GREECE AND THE AEGEAN UNDER FRANK AND VENETIAN DOMINATION (1204-1571).

The Despotat of Epirus

While the knightly Crusaders and the practical Venetians had thus established themselves without much difficulty, in the most famous seats of ancient poetry, there was one quarter of the Hellenic world where they had been forestalled by the promptitude and skill of a Greek. Michael Angelus, a bastard of the imperial house, had attached himself to the expedition of Boniface in the hope of obtaining some advantage on his own account. On the march the news reached him that the Greeks of the province of Nicopolis were discontented with the Byzantine governor who still remained to tyrannise over them. Himself the son of a former governor of Epirus, he saw that with his name and influence he might supplant the official representative of the fallen Empire and anticipate the establishment of a foreign authority. He hastened across the mountains to Arta, found the unpopular officer dead, married his widow, a dame of high degree, and with the aid of his own and her family connexions made himself independent Despot of Epirus. Soon his dominions stretched from the Gulf of Corinth to Durazzo, from the confines of Thessaly to the Adriatic, from Salona, whose French lord fell in battle against him, to the Ionian Sea. Treacherous as well as bold, he did homage, now to the Latin Emperor Henry and now to Venice, for his difficult country which neither could have conquered. But the mainland of Greece did not suffice for his ambition. He aided the Moreote Greeks at the battle of Koúndoura; his still abler brother, Theodore, accepted for him the Peloponnesian heritage of Sgourós, when the Argive leader at last flung himself in despair from the crags of Acrocorinth; the Ionian island of Leucas, which is practically a part of continental Greece, seems to have owned his sway; and, before he died by an assassin's hand in 1214, he had captured from Venice her infant colony of Corfu. Under him and his brother and successor Theodore, the Epirote court of Arta became the refuge of those Greeks who were impatient of the foreign rule in the Morea, and the base from which it was fondly hoped that the redemption of that fair land might one day be accomplished.

Organisation of Achaia

The Franks had scarcely occupied the scattered fragments of the Hellenic world when they began the political and ecclesiastical organisation of their conquest. We may take as the type of Frankish organisation the principality of Achaia, the most important of their creations and that about which we have most information. Alike in Church and State the Latin system was simple. These young yet shrewd nobles from the West showed a capacity for government which we are accustomed to associate with our own race in its dealings with foreign populations; and, indeed, the parallel is close, for in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Greece was to them what our colonies were to younger sons in the nineteenth. They found to their hands a code of feudalism, embodied in the "Assises of Jerusalem," which Amaury de Lusignan had recently adopted for his kingdom of Cyprus, and which later on, under the title of the "Book of Customs of the Empire of Romania," served as the charter of Frankish Greece. Champlitte himself, recalled home by the death of his brother, died on the journey before he could do more than lay the foundations of his principality, which it was reserved for Villehardouin, acting as the bailie of the next-of-kin, to establish firmly on approved feudal principles. Twelve baronies of different sizes were created, whose holders formed the temporal peerage of Achaia; seven lords spiritual, with the Latin Archbishop of Patras as their Primate, received sees carved out of the existing Greek dioceses; and the three great military orders of the Teutonic Knights, those of St John, and the Templars, were respectively settled at Mostenitsa, Modon, and in the rich lands of Achaia and Elis. There too was the domain of the prince, whose capital was at the present village of Andravida, when he was not residing at La Cremonie, as Lacedaemon was then called. Military service, serfdom, and the other incidents of feudalism were implanted in the soil of Hellas, and the dream of Goethe's Faust, the union of the classical with the romantic, was realised in the birthplace of the former. The romance was increased by the fatal provision—for such it proved to be—that the Salicl law should not apply to the Frankish states. Nothing contributed in a greater degree to the ultimate decline and fall of Latin rule in Greece than the transmission of important baronies and even of the principality of Achaia itself to the hands of women, who, by a strange law of nature, were often the sole progeny of the sturdy Frankish nobles. Ere long feudal castles rose all over the country, and notably in the Morea and the Cyclades, where the network of chivalry was most elaborate. Sometimes, as at Boudonitza, Salona, and Paroikía, the medieval baron built his keep out of the fragments of some Hellenic temple or tower, which the local tradition believed to have been the "work of giants" in days gone by; sometimes his donjon rose on a virgin site; but in either case he chose the spot with a view to strategic conditions. The Church, as well as the baronage, made its mark upon what was for it a specially uncongenial soil. The religious Orders of the West followed in the wake of the fortunate soldiers, who had founded a "new France" in old Greece. The Cistercians received the beautiful monastery of Daphni, on the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis, destined to be the mausoleum of the last Burgundian Duke of Athens; the "Crutched Friars" of Bologna had a hospice at Negropont; the emblem and the name of Assisi still linger in the Cephalonian monastery of Sisi ; and the ruins of the picturesque Benedictine abbey of Isova still survey the pleasant valley of the Alpheus. As for the Orthodox bishops, they went into exile; when, towards the end of the fourteenth century, they were again allowed to reside in their ancient sees, they became the ringleaders of the revived national party in the struggle against the rule of a foreign garrison and an alien Church. For in the Near East religion and nationality are usually identical terms.

The Latin Church

The wisdom which Villehardouin had shown in his treatment of Greeks and Franks alike now received its reward. Self-interest and the welfare of the State combined to indicate him as a better ruler of Achaia than any young and inexperienced relative of Champlitte who might, by the accident of birth, be the rightful heir. Youthful communities need able princes, and every step that he took was a fresh proof of Villehardouin's ability. He did homage to the Emperor Henry, and received in return the office of Seneschal of Romania; he won the support of Venice by relinquishing all claim to Modon and Coron; and he thereby induced the doge to assist him in his wily scheme for detaining the coming heir on his journey from France, so that he might arrive in the Morea after the time allowed by the feudal code for his personal appearance. When young Robert arrived with still a few days to spare, the crafty bailie avoided meeting him till the full period had elapsed. Then a parliament, summoned to examine the claimant's title, decided against the latter; Robert returned to France, while Geoffrey remained lord of the Morea. Poetic justice in the next century visited upon his descendants this sin of their ancestor. Meanwhile, Innocent III hastened to greet him as "Prince of Achaia"—a title which he did not consider himself worthy to bear till he had earned it by the capture of the still unconquered Greek castles of Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos. In 1212 the last of them fell; Othon de la Roche, as a reward for his aid, received the two latter as fiefs of the principality of Achaia, thus inaugurating the long connection of the Argolid with Frankish Athens; while Corinth became the see of a second Latin archbishop. Geoffrey I crowned his successful career by negotiating a marriage between his namesake and heir and the daughter of the ill-fated Latin Emperor, Peter of Courtenay, during a halt which the damsel made at Katakolo on her way to Constantinople. When he died, in 1218, " all mourned,rich and poor alike, as if each were lamenting his own father's death, so great was his goodness."

His elder son and successor, Geoffrey II, raised the principality to a pitch of even greater prosperity. We are told of his wealth and of his care for his subjects; he could afford to maintain "80 knights with golden spurs" at his court, to which cavaliers flocked from France, either in search of adventures abroad or to escape from justice at home. Of his resolute maintenance of the State against the Church the Morea still preserves a striking monument in the great castle of Chloumoiltsi, which the French called Clermont and the Italians Castel Tornese, from the tornesi or coins of Tours that were afterwards minted there for over a century. This castle, on a tortoise-shaped hill near Glarentza, was built by him out of the confiscated funds of the clergy, who had refused to do military service for their fiefs, and who, as he pointed out to the Pope, if they would not aid him in fighting the Greeks, would soon have nothing left to fight for. Alike with his purse and his personal prowess he contributed to the defence of Constantinople, receiving as his reward the suzerainty over the Duchy of the Archipelago and the island of Euboea. The Marquess of Boudonitza and the cautious Count of Cephalonia and Zante, the latter ever ready to worship the rising sun, became the vassals of one who was acknowledged to be the strongest Frankish prince of his time. For, if Athens had prospered under Othon de la Roche, and sea-girt Naxos was safe under the dynasty of Sanudo, the Latin Empire was tottering already, and the Latin kingdom of Salonica had fallen in 1223—the first creation of the Fourth Crusade to go—before the vigorous attack of Theodore Angelus, the second Despot of Epirus, who founded on its ruins the Greek Empire of Salonica. This act of ostentation, however, by offending the political and ecclesiastical dignities of the Greek Empire of Nicaea, provoked a rivalry which postponed the Greek recovery of Byzantium. The fall of the Latin kingdom of Salonica and the consequent re-conquest of a large part of northern Greece for the Hellenic cause alarmed the Franks, whose possessions lay between Thessaly and the Corinthian Gulf. Of these by far the most important was Othon de la Roche, the "Great Lord" of Athens, who had established around him alike at Thebes and Athens a number of his relatives from home, attracted by the good luck of their kinsman beyond the seas. But, as the years passed, the Burgundian successor of the classic heroes and sages, whom the strangest of fortunes had made the heir alike of Pindar and Pericles, began to feel, like several other Frankish nobles, a yearning to end his days in the less famous but more familiar land of his birth. In 1225, after twenty years of authority, he left Greece for ever with his wife and his two sons, leaving his Athenian and Theban dominions to his nephew Guy, already owner of half the Boeotian city. The descendants of the first Frankish Sire of Athens became extinct in Franche-Comte only as recently as the seventeenth century, and the archives of the Haute-Swine still contain the seal and counter-seal of the Megaskyr.

