MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER XVI

THE IONIAN ISLANDS UNDER VENICE (1485-1540)

The sequel of the long war which ended in 1479, fatal as it was to the ancient domination of the Italian counts of Cephalonia over the four Ionian islands which had so long formed a separate Latin state, enabled Venice to increase her possessions in the Ionian Sea. We saw in a previous chapter how in 1482 and the following year, she drove Antonio Tocco out of Zante, and Cephalonia, when he had recovered them from the Turks, and how she was forced to cede the latter of her conquests to Bajazet II, but managed to keep permanent possession of “the flower of the Levant”, on payment of an annual tribute of 500 ducats, which continued from 1485 down to its abolition by the treaty of Carlovitz in 1699, and formed a heavy burden on the revenues of the island.

The first care of the Venetians was to repopulate their new possession, which had not recovered during the brief restoration of the Tocchi from the emigration and devastation caused by the Turkish Conquest. The authorities of the Venetian colonies on the mainland were ordered to offer lands to settlers in the island; especially to stradioti from Modon, Coron, Nauplia, and Lepanto, who would serve as a protection; numbers of those light horsemen accepted, on condition that they should be free from tithes and from all compulsory feudal service for four years; and thus the republic soon had at her disposal a seasoned body of men— at once colonists and cavalry— for they had to keep their own horses—under the command of Theodore Palaiologos, perhaps a son of the defender of Salmenikon, who had already acted as an agent of the republic in sounding the opinions of the people of Cephalonia. In comparatively few years’ time, the stradioti of Zante numbered 1500 families; and, though they were liable to serve outside the island, they had a strong motive for settling there, in that they could bequeath their lands. The loss of Lepanto, Modon, and Coron naturally increased the tide of immigration to Zante ; the Knights of Rhodes received lands there; in 1528, despite plague and earthquakes, the population had reached 17,255 souls, and among them were some of the most illustrious Greek families of Crete, Constantinople, and the Morea. The island replaced Modon as the port of call on the way to the East; a flourishing town grew up at the water’s edge, where the modern capital stands; and successive governors noted with alarm the steady depopulation of the old mediaeval city on the castle hill, where the civil and ecclesiastical authorities lived, and strove by fiscal privileges to prevent the human current from flowing downwards.¹

The new colony was at first ordered to be governed by the laws of Lepanto, but the administration of Zante was later assimilated to that of Corfu. Down to 1545 it was entrusted to a single provveditore, who was at first a subordinate of the governor of Modon; but, in that year, at the request of the community, two councillors were appointed in Venice to accompany him, and to hold office for the term of two years, like himself. These councillors took it in turns to act as treasurer, a month at a time, and, together with the proweditore, they administered justice, an appeal lying from their decisions to Corfii. A secretary com­pleted the resident Venetian official hierarchy. There was, however, a much greater personage, the provveditore generale del Levante, an official first appointed in 1500, after the loss of Modon, whose commission included the supervision of all the Venetian colonies, but more especially Zante, in consequence of its increased importance. Every year it was his duty to visit the various islands; on his arrival the powers of the local governor lapsed, and those who had grievances hastened to lay them before him. The day of his arrival was a public holiday; the Greek and Latin clergy walked in procession to his palace ; the Catholic bishop and the Greek “chief priest” offered him respectively the cross and the Gospels to kiss; then they all proceeded in state to the Catholic cathedral, where the rival heads of the two churches sat side by side; the protopap&s wished the republic and her representative many years; the bishop celebrated mass; and a banquet to the magistrates and the nobles ended the day.

