and, though Charles had not yet had leisure
to occupy all of them, the Greeks had been unable to recover them from
Chinardo’s sons, while Joannina was held by an imperial garrison. Still, the
sway of Nicephoros extended over the rest of Epiros and over Akarnania and
Aetolia, while the bastard John I, who had played so treacherous a part at the
battle of Pelagonia, was established at Neopatras, or La Patre as the Franks
called it, beneath the rocky walls of Mount Oeta, and thence ruled over a mixed
population of Wallachs and Greeks, the successors of those Myrmidons, whom Achilles
had led to the siege of Troy. His boundaries were Olympos on the north, and
Parnassos on the south; while to the east of the latter mountain they ran down
to the Gulf of Corinth, at Galaxidi, and included much of the ancient Lokris
Ozolis; from the emperor he received the title Sebastokrator; the Franks, by a misunderstanding of his family name
of Doukas, styled him “Duke” of Neopatras; and, in that splendid and healthy
spot where the moderns seek the baths in summer, he had built a strong castle,
the ruins of which still attest his sovereignty. Married to a daughter of Taronas,
a Wallach chief, he had enlisted the sympathies of that race; and his
opposition to the subjection of the Orthodox Church to the pope, if it drew
upon him and his feebler but no less orthodox brother the anathemas of the
time-serving patriarch of Constantinople, made him the leading representative
of that fanatical Hellenism which arrogated to itself, as it still does today,
the sole right to the Christian name. Beneath his standard, many rigidly
orthodox families of the imperial capital found shelter, some of whose
descendants are still living in his old dominions. Among the fugitives there
were sufficient ecclesiastics to hold a council, which excommunicated the
emperor, the pope, and the oecumenical patriarch, with all the combined
bitterness of theologians and exiles. Two of the Thessalian bishops, their
Graces of Trikkala and Neopatras, did indeed venture to protest against this
new schism; but the one was put in prison, and the other was stripped of all
his garments except his shirt, and then turned out of doors on a freezing
December night. After this there could be no doubt of the bastard’s orthodox
zeal.
His restless character was well known at
Constantinople; but the emperor’s past experience of the difficulties which his
troops had met in their Epirote campaigns, and the state of his Asiatic
provinces, made it desirable that he should pacify a rival whom he would find
it hard to subdue. Accordingly, he endeavoured to flatter the bastard’s vanity
by arranging a marriage between his own nephew, Andronikos Tarchaneiotes, and
John’s beautiful daughter, and by conferring upon the Duke of Neopatras the
high dignity of Sebastokrator. But Tarchaneiotes, who had received an important
command in the Balkans, believing himself to have been passed over in the
bestowal of honours, threw up his post and fled to the court of his
father-in-law, who was not sorry to have an excuse for war with the emperor.
The shelter given to his treacherous official, and the violation of his
territory by the bastard, forced the emperor to despatch a large army,
including both Turkish and Cuman auxiliaries, against him under the command of
his own brother John, the victor of Pelagonia, a commander well acquainted with
the enemy and the enemy’s country. Many places in Thessaly submitted to the
imperial commander, and the bastard sought refuge behind the strong walls of
Neopatras, which he had recently fortified. The lofty position, and the
artificial defences of his capital, enabled him to defy the efforts of the
imperial engineers. But the size of the garrison led the bastard to fear that
his supplies would fall short, and he was doubtless aware that the besiegers
were using threats to induce his followers to betray him. Accordingly, choosing
a dark night, he had himself lowered by a rope from the ramparts, and,
disguised as a groom, traversed the enemy’s camp, crying out in the Greek of
the stables that he was looking for a horse which he had lost. Once out of the
camp, he proceeded by way of Thermopylae to Thebes, the court of his namesake,
John, Duke of Athens, “Sir Yanni”, as the Byzantine historian calls him, and
implored his aid against the emperor. As an inducement to the Duke, he offered
him the hand of his daughter Helene. John of Athens declined the proposed match
for himself, pleading his delicate health and his gouty disposition, but
suggested his younger brother William as a husband for the lady. The bastard
consented, but it was agreed that the allies should first attack the enemy. The
Duke of Athens, at the head of from 300 to 500 picked Athenian horsemen,
accompanied the fugitive back to some rising ground near Neopatras, from which
it was possible to see the imperial army, estimated at 30,000 cavalry. This
huge disparity of numbers did not, however, daunt the chivalrous duke. In
Greek, and in a phrase borrowed from Herodotos, which seems to have become
proverbial in Greece, he remarked to his companion that they were “many people,
but few men”. He then addressed his Athenian knights, and told them that if any
feared to face such enormous numerical odds, they were free to go home. Two
alone availed themselves of his permission, and then the rest fell upon the
imperial camp. The besiegers were completely taken by surprise; their great
host, composed of incoherent elements and various races, was thrown into
confusion by the compact body of Franks; one of those panics, so common with
Balkan armies, seized them; the cry was raised that the Duke of Athens, or even
the terrible Prince of Achaia was upon them, and they fled in disorder, and the
bastard re-entered his capital in triumph. Byzantine piety ascribed the defeat
to the vengeance of Heaven upon the Cuman auxiliaries, who had plundered
Thessalian monasteries, and eaten their rations off the holy eikons; a modern
historian may say that here, as in so many battles between Greeks and Franks,
Providence was on the side of the small but homogeneous and well-horsed
battalions. For once, the bastard kept faith with his Frankish ally. His
daughter married William de la Roche, and the important town of Lamia, together
with Gardiki, the ancient Larissa Kremaste, Gravia on the route from Lamia to
Salona, and Siderokastro, or Sideroporta, the ancient Herakleia, not far from
Thermopylae, were her dowry.1 Thus, the influence of the Athenian
duchy extended as far north as Thessaly.
