No More Learning

But it was a singularly miserable existence. During the
twenty-five years of his personal reign (1237–1261), Baldwin II, last Latin
Emperor of Constantinople, who had already visited Rome and Paris
in 1236, had to beg all over the Western world for help in men and
money, which he did not always get. To raise funds he was reduced
to pawning the most famous jewels in Constantinople, the crown of
thorns, a large piece of the true cross, the holy spear, the sponge, which
St Louis bought from him. And such was the distress of the wretched
Emperor that for his coinage the lead roofing had to be used, and to
warm him in winter the timbers of the imperial palace were chopped up.
Some rare successes indeed prolonged the life of the Empire. The Greco-
Bulgarian alliance was dissolved ; in 1240 Baldwin II recaptured Tzu-
rulum from the Greeks, and thus cleared the approaches to the capital
to a certain degree; in 1241 the death of John Asên began the decay
of the Bulgarian Empire. Nevertheless the days of the Latin State
were numbered. One question remained : would the Greek Empire of
Epirus or that of Nicaea have the honour of reconquering Constan-
tinople?
It was secured by Nicaea. While the Latin Empire was in its last
agony, John Vatatzes was succeeding in restoring Byzantine unity against
the aliens. He drove the Latins from their last possessions in Asia
Minor (1241); he gained the powerful support of the Western Emperor
Frederick II, whose daughter Constance he married (1244), and who,
out of hatred for the Pope, the protector of the Latin Empire, un-
hesitatingly abandoned Constantinople to the Greeks; he deprived the
Franks of the support of the Seljūq Sultan of Iconium (1244); and
he seized the Mongol invasion of Asia Minor as an opportunity of en-
larging his state at the expense of the Turks. He was specially active
in Europe. Since the year 1237, when Michael II Angelus (1237–1271)
had founded the despotat of Epirus in Albania at the expense of the
Empire of Thessalonica, anarchy had prevailed in the Greek States of
the West. In 1240, with the help of John Asên, the aged Theodore
Angelus had taken Thessalonica, overthrown his brother Manuel, and
caused his son John to be crowned as Emperor (1240-1244). Vatatzes took
advantage of this weakness. In 1242 he appeared outside Thessalonica
CH. XIV.


## p. 430 (#472) ############################################

430
Gradual advance of the Greeks
and forced John to renounce the title of Emperor, to content himself
with that of Despot, and to become vassal of Nicaea. In 1246 he
returned to the attack; this time he seized Thessalonica and expelled
the Despot Demetrius. Then he fell on the Bulgarians and took from
them a large part of Macedonia—Seres, Melnik, Skoplje, and other
places—and the following year he deprived the Latins of Vizye and Tzu-
rulum; finally, a family alliance united him to the only Greek prince
who still retained his independence in the West, Michael II, Despot of
Epirus. This ambitious and intriguing prince was doubtless about to
go to war with Nicaea in 1254. Nevertheless, when on 30 October 1254
Vatatzes died at Nymphaeum, the Empire of Nicaea, rich, powerful, and
prosperous, surrounded the poor remnants of the Latin Empire on all
sides. Only Constantinople remained to be conquered.
The final catastrophe was delayed for seven years by discords between
the Greeks. Theodore II Lascaris (1254-1258) had at one and the same
time to carry on war with the Despot of Epirus and to fight with the
Bulgars, who after the death of Vatatzes had considered the time
favourable for avenging their defeats. Theodore Lascaris routed them
at the pass of Rupel (1255); but it was only after the assassination of
their King Michael (1257) that he succeeded in imposing peace on
them. On the other hand, in spite of his great military and political
qualities, the new Greek Emperor was of a delicate constitution. The
field was therefore clear for the intrigues of ambitious men, and
especially for Michael Palaeologus, who, having married a princess of
the imperial family, openly aspired to the throne.
When by Theodore's premature death the throne passed to a child,
Michael had no difficulty in seizing the real power after the assassina-
tion of Muzalon the regent, nor a little later in superseding the
legitimate dynasty by causing himself to be crowned Emperor at Nicaea
on 1 January 1259. He soon justified this mean usurpation by the
victories he achieved.
He first brought the war with Michael II, Despot of Epirus, to a
successful conclusion. Michael II was a formidable enemy: he was the
ally of Manfred, King of Sicily, and of William of Villehardouin, Prince
of Achaia, who had both married daughters of the despot; he was
supported by the Albanians and the Serbs, and was very proud of the
successes he had secured; since the capture of Prilep (1258) he was
master of the whole of Macedonia, and was already threatening
Thessalonica. Michael Palaeologus boldly took the offensive, reconquered
Macedonia, and invaded Albania. In spite of the help brought by the
Prince of Achaia to his father-in-law, the army of Michael II was over-
whelmingly defeated at Pelagonia (1259). William of Villehardouin
himself fell into the hands of the Byzantines; and the Emperor seized
the opportunity to recover a part of the Peloponnesus. Henceforth the
despotat of Epirus was swallowed up by the Empire of Nicaea. The


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End of the Latin Empire
431
time had come when Michael Palaeologus was to restore Hellenism by
reconquering Constantinople.
In 1260 he crossed the Hellespont, took Selymbria and the other
strongholds still retained by the Latins outside the capital, and threatened
Galata. At the same time he very astutely utilised the rivalry of the
Venetians and Genoese to gain the alliance of the latter. On 13 March
1261, by the Treaty of Nymphaeum, he promised that, in return for
their help against Venice and their support against his other enemies, he
would grant them all the privileges enjoyed by the Venetians in the East.
The Genoese secured counting-houses at Thessalonica, Adramyttium,
Smyrna, Chios, and Lesbos ; they were to have the reversion of the
Venetian banks at Constantinople, Euboea, and Crete; the monopoly of
commerce in the Black Sea was assigned to them. At this price they
consented to betray Western Christendom.
Venice had realised, rather late in the day, the necessity of defending
the Latin Empire; since 1258 she had maintained a fleet of some im-
portance at Constantinople. But in July 1261 it happened that the
fleet had temporarily left the Golden Horn to attack the neighbouring
town of Daphnusia. One of Michael Palaeologus' generals, the Caesar
Alexius Strategopulus, seized the opportunity; on 25 July 1261, by a
lucky surprise, he captured the capital of the Latin Empire, almost
without resistance. Baldwin II had no alternative but to take to flight,
accompanied by the Latin Patriarch, the podestà, and the Venetian
colonists; on 15 August 1261 Michael Palaeologus made his solemn
entry into Constantinople, and placed the imperial crown on his head
in St Sophia.
Thus, after an existence of half a century, fell the State established
in Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Even though the Empire
had only an ephemeral existence, yet the East remained full of Latin
settlements. Venice, in spite of the efforts of her enemies, retained the
essential portions of her colonial empire in the Levant, Negropont, and
Crete, and the strong citadels of Modon and Coron; her patrician
families kept most of their seigniories in the Archipelago. So also did
the other Latin States in Greece born of the Crusade. Under the
government of the La Roche family, the duchy of Athens lasted until
1311; and although the disastrous battle of the Cephisus then transferred
it to the hands of the Catalans (1311-1334), who were superseded by
the Florentine family of Acciajuoli (1334-1456), the Byzantines never
regained possession of it. The principality of Achaia, under the govern-
ment of the three Villehardouins (1204–1278), was even more flourishing.
These settlements were really the most lasting results, within the Latin
Empire of Constantinople, of the Crusade of 1204.
CH. XIV.


