Part 8

In the autumn of 1204 Boniface set out to conquer his Greek dominions. The King of Salonika belonged to a family, which was no stranger to the ways of the Orient. One of his brothers had married the daughter of the Greek Emperor Manuel I; another brother and a nephew were Kings of Jerusalem—a vain dignity which has descended from them, together with the Marquisate of Montferrat, to the present Italian dynasty. Married to the affable widow of the Greek Emperor Isaac II, Boniface was a sympathetic figure to the Greeks, who had speedily flocked in numbers to his side, and several of whom accompanied him on his march through Greece. Among these was the bastard Michael Angelos, of whom we shall hear later as the founder of a new dynasty. With the King of Salonika there went too a motley crowd of Crusaders in quest of fiefs, men of many nationalities, Lombards, Flemings, Frenchmen and Germans. There were Guillaume de Champlitte, a grandson of the Count of Champagne; Othon de la Roche, son of a Burgundian noble; Jacques d’Avesnes, son of a Flemish crusader who had been at the siege of Acre, and his two nephews, Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer; Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, a Rhenish warrior who had given the signal for setting fire to Constantinople; the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, youngest son of a nobleman from near Parma, who had gone to Greece because at home every common man could hale him before the courts; Thomas de Stromoncourt, and Ravano dalle Carceri of Verona, brother of the _podestà_ Realdo, whose name still figures on the _Casa dei Mercanti_ there. Just as the modern general takes with him a band of war-correspondents to chronicle his achievements, so Boniface was accompanied by Rambaud de Vaqueiras, a troubadour from Provence, who afterwards boasted in one of the letters in verse which he addressed to his patron, that he “had helped him to conquer the Empire of the East and the Kingdom of Salonika, the island of Pelops and the Duchy of Athens.” Such were the men at whose head the Marquess of Montferrat marched through the classic vale of Tempe, the route of so many armies, into the great fertile plain of Thessaly.

While the Crusaders are traversing the vale of Tempe, let us ask ourselves for a moment, who were the races, and what was the condition, of the country which they were about to enter? The question is important, for the answer to it will enable us to understand the ease with which a small body of Franks conquered, almost without opposition, nearly the whole of Greece. The bulk of the inhabitants were, of course, Greeks; for no one, except a few propagandists, now believes the theory, so confidently advanced by Professor Fallmerayer 90 years ago, according to which there is not a single drop of Hellenic blood in the Greek nation, but the Kingdom of Greece is inhabited by Slavs and Albanians. At the time of the Frankish conquest, the Slavonic elements in the population, the survivals of the Slavonic immigrations of the dark centuries, were confined to the mountain fastnesses of Arcadia and Laconia, where Taygetos was known as “the mountain of the Slavs.” The marvellous power of the Hellenic race for absorbing and hellenising foreign nationalities—a power like that of the Americans in our own day—had prevented the Peloponnese from becoming a Slav state, a Southern Serbia or Bulgaria, though such Slavonic names as Charvati near Mycenæ and Slavochorio still preserve the memory of the Slavonic settlements. As for the Albanians, they had not yet entered Greece; had they done so, the conquest would probably have been far less easy. Besides the Greeks and the Slavs, there were Wallachs in Thessaly, who extended as far south as Lamia, and who had bestowed upon the whole of that region the name, which we find employed by the Byzantine historian Niketas, of “Great Wallachia.” That the Wallachs are of Roman descent, scarcely admits of doubt; at the present day the Roumanians claim them as their kinsmen; and the “Koutso”—or “lame,” Wallachs, so-called because they cannot pronounce _chinch_ (or _cinque_) correctly, form one of the most thorny questions of contemporary diplomacy. The Jewish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Greece about 40 years before the Frankish conquest, argued from their Scriptural names and from the fact that they called the Jews “brethren,” that they were connected with his own race. They showed, however, their “brotherly” love by merely robbing the Israelites, while they both robbed and murdered the Greeks.

