Part 9

It chanced that, a little before the capture of Constantinople, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, nephew of the quaint chronicler of the Fourth Crusade, had set out on a pilgrimage to Palestine. On his arrival in Syria, he heard of the great achievements of the Crusaders, and resolved without loss of time to join them. But his ship was driven out of its course by a violent storm, and Geoffroy was forced to take shelter in the harbour of Methone on the coast of Messenia. During the winter of 1204, which he spent at that spot, he received an invitation from a local magnate to join him in an attack on the lands of the neighbouring Greeks. Villehardouin, nothing loth, placed his sword at the disposal of the Greek traitor, and success crowned the arms of these unnatural allies. But the Greek _archon_ died, and his son, more patriotic or more prudent than his father, repudiated the dangerous alliance with the Frankish stranger. But it was too late. Villehardouin had discovered the fatal secret, that the Greeks of the Peloponnese were an unwarlike race, whose land would fall an easy conquest to a resolute band of Latins. At this moment, tidings reached him that Boniface was besieging Nauplia. He at once set out on a six days’ journey across a hostile country to seek his aid. In the camp he found his old friend and fellow-countryman, Guillaume de Champlitte, who was willing to assist him. He described to Champlitte the richness of the land which men called “the Morea”—a term which now occurs for the first time in history, and which seems to have been originally applied to the coast of Elis and thence extended to the whole peninsula, just as the name Italy, originally a part of Calabria, has similarly spread over the whole of that country. He professed his readiness to recognise Champlitte as his liege lord in return for his aid, and Boniface consented, after some hesitation, to their undertaking. With a hundred knights and some men-at-arms, the two friends rode out from the camp before Nauplia to conquer the peninsula.

The conquest of the Morea has been compared with that of England by the Normans. In both cases a single pitched battle decided the fate of the country, but in the Morea, the conquerors did not, as in England, amalgamate with the conquered. The Hastings of the Peloponnese was fought in the olive-grove of Koundoura, in the North-East of Messenia, and the little Frankish force of between 500 and 700 men easily routed the over-confident Greeks, aided by the Slavs of Taygetos, who altogether numbered from 4000 to 6000. After this, one place after another fell into the hands of the Franks, who showed towards the conquered that tact which we believe to be one of the chief causes of our own success in dealing with subject races. Provided that their religion was respected, the Greeks were not unwilling to accept the Franks as their masters, and on this point the conquerors, who were not bigots, made no difficulties. By the year 1212, the whole of the peninsula was Frankish, except where the Greek flag still waved over the impregnable rock of Monemvasia, the St Michael’s Mount of Greece, and where at the two stations of Methone and Korone in Messenia Venice had raised the lion-banner of St Mark. Insignificant as they are now, those twin colonies were of great value to the Venetian traders, and there is a whole literature about them in the Venetian Archives. All the galleys stopped there on the way to Syria and Crete; pilgrims to the Holy Land found a welcome there in “the German house,” founded by the Teutonic Knights, and as late as 1532 there was a Christian Governor at Korone. The population was then removed to Sicily, and of those exiles the present Albanian monks of Grottaferrata are the descendants.

I have now described the conquest of the mainland; it remains to speak of the islands, which had mostly been allotted to Venice by the treaty of partition. But the shrewd Government saw that its resources could not stand the strain of conquering and administering the large group of the Cyclades. It was, therefore, decided to leave to private citizens the task of occupying them. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that day, and on the bench of the Consular Court, as we should now call it, at Constantinople, sat the very man for such an enterprise—Marco Sanudo, nephew of “the old Doge Dandolo.” Sanudo descended from the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, equipped eight galleys and was soon master of seventeen islands, some of which he distributed as fiefs to his comrades. Naxos alone offered any real resistance, and, in 1207, the conqueror founded the Duchy of “the Dodekannesos” (or “Twelve Islands,” as the Byzantines called it), which soon received the title of the “Duchy of Naxos,” or “of the Archipelago”—a corruption of the name “Ægeopelagos,” which occurs as early as a Venetian document of 1268. This delectable Duchy lasted, first under the Sanudi, and then under the Crispi, till 1566, while the Gozzadini of Bologna held seven of the islands down to 1617, and Tenos remained in Venetian hands till it was finally taken in 1715 and ceded to the Turks by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718. For persons so important as the Dukes it was necessary to invent a truly Roman genealogy; accordingly, the Paduan biographer, Zabarella, makes the Sanudi descend from the historian Livy, while the Crispi, not to be beaten, claimed Sallust as their ancestor, and may, perhaps, be regarded as the forbears of the late Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi.

