Part 12

Guillaume’s captivity was the cause of endless evils for the principality; for Michael, who in 1261, by the recapture of Constantinople, had put an end to the short-lived Latin empire and restored there the throne of the Greeks, was resolved to regain a footing in the Morea and to make use of his distinguished captive for that purpose. He accordingly demanded, as the price of the prince’s freedom, the three strong fortresses of Mistra, Monemvasia, and Maina. The matter was referred to a ladies’ parliament held at Nikli, near the site of the ancient Tegea, for so severe had been the losses of the Frank chivalry that the noble dames of the Morea had to take the places of their husbands. We can well understand that, with a tribunal so composed, sentiment and the ties of affection would have more influence than the _raison d’état_. Yet Guillaume’s old opponent, Guy de la Roche, now Duke of Athens and bailie of Achaia during the prince’s captivity, laid before the parliament the argument that it was better that one man should die for the people than that the rest of the Franks should lose the Morea[53]. At the same time, to show that he bore no malice, he chivalrously offered to go to prison in place of the prince. But the ladies of the Morea thought otherwise. It was decided to give up the three castles; and two of the fair châtelaines were sent as hostages to Constantinople.

Thus, in 1262, the Byzantine Government regained a foothold in the Morea; a Byzantine province was created, with Mistra as its capital, and entrusted at first to a general of distinction annually appointed, and ultimately conferred as an appanage for life upon the Emperor’s second son. The native Greeks of the whole peninsula thus had a rallying-point in the Byzantine province, and the suspicion of the Franks that the surrender of the three fortresses “might prove to be their ruin[54],” turned out to be only too well-founded. As for the Franks who were left in the Byzantine portion of the Morea, their fate is obscure. Probably, as Dr Schmitt thinks, some emigrated to the gradually dwindling Frankish principality, while others became merged in the mass of Greeks around them. In all ages the Hellenes, like the Americans of to-day, have shown the most marvellous capacity for absorbing the various races which have come within their borders. A yet further element of evil omen for the country was introduced in consequence of this partial restoration of the Byzantine power. As might have been foreseen, the easy morality of that age speedily absolved the prince from his solemn oaths to the Emperor, and he was scarcely released when a fresh war broke out between them. It was then, for the first time, that we hear of Turks in the Morea—men who had been sent there as mercenaries by the Emperor Michael. Careless whom they served, so long as they were paid regularly, these Oriental soldiers of fortune deserted to the prince; and those who cared to settle in the country received lands and wives, whose offspring were still living, when the _Chronicle of the Morea_ was written (p. 372), at two places in the peninsula.

Unhappily for the principality, as the chronicler remarks, Guillaume de Villehardouin left no male heir; and nothing more strongly justifies the Salic law than the history of the Franks in the Morea, where it was not applied. Anxious to take what precautions he could against the disruption of his dominions after his death, the last of the Villehardouin princes married his elder daughter Isabelle to the second son of Charles of Anjou, the most powerful sovereign in the south of Europe at that time, who, in addition to his other titles, had received from the last Latin Emperor of the East, then a fugitive at Viterbo, the suzerainty over the principality of Achaia, hitherto held by the Emperor. This close connection with the great house of Anjou, to which the kingdom of the Two Sicilies then belonged, seemed to provide Achaia with the strongest possible support. The support, too, was near at hand; for communication between Italy and Glarentza, the chief port of the Morea, was, as we know from the novels of Boccaccio, not infrequent; and we hear of Frankish nobles from Achaia making pilgrimages to the two great Apulian sanctuaries of St Nicholas of Bari and Monte Santangelo. But, when Guillaume de Villehardouin died in 1278 and was laid beside his brother and father in the family mausoleum at Andravida (where excavations, made in 1890, failed to find their remains)[55], his daughter Isabelle was still a minor, though already a widow.

The government of the principality accordingly fell into the hands of bailies appointed by the suzerain at Naples. Sometimes the bailie was a man who knew the country, like Nicholas St Omer, whose name is still perpetuated by the St Omer tower at Thebes and the Santameri mountains not far from Patras; sometimes he was a foreigner, who knew little of the country, and, in the words which the _Chronicle_ (p. 544) puts into the mouths of two Frankish nobles, “tyrannised over the poor, wronged the rich, and sought his own profit.” The complainants warned Charles II of Anjou, who was now their suzerain, that he was going the right way to “lose the principality”; and the King of Naples took their advice. He bestowed the hand of the widowed Isabelle upon a young Flemish nobleman, Florenz of Hainault, who was then at his court, and who thus became Prince of the Morea. Florenz wisely made peace with the Byzantine province, so that “all became rich, both Franks and Greeks,” and the land recovered from the effects of war and maladministration. But the Flemings, who had crowded over to Greece at the news of their countryman’s good fortune, were less scrupulous than their prince and provoked reprisals from the Greeks, from whom they sought to wring money. On the other hand, it would seem that the natives of the Byzantine province were able to secure good treatment from the Emperor, for there is preserved in that interesting little collection, the Christian Archæological Museum at Athens, a golden bull of Andronikos II, dated 1293, concerning the privileges of the sacred rock of Monemvasia. When the modern Greeks come to think more highly of their mediæval history, they should regard that rugged crag with reverence. For two centuries it was the guardian of their municipal and national liberties.