In Zante, as in Corfu, there was a General Council, composed of all the nobles, which met once a year to elect a smaller council, whose numbers, limited;to 10 down to 1545, were finally fixed at 150. The organisation of the latter was deliberately borrowed from the similar body at Corfu; and, like it, the Zantiote Council of 150 had the right of conferring the local offices, which were few, unimportant, and highly coveted. This body also elected the three annual judges, and the captains of any galleys that were fitted out at Zante. The community had the right of sending deputations for the redress of grievances at its own expense to Venice, or to the prow edit ore generale, whose headquarters were Corfu. Society in Zante was formed on aristocratic lines; the islanders were divided into three classes: the people, the burghers, and the nobles; and the feudal system, introduced by the Latin counts, had split up the island into twelve fiefs. The noble families were for long unlimited in number; in 1542, however, it was ordained that no newcomers, except those who had emigrated from Nauplia and Monemvasia (then recently lost), could form part of the General Council unless they had resided for five years; and the total was finally fixed at ninety-three, the place of an extinct family being filled by the ennoblement of a family of burghers. There was no distinction, as at Corfu, between Latin and Greek nobles; the population of Zante was a mixture of races: Italians, Greeks from many parts of the Morea, and Jews, who had a ghetto walled in and guarded, and it was to this truly Levantine characteristic that Venetian governors attributed the difficulty of keeping order. Homicide was common, and the Mainate emigrants took the blood-feud with them to Zante.

The Catholic Church required re-establishment, for the Turks had destroyed the Franciscan monastery and the old cathedral in the castle, and the only Catholic place of worship left in the early years of the sixteenth century was a small chapel, which served as a barn. Under these circumstances, it was not to be wondered at that the Catholics had become converts to the Greek Church. The island now, however, became again the seat of a Catholic bishop. From the time when Honorius III had added the see of Zante to that of Cephalonia, its holder had hitherto always styled himself “Bishop of Cephalonia and Zante,” and had resided down to the time of Leonardo III Tocco in the former and more important island. When, however, the last of the Palatine counts restored the Greek bishopric of Cephalonia and Zante, he ordered that the next Catholic bishop, Giovanni Ongaro, while retaining the double title, should reside in Zante, where the number of Italians was larger than in the more purely Greek island, and thither, after the Venetian Conquest, the exiled Latin prelate returned. When, in 1488, he was laid to rest in the duomo, his successor altered his title, styling himself as His Grace “of Zante and Cephalonia,” the change in the order of the islands being doubtless due to the fact that Cephalonia was still in the power of the Turks. Even after it too became Venetian, Zante continued to be the residence of the Catholic bishop and to give him his first title, as is still the case. For long, however, the Catholic prelates were absentees; one of the Medici of Nauplia held the see for many years without visiting his flock; the number of Catholics naturally dwindled; and the Cephalonians complained that their children were left unconfirmed and the Latin churches allowed to fall into ruin. In Zante, however, the Venetians founded the still existent Catholic cathedral of S. Marco, which replaced the old minster of the Redeemer up in the castle; the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie; and S. Antonio ai Lazzaretti, besides restoring the old cathedral in the time of Sixtus V, whose arms were placed in the church, and the ancient Franciscan monastery, afterWards converted into barracks.

The Greek bishop of Cephalonia, whom Leonardo III had appointed, was still living at a very advanced age when the Venetians occupied Zante, and his successors, like their Latin rivals, included both islands in their titles, and claimed to exercise authority over both. Hence disputes arose between them and the protopap&s of Zante, an official elected by the Council of 150 for the term of five years, who was the real head of the Greek Church in the latter island. These disputes were further accentuated by the attempt of the metropolitan of Corinth to interfere in the affairs of a see, which was held by one of his suffragans. This interference was stopped by the Venetians, who forbade Greek priests to go to the mainland for consecration. A further grievance of the Orthodox Zantiotes was that the Cephalonian clergy always elected a native of that island to the episcopal, or archiepiscopal throne, as it became in 1632, while they had no voice in the election; it was accordingly at last decided that a Zantiote must be chosen on every third vacancy. The incident was typical of the jealousy between the islanders; and it is characteristic of Greek life, that when, in the sixteenth century, the Cephalonians claimed precedence over Zante, they quoted to the Venetians in support of their claim the fact that in the Homeric catalogue the people of Zakynthos are only cited as the subjects of Odysseus! Some of the Catholic bishops of Zante, like Medici, contravened the privileges of the Orthodox, ordering Catholic priests to perform services and baptisms in Greek churches.But against this the republic, true to her principles of toleration, promptly protested. Venetian policy in these islands was to pay respect to the Orthodox hierarchy, and at the banquet in honour of the provveditore generate at Cephalonia, the Orthodox bishop sat at his right hand and ate from a plate of gold.

