MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER VI

THE ANGEVINS IN GREECE (1278-1307)

With the death of Prince William of Achaia, the house of Anjou became the dominant factor in Greek politics. Charles I, King of Naples and Sicily, was now, by virtue of the marriage-contract made between his late son Philip and Isabelle de Villehardouin, Prince, as well as suzerain of Achaia, and soon the mint of Glarentza issued coins with his name, followed by the princely title which he now assumed, upon them. The treaty of Viterbo, which had given him the suzerainty over Achaia, had made no mention of Athens; but though there is no direct authority for assuming that Duke John of Athens acknowledged Charles as his overlord, the King of Naples addressed him as a feudatory of Achaia, and John’s successor, Duke William, recognised the King of Naples as his suzerain, only begging to be excused from doing homage in person at Naples. Charles was suzerain, too, of “the most high and mighty Count Palatine”, Richard of Cephalonia, and in Corfu his captain and vicar-general governed the islanders for the Neapolitan crown. Finally, in Epiros, he considered himself, in virtue of the treaty of Viterbo, the successor of Manfred and Chinardo, though he had as yet made small progress towards the realisation of his claims in that difficult country—the despair of regular armies. Thus, in almost every part of the Greek world the restless Angevin had a base for his long-projected attack upon Constantinople, which the armistice between Venice and the Greek Emperor, the cunning intrigues and diplomatic reconciliation of the latter with the papacy, and his own preoccupations in Italy, had hitherto prevented.

Charles lost no time in assuming the government of the principality of Achaia, and sent thither, as his bailie and vicar-general, Galeran d’Ivry, Seneschal of Sicily, who remained in his new post for two years. His appointment was notified to all the great feudatories of Achaia—to John, Duke of Athens, and his brother, William of Livadia; to Count Richard of Cephalonia; to the triarchs of Euboea; to Isabella, Marchioness of Boudonitza; to Chauderon, the Constable, and St Omer, the Marshal of Achaia; and to the Achaian barons, Guy de la Trémouille of Chalandritza, Geoffroy de Tournay, Guy de Charpigny of Vostitza, and Jacques de la Roche of Veligosti. The captains of Corinth, Chloumofitsi, Beauvoir, and Kalamata were ordered to hand over those important castles to him, and he was authorised to receive the homage of all the barons, knights, and other feudatories, “both men and women, both Latin and Greek”. Accordingly, upon his arrival at Glarentza, he summoned the prelates, barons, and knights of the principality, to hear the commands of his master. The assembly listened to the royal message, which bade them do homage to the bailie as the king’s representative, and then Archbishop Benedict of Patras, whom the other barons had put forward as their spokesman, rose to reply. The primate pointed out that such a demand was an infringement of the customs of the country, which had been drawn up in writing and sworn to by their forefathers, the conquerors of the Morea. The feudal constitution provided, he said, that a new prince should appear in person, and swear before God and the people with his hand upon the gospels, to rule them according to their customs, and to respect their franchises, and then all the lieges were bound to do him homage, sealing the compact of mutual loyalty with a kiss on the mouth. “We would rather die and lose our heritage”, added the bold ecclesiastic, “than be ousted from our customs.” The primate’s speech was not likely to please the bailie, but the assembly was unanimous in support of its leader, and it was obvious that the proud barons, jealous of their rights, were not going to do homage to a stranger who belonged to their own class. But, in the true spirit of constitutional monarchy, they were ready to make some compromise, so that his majesty's government might be carried on. The question of homage was put aside, and the bailie and the assembled vassals swore on the gospels—he to respect their customs, they to be loyal to Charles I and his heirs.

Galeran d’Ivry does not seem to have kept his oath, and his administration was unpopular. He began by removing all the officials whom he had found in authority, just like a modern Greek prime minister, and thus created a host of enemies. He was unsuccessful in a campaign which he undertook against the Greeks, who routed his troops in the defiles of Skorffi and took many prisoners. The barons complained that the Angevin soldiers, instead of defeating their foes, plundered friendly villages, and that the lands which had been taken from them, and the late prince had bestowed upon his Turkish auxiliaries, should be restored. In 1280, two of their number, Jean de Chauderon and Narjaud de Remy, went as a deputation to Naples, to complain of the bailie’s unconstitutional acts. Charles issued orders that the old usages of Achaia should be respected, recalled Galeran d’Ivry, and appointed in his place Filippo de Lagonessa, Marshal of Sicily and ex-Seneschal of Lombardy. But the experiment of sending bailies from Italy proved to be unsuccessful; accordingly, two years later, the King of Naples adopted the plan of choosing his vicar-general from the ranks of the Achaian barons. His choice fell upon Guy de la Tremouille, lord of Chalandritza, and head of one of the two families which still remained in undisturbed possession of the original baronies. But the baron of Chalandritza, though his family had come over at the Conquest, was not a sufficiently important person to impose his will upon his peers. His barony consisted of no more than four knights’ fees, and the ruined castle of Tremoula, near Kalavryta, which still preserves his name, is but small. Although the chivalry of Achaia was still so famous, that three of the Moreot barons —Jean de Chauderon, Geoffroy de Tournay, and Jacques de la Roche of Veligosti and Damala —were included by King Charles among the hundred combatants whom he took with him to Bordeaux in 1283, when it was proposed to decide the fate of Sicily by a duel between the two sovereigns of Naples and Aragon, yet the bailie found it necessary to employ Turkish, and even Bulgarian, mercenaries against the Greeks. Such was the disaffection in the principality, that he received orders not to allow a single inhabitant to serve on garrison duty.

It is no wonder that after three years of office, Guy de la Tr6mouille shared the fate of his two predecessors. Charles I of Naples had died in 1285; and, as his son and successor, Charles II was at the time a prisoner of the house of Aragon, the affairs of Naples and of Achaia were conducted by the late king’s nephew, Count Robert of Artois, as regent. One of his first acts was to remove the bailie of Achaia, appointing in his place a much more important personage— William, Duke of Athens, at that time the leading man in Frankish Greece. Connected through his wife with the energetic Duke of Neopatras, lord of Lamia in the north, directly interested, as baron of Nauplia and Argos, in the welfare of the Morea, he was the best possible selection, for in him the barons recognised the first among their equals. The Duke of Athens, whose coins may still be seen in the Archaeological Museum at Venice, was also possessed of ample means, which he spent liberally for the defence of Greece. Thus, in 1282, in spite of the annual attacks of Licario on his coast, he had fitted out nine ships in Euboea to co-operate with the Angevin fleet against the imperial navy; and, when bailie of the Morea, he built the castle of Demdtra, in the ever-unruly Skortd, a fortress which had been destroyed by the Greeks, and the site of which was perhaps at Kastri, to the left of the road between Tripolitza and Sparta. With the Venetian republic, which had trade interests at Athens, he was on such good terms, that when, in 1284, it was negotiating an armistice with the Emperor Andrdnikos II, it expressly stipulated that the Duke of Athens should be included in it —a stipulation not, however, insisted upon in the actual treaty of the following year. William was, however, well able to defend his land, and great was the regret when his valiant career was cut short in 1287, after only two years’ office in Achaia.

In the Athenian duchy, he was succeeded by his only son, Guy II, who was still a minor, and for whom his Greek mother, Helene, daughter of the Duke of Neopatras, acted as regent, the first Greek ruler of Athens for over eighty years. In the administration of the Morea, he was followed by the great Theban magnate, Nicholas II de St Omer, whom we have already seen defending the claim of his sister-in-law to the barony of Akova. The lord of half Thebes, like his father before him, he had built out of the vast wealth of his first wife, Princess Marie of Antioch, the noble castle of St Omer on the Kadmeia, of which only one tower now remains, but which was “the finest baronial mansion in all Romania”. It contained sufficient rooms for an emperor and his court, and the walls were decorated with frescoes, illustrating the conquest of the Holy Land by the Franks, in which the ancestors of the Theban baron had played a prominent part. As his second wife he had married the widowed Princess of Achaia, and had thus come into possession of the lands in the Morea which she received in lieu of her widow’s portion of Clermont and Kalamata, while his brother Jean had already established himself and founded a family in the peninsula. Nicholas had won the esteem of Charles I, who had sent him on a mission to the Armenian court, and he was thus well known to the Angevins. Like his immediate predecessor, he spent money in fortifications, building a small fortress to protect his wife’s village of Maniatochorion against attack from the two neighbouring Venetian colonies of Messenia, and the strong castle of Avarino on the promontory at the north end of the famous bay of Navarino, upon the site where once had stood the palace of Nestor, where in classic days the Athenians had entrenched themselves at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. But Nicholas de St Omer was not attracted to the spot by reminiscences of Homer or Thucydides. He was anxious to erect a mansion for his nephew Nicholas, and he chose the classic Pylos, with the noble bay at its foot, as a commanding position. We often find the place mentioned in the thirteenth century. The Franks called it “port de Junch”—the “harbour of rushes”—or “Zonklon,” by a corruption of that word; but the Greeks described it already as “Avarinos”—a name which occurs not only in the Greek Chronicle of the MoreaJ but in the earlier golden bull of Andrdnikos II, dated 1293. The theory, therefore, so confidently put forward by Hopf, that the modern name of Navarino is derived from the Navarrese company which occupied Zonklon a century later, falls to the ground. In all probability, Avarinos is a reminiscence, as Fallmerayer long ago suggested, of the barbarous tribe of Avars, who, according to a Byzantine historian of that period, “conquered all Greece” in 589, and who, if we may believe a correspondent of the Emperor Alexios I, “held possession of the Peloponnesos for 218 years”. Thus, the name “Navarino” would arise, in accordance with the usual Greek practice, of which we had several examples in the last chapter, out of the final letter of the accusative of the article, or else, the name of the new settlement there, “Neo-Avarino”, so called to distinguish it from St Omer’s castle of“Palaio-Avarino,” would easily be contracted into the form which the great battle which secured the independence of modern Greece has made known to every lover of Hellas.

