MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

A HISTORY OF FRANKISH GREECE (1204-1566)

CHAPTER IX

THE RISE OF THE ACCIAJUOLI (1333-1373)

The arrangement between John of Gravina and the titular empress, Catherine of Valois, had had the advantage of uniting all the Angevin dominions in Greece —the principality of Achaia, the county of Cephalonia, the castle of Lepanto, and the island of Corfu —in a single hand, and henceforth the jurisdiction of the Angevin bailie and the other chief functionaries of the Morea extended to the adjacent island of Cephalonia and to the “royal fortress” on the opposite coast of the Corinthian Gulf. Fortunately, too, although Robert, the young Prince of Achaia, for whom the empress had purchased the principality, was still a minor, his mother, who exercised supreme authority in his name, and even occasionally used the style of Princess, was endowed with very masculine qualities, which she soon began to display in the management of this substantial fragment of her shadowy empire. A strong ruler was, indeed, much needed in the Morea, where the lax control of the late prince and the confusion of the last twenty years had increased the spirit of independence among the great barons, never at any time very tolerant of dictation.

Among these feudal lords, the most important were the Archbishop of Patras and the Genoese family of Zaccaria, whom we have already seen ruling the island of Chios, and who had lately acquired a footing in the Morea, to which they were destined, later on, to give its last Frankish prince. Both of these great personages considered themselves practically independent. Martino Zaccaria had succeeded the extinct family of De la Roche as baron of Damala in Argolis, where he actually dared to issue coins of his own. He had succeeded, too, the house of Trémouille at Chalandritza, and though the Greek Emperor had lately captured both him and his rich island, his son Centurione was in possession of both his Peloponnesian baronies. The Empress Catherine was specially warned of the designs which this crafty Levantine nourished against her authority by Niccold di Bojano, a Neapolitan treasury official who drew up a report upon the state of her son’s principality. Centurione, he told her, must be put in his proper place, or else neither she nor her son would ever obtain theirs in the Morea.Patras, too, under its great archbishop, Guglielmo Frangipani, was practically autonomous, and Bertrand de Baux, the bailie whom the empress sent to govern Achaia, took the opportunity of his death to occupy the town and to besiege the castle. Pope Benedict XII entered a vigorous protest against this proceeding, claiming that Patras was under the direct jurisdiction of the archbishop, as the representative of the Holy See to which it belonged. He therefore ordered the bishops of Olena and Coron to lay the peninsula under an interdict. These difficulties convinced the empress that her presence was needed in the Morea; so, in 1338, she set out for Patras, accompanied by her trusted adviser, Niccold Acciajuoli.

We have already had occasion to mention this remarkable man, whose house was destined, in characteristically modem fashion, to supplant the noble chivalry of Frankish Greece. The history of the Acciajuoli bears a striking resemblance to that of the great financiers of our own time. After they had become famous, courtly biographers provided them with a pedigree stretching back as far as the sixth century, according to which the founder of the family was Angelo, brother of the Emperor Justin II, and one of its members was created a baron of the holy Roman Empire by Frederick Barbarossa. As a matter of fact, the Acciajuoli owed their origin to an enterprising citizen of Brescia, the Sheffield of Italy, who moved to Florence about 1160 and there established a steel-manufactory, which gave them their name. The “steel-workers” made money, lent it out at interest, and in due course became bankers, who played their part in the municipal life of their adopted city. They were also politicians of a practical sort, whose devotion to the Guelph cause brought them into relation with the Neapolitan Angevins, when the Florentines solicited the protection of King Robert of Naples against their Ghibelline enemies. That sagacious monarch rewarded one of the firm for his skill in transacting the royal business with the dignity of chamber­lain and privy councillor, and the latter naturally thought that in the management of the Naples branch his son would find an excellent opening. In 1331, when barely of age, young Niccold Acciajuoli arrived there accompanied by a single servant. But his skill in business, combined with an agreeable presence and chivalrous manners, won him the favour, perhaps the affection, of the titular empress, Catherine of Valois, who was left a widow in that year with three sons to bring up. He assisted her with their education, and it was he who arranged, as we saw, the exchange of the duchy of Durazzo for the principality of Achaia. The bank, of which he was the representative, was already interested in Greece, which the Italian financiers of that age regarded much as their modern representatives in London regard the colonies. Having succeeded in making his pupil Robert Prince of Achaia, the astute Niccolo resolved to acquire lands in the principality on his own account. He accordingly persuaded the bank to transfer to him the two estates, which it had received from John of Gravina, rounded them off by purchasing adjacent land, and further increased his holding by other properties at Andravida, Prinitza, Kalamata, and in the island of Cephalonia, which the empress bestowed upon him as the reward of his services. He thus became a vassal of the principality, taking care, however, to obtain from his patroness the reduction of the feudal burdens attaching to his lands and the permission to dispose of them to any person capable of rendering the requisite military service. Before his departure for Greece, he provided that, in the event of his death, the revenues of these estates should be devoted to building that splendid Certosa near Florence, which is still his chief monument.

The empress and her astute adviser must soon have seen for themselves the dangers to which Achaia was exposed. The Catalans of Attica were awkward neighbours, who required all the vigilance of the Knights of the Teutonic order; the Greeks had encroached on the principality from without, while within they now held many important offices; worst of all, the Turks, who had made enormous progress in Asia, now ravaged the Greek coast-line. The soundest and best managed portion of the principality was Patras, and the empress, who resided there, accordingly came to the con­clusion that her wisest course, especially as she needed papal aid against the Turks, was to disavow her too officious bailie, and recognise the authority of the Holy See over that temporal barony. Henceforth, the archbishop could truly say that he held the town direct from the pope.

Catherine remained two years in Greece, during which time Acciajuoli spared neither his purse nor his personal comfort in the cause of the principality. At his own expense he built a fort to defend the once fair vale of Kalamata, the garden of Greece, which was then lying a desolate waste, and his services were further rewarded by the gift of that barony, the fortress of Piada, near Epidauros, and other lands. Thus, as a large Peloponnesian landowner and the representative of his firm at the Glarentza branch, which then ranked in their books as of equal importance with their London office, the Florentine banker had a stake in the country which gave him a direct interest in its preservation, and induced him, even after the departure of his mistress, to act for a time as her bailie in Greece. He calculated, indeed, that, from first to last, his bank had sunk 40,000 ounces in the Morea. When he returned to Italy in 1341, Boccaccio, afterwards his bitter enemy, addressed him an enthusiastic letter of welcome, in which he compared him to a second Ulysses.