Florenz of Hainault lived too short a time for the welfare of the Morea; and Isabelle, once more a widow, was married again in Rome (whither she had gone for the first papal jubilee of 1300) to a prince of the doughty house of Savoy, which thus became concerned with the affairs of Greece. Philip of Savoy was at the time in possession of Piedmont; and, as might have been expected, Piedmontese methods of government were not adapted to the latitude of Achaia. He was a man fond of spending, and an adept at extorting, money. The microscopic Dr Hopf has unearthed from the archives at Turin the bill—a fairly extensive one—for his wedding-breakfast; and the magnificent tournament which he organised on the Isthmus of Corinth, and in which all the Frankish rulers of Greece took part, occupied a thousand knights for more than twenty days. “He had learned money-making at home,” it was said, when the extravagant prince from Piedmont let it be understood that he expected presents from his vassals, and imposed taxes on the privileged inhabitants of Skorta. But the days of the Savoyard in Achaia were numbered. The house of Anjou, suzerains of the principality, had never looked with favour on his marriage with Isabelle; an excuse was found for deposing him in favour of another Philip, of Taranto, son of the King of Naples. To make matters smoother, Isabelle and her husband received, as some compensation for relinquishing all claims to the Morea, a small strip of territory on the shores of the Fucine lake. They both left Greece for ever. Isabelle died in Holland; and Philip of Savoy sleeps in the family vault at Pinerolo, near Turin, leaving to his posterity by a second marriage the empty title of “Prince of Achaia.”

The house of Villehardouin was not yet extinct. Isabelle had a daughter, Matilda of Hainault, whose husband, Louis of Burgundy, was permitted, by the tortuous policy of the Neapolitan Angevins, to govern the principality. But a rival claimant now appeared in the field in the person of Fernando of Majorca, one of the most adventurous personages of those adventurous times, who is well known to us from the quaint Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner. Fernando had already had his full share of the vicissitudes of life. He had been at one time head of the Catalan Grand Company, which had just won the Duchy of Athens on the swampy meadows of the Bœotian Kephissos, and he had sat a prisoner in the castle of Thebes, the famous Kadmeia, whose walls were painted with the exploits of the crusaders in the Holy Land. He had married the daughter of Guillaume de Villehardouin’s younger child, the Lady of Akova, and he claimed Achaia in the name of his dead wife’s infant son. Such was the violence of the age that both the rivals perished in the struggle, Fernando on the scaffold, and Louis of Burgundy by a poison administered to him by one of the petty potentates of Greece. Even more miserable was the end of the unhappy Matilda. Invited by the unscrupulous King of Naples to his court, she was informed that she must marry his brother, John of Gravina. With the true spirit of a Villehardouin, the Princess refused; and even the Pope himself, whose authority was invoked, could not make her yield. She had already, she said, married again, and must decline to commit bigamy. This gave the King of Naples the opportunity he sought. He declared that, by marrying without her suzerain’s consent, she had forfeited her principality, which he bestowed upon his brother. The helpless Princess was thrown into the Castel dell’ Uovo at Naples, and was afterwards allowed to die a lingering death in that island-prison, the last of her race. So ended the dynasty of the Villehardouins.

Grievous, indeed, was the situation of the Franks in Greece at this moment. Though little more than a hundred years had elapsed since the conquest, the families of the conquerors were almost extinct. The terrible blow dealt at the Frank chivalry by the rude Catalans, almost on the very battlefield of Chaironeia, was as fatal to Frankish, as was the victory of Philip of Macedon to free, Greece. Of the barons who had taken part in that contest, where many Achaian nobles had stood by the side of the headstrong Athenian duke, only four survived. Moreover, the Frank aristocracy, as Finlay has pointed out, committed racial suicide by constituting themselves an exclusive class. Intermarriages with the Greeks took place, it is true; and a motley race, known as Gasmoûloi[56], the offspring of these unions, of whom the author of the _Chronicle_ was perhaps a member, fell into the usual place of half-castes in the East. But Muntaner expressly says that the nobles of Achaia usually took their wives from France. Meanwhile new men had taken possession of some of the old baronies—Flemings, Neapolitans, and even Florentines, one of whom, Nicholas Acciajuoli, whose splendid tomb is to be seen in the Certosa near Florence, laid on the rocks of Akrocorinth the foundations of a power which, a generation later, made the bankers of Tuscany dukes of Athens. The Greeks, had they been united, might have recovered the whole peninsula amidst this state of confusion. But the sketch which the imperial historian, John Cantacuzene, has left us of the _archontes_ of the Morea shows that they were quite as much divided among themselves as the turbulent Frank vassals of the shadowy Prince of Achaia. “Neither good nor evil fortune,” he wrote, “nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual hatred, which not only endures all their lives, but is transmitted after death as a heritage to their children[57].”