## p. 432 (#474) ############################################

432
CHAPTER XV,
GREECE AND THE AEGEAN UNDER FRANK
AND VENETIAN DOMINATION (1204–1571).
At the time of the Latin conquest of Constantinople, the Byzantine
Empire no longer comprised the whole of the Balkan peninsula and the
Archipelago. A Serbian state, a Bosnian banat, and a revived Bulgarian
Empire had been recently formed in the north, while two of the Ionian
Islands - Cephalonia and Zante-already owned the Latin sway of
Matteo Orsini, an Apulian offshoot of the great Roman family, and
Corfù was threatened by the Genoese pirate, Leo Vetrano. In the
Levant, Cyprus, captured from the Greeks by Richard I, was already
governed by the second sovereign of the race of Lusignan, while Rhodes,
amidst the general confusion, was seized by a Greek magnate, Leo
Gabalâs. All the rest of South-Eastern Europe—Thrace, Macedonia,
Epirus, Greece proper, Crete and the islands of the Aegean-remained
to be divided and, if possible, occupied by the Latin conquerors of
Byzantium.
While the newly-created Latin Empire was formed almost wholly
outside the limits of Greece, the Greek lands in Europe were partitioned,
with the exception of three islands, between the Crusaders, whose leader
was Boniface, Marquess of Montferrat, and the Venetian Republic. The
marquess received Salonica, the second city of the Byzantine world, with
the title of king; and his kingdom, nominally dependent upon the Latin
Empire, embraced Macedonia, Thessaly, and much of continental Greece,
including Athens. The Venetians, with a keen eye to business, managed
to secure a large part of the Peloponnese and Epirus, the Cyclades and
Euboea, the Ionian Islands, and those of the Saronic Gulf, and had pur-
chased from the marquess on 12 August 1204 the great island of Crete,
which had been "given or promised ” to him by Alexius IV in the
previous year. Such was, on paper, the new arrangement of the classic
countries which it now remained to conquer.
The King of Salonica set out in the autumn of 1204 to subdue his
Greek dominions and to parcel them out, in accordance with the feudal
system, among the faithful followers of his fortunes. In northern


## p. 433 (#475) ############################################

Conquest of Athens and the Morea
433
Greece he met with no resistance, for the only man who could have
opposed him, Leo Sgourós the archon of Nauplia, fled from Thermo-
pylae before the harnessed Franks, and retreated to the strong natural
fortress of Acrocorinth. Larissa with Halmyrus became the fief of a
Lombard noble, Velestino that of a Rhenish count; while the com-
manding position of Boudonitza above the pass of Thermopylae was
entrusted to the Marquess Guido Pallavicini, whose ruined castle still
reminds us of the two centuries during which Italians were wardens of
the northern March of Greece. Another coign of vantage at the pass
of Graviá was assigned to two brothers of the famous Flemish house of
St Omer, while on the ruins of classic Amphissa Thomas de Stromoncourt
founded the barony of Sálona, so called from the city which had given
to Boniface his royal title.
Neither Thebes nor Athens resisted the
invaders; the patriotic Metropolitan, Michael Acominatus, unable to
bear the sight of Latin schismatics defiling the great cathedral of Our
Lady on the Acropolis, withdrew into exile ; a Latin archbishop ere
long officiated in the Parthenon ; a Burgundian noble, Othon de la
Roche, who was a trusted comrade of Boniface, became Sire, or, as his
Greek subjects called him, Megaskyr or “Great Lord,” of both Athens
and Thebes, with a territory that would have seemed large to the
Athenian statesmen of old. Then the King of Salonica and the Sire of
Athens proceeded to attack the strongholds that still sheltered Sgouros
in the Peloponnese.
A large portion of that peninsula had been assigned, as we saw, to the
Venetians. But, with two exceptions," the Morea,” as it had begun to
be called a century earlier, was destined to fall into the hands of the
French. A little before the capture of Constantinople, Geoffrey de
Villehardouin, nephew of the delightful chronicler of the conquest, had
been driven by stress of weather into the Messenian port of Modon.
During the winter of 1204 he had employed himself by aiding a local
magnate in one of those domestic quarrels which were the curse of medi-
eval Greece, and thus paved the way for a foreign occupation.
Struck
by the rich and defenceless character of the land upon which a kind
fortune had cast him, Villehardouin no sooner heard of Boniface's
arrival in the peninsula than he made his way across country to the
Frankish camp at Nauplia, and confided his scheme of conquest to his
old friend, William de Champlitte, whose ancestors came from his own
province of Champagne. He promised to recognise Champlitte as his
liege lord in return for his aid; and the two comrades, with the approval
of Boniface, set out with a hundred knights and some men-at-arms to
conquer the Morea. One pitched battle decided its fate in that unwar-
like
age, when local jealousies and the neglect of arms had weakened the
power of resistance, and a tactful foreigner, ready to guarantee local
privileges, was at least as acceptable a master as a native tyrant and a
Byzantine tax-collector. One place after another surrendered; the little
יי
C. MED. H. VOL. IV. CH. XV.
28


## p. 434 (#476) ############################################

434
Corfù and Crete
בל
Frankish force completely routed the Moreote Greeks and their Epirote
allies in the Messenian olive-grove of Koundoura ; here and there
some warrior more resolute than his fellows held out-Doxapatrês,
the romantic defender of an Arcadian castle; John Chamáretos', the
hero of Laconia; Sgouros in his triple crown of fortresses, Corinth,
Nauplia, and the Larissa of Argos; and the three hereditary archons
of the Greek Gibraltar, isolated and impregnable Monemvasia ; but
Innocent III could address Champlitte, ere the year was up, as
Prince
of all Achaia. " The prince rewarded Villehardouin, the real author of
his success, with the Messenian seaport of Coron. But Venice, if she was not
strong enough to occupy the rest of the Peloponnese, was determined
that neither that place nor Modon, stepping-stones on the route to the
East, should fall into other than Venetian hands. In 1206 a Venetian fleet
captured both stations from their helpless garrisons, and the republic
thus obtained a foothold at the extreme south of the peninsula which
she retained for well-nigh three centuries. In the same year the seizure
and execution of Vetrano enabled her to make good her claim to Corfù,
where ten Venetian nobles were settled in 1207 as colonists. At this
the Count of Cephalonia and Zante thought it prudent to recognise her
suzerainty, for fear lest she should remind him that his islands had been
assigned to her in the partition treaty.
In the rest of the scattered island-world of Greece, Venice, as became
an essentially maritime state, acquired either actual dominion or what
was more profitable--influence without expensive administrative respon-
sibility. Crete furnished an example of the former system ; Euboea, or
Negropont, and the Cyclades and northern Sporades were instances of
the latter. “
For “the great Greek island " the Venetians had to contend
with their rivals, the Genoese, who had already founded a colony there,
and at whose instigation a bold adventurer, Enrico Pescatore, landed
and forced the isolated Venetian garrison to submit. It was not till
1212 that Pescatore's final defeat and an armistice with Genoa enabled
the Venetians to make their first comprehensive attempt at colonising
Crete. The island was partitioned into 132 knights' fiefs-a number
subsequently raised to 230—and 408 sergeants’ fiefs, of which the former
class was offered to Venetian nobles, the latter to Venetian burgesses.
The administrative division of Crete into six provinces, or sestieri, was
based on the similar system which still exists at Venice, and local
patriotism was stimulated by the selection of colonists for each Cretan
sestiere from the same division of the metropolis. The government of
the colony was conducted by a governor, resident at Candia, with the
title of duke, who, like most colonial officials of the suspicious republic,
held office for only two years, by two councillors, and by a greater and
lesser council of the colonists. But the same year that witnessed the
1 Pitra, Analecta sacra et classicu, vii. 90–91.