The news of the victory at Neopatras soon spread to
Euboea, where the Lombard barons recognised in the bastard a serviceable ally
against the Greek emperor, who was his and their enemy alike. Simultaneously
with the despatch of his army against the Duke of Neopatras, Michael VIII, had
sent a large fleet under his admiral, Philanthropends, to prevent the Franks of
the islands from co-operating with the bastard. This fleet was now stationed
off Demetrias, in the Gulf of Volo, and the Eubcean barons, excited by the
success of the Franks on land, resolved to repeat it at sea. They manned a
flotilla of Eubcean and Cretan vessels, armed with wooden towers, which made
them resemble floating towns, and placed it under the command of the son of the
late Venetian bailie. The flower of the Lombard nobility took part in an
enterprise which, shortly before, would have seemed as hopeless as “shooting
arrows against the sky”. But for an accident, however, it would have proved
successful. The rival fleets joined battle in the beautiful gulf, where the
navies of the world could easily lie, and, despite the superior numbers of the
Greek ships, the besiegers, from their wooden towers—for the conflict
“resembled a siege rather than a naval battle”—severely pressed their
opponents. Philanthro- penos was seriously wounded, many of his vessels were
driven ashore, and his flagship was being towed off by the victors, when John
Palaiologos suddenly arrived with the remnant of his defeated army on the
scene. Manning the empty ships with the best of his soldiers, he attacked the
exhausted Lombards with such vigour that all but two of their ships fell into
his hands, one of the triarchs, Guglielmo II da Verona, who was also in virtue
of his wife, the Lady of Passava, Marshal of Morea, was slain, and many of the
Eubcean nobles and their Venetian commander were taken prisoners. Guglielmo’s
brother, Giberto, managed to escape on a light armed vessel to Chalkis, which,
thanks to the energy of the Venetian bailie and colony, who abandoned their
neutrality at the alarm of an attack, and to the prompt despatch of
reinforcements by the Duke of Athens, was saved from the Greeks.
The Emperor’s brother did not, however, attempt to
follow up his victory, returning instead with his captives to Constantinople,
and then retiring from the public service in disgust But the Lombards of Eubcea
had now to cope with a more serious enemy, who had arisen in their midst, and
whom their overweening pride had converted into a valuable tool of Michael
VIII. Some time before the battle of Demetrias, there was living in Euboea a
knight of Karystos, named Licario, whose ancestors had come from Vicenza,
apparently soon after the Lombard settlement. Licario, a penniless adventurer
of great ambition, was, when we first hear of him, attached to the court of
Giberto II da Verona, who succeeded as triarch of central Euboea after the
death of Guglielmo II in the naval engagement. In Giberto’s house was also
residing Dame Felisa, widow of the triarch Narzotto, who acted as guardian for
her infant son. Felisa was still charming, Licario was ambitious; he dared to
avow his love, was told that it was requited, and secretly married her. The
fury of her relatives at this mesalliance knew no bounds; Licario’s endeavours
to obtain the intervention of various persons of influence in the Franco-Greek
world on his behalf failed; so he returned to Karystos and established himself
in a rocky fastness of the island, called, from its exposed position,
Anemopylse, or, “the gates of the wind”. Taking unto him other adventurous
spirits, in which feudal Euboea was not lacking, he created such a reign of
terror by his frequent descents upon the surrounding fields and villages, that
the peasants went to live within the walls of the nearest town, and durst not
resume their agricultural pursuits by day without first stationing watchmen to
tell them when Licario was coming. But he soon grew tired of plundering
peasants, and still thirsted for revenge on the haughty barons who had spurned
him. He therefore entered into negotiations with the emperor; and, finding his
overtures welcomed, proceeded to Constantinople, where he placed his services
at Michael’s disposal. He told the emperor that he would undertake to subdue
the whole of the island, if he were given sufficient forces, and offered to
hand over his own fortress, so that it might serve as a basis of attack. His
plan was accepted, soldiers were put at his disposal, and he carried on a
guerrilla warfare against the Lombards, which inflicted great harm on the
island; Oreos was taken, and he seized and fortified the castle of La Cuppa.
The triarchs received, however, valuable assistance from their suzerain, the
Prince of Achaia, who availed himself of a lull in the war against the Greeks
in the Morea to come over to Negroponte with as many men as he could collect,
and wrested La Cuppa from its Greek garrison. A more voluble but less useful
ally was Dreux de Beaumont, the marshal of Charles of Anjou, who accompanied
the prince with 700 men. To judge from his boasts, he was going to drive the
Greeks into the sea, but his obstinacy brought upon him a signal rout under the
walls of Oreos.
After the defeat of the Lombards’ fleet off Demetrias,
Licario prosecuted his campaign in Euboea with still greater success. Many of
the islanders had now flocked to his standard, and he ventured to besiege the strong
“red castle” of Karystos, his own birthplace. Othon de Cicon, the Burgundian
baron of Castel Rosso, held out for long against a combined attack by land and
sea, but he was at last compelled to surrender, and Licario was richly
rewarded by his imperial master for his capture of this great prize. Michael VIII,
like the Comneni before him, had adopted the principles of feudalism, and he,
accordingly, invested his faithful henchman with the whole island as a fief, on
condition that he kept 200 knights for the service of his liege lord. He also
bestowed on him the hand of a noble and rich Greek lady, who took the place of
the fair Felisa. These marks of favour spurred Licario to further efforts; the
important castles of La Cuppa, Larmena, and La Clisura were all taken and
re-fortified. Even beyond the shores of Euboea his hand was felt. The
neighbouring island of Skopelos was regarded as impregnable by its inhabitants;
even if all the realm of Romania were lost—so they boasted —they would escape
in safety, and Filippo Ghisi, the proud island baron, was fond of applying to
himself the line of Ovid, “I am too big a man to be harmed by fortune”. But
Licario, who knew that Skopelos lacked water, invested it during a hot summer,
forced it to capitulate, and sent its haughty lord in chains to Constantinople.
Far to the south we find Licario in the Bay of Navarino, “the port of rushes”,
as it was called, and he drove the Venieri from their island of Cerigo, the
Viari from theirs of Cerigotto. Venice became naturally alarmed at these
successes; she did not desire the system of triple government in Euboea to be
superseded by the establishment of a strong, centralised administration in the
hands of an able man, who might found a dynasty. So, when she renewed her truce
with the emperor in 1277, she expressly stipulated that she should be allowed “to
help and defend the island of the Evripos and those in it against your majesty.