Guy I of Athens

No better man than his nephew could have been found to carry on the work which he had begun. Under his tactful rule his capital of Thebes became once more a flourishing commercial city, where the silk manufacture was still carried on, as it had been in Byzantine times, where the presence of a Jewish and a Genoese colony implied that there was money to be made, and where the Greek population usually found a wise protector of their customs and their monasteries, diplomatically endowed by Vatatzes, the powerful Greek Emperor of Nicaea, in their foreign yet friendly lord. Policy no less than humanity must have led Guy I to be tolerant of the people over whom he had been called to rule. It was his obvious interest to make them realise that they were better off under his sway than they would be as subjects of an absentee Greek Emperor, who would have ruled them vicariously in the old Byzantine style, from Macedonia or Asia Minor. Thus his dominions, if "frequently devastated" by the Epirote Greeks, remained undiminished in his hands, while his most dangerous neighbour, Theodore, the first Greek Emperor of Salonica, became, thanks to his vaulting ambition, the prisoner of the Bulgarians at Klokotinitza, and the short-lived Greek Empire which he had founded, after the usurpation of his brother Manuel, was reduced in the reign of his son John to the lesser dignity of a Despotat, and was finally annexed, in that of John's brother Demetrius, to the triumphant Empire of Nicaea in 1246. Another and very able member of the family of Angelus, the bastard Michael II, had, however, made himself master of Corfil and Epirus ten years earlier, and there held aloft the banner of Greek independence, as his father, the founder of the Epirote dynasty, had done before him.

In the same year that witnessed the annexation of Salonica, the second Villehardouin prince of Achaia died, and was succeeded by his brother William. The new prince, the first of the line who was a native of the Morea—for he was born at the family fief of Kalamata—was throughout his long reign the central figure of Frankish Greece. Crafty and yet reckless, he was always to the front whenever there was fighting to be done, and his bellicose nature, if it enabled him to complete the conquest of the peninsula from the Greeks, tempted him also into foreign adventures, which undid his work and prepared the way for the revival of Greek authority. At first, all went well with the soldierly ruler. The virgin fortress of Monemvasía, which had hitherto maintained its freedom, yielded, after a three years' siege, to the combined efforts of a Frankish force and a Venetian flotilla, and the three local archonsMamonas, Daimonoyannes, and Sophianós—were obliged to acknowledge the Frank as their lord. To overawe the Slavs of Taygetus and the restive men of Maina, the prince built three castles, one of which, Mistra, some three miles from Sparta, was destined later on to play a part in Greek history second to that of Byzantium alone, and is still the chief Byzantine glory of the Morea. At this moment the Frankish principality reached its zenith. The barons in their castles lived "the fairest life that a man can"; the prince's court at La Cremonie was thought the best school of chivalry in the East, and was described as "more brilliant than that of a great king." Thither came to learn the noble profession of arms the sons of other Latin rulers of the Levant; the Duke of distant Burgundy was a guest at the prince's table; King Louis IX of France, most chivalrous sovereign of the age, might well esteem the tall knights of Achaia, who came with their lord to meet him in Cyprus, who helped the Genoese to defend Rhodes against the Greeks. Trade flourished, and such was the general sense of security that people gave money to the merchants who travelled up and down the country on their simple note of hand, while from the King of France the prince obtained the right to establish his own mint in the castle of Chloumofitsi in place of the coins which he seems to have struck previously in that of Corinth.

Battle of Karydi

Unfortunately the prince's ambition plunged the Frankish world of Greece into a fratricidal war. On the death of his second wife, a Euboean heiress, in 1255, he claimed her ancestral barony in the northern third of that island; and when the proud and powerful Lombards, aided by their Venetian neighbours, repudiated his claim, not only did hostilities break out in Euboea, but also extended to the mainland opposite. William had summoned Guy I of Athens, his vassal for Argos and Nauplia, and, as was even pretended, for Attica and Boeotia as well, to assist him in the struggle. The Megaskyr, however, not only refused to aid his nominal lord, but actively helped the opposite party. Practically the whole of Frankish Greece took sides in the conflict, despite the wise warnings of the Pope, anxious lest the cause of the Church should be weakened by this division among its champions at a time when their national enemy had grown stronger. In 1258, at the pass of Mt Karydi, between Megara and Thebes, Frankish Athens first met Frankish Sparta face to face. The battle of the Walnut Mountain" was a victory for the latter; the Athenian army retreated upon Thebes, before whose walls the prayers of his nobles prevailed upon the victor to make peace with their old comrades. Guy of Athens, summoned to appear before the High Court of Achaia at Nikli near Tegea for his alleged breach of the feudal code, was sent by the Frankish barons before the throne of Louis IX of France, whose authority they recognized as supreme in a case of such delicacy. The question was referred by the king to a parliament at Paris, which decided that Guy had been, indeed, guilty of a technical offence in taking up arms against his lord, but that, as he had never actually paid him homage, his fief could not be forfeited. His long journey to France was considered sufficient punishment for his disobedience. Guy did not return empty-handed; asked by the king what mark of royal favour he would prefer, he begged, and obtained, the title of Duke, which would raise him to the heraldic level of the Duke of Naxos, and for which, he said, there was an ancient precedent at Athens. The style of "Duke of Athens" was not only borne by his successors for two centuries, but has been immortalised by Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, who by a pardonable anachronism transferred to Theseus the title of the French, Sicilian, Aragonese, and Florentine rulers of the medieval city.

Battle of Pelagonia

The history of Frankish Greece is full of sudden reverses of fortune, by which the victor of one day became the vanquished of the next. Guy I had left his country a defeated and an accused man, while his successful rival was the practical leader of the Latin Orient; he returned with the glamour of the ducal title to find his conqueror and feudal lord a prisoner of the Greeks. During Guy's absence, William of Achaia, by his third marriage with Anna, daughter of the Despot Michael II of Epirus, had become involved in the tortuous politics of that restless sovereign. It was Michael's design to anticipate the Greeks of Nicaea in their projected re-conquest of Constantinople, and he was anxious to secure his position by marrying one of his daughters to the powerful Prince of Achaia and another to Manfred, the ill-fated Hohenstaufen King of Sicily. This latter alliance by making Corfu a part of the Epirote princess's dowry led to the subsequent occupation of that island by the Angevin conquerors of Naples. But the plans of the crafty despot met with a serious obstacle in the person of Michael VIII Palaeologus, who had usurped the Nicene throne and intended to make himself master of Byzantium, and who ordered his brother to punish the insolence of his Epirote rival. In 1259 the hostile Greek forces met on the plain of Pelagonia in Western Macedonia; William of Achaia with a chosen band of Franks and a contingent of native troops was among the despot's allies. At a critical moment, a private quarrel between the despot's bastard John and the Frankish prince led the indignant Epirote to desert to the enemy; the despot, warned of his son's intention, fled in the night, and the Franks were left to meet the foe's attack. Despite their usual prowess in the field, the battle was lost; the prince, unhorsed and hiding under a heap of straw, was recognized by his prominent teeth and taken prisoner with many of his nobles. Michael VIII saw at once that the capture of so distinguished a man might be made the means of re-establishing Greek rule in the Morea, and offered him and his fellow-prisoners their liberty and money for the purchase of other lands in France in return for the cession of Achaia. The prince, however, replied in the true spirit of feudalism, that the land conquered by the efforts of his father and his father's comrades was not his to dispose of as if he were an absolute monarch. For three years he remained in captivity, while the Latin Empire fell. Michael VIII restored the seat of his government to Constantinople, and the Duke of Athens acted as bailie of the widowed principality of Achaia. It was, indeed, a tragic moment in the history of Greece when there devolved upon the Duke of Athens the task of receiving the fugitive Latin Emperor Baldwin II as his guest in the castle of the Cadmea at Thebes and upon the sacred rock of the Athenian Acropolis.

The Ladies' Parliament

Master of Constantinople, Michael VIII was more than ever anxious to obtain a foothold in the Morea. He moderated his demands, in the hope of exhausting the patience of his wearied captives, and he professed that he would be content with the surrender of the three castles of Monemvasia, Maina, and Mistra, which had been either captured or built by the prince himself, and which were therefore his to bestow. The question, vital for the future of the Frankish principality, was referred to the high court at Nikli—a parliament consisting, with two exceptions, of ladies only, for the fatal day of Pelagonia had left most of the baronies in the possession of either the wives of the prisoners or the widows of the slain. In an assembly so composed, reasons of state and the scriptural argument employed by the Duke of Athens, that "it were better that one man should die for the people rather than that the other Franks of the Morea should lose the fruits of their fathers' labours," had naturally less weight than sentiment and the voice of affection. In vain Guy offered to pledge his own duchy to raise the ransom, or even to take the prince's place in prison. The three castles—with the doubtful addition of Geraki, which in any case soon became Greek—were surrendered; the prisoners were released; the noble dames were sent as hostages to Constantinople; and a Byzantine province, based on the ceded Frankish quadrilateral, was established in the south-east corner of the Morea, whose capital was Mistri, the seat of the "Captain of the Territory in the Peloponnese and its Castles." From the date of this surrender in 1262 began the decline of Frankish power; thenceforth friction between the rival elements in the population was inevitable; and while the discontented Greeks of the still Frankish portion of the peninsula found a rallying-point at Mistra, the Greek Emperor gained an excellent recruiting-ground for his light troops and his marines. In a word, the Ladies' Parliament of Nikli by destroying the unity of the State paved the way for the Turkish conquest.