## p. 435 (#477) ############################################

Euboea and the Archipelago
435
arrival of these settlers witnessed also the first of that long series of
Cretan insurrections which continued down to our own time. Thus
early, Venice learnt the lesson that absolute dominion over the most
bellicose Greek population in the Levant, however imposing on the map,
was in reality very dearly bought.
The north and south of Negropont had fallen to the Venetians in
the deed of partition. But a soldierly Fleming, Jacques d'Avesnes, had
received the submission of the long island when the Crusaders made
their victorious march upon Athens, building a fort in midstream,
without, however, founding a dynasty on the shore of the Euripus.
Thereupon Boniface divided Negropont into three large fiefs, which
were bestowed upon three gentlemen of Verona-Ravano dalle Carceri,
his relative Giberto, and Pegoraro dei Pegorari --who assumed from this
triple division the name of terzieri, or triarchs. Soon, however, Ravano,
triarch of Kárystos, the southern and most important third, which seems
to have included the island of Aegina, became sole lord of Negropont,
though in 1209 he thought it prudent to recognise Venice as his
suzerain. The republic obtained warehouses and commercial privileges
in all the Euboean towns; a Venetian bailie was soon appointed to
administer the communities which sprang up there ; and this official
gradually became the arbiter of the whole island. Upon Ravano's death
in 1216 the bailie seized the opportunity of conflicting claims to weaken
the power of the Lombard nobles by a re-division of the island into
sixths, on the analogy of Crete. The capital remained common to all
the hexarchs, while Ravano's former palace there became the official
residence of the bailie. A large and fairly harmonious Italian colony
was soon formed, and the pleasant little town of Chalcis has probably
never been a more agreeable resort than when noble Lombard dames
and shrewd Venetian merchants danced in the Italian palaces and took
the air from the breezy battlements of the island capital.
Venetian influence in the archipelago took a different form from that
which it assumed in Corfù, Crete, and Euboea. The task of occupying
the numerous islands of the Aegean was left to the enterprise of private
citizens. In truly Elizabethan style, Marco Sanudo, a nephew of the
old Doge Dandolo, descended upon the El Dorado of the Levant with a
band of adventurous spirits. Seventeen islands speedily submitted; of
the Cyclades Naxos alone offered resistance, and there, in 1207, the bold
buccaneer founded a duchy, which lasted for more than three centuries.
Keeping Naxos for himself, he assigned other islands to his comrades.
Thus Marino Dandolo, another nephew of the great doge, became lord
of well-watered Andros, the family of Barozzi obtained the volcanic isle
of Santorin, the Quirini associated their name with Astypálaia, or Stam-
palia, while the brothers Ghisi, with complete disregard for the paper
rights of the Latin Emperor to Tenos and Scyros, acquired not only
those islands but the rest of the northern Sporades. Lemnos, another
CH, XV.
28—2


## p. 436 (#478) ############################################

436
The Despotat of Epirus
לל
portion of the imperial share, became the fief of the Navigajosi, who
received from the Emperor the title of Grand Duke, borne in Byzantine
times by the Lord High Admiral. While the Greek archon of Rhodes,
Leo Gabalâs, maintained his position there with the barren style of
“ Lord of the Cyclades,” the twin islands of Cerigo, the fabled home of
Venus, and Cerigotto, which formed the southern March of Greece, fur-
nished miniature marquessates to the Venetian families of Venier and
Viaro. But the Venetian nobles, who had thus carved out for themselves
baronies in the Aegean, were not always faithful children of the
republic. Sanudo did homage not to Venice but to the Latin
Emperor Henry, the over-lord of the Frankish states in the Levant, and
did not scruple to conspire with the Cretan insurgents against the rule
of the mother-country, when self-interest suggested that he might with
their aid make himself more than “Duke of the Archipelago "_“King
of Crete. ”
While the knightly Crusaders and the practical Venetians had thus
established themselves without much difficulty in the most famous seats
of ancient poetry, there was one quarter of the Hellenic world where
they had been forestalled by the promptitude and skill of a Greek.
Michael Angelus, a bastard of the imperial house, had attached himself
to the expedition of Boniface in the hope of obtaining some advantage
on his own account. On the march the news reached him that the Greeks
of the province of Nicopolis were discontented with the Byzantine
governor who still remained to tyrannise over them. Himself the son
of a former governor of Epirus, he saw that with his name and influence
he might supplant the official representative of the fallen Empire and
anticipate the establishment of a foreign authority. He hastened across
the mountains to Arta, found the unpopular officer dead, married his
widow, a dame of high degree, and with the aid of his own and her
family connexions made himself independent Despot of Epirus. Soon his
dominions stretched from the Gulf of Corinth to Durazzo, from the con-
fines of Thessaly to the Adriatic, from Sálona, whose French lord fell in
battle against him, to the Ionian Sea. Treacherous as well as bold, he
did homage, now to the Latin Emperor Henry and now to Venice, for
his difficult country which neither could have conquered. But the main-
land of Greece did not suffice for his ambition. He aided the Moreote
Greeks at the battle of Koundoura; his still abler brother, Theodore,
accepted for him the Peloponnesian heritage of Sgourós, when the Argive
leader at last flung himself in despair from the crags of Acrocorinth;
the Ionian island of Leucas, which is practically a part of continental
Greece, seems to have owned his sway; and, before he died by an
assassin's hand in 1214, he had captured from Venice her infant colony
of Corfù. Under him and his brother and successor Theodore, the
Epirote court of Arta became the refuge of those Greeks who were
impatient of the foreign rule in the Morea, and the base from which it


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Organisation of Achaia
437
was fondly hoped that the redemption of that fair land might one day
be accomplished.
The Franks had scarcely occupied the scattered fragments of the
Hellenic world when they began the political and ecclesiastical organisa-
tion of their conquest. We may take as the type of Frankish organisation
the principality of Achaia, the most important of their creations and
that about which we have most information. Alike in Church and
State the Latin system was simple. These young yet shrewd nobles
from the West shewed a capacity for government which we are accus-
tomed to associate with our own race in its dealings with foreign
populations; and, indeed, the parallel is close, for in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries Greece was to them what our colonies were to
younger sons in the nineteenth. They found to their hands a code of
feudalism, embodied in the “ Assises of Jerusalem,” which Amaury de
Lusignan had recently adopted for his kingdom of Cyprus, and which
later on, under the title of the “ Book of Customs of the Empire of
Romania,” served as the charter of Frankish Greece. Champlitte
himself, recalled home by the death of his brother, died on the journey
before he could do more than lay the foundations of his principality,
which it was reserved for Villehardouin, acting as the bailie of the
next-of-kin, to establish firmly on approved feudal principles. Twelve
baronies of different sizes were created, whose holders formed the temporal
peerage of Achaia ; seven lords spiritual, with the Latin Archbishop of
Patras as their Primate, received sees carved out of the existing Greek
dioceses; and the three great military orders of the Teutonic Knights,
those of St John, and the Templars, were respectively settled at Mosten-
itsa, Modon, and in the rich lands of Achaia and Elis. There too was
the domain of the prince, whose capital was at the present village of
Andravida, when he was not residing at La Crémonie, as Lacedaemon
was then called. Military service, serfdom, and the other incidents of
feudalism were implanted in the soil of Hellas, and the dream of Goethe's
Faust, the union of the classical with the romantic, was realised in
the birthplace of the former. The romance was increased by the fatal
provision--for such it proved to be-that the Salic law should not apply
to the Frankish states. Nothing contributed in a greater degree to the
ultimate decline and fall of Latin rule in Greece than the transmission of
important baronies and even of the principality of Achaia itself to the
hands of women, who, by a strange law of nature, were often the sole pro-
geny of the sturdy Frankish nobles.
Ere long feudal castles rose all over
the country, and notably in the Morea and the Cyclades, where the
network of chivalry was most elaborate. Sometimes, as at Boudonitza,
Sálona, and Paroikia, the medieval baron built his keep out of the
fragments of some Hellenic temple or tower, which the local tradition
believed to have been the “work of giants” in days gone by; sometimes
his donjon rose on a virgin site; but in either case he chose the spot
CH. XV.