The administration of the great Theban baron was disturbed by another of those feudal claims, which had now become common since the almost complete disappearance of the families of the original conquerors. It will be remembered that on the death of Geoffroy de Bruy&res, his barony of Skortd had been divided into two halves, one escheating to the crown, the other being left in the hands of the widow. We saw how a certain knight, named Pestel, had claimed the barony, and how Prince William had ignored his claim. A new claimant now appeared in the person of another Geoffroy de Bruyeres, a cousin of the late baron, who arrived from Champagne with elaborate proofs of his relationship and a recommendation from the Regent of Naples to the bailie that the High Court should decide the question. The Court met at Glarentza, and the bishop of Olena gave judgment in its name against young Geoffroy, on the ground that Skorta would only have descended to him, if he had been a direct heir of its late lord, according to the decision of Prince William. Ashamed to return to France empty-handed, the claimant resorted to craft to obtain the coveted barony. He pretended to be suffering from colic, which could be best cured by drinking rain water, such as was to be found in the cistern of the small but strong castle of Bucelet, or Araklovon, which commanded the defile of Skorta, and which had been held at the time of the Conquest by the heroic Doxapatras. He first sent a trusty esquire to beg water from the benevolent governor, and then obtained leave to occupy a room in the tower, so that he might be able to drink the astringent water at his convenience. Soon he seemed to grow worse, and the unsuspecting governor permitted him to call his esquires to his bedside, so that they might hear his last dying depositions. Geoffroy then confided to them his plan. They were to induce the bibulous governor and his men to drink deep with them at a favourite tavern outside the castle gate, and then, when their guests had well drunk, they should seize the keys from the porter and bar out the intoxicated governor and garrison. The plan succeeded, and Geoffroy, now master of Bucelet, released some Greeks who were in the castle dungeon and despatched two of them by night to the imperial commander, offering to sell him the castle, of whose strategic value Geoffroy was well aware. He knew that Bucelet was the key of Skorta, and he surmised that the bailie would give him Karytaina, rather than that Bucelet, and with it, the whole of Arkadia, should fall into the hands of the Greeks. This surmise proved to be not far wrong. The Greek commander, overjoyed at the offer, hastened towards Bucelet with all his troops. Before, however, he had time to reach the castle, it had been closely invested by the Frankish soldiers, hastily summoned by the governor from their garrison duty at Great Ardchova. Such was the alarm caused in the principality, that the bailie himself marched at the head of all his available forces to Bucelet. Ordering Simon de Vidoigne, the captain of Skortd, to prevent the Greek army from crossing the Alpheios by the ford at Isova, he sent envoys to Geoffroy, offering him a free pardon if he would surrender the castle to him as King Charles II’s vicar-general, but, in the event of refusal, threatening to pull it down about his ears. “Indeed,” the messengers added, “Venetian carpenters have already been summoned from Coron to construct the necessary engines of war”. The prudent Geoffroy now saw that the time had come for a compromise; he offered to give up the castle to the bailie, if the latter would promise him some fief upon which he could settle; the bailie consented, and this audacious piece of feudal blackmail was rewarded by the hand of a wealthy widow, Marguerite de Cors, who brought him her father’s fief of Lisarea near Chalandritza, and her husband’s fief of Moraina in Skortd.¹ As for the castle of Bucelet, it was shortly afterwards bestowed upon Isabelle de Villehardouin by King Charles II.

That monarch had been released from prisoh in 1289, and one of his first acts was to appoint a fresh bailie of the Morea. His nominee was Guy de Charpigny, Lord of Vostitza, head of the sole surviving great baronial family of the Conquest— for Guy de la Trdmouille had now died without male heirs —and a man known personally to the Neapolitan court. But the Moreot barons were tired of this system of government by deputies. They had had in eleven years, six bailies —two foreigners, two of their own order, and two great magnates from the duchy of Athens. The foreigners had trampled on their privileges, their fellow-barons were not sufficiently far above them to secure their respect, and the duchy of Athens was now itself in the hands of a child and his mother. Meanwhile, the war against the imperial commanders at Mistra had gone on more or less continually ever since the death of William, for the Morea had been involved in the general Angevin plan of campaign against the Byzantine Empire. These facts had convinced the barons that their country could only be saved by a prince who would reside among them. Two of their number, Jean de Chauderon, the late prince’s nephew and grand constable of the principality, and Geoffroy de Tournay, formerly baron of Kalavryta, were frequent visitors at the Neapolitan court, where they enjoyed greater esteem than any other nobles of the Morea. They had both fought for Charles I at Tagliacozzo, they had both been chosen to fight for him at Bordeaux; and Chauderon held the post of admiral of the kingdom of Naples. Their advice was, therefore, likely to be accepted by the king. During their visits to Naples they had made the acquaintance of a young noble from Flanders, Florent d’Avesnes, brother of the Count of Hainault, and scion of a family which had greatly distinguished itself in the stormy history of the near East. His great-grandfather had stood by the side of Coeur-de-Lion at the siege of Acre; his grandfather had married the daughter of the first Latin emperor of Constantinople; his great-uncle had been the Jacques d’Avesnes, who had conquered Euboea and been wounded at the siege of Corinth. Florent’s father had been noted for his reckless extravagance and his amorous adventures, and, as he left seven children, there was not much prospect for a younger son of the family in the old home. Energetic and ambitious, the young noble was not content to live on the small appanage of Braine-le-Comte and Hal, which his eldest brother had given him; so, about two years before this date, he had gone to seek his fortune at the Neapolitan court, where he had received the post of grand constable of the kingdom of Sicily, and the captaincy of Corfù. But he was not satisfied with these dignities; he had, no doubt, heard of the discontent in the Morea with the existing method of government, and he saw therein a means of furthering his own ambition. Accordingly, he approached the two Achaian barons on the subject, and suggested that they should ask the king to give him in marriage the hand of the widowed Isabelle de Villehardouin, who was still living in the Castel dell’ Uovo, at Naples, like a prisoner of state, and to appoint him Prince of Achaia. At the same time, he pointed out, that if he became prince, they would remain the masters. The scheme met with their approval; they chose a favourable moment for addressing the lame monarch, and then frankly laid before him the dangers of the present situation. “Your bailie and your soldiers”, they said, “tyrannise over the poor, wrong the rich, seek their own advantage and neglect the country. Unless you send a man”, they added, “who will always stay there, and who, as heir of the Villehardouins, will make it his object to advance the country’s interests, you will —mark our words— lose the principality altogether”. They then reminded King Charles that his sister-in-law, the late Prince William’s daughter, “the Lady of the Morea”, as she was called, was living in widowhood, and prayed him to marry her to some great nobleman, who would govern Achaia to his Majesty’s benefit. Charles II listened to their advice, realising that hitherto Achaia had been a source of expense to the crown of Naples and was being rapidly ruined. He gave his consent to the marriage, but only on condition that, if Isabelle survived Florent, neither she nor her daughter nor any other female descendant of hers, should marry without the king’s consent. If this condition were not observed, the possession of the principality was at once to revert to the crown of Naples. This stipulation, against which the author of The Chronicle of the Morea strongly protests, was, twelve years afterwards, enforced against Isabelle herself, and, a generation later, against her ill-fated daughter Matilda.

Meanwhile, all parties were delighted at the marriage.

The Lady of the Morea, still only twenty-five years old, must have rejoiced at the prospect of leaving her gilded cage and returning to her native land, which she had left as a child eighteen years before. The wedding ceremony was performed with much state by the Archbishop of Naples, in September 1289, and the king invested Isabelle and her husband with the principality of Achaia. Then the young couple set out for their principality; on their arrival at Glarentza, the bailie hastened to meet them, and summoned the prelates, barons, knights, esquires, and burgesses to hear the orders of the king. In the Minorite church there, the king’s letters were read aloud, both in Latin and in the vulgar tongue, after which, the new prince took the customary oath to observe the customs of the country and the franchises of his vassals, and then he received their homage and the possession of the principality from the hands of the bailie. In the following spring, Charles II ordered the title of “Prince of Achaia”, which he and his father had used from the death of Prince William down to 1289, to be removed from the Great Seal of the kingdom of Naples; henceforth it figures in the docu­ments of Isabelle and Florent, and on the coins which they struck at Glarentza to replace the Achaian currency of Charles II and his father.

While the war against the Greeks had been going on all these years in the Morea, the house of Anjou had also pressed its claims in Epiros. So long as the Despot Michael II lived, Charles I had, indeed, been unable to make progress in the Highland country beyond the Adriatic. He had merely sent Jean de Clery to take possession of the Epirote possessions, which the treaty of Viterbo had conferred upon him, and his envoy had occupied the excellent harbour of Valona, upon which modern Italy casts longing glances.

But, not many months after the death of Michael II, the Albanian chiefs, by reason of their “devotion to the holy Roman Church”, recognised Charles of Anjou, the champion of the papacy, as their king, did homage to his repre­sentatives, and received from him a renewal of the privileges granted to their forefathers by the Byzantine emperors. Chinardo’s brother was then made Viceroy of Albania, Chinardo’s children were put safely under lock and key in the prison of Trani, the treaty of Viterbo was ratified by Charles’s son-in-law, Philip I of Courtenay, now titular emperor, at Foggia in 1274, and the feeble Despot of Epiros, Nikephoros I, unable to protect himself against the emperor Michael VIII, recognised Charles as his suzerain, sent his son as a hostage to Glarentza, and handed over to the Angevins the castle of Butrinto, the classic Buthrotum, and other places once held by Chinardo. A vigorous attempt was now at last made to attack the emperor by land and sea. A force of 3000 men was sent over to Epiros, and placed under the command of Hugues de Sully, nicknamed Le Rousseau from his red hair, a native of Burgundy, who had accompanied Charles to Naples, and had been appointed in 1278 Captain-General and Vicar of Albania and Corfu. Ros Solumas or Rosonsoules, as the Byzantine historians call him, was a big, handsome man, but a most unfortunate commander, proud, headstrong, and passionate. His men, among whom were many Saracens, shared his over-confidence, and were already partitioning in their own minds the dominions of the emperor, as the Frank Crusaders had really done three-quarters of a century earlier. But the Angevin expedition, which was to have conquered the empire, got no farther than Berat, the picturesque Albanian stronghold defended by its river and its rocky fortress. The emperor despatched a force to relieve the place, the red-haired giant fell from his horse, and, lying helpless in his heavy armour, was captured by the Greeks, or their Turkish auxiliaries. On the news of his capture, his men fled in panic, and the captives were led, like prisoners in a Roman triumph, through the streets of Constantinople, where Sully languished for years in the imperial dungeons. Such was the joy of the emperor, that he commissioned an artist to depict the victory of Berat upon the walls of his palace. The reacquisition of Durazzo completed the success of his arms, and the harbour of Valona and the castle of Butrinto alone remained to the Angevins in Epiros. At sea, the Angevin fleet, manned by Franks from the Morea and partly led by Marco II Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, did more harm than good to the Latin cause in the Levant, as the duke’s relative confesses, so that the double attack upon the empire had failed. Nor was the treaty for the recovery of the realm of Romania, which was concluded at Orvieto in 1281, thanks to the efforts of Leonardo of Veroli, the ever-useful chancellor of Achaia, between Charles, “Prince of Achaia”, his son-in-law, Philip I of Courtenay, titular emperor of Romania, and the Venetian republic, any more productive of results. The treaty seemed on paper to be a masterpiece of statecraft, for it brought Venice, so long neutral, into line against the Greeks. Charles and Philip were to provide some 8000 horses and sufficient men to ride them; Venice was to equip forty galleys or more, in order to secure the command of the sea; the year 1283 was fixed for the expedition, in which all the three high contracting parties were to take part in person; finally, there was to be neither peace nor truce with Michael VIII or his heirs. But nothing practical ever came of the treaty of Orvieto. History can only say of it, that it was one more of the many diplomatic failures to solve the Eastern question. Charles did, indeed, collect another small fleet, of which nine vessels were provided by Duke William of Athens, and six by the bailie of the Morea, Lagonessa, and the Venetians began to make preparations. But the French squadron fell foul of the Venetians, and the Greek admiral, John de lo Cavo, the terrible ex-pirate, captured two rich Venetian merchantmen.Then, suddenly the Angevin power in Sicily received a blow, which in a single night destroyed all the ambitious plans of Charles against the East. In 1282 took place the Sicilian vespers.

