Part 11
The Franks have too often been accused of being barbarians, whereas there is evidence that they were not indifferent to literature. Among the conquerors were not a few poets. Conon de Béthune was a writer of poems as well as an orator; Geoffroy I of Achaia composed some verses which have been preserved; Rambaud de Vaqueiras, the troubadour of Boniface of Montferrat, was rewarded for his songs by lands in Greece. Count John II Orsini of Epeiros ordered Constantine Hermoniakos to make a paraphrase of Homer in octosyllabic verse. We may say of this production, as Bentley said of Pope’s translation of the _Iliad_, “it is a pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer”; still it is interesting to find a Latin ruler patronising Greek literature. The courtly poet was so delighted that he tells us that his master was “a hero and a scholar,” and that the Lady Anna of Epeiros “excelled all women that ever lived in beauty, wisdom, and learning.” Historical accuracy compels me to add that the “heroic and scholarly” Count had gained his throne by the murder of his brother, while the “beautiful, wise and learned” Anna assassinated her husband! Throughout a great part of the Frankish period, too, people were engaged in transcribing Greek manuscripts. Several Athenians copied medical treatises, William of Meerbeke, the Latin Archbishop of Corinth in 1280, whose name survives in the Argive Church of Merbaka[46], translated Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle, and Proklos, and one of the Tocchi—the Italian family which followed the Orsini as Counts of Cephalonia—employed a monk to copy for him manuscripts of Origen and Chrysostom. Yet, in 1309, a Theban canon had to go to the West to continue his studies; and, a century later, the Archbishop of Patras obtained leave to study at the University of Bologna.
But the chief literary monument of Frankish Greece is the _Chronicle of the Morea_—the very curious work which exists in four versions, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. The Italian version need not detain us, for it contains no new facts and is merely an abbreviated translation of the Greek, chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary, but characteristic, mutilation of the proper names. The Spanish version, made in 1393 by order of Heredia, the romantic Grand-Master of the Knights of St John, and the French version, found in the castle of St Omer—another proof of Frankish culture—are of great historic interest. But by far the most remarkable of all the four versions is the Greek—a poem of some 9000 lines in the usual jog-trot “political” metre of most mediæval and modern Greek poetry, composed, in my opinion, by a half-caste lawyer, who obviously had the most enthusiastic admiration for the Franks, to whom he doubtless owed his place and salary. With the exception of a few French feudal terms, this most remarkable poem may be read without the slightest difficulty by any modern Greek scholar,—a striking proof that the vulgar Greek spoken to-day is almost exactly the same as that in common use in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the _Chronicle_ was composed. As regards its literary merits, opinions differ. As a rule, it is merely prose in the form of verse; but here and there, the author rises to a much higher level, and his work is a store-house of social, and especially legal information, even where his chronology and history have been shown by documentary evidence to be inaccurate.
The bright and chivalrous Frankish society has long passed away; but a few Italian and Catalan families still linger in the Cyclades, there are still Venetian names and titles in the Ionian Islands; the Tocchi were till lately represented at Naples and the Zorzi still are at Venice; the towers of Thebes and Paros, the Norman arch of Andravida, the noble castles of Karytaina and Chlomoutsi, and the carvings and frescoes of Geraki still remind us of the romance of feudal Greece, when every coign of vantage had its lord, and from every donjon floated the banner of a baron.
3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE
It is satisfactory to note that, after a long period of neglect, the great romance of mediæval Greek history is finding interpreters. Since George Finlay revealed to the British public the fact that the annals of Greece were by no means a blank in the Middle Ages, and that Athens was a flourishing city in the thirteenth century, much fresh material has been collected, by both Greek and German scholars, from the Venetian and other archives, which throws fresh light upon the dark places of the Latin rule in the Levant. Finlay’s work can never lose its value. Its author had not the microscopic zeal for genealogies and minutiæ which distinguished Hopf; but he possessed gifts and advantages of a far higher order. He knew Greece and the Greeks as no other foreign scholar has known them; he had a deep insight into the causes of political and social events; he drew his picture, as the Germans say, _in grossen Zügen_, and he left a work which no student of mediæval Greece can afford to ignore, and every statesman engaged in Eastern affairs would do well to read. All that is now wanted is for some one to do in England what Gregorovius did in so agreeable a manner for the Germans—to make the dry bones of the Frank chivalry live again, and to set before us in flesh and blood the Dukes of Athens and the Princes of Achaia, the Marquesses of Boudonitza, the Lords of Salona, the Dukes of the Archipelago, and the three barons of Eubœa. Despite the vandalism of mere archæologists, who can see nothing of interest in an age when Greeks were shaky in their declensions, and of bigoted purists among the Greeks themselves, who strive to erase every evidence of foreign rule alike from their language and their land, the feudal castles of the Morea, of continental Greece, and of the islands, still remind us of the days when classic Hellas, as Pope Honorius III said, was “New France,” when armoured knights and fair Burgundian damsels attended Mass in St Mary’s Minster on the Akropolis, and jousts were held on the Isthmus of Corinth.