The emperor continued to make use of his corresponding
right to levy war against the island, and Licario, supported by the Greek fleet
at Oreos, and by a body of Catalan mercenaries, who now make their first
appearance in Greek history, resolved upon nothing less than an attack upon its
capital. Knowing from bitter experience “the superciliousness of the Latins”,
who were sure to make the mistake of despising, and rushing out to attack a
foreign enemy, he laid an ambuscade for the impetuous garrison, and then
appeared in sight of the town. Duke John of Athens, the hero of Neopatras, was
then in Negroponte, and, gouty as he was, he mounted his horse and rode out of
the gate with the triarch Giberto da Verona and their followers along the road
in the direction of Oreos and the north. The rival forces came to close
quarters at Varonda, the modern village of Vathondas; the Catalan knife and the
generalship of Licario were too much for the impetuous Franks; the Duke of
Athens was wounded, and, unable to keep his gouty feet in the stirrups, fell to
the ground and was taken prisoner with Giberto and many others. The town of
Negroponte now seemed to lieat the mercy of Licario, but a crushing defeat of
the imperial forces on the mainland, and the energy of the Venetian bailie,
combined to save it. Simultaneously with the despatch of the Greek fleet to
Oreos, another army had been sent, under the two imperial generals, Synadenos
and Kavalldrios, to attack the redoubtable bastard of Neopatras. The bastard
met them on the historic plain of Pharsala, famous alike in the struggles of
Roman against Roman and of Greek against Turk. His clever strategy, and the
rush of his Italian auxiliaries, decided the day; one of the Greek commanders
was captured; the other fled, only to die of his injuries. Meanwhile, at
Negroponte, Morosini Rosso, known as “the good bailie” for his lavish
expenditure on the improvement of the town, had taken prompt measures for its
defence, and the news of its danger had at once been sent to Jacques de la
Roche, who governed Argos and Nauplia for his cousin, the Duke of Athens. By
forced marches, the governor reached Negroponte in the incredibly short space
of twenty-four hours, and the city was saved. Licario contented himself with
occupying the fine castle of Filla, and then set out with his prisoners in
chains to Constantinople. His revenge was complete; his haughty brother-in-law,
Giberto, in whose train he had once been a humble knight, was now his prisoner,
while he stood high in the confidence of his sovereign, and received the
dignity of Great Constable of the Empire as a further mark of imperial favour.
A Byzantine historian has depicted the final scene of Licario’s triumph in
dramatic language, worthy of the best days of Hellenic literature. He shows us
Giberto waiting as a prisoner at the door of the audience-chamber, while the
emperor is seated on his throne, surrounded by his councillors. Then Licario
enters, but yesterday Giberto’s servant, now arrayed in all the splendour of
his official robes, and showing by his haughty manner how great a man he had
become. The prisoner’s pulse beats faster and faster, the fellow is actually
whispering into the imperial ear! This was more than Lombard pride could bear;
Giberto burst a blood-vessel, and fell dead upon the floor.
Michael VIII might well be proud of his triumphs. He
had not only recovered the capital of the empire, but had had the rulers of the
two strongest Frankish states in Greece in his power. He did not, however,
avail himself of Duke John’s captivity to extort territory from the Franks of
Athens as he had done in the similar case of Villehardouin. It might have been
expected that he would have rounded off the Byzantine province in the Morea by
insisting on the cession of the Athenian fief of Argos and Nauplia as the price
of the duke’s freedom. On the contrary, he did not ask for a single stone of
the Athenian fortresses. He even thought of giving his prisoner his daughter in
marriage and so converting him into an ally. John’s state of health, however,
was such that a marriage was inadvisable, and the emperor accordingly released
him on payment of 30,000 gold solidi (£13,440). We may be sure that it was
policy and not generosity which prompted this act of forbearance. Michael VIII
knew that at that moment Charles of Anjou, a man whose ambitious designs he dreaded, was at last
preparing his long-expected expedition against the Greek Empire. Nearer home he
had a restless and victorious rival in the person of the Duke of Neopatras, who
was bound by ties of marriage to the ducal house of Athens, by ties of
friendship and commerce to the royal house of Naples. Finally, in
the midst of his own capital, there was a body of discontented ecclesiastics,
who regarded as a schismatic the man who had sent envoys to the pope and had
endeavoured to prevent the dismemberment of his empire by uniting the churches.
Michael was a cautious statesman, and he saw that the policy adopted in 1262
would not answer in 1279. Duke John of Athens did not long survive his release
from captivity; in 1280 he died, and his brother William, baron of Livadia,
reigned in his stead.
Licario returned to his native island after his signal
triumph over his own and the emperor’s enemies at Constantinople, and took up
his abode in the great castle of Filla, whose imposing ruins still look down
upon the Lelantian plain. Outside the walls of Chalcis he was now master of the
island, and he maintained such a reign of terror that no one could go in safety
to attend to the vineyards in the plain, nor could the priests “bless the
waters” of the classic fountain of Arethusa at Epiphany. Beyond Euboea, he
continued to make the Franks rue the day when he had gone over to the enemy.
Ere long, he succeeded Philanthropends as Byzantine admiral, with the usual
style of “ Grand Duke,” attached to that high official, and in that capacity
ravaged the islands of Seriphos and Siphnos, which he captured from their Latin
lords, took many castles on the mainland, and made an annual raid with the
fleet upon the dominions of Duke William of Athens. Then his name disappears
from history; we know not how he ended, nor what became of the children whom
his rich Greek wife had borne him. His strange and romantic career strikes the
imagination, and even in that age of adventurers he stands out above his
fellows. No renegade Latin had inflicted so much injury on his
fellow-countrymen. He had wrested almost all Euboea from the Lombards; he and
his Byzantine allies had captured almost all the Aegean islands from their
Italian lords, and some of them remained henceforth part of the imperial
dominions. Even as far east as Paphlagonia, he had won laurels by defeating the
Turks. Another Latin succeeded him in the post of Lord High Admiral, the pirate
captain John de lo Cavo of Anaphe, who continued, though in less dramatic
fashion, the destruction wrought by the low-born knight of Karystos.
Meanwhile, the long reign of William de Villehardouin
in the Morea had drawn to a close. After 1272 the war between Franks and Greeks
in the peninsula languished, owing to the negotiations between Michael VIII and
the papacy, and William and Dreux de Beaumont were able, as we saw, to go over
to help the Lombards of Negroponte against Licario. Three years later, however,
the Greeks renewed hostilities, and the prince ordered his nephew, Geoffroy de
Bruyères, to take the Angevin auxiliaries, whom Charles had placed at his
disposal as his captain-general, and garrison the southern frontier of Skortd.