Cantacuzene, however, took a step which ultimately led to the recapture of the Morea, when he abolished the system of sending a subordinate Byzantine official to Mistra, and appointed his second son, Manuel, with the title of Despot, as governor of the Byzantine province for life. The Despot of Mistra at once made his presence felt. He drove off the Turkish corsairs, who had begun to infest the deep bays and jagged coast-line of the peninsula, levied ship-money for its defence against pirates, and, when his Greek subjects objected to be taxed for their own benefit, crushed rebellion by means of his Albanian bodyguard. Now, for the first time, we hear of that remarkable race, whose origin is as baffling to ethnologists as is their future to diplomatists, in the history of the Morea, where hereafter they were destined to play so distinguished a part. It is to the policy of Manuel Cantacuzene, who rewarded his faithful Albanians with lands in the south-west and centre of the country, that modern Greece owes the services of that valiant race, which fought so vigorously for her independence and its own in the last century. Manuel’s example was followed by other Despots; and ere long ten thousand Albanians were colonising the devastated and deserted lands of the Peloponnese.

Meanwhile the barren honour of Prince of Achaia had passed from one absentee to another. John of Gravina, who had been installed in the room of the last unhappy Villehardouin princess, grew disgusted with the sorry task of trying to restore order, and transferred his rights to Catherine of Valois, widow of his brother, Philip of Taranto; her son Robert, who was both suzerain and sovereign of the principality, was a mere phantom ruler whom the Achaian barons treated with contempt. After his death they offered the empty title of princess to Queen Joanna I of Naples on condition that she did not interfere with their fiefs and their feuds. Then a new set of conquerors descended upon the distracted country, and began the last chapter of Frankish rule in Achaia.

The great exploit of the Catalans in carving out for themselves a duchy bearing the august name of Athens had struck the imagination of Southern Europe. Towards the close of the fourteenth century a similar, but less famous band of freebooters, the Navarrese Company, repeated in Achaia what the Catalans, seventy years earlier, had achieved in Attica and Bœotia. Conquering nominally in the name of Jacques de Baux, a scion of the house of Taranto, but really for their own hands, the soldiers of Navarre rapidly occupied one place after another. Androusa, in Messenia, at that time the capital of the Frankish principality, fell before them; and at “sandy Pylos,” the home of Nestor, then called Zonklon, they made such a mark that the spot was believed by Hopf to have derived its name of Navarino from the castle which they held there. In 1386 their captain, Pedro Bordo de San Superan, styled himself Vicar of the principality, a title which developed into that of prince.

Meanwhile another Western Power, and that the most cunning and persistent, had taken advantage of these troublous times to gain a footing in the Peloponnese. Venice, true to her cautious commercial policy, had long been content with the two Messenian stations of Modon and Koron, and had even refused a tempting offer of some desperate barons to hand over to her the whole of Achaia. During the almost constant disturbances which had distracted the rest of the peninsula since the death of Guillaume de Villehardouin, the two Venetian ports had enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity. The high tariffs which the Frankish princes had erected round their own havens had driven trade to these Venetian harbours, so conveniently situated for trade with the great Venetian island of Crete as well. The documents which Sathas has published from the Venetian archives are full of allusions to these two now almost forgotten places. But at last, towards the end of the fourteenth century, Venice resolved on expansion. She accordingly bought Argos and Nauplia, the old fiefs which the first French Lord of Athens had received from the first of the Villehardouins, and which lingered on in the hands of the representatives of the fallen Athenian duke. A little later Lepanto, the old Naupaktos, gave the Venetians a post on the Corinthian Gulf.