Of the Frankish period of Greek history the _Chronicle of the Morea_ is the most curious literary production, valuable alike as an historical source—save for occasional errors of dates and persons, especially in the earlier part—and as a subject for linguistic study. The present edition, the fruit of many years’ labour, is almost wholly devoted to the latter aspect of the _Chronicle_, about which there is much that is of interest. Versions exist in French, in Italian, and in Aragonese, as well as in Greek; and the question as to whether the Greek or the French was the original has been much discussed. The present editor, differing from Buchon and Hopf, believes that the French _Livre de la Conqueste_ could not have been the original. In any case, the Greek _Chronicle_ is of more literary interest than the French, because it throws a strong light on modern Greek. Any person familiar with the modern colloquial language could read with ease, except for a few French feudal terms, this fourteenth century popular poem, many of whose phrases might come from the racy conversation of any Greek peasant of to-day, and is very different from the classical imitation of the contemporary Byzantine historians. Its poetic merits are small, nor does the jog-trot “political” metre in which it is composed tend to lofty flights of poetry. We know not who was its author; but, on the whole, there seems to be reason for believing that he was a Gasmoulos—one of the offspring of mixed marriages between Greeks and Franks—probably employed, as his love of legal nomenclature shows, in some clerkly post. Unpoetical himself, he has at least been the cause of noble poetry in others; for, as Dr Schmitt shows, the second part of Goethe’s _Faust_ has been largely inspired by its perusal; and the hero of that drama finds his prototype in the chivalrous builder of Mistra.
* * * * *
No chapter of this mediæval romance is more striking than the conquest of the Morea by the Franks and the history of their rule in the classic peninsula. At the time of the fourth crusade the Peloponnese was a prey to that spirit of particularism which has been, unhappily, too often characteristic of the Greeks in ancient, in mediæval, and in modern times. Instead of uniting among themselves in view of the Latin peril, the great _archontes_ of the Morea availed themselves of the general confusion to occupy strong positions and to extend their own authority at the expense of their neighbours. The last historian and statesman of Constantinople before the Latin conquest, Niketas of Chonæ, has left us a sad picture of the demoralisation of society in Greece at that critical moment. The leading men, he says, instead of fighting, cringed to the conquerors; some were inflamed by ambition against their own country, slavish creatures, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of opposing the Latins[47]. Of these _archontes_ the most prominent was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had seized the Larissa of Argos and the impregnable citadel high above Corinth, and who, though he failed to imitate the heroism of Leonidas in the Pass of Thermopylæ, held out at Akrocorinth till his death.
Such was the state of the country when a winter storm drove into the haven of Modon, on the Messenian coast, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, a crusader from Champagne, and nephew of the chronicler of the conquest of Constantinople. A Greek _archon_ of the neighbourhood, thinking that the opportunity was too good to be lost, invited the storm-bound warrior to aid him in the conquest of the surrounding country. Geoffroy was nothing loth; and the two unnatural allies speedily subdued one place after another. But, as ill-luck would have it, the Greek died; and his son, more patriotic or less trustworthy than the father, broke the compact with the Frankish intruder, and turned Geoffroy out of his quickly-won possessions. The crusader’s position was serious; he was in a hostile country and surrounded by an alien and suspicious population; but he was a man of resource, and, hearing that Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat and King of Salonika, had made a triumphal march through continental Greece and was at that moment besieging the great stronghold of Nauplia, he set out across the Peloponnese—a six days’ journey—and succeeded in reaching the Frankish camp. There he found an old friend and neighbour, Guillaume de Champlitte, to whom he confided the scheme which he had been revolving in his mind. “I come,” he said, so we learn from his uncle’s chronicle, “from a land which is very rich, and men call it the Morea”—a name which here occurs for the first time in the history of Greece, and the origin of which is still a puzzle to all her historians. He urged Champlitte to join him in the task of conquering this El Dorado, promising to recognise him as his liege lord in return for his assistance. Champlitte agreed, and the two friends, at the head of a small body of a hundred knights and some esquires, started on their bold venture[48].