Geoffroy accordingly proceeded with his men to a place to which the Slavs of
Skortd had given, from its numerous walnut-trees, the name of Great Arachova,
and which, still known under that Slavonic designation, may be found to the
left of the road between Tripolitza and Sparta.1 There the French
soldiers contracted a fatal gastric fever from rash indulgence in the cold
water, with which the place abounded, and, though their leader pluckily led the
remnant of them against the Greeks, he succumbed himself to the disease, thus
ingloriously closing his varied career. In the Greek Chronicle of the Morea he
has found his funeral epitaph: “All, great and small, mourned his loss, even
the very birds, which have no speech; for he was the father of the orphan, the
husband of the widow, the lord and defender of the poor”. But his Greek foes
could not refrain from rejoicing at the death of “the best knight of all
Romania”.
The rest of Prince William’s reign was mainly occupied
by feudal disputes, which do not always reflect very highly on the character of
that warrior, who is a finer figure leading his knights to battle than when
relying on technicalities in the High Court. The double desertion by Geoffroy
of his liege lord had been punished, as we saw, by the restriction of his
barony of Skortfi to himself and the heirs of his body, so that, as he left no
children, it escheated, on his death, to the prince, who allowed Geoffroy’s
widow, Isabelle de la Roche, to retain one-half of it as her portion, according
to the usual custom of the country. Against this a certain knight, named
Pestel, protested as next-of-kin, and appealed from the prince to Charles of
Anjou, as suzerain of Achaia. Charles ordered his vassal to invest Pestel with
the barony; but William disregarded his orders, and there for the present the
matter rested. Isabelle, on her part, did not long remain a widow. Two years
after her late husband’s death, she married Hugh, Count of Brienne and Lecce,
an old friend of her father, Duke Guy I of Athens, and member of a family
destined to be even more celebrated in the history of Greece, than it had been
in that of France, Italy, and the Holy Land. The family came, like that of
Champlitte, from Champagne, where it first appears in the reign of Hugh Capet.
In the early part of the thirteenth century two brothers of this adventurous
house had won fame, the one in Italy, the other in the East. Walter, the elder,
was invested by Innocent III with the dignity of Count of Lecce, near Brindisi,
while John, the younger, became King of Jerusalem and Emperor of Constantinople.
Walter’s son, fourth of the name, was created Count of Jaffa by the King of
Cyprus, and died, after excruciating tortures, in the prisons of the paynim.
His son, Hugh, who now became connected with the affairs of Athens and Achaia,
was already well known to the prince and the barons of the Morea. An hereditary
enemy of the Hohenstaufen in Southern Italy, he had fought against Manfred at
Benevento, and had stood by the side of Prince William and Charles of Anjou at
Tagliacozzo. The reward of his services was the restoration to him of his
forfeited possessions at Lecce. In 1277 his marriage with Isabelle was
celebrated at Andravida, in the presence of the bride’s brother, Duke John of
Athens. Hugh received his wife’s half of the great barony of Skortd, and, after
arranging its affairs and appointing bailies to look after his interests, he
sailed with her to Apulia. Not long afterwards, Isabelle died, leaving a son,
who was destined to be the last French Duke of Athens.
Another feudal case caused the prince considerably
more trouble than that of the barony of Skortd. It will be remembered that,
when he had been released from imprisonment at Constantinople in 1262, one of
the hostages sent there on his behalf was the Lady Marguerite, daughter of Jean
II de Neuilly, baron of Passavd, and hereditary Marshal of Achaia. While
Marguerite was still a hostage at Constantinople, her uncle Gautier II de
Rozieres, baron of Akova or Matagrifon, as the Franks called it, died without
heirs of his body. As the Salic law did not prevail in Frankish Greece,
Marguerite was entitled to the barony as the next-of-kin; but her compulsory
absence from the Morea prevented her from making her claim within the term of
two years and two days, provided by feudal law for claimants abroad. The prince
thereupon declared the barony forfeited to the crown, and, when Marguerite was
at last released and claimed her inheritance, he ungenerously raised the
technical plea that the time for making such a claim had expired—a piece of
chicanery similar to that by which his father had won the principality. In vain
the lady pleaded that she had been absent on his service, William ungallantly
stuck to the letter of the law. Unprotected and helpless, for both her husbands
had been killed in battle —Guibert de Cors at Karydi, and Guglielmo II da Verona
in the sea-fight off Demetrias— she was advised by her friends to marry some
influential man, who would espouse her cause. The idea met with her approval,
and her choice lighted upon Jean de St Omer, brother of Nicholas II, who was
hereditary lord of half Thebes, where he built the magnificent castle, of which
the Santameri tower is the sole surviving fragment. By this marriage Jean
became hereditary Marshal of Achaia, and his family thus extended its authority
south of the Gulf of Corinth. Jean de St Omer did not allow his wife’s claim to
be neglected, and demanded to be heard before the court of the principality.
The prince convened the court in the church of the Divine Wisdom at Andravida,
and Jean, his wife, and his two brothers, Nicholas and Othon, appeared before
it. Then the lord of Thebes arose, proud of his lineage —for his grandmother had
been widow of Boniface of Salonika, and daughter of the King of Hungary, while
the Duke of Athens was his first cousin— and stated his sister-inlaw’s case.
The prince, nettled at his arrogant demeanour, asked him whether he demanded
the barony of Akova for her as a right or begged it as a favour, and when the
Theban baron replied that he asked no favour, but only what was justly due,
William summoned all the barons, prelates, and vassals of the principality to
consider the question thoroughly.
This second parliament was held in the Minorite church
of St Francis at Glarentza, and the prince, handing his sceptre to the
chancellor, Leonardo of Veroli, descended himself into the arena to plead the
cause of the crown in person. In lawyer-like fashion he called for the Book of
Customs, and cited the chapter relating to the obligation of a vassal to become
a hostage for his lord. The Court seemed at first decidedly in favour of the
claimant, but when the prince again called its attention to the letter of the
law, it gave its judgment against her. William thanked the Court for its
decision, but Jean de St Omer was so much offended that he refused even to go
through that usual form.
