CHAPTER XVIII

THE DUCHY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO (1463-1566)

 

William II died in 1463, and, in virtue of the arrangement made at his accession, his nephew, Francesco II of Santorini, succeeded him. But the new duke did not long enjoy this coveted dignity; afflicted with a serious malady, he went to seek the advice of a doctor at the Venetian colony of Coron, and died there the same year. His son, Giacomo III, was proclaimed duke by the people, under the regency of the late duke’s widow, though it seemed doubtful at first whether the lad’s uncle, Antonio of Syra, would not usurp the throne. Coinciding as it did with the long Turco-Venetian war, which lasted from 1463 to 1479, the reign of Giacomo III could not fail to be affected by the further disasters befalling the Venetian possessions in the Levant. In 1468 four Turkish vessels attacked Andros; Giovanni Sommaripa, baron of the island, lost his life in defending his home; and the invaders withdrew, after ravaging the place, with numerous prisoners and booty to the value of 15,000 ducats. Two years later, after the crowning disaster of the war —the capture of Negroponte— the Turkish fleet landed at Andros again on its way home, and carried off so many captives that the population was reduced to 2000 souls. Despite the reassuring visits of Venetian fleets, almost all the islands suffered in greater or less degree from Turkish raids at this terrible period. Paros retained no more than 3000 inhabitants; Antiparos, repopulated a generation before by Loredano, was reduced to barely a hundred persons; despite the previous efforts of Giovanni Quirini to colonise Stampalia, the carelessness of his son, an absentee, allowed the colony to dwindle down to 400, while the rich island of Santorin, though now a direct possession of the Duke of Naxos, nourished only 300 inhabitants, and yielded the duke no more than 500 ducats. Still smaller was the population of Keos and Seriphos, while the two Venetian islands of Tenos and Mykonos had long complained of the devastation wrought by the Turks —to which must be added the drain of men enlisted in the Archipelago for service in the Venetian navy, which put in there on the way to attack Smyrna in 1472. Delos, which the Venetian admiral, Mocenigo, visited at this time, was quite deserted; but the remains of the temple and the theatre, the colossus of Apollo, the mass of pillars and statues, and the cisterns full of water are described by his biographer. Naxos was visited by the Turkish fleet in its turn in 1477, and two years later the Naxian diocese, which had for some time been very poor, is described as being largely in the occupation of the Turks. Happily, the peace of 1479 at last terminated the long contest between Venice and the sultan; the Duke of Naxos and his subjects were treated as Venetians, and three years later the new sultan, Bajazet II, repeated his predecessor’s compact.

The restoration of peace was naturally a subject of rejoicing to the sorely tried Archipelago, and the marriage of his daughter at the Carnival of 1480 gave the duke an opportunity of giving vent to his own and his people’s feelings. He had chosen as his son-in-law, Domenico Pisani, son of the Duke of Candia and member of a very distinguished Venetian family, and he bestowed upon him, as his daughter’s dowry, his own native island of Santorin, on condition that Pisani should restore it in the event of a son being born to the ducal donor. Never had there been such splendid festivities in the history of the duchy. The castle at Melos, where Giacomo III was then residing, rang with the mirth of the wedding guests; and the merriment was renewed when the young couple landed with the duke in their new domain. Giacomo, we are told, “danced every day, leaping for joy and singing,” while the islanders shouted Viva Pisani! in honour of their baron. In the old castle of the Barozzi at Skaros, the chief of the five fortresses of the volcanic island, whose ruins still look down on the bottomless harbour far below, Pisani knelt down with his wife before their lord the duke, and received from his hands the keys of the castle, the rod which betokened their feudal rights, and the scroll, drawn up by the chancellor, which set out the conditions of their investiture. Then, in the tower of the lower castle, the vassals were ushered in to do homage to their new lord, foremost among them the two great families of Santorini, the Gozzadini and the Argyroi, or D’Argenta, Latinised Greek archons, who boasted their descent from one of the Byzantine emperors, but did not scorn to hold the castle of S. Niccolo from the lord of Santorini. When the ceremony was over, the flag of the Pisani was run up on the upper castle; the new dynasty was officially recognised in the motley heraldry of the Archipelago. Then the duke returned to his residence at Melos, and the new lord of Santorin set out to survey his island domain, too long neglected by its absentee ruler. Pisani showed all the energy of a king upon his coronation day. He planted vines and olives, sowed cotton, and consulted how he could best benefit the traders of the community. A new era seemed to have opened for the depopulated island; wherever the baron went, the church bells rang a merry peal to greet him; whenever he lay down to rest, the governors of the castles laid the keys in his chamber. Anxious for the spiritual welfare of his subjects, he appointed a new bishop; desirous to secure them against attack, he placed his island under Venetian protection, hoisted the banner of the republic beside his own, and journeyed with his wife to Venice to obtain confirmation of his possession. Naturally, Venice granted the request of so desirable and so well-connected a ruler.

But the idyll of Santorini did not last long. While Pisani was still in Venice, his father-in-law died. Giacomo III Had left no son, so that, by virtue of the marriage-contract, Pisani was entitled to retain his island; indeed, had not the Salic law been adopted, as we saw, in the Crispo dynasty, his wife would have succeeded as Duchess of the Archipelago. But the late duke’s brother, John III, not content with succeeding to the duchy, landed in Santorini, occupied Skards, pulled down the Pisani flag, and hoisted the lozenges and two crosses of the Crispi. Pisani’s father complained at Venice of this act of violence, and the Venetian Government ordered the admiral of the fleet to compel restitution of the island. But when his emissaries arrived at Santorini, they found that John III had strengthened the defences of Skards, and were compelled to retire ignominiously under a heavy shower of stones. This was more than the Venetian authorities could endure. They ordered the erring duke, in a most peremptory letter, to appear at Venice to answer the charges against him. His reply was to instruct his brother-in-law, then in Venice, to act on his behalf. The whole question was then investigated, and as important points of feudal law were involved, the judges ordered a clerk to make a fresh copy of the Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania, and to draw up a genealogical tree of the Dukes of Naxos —the oldest pedigree of the Sanudi and Crispi, with which we are acquainted. After opposite opinions had been expressed by the Court, a compromise was at last agreed upon, that the duke should keep Santorini on payment of compensation to Pisani and his heirs. John III, having obtained what he wanted, now humbly replied that he “was ready to live or die for Venice”; while the Pisani family ere long had the doubtful satisfaction of reigning over three of the smaller islands of the Archipelago.

The peace concluded between Venice and the Turk did not ensure the security of the Levant. During Mohammed II’s operations against Rhodes, the Aegean was beset with Turkish pirates, who were a continual dread to the more or less pious pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, and it was no uncommon thing to find the hold of a Turkish corsair filled with prisoners dragged away from their homes in the Cyclades. Bajazet II, the new sultan, in spite of his pledge to Venice that the duchy should not be asked for tribute, demanded arrears of payment, and complained that the Duke of Naxos and the baron of Paros harboured pirates who preyed upon the Turkish dominions. He followed this complaint by preparing a small fleet to drive the latter offender from the marble island. The republic ordered her admiral to protect him, and the Archbishop of Paros and Naxos took the opportunity of his presence in the Archipelago to suggest that the offer of an annuity might induce the rulers of those islands to make over all their rights to Venice. Neither the duke nor Sommaripa were, as a matter of fact, willing to abdicate, though the latter was glad to fly the Venetian flag beside his own. But the tyrannical conduct of John III soon brought about a Venetian occupation. That headstrong ruler exasperated his subjects by his exactions to such a pitch, that, led by a Greek veteran, they besieged him and the nobles in the castle, whence he was only rescued by the timely arrival of a fleet belonging to the Knights of Rhodes. Even this lesson did not make him mend his ways. The execution of the rebel leader rekindled the enmity of the people against the duke, and, when he died, in 1494, many of his subjects wagged their heads and spoke of poison.

