Part 21

Nicolò II was the last and worst of the Sanudi Dukes. From his father he had inherited two-thirds of Eubœa, which interested him more than his own Duchy, but at the same time involved him in disputes with Venice. Chafing at the tutelage of the Republic, he selected the moment when Venice was once more engaged in war with Genoa, to negotiate with the Navarrese company of mercenaries then in Central Greece for its aid in the conquest of the whole island of Eubœa. This attempt failed, and, so far from increasing his dominions, Nicolò diminished them in other directions. We have seen how Andros had been reunited with Naxos by Marco II. The new Duke now bestowed it as a sub-fief upon his half-sister, Maria Sanudo, thus severing its direct connection with his Duchy. Nor was he more cautious in his internal policy. He aroused the strongest resentment among his subjects, Greeks and Franks alike, by his extortion, and they found a ready leader in a young Italian who had lately become connected by marriage with the Sanudo family. This man, Francesco Crispo—a name which suggested to biographers of the late Italian Prime Minister a possible relationship—was a Lombard who had emigrated to Eubœa and had then obtained the lordship of Melos by his union with the daughter of Giovanni I’s brother Marco, who had received that island as a sub-fief of Naxos, and under whom it had greatly prospered. Crispo chanced to be in Naxos at the time when the complaints of the people were loudest, and he aspired to the fame, or at any rate the profits, of a tyrannicide. During one of the ducal hunting parties he contrived the murder of the Duke, and was at once accepted by the populace as his successor. Thus, in 1383, fell the dynasty of the Sanudi, by the hand of a Lombard adventurer, after 176 years of power.

Times had greatly changed since the conquest of the Archipelago, nor was a usurper like Crispo in a position to dispense with the protection of Venice. He therefore begged the Republic to recognise him as the rightful Duke, which the astute Venetians saw no difficulty in doing. He further strengthened the bond of union by bestowing the hand of his daughter upon the rich Venetian, Pietro Zeno, who played a considerable part in the tortuous diplomacy of the age. Crispo did not hesitate to rob Maria Sanudo of Andros in order to confer it upon his son-in-law, and it was not for many years, and then only after wearisome litigation, that it reverted to her son. She was obliged to content herself with the islands of Paros and Antiparos, and to marry one of the Veronese family of Sommaripa, which now appears for the first time in Greek history, but which came into the possession of Andros towards the middle of the fifteenth century, and still flourishes at Naxos. Sure of Venetian support, Crispo indulged in piratical expeditions as far as the Syrian coast, while he swept other and less distinguished pirates from the sea. His son-in-law seconded his efforts against the Turks; yet, in spite of their united attempts, they left their possessions in a deplorable state. Andros had been so severely visited by the Turkish corsairs that it contained only 2000 inhabitants, and had to be repopulated by Albanian immigrants, who are still very numerous there; Ios, almost denuded of its population, was replenished by a number of families from the Morea. Although the next Duke, Giacomo I, was known as “The Pacific,” and paid tribute to the Sultan on condition that no Turkish ships should visit his islands, he was constantly menaced by Bayezid I. In his distress, like the Emperor Manuel, he turned to Henry IV of England, whom he visited in London in 1404. Henry was not able to assist him, though he had at one time intended to lead an army “as far as to the sepulchre of Christ”; but, when Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, made a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1418, he was conveyed back to Venice on one of Pietro Zeno’s galleys. This was, so far as we have been able to discover, the only connection between England and the Duchy. In the same year Giacomo died at Ferrara, on his way to see the Pope, the natural protector of the Latins in the Levant.