In the south-east of the Peloponnese were to be found the mysterious Tzakones, a race which now exists at Leonidi and the adjacent villages alone, but which then occupied a wider area. Opinions differ as to the origin of this tribe, which still retains a dialect quite distinct from that spoken anywhere else in Greek lands and which was noticed as a “barbarian” tongue by the Byzantine satirist, Mazaris, in the fifteenth century. But Dr Deffner of Athens, the greatest living authority on their language, of which he has written a grammar, regards them as the descendants of the ancient Laconians, their name as a corruption of the words Τοὺς Λάκωνας, and their speech as “new Doric.” Scattered about, wherever money was to be made by trade, were colonies of Jews.

The rule of the Franks must have seemed to many Greeks a welcome relief from the financial oppression of the Byzantine Government. Greece was, at the date of the Conquest, afflicted by three terrible plagues: the tax collectors, the pirates, and the native tyrants. The Imperial Government did nothing for the provinces, but wasted the money which should have been spent on the defences of Greece, in extravagant ostentation at the capital. Byzantine officials, sent to Greece, regarded that classic land, in the phrase of Niketas, as an “utter hole,” an uncomfortable place of exile. The two Greek provinces were governed by one of these authorities, styled _prætor_, _protoprætor_, or “general,” whose headquarters were at Thebes. We have from the pen of Michael Akominatos, the last Metropolitan of Athens before the conquest and brother of the historian Niketas, a vivid account of the exactions of these personages. Theoretically, the city of Athens was a privileged community. A golden bull of the Emperor forbade the _prætor_ to enter it with an armed force, so that the Athenians might be spared the annoyance and expense of having soldiers quartered upon them. Its regular contribution to the Imperial Exchequer was limited to a land-tax, and it was expected to send a golden wreath as a coronation offering to a new Emperor. But, in practice, these privileges were apt to be ignored. The indignant Metropolitan complains that the _prætor_, under the pretext of worshipping in the Church of “Our Lady of Athens,” as the Parthenon was then called, visited the city with a large retinue. He laments that one of these Imperial Governors had treated the city “more barbarously than Xerxes,” and that the leaves of the trees, nay almost every hair on the heads of the unfortunate Athenians, had been numbered. The authority of the _prætor_, he says, is like Medea in the legend; just as she scattered her poisons over Thessaly, so it scatters injustice over Greece—a classical simile, which had its justification in the hard fact, that it had long been the custom of the Byzantine Empire to pay the Governors of the European provinces no salaries, but to make their office self-supporting, a practice still followed by the Turkish Government. The Byzantine Government, too, following a policy similar to that which cost our King Charles I his throne, levied ship-money, really for the purpose of its own coffers, nominally for the suppression of piracy.

Piracy was then, as so often, the curse of the islands and the deeply indented coast of Greece. We learn from the English Chronicle ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, which gives a graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, that many of the islands were uninhabited from fear of pirates, and that others were their chosen lairs. Cephalonia and Ithake, which now appears under its mediæval name of Val di Compare—first used, so far as I know by the Genoese historian, Caffaro, in the first half of the twelfth century—had a specially evil reputation, and bold was the sailor who dared venture through the channel between them. Near Athens, the island of Ægina was a stronghold of corsairs, who injured the property of the Athenian Church, and dangerously wounded the nephew of the Metropolitan. Yet the remedy for piracy was almost worse than the disease. Well might the anxious Metropolitan tell the Lord High Admiral, that the Athenians regarded their proximity to the sea as the greatest of their misfortunes.