The two great islands of Crete and Eubœa had very different fortunes. Crete, as we saw, was sold by Boniface to the Venetians, and remained a Venetian colony for nearly five centuries. Eubœa, or Negroponte, as it was called in the Middle Ages, was divided by Boniface into three large baronies, which were assigned to three Lombard nobles from Verona, who styled themselves the _terciers_, or _terzieri_. We have no English equivalent for the word; perhaps, borrowing a hint from Shakespeare, we may call them “the three Gentlemen of Verona.” But Venice soon established a colony, governed by a bailie, at Chalkis, the capital of the island, and the subsequent history of Negroponte shows the gradual extension of Venetian influence over the Lombards.

The seven Ionian Islands naturally fall into three divisions. Kythera (or Cerigo) in the far South; the centred group, consisting of Zante, Cephalonia, Ithake, and Levkas (or Santa Maura); and Corfù and Paxo in the North. Of these divisions, the first fell to the share of a scion of the great Venetian family of Venier—a family which traced its name and descent from Venus, and naturally claimed the island, where she had risen from the sea. Zante, Cephalonia and Ithake had a very curious history—a history long obscure, but now well ascertained. They belonged to Count Maio (or Matteo) Orsini, a member of the great Roman family, who came, as the Spanish Chronicle of the Morea informs us, from Monopoli in Apulia. This bold adventurer, half-pirate, half-crusader,—a not unusual combination in those days—thus succeeded to the realm of Odysseus, which was thenceforth known, from his title, as the County Palatine of Cephalonia. Corfù with its appendage of Paxo, was at first assigned to ten nobles of the Republic in return for an annual payment. But, ere long, those two islands, together with Levkas, which is scarcely an island at all, were included in the dominions of a Greek prince, the bastard Michael Angelos, who had slipped away from the camp of Boniface, and had established himself, by an opportune marriage with the widow of the late Byzantine governor, as independent Greek sovereign of Epeiros. His wife was a native of the country; his father had been its governor; he thus appealed to the national feelings of the natives, whose mountainous country has in all ages defied the attacks of invading armies. A man of great vigour, he soon extended his sway from his capital of Arta to Durazzo in the North, and to the Corinthian Gulf in the South, and his dominions, known as the principality, or Despotat of Epeiros, served as the rallying point of Hellenism—the only portion of Greece, except Monemvasia, which still remained Greek.

I would fain have said something of the inner life of Frankish Greece—of its society, of its literature, and of the great influence which women exercised in its affairs. But for these subjects there is no time left. I would only add, in conclusion, that the Frankish conquest of Greece affords the clue to one of the vexed problems of modern literature—the second part of Goethe’s _Faust_, which an American scholar, Dr Schmitt, has shown to have been inspired by the account given in the _Chronicle of the Morea_, a work which was first printed by Buchon in 1825, at the time when Goethe was engaged on that part of his famous tragedy. Its origin is obvious from the following lines, which he puts into the mouth of his hero:

I hail you Dukes, as forth ye sally Beneath the rule of Sparta’s Queen[44]! Thine, German, be the hand that forges Defence for Corinth and her bays: Achaia, with its hundred gorges, I give thee, Goth, to hold and raise. Towards Elis, Franks, direct your motion; Messene be the Saxon’s state: The Norman claim and sweep the Ocean, And Argolis again make great.

2. FRANKISH SOCIETY IN GREECE

We saw in the last essay, how at the beginning of the thirteenth century a small body of Franks conquered nearly the whole of Greece, and how, as the result of their conquests, a group of Latin states sprang into existence in that country—the Duchies of Athens and of the Archipelago, the principality of Achaia, the County Palatine of Cephalonia, the three baronies of Eubœa, and the Venetian colony of Crete, while at two points alone—in the mountains of Epeiros and on the isolated rock of Monemvasia, so well-known to our ancestors as the place whence they obtained their Malmsey wine—the Greek flag still waved. In the present essay, I would give some account of Frankish organisation, political and ecclesiastical, of Frankish society, and of Frankish literature.

The usual tendency of the desperately logical Latin intellect, when brought face to face with a new set of political conditions, is to frame a paper constitution, absolutely perfect in theory, and absolutely unworkable in practice. But the French noblemen whom an extraordinary accident had converted into Spartan and Athenian law-givers, resisted this temptation, nor did they seek inspiration from the laws of Solon and Lycurgus. They fortunately possessed a model, the _Assizes of Jerusalem_ which had been drawn up a century before for that Kingdom, and which, under the name of the _Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania_—a work still preserved in a Venetian version of 1452 drawn up for the island of Eubœa—was applied to all the Frankish states in Greece. This feudal constitution, barbarous as it may seem to our modern ideas, seems to have worked well; at any rate, it was tried by the best test, that of experience, and lasted, with one small amendment, for 250 years. In Achaia, about which we have most information, a commission was appointed, consisting of two Latin bishops, two bannerets, and five leading Greeks, under the presidency of Geoffroy de Villehardouin, for the purpose of dividing the Morea into fiefs and of assigning these to the members of the conquering force according to their wealth and the numbers of their followers, and the book, or “register” as the Chronicler calls it, containing the report of this commission, was then laid before a Parliament, held at Andravida, or Andreville, in Elis, now a small village which the traveller passes in the train between Patras and Olympia, but then the capital of the principality of Achaia.