The ease with which the little band of Western warriors conquered the peninsula, which had once produced the Spartan warriors, strikes every reader of the _Chronicle of the Morea_—the prosaic, but extremely curious and valuable poem in which the Frank conquest is described. The cause lay partly in the disunited state of Greek society and the feuds of the local _archontes_, but still more in the neglect of military training, due to the fact that the Byzantine emperors had long drawn their best troops from the non-Hellenic portions of their heterogeneous dominions. It is remarkable that, apart from Sgouros, interned, as it were, on Akrocorinth, and a Greek _archon_, Doxapatres, who held a small but strongly situated castle in one of the gorges of Arcadia, the invaders met with little opposition. Greece, as we know from the complaints of Michael Akominatos, the last orthodox Archbishop of Athens before the conquest, had been plundered by Byzantine tax-gatherers and despised as a “Scythian wilderness” by Byzantine officials. So, when the inhabitants found that the Franks had no intention of interfering with their prized municipal privileges, they had no great objection to exchanging a master who spent their money at Constantinople for one who spent it in Elis at the new Peloponnesian capital of Andreville or Andravida. One pitched battle decided the fate of “the isle of Greece,” as the Franks sometimes called it. At the olive grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia, the small force of Franks easily routed a Greek army six times larger; and as the chronicler, always in sympathy with the invaders, puts it,
Αὐτὸν καὶ μόνον τὸν πόλεμον ἐποῖκαν οἱ Ρωμαῖοι Εἰς τὸν καιρὸν ποὺ ἐκέρδισαν οἱ Φράγκοι τὸν Μορέαν.
Yet a modern Greek historian of singular fairness, the late K. Paparregopoulos, has remarked how great was the change in the Turkish times. The descendants of the unwarlike Moreotes, who fell so easy a prey to the Frankish chivalry in 1205, never lost an opportunity of rising against the Turks after the Frankish domination was over. As he justly says, one of the main results of the long Latin rule was to teach Greek “hands to war and their fingers to fight.”
Thus, almost by a single blow, the Franks had become masters of the ancient “island of Pelops.” Here and there a few natural strongholds still held out. Even after the death of Sgouros his triple crown of forts, Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos, was still defended for the Greek cause in the name of the lord, or Despot, of Epeiros, where a bold scion of the imperial house of Angelos had founded an independent state on the ruins of the Byzantine Empire. The great rock of Monemvasia in the south-east of the Morea, whence our ancestors derived their Malmsey wine, remained in the hands of its three local _archontes_; while, in the mountains of southern Lakonia, a race which had often defied Byzantium scorned to acknowledge the noblemen of Champagne. The local magnate, Joannes Chamaretos, could boast for a time that he kept his own lands in Lakonia, but he, too, had to take refuge at the Epeirote Court at Arta[49]. Finally, the two Messenian ports of Modon and Koron were claimed by Venice, which, with her usual astuteness, had secured those valuable stations on the way to Egypt in the deed of partition by which the conquerors of the empire had divided the spoils among themselves at Constantinople. Not without reason did Pope Innocent III, whose letters are full of allusions to the Frankish organisation of Greece, style Guillaume de Champlitte “Prince of all Achaia.”
Champlitte now attempted to provide for the internal government of his principality by the application of the feudal system, which, even before the Frankish conquest, had crept into many parts of the Levant. The _Chronicle of the Morea_, whose author revels in legal details, gives an account of the manner in which “the isle of Greece” was organised by its new masters. A commission, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five Greek _archontes_, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, drew up a species of Domesday-book for the new state. In accordance with the time-honoured feudal custom, twelve baronies were created and bestowed upon prominent members of the Frankish force, who were bound to be at the prince’s beck and call with their retainers in time of need; and the castles of these warrior barons were purposely erected in strong positions, whence they could command important passes or overcome troublesome neighbours. Even to-day the traveller may see the fine fortress above the town of Patras which Guillaume Aleman, one of the feudatories, constructed out of the Archbishop’s palace; the castle of Karytaina, the Toledo of Greece, still reminds us of the time when Hugues de Bruyères held the dalesmen of Skorta, ancestors of M. Delyannes, in check; and, far to the South, the war-cry of Jean de Neuilly, hereditary Marshal of Achaia, _Passe avant_, lingers in the name of Passavâ, the stronghold which once inspired respect in the men of Maina, who boast that they spring from Spartan mothers. Seven ecclesiastical peers, the Latin Archbishop of Patras at their head, and the three military orders of St John, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights also received fiefs; and, while Geoffroy de Villehardouin was invested with Kalamata and Kyparissia, fertile Elis became the princely domain.