When, in 1500, Cephalonia also became a Venetian possession, it was treated in the same way as Zante. The island needed cultivation ; for the Venetian Government during its previous brief occupation between 1483 and 1485 had ordered that it should be made to appear as desolate as possible, in order that the sultan might not think it worth while to insist upon its evacuation. The Turkish domination and the various attempts of the Venetians to recapture the island had naturally prevented its improvement, so that the first act of the latter, when they recovered it, was to plant there a military colony of stradioti from Modon and Navarino, with other survivors of those fallen towns, confiscating a part of five feudal baronies for the purpose. So greatly did Cephalonia increase in population, that, in 1548, despite the great Turkish raid of ten years earlier, it contained 15,304 souls, while the policy of fining all who left their lands untilled increased its fertility. But at this period there was only one fortified town in the island, the castle of St George, which the Venetians restored —for Assos was built later— and the inhabitants lived for the most part in scattered hamlets, which afforded a temptation to foreign and native thieves. Its government during the previous Venetian occupation had been modelled on that of Lepanto; it was now assimilated to that of Zante. But the character of the two islands, though separated by only a narrow channel, was widely different. Cephalonia, owing to its purer Hellenic population, was actuated by the democratic sentiments engrained in the Greek race, despite the existence of six baronies, a relic of the feudal system. The meetings of the Cephalonian Council were noted for their turbulence and irregularity, of which the Venetian governors often complained. The request for a “Council of primates” had been granted in 1506 on condition that every councillor should reside not more than a mile from the capital; but in 1548 we are told that “there was neither means nor place of meeting”. Tumultuous gatherings, at which even peasants took part, were held in the street, and we hear of 800 or 900 persons electing the captains of the galleys, the three annual judges, and the other local officials. Hence, while Corfiote nobles temporarily resident in Zante and Zantiote nobles in Corfu were allowed to take part in the General Council of their hosts, both islands scorn­fully refused the privilege to Cephalonians. After half a century of Venetian rule, a governor sums up the condition of the island in a sentence : “The inhabitants are poor and idle; civilisation and municipal laws there are none.” Yet the natives, like true Greeks, had even then a yearning for education. “There is not a single schoolmaster in all Cephalonia,” they pathetically wrote to Venice, and they begged that a portion of the fines paid by criminals might be set aside to provide a teacher’s salary. Their petition was granted, and at Zante the abbot of the Anaphonetria monas­tery was obliged to pay 150 ducats to the community every year as the pay of a schoolmaster. Otherwise a single Italian master in either island represented the most cautious republic’s total contribution to public education.

Under the jurisdiction of Cephalonia was the ancient home of Odysseus. After its devastation by Ahmed Pasha in 1479, Ithaka remained deserted and unclaimed till 1503, though it is mentioned several times during the previous war as a station of the Venetian fleet. But in that year a party of Venetian subjects landed on the island with their oxen, and began to cultivate it. The governor of Cephalonia, afraid of remonstrances from the sultan, advised caution, and reported the matter home. Thereupon, in 1504, an order was issued from Venice for repopulating “an island named Vai di Compare situated opposite Cephalonia, at present uninhabited, but reported to have been formerly fertile and fruitful.” Accordingly, lands were offered to settlers free from all taxes for five years, at the end of which time the colonists were to pay to the treasury of Cephalonia the same dues as the inhabitants of that island. The offer of the Senate seems to have been successful; among those who accepted it were the families of Boua Grivas, Petalas, and Karavias, which last in modern times produced a local historian of Ithaka. In 1545, the tithe of Ithaka —82 bushels of wheat— figures in the budget of Cephalonia, and three years later the retiring governor of the latter island reported that “under the jurisdiction of Cephalonia there is another island named Thiachi, very mountainous and barren, in which there are different harbours and especially a harbour called Vathi or Vai de Compare; in the which island are hamlets, in three places, inhabited by about sixty families, who are in great fear of corsairs, because they have no fortress in which to take refuge.” These three hamlets are doubtless those of Palaiochora, Anoe, and Exoe, which are regarded as the oldest in the island. In 1563, Ithaka is described as “very well populated, for many Cephalonians go to live there,” and we obtain a glimpse of its internal government. In 1504 a Venetian governor had been appointed, and a certain Pugliese had subsequently been made “ captain ” of Ithaka for life. On his death, in 1563, Venice allowed the Cephalonian council to elect one of its members every year to fill his place “without any cost to the republic”, on condition that he recognised in all things the superior authority of the provveditore, who paid it an annual visit. Ithakan interests were represented by two “elders of the people”, who acted as assessors to the “captain”, and the natives, after several complaints to Venice against his extortion and interference in their local affairs, at last secured the abolition of this office, so that thenceforth the two “elders” ruled alone. Every year the principal men of the island met to elect the local officials. Small as it is, Ithaka boasted of one feudal barony, held by the family of Galates—the only Ithakan family which enjoyed the privileges of nobility in the Venetian period. It had first received exemptions from Leonardo III Tocco, and it is still extant in the island.