According to this Achaian Doomsday-book, twelve baronies, whose number recalls the twelve peers of Charlemagne, were created, their holders, with the other lieges, forming a High Court, which not only advised the Prince in political matters but acted as a judicial tribunal for the decision of feudal questions. In the creation of these twelve baronies due regard was paid to the fact that the Franks were a military colony in the midst of an alien, and possibly hostile, population, spread over a country possessing remarkable strategic positions. Later on, after the distribution of the baronies, strong castles were erected in each upon some natural coign of vantage, from which the baron could overawe the surrounding country. The main object of this system may be seen from the name of the famous Arcadian fortress of Matagrifon, a name given also to our Richard I’s castle at Messina[45], (“Kill-Greek,” the Greeks being usually called _Grifon_ by the French chroniclers), built near the modern Demetsana by the baron of Akova, Gautier de Rozières, to protect the rich valley of the Alpheios. The splendid remains of the castle of Karytaina, the Greek Toledo, which dominates the gorge of that classic river, which the Franks called _Charbon_, still mark the spot where Hugues de Bruyères and his son Geoffroy built a stronghold out of the ruins of the Hellenic Brenthe to terrify the Slavs of Skorta, the ancient Gortys and the home of the late Greek Prime Minister, Delyannes. The special importance of these two baronies was demonstrated by the bestowal of 24 knights’ fees upon the former and of 22 upon the latter. The castle-crowned hill of Passavâ, so-called, not, as Fallmerayer imagined, from a Slavonic Passau, but from the French war-cry _Passe Avant_, still reminds us how Jean de Neuilly, hereditary marshal of Achaia and holder of four fiefs, once watched the restless men of Maina; and, if earthquakes have left no mediæval buildings at Vostitza, the classic Aigion, where Hugues de Lille de Charpigny received eight knights’ fees, his family name still survives in the village of Kerpine, now a station on the funicular railway between Diakophto and Kalavryta. At Kalavryta itself Othon de Tournay, and at Chalandritza to the south of Patras Audebert de la Trémouille, scion of a family famous in the history of France, were established, with twelve and four fiefs respectively. Veligosti near Megalopolis with four fell to the share of the Belgian Matthieu de Valaincourt de Mons, and Nikli near Tegea with six to that of Guillaume de Morlay. Guy de Nivelet kept the Tzakones of Leonidi in check and watched the plain of Lakonia from his barony of Geraki with its six fiefs—a castle which has been surveyed by the British School at Athens—and Gritzena, entrusted to a baron named Luke with four fiefs depending on it guarded the ravines of the mountainous region round Kalamata. Patras became the barony of Guillaume Aleman, a member of a Provençal family still existing at Corfù, and the bold baron did not scruple to build his castle out of the house and church of the Latin Archbishop. Finally, the dozen was completed by the fiefs of Kalamata and Kyparissia (or Arkadia, as it was called in the Middle Ages, when what we call Arcadia was known as Mesarea) which became the barony of Geoffroy de Villehardouin. In addition to these twelve temporal peers there were seven ecclesiastical barons, whose sees were carved out on the lines of the existing Greek organisation, and of whom Antelme of Clugny, Latin Archbishop of Patras and Primate of Achaia was the chief. The Archbishop received eight knights’ fees, the bishops four a piece, and the same number was assigned to each of the three great Military Orders of the Teutonic Knights, the Knights of St John, and the Templars. When, a century later, the Templars were dissolved, their possessions went to the Knights of St John. In Elis was the domain of the Prince, and his usual residence, when he was not at Andravida, was at Lacedæmonia, or La Crémonie, as the Franks called it.

After the distribution of the baronies came the assignment of military service. All vassals were liable to render four months’ service in the field, and to spend four months in garrison (from which the prelates and the three Military Orders were alone exempted), and even during the remaining four months, which they could pass at home, they were expected to hold themselves ready to obey the summons of the Prince. After the age of 60, personal service was no longer required; but the vassal must send his son, or, if he had no son, some one else in his stead. Thus the Franks were on a constant war footing; their whole organisation was military—a fact which explains the ease with which they held down the unwarlike Greeks, so many times their superiors in numbers. This military organisation had, however, as the eminent modern Greek historian Paparregopoulos has pointed out, the effect of making the Greeks, too, imbibe in course of time something of the spirit of their conquerors. It is thus that we may explain the extraordinary contrast between the tameness with which the Greeks accepted the Frankish domination, and their frequent rebellions against that of the Turks. All over the Levant and even in Italy the Frankish chivalry of Achaia became famous. They fought against the luckless Conradin at Tagliacozzo, and the ruse, which won that battle and which Dante has ascribed to Erard de Valéry, is attributed by the _Chronicle of the Morea_ to Prince William of Achaia. Round the Prince there grew up a hierarchy of great officials with high-sounding titles, to which the Greeks had no difficulty in fitting Byzantine equivalents. The Prince himself bore a sceptre, as the symbol of his office, when he presided over the sessions of the High Court.