Besides the Byzantine officials and the pirates, the Greeks had a third set of tormentors in the shape of a brood of native tyrants, whose feuds divided city against city and divided communities into rival parties. Even where the Emperor had been nominally sovereign, the real power was in the hands of local magnates, who had revived, on the eve of the Frankish conquest, the petty tyrannies of ancient Greece. Under the dynasty of the Comneni, who imitated and introduced the ways of Western chivalry, feudalism had already made considerable inroads into the East. At the time of the Fourth Crusade, local families were in possession of large tracts of territory which they governed almost like independent princes. Of all these _archontes_, as they were called, the most powerful was Leon Sgouros, hereditary lord of Nauplia, who had extended his sway over Argos “of the goodly steeds,” and had seized the city and fortress of Corinth, proudly styling himself by a high-sounding Byzantine title, and placing his fortunes under the protection of St Theodore the Warrior. The manners of these local magnates were no less savage than those of the Western barons of the same period. Thus, Sgouros on one occasion invited the Archbishop of Corinth to dinner, and then put out the eyes of his guest, and hurled him over the rocks of the citadel. The contemporary historian Niketas has painted in the darkest colours the character of the Greek _archontes_, upon whom he lays the chief responsibility for the evils which befell their country. He speaks of them as “inflamed by ambition against their own fatherland, slavish men, spoiled by luxury, who made themselves tyrants, instead of fighting the Latins.” The Emperor and historian, John Cantacuzene, gives much the same description of their descendants a century and a half later.

Such was the condition of Greece, when Boniface and his army emerged from the vale of Tempe and marched across the plain of Thessaly to Larissa. He bestowed that ancient city upon a Lombard noble, who henceforth styled himself Guglielmo de Larsa from the name of his fief. Velestino, the ancient Pheræ, the scene of the legend of Admetos and Alcestis, and the site of the modern battle, fell to the share of Berthold von Katzenellenbogen, whose name must have proved a stumbling-block to his Thessalian vassals. The army then took the usual route by way of Pharsala and Domoko—names familiar alike in the ancient and modern history of Greek warfare—down to Lamia and thence across the Trachinian plain to Thermopylæ, where Sgouros was awaiting it. But the memories of Leonidas failed to inspire the _archon_ of Nauplia to follow his example. Niketas tells us that the mere sight of the Latin knights in their coats of mail sufficed to make him flee straight to his own fastness of Akrocorinth, leaving the pass undefended. Conscious of its strength—for Thermopylæ must have been far more of a defile then than now—Boniface resolved to secure it permanently against attack. He therefore invested the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, nicknamed by the Greeks “Marchesopoulo,” with the fief of Boudonitza, which commanded the other end of the pass. Thus arose the famous Marquisate of Boudonitza, which was destined to play an important part in the Frankish history of Greece, and which, after a continuous existence of over two centuries, as guardian of the Northern marches, has left a memory of its fallen greatness in the ruins of the castle and chapel of its former lords, of whose descendants, the Zorzi of Venice, there are still living—so Mr Horatio Brown informs me—some thirty representatives in that city. Following the present carriage-road from Lamia to the Corinthian Gulf, Boniface established another defensive post at the pass of Gravia, so famous centuries afterwards in the War of Independence, conferring it as a fief on the two brothers Jacques and Nicholas de St Omer. At the foot of Parnassos, on the site of the ancient Amphissa, he next founded the celebrated barony of Salona, which lasted almost as long as the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Upon the almost Cyclopean stones of the classic Akropolis of Amphissa, which Philip of Macedon had destroyed fifteen centuries before, Thomas de Stromoncourt built himself the fortress, of which the majestic ruins—perhaps the finest Frankish remains in Greece—still stand among the cornfields on the hill above the modern town. According to the local tradition, the name of Salona, which the place still bears in common parlance, despite the usual official efforts to revive the classical terminology, is derived from the King of Salonika, its second founder. The lord of Salona soon extended his sway down to the harbour of Galaxidi, and the barony became so important that two at least of the house of Stromoncourt struck coins of their own, which are still preserved.

Boniface next marched into Bœotia, where the people, glad to be relieved from the oppression of Sgouros, at once submitted. Thebes joyfully opened her gates, and then the invaders pursued their way to Athens. The Metropolitan thought it useless to defend the city, and a Frankish guard was soon stationed on the Akropolis. The Crusaders had no respect for the great Cathedral. To these soldiers of fortune the classic glories of the Parthenon appealed as little as the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. The rich treasury of the Cathedral was plundered, the holy vessels were melted down, the library which the Metropolitan had collected was dispersed. Unable to bear the sight, Akominatos quitted the scene where he had laboured so long, and, after wandering about for a time, finally settled down in the island of Keos, whence he could at least see the coast of Attica.