At first both Zante and Cephalonia were a drag on the Venetian exchequer, for both required development, and the former was saddled with the Turkish tribute. But the introduction of the currant in the first half of the sixteenth century enormously increased the revenues of Zante. The wholesale conversion of corn-fields into currant plots caused, however, such alarm that the local authorities applied to Venice for leave to root up the currant bushes. The republic replied by allowing the currants to remain, but at the same time levied a duty (the “new tax” as it was called) upon them, the proceeds of which were devoted to the purchase and storage of bread stuffs. The two islands were also useful to the fleet, which bought its wine at Zante, and obtained its masts and spars from the forest on the Black Mountain, which the republic reserved for her exclusive use. She took over at the outset all the salt­pans, fisheries, mills, and other appurtenances of the Palatine counts, and farmed out the taxes in the usual manner. They chiefly consisted of a tithe on the produce, from which the stradioti were exempt, and which was assessed by assessors named scontri, annually elected by the governor and Council; of a house-duty, or livello; of a duty on all wine sold; and of the so-called preda, a tax on flocks and herds. Out of the corn paid as tithe by the Zantiotes sufficient was ordered to be sent to Venice every year to defray the amount of the Turkish tribute on that island. Thus, a century later, it came to be said that, if Corfu was useful to the republic as a strategic position, the other two islands were valuable from their revenues. Nor were the Cephalonians and Zantiotes, if we may believe the reports of their Venetian governors, otherwise than loyal to the republic. They knew that they had no alternative but Turkish government, and they saw, too, from their vicinity to the Morea, that their fellow-Greeks there were worse off than themselves. The peasants might not like the obligation to serve in the armed force or man the galleys of the islands, which the nobles were so proud to command. But they knew that the blood-tax of the Turks was harder than these milder forms of conscription. The Zantiote peasants hated their own aristocracy; the Cephalonians often quarrelled among themselves; but neither island ever rose against the republic which secured them the almost uninterrupted blessings of peace.

The Turco-Venetian war of 1499-1502, which gave Cepha-lonia to Venice, scarcely affected the sister-islands. Zante was reassured by the coolness of a stradioto at the moment of a scare of invasion. Corfu, which Bajazet II had threatened ten years earlier, prepared for an attack, and the houses of the suburb were sacrificed to the defences of the city. But the colony sustained no loss save the temporary capture of Butrinto; while a Corfiote captain, one of the ancient family of Goth, greatly distinguished himself by running the blockade of Modon, receiving in return for his services the jurisdiction over the fief of the gypsies. For a whole generation the Ionian islands enjoyed, like the other Venetian colonies, the long peace.

At last, however, after rather more than a century of almost complete freedom from attack, Corfu was destined to undergo the first of the two great Turkish sieges, which were the principal events in her annals during the Venetian occupation. In 1537 war broke out between the republic and Suleyman the Magnificent, at that time engaged in an attack upon the Neapolitan dominions of Charles V. During the transport of troops and material of war across the channel of Otranto, the Turkish and Venetian fleets came into hostile collision, and though Venice was ready to make amends for the mistakes of her officials, the sultan resolved to punish them for the insults to his flag. He was at Valona, on the coast of Epiros, at the time; and, removing his camp to Butrinto, whose commander surrendered at his approach, he gave orders for the invasion of Corfu.