During the greater part of the fifteenth century the history of the Archipelago presents a monotonous series of family feuds and Turkish aggression. The subdivision of the islands, in order to provide appanages for the younger members of some petty reigning dynasty, was a source of weakness, which recalls the mediæval annals of Germany, nor did there arise among the Dukes of this period a strong man like the founder of the Duchy. One of them was advised by Venice to make the best terms that he could with the Sultan, though complaints were made that he had failed to warn the Venetian bailie of Eubœa of the approaching Turkish fleet, by means of beacon-fires—an incident which takes us back to the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus. The fall of Constantinople, followed by the capture of Lesbos and Eubœa by the Turks, greatly alarmed the Dukes, who drew closer than ever to the Venetian Republic, and were usually included in all the Venetian treaties. Other misfortunes greatly injured the islands. The Genoese plundered Naxos and Andros, and the volcanic island of Santorin was the scene of a great eruption in 1457, which threw up a new islet in the port. A few years later, Santorin had suffered so much from one cause or another that it contained no more than 300 inhabitants. An earthquake followed this eruption, further increasing the misery of the Archipelago. But this was the age of numerous religious foundations, some of them still in existence, such as the church of Sant’ Antonio at Naxos, which was bestowed upon the Knights of St John, as their arms on its walls remind the traveller. It was about this time too that Cyriacus of Ancona, after copying inscriptions at Athens, visited Andros and other islands of the Ægean. The island rulers not only received him courteously, but ordered excavations to be made for his benefit—a proof of culture which should be set against their wanton destruction of ancient buildings, in order to provide materials for their own palaces—a practice of which the tower at Paros is so striking an example. When we remember that each petty lord considered it necessary to be well lodged, the extent of these ravages may be easily imagined.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century the condition of the islanders had become intolerable, and matters came to a climax under the rule of Giovanni III. That despotic Duke incurred the displeasure not only of the Sultan, but also of his own subjects. The former complained that he had fallen into arrears with his tribute—for the Dukes had long had to purchase independence by the payment of _bakshîsh_—and that he harboured corsairs, who plundered the Asian coast. The latter grumbled at the heavy taxes which the Duke pocketed without doing anything for the protection of his people. The Archbishop of Naxos made himself the mouthpiece of popular discontent, and wrote to Venice, in the name of the people of Naxos and Paros, offering to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Republic. Venice replied, authorising him to point out to the Duke and to Sommaripa, the lord of Paros, the utter hopelessness of their present position, and to offer them an assured income for the rest of their lives if they would cede their islands to a Venetian commissioner. But the negotiations failed; the Naxiotes, driven to despair, took the law into their own hands, and in 1494 murdered their Duke. The Archbishop then proceeded to Venice, and persuaded the Senate to take over the Duchy, at least till the late Duke’s son, Francesco, came of age. During the next six years Venetian Commissioners administered the islands, which were, however, loyally handed over to Francesco III at the end of that time. The new Duke proved unfortunately to be a homicidal maniac, who killed his wife and tried to kill his heir. As a consequence he was removed to Crete and a second brief Venetian occupation lasted during the rest of his successor’s minority[169]. The long reign of his son, Giovanni IV, who, soon after his accession, was captured by Turkish pirates while on a hunting party, lasted till 1564 and witnessed the loss of many of the Ægean islands. That great sovereign, Suleyman the Magnificent, now sat upon the Turkish throne, and his celebrated admiral, Khaireddîn Barbarossa, spread fire and sword through many a Christian village. In 1537 the classic island of Ægina, still under Venetian domination, was visited by this terrible scourge, who massacred all the adult male population, and took away 6000 women and children as slaves. So complete was the destruction of the Æginetans that, when a French admiral touched at the island soon afterwards, he found it devoid of inhabitants. There, as usual, an Albanian immigration replenished, at least to some extent, the devastated sites, but Ægina was long in recovering some small measure of its former prosperity. Thence Barbarossa sailed to Naxos, whence he carried off an immense booty, compelling the Duke to purchase his further independence—if such it could be called—by a tribute of 5000 ducats, and submitting him to the ignominy of seeing the furniture of his own palace sent on board the Admiral’s flagship under his very eyes. The horrible scenes of those days would seem to have impressed themselves deeply upon the mind of the wretched Duke, who gave vent to his feelings in a bitter letter of complaint to the Pope and other Christian princes. This curious document urged them to “apply their ears and lift up their eyes, and attend with their minds while their own interests were still safe,” and reminded them of the evils caused by discord in the councils of Christendom. The Duke emphasised his admirable truisms, which might have been addressed to the Concert of Europe at any time during the last fifty years, by a well-worn tag from Sallust—Sallustius Crispus, “the author of our race.” But neither his platitudes nor his allusion to his distinguished ancestry, which he might have had some difficulty in proving, availed him. The Turks went on in their career of conquest. Paros was annexed, Andros was forced to pay tribute, the Venetians lost Skiathos and Skopelos, and by the shameful treaty of 1540 forfeited the prestige which they had so long wielded in the Levant.