During her stay at Patras, the empress had also endeavoured to restore her influence in the Despotat of Epiros, where Lepanto alone remained of the former Angevin possessions. In 1335, the Italian Despot, John II, had met with the reward of his crimes at the hand of his “wise and learned” wife, who had poisoned him from fear of suffering a similar fate herself. She then assumed the regency for her youthful son, Nikephoros II, with the acquiescence of some, at least, of her unruly subjects. But the Emperor Andronikos III thought that the moment had now come for reuniting Epiros with the Byzantine Empire, especially as he had lately been forced to expel the Epirote garrisons from Kalabaka, Trikkala, and other places in Thessaly, which they had occupied on the death of Gabrielopoulos, the local magnate who had ruled there. At the news of his approach, the regent herself advised submission, as resistance seemed hopeless, so that Andronikos was able to accomplish without bloodshed what his predecessors had in vain struggled to obtain. No Greek emperor had visited Epiros since the time of Manuel I, nearly two centuries earlier; but the tour which Andronikos made through the cities of the Despotat was not so much due to curiosity as to the desire to let his new subjects see that he wished to understand their requirements. Judicious grants of titles and annuities to leading men were intended to console the Epirotes for the loss of their independence, while the regent was prudently ordered to leave the country. But the love of freedom had become ingrained in the breasts of others of the natives by the experience of more than a century; with their connivance and the aid of his Frankish tutor, young Nikephoros, a boy with ambitions far above his years, fled across to the Empress Catherine at Patras, and asked her to restore him to his throne. The empress saw that he might be made the tool of Angevin interests in Epiros, and ordered one of her Neapolitan suite to conduct the lad back to his faithful subjects, who had meanwhile expelled the Byzantine viceroy and were clamouring for him. Andronikos, accompanied by the future emperor, John Cantacuzene, now returned to Akarnania, where the latter’s diplomacy was more successful than the former’s strategy. The most obstinate resistance was offered by “Thomas’s Castle,” whither Nikephoros had fled, a strong fortress on the Adriatic, christened after the last Greek Despot, which could be easily provisioned from the sea. But, although the Empress Catherine sent a small fleet and troops from the Morea to assist her prottgt, the arguments of Cantacuzene at last induced the garrison to surrender. He told them that the Angevins, in spite of their frequent efforts to conquer their country, had never succeeded in holding more than a few isolated positions, like Lepanto, Vonitza, and Butrinto, and those only with the consent of the Despot. Allies so weak, he said, would be of no avail against the imperial forces; while, even if they were, they would conquer Epiros for themselves and not for the Epirotes, in which case the natives would be the slaves of the Latins. “If you surrender”, he concluded, “I will give my own daughter to Nikephoros, and will treat him as a son; my master will load him with honours, of which you too shall have your share”. At this, the garrison opened the gates; the whole country once more recognised the authority of the emperor, and Nikephoros, scarcely compensated by a high-sounding Byzantine title, was led away to Salonika.

The specious arguments of Cantacuzene at Thomokastron had had their effect upon the Moreot troops, whom the empress had sent to aid in defending that castle. When they returned home, and found Catherine and her skilful minister gone, and the Turks ravaging their coasts unchecked, they reflected that in the Morea, too, the Angevins were powerless to aid. Impressed with the tact of Cantacuzene, whose father had been governor of Mistra, and who had himself been offered that post twenty years earlier, they entered into negotiations with him in 1341 for the cession of the principality of Achaia. Their envoys, the Bishop of Coron, and a half-caste, near Siderds, told the great man that he had won their hearts by his conduct in Epiros, and begged him to come in person and take over their country. All they asked was to keep their fiefs, and to pay the same taxes to the emperor as they now paid to their prince; on these terms they were ready to do homage and receive an imperial viceroy. Cantacuzene was naturally flattered by this request, not, as he told them, the first of the kind; he promised to visit the Morea in the following spring, sending meanwhile a confidential agent to win over dissentients and to show that he was in earnest. But the grandiose scheme which he had formed of thus reuniting the Byzantine Empire from Tainaron to Constantinople was never accomplished. The great Servian tsar, Stephen Dushan, had now begun his meteoric career of conquest at the expense of the Greek Empire, while the latter was soon distracted by the intrigues of the rival emperors, John Cantacuzene and John Palaiologos.

Besides the party of Cantacuzene, there was still a section of the Franks which regarded King James II of Majorca, the grandson of the Lady of Akova, as the lawful Prince of Achaia. The King of Majorca, whom we last saw carried in Muntaner’s arms as a baby of a few weeks, had now grown up to manhood, and accordingly the cause for which his father, Ferdinand of Majorca, had fallen more than twenty years before was revived, though the old Catalan chronicler was no longer there to fight for it. A formal memoir was drawn up and sent to him, setting forth his rights, based upon the alleged will of his great-grandfather, Guillaume de Villehardouin, to the effect that if one of his two daughters died childless, the principality should go to the other or her heirs. Even so, James II would have had no claim, for Isabelle de Villehardouin’s daughter by her third marriage, Marguerite of Savoy, was still living; but the barons did not consider her existence as an obstacle to their plans. Their memorial informed the King of Mallorca that the island of Negroponte with its two great barons, Pietro dalle Carceri and Bartolomeo Ghisi, who then held all the three divisions of the island between them; the duchy of Naxos, then governed by Nicholas Sanudo; and the duchy of Athens, were all vassal states of the principality, though in the case of the last the feudal tie was ignored by the Catalans, “our bitterest foes”. The whole peninsula, they told him, was divided between Prince Robert of Taranto, a minor and an absentee, for whom Bertrand de Baux, now restored to favour, was again acting as vicar; the titular duke of Athens, Walter of Brienne, who held Argos and Nauplia from Robert; the Venetians, independent masters of Modon and Coron; and the Greek Emperor. The whole principality contained more than 1000 baronies and knights’ fees, each worth on an average 300 pounds of Barcelona a year; after deducting all expenses for garrisoning the castles, this would leave the prince with a nett revenue of 100,000 florins. This document, which gives a clear account of the Morea as it was in 1344, was signed by Roger, Archbishop of Patras; Philippe de Joinville, baron of Vostitza; Erard le Noir of St Sauveur, grandson of the man who had deserted the Infant of Majorca; Alibert de Luc, perhaps a descendant of one of the original barons of the Conquest, and many others. James II adopted the title of “Prince of Achaia” —a style assumed with about equal reason by another James, son of Philip of Savoy by his second marriage, and by Omarbeg of Aidin, who had at least plundered his “principality.” But his only act in that capacity was to confer upon Erard le Noir the hereditary dignity of Marshal of Achaia —an honour which was perhaps deserved, if we may believe the high praise bestowed by the anonymous chronicler of the Morea upon the benevolence of that baron, “a true friend to the poor man and the orphan”. In 1349 James II fell, like his father, in battle, fighting against the Aragonese, who had dispossessed him of his kingdom.

Meanwhile, the growing Turkish peril had convinced the popes that it was wise to recognise the Catalan occupation of Athens as an accomplished fact. Three years after Walter of Brienne’s unsuccessful expedition, Benedict XII had ordered the Archbishop of Patras to excommunicate once more the leaders of the Company—William, Duke of Athens; Nicholas Lancia, his vicar-general; Alfonso Fadrique and his two sons, Peter of Salona and James; and many more. But Archbishop Isnard of Thebes, who was better acquainted with the local needs than the pope, and who saw the growing tendency of his flock to join the Orthodox Church, not only annulled this sentence of excommunication on his own authority, but also celebrated mass before the Company in the Theban minster; and, though Benedict at first disapproved of this arbitrary act and ordered the renewal of the excommunication, he came to see that the Catalans might be useful as a buffer state between the Turks and the West, and disregarded the ineffectual protest of the exiled Duke of Athens. The Latin Patriarch of Constantinople acted as intermediary; on his way to his residence at Negroponte, he stopped in Attica, where he found the Catalans willing to return to the bosom of the Church. He communicated their prayer to Benedict, who replied that he would hear it, if they would send envoys to Rome. His successor, Clement VI, anxious to form a coalition against the Turks, charged the patriarch with the task of making peace between the Catalans and Walter of Brienne, gave them absolution for three years, and invited Prince Robert of Achaia and his mother, the Empress Catherine, to contribute galleys to the allied fleet. The crusade had small results, but the reconciliation between the Catalans and the papacy was complete. Henceforth, those “sons of perdition” were regarded as respectable members of Christendom. Unfortunately, soon after they became respectable, they ceased to be formidable. Occasionally, the old Adam broke out, as when Peter Fadrique of Salona is found plying the trade of a pirate with the aid of the unspeakable Turk. But their Thessalian conquests were slipping away from the luxurious and drunken progeny of the hardy warriors who had smitten the Franks at the Kephissos, while the Venetians of Negroponte had no longer cause to fear their once dreaded neighbours. When the bailie wanted money for public purposes he borrowed it from a Catalan knight of Athens; when a Catholic Bishop of Andros had to be consecrated, the Athenian Archbishop came to perform the ceremony of laying hands on his suffragan in the church of the Eubcean capital—an arrange­ment which shows that the ecclesiastical organisation of Athens had not been disturbed by the Catalan conquest. And in the war against Genoa, the Catalans rendered yeoman’s service to the Venetians at Oreos.