The solemn vow that William had taken never again to levy war against the Greek Emperor was soon broken; hostilities inevitably followed the proximity of the rival residences of Mistra and Sparta, and weary years of warfare depopulated the peninsula. One woman, we are told, lost seven husbands one after the other, all killed in battle; such was the drain upon the male portion of the inhabitants. The Greeks imported Turkish mercenaries to aid them against the Frankish chivalry,and thus the future masters of the peninsula made their first appearance there. But the Turks, unable to obtain their pay, deserted to the Franks, whom they helped to win the battle of Makryplagi on "the broad hillside" now traversed by the railway to Kalamata, receiving as a reward lands on which to settle. Had the pride of the Franks then allowed them to accept Michael VIII's proposal for a marriage between his heir, the future Emperor Andronicus II, and the prince's elder daughter Isabelle, the future of the Morea might have been different; the two races might have been welded together; Eastern and Western Christendom might really have met in a firm alliance at Mistra; and the Morea might perhaps have resisted the all-conquering Turks. But racial prejudice would not have it so; and Isabelle was made the instrument of uniting the fortunes of the principality with those of the Neapolitan Angevins, whose founder, Charles I, in 1267, received from the exiled Latin Emperor by the treaty of Viterbo the suzerainty of Achaiathe beginning of many unsuspected woes for that beautiful land.

The Angevins and Greece

From the first, William, who had welcomed this new feudal tie with the brother of the King of France, found that it constituted an obligation rather than a benefit. He was summoned to the aid of his Angevin suzerain against Conradin at the battle of Tagliacozzo, and when his daughter espoused the second son of Charles I the marriage contract stipulated that, whether the Prince of Achaia left heirs or not, the principality should belong to the house of Anjou, which since 1267 likewise held Corfu and aspired to be the dominant factor in southeastern, as it already was in southern, Europe. It was true that Neapolitan troops assisted him in the desultory warfare against the Greeks which, together with feudal disputes, occupied the rest of his reign. But when in 1278 the third Villehardouin prince was laid to rest beside his father and brother in the church of St James at Andravida, and the male stock of the family thus came to an end, the evils of the Angevin connexion began to be felt.

Elsewhere also the Greek cause had prospered at the expense of the Latins. In the north, it was true, Hellenism had split up into three divisions, for on the death of Michael II of Epirus his bastard, John I, had established himself as independent ruler of Neopatras—a splendid position on a spur of Mt Oeta, which commands the valley of the Spercheus and faces the barrier of Mt Othrys, while the snows of Tymphrestds bound the western horizon, beyond which lay the Epirote dominions of the lawful heir, Nicephorus I. As the champion of Orthodoxy at a time when Michael VIII was coquetting with the Papacy in order to avert the Angevin designs on Constantinople, the "Duke" of Neopatras, as the Franks called John Ducas Angelus, was a formidable adversary of the restored Greek Empire. When the imperial forces were sent to besiege his capital, he escaped by night and fled to Duke John of Athens, who in 1263 had succeeded his father Guy, and who assisted his namesake to rout them. But the imperial commander inflicted a crushing defeat off Demetrids in the Gulf of Volo upon a flotilla equipped by the Lombard barons of Euboea, while in that and the other islands of the Aegean the meteoric career of Licario, a knight of Karystos, caused serious losses to the Latins. Mortally offended by the proud Lombards, this needy adventurer, whose family, like theirs, had come from Northern Italy, gratified his vengeance by offering to subdue the long island to the Emperor's authority. Michael VIII gladly welcomed so serviceable a henchman; Licario's capture of Karystos proved that he was no vain boaster after the manner of the Franks ; he received from his new master the whole of Euboea as a fief, and soon one Lombard castle after another fell into his hands. Knowing full well the rashness of his fellow-countrymen, he easily entrapped one of the triarchs and Duke John of Athens, the victor of Neopatras, outside the walls of Negropont, and had the satisfaction of dragging them in chains to Constantinople. One of the most dramatic scenes in Byzantine history is the passage which describes the triumph of the once despised knight over his former superior, the rage and fury of the triarch and his sudden death of chagrin at the spectacle of the Emperor and Licario in confidential conversation. Ere long, Licario became Lord High Admiral, and spread devastation throughout the archipelago. Already the supposedly impregnable rock of Skdpelos, whose Latin lord had believed himself to be beyond the reach of malicious fortune, had surrendered to the traitor of Karystos; the rest of the northern Sporades, and Lemnos, the fief of the Navigajosi, shared its fate, and thenceforth remained in Greek hands till the fall of Constantinople. Ten other Latin islands were lost for twenty years or more, and two dynasties alone, those of Sanudo and Ghisi, survived this fatal cruise in the Aegean, while the two Venetian Marquesses of Cerigo and arigotto were driven from the southern March of Greece, and one of the three Monemvasiote archons, Paul Monoyannes, received the island of Venus as a fief of the Greek Empire. Licario disappeared from history as rapidly as he had risen; we know not how he ended; but his career left a permanent mark on Greek history. Thus Michael VIII had obtained extraordinary success over the Franks. He had destroyed the Latin Empire, recovered a large part of Negropont and many other islands; as early as 1256 his brother, as governor, had replaced the independent Greek dynasty of Gabalás in Rhodes; another viceroy was established at Mistra; and both a Prince of Achaia and a Duke of Athens had been his prisoners at Constantinople. But John of Athens was released on much easier terms than William of Achaia; for Michael VIII feared to provoke the Duke of Neopatras, who was bound by matrimonial ties to the ducal house of Athens and by those of commerce to the royal house of Naples, the dreaded enemy of the restored Greek Empire.

Nicholas II de St Omer

Soon afterwards the gouty Duke of Athens died, and William, his brother, reigned in his stead. A new era had begun all over the Frankish world. The house of Anjou was now the dominant factor in Greece. Isabelle de Villehardouin had been left a widow before her father died, and by virtue of her marriage contract Charles I of Naples and Sicily was now Prince as well as suzerain of Achaia, and governed that principality, as he governed Corfu, by means of deputies. While these two portions of Greece were his absolute property, he was acknowledged as suzerain of both the Athenian duchy and the palatine county of Cephalonia and Zante, and considered himself as the successor of Manfred in Epirus as well as in the Corfiote portion of the latter's Greek possessions. Alike in Corfu and Achaia his early governors were foreigners, and the Corfiotes for the first time found their national Church degraded and their metropolitan see abolished by the zeal of the Catholic Angevins. In Achaia, where the Frankish nobility was strongly attached to its privileges and looked upon newcomers with suspicion, the rule of the Angevin bailies was so unpopular that Charles was obliged to appoint one of the local barons, and almost the first act of the regency which followed his death was to confer the bailiwick upon Duke William of Athens, whose riches were freely expended upon the defences of Greece. Upon his death in 1287 he was succeeded at Athens by his infant son Guy II, under the regency of the duchess, a daughter of the Duke of Neopatras and the first Greek to hold sway over the Athenians since the conquest, while in the Morea a great Theban magnate, Nicholas II de St Omer, governed for Charles II of Anjou. This splendour-loving noble, then married to the widowed Princess of Achaia, had built out of the dowry of his first wife, a Princess of Antioch, the noble castle of St Omer, of which one tower alone remains, on the Cadmea of Thebes. An Emperor and his court could have found room within its walls, which were decorated with frescoes representing the conquest of the Holy Land by the ancestors of the Theban baron. Similar frescoes of the tale of Troy existed a century later in the archiepiscopal palace of Patras, and may still be seen, on a smaller scale, in the churches of Gerald. Besides the castle of St Omer, Nicholas built that of Avarino on the north of the famous bay of Navarino, the "harbour of rushes" as the Franks called it. And in the north-west of the peninsula the mountains and castle of Santameri still preserve the name of this once-powerful family.