The Duchy of Naxos had long existed by the grace of the Venetian Republic, and, now that Venice had been crippled, its days were numbered. The capture of Chios in 1566 was the signal for its dissolution. As soon as the news arrived in Naxos and Andros that the Turks had put an end to the rule of the joint-stock company of the Giustiniani in that fertile island, the Greeks of the Duchy complained to the Sultan of the exactions to which they were subjected by their Frank lords. There was some justification for their grievances, for Giacomo IV, the last of the Frank Dukes, was a notorious debauchee; and the conduct of the Catholic clergy, by the admission of a Jesuit historian, had become a public scandal. But the main motive of the petitioners seems to have been that intense hatred of Catholicism which characterised the Orthodox Greeks during the whole period of the Frank rule in the Levant, and which, as we saw under Austrian rule in Bosnia, has not yet wholly disappeared. Giacomo was fully aware of the delicacy of his position, and he resolved to convince the Turkish Government, as force was out of the question, by the only other argument which it understands. He collected a large sum of money, and went to Constantinople to reply to his accusers. But he found the ground already undermined by the artifices of the Œcumenical Patriarch, who had warmly espoused the cause of the Orthodox Naxiotes, and was in the confidence of the Turkish authorities. Giacomo had no sooner landed than he was clapped into prison, where he languished for five months, while the renegade, Pialì Pasha, quietly occupied Naxos and its dependencies and drove the Sommaripa out of Andros. But the Greeks of the Duchy soon discovered that they had made an indifferent bargain. One of the most important banking houses of the period was that of the Nasi, which had business in France, the Low Countries, and Italy, and lent money to kings and princes. The manager of the Antwerp branch was an astute Portuguese Jew, who at one time called himself João Miquez and posed as a Christian, and then reverted to Judaism and styled himself Joseph Nasi. A marriage with a wealthy cousin made him richer than before; he migrated to the Turkish dominions, where Jews were very popular with the Sultans, and became a prime favourite of Selim II. This was the man on whom that sovereign now bestowed the Duchy; and thus, by a prosaic freak of fortune, the lovely island of classical myth and mediæval romance became the property of a Jewish banker. Nasi, as a Jew, knew that he would be loathed by the Greeks, so he never visited his orthodox Duchy, but appointed a Spaniard named Coronello to act as his agent, and to screw as much money as possible out of the inhabitants. In this he was very successful.

As soon as Giacomo IV was released he set out for the west to procure the aid of the Pope and Venice for the recovery of his dominions, even pledging himself in that event to do homage to the Republic for them. But, in spite of the great victory of Lepanto, the Turks remained in undisturbed possession of the Duchy, except for a brief restoration of Giacomo’s authority by Venice in 1571. On the accession of Murad III Giacomo had hopes of obtaining his further restoration through the good offices of the new Sultan’s mother, a native of Paros, belonging to the distinguished Venetian family of Baffo. But though she promised her aid, and he went to plead his cause in person at Constantinople, the Sultan was inexorable. The last of the Dukes died in the Turkish capital in 1576, and was buried in the Latin church there. Three years later Joseph Nasi died also, whereupon the Duchy was placed under the direct administration of the Porte.