## p. 438 (#480) ############################################

438
The Latin Church
לל
with a view to strategic conditions. The Church, as well as the baronage,
made its mark upon what was for it a specially uncongenial soil. The
religious Orders of the West followed in the wake of the fortunate
soldiers, who had founded a “new France" in old Greece. The Cister-
cians received the beautiful monastery of Daphní, on the Sacred Way
between Athens and Eleusis, destined to be the mausoleum of the last
Burgundian Duke of Athens; the “Crutched Friars” of Bologna had a
hospice at Negropont; the emblem and the name of Assisi still linger
in the Cephalonian monastery of Sisia; and the ruins of the picturesque
Benedictine abbey of Isova still survey the pleasant valley of the
Alpheus. As for the Orthodox bishops, they went into exile; when,
towards the end of the fourteenth century, they were again allowed to
reside in their ancient sees, they became the ringleaders of the revived
national party in the struggle against the rule of a foreign garrison and
an alien Church. For in the Near East religion and nationality are
usually identical terms.
The wisdom which Villehardouin had shewn in his treatment of
Greeks and Franks alike now received its reward. Self-interest and the
welfare of the State combined to indicate him as a better ruler of
Achaia than any young and inexperienced relative of Champlitte who
might, by the accident of birth, be the rightful heir.
Youthful com-
munities need able princes, and every step that he took was a fresh
proof of Villehardouin's ability. He did homage to the Emperor
Henry, and received in return the office of Seneschal of Romania; he
won the support of Venice by relinquishing all claim to Modon and Coron ;
and he thereby induced the doge to assist him in his wily scheme for
detaining the coming heir on his journey from France, so that he might
arrive in the Morea after the time allowed by the feudal code for his
personal appearance. When young Robert arrived with still a few days
to spare, the crafty bailie avoided meeting him till the full period had
elapsed. Then a parliament, summoned to examine the claimant's title,
decided against the latter; Robert returned to France, while Geoffrey
remained lord of the Morea. Poetic justice in the next century visited
upon his descendants this sin of their ancestor. Meanwhile, Innocent III
hastened to greet him as “Prince of Achaia"-a title which he did not
consider himself worthy to bear till he had earned it by the capture of
the still unconquered Greek castles of Corinth, Nauplia, and Argos. In
1212 the last of them fell; Othon de la Roche, as a reward for his aid,
received the two latter as fiefs of the principality of Achaia, thus
inaugurating the long connexion of the Argolid with Frankish Athens;
while Corinth became the see of a second Latin archbishop. Geoffrey I
crowned his successful career by negotiating a marriage between his
namesake and heir and the daughter of the ill-fated Latin Emperor,
Peter of Courtenay, during a halt which the damsel made at Katákolo
on her way to Constantinople. When he died, in 1218, “all mourned,
וי


## p. 439 (#481) ############################################

Prosperity of Achaia
439
rich and poor alike, as if each were lamenting his own father's death, so
great was his goodness. "
His elder son and successor, Geoffrey II, raised the principality to a
pitch of even greater prosperity. We are told of his wealth and of his
care for his subjects; he could afford to maintain “80 knights with
golden spurs” at his court, to which cavaliers flocked from France, either
in search of adventures abroad or to escape from justice at home. Of
his resolute maintenance of the State against the Church the Morea still
preserves a striking monument in the great castle of Chloumoûtsi, which
the French called Clermont and the Italians Castel Tornese, from the
tornesi or coins of Tours that were afterwards minted there for over
a century. This castle, on a tortoise-shaped hill near Glarentza, was
built by him out of the confiscated funds of the clergy, who had refused
to do military service for their fiefs, and who, as he pointed out to the
Pope, if they would not aid him in fighting the Greeks, would soon have
nothing left to fight for. Alike with his purse and his personal prowess
he contributed to the defence of Constantinople, receiving as his reward
the suzerainty over the Duchy of the Archipelago and the island of
Euboea. The Marquess of Boudonitza and the cautious Count of Cepha-
lonia and Zante, the latter ever ready to worship the rising sun, became
the vassals of one who was acknowledged to be the strongest Frankish
prince of his time. For, if Athens had prospered under Othon de la
Roche, and sea-girt Naxos was safe under the dynasty of Sanudo, the
Latin Empire was tottering already, and the Latin kingdom of Salonica
had fallen in 1223—the first creation of the Fourth Crusade to go-
before the vigorous attack of Theodore Angelus, the second Despot of
Epirus, who founded on its ruins the Greek Empire of Salonica. This
act of ostentation, however, by offending the political and ecclesiastical
dignities of the Greek Empire of Nicaea, provoked a rivalry which post-
poned the Greek recovery of Byzantium. The fall of the Latin kingdom
of Salonica and the consequent re-conquest of a large part of northern
Greece for the Hellenic cause alarmed the Franks, whose possessions lay
between Thessaly and the Corinthian Gulf. Of these by far the most
important was Othon de la Roche, the “Great Lord” of Athens, who
had established around him alike at Thebes and Athens a number of his
relatives from home, attracted by the good luck of their kinsman beyond
the seas. But, as the years passed, the Burgundian successor of the
classic heroes and sages, whom the strangest of fortunes had made the
heir alike of Pindar and Pericles, began to feel, like several other
Frankish nobles, a yearning to end his days in the less famous but more
familiar land of his birth. In 1225, after twenty years of authority, he
left Greece for ever with his wife and his two sons, leaving his Athenian
and Theban dominions to his nephew Guy, already owner of half the
1 Pitra, op. cit. , vii. 335–338, 577—588.
CH, XV.


## p. 440 (#482) ############################################

440
Guy I of Athens
.
Boeotian city. The descendants of the first Frankish Sire of Athens
became extinct in Franche-Comté only as recently as the seventeenth
century, and the archives of the Haute-Saône still contain the seal and
counter-seal of the Megaskyr. No better man than his nephew could have
been found to carry on the work which he had begun. Under his tactful
rule his capital of Thebes became once more a flourishing commercial
city, where the silk manufacture was still carried on, as it had been in
Byzantine times, where the presence of a Jewish and a Genoese colony
implied that there was money to be made, and where the Greek popula-
tion usually found a wise protector of their customs and their monasteries,
diplomatically endowed by Vatatzes, the powerful Greek Emperor of
Nicaea', in their foreign yet friendly lord. Policy no less than humanity
must have led Guy I to be tolerant of the people over whom he had
been called to rule. It was his obvious interest to make them realise
that they were better off under his sway than they would be as subjects
of an absentee Greek Emperor, who would have ruled them vicariously
in the old Byzantine style, from Macedonia or Asia Minor. Thus his
dominions, if “ frequently devastated” by the Epirote Greeks, remained
undiminished in his hands, while his most dangerous neighbour, Theodore,
the first Greek Emperor of Salonica, became, thanks to his vaulting
ambition, the prisoner of the Bulgarians at Klokotinitza, and the short-
lived Greek Empire which he had founded, after the usurpation of his
brother Manuel, was reduced in the reign of his son John to the lesser
dignity of a Despotat, and was finally annexed, in that of John's brother
Demetrius, to the triumphant Empire of Nicaea in 1246. Another and
very able member of the family of Angelus, the bastard Michael II, had,
however, made himself master of Corfù and Epirus ten years earlier,
and there held aloft the banner of Greek independence, as his father, the
founder of the Epirote dynasty, had done before him.
In the same year that witnessed the annexation of Salonica, the
second Villehardouin prince of Achaia died, and was succeeded by his
brother William. The new prince, the first of the line who was a native
of the Morea-for he was born at the family fief of Kalamáta-was
throughout his long reign the central figure of Frankish Greece. Crafty
and yet reckless, he was always to the front whenever there was fighting to
be done, and his bellicose nature, if it enabled him to complete the con-
quest of the peninsula from the Greeks, tempted him also into foreign
adventures, which undid his work and prepared the way for the revival
of Greek authority.
· At first, all went well with the soldierly ruler.
The virgin fortress of Monemvasia, which had hitherto maintained its
freedom, yielded, after a three years' siege, to the combined efforts of
a Frankish force and a Venetian flotilla, and the three local archons-
Mamonâs, Daimonoyánnes, and Sophianós—were obliged to acknow-
1 Sathas, Μεσαιωνική Βιβλιοθήκη, VΙΙ. 509.