The barons soon, however, longed for a resident prince. In the eleven years that had elapsed since the death of William of Achaia, they had had six bailies—two foreigners, two of their own order, and two great Athenian magnates. At last they represented to Charles II that he should marry Princess Isabelle, "the Lady of the Morea," who was still living in widowhood at Naples, to Florent d'Avesnes, a young Flemish nobleman, brother of the Count of Hainault and great-nephew of the conqueror of Euboea. Florent was already a favourite of the king, who accordingly consented to the marriage, on condition that, if Isabelle should survive her husband, neither she nor her daughter nor any other of her female descendants should marry without the royal consent; the penalty for so doing was to be the reversion of the principality to the Neapolitan crown. This harsh stipulation was in the sequel twice enforced; but in the meanwhile all were too well satisfied with the alliance to consider its disadvantages. In 1289 Florent married and became Prince of Achaia, and for seven years the country had peace. The ravages of the Angevin bailies were repaired, and in the words of the Chronicle of the Morea, "all grew rich, Franks and Greeks, and the land waxed so fat and plenteous in all things that the people knew not the half of what they possessed." But the insolence of the Flemings, who had followed their countryman to the Morea, another Epirote campaign, and a raid by Roger Loria, the famous Admiral of Aragon, marred this happy period of Moreote history. Unfortunately, in 1297, soon after the peace with the Greeks of the Byzantine province had expired, Florent died, leaving Isabelle again a widow with one small daughter, who was affianced to Guy II, the young Duke of Athens, and rightly regarded as "the best match in all Romania."

The pen of the contemporary Catalan chronicler, Ramón Muntaner, who was personally acquainted with Guy, has left us a charming picture of the Theban court at this period. Muntaner, who had seen many lands, described him as "one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a king, and eke one of the richest." His coming of age was a ceremony long remembered in Greece, for every guest that came to do him honour received gifts and favours from his hand, and his splendid munificence to Boniface of Verona, a young cavalier from Euboea, who was chosen to dub him a knight, struck the shrewd Catalan freebooter as the noblest gift that any prince made in one day for many a long year. Jongleurs and minstrels enlivened the ducal leisure; in the noble sport of the tournament the young duke knew no fear, and in the great jousts at Corinth, in which more than a thousand knights and barons took part, he did not shrink from challenging a veteran champion from the West. Now for the first time we find the "thin soil " of Attica supplying Venice with corn, while the Theban looms furnished the Pope with silken garments. The excellent French that was spoken at Athens struck visitors from France, while long ere this the foreign rulers of Greece had learned the language of their Greek subjects. One Duke of Athens had even quoted Herodotus; one Archbishop of Corinth had actually translated Aristotle. In short, the little Frankish courts at the end of the thirteenth century were centres of prosperity, chivalry, and a large measure of refinement, while the country was far more prosperous than it had been in the later centuries of Byzantine rule, or than it was either beneath the Turkish yoke or in the early years of its final freedom under Otto of Bavaria. Unhappily, the Athenian duchy had scarcely reached its zenith, when the French dynasty fell for ever beneath the blows of another and a ruder race.

Philip of Taranto

The same year 1294 that made the young Duke of Athens his own master strengthened the hold of the Angevins upon Greece. The ambitious plans of Charles I for the conquest of Epirus and the restoration of the Latin Empire at Constantinople had been baffled by the defeat of his forces amid the mountains of the Greek mainland, and by the Sicilian Vespers and the consequent establishment of the rival house of Aragon on the throne of Sicily. Charles II attempted to recover by diplomacy what his father had lost by arms, and in 1294 he transferred all his claims to the Latin Empire, the actual possession of Corfu with the castle of Butrinto on the opposite coast, as well as the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, the duchy of Athens, the kingdom of Albania, and the province of Vlachia (as Thessaly was still called), to his second son, Philip, Prince of Taranto. This much-titled personage, who thus became the suzerain of all the Frankish states in Greece, thereupon married, after the fashion of the luckless Manfred, whose sons were still languishing in an Angevin dungeon, a fair Epirote princess, daughter of the Despot Nicephorus I, who promised to give him as her dowry the castle of Lepanto with three other fortresses, and, if the heir apparent died, to make Philip Despot of Epirus, if the heir apparent lived, to make him its suzerain. Philip of Taranto by these extraordinary arrangements became the most important figure, at least on paper, in the feudal hierarchy of medieval Greece. In this capacity he was called upon to give his consent to the third marriage of Princess Isabelle of Achaia, who, during the Papal Jubilee of 1300, had met in Rome Philip, a young scion of the house of Savoy, and desired to wed so likely a defender of her land. The Savoyard was reluctantly invested with the principality by Charles II on behalf of his son, and thus inaugurated the connection of his famous family with the Morea. But Philip of Savoy, though a valiant knight, looked upon his Greek principality as a means of making money against the evil day when the Angevins, as he felt convinced, would repent of having appointed him and when Philip of Taranto would desire to take his place. He and his Piedmontese followers became very unpopular ; for, while they occupied the chief strategic positions, he extorted loans and forced presents from his subjects. Before long Charles II revived the legal pretext that Isabelle's third marriage had been against his consent, and that she had therefore forfeited her principality; and Philip's refusal to assist in furthering the Angevin plans of conquest in Epirus gave him an excuse for releasing the Achaian barons from their allegiance to one who had broken the feudal law. Philip and Isabelle left the Morea for ever; an estate on the Fucine lake was considered adequate compensation for the loss of Achaia; and, in 1311, the elder daughter of the last Villehardouin prince, after having been the tool of Angevin diplomacy ever since her childhood, died in Holland far from the orange-groves of Kalamata. Her husband remarried, and his descendants by this second union continued to bear the name of "Achaia," and, in one case, endeavoured to recover the principality which had for a few brief years been his. Philip of Taranto, the lawful suzerain, became also the reigning prince, but, after a short visit, he resorted to the old plan of governing the Morea by means of bailies. Of these the first was Guy II, the good Duke" of Athens, whose wife, the elder daughter of Isabelle, might be regarded by the old adherents of the family as the rightful heiress of Achaia.

Walter of Brienne. The Catalans

Guy had latterly become more influential than ever; for death had left his mother's old home of Neopatras in the hands of a minor, John II, and the Duke of Athens had been appointed as regent there. Thus Athenian authority extended from the Morea to Thessaly; the Greek nobles of the North learnt French, and the coins of Neopatras bore Latin inscriptions in token of the Latinisation of the land. Alas! the duke was suffering from an incurable malady; he had no heir; and, when in 1308 he was laid to rest in the abbey of Daphni, the future destroyers of the French duchy were already at hand. For the moment, however, the future of Athens seemed to be assured. Guy's mother had married, after his father's death, a member of the great crusading family of Brienne, which had already provided a King of Jerusalem and Emperor of Romania and held the less sonorous but more profitable dignity of Counts of Lecce. By a previous marriage with an aunt of the duke, his stepfather had had a son Walter, who now succeeded to his cousin's dominions. Walter of Brienne possessed all the courage of his race; but he lacked the saving virtue of caution, and his recklessness at a critical moment destroyed in a single day the noble fabric which the wise statesmanship of the house of De la Roche had taken a century to construct. So dramatic are the vicissitudes of the Latin Orient: the splendid pageants of chivalry one day, absolute ruin the next.

The new conquerors of Athens came from an unexpected quarter. During the struggle for Sicily between the houses of Aragon and Anjou, Frederick II, the Aragonese king of the island, had gladly availed himself of the support of a band of Catalans, whose swords were at the disposal of anyone who would pay them. When the peace came, they found it necessary to seek employment elsewhere. At that moment the Greek Emperor, Andronicus II, hard pressed by the growing power of the Turks in Asia, was glad of such powerful assistance, and, to the detriment of Greece, took the Catalans into his service. In the East they repeated on a much larger scale their performances in the West; the Emperor, like the King of Sicily, found them valuable but dangerous allies, who quarrelled with his subjects, plundered his cities, and defied his orders. At last they constituted themselves into an organised society, and set out to ravage Macedonia and Greece on their own account. When they had exhausted one district they moved on to another, and by this locust-like progress they and some of their converted Turkish auxiliaries entered the great Thessalian plain in 1309. The young Duke of Neopatras, now emancipated by the death of Guy, was too feeble to oppose them till an imperial force compelled them to move on towards the Eden which awaited them in the Duchy of Athens. Walter of Brienne was at first by no means displeased with their appearance. He knew their language, which he had learnt as a child in Sicily, and he thought that he might use them for the accomplishment of his immediate object—the restoration of Athenian influence over the moribund principality of the Angeli at Neopatras. The Catalans accepted his proposals, and in six months they had captured more than thirty castles of northern Greece for their new employer.

The victors of the Cephisus were in one respect embarrassed by the completeness of their victory. They realised that they had no one in their own ranks of sufficient standing to become their ruler in the new position which their success had thrust upon them. They accordingly adopted the strange plan of offering the leadership to one of their prisoners, Boniface of Verona, the favourite of Guy II, and a great man in Euboea. Boniface was ambitious, but he felt that he could not, with his wide connections in the Frankish world, commit such an act of baseness. He, therefore, declined; but his fellow-prisoner, Roger Deslaur, a knight of Roussillon who had already acted as intermediary between the late Duke and the company, had no such obligations, and accepted the post with the castle of Salona and the hand of its widowed lady. A year later, however, the Catalans realized that their precarious situation (for all the Powers interested in Greece regarded them as interlopers) required to be strengthened by the invocation of some powerful and recognized sovereign as their protector. Their eyes naturally turned to their old employer, Frederick II of Sicily, and they begged him to send one of his sons to rule over them. Frederick gladly consented to a proposal which would add lustre to his house, and for the next 65 years the royal family of Sicily provided absentee dukes for the Catalan duchy of Athens, while the real political authority was always wielded by a vicar-general whom they appointed to represent them at the capital of Thebes. A marshal for long existed by the side of this official, till the two offices were first combined in the same person and then that of marshal was allowed to drop. An elaborate system of local government was created; representative institutions were adapted from Barcelona, whose "Customs" supplanted the "Assises of Romania," and whose language became the official as well as the ordinary idiom. The Greeks were, till towards the close of Catalan rule, treated as an inferior race, while the Orthodox Church occupied the same humble position that it had held in the Burgundian times. Feudalism lingered in a modified form; but it had lost its glamour, and the court of the Catalan vicar-general must have been a very drab and prosaic affair after the magnificent pageants of the splendour-loving Dukes of Athens, whose flag still floated over the Argive fortresses that had been granted to Othon de la Roche a century before.