Greek diplomacy had not been altogether unconnected with that ghastly tragedy. Excommunicated by the new pope, Martin IV, a Frenchman and a creature of Charles, Michael VIII saw that the farce of uniting the Eastern and Western churches was played out. He accordingly entered into negotiations with the deadly enemy of the house of Anjou, Peter III. of Aragon, employing as his intermediaries his brother-in-law, Benedetto Zaccaria, member of a rich Genoese family which had been entrusted by the emperor with the administration of the rich alum mines of Phokaia in Asia Minor; a Lombard, named Accardo, from Lodi; and the celebrated Giovanni di Procida, who visited Constantinople in the guise of a Franciscan monk. The emperor was to pay the King of Aragon an annual subsidy of £26,880 so long as the war against the Angevins lasted, and some portion of this sum was provided by the clan of Zaccaria. Michael VIII received full value for his money; for the fall of the Angevin power in Sicily not only freed him from a dangerous enemy, but also deprived the Frank states in Greece of valuable support. Not without reason has it been said that the Sicilian vespers sounded the knell of French rule in Hellas. Their immediate result was to stop any attempt to carry out the programme laid down at Orvieto. In Epiros the Angevin commanders contented themselves with holding the pitiful remnant of the Neapolitan possessions —a task rendered less difficult owing to the feeble character of the Despot Nikephoros I, the attacks made upon him and upon the emperor by the ever-restless bastard of Neopatras, and by the death, in the very year of the Sicilian vespers, of the emperor himself. The last act of Michael VIII was to let loose the Tartars against the crafty rival at Neopatras, who had so often been a thorn in his side. The death of the titular emperor of Romania in the following year removed one of the signatories of the treaty of Orvieto; another, the great Charles of Anjou, died in 1285, leaving his successor a prisoner of the Aragonese, and in the same year, Venice, the third member of that Triple Alliance, concluded an armistice for ten years with the new Emperor Andrdnikos II. Both parties were given a free hand in Negroponte; but the emperor promised to respect the Venetian colonies of Crete, Coron, and Modon, and to include the Duke of Naxos and the lord of Tenos in the treaty, provided that they swore not to give refuge to corsairs. A year earlier Andronikos had gained recognition in the west, and practically extinguished the claims of the house of Montferrat to the phantom kingdom of Salonika by his second marriage with Irene, daughter of the Marquis William VII and of Beatrice of Castile, who brought it to him as her dowry. Thus collapsed the coalition for the restoration of the Latin Empire.

Freed from the danger of attack from the Franks, Andrdnikos II resolved to secure himself against the intrigues of his hereditary rival, the Duke of Neopatras. The restless bastard had not been sobered by advancing years, and his eldest son, Michael, had begun to display all the ambitious activity which had characterised his father in his prime. The emperor thought it wise to take measures in time against a repetition of those movements in Thessaly which had given so much trouble to his father. In order to be quite sure of success, he tried both force and craft, sending an army and a fleet of about eighty ships under Tarchaneidtes and Alexios Raoul, an official of French descent, from whose family, according to some authorities, the great clan of Rolles derives its origin and name; at the same time, he entered into negotiations with his cousin Anna, the masculine wife of Nikephoros I, Despot of Epiros, for entrapping young Michael by some feminine stratagem. Anna’s skill proved superior to that of the imperial commanders. While they wasted time in restoring the fortifications of Demetrias, near the modern Volo, until pestilence slew Tarchaneidtes and dispersed his followers, the cunning Princess of Epiros obtained possession of her nephew under the pretext of marrying him to one of her daughters, and then sent him in chains to Constantinople, where he languished in prison for the rest of his life. Once, indeed, he managed to escape, thanks to the aid of Henry, an Englishman, presumably a member of the Varangian guard, who had been appointed his chief gaoler. Hiring a fishing-smack, they set sail in the night for Euboea, hoping to make their way thence to Athens, where Michael’s sister, Helene, was then duchess and regent. But one of those sudden storms so common in the Levant arose in the Marmara; their vessel was driven ashore at Rodosto, and they were there recaptured by the imperial authorities. Many efforts were made to induce Andrdnikos to release his prisoner, but in vain. Years rolled on, and at last Michael, grown desperate, resolved to kill the emperor, even if he perished himself. His prison was near the imperial apartments, and he therefore determined to set fire to his cell, in hope that the flames would reach the emperor’s bedchamber. Unluckily for the success of his plan, Andrdnikos was still awake when the fire broke out; orders were at once given to extinguish the conflagration, and Michael, fighting like a tiger, was felled at the door of his cell by one of the axes of the bodyguard. His father had avenged him upon the treacherous Anna by ravaging the Despotat of Epiros; and it was to save himself from these attacks that the unwarlike Nicephoros consented to become tributary to the King of Naples.

The founder of a dynasty is always able, and his son almost as invariably feeble. So it was with Andronikos II Nature had intended him for a professor of theology, to which engrossing subject he devoted what time he could spare from the neglect of his civil and military duties. In order to obtain money for the Orthodox Church and the imperial court, he allowed the navy to rot in the Golden Horn, after the fashion of the present sultan; his courtiers told him that there was nothing more to fear from the Latins after the death of Charles of Anjou, so that an efficient fleet was a sheer extravagance. He dismissed the half-breeds, who were his best sailors, allowing some of them to enter the service of the Franks, and thus permitted the pirates to scour the seas unchecked. Meanwhile, the handwriting was on the wall; the Turks were advancing in Asia Minor, yet the pedant on the throne of the Caesars seemed to regard their intrusion as of less moment to the empire than that of the filioque clause into the creed.

Under these circumstances, it was no wonder that Andronikos was glad to suspend, by agreement with the new Prince of Achaia, the attempts which his father had made for the reconquest of the Morea. The first act of Florent was to replace all the existing civil and military authorities by his own men, and to redress the grievances of the principality, which he found utterly exhausted by the exactions of the Angevin officials and mercenaries. He endeavoured to make the foreign blood-suckers atone for their maladministration by compelling them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains, and such was his severity towards them that he received a significant hint from King Charles to temper justice with mercy. As for the future, he wisely adopted the advice of such experienced men as old Nicholas de St Omer, Geoffroy de Tournay, and Jean de Chauderon, who urged him, in accordance with the general opinion, to make a durable truce with the Greek Emperor as the only way of preventing the further decline of the principality. He accordingly sent two envoys to the Byzantine governor (or  at Mistra, suggesting that an armistice should be concluded. The governors of the Byzantine province were, however, at that period, appointed for no longer than a year, and the then governor’s term of office had almost expired. He, however, at the advice of the local Greek magnates, referred the proposal to the emperor, who joyfully accepted it, all the more so because he was at the moment harassed by the Turks in Asia, by the Despot of Epiros, and by the Bulgarian Tsar. Andronikos sent to the Morea a great magnate, Philanthropenos, who belonged to one of the twelve ancient Byzantine families, and was apparently the same person as the Alexios Philanthropends who was grandson of the former Byzantine admiral, and a few years later rebelled and proclaimed himself emperor. The new governor met Florent at Andravida, where the heads of a treaty were drawn up in writing between them. But the cautious Fleming was still not content with the signature of an annual official, of however high rank. He pointed out that, as he was a prince, the emperor’s autograph should accompany his own. Philanthropenos agreed; two Greek archons and two Greek-speaking French barons, Jean de Chauderon and Geoffroy d’Aunoy, baron of Kyparissia, accompanied him to Constantinople, and Andronikos, glad to be relieved of the expense caused by the warfare in the Morea, signed the treaty with the purple ink, and sealed it with the golden seal in their presence. For full seven years the principality enjoyed repose, which was welcome to both Greeks and Franks alike. The ravages of the Angevin officials and their mercenaries were repaired; “all grew rich”, says the chronicler, “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”.

Unfortunately, by a custom of international law which then prevailed, a truce between two rulers was considered no bar to the offer of assistance by one of them to the enemy of the other. One of the reasons which had induced Andronikos to make peace in the Morea was, as we saw, his difficult position in Epiros. The Despot Nicvephoros, or rather his wife Anna, who really inspired his policy, was at this moment smarting under that spretae injuria formae which had caused so many woes to the ancient Greek world. She had rendered a great service to the emperor by betraying Michael of Neopatras into his hands, and she claimed her reward, which was to consist of a marriage between her very beautiful daughter, Thamar, and the emperor’s eldest son. She added as an inducement, that after her husband’s death she would transfer the Despotat to the emperor, regardless of the claims of her son Thomas, a child of feeble character, whom she judged incapable of governing in troublous times. The offer was a good one, for it would have ended the long rivalry between Epiros and Constantinople and have reunited a large part of the Byzantine Empire. But the patriarch opposed a marriage between second cousins; as a theologian, Andronikos agreed with the patriarch, as a politician of short views, he fancied that he had found a better match for his son in the person of Catherine of Courtenay, grand­daughter of Baldwin II, whose claims as titular empress of Constantinople would be extinguished by her marriage with the real heir. As a matter of fact, this alternative alliance came to nothing, while the rejection of the beauteous Thamar determined her father to wipe out this insult. The bastard of Neopatras also, if we may believe the much later Chronicle of Galaxidi seized this opportunity of avenging the emperor’s treatment of his eldest son, who was at that time a prisoner in Constantinople; “with tears in his eyes”, he appealed to the mountaineers of Loidoriki and the sailors of Galaxidi to come to his aid. Two hundred chosen men came from either place with the intention to do or die; but in a battle near Lamia, they were basely deserted by their comrades; the Galaxidiotes perished to a man, boldly fighting sword in hand; a quarter of the contingent from Loidoriki was left on the field; and the bastard, who had witnessed so many fights, only escaped capture by flight. Nikephoros was now exposed to the full force of the imperial army, which, 44,000 strong, crossed over from Thessaly by way of Metzovo to Joannina, the second most important city of the Despotat, which had been recovered from its former imperial garrison. Meanwhile, the emperor had chartered sixty Genoese galleys with orders to enter the Ambrakian Gulf.