Though he had left two children, a son and a daughter, both were minors and both illegitimate, so that the moment was favourable for Venetian intervention. It was perhaps not a mere chance that the Venetian admiral with six galleys was in the harbour, and his appearance inspired the popular party to advocate annexation to the republic. The chief men, however, favoured the claims of the children’s mother; and the most energetic member of the Crispo family, Giacomo, bastard of the old Duke William II, assumed the title of Governor of Naxos on their behalf and issued official documents in that style. Meanwhile, however, the people, accompanied by their wives holding their children in their arms, approached the Venetian admiral with cries of “we want to be governed by Venice! we submit to her!”. The admiral, who had probably suggested this demonstration, received them well, appointed a Venetian governor of Naxos, and despatched officers to occupy and administer the other islands which had belonged to the late duke—Santorini, Syra, Nio, and Melos. At the same time, an envoy of the Naxian people was sent to Venice to announce the news, followed by their archbishop and a formal embassy. It was then proposed in the senate that the republic should accept the duchy, after making due provision for the late duke’s widow and children, in order to relieve the people from tyranny, and to prevent the islands from becoming a nest of corsairs and a part of the growing Turkish Empire. It was, however, decided that the administration of the island revenues should be left to the ducal family; but that a Venetian governor should be appointed for a term of two years with residence at Naxos and a salary of 500 ducats payable out of those funds; Naxian citizens were to be sent to govern the dependent islands. As first Venetian governor of Naxos, Pietro Contarini was elected. Thus, in 1494, Venice at last became mistress of the duchy of the Archipelago.

The acquisition was not perhaps of great economic value. We are told that of the five islands which the late duke had held under his immediate sway, Santorini and Nio contained 800 souls, and Syra half that number. Both Nio and Melos had fine and frequented ports, but the fortifications of the latter harbour were in ruins, and the Milanese canon Casola, who put into Nio just before the duke’s death, likened the mountain castle of the Crispi there to “a pigstye,” where the inhabitants were crowded together for fear of pirates, but where the food was good and the women beautiful. Melos and Naxos were the most flourishing of the Cyclades; the former was rich in saltpetre, pumice, and mill-stones; and its hot baths, which had proved fatal, so it was said, to old Duke William II, were second only to those of Thermia, which the enthusiastic Venetian mariner, Bartolomeo “dalli Sonetti”, as he called himself, declared to be superior to the baths of Padua. Of the other Cyclades, where Venetian influence was now predominant, though the island barons were nominally independent of her, the two most prosperous were those of the Sommaripa: Paros and Andros. The German pilgrim, Father Faber, who was in the Archipelago eleven years earlier, tells us that Parian marble was exported to Venice, and that the island produced another stone, better even than marble. The lord of Andros, who was recognised by Venice as quite independent of the duchy of Naxos, seems even to have styled himself “Duke” of his own island, as Pietro Zeno, a much more important man, had done. All the other islands, except three and part of a fourth, now belonged to Venetian families: Amorgos and Stampalia to the Quirini; Seriphos to the Michieli; Antiparos to the Loredani; part of Kea, whose harbour could hold a great fleet, to the Premarini. The daughter of old William Crispo, Fiorenza, still held her isle of Anaphe; and the Gozzadini ruled over Siphnos, Thermia, and part of Kea. Seeing that Venice was absolute mistress of Tenos and Mykonos, as well as of the Northern Sporades, and had acquired Cyprus five years before, she still possessed a considerable stake in the Levant, despite the loss of Negroponte.

The Cyclades were all fortified, as we can see from the plans of each island, which the Venetian mariner, Bartolomeo dalli Sonnetti, has inserted in his quaint metrical account of his many voyages among them. Santorini and Kea boasted five castles apiece; Paros four (among them the strong fortress of Kephalos, which Niccolo Sommaripa had recently erected as his residence on a high rock above the sea); Naxos and Amorgos three each; Melos two; and Syra and most of the other islands one. Such was the condition of the Archipelago when the first Venetian governor landed at Naxos.

The Venetian administration, brief as it was, seems to have been beneficial to the islands. For a moment corsairs were wiped from the sea, and the frequent presence of a Venetian fleet in one or other of the harbours gave the inhabitants a sense of security. “They look upon our admiral” so runs a Venetian report, “as the Messiah”. But these benefits were only temporary. The pirates returned to their favourite hunting-ground as soon as the Venetian admiral had sailed, and two of them in particular, Paolo de Campo of Catania, half-corsair half-hermit, and his rival, Black Hassan by name, did much damage. Moreover, the renewal of hostilities between the sultan and the republic in 1499 alarmed the islanders. The Venetian governor of Naxos wrote that he had no powder; a Venetian ambassador, who paid a passing visit, reported that the fortifications were weak, and suggested that the governor should be recalled and his salary devoted to strengthening them. This policy, received powerful support at home from the Loredano family, one of whose daughters, “a lady of wisdom and great talent”, had married Francesco, the son of the late Duke of Naxos; accordingly, as the latter was now of age, the senate decided, in October 1500, to restore the duchy to him, on condition that he promised not to take his father as his model. And thus, in an evil hour, a youth who turned out to be a homicidal maniac, took the place of Venice.

The change was in every way unfortunate for the people of the Cyclades. The continuance of the Turco-Venetian war exposed Naxos to two attacks in successive years, in the course of which the lower town was taken and sacked, and many Naxians carried off as prisoners. So savage were the feelings of revenge which such deeds caused, that a celebrated Turkish corsair, driven ashore at Melos, was slowly roasted for three hours by the infuriated people. The peace of 1503, as usual, included the Archipelago, but the petty lords of the Aegean were at this time often more oppressive to their subjects than the Turks themselves. The Sommaripa of Paros were at war with the Sommaripa of Andros; the hapless Andrians wrote in Greek to Venice complaining that many of their fellow-countrymen had been borne off to the marble island, while their own “Duke” Francesco was so cruel a tyrant that they actually thought of calling in the Turks. Rather than allow such a calamity to happen, the republic removed the oppressor to Venice, and for seven years, from 1507 to 1514, Andros was ruled by Venetian governors and the lion banner floated over the wave-beat castle of her feudal lords. Meanwhile, the capital of the Archipelago, the fairest isle of the Aegean, had been the scene of one of the most ghastly tragedies in the history of the duchy. Francesco III had for long been ailing, but it was not till 1509, when he was engaged with the ducal galley in the Venetian service at Trieste, that we first hear of his madness. So violent was his conduct, that his men vowed they would rather serve the Turk, and the duke was put in custody at San Michele di Murano, the present cemetery island. Thence, however, in accordance with a practice still common in Italy, he was released, and thus given the opportunity of committing an atrocious crime. On 15th August 1510, he managed, “by songs, kisses, and caresses,” to entice his wife to his couch with the object of murdering her. For the moment, the duchess succeeded in escaping from the maniac’s sword by fleeing, just as she was, in her nightdress, to the house of her aunt, the Lady of Nio, Lucrezia Loredano. Thither, however, on the night of the 17th, her husband pursued her, burst open the doors and forced his way upstairs, where he found the Lady of Nio in bed. Meanwhile, on hearing the noise, the terrified duchess had hidden under a wash-tub; but a slave betrayed her hiding-place; the duke struck her over the head with his sword; and, in a frenzied attempt to ward off the blow, she seized the blade with both hands, and fell fainting on the floor at his feet. Even then the wretch’s fury was not appeased; he gave the prostrate woman a thrust in the stomach, and then left her to die. Meanwhile, the whole town was on its feet; the duke fled to his garden, and was thence induced by the people to return to his palace, where he vainly endeavoured to prove that his wife’s wounds were the result of playing with a knife. A meeting was now held, at which it was decided to depose the murderer, to proclaim his son Giovanni, then not more than eleven years of age, and to elect as governor of the duchy Giacomo Gozzadini, baron of Kea, who resided in Naxos and had already held that office once before. The news of his deposition reached Francesco as he sat at meat in the palace with his son; so great was his fury that he seized a knife to slay his heir, and had not the palace barber caught his arm, a second murder would have been committed. Fortunately, the lad escaped by leaping from the balcony; the people rushed into the palace, and after a fierce struggle, in which the duke was wounded, he was seized, and sent off to Santorin in safe custody.