The Infant Ferdinand of Majorca

Having thus established a connexion with one of the acknowledged states of Europe, the Catalan Grand Company began to extend its operations in Greece. A Catalan claim to the Morea furnished it with a plausible pretext for a raid. Two years after the battle of the Cephisus, Philip of Taranto had conferred that principality on Matilda of Hainault, the daughter of Isabelle and widow of Guy II of Athens, on condition that she married and transferred the princely dignity to Louis of Burgundy. The object of this manoeuvre was to compensate his brother the Duke of Burgundy for losing the hand of the titular Latin Empress of Constantinople, whom Philip, then a widower, had resolved to marry himself. But before Louis of Burgundy had taken possession of his Achaian principality, another claimant had appeared there. Besides Isabelle, William of Achaia had left another daughter, the Lady of Akova, who was regarded by some as the lawful representative of the Villehardouin dynasty, on the ground of a supposed will made by her father. With the object of securing her claims for her posterity, if not for herself, she married her danghter to the Infant Ferdinand of Majorca, who had at one time played an adventurous part in the career of the Catalan Company and was well known in Greece. Both the Lady of Akova and her daughter died before these claims could be realised, but her daughter left a baby behind her, the future King James II of Majorca; and, on behalf of this child, Ferdinand landed in the Morea to receive the homage of the principality. His usurpation was at first successful; he even coined his own money at the mint of Glarentza, while the Catalans of Athens set out to aid their old comrade against the Burgundian party. A battle in the forest of Manolada, in 1316, proved fatal, however, to the Infant's cause; and his head, severed on the field, was displayed before the gate of Glarentza. The Athenian Catalans turned back at the sad news, but Louis of Burgundy did not long enjoy the fruits of this victory; barely a month afterwards he died, poisoned, so it was said, by the Italian Count of Cephalonia, a medieval villain believed to be capable of every crime. Louis' widow, the Princess of Achaia, was forced against her will by the crooked diplomacy of Anjou to go through the form of marriage, in 1318, with John of Gravina, brother of Philip of Taranto. Matilda stoutly refused to be this man's wife, and when at last pressure was put upon her by the Pope to make her consent she replied that she was already another's. This confession proved to be her ruin. The crafty Angevins appealed to the clause in her mother's marriage contract which declared the principality forfeit should one of Isabelle's daughters marry without her suzerain's consent. While John of Gravina governed as Prince of Achaia, she languished in the Castel dell' Uovo at Naples, till at last, in 1331, death released her from the clutches of her royal gaoler. Thus closed the career of the Villehardouin family; thus, in the third generation, was the deceit of Geoffrey I visited upon the unhappy daughter of the unhappy Isabelle. Two years later, John of Gravina exchanged the Morea for the duchy of Durazzo, the kingdom of Albania, and the Angevin possessions in Epirus; while the titular Empress Catherine of Valois, acting for her son Robert of Taranto, whose father Philip was then dead, combined in her own person the suzerainty and actual ownership of Achaia, as well as the claim to the defunct Latin Empire. This arrangement had the advantage of uniting in a single hand all the Angevin dominions in Greece—the principality of Achaia, the castle of Lepanto, the island of Corfu, and the island-county of Cephalonia, which last had been conquered from the Orsini by John of Gravina in 1324.

The Duchy of Neopatras

If the Catalans had failed to found a principality in the South, they were much more successful in the North. The feeble Duke of Neopatras had died, the last of his race, in 1318, and the head of the Company, at the time Alfonso Fadrique, a bastard of King Frederick II of Sicily, conquered the best part of the former dominions of the Thessalian Angeli. At Neopatras itself he established a second Catalan capital, styling himself Vicar-General of the Duchies of Athens and Neopatras. The Sicilian Dukes of Athens assumed the double title, and, long after the Catalan duchies had passed away, the Kings of Aragon, their successors, continued to bear it. Venice profited by the dismemberment of this Greek state to occupy Pteleon at the entrance to the Pagasaean Gulf, her first acquisition on the Greek mainland since Modon and Coron. On the other side of Greece the principal line of the Angeli had also been extinguished in 1318 by the murder of the Despot Thomas, a victim of Count Nicholas of Cephalonia, another member of that unscrupulous family. The assassin soon perished by the hand of his brother John II, who thus continued the traditions of the Hellenised Orsini. But the new ruler of Epirus was a patron of Greek letters; at his command a paraphrase of Homer was written; while the famous church of Our Lady of Consolation at Arta still contains an inscription recording the Orsini and the two bears which were the emblems of their house—one of the most curious and least-known monuments of the Latin domination in Greek lands.

Meanwhile, the house of Brienne had not abandoned the idea of recovering the lost duchy of Athens. Young Walter had grown up to manhood, and, in 1331, landed in Epirus to reconquer his father's dominions. Once again, however, the brilliant qualities of chivalry were seen to be inferior to the less showy strategy of the Catalans. The Greeks remained unmoved by the appearance of this deliverer from the "extreme slavery" which a contemporary described as their lot, and the only lasting result of this futile expedition was the destruction by the Catalans themselves of the noble castle of St Omer, for fear lest it should fall into the invader's hands. The abode of the Theban barons is connected with literature as well as art, for the original of one of the most valuable memorials of Frankish rule, the French version of the Chronicle of the Morea, was found within its walls—a proof of culture among its inmates. Walter's subsequent career was connected with Florentine and English history rather than with Athens, for he became tyrant of Florence, and died, fighting against our Black Prince, at the battle of Poitiers. The family of Enghien, into which his sister had married, succeeded to his Argive castles and his Athenian claims.

While the titular Duke of Athens thus retired to rule over Florence, a Florentine family, destined ultimately to succeed to his Greek duchy, established itself in the Morea. Of the numerous visitors who have journeyed from Florence to see the famous Certosa, few realise that it was constructed out of the Greek revenues of its founder. Niccolo Acciajuoli had made the acquaintance of the titular Empress Catherine of Valois at the Neapolitan Court, whither he had gone to seek his fortune; he became her man of business and the director of her children's education, and, when she and her son Robert obtained through his negotiations the principality of Achaia, he received his reward in the shape of broad estates in that land. He gradually increased his stake in the country, and in 1358 was invested by his old pupil, the Emperor Robert, with the town and castle of Corinth, whence the Acropolis of Athens can be seen, and whence, thirty years later, it was to be conquered. At the other end of the Corinthian Gulf, the archbishopric of Patras was occupied by three members of the Acciajuoli clan, which thus continued to prosper while the feeble rule of an absentee prince and another disputed succession on his death in 1364 weakened the hold of the Angevins upon the principality. Philip II of Taranto, the brother, and Hugh of Lusignan, Prince of Galilee, the stepson, of the titular Emperor Robert, then contended for the possession of the Morea till the latter abandoned the struggle for another similar contest in Cyprus. During these internal convulsions, the Byzantine province had grown stronger and was better governed than the neighbouring Frankish principality. The imperial viceroys of Mistra had been appointed for much longer periods than had been the case before; and, in 1348, the Emperor John Cantacuzene had sent his son Manuel as Despot for life to the Morea. Thenceforth, as the seat of a younger member of the imperial family, Mistra became more and more important; and its splendid Byzantine churches still testify to the value which, as the Greek Empire declined, the Emperors attached to this isolated fragment of Greece. It is a curious freak of history that, in the last as in the early days of Greek freedom, the two most flourishing cities of Hellas were once more Athens and Sparta—the Athens of the Acciajuoli, the Sparta, as Mistra was often pedantically styled, of the Palaeologi.