Thus menaced by land and sea, Nikephoros sought the advice of his chief men, who recommended him to seek the aid of Florent, who had married his niece and whose Frankish chivalry was famous in the whole Greek world. Envoys were accordingly sent in 1292 to the Achaian capital of Andravida, where the matter was discussed in the church of the Divine Wisdom; the older men, who remembered the mishaps which had accrued to the Morea from the Epirote campaign of Prince William, thirty-three years before, were opposed to a repetition of that adventure; but dynastic reasons and the national love of glory prevailed, and it was agreed, that Florent should join his wife’s uncle with 500 picked warriors, on condition that the Despot gave them their pay and sent his only surviving son Thomas as a hostage to the Morea. At the same time, and on the same terms, Nikephoros secured the aid of Count Richard of Cephalonia and 100 of his islanders, sending him, as a pledge of his good faith, his daughter Maria.

The three allies met at Arta, and resolved on a march upon Joannina; but, before they had reached that place, the imperial army had fled in panic, nor could their chivalrous appeals to the honour of the Greek commander, whose Turkish and Cuman auxiliaries would only obey their own chiefs, prevail upon him to give them battle. After a brief raid into the emperor’s territory, they were hastily recalled by the news that the Genoese galleys had arrived at the mouth of the Ambrakian Gulf, that the sailors had landed at Preveza, and that they were marching straight for Arta. The Despot feared for his capital, for the Genoese were noted for their skill in sieges, and 1000 horsemen were despatched in hot haste to stop them. But the flight of the imperial army, which was to have co-operated with them by land, had discouraged the Genoese; some of their comrades were cut off by the cavalry; and, when Florent arrived and pitched his camp at Salagora, where the galleys were lying at anchor, so as to prevent them from landing, they sailed away to Vonitza on the south of the gulf, whence they ravaged the Despotat unchecked as far as the island of Santa Mavra, which then formed part of it. Then they returned to Constantinople; the allies of the Despot dispersed; and his son was released from his detention at Chloumofitsi. Count Richard of Cephalonia did not, however, send back his hostage, but married her to his eldest son John, a fine, strapping man, for whom no lady of Romania was good enough. Great was the indignation of Nikephoros, who had looked higher than the heir of the county palatine; but Epiros had no navy, and the count, safe in his island domain, could smile at his late ally’s impotent wrath, which was increased by the count’s refusal to carry out his promise of bestowing the famous “island of Ithaka, or the fort of Koronos”, in Cephalonia, upon his son. Nikephoros had acted more generously, for he had grown fond of his hand­some son-in-law, to whom he seems to have given the island of Leukas, or Santa Mavra, as it now began to be called. The history of Santa Mavra, and the origin of its name, are somewhat obscure; but it appears to have belonged to the despots of Epiros, in connection with whom we have more than once had occasion to allude to it, down to a little before the year 1300, when it is mentioned, under the names of “Luccate” and “ Lettorna” in two Angevin documents, as belonging to John of Cephalonia. In one of these documents, Charles II of Naples gives John permission to build a fort in “Lettorna”, and from this fort, which is known to have been subsequently called “Santa Mavra”, some scholars derive the common name of the island, while others think that it had the name even before the erection of the fort. Santa Mavra is a popular saint, alike in Greece and Italy, so that her name would appeal alike to the Italian Orsini and to the native Greeks.

The Despot was able to console himself for this mesalliance by a splendid match for his other daughter, the beautiful Thamar, whose slighted charms had been the cause of the late war. In 1294 the Epirote damsel was married at Naples to Philip, second son of King Charles II, who was thus able to recover by a dynastic alliance the ground which his house had lost by the sword beyond the Adriatic. The King of Naples laid his plans with much cunning. Before the marriage took place, he conferred upon his son the principality of Taranto, as being nearest to the coveted land of Epiros; his next step was to make his niece, Catherine of Courtenay, titular empress of Constantinople, ratify the treaty of Viterbo, and pledge herself never to marry without the consent of the crown of Naples, a piece of diplomacy which he attempted to justify by the most sickening and transparent excuses. He thus had in his own hands all the claims to the Latin Empire of Romania, which still counted for something in diplomatic circles. He then transferred all these claims, and the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, the duchy of Athens, the kingdom of Albania, and the province of Wallachia (or Thessaly) to his son, on whom he also bestowed the island of Corfu with the castle of Butrinto on the opposite coast of Epiros and its dependencies —the remnant, in fact, of the Angevin possessions on the Greek mainland. Thus, in 1294, Philip of Taranto became suzerain of all the Frankish states in Greece, which the King of Aragon, the great rival of the house of Anjou, promised to respect, and actual owner of the Angevin dominion in Corfú and on the Epirote litoral, over which his father retained the overlordship. A prince so richly endowed with dignities and estates was a desirable son-in-law; nor was the Despot moved to reject such a marriage for his daughter on the ground that the King of Naples was still keeping his nephews, the sons of Helene and Manfred, in the dungeons of Santa Maria del Monte, the fine castle which still stands near Andria. He promised to give Philip, in addition to Thamar’s dowry of £44,800 a year, the four fortresses of Lepanto, Vonitza, Angelokastro and Vrachori (the modern Agrinion); if his son Thomas died, Philip was to become Despot of all Epiros; if he lived to attain his majority, he was to hold the heritage of his ancestors as Philip’s vassal, and cede the latter another castle or a maritime province. On the other hand, Philip pledged himself to respect the religion of his wife and his future subjects; the first of these pledges he vio­lated; the confidence of the Greeks in the second must have been shaken by the creation of a Catholic archbishopric in “the royal castle” of Lepanto, whose Greek metropolitan, hitherto the chief ecclesiastic of the Despotat, transferred his see to Joannina, out of the reach of “the boastful, haughty, and rapacious Italians”. Philip of Taranto was now, by this extraordinary arrangement, master of the best positions in Astolia, and had a prospect of obtaining the whole of Epiros. The other branch of the Angeli, which ruled in Thessaly, was, indeed, naturally alarmed at this extension of Angevin sway in Western Greece, and the two younger sons of the old Duke of Neopatras made an attack upon Arta and captured Lepanto. The King of Naples in alarm bade Florent of Achaia and Hugues de Brienne, who was now guardian of the young Duke of Athens, defend Epiros. But this was a merely temporary acquisition, almost immediately relinquished; in fact, the chief result of these feuds between the two branches of the Angeli was to weaken both and so benefit the Angevins. Moreover, the Serbs had now occupied the north of the Despotat, so that the Albanian Catholic population naturally preferred the rule of a prince of their own faith to that of a sovereign who was a member of the Orthodox Church. Philip himself was able to pay but little attention to his transmarine possessions, for, like his father before him, he was taken prisoner by the Aragonese, at the battle of Falconaria in 1299, and was not released till the peace of Caltabellotta in 1302. But during his captivity his interests were well looked after, and his father spared no pains to conciliate the Epirotes. Two years later, Charles II. renewed the settlement of 1294, and his son was henceforth styled “Despot of Romania and Lord of the Kingdom of Albania” —the former of which titles may be read on the coins which he struck at his mint of “Nepant”, or Lepanto.

The seven years’ peace which the Morea enjoyed during the reign of Florent was disturbed by several violent incidents. Soon after the return of the prince from Epiros he had to pay a visit to his suzerain, the King of Naples, and during his absence in 1292 a piratical squadron under the command of Roger de Lluria, the famous admiral of King James of Aragon, made its appearance in Greek waters. Lluria’s brother-in-law, Berenguer d’Entenqa, had already ravaged Corfu and the coast of the Despotat of Epiros, but this fresh expedition was much more destructive. Lluria himself afterwards told Sanudo, that he had plundered the emperor’s dominions, because the latter had failed to pay the subsidy promised to King Peter of Aragon by Michael VIII, and, as the truce of Gaeta, between the houses of Anjou and Aragon, had barely expired, he did not attack the Franks of Achaia till he was attacked by them; but he damaged both Latin and Greek islands with piratical impartiality. Chios, then a Byzantine possession, yielded him sufficient mastic to fill two galleys; the Latin duchy of Naxos afforded him further booty, and then he steered his course for Monemvasia. Since the re-establishment of Byzantine rule in the south of the Morea, thirty years before, Monemvasia had greatly increased in importance. Michael VIII. had granted its citizens valuable fiscal exemptions; his pious son had confirmed their privileges and possessions, and in 1293 gave the metropolitan the title of “Exarch of all the Peloponnesos”, with jurisdiction over eight bishoprics, some, it is true, still in partibus infidelium, and confirmed all the rights and property of his diocese, which was raised to be the tenth of the empire and extended, at any rate on paper, right across the peninsula to “Pylos, which is called Avarinos”. The emperor lauds, in this interesting and beautifully illuminated document, still preserved in the National Library and (in a copy) in the Christian Archaeological Museum at Athens, the convenience and safe situation of the town, the number of its inhabitants, their affluence and their technical skill, their sea­faring qualities, and their devotion to his throne and person. Lluria doubtless found abundant booty in such a place; and he was able to sack the lower town without slaughter, for the archons and the people took refuge in the impregnable citadel which has defied so many armies, leaving their property and their metropolitan in his power. By the device of hoisting the Venetian flag and pretending to be a Venetian merchant, he managed to decoy a number of Mainates down to his ships, whom he carried off as slaves. Hitherto, he had not molested the Frankish part of the Morea, knowing it to be under the suzerainty of Anjou; but while he was watering and reposing at Navarino, a body of Greeks and Frankish knights under Giorgio Ghisi, the captain of Kalamata, and Jean de Tournay, “the finest and bravest gentleman in all Morea”, fell upon his men. A hand-to-hand fight ensued; Lluria and Jean de Tournay charged one another with such force that their lances were shivered to splinters, and the French knight fell with all his weight over the body of his adversary. Lluria’s men would have slain him, had not their leader bade them spare so gallant a warrior, in whom he recognised the son of an old acquaintance and whom he would fain have had for his own son-in-law. Most of the Franks and Greeks were soon either dead or prisoners, and it only remained for Lluria to assess and collect the ransom. For this purpose it was necessary to sail to Glarentza, the chief commercial place in Achaia, where the Princess Isabelle was then residing. When the red galley of the Aragonese commander with Jean de Tournay on board hove in sight, the Achaian admiral saluted him in her name, and beneath the shade of a tower by the sea-shore, at a place called Kalopotami, “the fair river”, Isabelle and her visitor met. The good burgesses of Glarentza were requested to advance the ransom of the captives —£3584 for Ghisi, whose father, the lord of Tenos, was a wealthy man, as Lluria knew full well, for he had lately visited his island, and half that sum for Tournay. The Aragonese admiral was loud in his praise of the man who had unhorsed him; he gave him a fine horse and a suit of mail, as a remembrance, and released all the other prisoners to please him. Then he set sail for Sicily, laden with treasure “enough to satisfy five armies”, not forgetting to plunder Patras, Cephalonia, and Corfu on the way. From this expedition Muntaner dates the lack of good men able to defend the Morea.