As the Byzantine Empire dwindled before the incursions of the Turks, the Greek province of Mistra assumed more importance in the eyes of the statesmen at Constantinople. In 1415 the Emperor Manuel II, with an energy which modern sovereigns of Greece would do well to imitate, resolved to see for himself how matters stood, and arrived in the Morea. He at once set to work to re-erect the six-mile rampart, or “Hexamilion,” across the Isthmus, which had been fortified by Xerxes, Valerian, Justinian, and, in recent times, by the last Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaiologos. Manuel’s wall followed the course of Justinian’s; and, in the incredibly short space of twenty-five days, forced labourers, working under the imperial eye, had erected a rampart strengthened by no less than 153 towers.

But the Emperor saw that it was necessary to reform the Morea from within as well as to fortify it without. We have from the pen of a Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, who has written a _Dialogue of the Dead_ in the manner of Lucian, a curious, if somewhat highly-coloured account of the Moreotes as they were, or at any rate seemed to him to be, at this time[58]. In the Peloponnese, he tells us, are “Lacedæmonians, Italians, Peloponnesians (Greeks), Slavonians, Illyrians (Albanians), Egyptians (gypsies), and Jews, and among them are not a few half-castes.” He says that the Lakonians, who “are now called Tzakones,” have “become barbarians” in their language, of which he gives some specimens. He goes on to make the shrewd remark, true to-day of all Eastern countries where the Oriental assumes a veneer of Western civilisation, that “each race takes the worst features of the others,” the Greeks assimilating the turbulence of the Franks, and the Franks the cunning of the Greeks. So insecure was life and property that arms were worn night and day—a practice obsolete in the time of Thucydides. Of the Moreote _archontes_ he has nothing good to say; they are “men who ever delight in battles and disturbances, who are for ever breathing murder, who are full of deceit and craft, barbarous and pig-headed, unstable and perjured, faithless to both Emperor and Despots.” Yet a Venetian report—and the Venetians were keen observers—sent to the government a few years later, depicts the Morea as a valuable asset. It contained, writes the Venetian commissioner, 150 strong castles; the soil is rich in minerals; and it produces silk, honey, wax, corn, raisins, and poultry.

Even in the midst of alarms an eminent philosopher—to the surprise of the elegant Byzantines, it is true—had fixed his seat at Mistra. George Gemistos Plethon believed that he had found in Plato a cure for the evils of the Morea. Centuries before the late Mr Henry George, he advocated a single tax. An advanced fiscal reformer, he suggested a high tariff for all articles which could be produced at home; a paper strategist, he had a scheme which he submitted, together with his other proposals, to the Emperor, for creating a standing army; an anti-clerical, he urged that the monks should work for their living, or discharge public functions without pay. The philosopher, in tendering this advice to the Emperor, modestly offered his own services for the purpose of carrying it out. Manuel II was a practical statesman, who knew that he was living, as Cicero would have said, “non in Platonis republica, sed in fæce Lycurgi.” The offer was rejected.

At last the long threatened Turkish peril, temporarily delayed by the career of Timour and the great Turkish defeat at Angora, was at hand. The famous Ottoman commander, Evrenos Beg, had already twice entered the peninsula, once as the ally of the Navarrese prince against the Greek Despot, once as the foe of both. In 1423 a still greater captain, Turakhan, easily scaled the Hexamilion, leaving behind him at Gardiki, as a memorial of his invasion, a pyramid of eight hundred Albanian skulls. But, by the irony of history, just before Greeks and Franks alike succumbed to the all-conquering Turks, the dream of the Byzantine court was at last realised, and the Frank principality ceased to exist.

The Greek portion of the Morea was at this time in the hands of the three brothers of the Emperor John VI Palaiologos—Theodore II, Thomas, and Constantine—the third of whom was destined to die on the walls of Constantinople as last Emperor of the East. Politic marriages and force of arms soon extinguished the phantom of Frankish rule; and the Genoese baron, Centurione Zaccaria, nephew of Bordo de San Superan, who had succeeded his uncle as last Prince of Achaia, was glad to purchase peace by giving his daughter’s hand to Thomas Palaiologos with the remaining fragments of the once famous principality, except the family barony and the princely title, as her dowry. Thus, when Centurione died in 1432, save for the six Venetian stations, the whole peninsula was once more Greek. Unhappily, the union between the three brothers ended with the disappearance of the common enemy. Both Theodore and Constantine were ambitious of the imperial diadem; and, while the former was pressing his claims at Constantinople, the latter was besieging Mistra, having first sent the historian Phrantzes, his confidential agent in these dubious transactions, to obtain the Sultan’s consent. Assisted by his brother Thomas and a force of Frank mercenaries, Constantine was only induced to keep the peace by the intervention of the Emperor; till, in 1443, Theodore removed this source of jealousy by carrying out his long-cherished scheme of retiring from public life. He accordingly handed over the government of Mistra to Constantine and received in exchange the city of Selymbria on the Sea of Marmora, where he afterwards died of the plague.