We learn from the _Book of the Customs of the Empire of Romania_ something about the way in which the feudal system worked in the principality of Achaia. Society was there composed of six main elements—the Prince, the holders of the twelve great baronies, the greater and lesser vassals (among whom were some Greeks), the freemen, and the serfs. The Prince and his twelve peers alone had the power of inflicting capital punishment; but even the Prince could not punish any of the barons without the consent of the greater vassals. If he were taken prisoner in battle, he could call upon his vassals to become hostages in his place, until he had raised the amount of his ransom. No one, except the twelve peers, was allowed to build a castle in Achaia without his permission, and without it any vassal, who left the country and stayed abroad, was liable to lose his fief. Leave of absence was, however, never refused if the vassal wished to claim the succession to a fief abroad, to contract a marriage, or to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, or to the Churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome or to that of St James at Compostella. But in such cases the vassals must return within two years and two days. The vassals were of two classes, the greater (or _ligii_) and the lesser (or _homines plani homagii_), who took no part in the Council of the Prince. A liege could not sell his fief without the Prince’s consent; but if the liege were a widow—for the Salic Law did not obtain in Frankish Greece, and ladies often held important fiefs—she might marry whom she pleased, except only an enemy of the Prince. When a fief fell vacant, the successor must needs appear to advance his claim within a year and a day if he were in Achaia, within two years and two days if he were abroad. It was the tricky application of this rule which led to the succession of Geoffroy de Villehardouin to the throne of Achaia. Champlitte had been summoned away to claim a fief in France, and had requested his trusted comrade in arms to act as his viceroy till he had sent a relative to take his place. When the news reached the Morea that a young cousin of Champlitte was on his way, Geoffroy resolved to use artifice in order to prevent his arrival in time. He accordingly begged the Doge to assist him, and the latter, who had excellent reasons for remaining on good terms with him, managed to entertain his passing guest at Venice for more than two months. When, at last, young Robert de Champlitte put to sea, the ship’s captain received orders to leave him ashore at Corfù, and it was with difficulty that he managed to obtain a passage from there to the Morea. When he landed there he had, however, a few days still in hand; but the crafty Villehardouin managed by marching rapidly from one place to another to avoid meeting him till the full term prescribed by the feudal pact had expired. He was then informed that he had forfeited the principality, which thus fell to Villehardouin by a legal quibble. The pious did not, however, forget to point out later on, that the crime of the founder of the dynasty was visited upon his family to the third and fourth generation, as we shall see in the sequel.

There was a great difference between feudal society in Achaia and in the Duchy of Athens. While in the principality the Prince was merely _primus inter pares_, at Athens the “Great Lord” had at the most one exalted noble, the head of the great house of St Omer, near his throne. It is obvious from the silence of all the authorities, that the Burgundians who settled with Othon de la Roche in his Greek dominions were men of inferior social position to himself—a fact further demonstrated by the comparative lack in Attica and Bœotia of those baronial castles, so common in the Morea. Indeed, it is probable that, in one respect, the Court of Athens under the De la Roche resembled the Court of the late King George, namely, that there was no one, except the members of his own family, with whom the ruler could associate on equal terms. But in Frankish, as in modern Athens, the family of the sovereign was soon numerous enough to form a coterie of its own. The news of their relative’s astounding fortune attracted to Attica several members of his clan from their home in Burgundy; they doubtless received their share of the good things, which had fallen to Othon; one nephew divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes, another more distant kinsman became commander of the castle of Athens. Other Burgundians will doubtless have followed in their wake, for in the thirteenth century Greece, or “New France,” as Pope Honorius III called it, was to the younger sons of French noble houses what the British colonies were fifty years ago to impecunious but energetic Englishmen. The elder Sanudo, who derived his information from his relatives, the Dukes of Naxos, specially tells us that this was the case at the Achaian Court. He says of Geoffroy II of Achaia, that “he possessed a broad domain and great riches; he was wont to send his most confidential advisers from time to time to the Courts of his vassals, to see how they lived, and how they treated their subjects. At his own Court he constantly maintained 80 knights with golden spurs, to whom he gave their pay and all that they required; so knights came from France, from Burgundy, and above all from Champagne. Some came to amuse themselves, others to pay their debts; others because of crimes which they had committed at home.”