Having thus obtained a confirmation of his legal
position, William could afford to be generous. He called for the chancellor,
told him that he had been irritated by the arrogance of the barons of St Omer,
but that, now that he had gained the case, he wished to give one-third of the
barony as a favour to the Lady Marguerite. Accordingly Colinet, the Lord Chamberlain
of the principality, and the elders of the barony, who knew its boundaries and
history, were ordered to come with the minutes of the baronial court, and eight
of the twenty-four fiefs of Akova were selected for her. A deed was at once
drawn up and sealed by the chancellor; it was placed under the coverlet of the
prince’s bed, and Marguerite was summoned to the presence of her lord. Then the
chancellor drew back the coverlet, and disclosed the document. The prince
handed it to her, and invested her with his glove, while the remaining two-thirds of the barony were bestowed upon her namesake, the prince’s younger
daughter, Marguerite.
Not long after this William died. When he felt his end
approaching, he retired to his beloved castle of Kalamata, the family fief of
the Villehardouins, where he had been born. To his bedside he summoned the
nobles of the principality, and asked their counsel in making his will. His
wife, his two daughters, and his subjects, great and small, he commended to
the care of King Charles I of Naples, and appointed Jean de Chauderon, the
Great Constable, Archbishop Benedict of Patras, and the Bishop of Modon, as
his executors. The first of them was to administer the affairs of the
principality, until Charles had had time to appoint a bailie. He begged that
all his gifts, whether to Latin and Greek monasteries, or to private
individuals, should be respected, and directed that his body should be buried
in the memorial church of St James at Andravida, which he had built and presented
to the Templars, beside those of his father and brother. Then on 1st May 1278
he died. The last of the Villehardouin princes was laid to rest as he had
ordered, and four chaplains were appointed, in accordance with his wishes, to
pray for the souls of the three departed in the church of St James. The outline
of the church can still be traced, but no archaeologist has disturbed the long
repose of the French rulers of the Morea. Requiescant in pace.
It was a great misfortune for the principality that
William left no son to inherit it. With him the male stock of the Villehardouins
came to an end, for the “Prince of the Morea”, mentioned by the Byzantine
historian Pachymeres as having become patriarch of Antioch, and
being at one time a likely candidate for the oecumenical throne, cannot be
proved to have been a brother of Prince William. Nor was the latter’s
son-in-law, Philip of Anjou, alive at the time of his death. The young prince
had overstrained himself in bending a crossbow, and never got over the effects
of the injury. A year before his father-in-law he died, and in the beautiful
cathedral at Trani, where, six years earlier, his marriage had been celebrated,
he found a grave. Thus the Villehardouin family was now reduced to William’s
two daughters, of whom Isabelle, according to the Catalan chronicler Muntaner, was only fourteen years old, though already a widow, and Marguerite was two years
younger. Their Greek mother, Anna of Epiros, or Agnes as the Franks called her,
who received the castles of Kalamata and Chloumoutsi for her life, soon
afterwards married Nicholas II of St Omer, the proud baron who had treated her
first husband with such arrogance. Henceforth, in the hands of women, the
principality naturally declined. There was no strong man to keep the unruly
barons in check; the bailies whom the kings of Naples appointed were sometimes
foreigners, ignorant of the country and its conditions, and after the time of
Villehardouin only four princes of Achaia ever resided in the land, whence they
took their title. Moreover, by this time a change had come over the feudal
society of the Morea. Of the twelve original baronies, two alone— Vostitza and
Chalandritza—remained in the families of the old barons. Two—Kalavryta and
probably Geraki—had been lost to the Greeks since the fatal re-establishment of
the imperial power in the peninsula; Patras had early passed from the Aleman
family to the archbishop; and, though it seems to have returned to its secular
lords, William Aleman had more recently pledged it to the primate for 16,000 hyperperi, and had left the country; the baron of
Gritzena has never been mentioned again, and had, therefore, probably died
without heirs; the families of Karytaina, Akova, Veligosti, Passava, and Nikli
were all extinct in the male line, and those great baronies passed by marriage
either altogether or in part to the houses of Brienne, St Omer, De la Roche,
and De Villiers. Of the two Villehardouin family fiefs, Arkadia had been
bestowed by the late prince upon Vilain d’Aunoy, Marshal of Romania, one of the
French nobles who had emigrated from Constantinople to the Morea after the fall
of the Latin Empire; while Kalamata was temporarily
in the hands of the Princess Agnes, not only a woman but a Greek, and was soon
exchanged, together with Clermont, the rest of her widow’s portion, for other
lands in less important strategic positions; Nothing is more remarkable in the
history of Frankish Greece than the rapidity with which the race of the
conquerors died out. Only two generations had passed since they first set foot
in the Peloponnese, yet already many of their families were extinct The almost
ceaseless wars of Prince William, and the racial suicide which the Franks
committed by keeping themselves as far as possible a caste apart from the
Greeks, had had the natural results, and where they intermarried with the
natives, the children were almost always more Greek than French, serving on the
emperor’s ships and fighting the emperor’s battles. One of the few exceptions
to this tendency was where, for reasons of state, a French prince married a
Greek princess, as in the case of William of Achaia and his namesake of Athens.
But in medieval Greece, as in modern Europe, mixed marriages between
sovereigns bear no resemblance to those between private individuals; in almost
every instance, the offspring of a royal union sympathises with the nationality
with which his interests are identified; whereas, the Gasmotilos, despised by
the haughty Franks, found a welcome and a career in the service of the Greek
Empire.