Meanwhile, in distant Sicily, the shadowy Dukes of Athens and Neopatras came and went without ever seeing their Greek duchies. Duke William died in 1338, and his successors in the title, John and Frederick of Randazzo, the picturesque town built on the lava of Etna, both succumbed to the plague ten and seventeen years later —mere names in the history of Athens, where almost their only known acts are in connexion with the castle of Athens and the church of St Michael at Livadia. Soon, however, after the death of the latter, in 1355, his namesake and successor became also King of Sicily under the title of Frederick III. Thus, the two Greek duchies, which had hitherto been the appanage of younger members of the royal family, were now united with the Sicilian crown. For a moment, indeed, in 1357, the new King of Sicily, hard pressed by enemies in his own island, actually proposed to purchase the aid of Pedro IV of Aragon by bestowing Athens and Neopatras upon that sovereign’s consort and his own sister, Eleonora. But as no help was forthcoming from his brother-in-law, the proposal fell through.

The new duke found himself at once called upon to answer two petitions from his distant subjects. Shortly before the death of his namesake and predecessor, a deputation had arrived from Athens and Neopatras, begging for the removal of Ramon Bernardi, the then vicar-general of the duchies, which were declared by the petitioners to be in danger, owing to the lack of proper authority. They suggested as suitable candidates for the post, Orlando de Aragona, a bastard of the house of Sicily, or one of Alfonso Fadrique’s sons, James and John. Frederick III granted the prayer of the petitioners, and appointed James Fadrique vicar-general; a second petition prayed the duke to reward his strenuous labours in defence of the duchies. What those labours were the document does not specify; but we learn from another source that one of his services to his sovereign was to crush a revolt of Ermengol de Novelles, the hereditary marshal. We may surmise that the dualism between that powerful noble and the vicar-general had now developed into open rebellion; we know that the marshal lost his strong fortress of Siderokastron, which James Fadrique added to his own lands, and which his royal master confirmed to him; and we may assume that the De Novelles family was further punished by the loss of the marshal’s b&ton, which is known to have been held by Roger de Lluria during the rest of Ermengol’s lifetime. On the present occasion the petitioners begged that the loyal James might have assigned to him as his reward the castles of Salona and Loidoriki with their appurtenances, which were his by law. They had belonged to his father, and had descended from him to his eldest son Peter, on whose demise without children, they should have come to James as next-of-kin. Owing, however, as it would appear, to the disturbed state of the duchy, those great possessions had been withheld from him. All these facts point to the mutual jealousy of the great Catalan feudatories of each other, a jealousy which was sure to break out in civil war, whenever the vicar-general was weak. Naturally, an hereditary office-holder like the marshal, with a large stake in the country and a powerful Greek connection, would be a dangerous rival to a foreigner from Sicily, the creature of a distant sovereign.

James Fadrique did not long retain the office which the envoys of the duchies had begged the King of Sicily to bestow upon him. Possibly, like his father, he had enemies at court, who represented to his suspicious master that he was too powerful and too independent; at any rate, in 1359, Gonsalvo Ximenes de Arenos had succeeded him as vicar-general. In that year, however, the post was conferred upon a great Sicilian noble, Matteo Moncada, or Montecateno, whose family had come from Cataluña to Sicily after the Vespers. Frederick added to his vicar’s dignity by conferring upon him the lordships of Argos and Corinth and the marquisate of Boudonitza—dignities which were not his to bestow. For Argos still belonged to Guy d’Enghien; Corinth had lately been bestowed upon Niccoló Acciajuoli; while Boudonitza, though threatened by the Catalan Company, was in the possession of the Zorzi—an outpost against attacks from the north, where a new power was now established.

The five years’ civil war between John Cantacuzene and John Palaiologos and the Napoleonic career of Stephen Dushan, the great Servian tsar, who for a few years made the Serbs the dominant race of the Balkan Peninsula, had profoundly affected Northern Greece. Cantacuzene’s popularity was not confined to the Morea; from Thessaly, where the Byzantine Empire had latterly recovered much lost ground, but where the Albanians had seized the moment of the late emperor’s death to plunder the towns, and from Akarnania, where his recent exploits were remembered, and whither the widow of the late Despot had escaped, came invitations to assume the government of those provinces. Cantacuzene was unable to go there in person at so critical a moment in his career; but he appointed as life governor of Thessaly his nephew John Angelos, an experienced soldier and a man of affairs, who assisted him with the famed Thessalian cavalry, completed the downfall of Catalan rule in that region, and made himself master of ^Etolia and Akarnania, taking the ambitious Anna prisoner. He died, however, in 1349, and the great Servian tsar, who had already extended his sway as far as Joannina, then annexed the rest of north-west Greece and Thessaly to his vast empire, which extended from Belgrade to Arta. Besides styling himself “Tsar and Autocrat of the Serbs and Greeks, the Bulgarians and Albanians”, Dushan now assumed the titles of “Despot of Arta and Count of Wallachia”. He assigned Akarnania and zEtolia to his brother, Simeon Urosh, who endeavoured to conciliate native sympathies by marrying Thomais, the sister of the deposed Despot Nike­phoros II, while a Serb magnate, named Preliub, received Joannina and Thessaly, with the title of Caesar, and made even the Venetians tremble in their settlement at Pteleon.