The Naxiotes lost no time in reporting what had occurred to the nearest Venetian authorities, and the question was brought before the Republican Government. The latter decided to send out Antonio Loredano, the brother of the murdered duchess, as governor of Naxos, with a salary of 400 ducats a year, payable out of the ducal revenues, and to remove the maniac to Candia. There, in 1511, on the anniversary of his crime, he died of fever. For four and a half years Loredano remained in office, and thus for the second time Naxos enjoyed a brief Venetian protectorate. As Andros was also under the administration of the republic, pending the settlement of the various claims to that island, the shadow of the winged lion had fallen over the whole Archipelago. Nor were the Venetian governors by any means to be pitied, for life was taken easily in the Aegean when there was no fear of plague and when there was a temporary lull in the raids of corsairs. We have an interesting account of the amusements organised for one of the Venetian ambassadors who stopped in the islands at this period. “Naxos and Paros,” we are told, “are places of much diversion, whose lords honoured his Excellency with festivities and balls, at which there was no lack of polished and gracious ladies.” The rector of Skyros reported that his island would be most productive, if only the Greeks could be induced to cultivate it assiduously. But there were only two working-days in the week; day after day the people were keeping some festival, gazing with awe at the famous miracle-working eikons in the church of St George, which even Turks thought fit to propitiate with offerings, or dancing the picturesque country dances that have now all but gone. “So passes our life,” the rector, evidently a serious man, sadly wrote. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that no revenues were ever seen at Venice from the Venetian islands of the Aegean.The Venetian administration of Naxos ceased when the young Duke Giovanni IV came of age,and as Alberto Sommaripa had at last been recognised as rightful lord of Andros and clad in scarlet at Venice in token of his succession, the Cyclades were once more left to the government of the local dynasties. The reign of Giovanni IV was the longest of any Duke of the Archipelago, and, with one exception, the most unfortunate. He had not been long on the throne, when he was surprised while hunting, by a Turkish corsair, and carried off as a prize. Venice at once ordered her admiral in Greek waters to ransom her protege, and the Venetian ambassador at Constantinople spoke so strongly on the subject, that the sultan promised to issue a letter “marked with the corsair’s head.” The duke’s imprisonment was brief, but his capture, as he plaintively said, had so bad an effect on his finances that he could not pay his liabilities.Possibly he was not sorry of an excuse for shirking them, as a Venetian commissioner found his revenues to be 3000 ducats and his expenditure 1300. “The young duke,” wrote this authority, “is surrounded by evil counsellors; his island is weak, his castle strong, but badly armed”. Sanudo, who met him in Venice, describes him as “a very inexperienced youth”, but none the less the proud republic treated him with the utmost consideration. Not only did she include “Naxos and the islands appertaining to it” in her treaty with Selim I in 1517, but she bestowed many marks of honour upon the ducal visitor, which show how high was the social status of the ruler of the Archipelago. Four nobles in scarlet and many more in black were sent by the doge to escort him from the house where he was staying, six trumpeters and the men of the ducal galley preceded him, and when he appeared clad in crimson velvet with a gold chain round his neck, the doge embraced him and bade him be seated at his side.

Like most of his race, however, Giovanni IV did not scruple to defy the republic when it suited his purpose. Soon after his accession, the Sommaripa dynasty became extinct in Paros, by the death of the last baron without issue. Several claimants at once arose; for Paros, though its revenues were then small, was one of the most important islands. Of these claimants the most active was the young Duke of Naxos, who captured the castles of Kephalos and Paroikia, and installed his own officials in both of those fortresses. Meanwhile, the Venetian Government, in its capacity of the late baron’s residuary legatee, and in virtue of the general powers of arbitration which it had long claimed in such cases, ordered a commissioner to occupy Paros in its name, pending the decision of the dispute. The Naxian garrison, however, forcibly repulsed his overtures, and it was necessary to make a naval demonstration before the duke was brought to reason. The question was then submitted to a committee of experts in Venice, and the senate decided in favour of Fiorenza Venier, who, as sister of the late baron, was the legal heiress, according to the statutes of the Empire of Romania, and who, as widow of a Venetian noble, was the most desirable candidate. Thus, in 1520, the marble island, like the island of Venus, passed to the Venieri. But they had little time to leave any mark upon their new domain, for their dynasty too became extinct at Paros eleven years later, when a fresh dispute arose as to the succession. On this occasion, the Duke of Naxos, now grown wiser, did not interpose; a Venetian commissioner was sent to govern the island in the interim, and in 1535 the republic decided in favour of another woman—Cecilia, sister of the last baron and wife of a brave Venetian, Bernardo Sagredo, whose heroic defence of the island against the Turks is one of the last and brightest pages in the history of the Archipelago.

The accession of Suleyman the Magnificent renewed and increased the dangers to which the petty lords of the Aegean, as the advanced guard of Christendom, were peculiarly exposed. Any advantages which they might gain from his treaty with Venice were more than balanced by his capture of Rhodes —a feat of arms facilitated by the indifference of the most serene republic. But the Duke of Naxos was not indifferent to the fate of the warrior Knights, a branch of whose Order existed in his capital, and who had held for the last forty years the neighbouring island of Nikaria. He prayed God to help them in this, their hour of need, and incurred the censure of Venice and the risk of a Turkish attack by furnishing them with provisions. It seems, indeed, to have been thought that after the fall of Rhodes they would ask his permission to make Naxos their headquarters. Such an act of generosity would, however, have been fatal to the duchy; for either the newcomers would have made themselves its masters, or the sultan would have annexed it without delay, rather than allow so central a position to fall into the possession of his deadly foes. The popes had, however, long ago transferred Lindos and two Asian bishoprics to the metropolitan see of the Archipelago at Naxos, and now endowed the archbishop with the goods of the Order there.

During the next ten years we hear little of the duchy; Venice was at peace with the great sultan, so that her protege was able to leave his island state for the purpose of paying a vow at Loreto and Rome, undisturbed except by the visit of some dangerous Turkish corsair. His weakness was, however, clearly displayed in 1532, when Kurtoglu, one of the worst of those sea-robbers, suddenly appeared at Naxos with twelve sail, and was only bought off by a gift of money and refreshments. Both the Venetian governor of Paros and the petty seigneur of Sifanto had to pay black­mail to this ruffian, who levied 30 ducats from the exiguous finances of the latter island. “It would make the very stones weep,” wrote the Venetian rector of Mykonos, “to see the ruin” which another of these pirates caused. Meanwhile, the nephew of a famous corsair compiled a Turkish account of the Cyclades to facilitate their conquest.

The long-threatening storm at last burst over “the isles of Greece.” In 1536 France and the sultan made an unholy alliance for the purpose of driving Venice from the Levant, and in the following year the war broke out, which was destined to deprive the republic of her last possessions in the Morea. The Turkish attack upon Corfu failed, as we saw; but a fleet of seventy galleys and thirty smaller vessels appeared in the Aegean under the command of Khaireddin Barbarossa, the terrible corsair, himself an islander from Lesbos, who had risen to be the Turkish admiral. His first attacks were directed against the two Venetian islands of Cerigo and Aegina, whose terrible sufferings at his hands have been described in previous chapters. From Aegina the red-bearded commander sailed to the Cyclades, where one petty Venetian dynasty after another fell before him. The castle of Seriphos, where the Michieli had lorded it for over a century, could not save their diminutive barony from annexation; the group of three islands, Nio, Namfio, and Antiparos, which had passed by marriage or inheritance a few years before from the ducal family to the Pisani, now became Turkish; the Quirini lost their possessions of Stampalia and Amorgos, whose inhabitants fled to Crete. These six islands never again owned the Latin sway. Abandoned by Venice in the shameful treaty of 1540, their Venetian lords in vain attempted to recover them by negotiations with the Porte. The Pisani pleaded for the restitution of little Namfio, but the Venetian bailie at Constantinople replied that all the inhabitants had been removed, and that the islet had been left a mere barren rock. The Quirini were willing to acquiesce in the loss of Amorgos, if they could but retain Stampalia, the island whose name they had incorporated with their own. But there, again, the sultan was inexorable.The escutcheon of the Michieli over the castle gate at Seriphos alone preserves the memory of their rule there; but the connection of the Quirini with Stampalia survives in their arms and superscription in that island, and in the name of the square, street, bridge, and palace in Venice, where they long resided, and where the last of their race only recently died. But few who enter the library, into which the Palazzo Quirini-Stampalia has now been converted, realise the historic meaning of its double name.