No contemporary authority informs us what became of
the Franks who had lands in that part of the Morea which was reconquered by the
Greeks after 1262. We know, indeed, that one prominent man, Jean de Nivelet,
baron of Geraki, settled down at a place near Vostitza, to which he gave his
family name. No doubt some others followed his example, and it is probable that
several of the smaller persons found a new home within the Venetian colonies of
Modon and Coron. But those twin trading settlements were circumscribed, the
conditions of life there would scarcely appeal to the fighting chivalry of
France, and, as the Frank principality grew less, it must have become harder
for them to find even small estates, where they could live the life to which they
had been accustomed down in the south. To return to France was difficult; for
two whole generations spent in the East must have unfitted them for the West,
just as today, the Levantine who is happy at Smyrna is miserable in London or
Berlin. The only course open to many of them was to remain in the Byzantine
province, where fusion with the Greek race awaited them, and, as its natural corollary, the adoption of the orthodox religion by
themselves or their children, a phenomenon which meets us in the case of the Franks of Arkadia sixty years later. Where the
Italian element in Greece has been strong and compact, and where Latin rule has
endured, as in the Ionian and Aigean islands, for many centuries, it has been
possible for the descendants of the Venetians to keep their own religion, and
even their own speech. But that has not been the case in the Peloponnese, in
continental Greece, or in Euboea. On the other hand, the Moreot Franks were
never fanatical Catholics; Prince William endowed Greek monasteries; his
brother appropriated Catholic revenues; the rank-and-file may therefore have
thought that the omission of the filioque clause from the creed was a small
price to pay for their undisturbed residence among the Greeks of the Byzantine
province, where, as time went on, they became merged in that extraordinary
nationality which has assimilated one race after another upon the soil of
Hellas.
Of the internal condition of the Athenian Duchy at
this period we can glean but little. From the fact, however, that Duke John was
able to lend money for the pay of the Angevin troops in the Morea, we may
assume that his finances were satisfactory, and a Venetian document of 1278 mentions
subjects of the republic who were settled as merchants at Satines, as Athens
now began to be called in the vernacular from an amalgamation of the
preposition with the accusative. From a notice two years earlier we learn that
at that time the beautiful abbey of Daphni was the sole surviving possession of
the Cistercians on Greek soil. The ecclesiastical establishment of Athens had,
indeed, become a comfortable home for those members of the ducal family who had
entered the Church. We hear of two De la Roche who were canons of Athens at
this period; one of them, Nicholas, has left his name as “founder” of some
mediaeval building on one of the pillars of the Stoa of Hadrian; the other,
William, was made “procurator of the Athenian Church”; but, despite the prayers
of the chapter, Clement IV declined to appoint as Archbishop of Athens one who
had “a grave defect in the matter of literature”. Obviously the influential
canon was not a reading man.
Great changes had occurred in the Ionian islands
during the period covered by this chapter. While Leukas still remained united
to the Despotat of Epiros, whose ruler was now the feeble Nikephdros I, Corfú
had become a possession of the house of Anjou, and Cerigo had passed into the
hands of the great Monemvasiote family of Daimonoyannes, with whom it remained
for forty years. Over the three central islands of Cephalonia, Zante, and
Ithaka, there now ruled “the most high and mighty palatine count, Richard
Orsini”, like his father Matthew, a vassal of the Prince of Achaia, and
consequently bound by the same feudal tie to King Charles of Naples. In the
next chapter we shall have occasion to mention this remarkable man, who was
destined to play a conspicuous part in the history of both Corfu and Achaia.
During the present period we find him confirming, in 1264, the possessions of
the Catholic bishopric of Cephalonia, which, as we saw, was united with that of
Zante, in a voluminous document of much value for the contemporary geography of
the diocese. The numerous Italian names which it contains point to the
existence of a large Italian colony, the descendants of Margaritone’s men. It
specially mentions the island of Ithaka as part of his dominions, and calls the
ancient home of Odysseus by its classic name, which also occurs in a Venetian
document of some years later, where it is mentioned as the scene of piracies.
Horses and mules seem to have been as scarce in his islands as in the time of
Homer, for he had to ask permission of King Charles to import those animals
from the rolling plains of Apulia to his rocky domain.
The three Venetian colonies now left in Greece proper—
at the town of Negroponte and the two Messenian stations of Coron and Modon— had
naturally been affected by the disturbed state of the Levant during the
hostilities between the Franks and the Emperor Michael VIII. Since the loss of
Constantinople, Negroponte had become far more important to the republic, the
salary of the Venetian bailie had been raised, and money had been spent freely
on the town, so much so, indeed, that the Venetian Sanudo comments on the great
expenses incurred by his fellow-countrymen in the Near East, “and especially
for the preservation of Negroponte”. An inscription of 1273 tells
how the then bailie built a chapel of St Mark —a proof of piety, or more
probably of the increase of the Venetian colony. The occupation of the whole
island outside the walls of the capital must have greatly damaged the traffic
in corn, oil, and wine, wax and honey, raw and worked silk, which are mentioned
as the products of Euboea in the thirteenth century, and the same was the case
with the wine and oil trade of the two Messenian stations, to which, however,
on other grounds, Venice naturally attached great value. Scarcely a man-of-war,
scarcely a trading ship on her way to the Archipelago, the Black Sea, or the
Sea of Azov, failed to be sighted by the Venetian watchmen at Coron and Modon,
so appropriately called “the chief eyes of the republic”, and there was money,
too, to be made by the Jewish, and not less by the Christian, tradesmen of the
two ports, out of the pilgrims, who put in there on their way to the Holy
Sepulchre. Whenever, too, the Franks were besieging a castle, it was here that
they went for the makers of siege-engines. Coron was the more important of the
two: its cochineal was celebrated, and when, about this time, the number of the
captains of these stations was increased from two to three, two of the trio
resided there, while in critical times a bailie was sent as a consul.
In the other parts of the Morea, there was a trade
done in raisins and figs, oil, honey, wax, and cochineal, sufficient to attract
the merchants of Florence and Pisa, while silk and sugar, small in quantity and
poor in quality, were also produced; but the famous vineyards of Monemvasia,
whence our ancestors got their Malmsey, had passed into the hands of the
Greeks. During the intermittent war with the latter, the principality
constantly suffered from lack of corn, which had to be imported, like horses,
from Apulia. In 1268 the prince asked his new suzerain for the loan of 2000
ounces of gold, in order “to repair the ravages made by war on his land”, and
at the same time his private affairs were so unsatisfactory that he was forced
to pledge valuables to the amount of 127 ounces (or a little over £300) at the
pawnshops of Barletta, in order to pay his way. But at the time of his death,
he was able to charge the annuity of £1054, which he left to one of his
executors, upon the customs-dues of Glarentza, the chief port of Achaia, and
the seat of a bank which used to lend money to the Angevin bailies, while, two
years later, the revenues of the principality were required to furnish an
annual salary of £1200 to one of those officials. A shrewd man and a court
favourite, like Leonardo of Veroli, the Chancellor of Achaia, was able to amass
a large fortune, and left behind him houses and lands scattered over the
principality from Corinth to Kalamata. What is still more interesting is the
fact that he had collected a small library. From the inventory of
his books we gather that his taste lay chiefly in the direction of novels and medicine, for the list contains fourteen romances and two
medical works. But our curiosity is aroused when we hear that he also possessed
“a Greek book and a chronicle”, and that he had a work in which he was
interested copied for him by two copyists in the royal library at Naples, and
carefully corrected by a French priest and two Italians. Obviously then, Franks
of position sometimes spent the long winter evenings in the Achaian castles
with books of history and romance, and some of them were able to read the
language of their subjects. One Archbishop even translated Aristotle.