## p. 441 (#483) ############################################

Battle of Karýdi
441
וי
וי
ledge the Frank as their lord. To overawe the Slavs of Taygetus and
the restive men of Maina, the prince built three castles, one of which,
Mistrâ, some three miles from Sparta, was destined later on to play a
part in Greek history second to that of Byzantium alone, and is still the
chief Byzantine glory of the Morea. At this moment the Frankish
principality reached its zenith. The barons in their castles lived “ the
fairest life that a man can”; the prince's court at La Crémonie was
thought the best school of chivalry in the East, and was described as
“ more brilliant than that of a great king. Thither came to learn the
noble profession of arms the sons of other Latin rulers of the Levant;
the Duke of distant Burgundy was a guest at the prince's table; King
Louis IX of France, most chivalrous sovereign of the age, might well
esteem the tall knights of Achaia, who came with their lord to meet
him in Cyprus, who helped the Genoese to defend Rhodes against the
Greeks. Trade flourished, and such was the general sense of security that
people gave money to the merchants who travelled up and down the
country on their simple note of hand, while from the King of France the
prince obtained the right to establish his own mint in the castle of
Chloumoûtsi in place of the coins which he seems to have struck pre-
viously in that of Corinth.
Unfortunately the prince's ambition plunged the Frankish world of
Greece into a fratricidal war. On the death of his second wife, a
Euboean heiress, in 1255, he claimed her ancestral barony in the northern
third of that island; and when the proud and powerful Lombards, aided
by their Venetian neighbours, repudiated his claim, not only did
hostilities break out in Euboea, but also extended to the mainland
opposite. William had summoned Guy I of Athens, his vassal for
Argos and Nauplia, and, as was even pretended, for Attica and Boeotia
as well, to assist him in the struggle. The Megaskyr, however, not only
refused to aid his nominal lord, but actively helped the opposite party.
Practically the whole of Frankish Greece took sides in the conflict, despite
the wise warnings of the Pope, anxious lest the cause of the Church
should be weakened by this division among its champions at a time when
their national enemy had grown stronger. In 1258, at the pass of Mt
Karýdi, between Megara and Thebes, Frankish Athens first met Frankish
Sparta face to face. The battle of “the Walnut Mountain ” was a
victory for the latter; the Athenian army retreated upon Thebes, before
whose walls the prayers of his nobles prevailed upon the victor to make
peace with their old comrades. Guy of Athens, summoned to appear
before the High Court of Achaia at Níkli near Tegea for his alleged
breach of the feudal code, was sent by the Frankish barons before
the throne of Louis IX of France, whose authority they recognised
as supreme in a case of such delicacy. The question was referred by
the king to a parliament at Paris, which decided that Guy had been,
indeed, guilty of a technical offence in taking up arms against his lord,
CH, XY.


## p. 442 (#484) ############################################

442
Battle of Pelagonía
but that, as he had never actually paid him homage, his fief could
not be forfeited. His long journey to France was considered sufficient
punishment for his disobedience. Guy did not return empty-handed;
asked by the king what mark of royal favour he would prefer, he begged,
and obtained, the title of Duke, which would raise him to the heraldic
level of the Duke of Naxos, and for which, he said, there was an ancient
precedent at Athens. The style of “Duke of Athens ” was not only
borne by his successors for two centuries, but has been immortalised by
Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, who by a pardonable
anachronism transferred to Theseus the title of the French, Sicilian,
Aragonese, and Florentine rulers of the medieval city.
The history of Frankish Greece is full of sudden reverses of fortune,
by which the victor of one day became the vanquished of the next.
Guy I had left his country a defeated and an accused man, while his
successful rival was the practical leader of the Latin Orient; he returned
with the glamour of the ducal title to find his conqueror and feudal
lord a prisoner of the Greeks. During Guy's absence, William of
Achaia, by his third marriage with Anna, daughter of the Despot
Michael II of Epirus, had become involved in the tortuous politics of
that restless sovereign. It was Michael's design to anticipate the Greeks
of Nicaea in their projected re-conquest of Constantinople, and he was
anxious to secure his position by marrying one of his daughters to the
powerful Prince of Achaia and another to Manfred, the ill-fated Hohen-
staufen King of Sicily. This latter alliance by making Corfù a part of
the Epirote princess's dowry led to the subsequent occupation of that
island by the Angevin conquerors of Naples. But the plans of the
crafty despot met with a serious obstacle in the person of Michael VIII
Palaeologus, who had usurped the Nicene throne and intended to make
himself master of Byzantium, and who ordered his brother to punish
the insolence of his Epirote rival. In 1259 the hostile Greek forces met
on the plain of Pelagonía in Western Macedonia; William of Achaia
with a chosen band of Franks and a contingent of native troops was
among the despot's allies.
At a critical moment, a private quarrel
between the despot's bastard John and the Frankish prince led the in-
dignant Epirote to desert to the enemy; the despot, warned of his
son's intention, fled in the night, and the Franks were left to meet the
foe's attack. Despite their usual prowess in the field, the battle was
lost; the prince, unhorsed and hiding under a heap of straw, was recog-
nised by his prominent teeth and taken prisoner with many of his nobles.
Michael VIII saw at once that the capture of so distinguished a man
might be made the means of re-establishing Greek rule in the Morea,
and offered him and his fellow-prisoners their liberty and money for the
purchase of other lands in France in return for the cession of Achaia. The
prince, however, replied in the true spirit of feudalism, that the land con-
quered by the efforts of his father and his father's comrades was not his to


## p. 443 (#485) ############################################

The Ladies' Parliament
443
dispose of as if he were an absolute monarch. For three years he remained
in captivity, while the Latin Empire fell. Michael VIII restored the seat
of his government to Constantinople, and the Duke of Athens acted as
bailie of the widowed principality of Achaia. It was, indeed, a tragic
moment in the history of Greece when there devolved upon the Duke of
Athens the task of receiving the fugitive Latin Emperor Baldwin II as
his guest in the castle of the Cadmea at Thebes and upon the sacred
rock of the Athenian Acropolis.
Master of Constantinople, Michael VIII was more than ever anxious
to obtain a foothold in the Morea. He moderated his demands, in the
hope of exhausting the patience of his wearied captives, and he professed
that he would be content with the surrender of the three castles of
Monemvasía, Maina, and Mistrâ, which had been either captured or
built by the prince himself, and which were therefore his to bestow.
The question, vital for the future of the Frankish principality, was
referred to the high court at Níkli-a parliament consisting, with two
exceptions, of ladies only, for the fatal day of Pelagonía had left most of
the baronies in the possession of either the wives of the prisoners or the
widows of the slain. In an assembly so composed, reasons of state and
the scriptural argument employed by the Duke of Athens, that "it were
better that one man should die for the people rather than that the other
Franks of the Morea should lose the fruits of their fathers' labours," had
naturally less weight than sentiment and the voice of affection. In vain
Guy offered to pledge his own duchy to raise the ransom, or even to take
the prince's place in prison. The three castles—with the doubtful
addition of Geráki, which in any case soon became Greek—were sur-
rendered; the prisoners were released; the noble dames were sent as
hostages to Constantinople; and a Byzantine province, based on the
ceded Frankish quadrilateral, was established in the south-east corner of
the Morea, whose capital was Mistrâ, the seat of the “ Captain of the
Territory in the Peloponnese and its Castles. ” From the date of this
surrender in 1262 began the decline of Frankish power; thenceforth
friction between the rival elements in the population was inevitable;
and while the discontented Greeks of the still Frankish portion of the
peninsula found a rallying-point at Mistrâ, the Greek Emperor gained an
excellent recruiting-ground for his light troops and his marines. In a
word, the Ladies' Parliament of Níkli by destroying the unity of the State
paved the way for the Turkish conquest.
The solemn vow that William had taken never again to levy war
against the Greek Emperor was soon broken ; hostilities inevitably
followed the proximity of the rival residences of Mistrâ and Sparta, and
weary years of warfare depopulated the peninsula. One woman, we are
told, lost seven husbands one after the other, all killed in battle; such
was the drain upon the male portion of the inhabitants. The Greeks
imported Turkish mercenaries to aid them against the Frankish chivalry,
CH. XV.