Having thus made an easy conquest of the smaller islands, Barbarossa appeared at Paros, and ordered it to surrender. But Bernardo Sagredo, the baron of the marble island, was resolved not to relinquish his newly-won possession without a struggle. Abandoning the fortress of Agousa to the enemy, he shut himself up with the small forces at his command in the strong castle of Kephalos, where, with the aid of a Florentine outlaw, he not only held out for several days, but made effective sorties against the besiegers. Want of powder, however, forced him to yield; his wife, Cecilia Venier, was allowed to withdraw to Venice, and Sagredo himself was soon released from captivity, thanks to the gratitude of a Ragusan sailor who had once rowed in a galley under his command. The Parians, some 6000 in number, were treated as the other islanders had been; the old men were butchered, the young men were sent to serve at the oar; the women were ordered to dance on the shore, so that the conqueror might choose the most pleasing for his lieutenants; the boys were enrolled in the corps of the janissaries. Though Sagredo tried to recover his lost island by the offer of tribute, it was abandoned to the sultan by the treaty of 1540. But the latter would seem to have given it to the Duke of Naxos, among whose possessions we find it included some twenty years later, while at the same time, a Greek named Erachides Basilikos, one of those adventurers so common in the Levant, who boasted that he was descended from the rulers of Moldavia, was pleased to style himself Margrave Palatine of Paros!

From Paros the Turkish fleet sailed across to the capital of the Cyclades. We have from the pen of the duke himself a graphic account of this dreaded visitation. As soon as the fatal galleys were sighted, the inhabitants fled from all parts of the island to take refuge in the city, leaving in their haste their heavy goods and chattels behind them. The Turks had no sooner landed than they forced their way into the tower near the sea and the adjoining houses, and, in their rage at finding no one there, destroyed all those buildings and broke open the cellars, where corn, wine, and oil were stored. Meanwhile, a Christian emissary of the Turkish commander sought an audience of the reluctant duke in his palace in the upper town. “If,” he said, “you will voluntarily submit yourself and your islands to the emperor, already master of Asia and ere long of all Europe too, you may easily obtain his favour. If not, then I bid you expect his hatred and indignation.” The envoy continued in the same strain: “If you surrender, all your possessions shall be saved; but if you refuse, we will send you, your wife and children, your fellow-countrymen and subjects, to destruction together. We have a powerful fleet, a vigorous and vic­torious soldiery, and an admirable siege equipment. Take warning and counsel, then, from the Aeginetans, the Parians, and the other lords of the Cyclades. You are fortunate to be able, if you choose wisely, to profit by the misfortunes of your neighbours.” The duke begged the envoy to withdraw, while he took counsel with his advisers. The trembling council hastily met, and, as the ducal resources were inadequate to the task of resisting and there was no hope of help from Western Christendom, it was decided to accept the Turkish terms, rather than expose the duke and his subjects to the certainty of death or slavery. Accordingly, on nth November, Giovanni IV surrendered, promising to pay an annual tribute of 5000 ducats, and paying the first year in advance, in order to mollify his threatening adversary. The sum, he plaintively says, was beyond the means of a poor duke and an exiguous state, but the loss of the money was a lesser evil than the loss of his dominions. Yet, with all these concessions, he could not prevent the Turks from ravaging “the Queen of the Cyclades” and carrying off more than 25,000 ducats’ worth of booty, and he already foresaw that, unless Christendom would unite against the Turk, in a few years’ time he would share the same fate which had, eighty years before, befallen the last Greek emperor of Constantinople.

With the forlorn hope of making Christendom forget its quarrels and combine against the common foe, the duke addressed his memorable letter to “Pope Paul III; the Emperor Charles V; Ferdinand, King of the Romans; Francois I of France; and the other Christian kings and princes.” In this curious document he bade them “apply their ears and lift up their eyes, and attend with their minds, while their own interests were still safe”, lest they, too, should suffer the fate of the writer. He reminded them of the wealth and strength of the magnificent sultan, which, even if united by some miracle, they would find it hard to resist. He pointed out that Suleyman’s policy was to separate them, so as the easier to destroy one while cajoling another, and that by this means ere long the whole earth would be the sheep-fold of Mahomet. He emphasised these admirable truisms, which might have been addressed to the Concert of Europe at any time during the last thirty years, by a well-worn tag from his ancestor Sallust —Sallustius Crispus “the author of our race” —and urged his correspondents to wake up and invade the Turkish Empire while the sultan’s attention was distracted by the Persian war. But neither his platitudes nor his allusion to his distinguished ancestry, which he might have had some difficulty in proving, availed the unfortunate duke with the selfish powers of Europe.

Meanwhile, Barbarossa went on with his career of conquest; Mykonos, so sorely tried sixteen years before, now succumbed, never to become Venetian again, though the rector of Tenos might still pretend to jurisdiction over the sister island and for half a century longer bear its name in his commission. Many of the inhabitants were carried off; the rest fled to Tenos. The people of the latter island, despite their devotion to Venice, yielded at once to the summons of the terrible admiral; at the suggestion of a treacherous Melian, who, as a subject of the Duke of Naxos, was no friend of the Venetians, they handed Dolfino, the rector, to Barbarossa. They soon repented their precipitate surrender, sent to Crete for aid, and once more hoisted the lion banner. So ashamed were the Teniotes of their disloyalty, that later travellers were told that their ancestors had merely thought for a moment of surrender, and that they had not only routed the forces of Barbarossa, but had thrown down from the battlements of the castle the officer whom he had sent to arrange the terms of the expected capitulation. Kea, then divided between the Premarini and the Gozzadini, was captured, but bestowed by the sultan on the duke in the following year. Crusino Sommaripa lost Andros, but managed to regain possession of his island, thanks to the intervention of the French ambassador at Constantinople, to whom he doubtless emphasised his own French descent. It was arranged that he should pay an annual tribute of 35,000 aspers to the Bey of Negroponte, and a firman of the sultan specially allowed the Andrians to defend themselves against the violence of the janissaries. The other islands received similar capitulations.

In 1538, Barbarossa made a second cruise in the Aegean with a fleet of 120 sail, received the tribute due from the Duke of Naxos, and put an end for ever to the rule of Venice in the Northern Sporades. Though at times oppressed by their Venetian rectors, the Greeks of those islands had often sought and found justice from the Home Government. Only a few years before their capture by the Turks, they had taken the opportunity of the visit of a Venetian commissioner to complain of the tyranny of their rectors. Sanudo has left us a picturesque account of the scene —how the people of Skyros, men and women alike, came down to the shore, crying “Mercy, mercy upon us!” how the commissioner bade the town-crier summon all who had any grievance against the rector to appear before him, and how they told him the piteous tale of their woes. Their rector, said their spokesman, the Greek bishop, had “cornered” all the corn of the island, and had prevented the importation of more by asking the neighbouring Turkish governors to send none to Skyros. Then, despite the express clause in their capitulations forbidding the rector to engage in trade, he had sold them his whole stock at his own price, and allowed no one to bake bread except from his corn, so that many had fled to Turkey. Similarly, the people of Skiathos had complained that there was such insecurity that they must perforce remain shut up in the castle “like a bird in its cage.” In both these cases the rector was removed, and Venetian justice was amply vindicated; it might therefore have been expected that the natives would have fought to the last for their masters. But their treachery caused the loss of both these islands. The people of Skyros at once handed over Cornaro, their rector, with his court and some Italian artillerymen sent from Candia, and offered to pay 2000 ducats tribute to the Turk. Memmo, the rector of Skiathos, knew that the lofty castle possessed great natural strength; he therefore resolved to hold out, and, as his garrison was small, armed the natives, on whom he thought he could rely. Unhappily, an arrow wounded him at the first attack; as he lay wounded in his litter, the traitors in the castle fell upon him and slew him; whereupon they let down ropes from the rocks and drew the Turks up into the citadel. Barbarossa was so indignant at the murder of his brave opponent, that he ordered the instant beheadal of the men who had betrayed their commander, and carried off the rest of the inhabitants into slavery. When Baron Blancard, the French admiral, passed soon afterwards, he found Skiathos and Skopelos both deserted.