There was, however, another industry more lucrative
than law or agriculture, which was then thriving in most parts of the Levant.
Piracy has, in almost every age, been the curse of the Greek seas, and it
flourished luxuriantly at this period. A document of the year 1278,
which contains the detailed report of three Venetian judges, appointed to
estimate the damages sustained by subjects of the republic in Greek waters
during recent years, throws a lurid light on the state of public security in
the realm of Romania. We read of corsairs of many nationalities —Genoese (whose
depredations were so numerous as to merit a special list all to themselves),
Venetians, Lombards, Pisans, Sicilians, Provencals, Catalans, Spaniards,
Greeks, Slavs, and half-castes. But Genoa had the distinction of furnishing
most of the captains, and Venice that of supplying most of the crews. Perhaps
the most famous of these pirates was John de lo Cavo (or de Capite), a native,
and subsequently lord, of the island of Anaphe, whose professional headquarters
were at Anaea, on the coast of Asia Minor opposite Samos, whose favourite haunt
was the sea round Eubcea, and who succeeded Licario as imperial admiral. Among
the many sufferers from his depredations was the father of the historian
Sanudo, who lost valuable merchandise on two Venetian vessels which fell into
this corsair’s clutches, and for which £10,752, or one-third of the value, was
afterwards paid as compensation by the emperor. Another pirate, whose name
became a household word in Greece, was Andrea Gaffore, a Genoese, whom Sanudo
knew personally,
and who, after a long career of plunder, settled down with his pile as a peaceful
citizen at Athens, where we find him in the early part
of the next century. Scarcely less successful a
sea-robber was Roland, knight of Salonika, whose operations extended as far
west as Zante. The profession was so lucrative, and was considered so
respectable, that it became hereditary. The son of John de lo Cavo assisted his
father; Gaffore had a brother in the business; the knightly Roland took his
son-in-law, Pardo, presumably a Spaniard,
into partnership. Men of distinguished lineage, Greeks and Franks alike, became
corsairs. The great archontic families of Monemvasia, the Daimonoydnnai and the
Mamonddes, figure conspicuously in the report of the Venetian judges, and one
of the former, Paul Monoydnnes (as his name was written for short) became the
first Greek lord of Cerigo, after the expulsion of the Venier dynasty by
Licario. Sanudo specially speaks of the piracies committed by the Lombard
barons of Negroponte, who found the harvests of the sea far more fruitful than
those of their great island. Every year they used to send a fleet of ioo sail
to pillage the coast of Asia Minor, and on one occasion they took booty to the
value of 50,000 hyperperi (£22,400) at Anaea. It was therefore no wonder that
old Guglielmo da Verona could afford to maintain 400 knights, that the island
was famous for its fine cavalry, which greatly injured the Greeks on land, or
that Negroponte could boast of a rich Venetian banking-house, that of Andrea
Ferro, which was able to finance the Franks of the Morea in their war against
Michael VIII. The other island barons followed the example of the Dalle Carceri
clan in Euboea, plundering Greeks and anyone whom they met, not sparing even
the pious pilgrim on his way to the Holy Sepulchre. Even the ducal family of De
la Roche gave shelter to corsairs in the beautiful Gulf of Nauplia, and thus
brought down upon themselves, according to the devout Sanudo (mindful of his
father’s stolen cargo) the special displeasure of Providence, which had
similarly punished the Venieri of Cerigo and the Viari of Cerigotto. Besides
Anzea and Nauplia, Monemvasia and the islands of Skopelos, Keos, and
Samothrace, were favourite lairs of the pirates. On one occasion, the Monemvasiotes
looked calmly on, while a flagrant act of piracy was being committed in their
harbour, which, as the port of shipment for Malmsey wine, attracted corsairs
who were also connoisseurs. After the capture of Skopelos and Lemnos by
Licario, the inhabitants of those islands emigrated to Euboea, and turned
pirates, so that it became the principal rendezvous of the fraternity and a
nest of searobbers. During a war against the Emperor Andrdnikos II, 300
privateers were sent out from Negroponte alone, and Sanudo had the honour of
knowing a Cretan pirate, who used to boast that with his one ship he had done
400,000 hyperperi worth of damage (£179,200) to the Greek Empire. These
privateers had, indeed, a regular fixed tariff, which was recognised as a custom
of the trade. The captain was entitled to three denarii of spoil for every two
which he had spent on fitting out his vessel; but, if he attacked the lair of a
fellow-pirate, his gains, in consideration of the extra risk, or perhaps by way
of salve to his professional conscience, were assessed at twice the amount of
his outlay. Within the realm of Romania the privateer captain had also
one-fifth of the takings, and enjoyed besides certain perquisites as dragoman
and pilot. But great as were the gains of the pirates, they represented only a
part of the damage done. The misery and desolation which they caused defy
calculation, and were by no means confined to one race, or creed. Neutrals, no
less than open enemies, were considered as fair game by these gentry, and the
losses of which the Venetians complained had all been sustained during the
period when Michael VIII, whose flag these privateers usually flaunted, was
supposed to be cherishing a “pure and guileless truce” with the republic.