The island was not taken unawares. The presence of the sultan in Epiros and the naval operations of Andrea Doria to the north and south of Corfu had put the authorities on their guard, and Admiral Girolamo Pesaro with a large fleet, which was joined by a contingent of five Ionian galleys, had been despatched to Corfiote waters. The town still relied for its protection upon the two fortified peaks of what is now called the Fortezza Vecchia, defended by a garrison of some 2000 Italians and the same number of Corfiotes, under the command of Naldo, an officer who had distinguished himself in the Italian wars, while four galleys, with their crews on board, lay behind the breakwater below the fortress. The place was well supplied with guns and ammunition; it contained provisions for three years; and its defences were strengthened by the destruction of 3,000 houses in the suburbs, which might have served as cover to the enemy.

The Turks, under the command of the redoubtable Khaireddin Barbarossa, the most celebrated captain in the service of the sultan, landed at Govino, where the much later Venetian arsenal now stands, towards the end of August, destroyed the village of Potamo, and marched upon the capital. On the 29th another force of 25,000 men crossed over to join him, these operations being facilitated by the fact that Pesaro had sailed up the Adriatic without engaging the Turkish fleet. The mart, as it was called, which lay outside the city walls, was speedily taken, and its remaining inhabitants found the gates shut against them and were forced to crouch under the castle ramparts on the rocky promontory of S. Sidero or behind the breakwater. The Corfiote traveller, Noukios, an eyewitness of the siege, has left a graphic account of the sufferings of these poor wretches, huddled together on a narrow ledge of rock, without food or shelter, and exposed to the stones of the garrison and to the full force of one of those terrific storms of rain not uncommon in Corfu at that season. Those who. could afford to bribe the soldiers on the walls were pulled up by means of ropes, while the rest were left to die of cold or hunger. When it seemed that the siege was likely to last, the Venetian governor, in order to economise food and space, turned out of the fortress the old men, women, and children, who went to the Turkish lines to beg for bread. The Turkish commander, hoping to work on the feelings of the garrison, refused; so the miserable creatures, repudiated alike by the besieged and the besiegers, wandered about distractedly between the two armies, striving to regain admission to the fortress by showing their ancient wounds gained in the Venetian service; and, at last, when their efforts proved unavailing, lying down in the ditches to die. Meanwhile, for three days and nights the suburbs were blazing, and the Turks were ravaging the fair island with fire and sword. The castle of Sant’ Angelo on the west coast alone resisted their attacks. More than 3000 refugees from the countryside had congregated within its walls, and four times did its brave Corfiote garrison repulse the enemy. Barbarossa, whose headquarters were at the Avrame Palace on the sea-shore, now began the bombardment of the fortified peninsula, which contained the mediaeval city of Corfu. He planted a cannon on the islet of Vido, then called Malipiero, the pleasaunce of a nobleman, and noted for its abundance of game. But the gunners made such bad practice that in three days they only hit the mark five times, while the rest of their shots flew over the fortress into the sea on the other side. Nor was Barbarossa more fortunate in an attempt to bombard the city from his own galley; a well-aimed shot struck the vessel; and, when he retired in the direction of the fountain of Karddki, where ships were accustomed to water, and began a cannonade of the place from that side where the walls were lower, the great distance caused most of his projectiles to fall short of the mark. At this, Ayas Pasha, the grand vizier, resolved to see for himself the prospects of taking the city; he therefore ventured out one dark and rainy night to inspect the moat and the walls. What he saw convinced him that Corfu could only be captured after a long siege, whereas the month of September had now begun and sickness had broken out among the half-starved Turks. He therefore advised the sultan to abandon the attempt. Suleyman first resolved to try the effect of persuasion upon the garrison; he therefore sent a Corfiote prisoner to frighten the Venetian authorities into surrender. The bailie, Simeone Leone, and the provveditore, Luigi da Riva, dismissed the sultan’s envoy without a reply, and a brisk cannonade from the castle batteries proved an effective answer to fresh demonstrations of hostility. Suleyman accordingly made a virtue of necessity; the grand vizier sent for the Venetian representative at Constantinople, who was at the sultan’s headquarters, and offered to raise the siege, if the republic would compensate his master for his losses; but, before any reply could arrive from Venice, the siege had been already raised. After firing all the houses that remained standing in the suburbs, the Turks were ordered to embark; their fleet made one more demonstration; but on 11 th September, after a stay of only thirteen days in the island, they recrossed the channel to Epiros. But in that short time they had wrought enormous damage. The Corfiote traveller tells us that they had destroyed “all the works of men’s hands” throughout the island, and that they slew or carried off all the animals they could find; sparing only the trees and vines owing to the suddenness of their departure. The Duke of Naxos wrote to the pope, that two large cities might have been built out of the houses and churches which they had destroyed; the privileges and letters-patent of the islanders had perished in the flames or had been used as ammunition, and a Corfiote peti­tion states that they carried away more than 20,000 captives. The population was so greatly reduced by this wholesale deportation, that the nobles had to be recruited from the burgesses, and nearly forty years afterwards the whole island contained only some 17,500 inhabitants, or less than one-fifth of the estimated population in classical times. Among these captives was a young girl, Kale Kartdnou, whom (and not a Baffo of Paros) the Corfiote historians believe to have been the mother of Murfid III.