Like the islands of the dispossessed barons of the Archipelago, the Northern Sporades and the much older Venetian colony of Mykonos were retained by the sultan at the peace of 1540, despite the efforts of the Venetian plenipotentiary. Five years later we find Venice still in vain trying to obtain the restitution of little Mykonos. Only the non­-Venetian dynasties of the Aegean —the Crispi, the Sommaripa, and the Gozzadini— survived the two fatal visits of the red-bearded admiral. Even the lord of little Siphnos was glad to pay tribute, “not wishing to appear either wiser or more foolish than his neighbours.” They well knew, however, that they only existed on sufferance. Venice could no longer afford them protection, nor had she the same interests as before in a sea where Tenos was now her sole possession.

Her shameful neglect of even so important an outpost as Tenos was shown from the fact that no sindici visited the island to redress the grievances of the Greeks for over thirty years. It is to the visit of one of these officials in 1563 that we owe a most interesting account of the state of the Cyclades on the eve of the Turkish Conquest. “Tenos,” he wrote, “is the richest and most populous of all the Aegean islands, with the exception of Chios; the fortress is almost impregnable, though the garrison consists of but twelve foot soldiers; the population is 9000, a good part of whom speak Italian and are Catholics. Such is their civilisation, that this remote island scarcely differs at all from Venetia; while the corsairs are a constant menace to the other islands, they rarely venture to molest Tenos, defended as it is by 2000 able­bodied men. Among themselves the Teniotes are peaceable; the oldest inhabitant cannot remember a murder; the rectors find them excellent and most obedient subjects, and fines are accustomed to be paid in silk, the staple of the island. Yet some of those officials in the past have made too much out of the islanders, who have one special grievance against them. Tenos, it should be remembered, consists of two halves—one half directly administered by the republic, the other originally let by the senate to the Loredano family and disposed of by them to some citizens of the island called Scutoni, or Scutari. According to the Venetian regulations, the produce of the former half, consisting of corn and wine, should be sold every year by auction to the highest bidder; and out of the proceeds, which should average Soo ducats, the salaries of the rector and the other officials should be paid. Latterly, however, in distinct violation of the capitulations, which prohibit direct or indirect trading by the rectors, those officials have bought up all the corn at low prices, as no one dared to bid against them, especially as the governors of Tenos have more power than those of any other Venetian colony, and are less liable, from their distance from Venice or even Crete, to be called to account. This abuse is doubly bad: for not only are the natives compelled to buy corn from the rector on his own terms, as the island does not produce sufficient other grain for their nourishment, but the castle is often left without provisions. Two remedies are suggested : the increase of the rector’s present miserable salary of seven ducats a month, which forces him to make money in this way; and the substitution of a cash payment by the people, instead of this zemoro, or tithe in kind, which they would much prefer. For humanitarian, strategic, and political reasons alike, the republic should hold this island dear. For it is the sole refuge in the Archipelago for fugitive slaves, whose surrender the other islanders dare not refuse, and it is the first point whence a Turkish fleet can be spied, and thus Candia can be warned in time. Above all, it is a living memorial of Venetian rule, which keeps ever before the eyes of the other islanders the blessings of your sway. Moreover, if the Teniotes were discontented, you could not retain them for a moment, nor are there wanting incentives to disaffection among them. Their neighbour, the Duke of Naxos, naturally an ambitious man, anxious to increase his state by hook or by crook at the expense of his neighbours, covets Tenos, and lavishes favours on its inhabitants, whenever they come tp Naxos or any of his other islands, trying to persuade them that they would be better off under his rule. His argument is an appeal to their material interests, “As my subjects”, he tells them, “you would be Turkish tributaries, and in that capacity you would be able to purchase corn in Turkey and could more easily recover any of your friends who have been captured by Turkish corsairs. On the other hand”, added the commissioner, “I have found in the other islands, formerly under Venetian protection, in­credible affection for, and devotion to, your rule. Never have those people forgotten that happy time”.

It was the Venetian policy to allow the Teniotes a large measure of local government, and the local offices were held on short tenures, so that as many as possible might participate in them. Every 25th of April the rector summoned the council, composed of all the citizens of the capital, or Castello, and submitted to them the names of four different families, from one of which they elected an official, called the “bailie.” Local judges, annually elected, tried small cases, with an appeal to the rector, instead of to Crete, as the journey thither was both expensive and unsafe. The republic wisely allowed the old code to continue in force—the Assizes of Romania and the statutes of Casa Ghisi, by which Tenos had been governed for nearly two centuries before her time. She had confirmed the privileges, alike of the Byzantine emperors and of the Latin barons, and her rector every two years named the headmen, or primates of the villages. Once a year, on May-day, he kept up the ancient custom of receiving the homage of the feudatories at the mountain of S. Veneranda; four times a year it was their duty to practice the cross-bow for the defence of the island. All the summer long, watch was kept day and night at the coast (the so-called merovigli and nichtovigli), and relays of peasants, called roccari, or “men of the fortress,” had to guard the castle at night. Beacon-fires were lighted as soon as a suspicious sail was sighted; rewards were offered for every corsair’s head that was brought to the rector; Turkish captains were propitiated by presents of live stock; and finally five so-called  “centurions” were elected by the council to form a trainband of ioo men each, as in the Ionian islands. Such was existence in the one Venetian island of the zEgean at the time of the Turkish conquest of the other Cyclades.

The writer above mentioned then proceeds to describe the condition of the duchy. “The islands of Zia, Siphnos, and Andros,” he told his Government, “have their own lords (the Sommaripa and the Gozzadini), but are tributaries of the sultan; the other sixteen islands are under the duke, but of these, only five: Naxos, Santorin, Melos, Syra, and Paros, are inhabited. The Duke of Naxos, a man of nearly seventy, is, in point of dignity, the Premier Duke of Christendom; but, despite his title, he is duke more in name than in fact; for in all things the Grand Turk and his ministers are practically supreme. Every year, when the Turkish captains arrive, the duke’s subjects bring their complaints against him before them, so that he dare not punish his own dependents for their crimes, nor even for their offences against his own person. He dresses and lives like a pauper, without the least pomp or princely expenditure; for, though he raises from 9000 to 10,000 ducats a year out of his islands, he has to pay 4000 ducats as tribute to the sultan, and his sole thought is how he can save money with which to bribe the Turkish captains and ministers. Under these circumstances, his administration is rather the shadow of a principality than a government”.

The Venetian commissioner’s report is fully confirmed from what we know of the duke from other sources. Scarcely had the peace of 1540 been concluded than he, who had so eloquently preached to the Great Powers the need of union, exemplified the insincerity of such maxims by benefiting his own relatives at the expense of his Christian neighbours. The Turks acquiesced, and the Venetians in vain protested, when he kept the Premarini out of their part of Zia, and bestowed it, together with the devastated island of Mykonos, which Venice had been forced to abandon to the sultan, upon his daughter on her marriage with Gian Francesco Sommaripa, the last Latin lord of Andros, while allowing the Gozzadini, who were his wife’s relatives and the traditional friends of his dynasty, to retain their share of Zia. The duke might go on distributing fiefs to his friends —we have several documents bearing his name, and one bearing his ducal seal— he might appoint his relatives governors of his subordinate islands; but he was under no illusions as to the security of his tenure. Every year the disaffection of his Greek subjects, who at this time formed nineteenth-twentieths of the population of Naxos, increased; they saw that their Latin masters were them­selves the slaves of the Turks, and when a Western nation has lost its prestige, how can it hope to govern an oriental people? Moreover, in order to raise funds for his tribute to the sultan and for bribing the Turkish officials, the duke was forced to squeeze more money than before out of his subjects. The latter, as in the other Latin states of the Levant, found leaders in the Orthodox clergy. In 1559, the duke was forced to banish the Orthodox metropolitan of Paronaxia for sedition. This divine, dabbling in politics after the fashion of his kind, had conspired with a certain Mamusso of Candia to stir up a revolt among his flock. “It was disgraceful” he said, “that so many valiant Greeks should allow their religion to be insulted and their country to be governed by a mere handful of Franks”. Such an incident, to which there had been no parallel in the history of the duchy since the days of Marco II, was ominous of the future. Worse still, the oecumenical patriarch asked the grand vizier to oust the Catholic hierarchy, whose scandalous conduct and great unpopularity were admitted by the duke in two letters to Rome. “I have decided,” he told the Vatican, “to have no more friars or foreigners as archbishops: local people alone are popular.” It was obvious that at any moment the natives might call in the Turks to put an end to the tyranny of the small foreign garrison, which still preserved its titles and dignities without the power to make them respected.