## p. 444 (#486) ############################################

444
The Angevins and Greece
יל
and thus the future masters of the peninsula made their first appearance
there. But the Turks, unable to obtain their pay, deserted to the
Franks, whom they helped to win the battle of Makryplági on “the broad
hillside” now traversed by the railway to Kalamáta, receiving as a
reward lands on which to settle. Had the pride of the Franks then
allowed them to accept Michael VIII's proposal for a marriage between
his heir, the future Emperor Andronicus II, and the prince's elder
daughter Isabelle, the future of the Morea might have been different;
the two races might have been welded together ; Eastern and Western
Christendom might really have met in a firm alliance at Mistrâ; and
the Morea might perhaps have resisted the all-conquering Turks. But
racial prejudice would not have it so; and Isabelle was made the instru-
ment of uniting the fortunes of the principality with those of the
Neapolitan Angevins, whose founder, Charles I, in 1267, received from the
exiled Latin Emperor by the treaty of Viterbo the suzerainty of Achaia-
the beginning of many unsuspected woes for that beautiful land.
From the first, William, who had welcomed this new feudal tie with
the brother of the King of France, found that it constituted an obliga-
tion rather than a benefit. He was summoned to the aid of his Angevin
suzerain against Conradin at the battle of Tagliacozzo, and when his
daughter espoused the second son of Charles I the marriage contract
stipulated that, whether the Prince of Achaia left heirs or not, the
principality should belong to the house of Anjou, which since 1267
likewise held Corfù and aspired to be the dominant factor in south-
eastern, as it already was in southern, Europe. It was true that Nea-
politan troops assisted him in the desultory warfare against the Greeks
which, together with feudal disputes, occupied the rest of his reign.
But when in 1278 the third Villehardouin prince was laid to rest beside
his father and brother in the church of St James at Andravida, and the
male stock of the family thus came to an end, the evils of the Angevin
connexion began to be felt.
Elsewhere also the Greek cause had prospered at the expense of the
Latins. In the north, it was true, Hellenism had split up into three
divisions, for on the death of Michael II of Epirus his bastard, John I,
had established himself as independent ruler of Neopatras—a splendid
position on a spur of Mt Oeta, which commands the valley of the
Spercheus and faces the barrier of Mt Othrys, while the snows of
Tymphrestós bound the western horizon, beyond which lay the Epirote
dominions of the lawful heir, Nicephorus I. As the champion of
Orthodoxy at a time when Michael VIII was coquetting with the
Papacy in order to avert the Angevin designs on Constantinople, the
“Duke” of Neopatras, as the Franks called John Ducas Angelus, was
a formidable adversary of the restored Greek Empire. When the
imperial forces were sent to besiege his capital, he escaped by night and
fled to Duke John of Athens, who in 1263 had succeeded his father


## p. 445 (#487) ############################################

Career of Licario
445
Guy, and who assisted his namesake to rout them. But the imperial
commander inflicted a crushing defeat off Demetriás in the Gulf of Volo
upon a flotilla equipped by the Lombard barons of Euboea, while in
that and the other islands of the Aegean the meteoric career of
Licario, a knight of Kárystos, caused serious losses to the Latins.
Mortally offended by the proud Lombards, this needy adventurer, whose
family, like theirs, had come from Northern Italy, gratified his vengeance
by offering to subdue the long island to the Emperor's authority.
Michael VIII gladly welcomed so serviceable a henchman; Licario's
capture of Kárystos proved that he was no vain boaster after the
manner of the Franks; he received from his new master the whole of
Euboea as a fief, and soon one Lombard castle after another fell into his
hands. Knowing full well the rashness of his fellow-countrymen, he
easily entrapped one of the triarchs and Duke John of Athens, the
victor of Neopatras, outside the walls of Negropont, and had the satis-
faction of dragging them in chains to Constantinople. One of the most
dramatic scenes in Byzantine history is the passage which describes the
triumph of the once despised knight over his former superior, the rage
and fury of the triarch and his sudden death of chagrin at the spectacle
of the Emperor and Licario in confidential conversation. Ere long,
Licario became Lord High Admiral, and spread devastation throughout
the archipelago. Already the supposedly impregnable rock of Skopelos,
whose Latin lord had believed himself to be beyond the reach of
malicious fortune, had surrendered to the traitor of Kárystos; the rest
of the northern Sporades, and Lemnos, the fief of the Navigajosi, shared
its fate, and thenceforth remained in Greek hands till the fall of Con-
stantinople. Ten other Latin islands were lost for twenty years or more,
and two dynasties alone, those of Sanudo and Ghisi, survived this fatal
cruise in the Aegean, while the two Venetian Marquesses of Cerigo and
Cerigotto were driven from the southern March of Greece, and one of
the three Monemvasiote archons, Paul Monoyánnes, received the island
of Venus as a fief of the Greek Empire. Licario disappeared from
history as rapidly as he had risen ; we know not how he ended; but his
career left a permanent mark on Greek history. Thus Michael VIII had
obtained extraordinary success over the Franks. He had destroyed
the Latin Empire, recovered a large part of Negropont and many
other islands ; as early as 1256 his brother, as governor, had replaced
the independent Greek dynasty of Gabalâs in Rhodes? ; another viceroy
was established at Mistrâ; and both a Prince of Achaia and a Duke
of Athens had been his prisoners at Constantinople. But John of
Athens was released on much easier terms than William of Achaia ; for
Michael VIII feared to provoke the Duke of Neopatras, who was bound
by matrimonial ties to the ducal house of Athens and by those of
1 Miklosich and Müller, Acta et diplomata, vi. 198.
CH. XV.


## p. 446 (#488) ############################################

446
Nicholas II de St Omer
commerce to the royal house of Naples, the dreaded enemy of the
restored Greek Empire. Soon afterwards the gouty Duke of Athens
died, and William, his brother, reigned in his stead. A new era had
begun all over the Frankish world. The house of Anjou was now the
dominant factor in Greece. Isabelle de Villehardouin had been left a
widow before her father died, and by virtue of her marriage contract
Charles I of Naples and Sicily was now Prince as well as suzerain of
Achaia, and governed that principality, as he governed Corfù, by means
of deputies. While these two portions of Greece were his absolute
property, he was acknowledged as suzerain of both the Athenian duchy
and the palatine county of Cephalonia and Zante, and considered
himself as the successor of Manfred in Epirus as well as in the Corfiote
portion of the latter's Greek possessions. Alike in Corfù and Achaia
his early governors were foreigners, and the Corfiotes for the first time
found their national Church degraded and their metropolitan see
abolished by the zeal of the Catholic Angevins. In Achaia, where the
Frankish nobility was strongly attached to its privileges and looked upon
newcomers with suspicion, the rule of the Angevin bailies was so
unpopular that Charles was obliged to appoint one of the local barons,
and almost the first act of the regency which followed his death was to
confer the bailiwick upon Duke William of Athens, whose riches were
freely expended upon the defences of Greece. Upon his death in 1287 he
was succeeded at Athens by his infant son Guy II, under the regency
of
the duchess, a daughter of the Duke of Neopatras and the first Greek
to hold sway over the Athenians since the conquest, while in the Morea
a great Theban magnate, Nicholas II de St Omer, governed for Charles II
of Anjou. This splendour-loving noble, then married to the widowed
Princess of Achaia, had built out of the dowry of his first wife, a Princess
of Antioch, the noble castle of St Omer, of which one tower alone
remains, on the Cadmea of Thebes. An Emperor and his court could
have found room within its walls, which were decorated with frescoes repre-
senting the conquest of the Holy Land by the ancestors of the Theban
baron. Similar frescoes of the tale of Troy existed a century later in
the archiepiscopal palace of Patras, and may still be seen, on a smaller
scale, in the churches of Geráki. Besides the castle of St Omer,
Nicholas built that of Avarino on the north of the famous bay of
Navarino, the “harbour of rushes” as the Franks called it. And in the
north-west of the peninsula the mountains and castle of Santaméri still
preserve the name of this once-powerful family.
The barons soon, however, longed for a resident prince. In the
eleven years that had elapsed since the death of William of Achaia, they
had had six bailies—two foreigners, two of their own order, and two
great Athenian magnates. At last they represented to Charles II that
he should marry Princess Isabelle, “the Lady of the Morea,” who was
still living in widowhood at Naples, to Florent d'Avesnes, a young