Great was the joy in Venice at the news that the invaders had abandoned Corfu, and public thanksgivings were offered up for the preservation of the island, even in the desolate condition in which the Turks had left it. Planks were sent to rebuild the suburb; the Italian mercenaries who had maltreated the inhabitants during the siege were hanged; and a noble Venetian was beheaded. The Greeks had made immense sacrifices in their determination never to yield —they could not have fought better, it was said, had they been fighting for the national cause— and they had their reward. The new bailie, Tiepolo, contented everyone, we are told, by his wise provisions; he restored order out of chaos, and did his best to promote peace with the Turks; while the republic bestowed upon Eparchos, the distinguished Corfiote scholar and envoy, the vacant fief of the gypsies, as compensation for his losses and as the reward of his services. But the chief result of the siege was the tardy but systematic fortification of the town of Corfu, at the repeated request of the Corfiote Council, which sent several embassies to Venice on the subject. More than 2000 houses were pulled down in the suburb of San Rocco to make room for the walls, for which the old city of Palaiopolis once more provided materials, and Venice spent a large sum on the erection of new bastions. Some parts of the Fortezza Vecchia date from this period; what is now called the Fortezza Nuova was built between 1577 and 1588, when the new works were completed. The traveller Buochenbach, who visited the island in 1579, gives the inscriptions placed on two of the new bastions; we have two plans showing the fortifications of the citadel and of the town about this time; and visitors to Venice will remember the models of Corfu in the arsenal and on the outside of Sta. Maria Zobenigo.

The other Ionian islands suffered in less degree at the hands of the Turks. They ravaged Paxo, carried off over 13,000 souls from Cephalonia, descended upon Zante, and burnt Parga, whose inhabitants long wandered homeless about the mountains of Epiros, until Venice at last restored their beloved abode. They laid in ashes the monastery of the Redeemer on one of the Strivali islands, the Strophades of the ancients —a building already once before destroyed by the Turks— despite the prowess of those very muscular Christians, the monks, whose martyrdom was commemorated by a Zantiote poet. Finally, the devastation of the Venetian islands was completed by a raid upon the southernmost of them all, Cerigo. 