But Guillaume de Champlitte did not long enjoy his Achaian dignity. If he was a prince in Greece he was still a French subject; and the death of his brother made it necessary for him to do homage in person for his fief in France. On the way he died; and the cunning Villehardouin, by an ingenious stratagem, contrived to become master of the country. It had been declared that a claimant must take possession of Achaia within a year and a day after the date of the last vacancy; and Geoffroy contrived to have Champlitte’s heir detained in Venice and left behind at Corfù till the fatal date had almost passed. A little skilful manœuvring from one place to another in the Morea filled up the rest of the time, so that, when young Robert de Champlitte at last met Geoffrey in full court at Lacedæmonia, the mediæval town which had risen near the Eurotas, the year and a day had already elapsed. The court decided in favour of Geoffrey, anxious, no doubt, that their ruler should be a statesman of experience and not a young man fresh from France. Robert gave no further trouble, and Geoffrey remained for the rest of his days “Lord of Achaia.” By his tact and cleverness he had contrived to win the regard both of the Frank barons and of the Greek population, whose religion and ancient customs he had sworn to respect. He was thus enabled to subdue the three outstanding fortresses which had once been the domain of Sgouros, while he settled all claims that the Venetians might have upon the Morea by allowing them to keep Modon and Koron, granting them a separate quarter in every town in his principality, and doing homage to them for the whole peninsula on the island of Sapienza. He crowned his career by marrying his son to the daughter of the Latin Emperor Peter of Courtenay, from whose family the Earls of Devon are descended.
Under his son and successor, Geoffrey II, the Frank principality prospered exceedingly. The Venetian historian, Marino Sanudo, who derived much of his information from his relative, Marco II Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, has given us a vivid picture of life at the Peloponnesian court under the rule of the second of the Villehardouins. A just prince, Geoffrey II used to send his friends from time to time to the baronial castles of the Morea to see how the barons treated their vassals. At his own court he kept “eighty knights with golden spurs”; and “knights came to the Morea from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne, to follow him. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts, others again because of crimes which they had committed[50].” In fact, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the Morea had become for the younger sons of the French chivalry much what the British colonies were to adventurers and ne’er-do-weels fifty years ago. It was a place where the French knights would find their own language spoken—we are specially told what good French was spoken in Greece in the Frankish period—and could scarcely fail to obtain congenial employment from a prince of their own race.
One difficulty, however, had soon arisen in the Frank principality. The Latin clergy, who had had their full share of the spoils, declined to take any part in the defence of the country. Geoffrey, with all the energy of his race, opposed a stout resistance to these clerical pretensions, and confiscated the ecclesiastical fiefs, spending the proceeds upon the erection of the great castle of Clermont or Chlomoutsi above the busy port of Glarentza, the imposing ruins of which are still a land-mark for miles around. When he had finished the castle Geoffroy appealed to the Pope, placing before the Holy Father the very practical argument that, if the principality, through lack of defenders, were recaptured by the Greeks, the loss would fall just as much on the Roman Church as on the prince, while the fault would be entirely with the former. The Pope was sufficiently shrewd to see that Geoffroy was right; the dispute was settled amicably; and both the prince and the Latin clergy subscribed generously for the preservation of the moribund Latin empire, which exercised a nominal suzerainty over the principality of Achaia.
Geoffroy’s brother and successor, the warlike Guillaume de Villehardouin, saw the Frank state in the Morea reach its zenith, and by his rashness contributed to its decline. Born in Greece, and speaking Greek, as the _Chronicle of the Morea_ expressly tells us, the third of the Villehardouins began by completing the conquest of what was his native land. It was he who laid siege to the rock of Monemvasia for three long years, till at last, when the garrison had been reduced to eat mice and cats, the three _archontes_ advanced along the narrow causeway which gives the place its name[51], and surrendered on terms which the prince wisely granted. It was he, too, who built the noble castle of Mistra on the site of the Homeric Messe, now abandoned to tortoises and sheep, but for two centuries a great name in the history of Greece. To a ruler so vigorous and so determined even the weird Tzakones, that strange tribe, perhaps Slavs but far more probably Dorians, which still lingers on and cherishes its curious language around Leonidi, yielded obedience; while the men of Maina, hemmed in by two new castles, ceased to trouble.
For the first and last time in its history the whole Peloponnese owned the sway of a Frank prince, except where, at Modon and Koron, Venice kept “its right eye,” as it called those places, fixed on the East. So powerful a sovereign as St Louis of France wished that he had some of Guillaume’s knights to aid him in his Egyptian war; and from seven hundred to one thousand horsemen always attended the chivalrous Prince of Achaia. His court at La Crémonie, the French version of Lacedæmonia, was “more brilliant than that of many a king”; and this brilliance was not merely on the surface. “Merchants,” says Sanudo, “went up and down without money, and lodged in the house of the bailies; and on their simple note of hand people gave them money[52].” But Guillaume’s ambition and his love of fighting for fighting’s sake involved the principality in disaster. Not content with beginning the first fratricidal war between the Frank rulers of the East by attacking Guy de la Roche, Lord of Athens, he espoused the cause of his father-in-law, the Greek Despot of Epeiros, then engaged in another brotherly struggle with the Greek Emperor of Nice. On the field of Pelagonia in Macedonia the Franks were routed; and the Prince of Achaia, easily recognised by his prominent teeth, was dragged from under a heap of straw, where he was lying, and carried off a prisoner to the court of the Emperor Michael VIII.