Giovanni IV, happy in the opportunity of his death, was spared the humiliation of witnessing the fall of his dynasty. He ended his long reign —the longest of any Duke of the Archipelago— in 1564, and his second son, Giacomo IV, the last Christian ruler of the duchy, reigned in his stead —for his elder son, Francesco, who had shared his father’s throne and had therefore acquired some experience of government, had unfortunately predeceased him. The new duke recognised that he was a mere puppet of the Turks; in a letter, written in 1565, he plaintively says: “We are now tributaries of the great emperor, Sultan Suleyman, and we are in evil plight, because of the difficulties of the times; for now necessity reigns with embarrassment and pain for her ministers; and, like plenipotentiaries or commissioners of others, we husband our opportunities as fate doth ordain.” But, though he saw the weakness of his position, he acted as if it were impregnable. He and the nobles of his petty court thought of nothing but their pleasures and of how to gratify them. The debauchery of the castle of Naxos utterly scandalised the temperate Greeks; the heir apparent was a notorious evil liver; and the climax was reached when the Latin clergy lived in open concubinage and a Catholic ecclesiastic publicly accompanied the body of his mistress to the grave and received the condolences of his friends on his loss. These shocks to their morality, combined with fiscal oppression, at last made the Greeks desire a change of master, such as the people of Chios had just experienced. They sent two of their number to the sultan, begging him to send them some person fitter to govern them, much as the Samians constantly do at the present day. The duke now realised his peril; he collected 12,000 dutats and sailed for Constantinople to counteract their efforts by the most convincing of arguments. But he was too late; on his arrival, he was at once stripped of all his possessions and thrown into prison like a common malefactor, where he remained for five or six months. Meanwhile, another Christian renegade, Piali Pasha, who had driven the Genoese from Chios, returned from the Adriatic, and occupied Naxos without opposition. The Greeks of Andros, who had learnt to despise their feeble lord, seeing how successful their fellows in Naxos had been in getting rid of their duke, conspired against the life of Sommaripa. Deserted by most of the Latins of the island, who, instead of rallying round him, fled from the persecution of the Greeks, he saved his life, but lost his islands of Andros and Zia, by flight to his wife’s native Naxos. At the same time, the last remaining Latin dynasty, that of the Gozzadini, was wiped from the map. Thus, after having lasted for 359 years, the Latin duchy of the Archipelago ceased to exist. Tenos alone survived the wave of Turkish conquest which swept over the Aegean.

The Naxiotes and Andrians soon found that they had exchanged the rule of King Log for that of King Stork. The new sultan, Selim II, bestowed the oldest and most picturesque of all the Latin states of the Levant upon his favourite, Joseph Nasi, a Jewish adventurer, who thus, after many vicissitudes, rose from the prosaic counting-house to the romantic island-throne of the Sanudi and the Crispi. Nasi belonged to a family of Portuguese Jews, who had outwardly embraced Christianity in order to escape persecu­tion, and had assumed the aggressively Portuguese name of Miquez, the better to conceal their Hebrew origin. Like other members of his family, Joao Miquez, as he was then pleased to call himself, went to seek his fortune at Antwerp, where his aunt, a rich widow, admitted him to the management of her affairs. He there won the favour of the regent of the Low Countries, Maria, sister of the Emperor Charles V, and the love of his fair cousin, with whom he eloped. His aunt sanctioned the marriage, and the whole household migrated for greater security to Italy. We next hear of Miquez founding a bank at Lyons, and becoming the creditor of the French crown to a large amount. Thence, armed with a letter of introduction from the French ambassador in Rome, he made his way to Constantinople, where Jews were well received, and where his real fortunes began. There was no longer need for disguising himself as a Christian; he returned to the faith and name of his Jewish forefathers; and, as Joseph Nasi, gained the intimacy of the future sultan, Selim II, thanks to one of his coreligionists, a Jewish doctor named Daout, and retained it by pandering to the vices of that bibulous and gluttonous ruler, to whom he presented choice wines and dainties for his table. But Nasi, like the Jewish magnates of our own time, was anxious to benefit his race as well as himself. He had long cherished the idea of founding a Jewish state, and thus, in the sixteenth century, anticipated the Zionist movement. He had in vain asked Venice to give him an island for the new Zion; from Suleyman the Magnificent he obtained permission to rebuild the town of Tiberias. Startled French diplomatists, upon whom he kept pressing his claims for payment, reported that he intended to make himself “King of the Jews”; fulsome Jewish authors dedicated to him their works; the whole downtrodden race regarded him as its head. Such was the man upon whom Selim II now solemnly conferred Naxos, Andros, and the other islands of the Archipelago, with the historic title of duke.

When the islanders heard that a Jew was to be their new master, they hastened to repair the mistake which they had committed. The Greeks do not love the Catholics, but they love the Jews even less, and the latter fully reciprocate their feelings. The subjects of the dispossessed duke begged the sultan to release Giacomo IV and restore him to his now faithful people. Selim set the prisoner free, but refused to replace him on the ducal throne. Finding that arguments were useless against the all-powerful Jew, Crispo, accompanied by his family and by his sister, the Lady of Andros, fled to the Morea, whence he proceeded to Rome to seek aid of Pope Pius V, while his wife found a refuge in the republic of Ragusa. From Rome the duke went to beg alms of Venice; and the Venetian Government, moved by the spectacle of his poverty, assisted him, as the pope had done, and thus enabled him to live in a manner more suitable to the “Premier Duke of Christendom.”

The Jewish Duke of Naxos never once visited his duchy during the thirteen years for which it belonged to him. Possibly he did not dare, certainly he did not desire, to quit the court of Constantinople, where he was the boon companion of Selim the Sot, for the splendid isolation of the Crispi’s feudal castle at Naxos or for the island fortress of the Sommaripa at Andros. Moreover, he was engaged in larger enterprises —seizing the French ships at Alexandria, hounding the Turks against Otranto, scheming for the conquest of Cyprus. At the same time, he was anxious to make as much out of the Cyclades as possible —for his tribute to the sultan from the islands was 14,000 ducats and his personal expenses enormous— and he therefore sent there as his deputy a man in whom he had the fullest confidence, Dr Francesco Coronello, a lawyer by profession, a Christian by name, but a Spanish Jew by race, whose father, Salamon, had been governor of Segovia, but was at this time “the right eye” of Nasi at Constantinople, constantly consulted by the great financier, and together with his son Francesco—so it was said in the Cyclades—responsible for the deposition of the Crispi and the Sommaripa. The Jesuit historian of the duchy, moved by the fact that a Coronello was in his time French consul at Naxos, has depicted Francesco Coronello as a beloved and respected ruler; and such was the official Turkish view. But the contemporary opinion of him, as held at least in the Venetian island of Tenos, was very different. The Teniotes had special reasons for disliking the change of government in the neighbouring islands.

The lords of Andros and Naxos, even when Turkish tributaries, had not ceased to be Christians, and had always secretly warned their co-religionists of any coming attack. The Jewish duke’s lieutenant, on the other hand, allowed neither news nor food to reach Tenos or Crete from his islands, and sent back all runaway slaves to their masters at Constantinople. At a time of peace, this “mortal enemy of Venice” seized a Cretan brig, laden with money and powder for the garrison of Tenos, taking the cargo and enslaving the crew. In order to hound on the sultan against the republic, he sent him a specimen of the bread which the Venetians of Crete were obliged to eat in their dire extremity. Being in the adjacent island of Androsin 1570, he discovered that Tenos also had no provisions. According to a story current at the time, he had sent Selim a picture of a lovely garden, in the midst of which was one very fruitful tree. “The garden”, the sultan was told, “is the Cyclades, and is all your majesty’s, save this one tree, which is Tenos”. Sure of the sultan’s approval, he therefore urged Piali Pasha, who was then at Athens, to complete his conquest of the Cyclades by capturing the Venetian island. “Tenos”, he told the Turkish admiral, “is the refuge of all the fugitive slaves and of all the Christian vassals; unless you take it, the other islands will never be quiet”. Piali responded to this appeal; he landed with Coronello at Tenos with 8000 men; but though he did great damage, the courage of Girolamo Paruta, the Venetian rector, saved the last Venetian possession in the Aegean. Soon afterwards, Coronello himself fell into the hands of his enemies. During a visit to Syra, even then a flourishing island with more than 3000 inhabitants, he was seized in the night by the leading men, and handed over to the commander of three Cretan vessels, then lying in the harbour. When the Teniotes heard that their arch foe, “the heart and soul of Joao Miquez,” had been captured, they offered the ships’ captain 500 sequins to put him ashore on Tenos and let them execute him with cruel tortures. Coronello, however, bid a higher sum, if the captain would take him to Canea instead, and he was accordingly put in prison there, pending the decision of the Home Government Meanwhile, the Turkish authorities despatched a commissioner to punish the people of Syra, but the latter protested that it was not they but the ships’ captain who had kidnapped Coronello, and convinced the commissioner of their truthfulness by a bribe.