Private commerce was, under these circumstances,
attended with enormous risks, especially among the Greek islands. Traffic
between Andros and Euboea was specially dangerous, for to the normal perils of
that mill-race, the Doro channel, was added the probability that John de lo
Cavo or DaimonoyAnnes would be lurking behind the Euboeari headland of Cape
Mantello, as it was then named. We hear of a Venetian merchant of Athens
plundered as he was sailing past Marathon; and often a well-filled merchantman
got no farther than “the Columns” of Sunium; a ship was seized even in the port
of Chalkis under the eyes of the bailie. The passage from Euboea across to
Atalante was infested by pirate brigs, and cargoes of beans and other articles
of food, intended for the consumption of the Marquis of Boudonitza and his
men, were taken at the landing-place. A harmless trader might easily find
himself stripped of all but his shirt, or even deprived of that garment, and
carried off to work in the prisons of Rhodes. Wherever there was a good harbour, in
the Pagaean Gulf, in the island of Ios, in Suda bay, in the extinct crater
of Santorini, in the noble bay of Navarino, “the port of rushes”, as the Franks
called it, there was also a good place for the pirate captain and his crew.
Maina had a peculiarly bad name for piracy even then, and ships anchoring in
Porto Quaglio or off Oetylos often did so at the risk of their cargoes. The
Gulf of Corinth was another risky place, and far up the west coast of Greece,
the narrow channel of Corfu was still a resort of corsairs, who carried off
their prisoners to the classic Butrinto—the “tall city of Buthrotum” of the Aeneid
—which had been taken by the Greeks from its Angevin commander. The point of
Ithaka was another dangerous spot, the bishop of Cephalonia was plundered by
Dalmatian pirates, and “Ambracia’s Gulf” with its narrow entrance seemed to
have been specially constructed for the purpose of incercepting Corfiote
vessels on their way to the skala of Arta.
But there were land-rats no less than water-rats which
disturbed the path of the merchant and the priest. The more or less
intermittent Franco-Greek war which had gone on in the Morea since the fatal
cession of the three castles had completely changed the conditions of life
there. The profound security which we found existing in the early days of
Prince William’s reign had disappeared. The Venetians of Coron and Modon,
though those places were specially guaranteed against attack in the
arrangements made by the republic with Michael VIII, found that their neutrality
availed them nothing when they met a Greek captain —half officer, half
bandit— outside the narrow boundaries of the two Messenian colonies. On one
occasion, the archdeacon of Modon, while travelling in the company of his
bishop to Glarentza, was stopped at Krestena, near Olympia, and dragged before
the emperor’s brother, Constantine, then commanding in the Byzantine province.
In vain the archdeacon protested that he was “a Venetian citizen”; his
nationality was disregarded, and he was murdered by the soldiery. It is
interesting to note that the Venetian judges assessed the value of a colonial
archdeacon at 450 hyperperi. Nor was Constantine Palaiologos’s army less
scornful when the local authorities of Coron sent him in a bill of damages for
the loss of a cargo of Cretan cheese and wine. Venetian subjects languished in
the dungeons of Kalavryta since the Greeks had dispossessed Geoffroy de Tournay
of that fine castle, where an imperial commandant now flew the double-headed
eagle from the keep.
Three-quarters of a century of Frankish rule had
endowed Greece with a strange, yet often picturesque, geographical
nomenclature. There can be no doubt that the Franks, not being Englishmen, had
by this time learnt at least sufficient Greek for all ordinary colloquial
purposes, though later than this, French, and excellent French too, was spoken
at the court of Thebes. We are expressly told that Prince William of Achaia and
Duke John of Athens spoke in Greek to the Greek commanders, the latter even
using, perhaps unconsciously, an epigrammatic phrase of Herodotos, while
Ancelin de Toucy, the Constable Chauderon, and Geoffroy d’Aunoy all spoke
Greek, and Leonardo of Veroli read it. But, all the same, the
Franks, assisted by ignorant natives, had corrupted Greek proper names in a way
often unrecognisable to those who have not read the French and Italian
documents of the period. We have already mentioned how “Athens” had become “Satines”,
“Lemnos” “Stalimene”, “Neopatras” “La Patre,” “Lacedaemonia” “La Cremonie,” and
“Euripos” “Negroponte”. But all over the Franco-Greek world the same process
had been going on.
The island of Samothrace
meets us frequently as
“Sanctus Mandrachi” (a saint
invented to account for the name); “Ios” and “Anaphe”, by the usual process of adding the final
letter of the accusative of the article to the following noun, now figure as
“Nio” and “Nanfio”; “Zetounion” (the Byzantine name for “Lamia”) is, in
Frankish parlance, “Giton” or “Gipton”; and
Thebes had become “Estives” or “Stivas”2 as early as the beginning of the twelfth century ; Salona
is, in French, “La Sole,” or in Italian, “La Sola,” which is the official
designation on the coins of its French lords. “Naupaktos,” corrupted into “epantum” as early as 1210,
has by 1278 assumed the more modern form of “Lepanto”, though the other
corruption long survived in popular and official use, for example, on the coins
of Philip of Taranto. The former obviously arose out of the Greek accusative,
the latter from the favourite Frankish method of placing the French definite
article before a Greek word (“Le Pakto”). Of this practice “L’Arte” (“Arta”),
and “La Prevasse” (“Preveza”) are other
examples. Conversely, “Larissa”
becomes “L’Arse.” “Monemvasia” is gallicised into “Malevasie,” and Italianised
into “Malvasia,” from which the transition is easy to the English form “Malmsey.” “Livadostro,” the port of Athens on the
Corinthian Gulf, meets us as “Rive d’ Ostre,” and “Sunium” is already described as “the pillars” (“Colonne”),
from its noble temple, and is yet further concealed under the guise of
“Pellestello” (“many columns”,), while in the French version of the Chronicle of the Morea, “Kalavryta” is “La Grite.” Several well-known classical names had
now vanished: thus Ossa had already received its modern name of Kissavos, and
Taygetos that of Pentedaktylon.Ithaka, in common parlance, no less than in
learned Byzantine writers, maintained the name which had descended from the
days of Homer, though it was also called Vai di Compare.
Thus, if the Franks by the end of two generations had
acquired the language, and made their mark upon the map of Greece, the Greeks
had reasserted themselves, alike in the south-east and in the north. Already
the Frankish territories had greatly contracted, already the heroic age of
Frankish Hellas was over. A new period was about to begin, when the fortunes of
the country, hitherto directed by vigorous resident princes, were to depend on
the Eastern policy of an Italian court and its ambitious monarch.
CHAPTER
VI
THE ANGEVINS IN GREECE (1278-1307)
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