The Serbians in Northern Greece

The peril that was to prove fatal alike to the medieval Athens and the medieval Sparta had ere this appeared on the horizon of Greece. The growing Turkish danger had at last induced the Papacy to recognize the Catalan conquest of Attica, and extend its benediction over those whom it had hitherto described as "sons of perdition." But the new generation of Catalans that had succeeded to the sturdy conquerors of the Cephisus was a degenerate race, given to drink and divided by quarrels, which led to the introduction of the Turks, by this time established in Europe. For the moment, however, the north of Greece had been annexed to the ephemeral empire of the great Serbian Tsar, Stephen Dugan; and, even after his death in 1355, Serbian rule lingered on for a time and provided a more or less feeble barrier between the duchy of Athens and the Ottoman power. On the other side of continental Greece, the tottering Greek despotat of Epirus, long disputed between the Byzantine and the Serbian Empires, had finally perished in 1358 with the Despot Nicephorus II, becoming partly Serb and partly Albanian, while the former island-domain of the Orsini, the county palatine of Cephalonia, had been conferred by the Angevins upon Leonardo Tocco of Benevento, who united four out of the seven Ionian islands in his hand, adopted from one of them the style of "Duke of Leucadia," and founded a family which, after over a century's rule in Greece, has only become extinct at Naples in our own time. Elsewhere, in Chios and Lesbos, two other fresh Italian factors had appeared in the many-coloured map of the Levant: the Genoese families of Zaccaria and Gattilusio. The rule of the Zaccaria in the former island lasted only from 1304 to 1329, but in 1346 Chios was reconquered by a band of Genoese, who formed a chartered company, or maona, which, reconstituted some years later under the title of the "Maona of the Giustiniani," held the island till the Turkish conquest in 1566. Lesbos, in 1355, was bestowed by the Greek Emperor, John V, upon his brother-in-law, Francesco Gattilusio, whose dynasty survived by nine years the fall of Constantinople, while in 1374 Genoa obtained Famagosta in pledge from King Peter II of Cyprus. Yet another bulwark of Latin rule had been created in the Aegean by the capture of Rhodes from the Seljuqs, the successors of the Greek governors, by the Knights of St John in 1309. But, if Latin Christendom was as strong as ever in the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian seas, it was weaker in the continental states that lay between them.

The Navarrese Company

The death of Frederick III, King of Sicily and Duke of Athens, in 1377, was a severe blow to the two Catalan duchies, for the claims of his daughter and heiress, Maria, were disputed by Pedro IV of Aragon, who found support with the clergy, the leading nobles, and the burgesses of Athens and Neopatras. Another competitor, however, appeared upon the scene, and repeated on a smaller scale the history of the Catalan Company seventy years earlier. During the struggle between the Kings of France and Navarre, the latter had been assisted by a body of Navarrese of good family, who, at the peace, had offered their services to their sovereign's brother for the conquest of Durazzo, and were at this time lying idle in the south of Italy. Meanwhile, the principality of Achaia, on the death of the childless Philip II in 1373, had been offered to Queen Joanna I of Naples, conferred by her upon one of her numerous husbands, Otto of Brunswick, and then pawned in 1377 for five years to the Knights of St John. All the time, however, the lawful heir was the nephew of Philip and last titular Emperor of Constantinople, Jacques de Baux, who thought that in the disturbed condition of Greece the moment had arrived to make good his claim to Achaia, and that the Navarrese Company would be the best means of doing so. The Company entered his service, captured Corfu from the Neapolitan officials, and in 1380 entered Attica, of which Baux as Prince of Achaia might claim the suzerainty, and as the uncle of Maria of Sicily might desire the conquest. The Navarrese, under the leadership of Mahiot de Coquerel, and Pedro de S. Superan, known as "Bordo" or the "bastard," were aided by the Sicilian party against the mutual enemy, and the important castle of Livadia, a town which had attained great prominence under Catalan rule and had received special privileges at the Catalan conquest, fell into their hands. Salona and the castle of Athens, however, held out, and their defenders expected their duke, the King of Aragon, to reward their loyalty by signing two series of capitulations which their envoys presented to him. Pedro IV granted many of their requests, and showed his appreciation of the glamour which must ever attach to the sovereign of the Acropolis by describing that sacred rock as "the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such that all the kings of Christendom together could in vain imitate." But so great had been the ravages of civil war in the duchy, that he was forced to invite Greeks and Albanians to settle there, the beginning of the Albanian colonization of Attica and Boeotia. As for the Navarrese, they marched into the Morea in 1381, came to terms with the Knights of St John, already weary of their bargain, and occupied the principality in the name of Jacques de Baux. When the latter died in 1383, they became practically independent, despite the protests of rival claimants. Androasa, in Messenia, was the Navarrese capital; Coquerel, and, after him, S. Superan, ruled with the title of Vicar, which the latter in 1396 exchanged for that of Prince. Thus, at the end of the fourteenth century, a Navarrese principality was carved out of Achaia, just as at its beginning a Catalan duchy had been created in Attica.

Florentine capture of Athens

The existence of the latter was now drawing to a close. While the Duke of Athens remained an absentee at Barcelona, Nerio Acciajuoli, the adopted son of the great Niccolò, was watching every move in the game from the citadel of Corinth. Like a clever diplomatist, he prepared his plans carefully; and, when all was ready, easily found his casus belli. The important castle of Salona was at this time in the possession of a woman, and her only daughter, the young countess, was the greatest heiress of the Catalan duchies. Nerio applied, on behalf of his brother-in-law, for her hand; the offer was scornfully refused, and a Serbian princeling preferred to the Florentine upstart's kinsman. The choice of a Slav offended Franks and Greeks alike; Nerio invaded the duchies by land and sea, and in 1387 was master of the city of Athens. The Acropolis, however, held out under the command of a valiant Spaniard, Pedro de Pau, and John I of Aragon, who had by that time succeeded Pedro IV as Duke of Athens and Neopatras, wrote as late as 22 April 1388 to the Countess of Sdlona, offering her the "Castle of Athens," if she could succour its garrison. Ten days later, the Acropolis was Nerio's; Catalan domination was over. Two Catalan fiefs alone, the county of Salona and the island of Aegina, remained independent, but memorials of Catalan rule may still be seen in the castles of Livadia and Lamia and in a curious fresco at Athens. Otherwise, the Catalans melted away, as if they had never been masters of the city of the sages, till at last the title of Athens and Neopatras in the style of the Kings of Spain was the sole reminder of the Greek duchies that had once been theirs.

The epoch that had now been reached was one of change all over Greece. Two years before Nerio hoisted his flag on the Acropolis, another Florentine, Esau Buondelmonti, had put an end to Serbian rule at Joánnina by marrying the widow of Thomas Preljubovic, the former ruler of Epirus, while Esau's sister was regent of Cephalonia. Venice, as well as Florence, had increased her Greek possessions. In 1363 a Cretan insurrection, more serious than any that had yet occurred because headed by Venetian colonists, involved Tito Venier, the Marquess of Cerigo, whose family had recovered their island by intermarriage with its Greek lords. Thenceforth Cerigo remained either wholly or partially a Venetian colony. In 1386 Venetian replaced Neapolitan rule at Corfu, and in 1388 the republic purchased Argos and Nauplia, the ancient fiefs of the French Dukes of Athens, from their last representative, Marie d'Enghien. Two years later, the islands of Tenos and Myconus became Venetian by bequest of the Ghisi. In 1383 the murder of Niccolò dalle Carceri, a great Euboean baron who was also Duke of Naxos, and the usurpation of Francesco Crispo, a Lombard of Veronese origin, had installed a new dynasty in the archipelago, which not only allowed two Euboean baronies to come under Venetian influence but also made the duchy of Naxos more dependent upon the goodwill of the republic. Thus, if Florence was predominant at Athens, in Epirus, and in the county palatine, Venice was stronger than ever in Negropont and Crete, held the Argive castles as well as Modon and Coron in the Morea, and was mistress of Corfu and Cerigo. As Pteleon was a Venetian colony, and as the Marquess of Boudonitza had long belonged to the Venetian family of Zorzi, both the northern and the southern Marches of Greece were in Venetian hands. Athens itself was soon to follow.

Nerio's ambition had not been appeased by the acquisition of that city; he coveted the Argive appurtenances of the Athenian duchy in its palmy days. Accordingly, he instigated his son-in-law, the Despot Theodore Palaeologus, who then ruled at Mistra, to seize Argos before the Venetian commissioner could arrive. On this occasion, however, the wily Florentine over-reached himself; he became the prisoner of the Navarrese Company, acting on behalf of Venice, and had to strip the silver plates off the doors of the Parthenon and rob the treasury of that venerable cathedral in order to raise his ransom. In 1393 the Turks, by the conquest of Thessaly and Neopatras, became his neighbours on the north, and it became evident that the Turkish conquest of Athens, which he avoided by the payment of tribute, was only a question of time. Before the year 1394 was many weeks old, the Catalan county of Salona had become Turkish, the Dowager Countess had been handed over to the insults of the soldiery, and her daughter sent to the harem of the Sultan, who ere long was reported to have murdered the ill-fated heiress of the Fadriques. The memory of her tragic fate still lingers round the castle rock of Salona, and the loss of this western bulwark of Athens sounded like a death-knell in the ears of Nerio. King Ladislas of Naples might confer upon him the coveted title of Duke of Athens—a name to conjure with in the cultured world of Florence—but when, a few months later, the first Florentine wearer of the title lay a-dying, he foresaw clearly the fate that was hovering over his new-won dominions.