While Thessaly and north-west Greece had thus passed in the middle of the fourteenth century under Servian rule, there had been, by way of compensation, a Greek revival in the Morea. In 1348, the Emperor John Cantacuzene, remembering the long connection of his family with a country in which both his father and grandfather had died, and of which he had been himself offered the governorship, sent his second son Manuel as governor to Mistra, not merely for a term of years, but for life. Manuel remained Despot of the Byzantine province till his death in 1380, and his long rule of thirty-two years contributed greatly to the prosperity of the Greek portion of the peninsula. Henceforth, Mistra assumed more and more importance as the seat of a younger member of the imperial family; and, as the Turks drew closer to Constantinople, more and more value was set on the strongly fortified hill near Sparta, whose fine Byzantine buildings still testify to the piety and the splendour of the Despots, and still bear their quaint monograms. The early years of the century, as we saw, had witnessed great ecclesiastical activity at Mistr£. Manuel continued in the footsteps of Andronikos II; he erected a church of the Saviour; and a poem addressed by him to his father long adorned the church of the Divine Wisdom. As is usual where there are Greeks, there was a desire for books at the new Sparta, and we are therefore not surprised to find men engaged in copying manuscripts there. Later on, when the Emperor John Cantacuzene had abandoned the throne for the garb of a monk, he spent a year with his son at Mistra, and there, in 1383, he died and was buried. He has given us in his history a graphic picture of the state of the peninsula at the moment of his son’s appointment. Turkish raids, the rule of the Franks, and, worst of all, the constant internecine quarrels of the Greeks had brought the country to the verge of ruin. The towns had been divided by the party strife of their citizens, the villages had been devastated by foreign foes; agriculture was neglected, so that the Morea was “worse than the proverbial Scythian desert”. The imperial historian, no mean judge of men, gives the Moreot archons much the same character as Nikitas Choniates had given them more than a century and a half earlier: “Neither good nor evil fortune, nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual enmity, which not only endures during their lifetime, but descends as a heritage to their children. These modern Spartans neglect all the laws of Lycurgus, but obey one of Solon— that which punishes those citizens who remain neutral in party strife!”. Men of this kind, like the Albanians of today, had no appreciation for firm government, which interfered with their time-honoured custom of cutting one another’s throats in some faction fight. They soon found a leader in a certain Lampoudios, the cleverest scoundrel of them all, who had already rebelled against the Despot, but had been pardoned and provided with opportunities of rehabilitating his ruined fortunes. One of Manuel’s wise measures was the creation of a navy for coast defence against the small bands of Turks from Asia Minor, which constantly molested the Peloponnesian coasts. For this purpose, he proposed to levy ship-money on the inhabitants, and the crafty Lampoudios begged, and obtained, permission to collect it. He went all over the country, like a born demagogue, reproaching the people with being “voluntary slaves ” of the Despot, creatures unworthy of their ancestors, the heroes who had fought—against each otherwhile the Franks were conquering Greece. The taunt and the threatened tax had their effect; the people rose at a given signal, seized the chief officials of the towns and villages, and marched on Mistra. But the news that the Despot was preparing to attack them with the 300 men of his Byzantine bodyguard, and a few Albanian mercenaries, who now for the first time appear in the history of the Morea, sufficed to cause a general panic. Manuel with his usual clemency pardoned the rebels, who for a long time kept the peace. But that their behaviour was due to fear rather than gratitude was demonstrated when his father fell and the Emperor John Palaiologos sent Michael and Andrew Axsan as governors to the Morea. The whole province, with the exception of one faithful city, went over to the newcomers, but Manuel stood firm, drove out the Asans and secured his recognition by the imperial government. Henceforth, the Greeks acquiesced in his mild but firm rule; the local magnates abandoned politics for the less exciting pursuit of agriculture, and it became the fashion to acquire large estates and to develop the country. Those who know the Greek distaste for rural life will realise how marvellous the influence of Manuel must have been. The Cantacuzenes wisely based their national policy upon the support of the national Church; thus the emperor in 1348 confirmed by a golden bull the possessions of the great monastery of Megaspelaion, a direct dependency, or stavropegion, of the Patriarchate, which his predecessors had favoured, and the monks continued to dispose of their serfs as they chose; six years later, the monastery was assigned by the patriarch as residence for life to the Greek metropolitan of Patras, “Exarch of all Achaia”, who since the Latin Conquest had been, of course, unable to occupy his titular see. All these things testified to the great Greek revival in the Morea. With his Frankish neighbours, however, Manuel was usually on excellent terms; they, too, learnt to respect his truthfulness, for his word was as good as his oath, and he never broke his engagements with them. Having been defeated by him at the outset, they became his allies, and agreed to assist him both within and without the peninsula at their own expense. This alliance proved most successful in repelling the Turks, who were now a serious danger to Franks and Greeks alike.  

The Ottomans have always made and retained their conquests in the Near East, thanks to the quarrels of the Christians, and it was the internal disputes of the Catalan state which now introduced them into Greece. In 1361, Moncada had been succeeded as vicar-general of the duchies by Roger de Lluria, a relative and namesake of the great Aragonese admiral, who had ravaged the Morea seventy years earlier. The Lluria family had gained influence at Thebes, of which city Roger’s brother had recently been governor, while Roger himself had received grants from John and Frederick of Randazzo, and held the great office of marshal. There was, however, a party at the capital opposed to this now predominant family, while the new vicar found himself simultaneously involved in a quarrel with the Venetians of Euboea arising out of a number of petty grievances on both sides. Thus pressed, Lluria resorted to the traditional policy of the Catalan Company and called in the Turks to his aid. They had not far to come, for Murad I. had now transferred the Turkish capital from Brusa to Adrianople, and they were already casting longing eyes on Greece. They readily responded to his summons, and in 1363 Thebes, the capital of the Catalan duchy, was occupied by these dangerous allies. The archbishop and an influential deputation from various communities in the duchies hastened to Sicily to lay their grievances before their duke. Frederick III listened to the tale of their sufferings, re­appointed Moncada vicar-general, and ordered Lluria to obey the latter’s orders. Pope Urban V, too, appealed to the religious sentiments of Lluria and his brother, and urged the Lombards and Venetians of Euboea and the primate of Achaia to prevent the “profane multitude of infidel Turks’’ from entering the Morea, as was their intention. The common danger, even more than the papal admonitions, aroused all those interested in the peninsula to combine in its defence. The united efforts of Gautier de Lor, the bailie of Achaia, the Frankish barons, the Despot Manuel, the Knights of St John, and a Venetian fleet succeeded in burning thirty-five Turkish galleys which were lying off Megara. At this the Turks perforce abandoned their projected invasion, and retreated to their ally’s capital of Thebes. The loyal union of Greeks and Latins had saved the Morea. This alone would entitle Manuel Cantacuzene to the eulogies which his father and his father’s devoted friend, the litterateur Demetrios Kydones, bestowed upon his wise administration.

The distracted Frankish principality, nominally subject to an alien and absent prince, offered a sad contrast to the Byzantine province under a resident native governor. Prince Robert, who assumed the title of Emperor of Constantinople on the death of the Empress Catherine in 1346, from that moment never set foot in Achaia; indeed, he was for several years a prisoner in Hungary; and his main interest in his Greek dominions was that they enabled him to present large estates to his wife. He had married in 1347 Marie de Bourbon, widow of Hugues IV, King of Cyprus, and to her he assigned lands in Corfu and Cephalonia, the old Villehardouin family fief of Kalamata, and other places in Achaia, to which she added by purchase the baronies of Vostitza and Nivelet. The frequent changes of the Angevin bailies, which are recorded in the Aragonese Chronicle of the Morea at this period, naturally weakened still further the authority of the absent prince, while real power fell more and more into the hands of the Archbishop of Patras and the family of the Acciajuoli, who at last became identical. After his departure from Greece, Niccold Acciajuoli had not forgotten to look after his great interests in that country. We may dismiss the story of a much later Neapolitan historian, that he was sent by Queen Joanna I of Naples to receive the homage of the Athenians, whom the writer imagines to have been brought under her authority by two enterprising men from Lecce —an obvious mistake, due to the subsequent rule of his family there. But he added to his already large possessions in Achaia the fortress of Vourkano, at the foot of classic Ithome, the picturesque site of the present monastery, and in 1358 received from Prince Robert the town and castle of Corinth, which was part of the princely domain; two years afterwards, one of his family became through his influence Archbishop of Patras, a dignity subsequently held by two others of this clan, and estimated to be worth more than 16,000 florins a year.