This seems the most appropriate place to describe the vicissitudes of Kythera, or Cerigo, which, though neither geographically nor any longer politically one of the Ionian group, was so reckoned during the British occupation and during the last eighty years of Venetian rule. The history of the fabled home of Venus was absolutely different from that of the other Greek islands, in some respects resembling that of the Cyclades, in others that of the Ionian islands, just as it is placed half-way between the two. At the time of the Conquest, in 1207, it was occupied, as we saw, by the Venetian family of Venier, self-styled descendants of the goddess of love, who took the title of Marquis of Cerigo, because they guarded the southern marches of Greece, while the same style was adopted by their fellows, the Viari, who held sway over the islet of Cerigotto, famous in our own time for the discovery of the bronze statue of “the youth of Antikythera.” When, however, the Greeks recovered Monemvasia, the position of the two marquises became dangerous. It would appear from a confused passage of the Italian memoir on the island, that the natives of Cerigo, impatient at the treatment which they received from their Latin lord, sent a deputation to invoke the aid of the Greek governor of the new Byzantine province. At any rate, Licario’s famous cruise among the Latin islands proved fatal to the rule of both the Venetian marquises. A governor was sent to Cerigo from Monemvasia; but ere long the island was conferred by Michael Palaioldgos upon Paul Monoydimes, one of the three great Monemvasiote archons, who is described in a Venetian document as being, in 1275, “the vassal of the Emperor and captain of Cerigo". Monoydimes fortified the island, where his tomb was discovered during the British protectorate, and it remained in the possession of his family till 1309, when intermarriage between the children of its Greek and Latin lords restored Cerigo, with the approval of Venice, to the Venieri.

The island now received a strict feudal organisation, which long continued to affect its topography and its land tenure. It was divided up into twenty-four carati, or shares, six of which were owned by each of the four brothers Venier, while the fertile plain and the castle of Kapsali were held in common. In order to increase the population, the brothers invited Cretans to settle there, granting them exemption from all services and dues for ever. The rest of the islanders were simple serfs, whom the brothers divided among them like so much live stock; these paroikoi, as they were called, ran with the land ; they could not marry without the consent of their lords; they could not engage in any except the smallest trade; they could not quit the island without leaving a pledge of their return; in short, they were at the beck and call of their masters, or worse, of their masters’ agents, for the marquises usually preferred residence in Crete to their ancestral castle of Kapsali, where one of the clan held the command for the others.

Such was the state of Cerigo down to 1363, the year of the great Cretan rebellion. In that rising the Venier family took a very prominent part; Tito Venier was one of the ringleaders, and both he and two other members of his family paid for their disloyalty with their heads. A Venetian fleet arrived off" Cerigo, and young Piero Venier, who held the castle, had no option but to surrender. The republic took possession of the island, and for thirty years it formed a Venetian colony, governed by a castellano, sent every two years from Crete.

The Venieri did not, however, abandon the hope of recovering their confiscated marquisate; they had influence at Venice; they had not all been disloyal to the mother country; and, accordingly, in 1393, a portion of the island was restored to them. Henceforth, eleven out of the twenty- four shares were held by Venice, and the remaining by the Venieri — an arrangement which we find in force two centuries later—but the republic continued to appoint the governor. In fact, the system adopted resembled the administration of Tenos in the sixteenth century. The Venieri were never disturbed again in the possession of their thirteen shares; down to the fall of the republic in 1797 they remained “partners,” or compartecipi, of Venice; and their name is still borne by humble inhabitants of Cerigo.

The organisation of this distant colony by the republic resembled that of Corfu. In 1502 the governor received the higher rank of provveditore, the first of whom was specially sent out to strengthen the fortifications of the castle, above whose gate may still be read the date of 1503, when the old fortress was enlarged. This official, who exercised judicial, executive, and military powers, was dependent on the Government of Crete, so long as that great island remained Venetian; during the brief Venetian occupation of the Morea in the eighteenth century, he took his orders from there; and, finally, after the peace of Passarovitz, he became the subordinate of the provveditore generale del Levante at Corfu. Appeals lay from him to those officials, and from them to the Home Government. In 1573, on the petition of the principal inhabitants, a Council of thirty was estab­lished, whose members formed a close oligarchy, and a “Golden Book” was started, in which the names of the nobles and their sons were registered. This body, which existed down to 1797, had the exclusive right of electing the local authorities from its own ranks, including two councillors, who acted as assessors of the governor, and three judges of petty sessions, who had jurisdiction in small cases. The Council also had the privilege of electing envoys, or sindaci, who were commissioned to lay any complaints which the islanders had against the Venetian governor or his subordinates before the authorities at Venice. But the local historian informs us that Venice always upheld her own officials. To her the island, from its geographical position, was of much importance after she lost her last stations in the Morea. Cerigo was then her only port of call between Zante and Crete; it was also an excellent post of observation where news could be easily obtained from the Morea and ships sighted at a huge distance. From March to October, the dangerous months, a guard was always mounted on Cape St George, beacon-fires were lighted at night, and the Cretan Government was kept advised of the approach of a Turkish fleet; in short, Cerigo was “an eye of Crete”; but, after the loss of that island, it too lost its importance, and after the peace of Passarovitz it was practically useless.