Thebes with Bœotia and Athens with Attica and the Megarid were bestowed by the King of Salonika upon his trusty comrade in arms, Othon de la Roche, who had rendered him a valuable service by assisting to settle a serious dispute between him and the Emperor Baldwin, and who afterwards negotiated the marriage between Boniface’s daughter and Baldwin’s brother and successor. Thus, in the words of a monkish chronicler, “Othon de la Roche, son of a certain Burgundian noble, became, as by a miracle, Duke of the Athenians and Thebans.” The chronicler was only wrong in the title which he attributed to the lucky Frenchman, who had thus succeeded to the glories of the heroes and sages of Athens. Othon modestly styled himself _Sire d’Athènes_, or _Dominus Athenarum_ in official documents, which his Greek subjects magnified into “the Great Lord” (Μέγας κύρ), and Dante, who had probably heard that such had been the title of the first Frankish ruler of Athens, transferred it by a poetic anachronism to Peisistratos. Half a century after the conquest, Othon’s nephew and successor, Guy I, received, at his request, the title of Duke from Louis IX of France—and Shakespeare in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and Chaucer in _The Knight’s Tale_ have by a similar anachronism conferred the ducal title of the De la Roche upon Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens. Contemporary accounts make no mention of any resistance to the Lord of Athens on the part of the Greeks. Later Venetian authors, however, actuated perhaps by patriotic bias, propagated a story, that the Athenians sent an embassy to offer their city to Venice, but that their scheme was frustrated “not without bloodshed by the men of Champagne under the Lord de la Roche.”

We naturally ask ourselves what was the appearance and condition of the most famous city of the ancient world at the time of Othon’s accession, and the voluminous writings of the eminent man who was Metropolitan at that moment, which have been published by Professor Lampros of Athens, throw a flood of light upon the Athens of the beginning of the thirteenth century. The only Athenian manufactures were soap and the weaving of monkish habits, but the ships of the Piræus still took part in the purple-fishing off the lonely island of Gyaros, the Botany Bay of the Roman Empire. There was still some trade at the Piræus, for the Byzantine Admiral had found vessels there. It was then guarded by the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, which gave the harbour its mediæval name of Porto Leone, and on which Harold Hardrada, afterwards slain at Stamford Bridge, had scratched his name nearly two centuries before. We may infer, too, from the mention of Athens in the commercial treaties between Venice and the Byzantine Empire that the astute Republicans saw some prospect of making money there. But the “thin soil” of Attica was as unproductive as in the days of Thucydides, and yielded nothing but oil, honey, and wine, the last strongly flavoured with resin, as it still is, so that the Metropolitan could write to a friend that it “seems to be pressed from the juice of the pine rather than from that of the grape.” The harvest was always meagre, and famines were common. Even ordinary necessaries were not always obtainable. Akominatos could not find a decent carriage-builder in the place; and, in his despair at the absence of blacksmiths and workers in iron, he was constrained to apply to Athens the words of Jeremiah: “the bellows are burnt.” Emigration, still the curse of Greece, was draining off the able-bodied poor, so that the population had greatly diminished, and the city threatened to become what Aristophanes had called “a Scythian wilderness.”