Not long after Lluria’s expedition the Slavs of Gianitza, near Kalamata, surprised, in a period of profound peace, the ancestral castle of the Villehardouins, where Prince William had been born and died, and absolutely refused to give it up to Florent. The latter appealed to the Byzantine governor at Mistrii, but his reply was that the Slavs had neither acted by his advice, nor recognised his authority; “they are people”, he said, “who do as they like, and only obey their own chiefs”, a fairly accurate definition of the manner in which the Melings of Taygetos had always lived. Failing to obtain satisfaction from the emperor’s representative, Florent sent two envoys to the emperor, Jean de Chauderon, the grand constable, and Geoffroy d’Aunoy, baron of Arkadia, who had both learnt the Greek language and Greek ways at Constantinople, where they had already been on an embassy, while the latter had married a relative of the emperor. At first Andrdnikos II refused to see them, for he was by no means anxious to order the restoration of Kalamata. But they chanced to meet Pierre de Surie, whom Charles II had sent as an emissary to Naples to discuss the proposed marriage of the titular empress Catherine of Courtenay with the son of Andrdnikos. To him they disclosed their business, and he contrived that the emperor should not only grant them an audience, but give them a favourable response. The delighted envoys were, however, informed by the marshal of the Byzantine province of Mistra, who was then in Constantinople, that the emperor had none the less given secret orders, of which he would probably be the bearer, that the castle should not be given up. This man, Sgouromailly by name, was a half-caste from Messenia, a descendant of the Greek family of Sgourds and the French family of Mailly, and, unlike most of the Gasmoui, had a marked predilection for the Franks, though well aware that the half-castes of the Morea had a factitious importance at Constantinople which led to valuable posts. He therefore suggested that the envoys should return with him on his swift galley, and should at once obtain in writing the imperial order for the surrender of Kalamata. They acted on his advice; the half­caste was as good as his word; the castle was occupied by his followers, and at once restored to the Franks, to the great joy of Florent. Sgouromailly, however, paid dearly for his Francophil feelings. When he returned to his post at Mistra, he found a secret order from the emperor, bidding him on no account surrender Kalamata. Regarded as a traitor by the Greeks, he had to flee to Tzakonia; his office was taken from him, and he died in a humble straw-loft, a fugitive and an outlaw. A century and a half later we find his family still .mentioned among the Moreot archons, and the name exists in the Peloponnese today.

Another incident served to disturb the relations between Franks and Greeks, and illustrates the insolence of the Flemings, who had followed their countryman into the Morea, and had there received baronial lands, often at the cost of the old Frankish nobility. Among these newcomers were two near relatives of Florent, Engelbert and Walter de Liedekerke, of whom the former succeeded old Jean de Chauderon, as grand constable, while the latter was appointed governor of the castle of Corinth. Walter was an extravagant man, who found his emoluments quite inadequate to his expenditure, and resorted to extortion in order to maintain his establishment. So profound was the peace between Greeks and Franks at this time, that many of the emperor’s subjects from the Byzantine province had settled on the fertile lands near the Corinthian Gulf, which they shared in common with the Frankish vassals of the prince. Among these settlers was a certain Photios, cousin of Jacques le Chasy, or Zosses, “the most gallant soldier that the emperor had in all Morea”, who at that time held the old domain of the Tournay family at Kalavryta, and whose clan, perhaps of Slavonic origin, ruled over a part of Tzakonia. The serfs, who cultivated these lands, disliked Photios’s presence there, and complained to Corinth that they could not support the burdens of two lords. Their complaint was carried to Walter, who at once ordered the arrest of Phdtios, on the ground that neither Franks nor Greeks had the right of settling on the common lands. When he saw that his prisoner was a rich man, he resolved to make him pay a heavy blackmail. He thrust him into the castle keep, and told him that unless he paid the damages for his trespass, assessed at more than £4480, he would hang him. Phdtios at first refused to pay, but the governor ordered two of his teeth to be extracted— a form of argument so convincing that he was glad to compound with his gaoler for a tenth of the original sum. As soon as he was free, he appealed to the commander of the Byzantine province for retribution, and the latter laid the matter before Florent, who, however, supported his relative, adding that Phdtios had got less than his deserts.

Finding justice thus denied to him, Phdtios resolved to take the law into his own hands. Accordingly he lay in wait for Liedekerke at the little harbour of St Nicholas of the Fig-tree (the modern Xylokastro), on the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, thinking that the governor would probably land there to take his midday meal by the edge of an abundant spring. Presently, sure enough, a Frankish galley hove in sight, and from it there stepped ashore a noble baron with fair complexion and blond hair, the very image of Walter. Photios, certain of his man, waited till the baron was seated at his repast, and then struck him again and again with his sword, crying aloud with revengeful joy, “There, my lord Walter, take your money!” The wounded man’s attendants shouted aloud, “Ha! Photi, Photi, what are you doing? You are killing the baron of Vostitza, by mistake for the governor of Corinth!” Horror-stricken at his mistake, for Guy de Charpigny, the late bailie of the Morea, was beloved by all, Photios threw away his sword, lifted the wounded man tenderly in his arms, and begged his forgiveness. But it was too late; his innocent victim died of his wounds, nor did Florent, who realised that the fault lay with his own relative, venture to seek reparation by force from the Byzantine governor.

At last the seven years’ peace, which had so greatly benefited the Morea, came to an end. At Vervaina, between Tripolitza and Sparta, there was a beautiful meadow, on which an annual fair was held in the middle of June; it was a central position, so that Greeks and Franks alike flocked thither to buy and sell; such festivals were common in Frankish times as in classic days, and one of the privileges which Andronikos III gave to the Monemvasiotes was his special protection at all the Peloponnesian fairs. Now it chanced on this occasion, that a French knight, who lived hard by, came to words with a Greek silk-merchant, and from words the arrogant Frank proceeded to blows. The silk­merchant returned to his home muttering vengeance, and conceived the design of capturing the castle of St George, which, from its commanding situation in front of Skorta, would be a peculiarly acceptable prize to the emperor. Having gained two traitors within the castle walls, he confided his plan to a fellow-countryman from Skorta, who commanded a body of Turkish mercenaries in the imperial service; a moonlight night was chosen for the venture, the traitors did their work, and next morning the Byzantine double-eagle flew from the castle keep, and the Turkish garrison mounted guard on the ramparts. When Florent heard the news at his favourite residence of Andravida, he marched at once to besiege the stolen fortress. But, though he swore that he would stay there till he retook it, though he summoned an experienced Venetian engineer from Coron who did some harm to the tower, though he fortified one strong position after another and built another castle which he called Beaufort, perhaps identical with “the Fair Castle” (Oraiokastro) in the mountains behind Astros, to command the pass to Skortd, and though he sent for soldiers from Apulia and obtained archers and spearmen from a powerful Slav chieftain who ruled in Maina, the fine castle held out. At last, when winter came, Florent withdrew. Before the following spring of 1297, he was dead. The French chronicler mourns his loss, “for he was upright and wise, and knew well how to govern his land and his people”. If he had the faults of a foreigner, he was a brave man who was yet a lover of peace. Unfortunately, like Prince William before him, he left no son, only one daughter, Mahaut or Matilda, who was a child of three years of age at her father’s death. It seemed as if the destinies of Achaia were ever to depend on women. Her mother, Isabelle, continued to reign as Princess of Achaia, whose coinage bore her name, but she soon retired to her favourite castle of Nesi or L’llle, as the Franks translated it, situated in the delightful climate of her own Kalamata. The administration of the principality she entrusted to a bailie, Count Richard of Cephalonia, who not long after married her widowed sister, Marguerite, and was connected with all the leaders of the Frankish world. A new chancellor was appointed in the person of Benjamin of Kalamata, and a Greek named Basilopoulos became chamberlain —a sign of the prominent position now occupied by the natives.

Florent had left his people at war with the Byzantine province, and it was therefore the first care of his widow to protect her frontier. This she did by building a new castle, Chasteneuf as it was called, in the vale of Kalamata, through which the present railway travels. By this means the people of western Messenia were freed from the necessity of paying dues to the governors of the two nearest Greek castles, Mistra and Gardiki —the fortress which the emperor had built in the pass of Makryplagi, above the cave where the Greek commanders had taken refuge after that memorable battle. But the barons thought that a politic marriage would be an even better protection for their country than strong walls. There was some talk of a union between the widowed princess and John, the son of the emperor. Andronikos had himself been suggested as a husband for Isabelle more than thirty years earlier, so that there would have been some disproportion between the mature charms of the Achaian princess and the extreme youth of his son. This alliance fell through; but it was agreed, on the proposal of Nicholas III de St Omer, the Grand Marshal of Achaia, that a marriage should be arranged between the little princess Matilda and his young cousin, Guy II, Duke of Athens, who had now come of age, and was regarded as “the best match in all Romania”.

The seven years’ minority of the young Duke had been an uneventful period in the history of Athens. His Greek mother, Helene Angela, had provided him with a powerful guardian by her second marriage with her late husband’s brother-in-law, Hugues de Brienne, who was now a widower, and who brought her half the great barony of Karytaina, which figures on her coins—almost the sole instance of a baronial currency in the Morea. A delicate feudal question, the same which had led to war between Athens and Achaia a generation earlier, alone disturbed the repose of the ducal court, and threatened to renew that fratricidal strife. The Duchess of Athens had done homage to the Neapolitan court, but both she and her husband Hugues flatly refused to recognise themselves as the vassals of Prince Florent of Achaia, on the ground that there was no feudal nexus between the two Frankish states. Both parties appealed to their common suzerain, Charles II of Naples, who, after a futile attempt to settle the matter by arbitration, finally wrote, in 1294, that when he had conferred Achaia upon Florent he had intended the gift to include the overlordship of Athens. Accordingly, he expressly renewed that grant, and peremptorily ordered Guy II, who had by that time come of age, and his vassals, among whom Thomas III of Salona, Othon of St Omer, and Francesco da Verona are specially mentioned, to do homage to the Prince of Achaia. At last, after two years’ further delay, the Duke of Athens obeyed.