To the inhabitants, however, the situation of the island was a doubtful advantage, for it exposed them to the attacks of corsairs and Turks. True, it was defended by three castles, in which Venice kept a small garrison, paid by the Cretan Government. But, in 1537, it suffered terribly from Barbarossa’s raid. From the castle of San Dimitri, at that time the chief place of the island, 7000 souls were carried off without the least resistance, and the other towns were sacked and destroyed. This raid made a profound impression on the islanders, and “Barbarossa’s sack of Palaiochora” was long spoken of as the blackest day in the annals of Cerigo. The survivors either fled to the thickets, or else escaped to the Morea, whence it was difficult to entice them back. Hence the land went out of cultivation; the population sank in 1545 to 1850, and the Venetian part of the island yielded less than a quarter of the corn which it produced before the war. Such was the distress that, in 1562, all the inhabitants desired to emigrate into Turkish territory. Their misery was, indeed, due to domestic tyranny, as well as to foreign invasion. The Venieri let their portion of Cerigo to local personages, who farmed the taxes, and their share of the island came to be called the Commessaria from being managed by these commessi, or agents, who ground down the peasants with every kind of exaction. It was impossible to induce their victims to bring their woes before the Venetian governor, because as the peasants shrewdly remarked, “our rectors come and go, while our tyrants live permanently here.” In vain, both Venice and the Venieri tried to lure the peasants back by exemptions for five years from the terzarie, or third of the produce, which was the chief revenue of the island. A Venetian governor declared that he had never heard of a single fugitive who had returned. Hence the Venetian commissioner who visited Cerigo in 1563 reported that all the revenues of the republic’s portion, amounting to an average of 500 ducats, were eaten up by the officials’ salaries and the costs of the swift vessels which carried news to Crete.

The Venieri and the Venetians treated the Greek Church with leniency. The famous golden bull of Andronikos II, issued in 1293 during the brief sway of the Greeks over the island, mentions the bishopric of Kythera as already existing, and names its bishop as first among the suffragans of the metropolitan of Monemvasia. We hear, indeed, of a protopapas instead of a bishop in the second half of the four­teenth century; but later on the chief ecclesiastic of the island had the episcopal title, and enjoyed the exclusive right of ordaining the Cretan priests. The best known of the series, Maximus Margounios, who was appointed towards the close of the sixteenth century, won fame as a Greek scholar, a theologian, a letter writer, and a lyric poet. It is only in our own time that the exigencies of local politics threatened for a moment this ancient see. And down to our own day the Kytherians, whether at home or at Athens, celebrate every 7th October the festival of their patron saint, Our Lady of the myrtle bough, whose image borne by the waves to the island and found in a myrtle tree represents the Christian version of Aphrodite rising from the sea.

The peace of 1540, which restricted the possessions of Venice in the Levant to Crete and Cyprus —the latter soon to go— the solitary outpost of Tenos in the Aegean, and six out of the seven Ionian islands with their dependencies of Parga and Butrinto on the mainland, greatly increased the importance of this last group to the republic. We saw how the stradioti from her lost colonies in the Morea found a home in Corfu; and, were we to continue the. story of the Ionians under Venetian rule, we should find that they came at last to represent all that was left of her once splendid colonial empire in Greece. But the history of the Ionian islands down to the fall of the republic in 1797 is beyond the scope of the present work.

CHAPTER XVII

THE DUCHY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO (1207-1463)