Nerio left no legitimate sons; but he had a bastard, Antonio, the child of a fair Athenian, and to him he left Thebes and Livadia, while he bequeathed the city of Athens and his valuable stud to the Parthenon, in which he desired to be buried. It was not to be expected that the Orthodox Greeks, who had recently been allowed for the first time since the Frankish conquest to have their own metropolitan resident at Athens, and had thereby recovered their national consciousness, would permit their city to become the property of a Roman Catholic cathedral. While, therefore, Nerio's two sons-in-law, the Despot Theodore I and Carlo I Tocco, were fighting over the possession of Corinth, the Metropolitan of Athens called in the Turks. The Acropolis, however, held out, and its governor, one of Nerio's executors, offered to hand over Athens to the Venetian bailie of Negropont for the republic, on condition that the ancient privileges of the Athenians should be respected. The bailie dispersed the Turks, and the home government decided to accept Athens, but on one ground alone: its proximity to the Venetian colonies, which might be injured if it were allowed to fall into Turkish or other hands. A governor, styled podesta and captain,was appointed, and so little desirable did the position seem that four months elapsed before any Venetian noble could be found to accept it. Nor need this reluctance surprise us.

Condition of Athens

Athens at the close of the fourteenth century, as we know from the contemporary account of an Italian visitor, could not have been a very desirable residence. The city contained "about a thousand hearths" but not a single inn; Turkish pirates infested the coast, and Antonio Acciajuoli harried the countryside. Still, the "Church of St Mary" was the wonder of the pious pilgrim, just as the relics which it contained had been the envy of Queen Sibylla of Aragon. Twenty of the columns of the "house of Hadrian," as the temple of the Olympian Zeus was popularly described, were then standing, and the remains of the Roman aqueduct marked, according to the local ciceroni, "the study of Aristotle." Venice, however, was not long concerned with the care of this glorious heritage which she so lightly esteemed. The bastard Antonio routed her forces in the pass between Thebes and Negropont, and after a long siege forced the gallant defenders of the Acropolis to surrender from sheer starvation. To save appearances the shrewd conqueror, having obtained all that he wanted, agreed to become the nominal vassal of the republic for "Sythines," as Athens was then called, while the Venetians compensated themselves for its actual loss by the acquisition of the two keys of the Corinthian Gulf—Lepanto, in 1407, from Paul Bona Spata, its Albanian lord, and Patras from its Latin archbishop on a five years' lease. The former of these places remained Venetian for over ninety years; the latter, with an interval, till 1419, when it was restored to ecclesiastical rule, and consequently lost. Four years later the republic purchased Salonica.

The Turkish defeat at Angora in 1402 gave Greece, like the other Christian states of the Near East, a brief respite from her doom, and the tide of Turkish conquest temporarily receded. The Despot Theodore I of Mistra, who had endeavoured to strengthen the fighting forces of the Morea by the admission of a large Albanian immigration, and by handing over Corinth to the Knights of St John, now urged the latter to occupy the county of Salona instead. Turkish rule was, however, soon restored there; and in 1414 the sister creation of the Crusaders, the historic marquessate of Boudonitza, finally disappeared from the map. Meanwhile, in the Frankish principality of Achaia a new and vigorous prince, the last of the line, had arisen. On the death of S. Superan in 1402, his widow had succeeded him, but the real power was vested in her nephew Centurione Zaccaria, a member of the Genoese family which had once ruled over Chios. Centurione, following the precedent of the first Villehardouin, deprived S. Superan's children of their birthright and, by the same legal quibble, received in 1404 the title of Prince of Achaia from the King of Naples. But the Frankish portion of the peninsula was dwindling away before the advancing Greeks. The young Despot Theodore II, who had succeeded his namesake in 1407, was a son of the Emperor Manuel II, who therefore took a double interest in a part of his diminished Empire which seemed best able to resist a Turkish attack. Manuel visited the Morea, rebuilt the six-mile rampart across the Isthmus, and reduced the lawless Mainates to order. Nor was he the only Greek who occupied himself in the welfare of the Peloponnese. It was at this time that the philosopher George GemistPlethon, who was teaching the doctrines of Plato at Mistra, drew up his elaborate scheme for the regeneration of the country. If Plethon was an idealist, the other side of the picture is supplied by the contemporary satirist Mazares, who described in dark colours the evil qualities of the seven races then inhabiting the peninsula, the insecurity of life and property, and the faithlessness and craft of the Greek archons. Unfortunately, the last period of Moreote history before the Turkish conquest proved that the satirist was nearer the truth than the philosopher.

Loss of the last Venetian colonies

Even after the loss of Cyprus, the republic still retained for nearly a century more her much older colony of Crete. The Cretan insurrection of 1363 had been followed by a long period of peace; but after the Turkish conquest of Negropont the Venetians became alarmed for the safety of their other great island. When Cyprus became also Venetian it served as an outpost of Candia, and its capture was therefore felt to have weakened the republic's position in Crete. It was at this period that Venice set to work to restore the fortifications of the island, and sent Foscarini on his celebrated mission to redress the grievances of the islanders. The old feudal military service, which had fallen into abeyance, was revived; exemptions were curtailed; the Jews regarded the commissioner as their enemy, the peasants looked on him as their friend. But vested interests and the fanaticism of the Orthodox clergy proved stubborn obstacles to the reformer. The population diminished, the island cost more than it yielded, and the Cretans avowed their preference for the Turkish rule which was destined to be their lot. In 1669, after a war that had lasted well-nigh a quarter of a century, "Troy's rival," Candia, fell, and only the three fortresses of Grabusa, Suda, and Spinalonga remained in Venetian hands—the first till 1691, the two last till 1715, when Tenos also, the last Venetian island in the Aegean, was lost. Venice, however, still retained the Ionian Islands, including Santa Mavra, reconquered by Morosini in 1684, down to the fall of the republic in 1797, when the career of Franks and Venetians in Greek lands, which had begun six centuries earlier, ended with the short-lived triumph of Bonaparte, the self-constituted heir of both.

Frankish society

The Frankish domination in Greece is certainly the most romantic period of her history. The brilliant courts of Thebes and Nicosia, the gaieties of Naxos and Negropont, the tournament of Corinth, the hunting parties of Attica, Cyprus, and the Morea, and the pleasaunces of Elis, were created by the Franks and perished with them. The grass-grown ruins of Glarentza were then a flourishing mart with its own weights and measures, the residence of Italian bankers, and known all over the Mediterranean; the palace of Mistra, now the haunt of tortoises and sheep, was then a princely residence, second to Constantinople alone. Splendid castles in marvellous sites, like Passava, Chloumotitsi, and Dieu d'Amour, remind us how the Frank nobles lived and fought, while dismantled abbeys by fair streams or above azure seas, like Isova and Bella Paise, tell us how the Latin monks fared in these lands of their adoption. But, except in the Cyclades and the Ionian Islands, the Frankish conquest has left little mark upon the character and institutions of the people. With the exception of the half-castes, a despised breed which usually sided with the Greeks, the two races had few points of contact and never really amalgamated. They differed in origin, in creed, in customs, and, at first, in language, and the tact of many Frankish rulers did not succeed in bridging the impassable chasm which Nature has placed between East and West. In a word, the Frankish conquest of Greece did not succeed in becoming a permanent factor in Greek life, because it was unnatural. Here and there, especially in the case of the Cephalonian Orsini, Latin princes became hellenised, adopting the religion and language of their subjects, only in such cases, as is usual, to assimilate their vices without their virtues. Even in the Cyclades, where the Latin element is still considerable and the Roman Church is still powerful, the picturesque adventurers who built their castles above marine volcanoes or out of classical temples were to the last a foreign garrison, while in Crete the existence, much rarer elsewhere, of a considerable native aristocracy furnished leaders for that long series of revolts against foreign authority which was a peculiar feature of Cretan history. One lesson, however, the Greeks of the Morea learnt from the Franks, a lesson to which they owe in some measure their later independence—that of fighting. For, if the Frankish conquest found the Greeks an unwarlike race, the Turkish conquest was disturbed by continual insurrections. Of the influence of the Latin domination upon the common language of the country there is abundant evidence, especially in the islands, where Venetian authority lingered longest. Frankish Greece has bequeathed to us in literature the curious Chronicle of the Morea, a work extant in four languages and even more valuable for social and legal than for political history; while Crete and Corfu produced romances drawn from Western models. In art the influence of Venice may still be seen at Monemvasia, Andros, and Zante, whereas Crete gave birth to a native school of painting which owed nothing to foreign influence, and in the frescoes of Geraki we have perhaps the sole surviving portraits of Frankish nobles on the soil of Greece. That the Latin masters of the country were not indifferent to culture, we know, however, from several instances. An Orsini patronising a vernacular version of Homer, a Giustiniani and a Gattilusio interested in archaeology, a Sommaripa excavating statues, a Tocco facilitating a foreign savant's search for inscriptions, a Crispo quoting Sallust, a Ghisi studying the Chronicle of the Morea, an Archbishop of Corinth translating Aristotle—such are a few of the figures of this by no means barbarous epoch, to which we owe some of the best Byzantine historians—the Athenian Chalcocondyles, the Lesbian llucas, the Imbrian Critobulus, the Monemvasiote Phrantzes, men not only of letters but of affairs. Even under the Catalans at Athens we find a bishop possessed of a library, while Mistra in the time of the Palaeologi was a centre of philosophic culture as the residence of Plethon. "New France" was therefore, especially at its zenith, a land more brilliant and more prosperous than either the Byzantine provinces out of which it was formed or the Turkish provinces which succeeded it. But the Franks, like their successors, could neither absorb nor suppress that marvellous Greek nationality which has survived through the vicissitudes of more than twenty centuries. Thus the motley sway of Frenchmen and Italians, Catalans and Navarrese, Flemings and Germans, over the classic home of literature and the arts has remained save in a few cases merely a long episode in the long history of Greece, but still an episode curious above all others from its strange contrasts, its unexpected juxtapositions of races and civilisations, its dramatic surprises, and its sudden and tragic reverses of fortune.