The fatal war had now broken out which was to cost Venice the possession of Cyprus, and the republic, suspecting that Nasi had been responsible for the recent conflagration in her arsenal, and knowing that he had been largely instrumental in hounding on Selim II against that island, whose arms he had had painted in his house, and whose king he aspired to be, naturally bethought herself of the exiled Duke of Naxos. A Venetian fleet entered the Archipelago; the moment was propitious, for Nasi’s lieutenant was a prisoner at Canea; and thus, in 1571, with the aid of the provveditore Canale, Giacomo IV was restored to the ducal throne, and Niccolo Gozzadini recovered his island of Siphnos. He does not seem, however, to have returned to Naxos, which was temporarily placed under the administration of a certain Angelo “Giudizzi,” perhaps one of the Gozzadini family. But he exercised his authority by nominating a new Archbishop. The duke showed his gratitude to the republic by following her fleet at the great battle of Lepanto with a force of 500 men.

Meanwhile, the Teniotes had sent a secret envoy to Venice, imploring the republic not to let loose so dangerous a man as Coronello. The senate accordingly ordered the Cretan authorities to enquire into the truth of the allegations against him; if they proved to be true, then to put him to death secretly and give out that he had died of an illness; if there was any doubt about the charges, to send him to the prison at Candia for greater security. The sequel of this incident is unknown; but Coronello managed to regain his freedom and his former position in Naxos, which was re­covered by the Turks under Mehmet Pasha almost as soon as it had been won by Canale. At any rate, in 1572 we find Giacomo IV. begging the republic to order its fleet to aid him in recapturing his dominions, and presenting them in advance to his benefactress Venice. Like other people, he was inspired with hope by the recent victory of Lepanto, in which he had borne a part; but his hopes were disappointed in the humiliating peace which the Venetians concluded with the sultan in 1573.

On the death of Selim II in the following year, the influence of his favourite Nasi was expected to wane, especially as the grand-vizier loathed him, and the chances of the deposed duke accordingly seemed brighter. The mother of the new sultan (Murad III), a Bafifo, was a native of Paros, and he therefore hoped that her influence with her son would be exerted in his favour. Accordingly, in 1575, he set out for Constantinople by way of Ragusa and Philippopolis, where the Ragusan historian Luccari invited him to dinner and learnt from him much about the past glories of the Crispi. But his mission failed, and in the following year he died of a broken heart at Pera, and was buried in the Latin church there. Nasi, whose influence, though diminished since the accession of Murad III, was still sufficient to enable him to retain the duchy of Naxos and the duty on wine, continued to govern the islands from his mansion at Belvedere, near Constantinople, through the faithful Coronello, whose authority was such that he is said to have styled himself officially “Duke of the Archipelago”. Nasi maintained the ancient customs and laws of the Latins; his other officials were all Christians; and he tried to win over some of the old families, like the Sirigo and the D’Argenta, or Argyroi of Santorin, by giving them places under his lieutenant-governor and by confirming them in their ancient fiefs. Coronello even succeeded in legitimising his own position to a certain extent by marrying one of his sons to a member of the old ducal family. But his administration was as little able as that of the Crispi to protect the lives and property of his master’s subjects from corsairs. In 1577, the D’Argenta, who had been barons of the castle of St Nicholas in Santorin for generations, were attacked by ten Turkish galleys and carried off to Syria. They managed to obtain their freedom, but not to regain their ancestral castle; for four weary years they wandered about Europe, seeking the aid of princes and men of renown, till at last, armed with a letter from Gregory XIII., they knocked one day at the hospitable door of honest Martin Kraus, Professor of Classics at Tubingen. Kraus was interested in the new Greece as well as in the old; he collected money for his two visitors, and at the same time material from them for his Turcogrtzcia. One of them described for him the present condition of the Archipelago—how Santorin still had five castles, Paros two, and Melos, Nio, Seriphos, Siphnos, Andros, Mykonos, Amorgos, Anaphe, and Astypalaia one apiece; how all these islands still possessed towns or villages; and how two of them, Paros and Melos, were episcopal sees. He told him how Tenos still kept aloft the Venetian flag; and he might have added that the Teniotes were intensely loyal to the republic, which gave them a large share in the government. Since the severe lesson which Coronello had received, he does not seem to have molested them again. They now received news and food from Syra with the more or less open connivance of Nasi’s Christian officials; they continued to harbour fugitive slaves—a practice at which the Venetian rector wisely winked, and their only grievance was that the republic had issued an ordinance confiscating their property if they were absent for more than six months —a penalty which affected many breadwinners.

Duke Nasi of Naxos died of stone in August 1579, and, as he left no heirs, his dynasty died with him. The Jewish poets, whom he had so liberally encouraged, lamented him as “the sceptre of Israel, the standard-bearer of the dispersed Jews, the noble duke, the sublime lord”. His widow, the Duchess Reina, continued to live at her husband’s mansion near Constantinople for many years longer, publishing at her own cost the works of Hebrew scholars and poets; while of his mother-in-law, Gracia, we have two memorials, in the shape of the Jewish Academy which she founded at Con­stantinople, and in the bronze medallion of herself now in the national library in Paris. Of Francesco Coronello we hear no more; but his family became thoroughly naturalised at Naxos, and is not yet extinct in Greece.

Thus ended the brief Jewish sway over the “Isles of Greece”, not the least curious of the many strange accidents of Levantine history, where the most unlikely nations are found in the least expected situations. The experiment was bound to be a failure. A Jew was the last person calculated to make a popular ruler of a Greek state; an absentee, whose expenses, owing to his mode of life and the exigencies of bakshish, were so huge that three years after he became duke he was described as “overwhelmed with debts”, and that he did not leave 90,000 ducats behind him when he died, was sure to wring the uttermost farthing out of his alien subjects. If the last Crispo had chastised them with whips, we may be sure that Nasi had chastised them with scorpions. The official view, as expressed in the capitulations of 1580, was that they had lived unmolested and unoppressed ; but their desire for the reinstatement of their old masters, already once manifested, and again demonstrated on the death of the Jewish duke, proves the unpopularity of his rule.

No sooner was the news known, than several inhabitants of the Cyclades who were at Constantinople went to the Porte and begged for the restoration of their former lords of Naxos and Andros, whose children had retired to Venice. The French ambassador reported that the grand-vizier, a bitter enemy of Nasi, had expressed himself as favourable to the revival of these two ancient dynasties, but nothing came of the plan. It was decided to annex the islands to the Turkish Empire, and a sandjakbeg and a cadi were sent to govern them. In 1580, a deputation of Christians from theislands, including a Sommaripa of Andros, appeared at the Porte, and obtained from Murad III. extremely favourable capitulations. Their capitation tax was to be kept at its old figure; their churches were to be free, and could be repaired at their own pleasure; all their ancient laws and customs were to remain in full force; they were entitled to retain their local dress; and, as of old, silk, wine, and provisions were exempt from duty in their islands. These capitulations were confirmed by Ibrahim sixty years later, and formed the charter of the Cyclades under Turkish rule.