But though Naxos and all the important islands had been annexed by the Turks, there still remained a few fragments of the Latin rule in the Levant. The seven islands of Siphnos, Thermia, Kimolos, Polinos, Pholegandros, Gyaros, and Sikinos were retained by the Gozzadini family on payment of a tribute until 1617, while Venice still preserved Tenos as a station[170] in the Levant for a whole century more. Everywhere else in the Ægean the crescent floated from the battlements of the castles and palaces where for three and a half centuries the Latin nobles had practised the arts of war.

The occupation of the Greek islands by the Latins was unnatural, and, like most unnatural things, it was destined not to endure. But this strange meeting of two deeply interesting races in the classic seats of Greek lyric poetry can scarcely fail to strike the imagination. And to-day, when Italy is once more showing a desire to play a _rôle_ in the near East, when Italians have officered the Cretan police, when Italian troops have occupied thirteen islands in the lower Ægean since 1912, including the old Quirini fief of Stampalia, when the Aldobrandini’s thirteenth century possession of Adalia is being revived, and the statesmen of Rome are looking wistfully across the Adriatic, it is curious to go back to the times when Venetian and Lombard families held sway among the islands of the Ægean, and the Latin galleys, flying the pennons of those petty princes, glided in and out of the harbours of that classic sea. Even in her middle age Greece had her romance, and no fitter place could have been chosen for it than “the wave-beat shore of Naxos.”

APPENDIX

THE MAD DUKE OF NAXOS

Subsequent historians of the Duchy of Naxos have accepted without question Hopf’s[171] chronology and brief description of the reign of Francesco III Crispo, who was formally proclaimed duke, after a brief Venetian protectorate, in October 1500. According to the German scholar, who is followed by Count Mas Latrie[172], Francesco III “quietly governed” his island domain down to 1518, the only incident in his career being his capture by Turkish corsairs while hunting in 1517. His wife, according to the same authorities, had already predeceased him, having died “before 1501.” But a perusal of Sanuto’s _Diarii_ shows that all these statements are wrong. Francesco III, so far from “quietly governing” his subjects, was a homicidal maniac, who murdered his wife in 1510 and died in the following year.

We first hear of the duke’s madness in 1509, when he and his brother-in-law, Antonio Loredano, were on board the ducal galley, then engaged in the Venetian service at Trieste. The duke was put in custody at San Michele di Murano, but was subsequently released and allowed to return to Naxos[173]. There, as we learn from two separate accounts, one sent to the Venetian authorities in Crete by the community of Naxos, the other sent to Venice by Antonio da Pesaro, Venetian governor of Andros, the duke had a return of the malady[174]. On August 15, 1510, he was more than usually affectionate to his wife, Taddea Loredano, to whom he had been married fourteen years, and who is described by one of the Venetian ambassadors as “a lady of wisdom and great talent[175].” Having inveigled the duchess to his side “by songs, kisses, and caresses,” he seized his sword and tried to slay her. The terrified woman fled, just as she was, in her nightdress, out of the ducal palace, and took refuge in the house of her aunt, Lucrezia Loredano, Lady of Nio. Thither, in the night of Saturday, August 17, her husband pursued her; he burst open the doors, and entered the bedroom, where he found the Lady of Nio and her daughter-in-law, to whom he gave three severe blows each. Meanwhile, on hearing the noise, the duchess had hidden under a wash-tub; a slave betrayed her hiding-place, and the duke struck her over the head with his sword. In the attempt to parry the blow, she seized the blade in her hands, and fell fainting on the ground, where her miserable assailant gave her a thrust in the stomach. She lived the rest of the night and the next day, while the duke fled to his garden, whence he was induced by the citizens to return to the palace. There, as he sat at meat with his son Giovanni, he heard from one of the servants that the people wished to depose him and put Giovanni in his place. In a paroxysm of rage, he seized a knife to kill his son; but his arm was held, and the lad saved himself by leaping from the balcony. The duke tried to escape to Rhodes, but he was seized, after a struggle in which he was wounded, and sent to Santorin. His son Giovanni IV was proclaimed duke, and as he could not have been more than eleven years old—his birth is spoken of as imminent[176] in May 1499—a governor of the duchy was elected in the person of Jacomo Dezia, whom we may identify with Giacomo I Gozzadini, baron of the island of Zia, who is mentioned as being present in the ducal palace at Naxos, in a document[177] of 1500, whose family had a mansion there, and who had already been governor in 1507. From Santorin, Francesco III was removed on a Venetian ship to Candia, where, as we learn from letters of August 15, 1511, he died of fever[178].