The bestowal of the great fortress of Corinth upon the shrewd Florentine banker was a marked tribute to his ability. The dwellers on the shores of the gulf were now a prey to the Turkish corsairs, against whom Robert in vain asked the pope and the Venetians for aid. The pope was, indeed, fully alive to the Turkish peril, and suggested to the Knights of St John the acquisition of the defenceless principality; when this project failed, he begged Niccoló Acciajuoli to impress upon Robert the necessity of doing something to save Achaia from the infidels. The citizens of Corinth united their petitions to these admonitions of the pope; they told Robert that he had left them to the tender mercies of the Turks, who daily afflicted them, that their fortresses had lost many of their defenders by captivity and famine, that their land was a desert, and that unless he could provide some remedy, they must either go into exile or pay tribute to the enemy. Robert accordingly bestowed the town and castle, with all their appurtenances, including eight smaller castles, upon Niccold Acciajuoli, who had meanwhile been created grand seneschal of Sicily and Count of Malta, as the most likely man to defend them. Niccold spent large sums in repairing the fortifications of Akrocorinth, and obtained for his vassals from Robert the remission of all arrears due to the princely treasury, an order compelling all his serfs who had emigrated owing to the unsettled state of the district to return, and permission to render all the feudal service, for which he was liable on account of his other Peloponnesian possessions, exclusively in the frontier district of Corinth, more exposed than the rest of the peninsula to attacks from Catalans and Turks. Unable to return to Greece himself, he appointed his cousin Donato his representative at Corinth and in the rest of his Achaian fiefs, charging him to further the welfare of his dependants, to administer even-handed justice, to protect the Church —an injunction sometimes neglected— and to pay special regard to the fortifications. A swarm of Greeks— “Greeklings,”the scornful Boccaccio calls them— crowded the almost regal audiences which he gave in his Italian palaces, and his will reads like an inventory of a large part of the Morea. He died in 1365, and lies in the noble Certosa which he had built near Florence to be his mausoleum. Few who visit it reflect that it was erected out of the spoils of Greece.

Upon the death of the titular emperor Robert in 1364, the principality of Achaia was for the second time exposed to the evils of a disputed succession. Robert had left no children; but his stepson, Hugues de Lusignan, Prince of Galilee, who by the law of primogeniture should have been King of Cyprus, finding himself deprived of the Cypriote throne by his uncle, conceived the idea of seeking compensation in Achaia, which was claimed by the late prince’s brother Philip, now titular emperor of Constantinople, who accordingly styled himself also “Prince of Achaia”. Robert’s widow, Marie de Bourbon, favoured her son’s enterprise, and her territorial influence in the country, owing to purchase and her late husband’s gifts, was greater even than that of Niccolo Acciajuoli himself. We learn from a list of the Achaian baronies in 1364, preserved by a lucky accident, that no less than sixteen castles were her property, including such strongholds as the great fortress of Chloumoutsi, the old family castle of the Villehardouins at Kalamata, the two fortresses which the famous house of St Omer had built on the bay of Navarino and in the Santameri mountains above the plain of Elis, and Beauvoir, or “Mouse Castle”, whose ruins still command the harbour of Katakolo. But the barons had appointed the lord of Chalandritza, Centurione Zaccaria, bailie of the principality on the death of Robert, and had sent him to receive Philip’s oath as their new prince at Taranto. Thus, when Marie de Bourbon and her son arrived in Greece in 1366 with more than 12,000 troops from Cyprus and Provence, they found that Philip’s bailie held all the fortresses for his master, except that of Navarino, while Angelo Acciajuoli, Archbishop of Patras and an adopted son of the great Niccoló, had declared for Philip as lawful Prince of Achaia. Confident in their superior numbers, Marie and the Prince of Galilee besieged the castle of Patras. But the archbishop, though he had only 700 horse­men, possessed among the canons of his cathedral one of the greatest commanders of that age. Some years before, a young Venetian, Carlo Zeno, had received, as a mere boy, a canon’s stall at Patras, then already regarded as the property of the Holy See. It was part of the canons’ duty to guard the castle, or donjon, as it was called, of Patras, and this uncanonical work exactly suited Zeno. The lad cared more for fighting than for theology, and the almost constant warfare with Turkish pirates at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf gave him ample outlet for his energies. Wounded in one of these skirmishes, the young canon had only recently returned to his stall, whence the archbishop summoned him to assume the command of the garrison. Zeno had learnt all the devices of Greek warfare; he waited till the besiegers were scattered about the country, plundering the rich environs of Patras, fell upon them with signal success, and not only defended Patras for six months, but carried the war to the walls of Navarino, where Marie and her son had taken refuge, and where the Emperor Philip’s bailie lay a prisoner. The commander of Navarino now summoned the Despot of Mistra and Guy d’Enghien, the lord of Argos, to his aid, the civil war spread, and the Byzantine and Argive forces ravaged the plain of Elis. Fortunately, at this moment, a peacemaker appeared upon the scene, in the person of the chivalrous Conte Verde, Amadeo VI of Savoy, who chanced to put in at Coron on his expedition to the East. He there received news of the siege of Navarino, and hastened to the aid of Marie de Bourbon, who was his wife’s cousin; at the sight of his galleys, the archbishop’s troops withdrew from the attack, whereon Amadeo offered his services as an arbitrator to the two parties. Both Marie and the archbishop accepted his offer; they met on neutral ground at Modon; Marie relinquished all claims to Patras, and recognised the independence of the archbishop, who, in return, agreed to make her a money payment. The collection of this money was entrusted to the ever-useful Zeno, who adopted the usual plan of inviting the citizens of Glarentza to subscribe it. Glarentza was then not only “ the chief city of Achaia,” but an important trade centre, though its mint had now ceased to issue the familiar Achaian coinage, the last specimens of which, bearing Robert’s name, may still be seen in the Museo Correr at Naples. Boccaccio, who laid a scene of his novel Alatiel there, represents Genoese merchants as trading with Glarentza, and we know that it levied a duty of from two to three per cent, on all merchandise. It could therefore have well afforded to pay the indemnity. But a certain knight of Glarentza denounced Zeno as a traitor for having made peace on what he considered such unfavourable terms; Zeno challenged his accuser to a duel, was deprived of his canonry in consequence, and resigned the other ecclesiastical benefices which he held in Greece. The point of honour was referred to Queen Joanna I of Naples, who decided in Zeno’s favour; the latter, as the reward for his services, received from the Emperor Philip the post of bailie of Achaia, where for the next three years he remained to assist his old patron, the archbishop, and his successor, “with both hand and counsel”. No further hostilities took place between the see of Patras and the Prince of Galilee, who continued to occupy the south-west of the peninsula, whence his followers were a menace to the neighbouring Venetian colonies. But the murder of his uncle, the King of Cyprus, in 1369, led him to leave Greece in order to push his pretensions to the throne of that island; and, in the following year, he and his mother signed an agreement with the Emperor Philip, by which they relinquished Achaia, except her widow’s portion of Kalamata, in return for an annuity of 6,000 gulden. From that time till his death, nine years later, the Prince of Galilee troubled Greece no more; but we shall hear of his mother again in the tangled history of the principality, while an Isabelle de Lusignan, probably his daughter, married one of the Despots of MistrS, where her monogram has lately been found. The Emperor Philip, for his part, did not long enjoy the undisputed right to bear the title of “Prince of Achaia”. He died in 1373, without having visited his Greek dominions; but in that short time, his bailie, a Genoese, had so harassed the Archbishop of Patras, that the latter, a Venetian citizen, actually offered his town and its territory to the republic of St Mark. The offer was not accepted then, but there was talk of removing all the Venetian trade from Glarentza to Patras, and thirty-five years later the administration of the town passed into the hands of Venice.