## p. 447 (#489) ############################################

The Theban Court
447
לל
Flemish nobleman, brother of the Count of Hainault and great-nephew
of the conqueror of Euboea. Florent was already a favourite of the king,
who accordingly consented to the marriage, on condition that, if Isabelle
should survive her husband, neither she nor her daughter nor any other of
her female descendants should marry without the royal consent; the penalty
for so doing was to be the reversion of the principality to the Neapolitan
crown. This harsh stipulation was in the sequel twice enforced ; but in
the meanwhile all were too well satisfied with the alliance to consider its
disadvantages. In 1289 Florent married and became Prince of Achaia,
and for seven years the country had peace. The ravages of the Angevin
bailies were repaired, and in the words of the Chronicle of the Morea,
“all grew rich, Franks and Greeks, and the land waxed so fat and
plenteous in all things that the people knew not the half of what
they possessed. ” But the insolence of the Flemings, who had followed
their countryman to the Morea, another Epirote campaign, and a raid
by Roger Loria, the famous Admiral of Aragon, marred this happy
period of Moreote history. Unfortunately, in 1297, soon after the
peace with the Greeks of the Byzantine province had expired, Florent
died, leaving Isabelle again a widow with one small daughter, who was
affianced to Guy II, the young Duke of Athens, and rightly regarded as
“ the best match in all Romania. "
The pen of the contemporary Catalan chronicler, Ramón Muntaner,
who was personally acquainted with Guy, has left us a charming picture
of the Theban court at this period. Muntaner, who had seen many
lands, described him as one of the noblest men in all Romania who
was not a king, and eke one of the richest. ” His coming of age was a
ceremony long remembered in Greece, for every guest that came to do
him honour received gifts and favours from his hand, and his splendid
munificence to Boniface of Verona, a young cavalier from Euboea, who
was chosen to dub him a knight, struck the shrewd Catalan freebooter
as the noblest gift that any prince made in one day for many a long
year. Jongleurs and minstrels enlivened the ducal leisure ; in the noble
sport of the tournament the young duke knew no fear, and in the great
jousts at Corinth, in which more than a thousand knights and barons
took part, he did not shrink from challenging a veteran champion from
the West. Now for the first time we find the “ thin soil” of Attica
supplying Venice with corn, while the Theban looms furnished the
Pope with silken garments. The excellent French that was spoken at
Athens struck visitors from France, while long ere this the foreign
rulers of Greece had learned the language of their Greek subjects. One
Duke of Athens had even quoted Herodotus; one Archbishop of
Corinth had actually translated Aristotle. In short, the little Frankish
courts at the end of the thirteenth century were centres of prosperity,
chivalry, and a large measure of refinement, while the country was far
more prosperous than it had been in the later centuries of Byzantine
CH. XV.


## p. 448 (#490) ############################################

448
Philip of Taranto
rule, or than it was either beneath the Turkish yoke or in the early years
of its final freedom under Otto of Bavaria. Unhappily, the Athenian
duchy had scarcely reached its zenith, when the French dynasty fell for
ever beneath the blows of another and a ruder race.
The same year 1294 that made the young Duke of Athens his own
master strengthened the hold of the Angevins upon Greece. The
ambitious plans of Charles I for the conquest of Epirus and the restora-
tion of the Latin Empire at Constantinople had been baffled by the
defeat of his forces amid the mountains of the Greek mainland, and by
the Sicilian Vespers and the consequent establishment of the rival house
of Aragon on the throne of Sicily. Charles II attempted to recover by
diplomacy what his father had lost by arms, and in 1294 he transferred
all his claims to the Latin Empire, the actual possession of Corfù with
the castle of Butrinto on the opposite coast, as well as the suzerainty
over the principality of Achaia, the duchy of Athens, the kingdom of
Albania, and the province of Vlachia (as Thessaly was still called), to
his second son, Philip, Prince of Taranto. This much-titled personage,
who thus became the suzerain of all the Frankish states in Greece, there-
upon married, after the fashion of the luckless Manfred, whose sons were
still languishing in an Angevin dungeon, a fair Epirote princess, daughter
of the Despot Nicephorus I, who promised to give him as her dowry the
castle of Lepanto with three other fortresses, and, if the heir apparent
died, to make Philip Despot of Epirus, if the heir apparent lived, to
make him its suzerain. Philip of Taranto by these extraordinary
arrangements became the most important figure, at least on paper, in
the feudal hierarchy of medieval Greece. In this capacity he was called
upon to give his consent to the third marriage of Princess Isabelle
of Achaia, who, during the Papal Jubilee of 1300, had met in Rome
Philip, a young scion of the house of Savoy, and desired to wed so likely
a defender of her land. The Savoyard was reluctantly invested with the
principality by Charles II on behalf of his son, and thus inaugurated the
connexion of his famous family with the Morea. But Philip of Savoy,
though a valiant knight, looked upon his Greek principality as a means
of making money against the evil day when the Angevins, as he felt
convinced, would repent of having appointed him and when Philip of
Taranto would desire to take his place. He and his Piedmontese
followers became very unpopular; for, while they occupied the chief
strategic positions, he extorted loans and forced presents from his
subjects. Before long Charles II revived the legal pretext that
Isabelle's third marriage had been against his consent, and that she
had therefore forfeited her principality; and Philip's refusal to assist in
furthering the Angevin plans of conquest in Epirus gave him an excuse
for releasing the Achaian barons from their allegiance to one who had
broken the feudal law. Philip and Isabelle left the Morea for ever; an
estate on the Fucine lake was considered adequate compensation for the