Meanwhile, on October 18, 1510, it had been proposed at Venice that the mad duke’s brother-in-law, Antonio Loredano, should be sent as governor to Naxos, with a salary of 400 ducats a year, payable out of the revenues, just as Venetian governors had been sent there during the minority of Francesco III. Loredano sailed on January 16, 1511, for his post, where he remained for four and a half years[179]. Naxos, in his time, cannot have been a gloomy exile, for we hear of the “balls and festivals with the accompaniment of very polished female society” which greeted the Venetian ambassador[180]. We do not learn who governed the duchy between July 1515, when Loredano returned to Venice, and the coming of age of Duke Giovanni IV, which seems to have been in May 1517. On May 6 of that year he wrote a letter to the Cretan government, signed _Joannes Crispus dux Egeo Pelagi_, which Sanuto has preserved[181]; and in the same summer _il ducha di Nixia, domino Zuan Crespo_, was captured by corsairs while hunting, and subsequently ransomed[182]—an adventure which Hopf, as we have seen, wrongly ascribed to Francesco III.

7. CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)

Of all the Levantine possessions acquired by Venice as the result of the Fourth Crusade, by far the most important was the great island of Crete, which she obtained in August, 1204, from Boniface of Montferrat to whom it had been given 15 months earlier by Alexios IV, at the cost of 1000 marks of silver. At that time the population of the island, which in antiquity is supposed to have been a million, was probably about 500,000 or 600,000[183]. Lying on the way to Egypt and Syria, it was an excellent stopping-place for the Venetian merchantmen, and the immense sums of money expended upon its defence prove the value which the shrewd statesmen of the lagoons set upon it. Whether its retention was really worth the enormous loss of blood and treasure which it involved may perhaps be doubted, though in our own days the Concert of Europe has thought fit to spend about thrice the value of the island in the process of freeing it from the Turk. What distinguishes the mediæval history of Crete from that of the other Frank possessions in the Near East is the almost constant insubordination of the Cretan population. While in the Duchy of Athens we scarcely hear of any restlessness on the part of the Greeks, while in the Principality of Achaia they gave comparatively little trouble, while in the Archipelago they seldom murmured against their Dukes—in Crete, on the other hand, one insurrection followed another in rapid succession, and the first 160 years of Venetian rule are little else than a record of insurrections. The masters of the island explained this by the convenient theory, applied in our own time to the Irish, that the Cretans had a double dose of original sin, and the famous verse of Epimenides, to which the New Testament has given undying reputation, must have been often in the mouths of Venetian statesmen. But there were other and more natural reasons for the stubborn resistance of the islanders. After the reconquest of Crete by Nikephoros Phokas, the Byzantine Government had sent thither many members of distinguished military families, and their descendants, the _archontes_ of the island at the time of the Venetian invasion, furnished the leaders for these perennial revolts[184]. Moreover, the topography of Crete is admirably suited for guerilla warfare; the combination of an insular with a highland spirit constitutes a double gage of independence, and what the Venetians regarded as a vice the modern Greeks reckon as a virtue.