While the Acciajuoli family had played so important a part in asserting the independence of the archbishopric of Patras, its members had continued to extend their territorial influence in other parts of the peninsula. By his will, Niccold Acciajuoli had divided his Greek possessions between his eldest living son, Angelo, and his cousin and adopted son, also called Angelo, and afterwards Archbishop of Patras, whom we have just seen at war. To the former he had bequeathed “the most noble city of Corinth”, with all the nine castles dependent upon it, as well as all the other lands and castles of which he was possessed in Greece, except those which he left to the latter. His adopted son’s share was the castle of Vourkano in Messenia, and all his farms, rights, and vassals in the barony of Kalamata. The two Angelos were to share the expense of endowing a Benedictine monastery in the tenement of Pethone in the said barony. Anxious for the further welfare of his house in Greece, the astute testator left still more property— “the lands which had formerly belonged to Niccold Ghisi, the great constable of the principality of Achaia” —to his adopted son, on condition that the latter married Fiorenza Sanudo, the much-sought heiress of the duchy of the Archipelago. After the death of Niccolo, the Emperor Philip, as Prince of Achaia, duly conferred the castle and town of Corinth afresh upon his son Angelo, and a little later, as a reward for his trouble and expense in accompanying him to Hungary, raised him to the dignity of a palatine. But this Angelo was too much occupied with affairs in Italy, where he had inherited large possessions from his father; he had received from Philip express permission to nominate a deputy-captain of Corinth in his place, and as such he selected Rainerio, or Nerio, Acciajuoli, another cousin and adopted son of Niccold.

Young Nerio Acciajuoli, who was destined to make himself master of Athens and rule over the most famous city in the world, had already begun his extraordinary career in Greece. He, too, sought the hand of the fair Fiorenza Sanudo —the Penelope of Frankish Greece— who was now Duchess of the Archipelago, and his brother John, then Archbishop of Patras, aided him in this plan for bringing that delectable duchy into the family. But Venice was resolved that so great a prize should fall to the lot of none but a Venetian nominee, and she succeeded in frustrating Nerio’s intended marriage. Baffled in the Aegean, he next turned his attention to the Peloponnese, where he purchased from Marie de Bourbon the baronies of Vostitza and Nivelet. Thus, when he became deputy-captain of Corinth with its dependency of Basilicata, the ancient Sicyon, his authority stretched along a large part of the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, as well as over the isthmus. Soon he became real owner of the Corinthian group of castles, which Angelo was glad to pawn to him for a sum of money paid down. The loan was never repaid; so, while Angelo and his offspring kept the empty title of Palatine of Corinth, Nerio remained in possession of this valuable position, which served him as a base for attacking the Catalans of Attica. Naturally, numbers of relatives and hangers-on of the Acciajuoli followed their fortunate kinsmen to Greece, so that a Florentine colonisation somewhat replenished the diminished ranks of the French settlers and the Neapolitan adventurers. The baronage of Achaia was, indeed, by this time a mixture of races; of those who figure in the feudal roll of 1364, the Acciajuoli hailed from Florence, the Zaccaria from Genoa, Marchesano from Nice; Janni Misito was apparently a Greek; in fact, Erard le Noir was almost the only Frenchman left among the great barons, and even his ancestors had not come over at the Conquest. The old conquering families were extinct.

The Acciajuoli were not the only new Italian family which at this period laid the foundations of a dynasty in Greece. Among the favourites of the Angevins were the Tocchi, who had originally come from Benevento, and who were leading personages at the Neapolitan court. Flattering genealogists derived their name and lineage from the Gothic tribe of Tauci, which had followed Totila into Italy; but the first historic member of the clan was Ugolino, the grand seneschal. A Guglielmo Tocco had held the post of governor of Corfii for Philip I. of Taranto and his son, and became connected with one of the reigning families of Greece by marrying the sister of John II of Epiros. His son Leonardo continued to enjoy the favour of Robert; he was one of the witnesses of his marriage-contract, he worked hard to secure his libera­tion from imprisonment in Hungary, and, by marrying the niece of Niccold Acciajuoli, secured the influence of that powerful statesman. Accordingly, in 1357, Prince Robert bestowed upon him the county of Cephalonia, to which Leonardo might perhaps lay some claim as first-cousin of the last of the Orsini. To the islands of Cephalonia, Zante, and Ithaka, he added in 1362 that of Santa Mavra and the fort of Vonitza, whose inhabitants had grown tired of the Zorzi family, and summoned him to their aid —an episode which forms the subject of an unfinished drama by the modern poet Valaorites. If we may believe another modern writer, he promised to give them a share in the local administration, to respect their property, and to tolerate their religion. We know, however, from a contemporary document, that he showed his toleration by driving out the orthodox archbishop from the island. He thus reunited the old dominions of the Orsini, and he and his heirs, under the style of “Duke of Leucadia, Count of Cephalonia, and Lord of Vonitza”, not only held their possessions for over a century, but, almost alone of the Frankish rulers of Greece, left representatives down to the present generation.

It is only in our own time that the family has become extinct.

It was not to be wondered that the Angevins should desire to see the Ionian Islands in the hands of a strong man whom they could trust, at a moment when the adjacent continent, where they still held Lepanto, was in flames. On the death of the great Servian tsar, Dushan, in 1355, anarchy broke out in his rapidly formed empire, and every petty Servian satrap declared his independence. At the same moment, the death of Preliub, the Servian ruler of Thessaly, and the fall of John Cantacuzene from the Byzantine throne, completed the confusion. Such an opportunity seemed to the dethroned Despot of Epiros, Nicephoros II, favourable for the recovery of his inheritance. Since his surrender, he had been living as governor of the Thracian cities on the Dardanelles in the enjoyment of his imperial father-in-law’s favour and confidence. He now marched into Thessaly, whose inhabitants received him gladly, and then crossed Pindos into Acarnania, whence he drove out the Servian prince, Simeon Urosh, thus reviving in his own person the ancient glories of the Greek Despotat of Epiros. But, from a desire to conciliate Servian sympathies, he was so foolish as to desert his devoted wife, in order to contract a marriage with the sister-in-law of the late Servian tsar. This act both offended and alarmed his Albanian subjects, particularly devoted to the Cantacuzene family, and then, as now, suspicious of Servian influence. The injured wife took refuge with her brother Manuel at Mistra, while the Albanians rose against her husband. Nicephoros summoned to his aid a body of Turkish mercenaries, who were ravaging Thessaly, and confidently attacked his rebellious subjects. Rashness had always been his chief characteristic, and in the battle which ensued, near the town of Acheloos in 1358, it cost him his life. Thus ended the Despotat of Epiros, and the lands which had owned the sway of the Greek Angeli and the Roman Orsini, now fell into Servian and Albanian hands. Simeon Urosh, who now styled himself “Emperor of the Greeks and Serbs,” established his court, with all the high-sounding titles of Byzantium, at Trikkala, where an inscription still preserves his name, and obtained recog­nition of his authority, at least in name, over Epiros, as well as Thessaly. Henceforth, however, he devoted his personal attention exclusively to the latter, assigning Joannina to his son-in-law, Thomas Preliubovich, in 1367, and Aitolia and Akarnania to two Albanian chiefs, belonging to the clans of Boua and Liosa —a name still to be found in the plain of Attica. Thus, about 1362, all north-west Greece was Albanian, except where the Angevin flag still floated over the triple walls of Lepanto, and that of the Tocchi over Vonitza.