The coming of age of the last De la Roche Duke of Athens has been described by the quaint Catalan chronicler, Ramon Muntaner. The ceremony took place on St John Baptist’s day, 1294, at Thebes, whither the young duke had invited all the great men of his duchy; he had let it be known, too, throughout the Greek Empire and the Despotat of Epiros and his mother’s home of Thessaly, that whosoever came should receive gifts and favours from his hand —“for he was one of the noblest men in all Romania who was not a king, and eke one of the richest”. When all the guests had assembled, mass was celebrated in the cathedral by Nicholas, Archbishop of Thebes, and then all eyes were fixed upon the duke, to see whom he would ask to confer upon him the order of knighthood—a duty which the King of France or the emperor himself would have thought it a pleasure and an honour to perform. What was the surprise of the brilliant throng when Guy, instead of calling upon one of his great nobles, Thomas III of Salona or Othon of St Omer, fellow-owner with the duke himself of the barony of Thebes, summoned to his side a young knight of Euboea, Bonifacio da Verona, grandson of that Guglielmo I who had styled himself King of Salonika and had played so large a part in the events of his time. Bonifacio was, however, a poor man, the youngest of three brothers, whose sole possession was a single castle, which he had sold the better to equip himself and his retinue. Yet no one made a braver show than he at the Athenian court, whither he had gone to seek his fortune; he always wore the richest clothes, and on the day of the great ceremony none was more elegantly dressed than he and his company, though everyone equipped himself and the jongleurs in the fairest apparel. He had fully a hundred wax tapers ornamented with his arms, yet he had borrowed the money for all this outlay, trusting to the future to pay it back. This was the man whom the duke now bade approach. “Come here”, quoth he, “Master Boniface, close to my lord archbishop, for our will is that thou shalt dub us a knight”. “Ah, my lord”, replied Boniface, “what sayest thou! thou dost surely mock me”. “No, by our troth”, quoth the duke, “so do we wish it to be”. Then Boniface, seeing that the duke spake from his heart, came and stood near the archbishop at the altar, whereon lay the arms of the duke, and dubbed him a knight. Then the duke said aloud, before all the company, “Master Boniface, custom it is, that those who make men knights should make them presents too. Howsobeit, it is our will to do the contrary. Thou hast made us a knight, wherefore we give thee from this moment 50,000 sols of revenue for thee and thine for ever, in castles and in goodly places and in freehold, to do therewith as thou wilt. We give thee also to wife the daughter of a certain baron whose hand is ours to bestow, and who is lady of part of the island and city of Negroponte”. The duke was true to his word; he gave him his own mother’s dowry of Gardiki in Thessaly with the classic island of Salamis, thirteen castles in all on the mainland of the duchy, and the hand of his cousin, Agnes de Cicon, lady of Aigina and Karystos. It was true that the latter castle was still in the hands of the Greeks, but not long afterwards Boniface showed that he had deserved his good fortune by wresting it from them. The Catalan chronicler, who had stayed in Boniface’s house at Negroponte and had there heard the story of his sudden rise, might well say that this was the noblest gift that any prince made in a single day for a long time. The episode gives us, indeed, some idea of the wealth and splendour of the Burgundian dukes of Athens.

Such was the man whom Nicholas de St Omer pro­posed as a husband for Princess Isabelle’s little daughter. Guy, on his part, gladly accepted the idea of an alliance, which, if he could obtain the sanction of the King of Naples, might one day, in due course of nature, make him Prince of Achaia, and thus end for ever the vexatious question of homage. So, when the Achaian envoys arrived, he at once agreed to their suggestion that he should pay a visit to their mistress and his suzerain. He sent for Thomas III of Salona, his chief vassal and the most honourable man in all Romania, and for his other barons and knights, and set out in 1299 with his accustomed splendour for Vlisiri (or La Glisiere, as the Franks called it) in Elis, a land of goodly mansions, where there was ample accommodation for the princess and all her retinue. There the marriage was arranged; Kalamata, the family fief of the Villehardouins, became the dowry of the bride; the bishop of Olena performed the ceremony; and, after some twenty days of feasting and rejoicings, the duke departed for Thebes with his five-year-old wife. The King of Naples, who at first protested against a marriage with this mere child, contracted without his previous consent, subsequently gave his approval; the qualms of Pope Boniface VIII at the union of rather distant cousins, were pacified by the gift of twenty silken garments from the manufactories of Thebes. Such dispensations were commonly granted to the Frankish lords of Greece at this period, for, as the pope said in a similar case, their numbers had been so reduced by war, that they could scarcely find wives of their own social rank who were not related to them.

Isabelle herself did not long remain a widow after her daughter’s marriage. In 1300, Boniface VIII held the first jubilee, or anno santo, of the Roman Church, and among the thousands who flocked to Rome on that great occasion was the Princess of Achaia. Before she sailed from Glarentza, she appointed Nicholas de St Omer bailie during her absence, as it was considered that Count Richard of Cephalonia, who was now her brother-in-law—for he had recently married her sister Marguerite, the Lady of Akova—had grown too old to govern the country in time of war. Isabelle met in Rome, not by accident —for negotiations had been going on for some time about the matter— Philip of Savoy, son of the late Count Thomas III. A child at the time of his father’s death, he had been superseded in Savoy by his uncle, Amedeo V, but had received Piedmont as his share, and had fixed his sub-Alpine capital at Pinerolo, where his remains still lie. Philip was a valiant knight, not much over twenty, who could help her to defend her land against the Greeks and might even recover what her father had lost; the pope was in favour of the union, and the protest of King Charles II of Naples, who appealed to the conditions laid down at the time of Isabelle’s second marriage, was induced, on the papal intervention, to give his consent. At the palace where he was then staying, near the Lateran, he invested Philip of Savoy with the principality of Achaia, in the name of his own imprisoned son, Philip of Taranto, to whom, as we saw, he had transferred the suzerainty seven years before, and one of the witnesses of the deed was that same Roger de Lluria, now in the Angevin service, who had met Isabelle at Glarentza under such very different circumstances. The marriage, which took place in Rome in 1301, was a grand affair; the bill for the wedding breakfast—a very extensive one—has been preserved, and the frugal Greeks would have been surprised at the quantity of food provided for their new prince and his guests. A few days before the wedding, Isabelle bestowed the castle and town of Corinth upon her future husband, who, in his turn, promised to bring a certain number of soldiers with him to Greece for the defence of the land and the prosecution of the war. The honeymoon was spent in Piedmont, where the prince had to put his affairs in order. Indeed, it was not till the end of 1302 that the princess returned with him and a body of Savoyards and Piedmontese to her native land.

Philip of Savoy swore, like his predecessor, to observe the usages of the land, and was greeted, in the name of the assembled vassals, by the Archbishop of Patras, who had played the most prominent part, alike when Charles I had sent his first bailie and when Florent had been appointed prince. But the new prince soon tried to disregard the customs of the country. He knew that the King of Naples really disliked his marriage, and the knowledge that Charles II might at any time depose him, and would probably do so in the event of his surviving Isabelle, increased his natural desire to make up for his heavy expenditure in coming, and to lay by for a rainy day. “He had learned money-making at home from the tyrants of Lombardy”, it was whispered, when he began to practise a system of regular extortion. As soon as he had put his Piedmontese and Savoyard officers and soldiers into the castles of the Morea, he summoned his chief confidant, Guillaume de Monbel, whom he had brought with him from Italy, and took counsel how he could best fill his coffers. In this enterprise he received assistance from one of his predecessor’s advisers, Vincent de Marays, a sly old knight from Picardy and a protegi of Count Richard of Cephalonia, who had a grudge against the chancellor, Benjamin of Kalamata, for having secured his patron’s dismissal from the post of bailie. Benjamin was a rich man, who was a larger landowner than even Leonardo of Veroli had been, and therefore well able to pay blackmail. An excuse for extortion was found in the chancellor’s omission to send in his accounts of public monies received by him during several years; and he was forthwith arrested on a charge of malversation. Benjamin appealed in his trouble to his powerful friend, Nicholas III. de St Omer, whose appointment as bailie he had obtained, and who was at once the most beloved and the most dreaded man in Achaia. The haughty marshal marched straight into the chamber where the prince was sitting with the princess and his Piedmontese friends, and asked him point-blank, why he had ordered the chancellor’s arrest. When Philip replied, that Benjamin owed him an account of the revenues which had passed through his hands, St Omer rejoined that the imprisonment of a liege for debt was against the customs of the country. “Hah! cousin”, quoth the prince, “where did you find these customs of yours?” At that the marshal drew a huge knife, and, holding it straight before him, cried: “Behold our customs! by this sword our forefathers conquered this land, and by this sword we will defend our franchises and usages against those who would break or restrict them”. The princess, fearing for her husband’s life, exclaimed aloud; but St Omer reassured her by saying that it was not the prince but his evil counsellors whom he accused. The irate marshal was finally appeased by a soft answer; the chancellor procured his release from prison by a payment of 20,000 hyperperi of Glarentza to the prince. From that moment the wily Benjamin ingratiated himself with his avaricious master, whose passion for money he well knew how to gratify at the same time as his own desire for revenge. At his suggestion, his enemy Count Richard of Cephalonia was compelled to lend Philip 20,000 hyperperi, for which he received almost nothing in return. But this was not all that the prince managed to squeeze out of the wealthy family of the Cephalonian Orsini. When, a little later, old Count Richard was killed by one of his own knights, whom he had struck on the head with a stick while sitting on the Bench at Glarentza, his son John I had to purchase his investiture with his islands from his suzerain, the Prince of Achaia, by a large present of money. Not long afterwards he gave Philip a heavy bribe to decide in his favour an action brought against him in the High Court of Achaia by his stepmother, the Lady of Akova, for restitution of her late husband’s personal property, valueo at £44,800. The proud Nicholas de St Omer, however, espoused the cause of the lady, more from contempt and dislike for the venal prince than from a desire to punish the violence of his brother-in-law, the new Count of Cephalonia. Again, Philip had to suppress his indignation at the insolence of the greatest baron in the land, who boasted that he had royal blood in his veins, who was cousin of the Duke of Athens, and connected by feudal ties with the leading Achaian nobles; a compromise was made, by which the Lady of Akova was to receive one-fifth of the amount claimed. From other quarters, too, the Piedmontese prince extorted various sums. Basildpoulos, the Greek who had been appointed chamberlain, made him a compulsory present of £1344; the people of Karytaina contributed £1792; the citizens of Andravida, his favourite residence, £224; the burgesses of Glarentza, £268, 16s.; while the tolls of that port were charged with an annuity of £134, 8s. to one of his Piedmontese favourites. These transactions give us some idea of the wealth of Greece at this period.