But, though the duchy of the Archipelago had passed away for ever, one petty but ancient Latin dynasty still lingered on in the Cyclades for well-nigh forty years longer. The Gozzadini had been restored to Sifanto, as we saw, in 1571, and in their palace in that insignificant island, and in their time-honoured castle of Akrotiri in Santorin, they continued to reside. We are not told how they managed to survive the Turkish wave, which had swept all else away; perhaps their insignificance saved them —perhaps their greater subservience to the sultan— possibly the fact that they sprang from Bologna and not from Venice. At any rate, they, who had boasted their independence of the duchy, still existed, though tributaries of the Turkish Empire. In 1607 Angelo Gozzadini sent his sons to be educated at the Coliegio Greco in Rome, and on that occasion Pope Paul V issued an appeal on his behalf to all Christendom, with special reference to the forthcoming cruise of the Venetian fleet in the Aegean. “I have heard”, wrote the pope, “that my beloved son, Angeletto Gozzadini of the noble Bolognese family rules the seven islands of Sifanto, Thermia, Kimolos, Polinos, Pholegandros, Gyaros, and Sikinos, truly adhering to the Catholic faith. All Christians who arrive in his islands should therefore treat him well”. In the following year, the Venetian squadron found a hospitable reception from him in his island domain, and he professed himself a loyal vassal of the republic; but, in 1617, his diminutive state was swallowed up in the Turkish Empire, at a moment when feeling ran high against the Catholics of the Archipelago. Angelo took refuge in Rome, where Cardinal Gozzadini was then influential; but in his old age he returned to Naxos, where his forbears had lived so long.

His two sons, one of whom fought for Venice in the Candian war, in vain hoped for the restoration of their seven islands, but they died, like so many dispossessed princes, in exile in Rome. The family has only just become extinct at Bologna; Tournefort found three of its members residing at Sifanto, and it still exists in the Cyclades, where for 310 years it had held sway. During that long period, as was natural, the proud nobles from Bologna erected monuments of their rule, some of which still survive. Their ruined castle at Sifanto is still called “the palace” (seraglio'), and inside, on a marble pillar, could till lately be seen their arms, with the date 1465 and the initials of Niccolb Gozzadini, the first of the family who ruled there. One of the two towers of the island long bore their name, while their escutcheon still ornaments the old convent, now turned into a school; their name recurred in inscriptions on two of the now ruined churches at Zia, and their arms used to be seen on that of Palaiochora at Melos recently restored. Those from “the palace” are now in Syra.

Owing to its longer duration and to the essentially aristocratic character of its constitution, the duchy of the Archipelago has bequeathed to us more heraldic memorials than the other Frankish states. While coats of arms are rarely found in the castles of feudal Achaia, with the notable exception of Geraki, there is scarcely an island in the Cyclades which has not preserved some emblem of its former lords. Two hundred years ago the arms of the Sommaripa covered the walls of Andros ; and the author has seen on a tower in that picturesque town a splendid escutcheon—two heraldic monkeys supporting a shield containing two fleurs- de-lys, while the sun is represented on the stone below. Allusion has already been made to the heraldry of Naxos, the big church in the castle at Melos still bears the escutcheon and inscription of the Crispi, while two crowned lions ram­pant with outstretched paws—perhaps the arms of the Michieli—may be seen on two slabs in the floor of the church in the ancient monastery of Our Lady at Amorgos. Even when they have preserved nothing else, the descendants of the island barons have cherished these marks of nobility.

But an agency more powerful than stone inscriptions has kept alive the Latin influence, and has kept together the old Latin families in the Cyclades. In the very year that Naxos was finally annexed to Turkey, Pope Gregory XIII confirmed the metropolitan jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Naxos over his suffragans, who in Sauger’s time, a century later, were five in number; and among the bishops we find scions of the former dynasties; others of the old Italian families went over to the Greek Church, but numbers of them remained true to the faith of their ancestors; and at the present day the Catholics of the Cyclades are in many cases descendants of the Latin conquerors. In the present Greek parliament there are such names as Crispi; and the present Catholic Archbishop of Athens is a Delenda of Santorini.

Of the feudal society in the Cyclades it is possible to form some idea from the letters of the dukes which have come down to us. There, as in the rest of Frankish Greece, the Assizes of Romania were the feudal code, modified by the special usages of Naxos, of which one clause in Italian has been preserved in the British Museum. The duke, as the head of the social firmament was, as we have seen, a personage of much importance, not only in his own scattered realm, but in Achaia, of which he was a peer, at the Vatican, where he insisted on his right of nominating bishops, and at Venice, where he was regarded as the premier duke of Christendom.

The republic treated him with much the same attention, and for much the same reason, which the British Government shows to Indian princes on a visit to London. Nominally independent, he was really a Venetian vassal, and as such might at any time be useful to Venetian interests in the East. In his own immediate circle of islands—those which were under his direct government—he was more autocratic than the Prince of Achaia, and the long history of both the Sanudo and the Crispo dynasties is not broken by the appearance of those pretenders who were so common in the more important principality. It was only in the smaller islands that disputed successions sometimes arose, and then they were usually settled by Venetian intervention. More fortunate, too, than their brethren of the mainland, both the Sanudi and the Crispi produced an abundant stock of males to inherit their throne. Once only did the ducal dignity devolve upon a woman, and in the second dynasty, as we saw, the Assizes of Romania were so far modified as to exclude females from the ducal succession. Hence, with one or two rare exceptions, dynastic intrigues were avoided.

The duke in so peculiarly scattered a domain could not personally administer the affairs of all the islands which were directly subject to him, and in these he was represented by governors. In the ducal letters we read of such officials as “lieutenants”, “bailies”, and “ducal factors”—an office found also under the Jewish dispensation at Santorini —while there was a “captain” of the castle of Naxos. Another important post, conferred for a long term of years and extant also in Turkish times, was that of apanochinigari of the island and city of Naxos, an official perhaps originally the “chief huntsman” of the ducal household, but later on a civil authority. Legal documents were usually counter­signed by the chancellor, and the usual language of the ducal chancery was the Venetian dialect, varied by Latin. There is, however, an example of a Naxian deed drawn up in a Greek copy.

In a state where the Latins had dwelt so long, there was naturally a large number of half-castes, called vasmuli in the language of the islands. These half-breeds were neither wholly free, nor wholly slaves; they could acquire property, but they could not bequeath it to their heirs, and at their death all they had was their lord’s; they and their animals were liable to forced service by land and sea; and, if enfranchised, they had to purchase their freedom anew from their lord’s successor. As for the serfs, though they could acquire a peculium of their own, it was ever at their lord s disposal, and a female serf with her children yet unborn was transferred from one master to another like so much personal property. Yet, if these serfs were exclusively Greek, the dukes, with rare exceptions, treated the Orthodox Church with respect. There can, however, have been no love lost between the Greek serf, chained to the oar of the baronial galley, or labouring in the fields of his feudal lord, and the proud nobles, who traced their descent from the great families of Venice or Bologna, and who sat as of right in “the higher and lower court” of the duchy.

Taxes and dues, however, do not, as a rule, appear to have been excessive. An orange at Christmas, or a fowl, was the usual equivalent of our peppercorn rent —a formal recognition of feudal ownership. Tithes and thirtieths were paid by the islanders; the Byzantine land-tax, or akrostichon, had survived; and there was the turcotelis, the equivalent of our Danegeld, the blackmail levied by the Turkish corsairs on the duke, and extracted by him in turn from his subjects. Yet, as we saw, when the islands became a Hebrew possession, the natives might well have exclaimed in the language of their former dukes—quando si stavapeggio, si stava meglio.

The Italian society of the Cyclades was by no means uncultured in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We saw how Crusino Sommaripa made excavations at Paros, and how he received the travelling antiquary from Ancona. Giacomo I Crispo, whose lovely park was a proof of his taste, made scientific experiments in the crater of Santorin, and Buondelmonti was able to buy a manuscript at Andros.³ At the end of the fifteenth century, the old baronial castles of the islands rang with the sound of merriment; balls were of constant occurrence; and, as the Turkish peril drew nearer and nearer, the motto of the dukes seems to have been: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”.

The duchy of the Archipelago has passed away for ever—unsung, unlamented. The stern classicist regards the Italian dukes as mere interlopers on the old Hellenic soil; he would pull down their towers as ruthlessly as a Sanudo or a Crispo pulled down his temples, and a Venetian lion, winged and evangelised, is of less value in his eyes than a Periklean potsherd. But the romance, the poetic haze of Greece was in her middle age, rather than in her classic youth; and, as we voyage among those dream islands over a sea of brightest blue, we seem to see the galley of some mediaeval duke shoot out from the harbour in quest of spoil.

 

END