The brief Servian domination over Thessaly was destined soon to yield before the advance of the all-conquering Turks. But the reigns of Simeon Urosh and his son John, who sought to live as men of peace in their Thessalian capital of Trikkala, have bequeathed to modern Greece the strangest of all her mediaeval monuments. No one who has visited the famous monasteries “in air,” the weirdly fantastic Meteora, which crown the needle-like crags of the grim valley of Kalabaka, has satisfactorily answered the question, how the first monk ever ascended the sheer rocks on which they are built, rocks to which the traveller must scale by swinging ladders, unless he prefers to be hauled up, fish-like, in a net. According to the late Abbot of Meteoron, who published a history of the twenty-four monasteries, the origin of this aerial monastic community may be traced to the end of the tenth century, when a monk Andrdnikos, or Athanasios, established himself there at the time when the great Bulgarian tsar Samuel was ravaging Thessaly. The same authority ascribes the foundation of the most accessible of the five still inhabited monasteries, that of St Stephen, to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the monks there related to the present author how the pious emperor, Andrdnikos the elder, when forced to abdicate, had come and settled for a little time there, under the name of Antonios, giving at his departure a considerable sum for the extension of the buildings. According, however, to a fifteenth century manuscript, preserved in a late copy at Meteora, and to a monkish biography recently published by Professor Lampros, it was the Abbot Neilos of Doupiane, near the picturesque village of Kastrdki, who, in 1367, first built four churches in the caverns, which we see in the rocks of that wild and savage valley of isolated crags, while the Athandsios who “first mounted to the flat top” of Meteoron was a contemporary of Simeon Urosh, who had been taken prisoner by the Catalans when a lad at Neopatras. In any case, the monasteries attained their zenith under the Servian rulers of Thessaly. John Urosh, who had been on Mount Athos as a youth, retired from the world to the pinnacle of Metdoron, as the largest of the monasteries is pre-eminently called, leaving two deputies to govern his dominions. The humble fathers received him with gladness; we can easily imagine the delight with which they listened to his tales of the career of politics which he had left, just as their modern successors love no talk so much as that of the stranger newly arrived from a ministerial crisis at Athens. By his energy and influence he was able to increase the importance of the monastery; in 1388, he founded the present church of the Transfiguration, as an inscription still preserved there states; while his genius for organisation was displayed in a larger sphere on behalf of his sister, the widowed Lady of Joannina, and in the less exalted task of managing the lands which she bestowed on the monastery, which still reverences his portrait with that of Athandsios, its pious founder. After presiding for seventeen years over the community as “father of Meteoron,” he finally became Abbot— a title hitherto borne by no head of the Meteora monasteries, which had remained under the jurisdiction of the Abbot of Doupiane— and was consecrated a bishop by the metropolitan of Larissa, when, in 1393, the Turkish Conquest of Thessaly put an end to his temporal power. The Abbot of Meteoron became the president of a monastic federation, of which the other monasteries were members, retaining the management of their internal affairs —a form of government which has now ceased. But his admirers still called him “King Joseph”— the monastic name which he had assumed— from the remembrance of his former dignity, and he died in 1411 in his lonely cell far above the intrigues and controversies of his time. Such was the euthanasia of the last Christian ruler of Thessaly.

Meanwhile, the Catalan duchy of Athens, like the principality of Achaia, had experienced the evils of a weak and absent sovereign, and of the consequent anarchy which ensued. We saw that, in 1363, in response to the Theban envoys, Frederick III of Sicily had re-appointed Moncada as vicar-general for life, and had sent letters to the community of Thebes and to Roger de Lluria, bidding them obey this tried representative of the duke. But, although entrusted by his sovereign with very wide powers, Moncada does not seem to have occupied himself very much with the affairs of the duchy, nor even to have revisited it. At any rate, early in 1365, he was still only preparing to sail for Greece, where one great Catalan magnate after another acted as his deputy. First it seems to have been James Fadrique, Count of Salona, the former vicar-general, who governed in his stead; then, after Fadrique’s death in 1365, we find Roger de Lluria once more rehabilitated and negotiating as “ marshal and vicar-general” with the Venetians for the renewal of the treaty of peace between them and the Company. It is characteristic of Venetian policy towards the Latin states of Greece, that the republic emphatically rejected Lluria’s request that the Company might be allowed to fit out a fleet at its own expense against its enemies. He was reminded that the old clause prohibiting the growth of an Athenian navy was still in force; thus did Venice crush the efforts of this mediaeval ThemistokRs, as in our own time the Powers have sealed up the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.

A letter of the governor of Livadia to Frederick III depicts in dark colours the condition of the duchies at this period. Menaced from without by the Venetians of Euboea and the Turkish peril, the Catalans were divided among themselves by party strife, which paralysed the central authority, and caused a general feeling of insecurity. One party wished to place the duchies under the aegis of Genoa, the natural enemy of Venice, while a rival to Lluria had arisen in the person of Pedro de Pou (the Catalan equivalent of de Pitted), who held the strong castle of Lamia. This man had long exercised the chief judicial authority in the duchies, and acted at this time as their vicar during the absence of Moncada. We may infer that the absent vicar-general had not forgotten Lluria’s treasonable alliance with the Turks, which his master had not dared to punish, and may have found Pou a more loyal, or, at any rate, a more supple representative. Pou was, however, a grasping and ambitious official, as well as an unjust judge. While he allowed cases to be protracted for years, while he seized a Greek serf, the property of another Catalan, and sold him as a slave to Majorca, his advice to Moncada was most injurious to Lluria and his friends, whose castles he seized during an Albanian raid and then retained. The discontent culminated in a rising against the tyrant in the summer of 1366. Pou, his wife, and his chief followers were slain; Moncada’s men who came to avenge them were killed; and Lluria once more acted as vicar-general. The victors sent an envoy to Sicily to justify their conduct to their duke, who wisely granted them an amnesty, which he had no power to refuse, and ordered all confiscated property to be restored. The experiment of allowing the vicar-general, as well as the duke, to remain in Sicily, while the" duchies were administered by the vicar­general’s vicars, had proved to be a failure; as a strong man on the spot, Lluria, now the enemy of the Turks, was the best selection; after some hesitation, due to the difficulty of solving the delicate situation created by Moncada’s absence in Sicily, the natural desire not to offend that powerful noble, and an equally natural distrust of Lluria, King Frederick came to a decision, which was perhaps inevitable under the circumstances. Moncada was removed, and in May 1367, Lluria was formally re-appointed vicar-general during his sovereign’s good pleasure, in consideration of his “strenuous defence of the duchies against the Parthians (or Turks)”, when he had “shirked neither danger to his person nor expense to his pocket”. The Thebans must have smiled when this diplomatic phrase of the ducal chancery was read to them; but it was the age and country of rapid changes of policy, and Roger de Lluria now found it worth while to be loyal. Honours were heaped upon him by his grateful, or nervous, master, the privileges granted to him by the last two Dukes of Athens were confirmed, and thenceforth to his death he combined the double qualities of marshal and vicar-general of the duchies.