## p. 449 (#491) ############################################

Walter of Brienne. The Catalans
149
loss of Achaia ; and, in 1311, the elder daughter of the last Ville-
hardouin prince, after having been the tool of Angevin diplomacy ever
since her childhood, died in Holland far from the orange-groves of
Kalamáta. Her husband remarried, and his descendants by this second
union continued to bear the name of “Achaia," and, in one case,
endeavoured to recover the principality which had for a few brief years
been his. Philip of Taranto, the lawful suzerain, became also the
reigning prince, but, after a short visit, he resorted to the old plan of
governing the Morea by means of bailies. Of these the first was Guy II,
“the good Duke" of Athens, whose wife, the elder daughter of Isabelle,
might be regarded by the old adherents of the family as the rightful
heiress of Achaia.
Guy had latterly become more influential than ever; for death had left
his mother's old home of Neopatras in the hands of a ninor, John II, and
the Duke of Athens had been appointed as regent there. Thus Athenian
authority extended from the Morea to Thessaly; the Greek nobles of
the North learnt French, and the coins of Neopatras bore Latin inscrip-
tions in token of the Latinisation of the land. Alas! the duke was
suffering from an incurable malady; he had no heir; and, when in
1308 he was laid to rest in the abbey of Daphní, the future destroyers
of the French duchy were already at hand. For the moment, however,
the future of Athens seemed to be assured. Guy's mother had married,
after his father's death, a member of the great crusading family of
Brienne, which had already provided a King of Jerusalem and Emperor
of Romania and held the less sonorous but more profitable dignity of
Counts of Lecce. By a previous marriage with an aunt of the duke,
his stepfather had had a son Walter, who now succeeded to his cousin's
dominions. Walter of Brienne possessed all the courage of his race ;
but he lacked the saving virtue of caution, and his recklessness at a
critical moment destroyed in a single day the noble fabric which the
wise statesmanship of the house of De la Roche had taken a century to
construct. So dramatic are the vicissitudes of the Latin Orient: the
splendid pageants of chivalry one day, absolute ruin the next.
The new conquerors of Athens came from an unexpected quarter.
During the struggle for Sicily between the houses of Aragon and Anjou,
Frederick II, the Aragonese king of the island, had gladly availed himself
of the support of a band of Catalans, whose swords were at the disposal
of anyone who would pay them.
them. When the peace came, they found it
necessary to seek employment elsewhere. At that moment the Greek
Emperor, Andronicus II, hard pressed by the growing power of the
Turks in Asia, was glad of such powerful assistance, and, to the detri-
ment of Greece, took the Catalans into his service. In the East they
repeated on a much larger scale their performances in the West; the
Emperor, like the King of Sicily, found them valuable but dangerous
allies, who quarrelled with his subjects, plundered his cities, and defied
C. MED. H. VOL. IV. CH. XV.
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## p. 450 (#492) ############################################

450
Battle of the Cephisus
his orders. At last they constituted themselves into an organised
society, and set out to ravage Macedonia and Greece on their own
account.
When they had exhausted one district they moved on to
another, and by this locust-like progress they and some of their
converted Turkish auxiliaries entered the great Thessalian plain in
1309. The young Duke of Neopatras, now emancipated by the death
of Guy, was too feeble to oppose them till an imperial force compelled
them to move on towards the Eden which awaited them in the Duchy
of Athens. Walter of Brienne was at first by no means displeased with
their appearance.
He knew their language, which he had learnt as a
child in Sicily, and he thought that he might use them for the accom-
plishment of his immediate object—the restoration of Athenian influence
over the moribund principality of the Angeli at Neopatras. The
Catalans accepted his proposals, and in six months they had captured
more than thirty castles of northern Greece for their new employer.
Having thus rapidly obtained his end, Walter wished to dispense
with his instrument. He picked out the best of the Catalans for his
future use and then peremptorily bade the rest begone without the for-
mality of payment for their recent services. The Catalans, thus harshly
treated, remonstrated ; Walter vowed that he would drive them out by
force, and took steps to make good his threat. In the spring of 1311,
at the head of such a force as no Athenian duke had ever led before, a
force recruited from the baronial halls of the highlands and islands of
Hellas, he rode out to rout the vulgar soldiers of fortune who had dared
to defy him. Once again, after the lapse of many centuries, the fate of
Athens was decided on the great plain of Boeotia. The Catalans, who
knew that they must conquer or die, prepared the battlefield with con-
summate skill. They ploughed up the soft ground in front of them, and
irrigated it from the neighbouring Cephisus; nature herself assisted
their strategy, and, when the armies met on 15 March, the quaking bog
was concealed with an ample covering of verdure. Walter, impetuous
as ever, charged across the plain with a shout, followed by the flower of
the Frankish chivalry. But, long before they could reach the Catalan
camp, they plunged into the quagmire. Their heavy armour and the
harness of their horses made them sink yet deeper, till they stood
imbedded in the marsh, as incapable of motion as equestrian statues.
The Catalans plied them with missiles; the Turks completed the deadly
work; and such was the carnage of that fatal day, that only some four or
five of the Frankish knights are known to have survived. The duke
was among the slain, and his head, severed by a Catalan knife, was borne
to rest in his good city of Lecce long years afterwards. His duchy lay
at the mercy of the victors, for there was none left to defend it save the
heroic duchess. But, finding resistance vain, she escaped with her little
son to France, and thus avoided the fate of many another widowed dame
of high degree who became the wife of some rough Catalan, “unworthy,"


## p. 451 (#493) ############################################

Catalan organisation of Athens
451
in the phrase of Muntaner, “ to bear her wash-hand basin. ” As for the
Greeks, they made no effort to rise in defence of the old order against
their new masters; so shallow were the roots which French rule had
struck in that foreign land. Nor have the Burgundian Dukes of Athens
left many memorials of their sway. A few coins, a few arches, a few
casual inscriptions—such is the artistic patrimony which Attica and
Boeotia have preserved from this brilliant century of Latin culture.
The victors of the Cephisus were in one respect embarrassed by the
completeness of their victory. They realised that they had no one in
their own ranks of sufficient standing to become their ruler in the
new position which their success had thrust upon them. They accord-
ingly adopted the strange plan of offering the leadership to one of their
prisoners, Boniface of Verona, the favourite of Guy II, and a great man
in Euboea. Boniface was ambitious, but he felt that he could not, with
his wide connexions in the Frankish world, cominit such an act of baseness.
He, therefore, declined; but his fellow-prisoner, Roger Deslaur, a knight
of Roussillon who had already acted as intermediary between the late
Duke and the company, had no such obligations, and accepted the post
with the castle of Sálona and the hand of its widowed lady. A year
later, however, the Catalans realised that their precarious situation (for
all the Powers interested in Greece regarded them as interlopers)
required to be strengthened by the invocation of some powerful and
recognised sovereign as their protector. Their eyes naturally turned to
their old employer, Frederick II of Sicily, and they begged him to send
one of his sons to rule over them. Frederick gladly consented to a
proposal which would add lustre to his house, and for the next 65 years
the royal family of Sicily provided absentee dukes for the Catalan
duchy of Athens, while the real political authority was always wielded
by a vicar-general whom they appointed to represent them at the
capital of Thebes. A marshal for long existed by the side of this
official, till the two offices were first combined in the same person
and then that of marshal was allowed to drop. An elaborate system of
local government was created; representative institutions were adapted
from Barcelona, whose “ Customs” supplanted the “Assises of Ro-
mania," and whose language became the official as well as the ordinary
idiom. The Greeks were, till towards the close of Catalan rule, treated
as an inferior race, while the Orthodox Church occupied the same
humble position that it had held in the Burgundian times. Feudalism
lingered in a modified form ; but it had lost its glamour, and the
court of the Catalan vicar-general must have been a very drab and
prosaic affair after the magnificent pageants of the splendour-loving
Dukes of Athens, whose flag still floated over the Argive fortresses that
had been granted to Othon de la Roche a century before.
Having thus established a connexion with one of the acknowledged
states of Europe, the Catalan Grand Company began to extend its
CH. XV.
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## p. 452 (#494) ############################################

452
The Infant Ferdinand of Majorca
operations in Greece. A Catalan claim to the Morea furnished it with
a plausible pretext for a raid.
Two years after the battle of the
Cephisus, Philip of Taranto had conferred that principality on
Matilda of Hainault, the daughter of Isabelle and widow of Guy II of
Athens, on condition that she married and transferred the princely
dignity to Louis of Burgundy. The object of this maneuvre was to
compensate his brother the Duke of Burgundy for losing the hand of
the titular Latin Empress of Constantinople, whom Philip, then a
widower, had resolved to marry himself. But before Louis of Burgundy
had taken possession of his Achaian principality, another claimant had
appeared there.