Yet, in spite of all these “benevolences”, the prince had to raise a loan from the Glarentza branch of the Florentine banking-house of Peruzzi, which financed our own sovereigns. At last his exactions led to a serious rising. The people of Skorta had always been the most turbulent element of the population, and their mountainous country —the Switzerland of the Morea— the most jealously guarded by the Franks. Yet, in spite of the well-known characteristics of these Arkadian mountaineers, and of the natural fortress which they inhabited, Philip, instigated by his evil genius, the old knight from Picardy, must needs impose an extraordinary tax upon the Arkadian archons. He was told that they were rich, and the large sum which he had already received from the Arkadian town of Karytaina doubtless made him think that they could well afford to pay more. But the natives of Gortys, from the Frankish times to those of M. Delydnnes, have been sticklers for their constitutional rights, guaranteed to them at the time of the Conquest. Their chief men met in the house of the two brothers Mikronas, at the foot of the mountain, on which stand the lonely ruins of the noble temple of Bassae, and swore, in a spirit worthy of the ancient Greeks, that they would rather die than pay a single farthing of the tax. The only man who might have prevented their rising was Nicholas de St Omer; but they knew that he was going to Thessaly; and, the moment that he had gone, they sent two spokesmen to Mistra to invite the Byzantine governor’s aid and offer their land to the emperor. Their mission aroused no suspicion, for it was a common thing for pilgrims to visit the shrine of St Nikon at Lacedaemonia —the Armenian monk, who, after converting the Cretan apostates back to Christianity, had established himself in the latter part of the tenth century at Sparta, where his memory is still green. The governor received their offer with gladness; he assembled his troops on the famous plain of Nikli, whence the traitors guided them by a sure road into Skortd. Soon two Frankish castles, St Helena and Creve-Coeur, on either side of Andritsaina, were smoking ruins. But the Greeks, as the chronicler remarks, were better at a first assault than at a prolonged siege. Florent’s newly-built castle of Beaufort resisted their attack, and when Philip approached, they speedily fled in disorder. The prince wisely abstained from carrying the war into the Byzantine province. He bade the terrified serfs, who had fled from Greeks and Franks alike, return to their homes; enquired from them the cause of the rebellion ; and, when he was told that it was the work of a family party of archons, contented himself with confiscating the lands and goods of the latter.

We saw that the rising would not have happened but for the absence of the marshal Nicholas de St Omer in Thessaly, and it is now necessary to describe the important events which had necessitated his presence there. In 1296, both Nikephoros, Despot of Epiros, and the bastard John I., Duke of Neopatras, had died; and, seven years later, the latter’s son and successor, Constantine, had followed his father to the grave, leaving an only son, John II, who was still a minor at the time of his death. In his last will and testament Constantine had appointed his nephew Guy II, Duke of Athens, guardian of the child and regent of his dominions, not only because Guy was his nearest surviving male relative, but because the Athenian duchy, then the strongest of all the Frankish states, could alone protect Thessaly against the designs of the Emperor Andronikos II on the one side, and of the able and ambitious Lady Anna, of Epiros, who was regent in the name of the young Despot Thomas, on the other. Guy, who had already interests on the Thessalian frontier, joyfully accepted the honourable office, which flattered his ambition. He summoned Thomas of Salona, his chief vassal, Boniface of Verona, his favourite, and others from Euboea, and at Zetouni, the modern Lamia, which his mother had brought as part of her dowry to the duchy of Athens, received the homage of the Thessalian baronage. There he arranged for the future government of his ward’s estates. The Greek nobles were to guard the Thessalian castles, while he was to have the revenues, and provide out of them for the administration, of the country; as marshal of Thessaly, Guy appointed a nobleman who was viscount, or president of the Court of the Burgesses at Athens; as his bailie and representative in the government of the land the duke chose Antoine le Flamenc, a Fleming who had become lord of Karditza, on the margin of the Copaic lake, where a Greek inscription on the church of St George still commemorates him as its “most pious” founder, and who is described by the chronicler as “the wisest man in all the duchy”. Feudalism, as we saw, had already permeated Thessaly under the rule of the Angeli; it was further strengthened by the Frankish regency; the Greek nobles learnt the French language, and coins with Latin inscrip­tions were issued in the name of the young Despot from the mint of Neopatras.

The fears of the late Despot were speedily fulfilled. Scarcely had Guy returned to his favourite residence of Thebes, when the ambitious Lady Anna of Epiros seized his ward’s Thessalian Castle of Phanari—a place which still rises like a “watch-tower” above the great plain. The Duke of Athens, furious at this audacious act of a mere woman, summoned his vassals and friends, among them his cousin Nicholas de St Omer, to join him in the campaign against the Epirotes. Philip of Savoy, though on good terms with the Duke of Athens, who had done him personal homage for the duchy, the baronies of Argos and Nauplia and his wife’s dowry of Kalamata, refused to give St Omer permission to leave the Morea. But the marshal departed, without his prince’s consent, at the head of 89 horsemen, of whom no less than 13 were belted knights, and joined the duke not far from the field of Domoko, so memorable in the history of modern Greece. When he saw the assembled host, of which the duke begged him to assume the command, he was bound to confess that never in all Romania had he seen a braver show. There were more than 900 Frankish horsemen, all picked men; more than 6000 Thessalian and Bulgarian cavalry, commanded by 18 Greek barons, and fully 30,000 foot-soldiers. Against such a force the Lady Anna felt that she could do nothing; so, before it had advanced far beyond Kalabaka, on the way to Joannina, she offered to restore the stolen castle, and pay a war indemnity of £4480. Her offer was accepted; but, as it seemed desirable to find work for so fine an army, an excuse was made for an attack upon the Greek Empire, with which Athens was then at peace. The troops were already well on the way to Salonika, when the Empress Irene, who was living there separated from her husband, appealed to the chivalry of the Franks not to make war against a weak woman. Guy and his barons were moved by this appeal; they returned to Thessaly, and disbanded their forces.

The crafty Lady of Epiros had succeeded in disarming one enemy; but she soon found herself attacked by another. Philip of Taranto had now been liberated from prison, so that his father thought that the moment had come to demand the performance of those exorbitant conditions, to which the late Despot of Epiros had consented at the time of his daughter’s marriage with the Angevin prince. Philip had not kept his part of the bond; for he had made the beautiful Thamar change her religion and her name; but his father, none the less, expected the precise fulfilment of the marriage-contract by the other side. He now requested the Lady Anna to hand over Epiros to Philip, or else to make her son Thomas do homage to the Prince of Taranto, on which condition he might hold the Despotat as the latter’s vassal. Anna was a woman of spirit and resource; she never forgot that she belonged by birth to the imperial house, and, as a patriotic Greek, she preferred that her son’s dominions, as it seemed difficult to maintain their independence, should belong to the Palaioldgoi rather than to the Angevins. She accordingly made overtures to Andrdnikos II for the marriage of her son with his granddaughter, and replied to the King of Naples that Thomas was the vassal of the emperor alone. She added that the late Despot had no power to violate the laws of nature by disinheriting his son in favour of one of his daughters; she must therefore decline, so long as her son lived, to surrender to Philip anything beyond what he already held. Charles II thought that it would be easy to conquer a woman and a boy; so, on receipt of this answer, he summoned his son’s vassals, Philip of Savoy and Count John I of Cephalonia, to his aid against the Despoina. But the strong walls of Arta, and the natural difficulties of the country, proved too much for the invaders, who soon abandoned their inglorious campaign. Anna prevented the co-operation of Philip of Savoy in a second attack upon her by a judicious bribe of £2688, while Philip, in order to have a plausible excuse for declining his suzerain’s summons, issued invitations to all the vassals of Achaia to attend a general parliament on the Isthmus of Corinth in the following spring of 1305.

On that famous neck of land where in classic days the Isthmian games had been held, the mediaeval chivalry of Greece now assembled for a splendid tournament. All the noblest men in the land came in answer to the summons of the Prince of Achaia. There were Guy II of Athens with a brave body of knights, the Marquis of Boudonitza, and the three barons of Euboea, the Duke of the Archipelago and the Count Palatine John I of Cephalonia —the last anxious for judgment of his peers betwixt his jealous sister and her irascible husband, the Marshal Nicholas de St Omer, who summoned his Theban vassals to his side. Messengers were sent throughout the highlands and islands of Frankish Greece to proclaim to all and sundry how seven champions had come from beyond the seas and did challenge the chivalry of Romania to joust with them. Never had the fair land of Hellas seen a braver sight than that presented by the lists at Corinth in the lovely month of May, when the sky and the twin seas are at their fairest. More than a thousand knights and barons took part in the tournament, which lasted for twenty days, while all the fair ladies of Achaia “rained influence” on the combatants. There were the seven champions, clad in their armour of green taffetas covered with scales of gold; there was the Prince of Achaia, who acquitted himself right nobly in the lists, with all his household. Most impetuous of all was the young Duke of Athens, eager to match his skill in horsemanship and with the lance against Master William Bouchart, justly accounted one of the best jousters of the West. The chivalrous Bouchart would fain have spared his less experienced antagonist. But the duke, who had cunningly padded himself beneath his plate armour, was determined to meet him front to front; their horses collided with such force that the iron spike of Bouchart’s charger pierced Guy’s steed between the shoulders, so that horse and rider rolled in the dust. St Omer would have given much to meet Count John in the lists; but the latter, fearing the marshal’s doughty arm, pretended that his horse could not bear him into the ring, nor could he be shamed into the combat even when Bouchart rode round and round the lists on the animal, crying aloud as he rode, “This is the horse which could not go to the jousts!”. So they kept high revel on the isthmus; alas! it was the last great display of the chivalry of “New France”; six years later many a knight who had ridden proudly past the fair dames of the Morea lay a mangled corpse on the swampy plain of Boeotia.