The declining power of the Catalan duchies inspired the heirs of Walter of Brienne with the idea of renewing the attempt which he had made so unsuccessfully nearly forty years before. His nephew, Sohier d’Enghien, who had borne the title of Duke of Athens, had perished on the scaffold at the hands of the regent of Hainault in 1366; but his brothers, Guy of Argos, and the Counts of Lecce and Conversano, asked the Venetian republic, of which they were honorary citizens, to aid them in the recovery of Athens by permitting them to use Negroponte as their base. The republic coldly replied that she was at peace with the Catalans, and must therefore decline. If we may trust a notice in the Aragonese Chronicle, the Count of Conversano, at that time bailie of Achaia, none the less attacked Athens with an army from Achaia, and temporarily occupied the whole city except the Acropolis. But, in any case, through the good offices of the bailie of Negroponte, a treaty was made between the vicar-general and the lord of Argos, by which the latter’s only daughter was to marry Lluria’s son John, and Venice was to receive Megara as a pledge of good faith. The marriage did not take place, and ten years later we find John de Lluria a prisoner of the Count of Conversano.

From some mysterious documents preserved in the Vatican archives, it would appear that another and much more elaborate matrimonial alliance was being projected at this time for the purpose of reconciling the claims of the house of Enghien to Athens with the ducal dominion exercised over it by the King of Sicily. The idea was to marry Gautier d’Enghien, now titular Duke of Athens, to Constance, daughter of John of Randazzo and first cousin of King Frederick. This intrigue occupied a number of celestial minds, but without result. It proves, at least, the tenacity of the claims put forward even at this late date by the heirs of the last French Duke of Athens.

The domestic quarrels of the Catalans broke out again on the death of Roger de Lluria in 1370, and the mutual jealousies of the leading men were increased by the practice of sending strangers from Sicily to fill the most important posts in the duchies for life, or during good pleasure. Thus at this time, both the vicar-general and the captain of “the castle of Athens”, belonged to the great Sicilian family of Peralta, connected by marriage with the royal house, but newcomers to Greece. The Catalans had now been estab­lished for two generations at Athens, and they felt, like most colonies after that period, that the mother country should intervene as little as possible in their affairs, and that the best places should be held by the colonists. Being not only a colony, but a military commonwealth, they preferred that tenure of office should be short, so that those places should go round. Frederick III, docile as usual, granted both their requests; the captain of the Acropolis was removed because he had been three years —the old constitutional period— in office; henceforth the community of Athens was to elect its own captain from among the body of Athenian citizens, merely subject to the duke’s confirmation. A similar arrangement was made at Livadia, whose governor had received and held all the three offices of castella.no, veguer, and captain, as the reward for his services as a peacemaker during the barons’ war, which had begun after Lluria’s demise. These offices were now separated, as the Catalans desired; but so morose was the reply of the people of Livadia, when asked to submit the names of their new officials, that the king took the matter into his own hands.

A few lines about the Venetian colonies will complete this sketch of Greece in the second half of the fourteenth century. The importance which the republic attached to Modon and Coron may be inferred from the minute regulations for their government, the so-called “Statutes and Capitulations,” which begin with this period. The two Messenian stations suffered, like the rest of the world, from the Black Death, so that it was necessary to send a fresh batch of colonists from home, and the franchise was extended to all the inhabitants, except the Jews. A curious regulation forbade the Venetian garrison to wear beards, so as to distinguish them from the Greeks. We still hear complaints of the maltreatment of the Greek peasants there, and their consequent emigration into the Frankish territory; but they now had influential spokesmen in the Greek bishops, who were permitted to reside in their ancient sees by the side of their Catholic colleagues. One of the latter, however, St Peter Thomas, effected many conversions, and even in that age, when the ecclesiastics wielded the greatest influence in Frankish Greece, his authority with the great nobles of Achaia was exceptional. Though usually more peaceful than the neighbouring states, the Venetian colonies were affected by the war between the republic and Genoa, which lasted from 1350 to 1355. In 1347 the Genoese had recovered from the Byzantines the rich mastic island of Chios, and entrusted its administration to a chartered company, or maona, which continued to manage it for more than 200 years. This step, and the exclusion of their commerce from the Black Sea, irritated the Venetians, who sent a fleet to the Levant, which made Negroponte the base of its operations. The large harbour between the classic bay of Aulis, where the Greek fleet had assembled before sailing for Troy, and the Skala of Oropos, was the scene of a Genoese defeat; but the vanquished retaliated by burning the Venetian and Jewish quarters of Negroponte and hanging up the keys of the town before the gates of Chios. The Venetians now induced both John Cantacuzene and Pedro IV of Aragon, whose rule over Sardinia had been undermined by Genoese intrigues, to join them in crushing the common enemy. The King of Aragon’s action naturally predisposed the Catalans of Attica to take the same side as their fellow-countrymen; but Pedro declined to assist until Venice had paid to Muntaner’s heirs the compensation due for the loss sustained by the Catalan chroniclerat Negroponte half a century earlier. The aid of a Catalan force from Athens and Thebes enabled the Venetians to repel a Genoese attack on the fortress of Oreos, then a strong place, though now a mere ruin; but Pteleon, the importance of which had much increased of late, was exposed to the forays of the invaders, who also landed in the famous harbour of Navarino, and plundered the Venetians. Now that the Genoese family of Zaccaria had become barons in the Morea, it was inevitable that a war between the two rival republics should involve hostilities between it and the garrisons of the two Messenian colonies. So risky had official posts in Greece become, that Venice found it necessary to raise the salaries of her governors of Modon and Coron, and of her councillors at Negroponte, in order to attract good men.

The damage done to Negroponte was soon repaired, and the war served to strengthen the growing power of Venice over the island. Indeed, Nikephoros Gregorys, who himself visited the island during the war, remarks that “Euboea has now been subject to the Venetians for many years.” The population had been increased by many fugitives from Thessaly after the Catalan conquest of Athens, and there, too, all the natives of the city, except the Jews, now received the Venetian franchise after ten years’ residence. Even the Jews, who had had to pay for fortifying the town of Negroponte more securely against the Turks, preferred to be under the direct authority of the bailie, to whom they now paid nearly £90, in taxes, instead of remaining “Jews of the Lombards,” to whom they had paid only half that sum. The triarchs, now reduced to two —one a Ghisi, the other a Dalle Carcerino longer opposed the republic, though they occasionally complained that the bailie interfered with them and even quashed the decisions of their judge; but feudal disputes were referred by common consent to the Latin patriarch of Constantinople, who, as we saw, now, ex-officio, held the see of Negroponte, and must, by that fact, have conferred dignity upon the island. Upon the triarchs was shifted the cost of fitting out the Euboean galleys —a burden subsequently shared between them and Venice— while the bailie appointed the collectors of customs. Two of the chief fortresses of the island passed, too, into Venetian hands —Larmena and the “red castle” of Karystos. Venice had long striven to obtain the latter coveted position, even today a noble ruin, and then so strong that it could be defended by some thirty men-at-arms; at last, in 1365, after many attempts, she bought the whole barony, serfs and all, from Bonifacio Fadrique, for 6000 ducats.

Thus, the chief results of the forty years which have been described in this chapter, were the revival of Greek influence in the Peloponnese, thanks to the statesmanship of the Cantacuzenes; and the rise of the Acciajuoli as a force in Greece, thanks to the shrewdness of a Florentine banker. At Athens, the ultimate goal of the latter’s family, the Catalans have grown feeble and disunited; in Epiros and Thessaly, Serb and Albanian have displaced alike Frank and Hellene; while the Turk is waiting his time to supplant all four Christian races. In the Ionian Islands a new and virile Italian dynasty has been founded; while Venice has tightened her hold on her Greek colonies. Such is the picture which Greece presents to us in 1373.

CHAPTER X

THE NAVARRESE COMPANY 1373 - 1388