Externally, the visitor to the Athens of that day, must have been struck by the marked contrast between the splendid monuments of the classic age and the squalid surroundings of the mediæval town. The walls were lying in ruins, the houses of the emigrants had been pulled down, the streets, where once the sages of antiquity had walked, were now desolate. But the hand of the invader and the tooth of time had, on the whole, dealt gently with the Athenian monuments. The Parthenon, converted long before into the Cathedral of Our Lady of Athens, was almost as little damaged, as if it had only just been built. The metopes, the pediments, and the frieze were still intact, and remained so when, more than two centuries later, Cyriacus of Ancona, the first archæologist who had ever visited Athens during the Frankish period, drew his sketch of the Parthenon, which is still preserved in Berlin and of which a copy by Sangallo may be seen in the Vatican library. On the walls were the frescoes, traces of which are still visible, executed by order of the Emperor Basil II, “the slayer of the Bulgarians,” nearly two centuries earlier. Over the altar was a golden dove, representing the Holy Ghost, and ever flying with perpetual motion. In the cathedral, too, was an ever-burning lamp, fed by oil that never failed, which was the marvel of the pilgrims. So widespread was the fame of the Athenian Minster, that the great folk of Constantinople, in spite of their supercilious contempt for the provinces and their dislike of travel, came to do obeisance there. Of the other ancient buildings on the sacred rock, the graceful temple of Nike Apteros had been turned into a chapel; the Erechtheion had become a church of the Saviour, or a chapel of the Virgin, while the episcopal residence, which is known to have then been on the Akropolis, was probably in the Propylæa. The whole Akropolis had for centuries been made into a fortress, the only defence which Athens then possessed, strong enough to have resisted the attack of a Greek magnate like Sgouros, but incapable of repulsing a Latin army. Already strange legends and new names had begun to grow round some of the classical monuments. The Choragic monument of Lysikrates was already popularly known as “the lantern of Demosthenes,” its usual designation during the Turkish domination, when it became the Capuchin Convent, serving in 1811 as a study to Lord Byron, who from within its walls launched his bitter poem against the filcher of the Elgin marbles. But, even at the beginning of the thirteenth century, many of the ancient names of places lingered in the mouths of the people. The classically cultured Metropolitan was gratified as a good Philhellene, to hear that the Piræus and Hymettos, Eleusis and Marathon, the Areopagos and Kallirrhoe, Salamis and Ægina were still called by names, which the contemporaries of Perikles had used, even though the Areopagos was nothing but a bare rock, the plain of Marathon yielded no corn, and the “beautifully-flowing” fountain had ceased to flow. But new, uncouth names were beginning to creep in; thus, the partition treaty of 1204 describes Salamis as “Culuris” (or, “the lizard”), a vulgar name, derived from the shape of the island, which I have heard used in Attica at the present day.

Of the intellectual condition of Athens we should form but a low estimate, if we judged entirely from the lamentations of the elegant Byzantine scholar whom fate had made its Metropolitan. Akominatos had found that his tropes, and fine periods, and classical allusions were far over the heads of the Athenians who came to hear him, and who talked in his cathedral, even though that cathedral was the Parthenon. He wrote that his long residence in Greece had made him a barbarian. Yet he was able to add to his store of manuscripts in this small provincial town. Moreover, there is some evidence to prove that, even at this period, Athens was a place of study, whither Georgians from the East and English from the West came to obtain a liberal education. Matthew Paris tells us of Master John of Basingstoke, Archdeacon of Leicester in the reign of Henry III, who used often to say, that whatever scientific knowledge he possessed had been acquired from the youthful daughter of the Archbishop of Athens. This young lady could forecast the advent of pestilences, thunderstorms, eclipses, and earthquakes. From learned Greeks at Athens Master John professed to have heard some things of which the Latins had no knowledge; he found there the testaments of the twelve Patriarchs, and he brought back to England the Greek numerals and many books, including a Greek grammar which had been compiled for him at Athens. The same author tells us, too, of “certain Greek philosophers”—that is, in mediæval Greek parlance, monks—who came from Athens at this very time to the Court of King John, and disputed about nice sharp quillets of theology with English divines. It is stated, also, though on indifferent authority, as Mr F. C. Conybeare of Oxford kindly informs me, that the Georgian poet, Chota Roustavéli, and other Georgians spent several years at Athens on the eve of the Frankish conquest.

Othon de la Roche showed his gratitude to his benefactor, the King of Salonika, by accompanying him in his attack upon the strongholds of Sgouros in the Peloponnese. The Franks routed the Greek army at the Isthmus of Corinth, and while Othon laid siege to the noble castle above that town, Boniface proceeded to the attack on Nauplia. There he was joined by a man, who was destined to be the conqueror and ruler of the peninsula.