The tournament at Corinth was Philip’s final appearance on the stage of Greek public life. Charles II had consented with reluctance to his marriage; he was now resolved that the house of Anjou should have the real possession, as well as the shadowy suzerainty, of Achaia. Although Philip had responded to his previous summons to aid him in Epiros, towards the end of 1304 he had renewed his original declara­tion that Isabelle, by marrying without his consent, had forfeited the principality of Achaia, in accordance with the terms laid down at the time of her former marriage with Florent. Philip’s refusal to assist his suzerain in a second Epirote campaign gave the King of Naples a further excuse for deposing the princess and her husband; such a refusal constituted a gross breach of the feudal code, which justified Charles in releasing the Achaian barons from their allegiance to their prince. The latter did not await that final blow; before it was delivered, he had quitted the Morea for his Italian dominions, against which the house of Anjou was also plotting, leaving his old enemy, Nicholas de St Omer, as bailie. If we may believe the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea Isabelle’s elder daughter, Matilda of Athens, claimed Achaia as her heritage from the bailie, who refused to hand it to her without orders from Naples. Her husband retaliated by seizing St Omer’s half of Thebes, including the castle which bore his name. Charles II, however, bestowed the forfeited principality of Achaia upon his favourite son, Philip of Taranto, who soon afterwards arrived there on his way to attack the Lady of Epiros, and received the homage of the Achaian barons. Thus, both the actual possession and the suzerainty of the principality were once more in the hands of the same person. Any claims that Philip of Savoy and Isabelle might still entertain were bought by the King of Naples and his son, who, in exchange for their Greek dominions, promised to give them, upon the death of the existing countess, the county of Alba, on the shores of the Fucine lake, worth 600 gold ounces a year, and to pay them, during the remainder of her life, an annuity of that amount. To the one child of their marriage, little Marguerite of Savoy, Charles II promised sufficient land near Alba to yield a dowry of 200 gold ounces, or £480 a year, on condition that she ceded the two castles of Karytaina and Bucelet, which her parents had bestowed upon her. By way of enhancing the importance of his gift, the king raised Alba to the rank of a principality; but he neither put Philip of Savoy into actual possession of it, nor paid him the promised annuity. Isabelle did not long survive the loss of her inheritance. In 1311, disregarding these arrangements with the King of Naples, she made a will, leaving her elder daughter, Matilda, heiress of all Achaia, with the exception of the three castles of Karytaina, Beauvoir (above Katakolo), and Beauregard (also in Elis), which were to form the dowry of her younger daughter, Marguerite. In the same year, Isabelle died in Holland— the country of her second husband. Philip of Savoy almost immediately remarried; and though his and Isabelle’s daughter, Marguerite, renounced all her claims to Greece on her marriage in 1324, his descendants by his second marriage continued to style themselves “Princes of Achaia” till the extinction of their line a century later, and, like their ancestor, issued coins with that title engraved- upon them. One of these Piedmontese princes even endeavoured to make good his pretensions, and down to the last century illegitimate descendants of Philip of Savoy usurped the name of Achaia.

Princess Isabelle of Achaia is one of the most striking figures in the portrait-gallery of the ladies of the Latin Orient. Affianced when a mere child to a foreign prince whom she had never seen; torn from her home and sent to live in an Italian castle, which was to be almost a prison; widowed at an age when most women are not yet wed; separated for long years from her fatherland, till at last she was allowed to return as the wife of a gallant Flemish adventurer; widowed again, and then remarried, midst the pomp and ceremony of the papal court, to a third husband, only to die, after all these vicissitudes, still in middle age, an exile in a distant northern land, she was throughout her life the victim of dynastic politics. A brave woman, every inch a Villehardouin, she did not flinch from meeting the boldest corsair of that age on the sea shore; deeply imbued with piety, she founded the monastery of Sta. Chiara, near Olena. We can see her still, as she rode through the streets of Naples on her “sombre brown pillion of Douai cloth,” which the careful Angevin provided for his prisoner of state—a cheap price to pay for keeping in his clutches the “Lady of the Morea.”

Philip of Taranto did not remain long in his Peloponnesian principality. As soon as he had received the homage of the barons, who were not sorry to be rid of his extortionate namesake, he set out for Epiros, to substantiate his claims there. But, woman as she was, the Lady Anna was too much for the Neapolitan prince; an epidemic came to her aid, and he returned unsuccessful to Naples. As his bailie in Achaia he appointed Guy II, Duke of Athens, the most important of all the contemporary Frankish rulers of Greece, whose wife, Matilda, as the elder daughter of Isabelle, would naturally represent in the eyes of the Moreot barons the princely house of Villehardouin. In this way, perhaps, he hoped to satisfy her claims. Two years earlier, when still only twelve, she had attained her majority, and the festival had been cele­brated at Thebes with all the customary splendour of the Athenian court, in the presence of her widowed aunt, the Lady of Akova, Nicholas de St Omer, the two archbishops of Athens and Thebes, and other high ecclesiastical and civic dignitaries.

It was, indeed, a time of great prosperity for the Athenian duchy, whose ruler was at once Duke of Athens, regent of Thessaly, and bailie of Achaia. We have already seen how great were the riches and position of the duke, who delighted in splendid apparel, and whose frescoed Theban castle rang with the songs of minstrels. Nor was this prosperity merely superficial. Now, for the first time, we find Attica supplying Venice with corn, which usually had to be imported into the duchy from the south of Italy; while the gift of silken garments to Boniface VIII is a proof of the continued manufacture of silk at Thebes. No less than three series of coins were required for the commercial needs of the duchy in his reign. Athens, too, was a religious centre. We find Pope Nicholas IV granting indulgences to all who visited “Santa Maria di Atene” on the festivals of the Virgin, of St James the Apostle, and St Eligius, and on the anniversary of its dedication as a Christian church. It was now, too, that the canon Nicholas de la Roche founded an ecclesiastical building, perhaps the belfry of the ancient church of Great St Mary’s, which stood till a few years ago, in the Stoa of Hadrian, while the great Byzantine monastery of Hdsios Loukds, near Delphi, received fresh lustre from the presence of the dowager duchess within its walls. Not far away, on an islet in the Gulf of Corinth, the persecuted Eremites from Italy begged Thomas of Salona to give them a refuge, only to find that even there the long arm of the mundane pope could reach them. Prosperous, indeed, must have been the region round Parnassos, for “the hero” Thomas had his private mint, which his jealous lord, the duke, tried to prohibit. But the days of the ducal family were drawing to a close. The splendid magnificence of the duke could not conceal the incurable malady which was undermining his health; he had no heirs of his body; and, to the north, there lay that company of wandering Catalan warriors, which was already a menace to his dominions.

A hundred years had passed away since the Conquest, and Greece, in this first decade of the fourteenth century, was practically divided between the Duke of Athens, the Angevins, the Orsini, the Greeks, and the Venetians. The house of Anjou had obtained possession of Achaia from the family of the conqueror, had established itself in the finest of the Ionian islands, and had gained a footing here and there on the coast of Epiros. The Orsini had tightened their hold over their county palatine in the Ionian Sea, but neither Angevins nor Orsini had absorbed the Greeks, who were their neighbours. If Frankish influence, personified by the Duke of Athens and his viceroy, was predominant in Thessaly, an able and unscrupulous woman still held Epiros for the national cause, while the pope plaintively wrote that “much of Achaia was in Greek hands,” and in vain ordered a tithe to be levied and paid to its prince for the recovery of what had been lost. Venice, however, had maintained and strengthened her three colonies of Modon, Coron, and Negroponte. Lluria had spared the two Messenian stations on his cruise round the Morea, because their Venetian masters were at peace with the house of Aragon; but the republic, none the less, constructed an arsenal at Coron, and restored the walls of Modon. Their trade naturally suffered when the dominions of the republic were laid under an interdict by the pope, and after the great earthquake of 1304; but such was their prosperity in 1291, that it was ordered that 2000 ounces should be sent to Venice every year out of their surplus revenues, and a little later the salaries of their officials were raised. Finding that the wives of the governors interfered in the colonial administration, and that their sons engaged in commerce, the Home Government made a rule, that they must leave their female belongings and their grown-up sons behind them in Venice. Stringent regulations were also issued for the protection of the peasants’ property, and it was the policy of the republican authorities to keep on good terms with both their Greek and Frankish neighbours; to the latter, however, they did not hesitate to lend the services of the famous engineers of Coron whenever there was a castle to besiege.

We last saw the island of Euboea almost entirely in the hands of the Greeks, thanks to the energy of Licario; but before the close of the century, the imperial garrisons had all been driven out of the island. The first step was the recovery of the two castles of La Clisura and Argalia, by treachery; as the island was specially excepted from the truce of 1285 between Venice and Andrdnikos II, the process of reconquest could go on more or less uninterruptedly; till, finally, the quarrels between the Venetians and their Genoese rivals at Constantinople led, in 1296, to the renewal of hostilities between the former and the Greek Empire, and so afforded an excellent opportunity for recapturing the last remaining Byzantine fortresses of Karystos, Larmena, and Metropyle. The credit for this final blow belonged to Bonifacio da Verona, who thus obtained posses­sion of the noble castle of southern Euboea, which had been part of his wife’s dowry; henceforth, in fact, as well as in name, the prime favourite of Duke Guy of Athens was baron of Karystos, and the most important of all the Lombard lords in the island. But the real influence over Euboea was gradually passing into the hands of the Venetians. Not only did the latter buy more land round about Chalkis, but by the usual ill-luck which attended Frankish marriages in the Levant, the three great baronies of Negroponte were at this time almost entirely in the possession of women, so that the Venetian bailie acquired a predominant position, which was further enhanced by the popularity of several of those officials. The elder Sanudo, however, a Venetian himself, noticed that the Greek peasants preferred the Genoese to the Venetians, hastening down to the shore with provisions as soon as a Genoese galley hove in sight, but by no means displaying the like alacrity when they descried the Venetian flag. And, as the same author shrewdly observed, “in Candia, Negroponte, and other islands, and in the principality of the Morea, although those places are subject to the Frankish sway and obedient to the Roman Church, yet almost all the inhabitants are Greeks, and inclined to that sect, and their hearts are turned towards things Greek; and, if they had a chancfe of displaying their preference freely, they would do so”. A bigoted French bishop, like Gautier de Ray of Negroponte, cousin of the Duke of Athens, could still further estrange the “schismatic” Greeks from the Catholic fold. One other section of the community in that city —the Jews— had no special reason for loving the Venetian administration, for it was upon them that the burden of taxation was more especially laid. Thus, when the salaries of the two Venetian councillors were increased, as compensation for their exclusion from trade, the difference was ordered to be defrayed by the Jews, who had also, in 1304, to pay the cost of fortifying with strong walls and gates the hitherto open Venetian quarter of the city of Negroponte. This precaution, followed by an order that henceforth the bailie and one of the two councillors must always reside within the walls, was due to an attempt by the Lombards to levy taxes on a Venetian citizen; it was then that Chalkis assumed the picturesque appearance of a walled city, which, in spite of modern acts of Vandalism, it still preserves. Occasionally, however, a Jewish family was specially exempted from taxation, as a reward for its loyalty to the republic. Thus, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Eubcea possessed for Venice an importance second to that of Crete alone. It became the station of a Venetian fleet, and during the maritime war against Andronikos II, which was concluded by the ten years’ truce of 1303, it was a convenient basis whence privateers and armatores could swoop down upon those islands of the Archipelago which Licario had wrested from their Latin lords.

Such was the condition of Greece, when a new race of conquerors from the West suddenly appeared there, and destroyed in a single day the most magnificent fabric which the Franks had raised in “New France”.

CHAPTER VII

THE CATALAN GRAND COMPANY (1302-131)