TABLES OF RULERS.
PRINCES OF ACHAIA.
William de Champlitte 1205.	Robert of Taranto 1346
Geoffrey I de Villehardouin. Bailie 1209; prince 1210.	Marie de Bourbon 1364.
Geoffrey II de Villehardouin 1218	Philip II of Taranto 1370.
William de Villehardouin 1246.	Joanna I of Naples 1374.
Charles I of Anjou 1278.	Otto of Brunswick 1376.
Charles II of Anjou 1285.	[Knights of St John-1377-81.]
Isabelle de Villehardouin 1289.	Jacques de Baux 1381.
With Florent of Hainault 1289.
With Philip of Savoy 1301.
Philip I of Taranto 1307.
Matilda of Hainault 1313.	Mahiot de Coquerel, vicar 1383.
With Louis of Burgundy 1313	Bordo de S. Superan. Vicar 1386; prince 1396
John of Gravina 1318.	Maria Zaccaria 1402.
Catherine of Valois-Robert of Taranto 1333.	Centurione Zaccaria 1404-32.

DUKES OF ATHENS
Othon de la Roche, Megaskyr 1205	Pedro IV of Aragon 1377
Guy I. Megaskyr 1225; duke 1260.	John I of Aragon 1387.
John 1 1263.
William 1280.
Guy II 1287.	Nerio I Acciajuoli. Lord of Athens 1388; duke 1394.
Walter of Brienne 1309.
	[Venice-1394-1402.]
Roger Deslaur, chief of the Catalan Company 1311.	Antonio I 1402.
Manfred 1312.	Nerio II 1435.
William 1317.	Antonio II 1439.
John of Randazzo 1338.	Nerio II (restored) 1441.
Frederick of Randazzo 1348.	Francesco 1451.
Frederick III of Sicily 1355.	Franco 1455-6; "Lord of Thebes" 1456 -60.

DESPOTS OF EPIRUS
Michael I Angelus 1204	Nicephorus II 1335-58.[Byzantine 1336-49 ; Serbian 1349-56. ]
Theodore 1214. Emperor of Salonica 1223.
Manuel 1230. Emperor of Salonica 1230.
Michael II 1236.	Simeon Uros 1358.
Nicephorus I 1271. /td>	Thomas Preljubovic 1367.
Thomas 1296	Maria Angelina 1385.
	Esau Buondelmonti 1386-1408.
Nicholas Orsini 1318.	[Albanians-1408-18; then united with Cephalonia.]
John II Orsini 1323.

DUKES OF NEOPATRAS
John I Angelus 1271.	John II 1303-18.
Constantine 1295.	[United with Athens.]


PALATINE COUNTS OF CEPHALONIA.
Matteo Orsini 1194.	Leonardo I Tocco 1357.
Richard. Before 1264.	Carlo I. Before 1377.
John I 1303.	Carlo II 1429.
Nicholas 1317.	Leonardo III 1448-79.
John II 1323.	Antonio 1481-3.
[Angevins (united with Achaia) 1324-57.]


DUKES OF THE ARCHIPELAGO.
Marco I Sanudo 1207.	Fiorenza 1361.
Angelo c. 1227.	With Niccole II Sanudo "Spezzabanda " 1364.
Marco II 1262.	Niccolò III dalle Carceri 1371.
Guglielmo I 1303.	Francesco I Crispo 1383.
Niccolò I 1323.
Giovanni I 1341.
Giacomo I 1397	Venice 1494-1500
Giacomo II 1418	Franesco III 1500
Giacomo II 1433	venice 1511-17
Gian Giacomo 1447	Giovanni IV 1517
Guglielmo II 1453	Giovanni IV 1564-6
Francesco II 1463
Giacomo III 1463
Giovanni III 1480


LORDS OF CORFU.
[Venice-1206-14.]	Robert of Taranto 1346.
Despots of Epirus 1214-59.	Marie de Bourbon 1364.
Manfred of Sicily 1259-66.	Philip II of Taranto 1364
Chinardo 1266.	Joanna I of Naples 1373.
Charles I of Anjou 1267.	Jacques de Baux 1380.
Charles II of Anjou 1285.	Charles III of Naples 1382-86.
Philip I of Taranto 1294.	[Venice-1386-1797.]
Catherine of Valois.) 1331. Robert of Taranto


VENETIAN COLONIES.
Crete. [Genoese occupation 1206-10] 1204-1669. (Two forts till 1715.)	Cephalonia 1483-5; 1500-1797.
Modon} 1206-1500 ; 1685-1715. Coron	Zante 1482-1797.
Argos 1388-1463.	Cerigo 1363-1797.
Nauplia 1388-1540 ; 1686-1715.	Sta. Mavra 1502-3; 1694-1797.
Monemvasia 1464-1540 ; 1690-1715.	Athens 1394-1402 ; 1466 ; 1687-88.
Lepanto 1407-99; 1687-99.	Patras 1408-13; 1417-19; 1687-1715.
Negropont 1209-1470.	Naxos 1494-1500; 1511-17.
Pteleon 1323-1470.	Andros 1437-40; 1507-14.
Egina 1451-1537; 1693-1715.	Paros 1518-20; 1531-36.
Tenos 1390-1715.	Maina 1467-79.
Myconus 1390-1537.	Vostitza 1470.
Northern Sporades 1453-1538.	Amorgos 1370-1446.
Corfu 1206-1214; 1386-1797.	Lemnos 1464-79.
	Cyprus 1489-1571.


EPIROTE EMPERORS OF SALONICA.
Theodore Angelus. Emperor 1223.	Demetrius. Despot 1244-46.
Manuel. Emperor 1230.	[Annexed to Nicaea 1246.]
John. Emperor 1240 ; Despot 1242.


KINGS OF CYPRUS.
Guy de Lusignan. Lord of Cyprus 1192.	Peter I de Lusignan 1359; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia 1368.
Amaury de Lusignan. Lord of Cyprus 1194; King 1197; King of Jerusalem 1198.	Peter II de Lusignan 1369; Titular King of Jerusalem.
Hugh I de Lusignan. King of Cyprus 1205.	James I de Lusignan 1382 ; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia 1393.
Henry I de Lusignan 1218.	Janus de Lusignan 1398 ; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia.
Hugh II de Lusignan 1253	John II de Lusignan 1432; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia.
Hugh III de Lusignan 1267; Titular King of Jerusalem 1269.	Charlotte de Lusignan 1458 ; 1-1487 ; Titular Queen of Jerusalem ; Queen of Armenia.
John I de Lusignan 1284; Titular King of Jerusalem.	James II de Lusignan 1460; + 6 July 1473 ; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia.
Henry Il de Lusignan 1285; Titular King of Jerusalem.	[Caterina Cornaro Regent 1473-4.]
[Amaury de Lusignan : Regent 1306-10.]	James III de Lusignan, b. 27 August 1473 ; Titular King of Jerusalem ; King of Armenia
Hugh IV de Lusignan 1324; Titular King of Jerusalem.	Caterina Cornaro 1474-89; +1510; Titular Queen of Jerusalem; Queen of Armenia.
	[Venice-1489-1571.]

N.B. The Kings of Cyprus also bore the titles of King of Jerusalem 1198-1205, and from 1269 onward, and of King of (Little) Armenia 1368-9, and from 1393 onward.


RHODES.
Leo Gabalas 1204.	[Annexed to Nicaea 1256.]
John Gabalas. Between 1234 and 1248-56.	[Saracens c. 1282-1309.]
[Genoese 1248-50.]	Knights of St John 1309-1523.


GENOESE COLONIES
Smyrna 1261-c. 1300 ; 1344-1402.	Lesbos 1333-36; 1355-1462.
Foglia (Phocaea) 1275-1340; 1346-48.	Thasos 1307-13 ; c. 1434 (or ? c. 1419)1455. [ Papal 1456-59 ; Venetian 1464-79.]
Vecchia 1358-1455.
Nuova 1351-1455.
Chios 1304-29 ; 1346-1566. [Venetian 1694-95.]	Lemnos 1453-56. [Papal 1456-58 ; Venetian 1464-79 ; 1656-57.]
Samos 1304-29 ; 1346-1475.	Aenus c. 1384-1456.
Icaria 1304-29; 1346-1481. [Knights of St John 1481-1523; Venetian 1694- 95.]	Samothrace c. 1431-56. [Papal 1456-59 ; Venetian 1466-79.]
Psard 1346-1475.	Imbros 1453-56. [Venetian 1466-79.] Famagosta 1374-1464.