William Miller

“ But even the most benevolent and most efficient government by foreigners—and a modern Greek historian has attributed both good intentions and efficiency to the Venetians—is bound to fail when national consciousness begins to awaken. After the Venetians went, the Greeks prepared to fight, not to substitute the rule of one foreign power for that of another but for independence, not for Venice, or Turkey, or Russia, but for Greece. The younger generations, which had grown up under Venetian auspices, were manlier and better than those which had only known Turkish rule. ”

“ While he had been engaged in the west of the Balkan peninsula there had grown up in the east under the mighty auspices of Stephen Dushan the great Serbian Empire, which threatened at one moment to swallow up Constantinople itself. Dushan is the greatest name in the whole history of the peninsula, a name cherished to this day by every patriotic Serb. But just as the restoration of Dushan’s Empire, the daydream of Serbian enthusiasts, jeopardised the existence of Austrian Bosnia, so the conquests of the great Serbian Tsar alarmed the Bosnian ruler of that day. ”

“ During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice. ”

“ When, in the spring of 1388, Nerio Acciajuoli found himself master of “the Castle of Setines,” as the Franks called the Akropolis, his first care was to conciliate the Greeks, who formed by far the largest part of his subjects, and who may have aided him to conquer the Athenian duchy. For the first time since the day, nearly two centuries before, when Akominatos had fled from his beloved cathedral to exile at Keos, a Greek Metropolitan of Athens was allowed to reside in his see, not, indeed, on the sacred rock itself, but beneath the shadow of the Areopagos. ”

“ It was he, too, who built the noble castle of Mistra on the site of the Homeric Messe, now abandoned to tortoises and sheep, but for two centuries a great name in the history of Greece. To a ruler so vigorous and so determined even the weird Tzakones, that strange tribe, perhaps Slavs but far more probably Dorians, which still lingers on and cherishes its curious language around Leonidi, yielded obedience; while the men of Maina, hemmed in by two new castles, ceased to trouble. ”

“ Some rolled over with their armoured riders in the mire; others, stuck fast in the stiff bog, stood still, in the picturesque phrase of the Byzantine historian, “like equestrian statues,” powerless to move. The shouts of “Aragon! Aragon!” from the Catalans increased the panic of the horses; showers of arrows hailed upon the helpless Franks; and the Turkish auxiliaries of the Catalans rushed forward and completed the deadly work. ”

“ Throughout the vicissitudes of the five and a half centuries, which we have traversed since the Roman Conquest, one conqueror after another had spared the glories of Athens, and even after the terrible calamity of this Gothic invasion she remained the one bright spot amid the darkness which had settled down upon the land of the Hellenes. ”

“ We are too much accustomed to regard Byzantine personages as merely so many stained-glass portraits, all decorations and angles, instead of men and women of like passions with ourselves. Anna Comnena was, in her loves and her dislikes, her vanities and her ambitions, very much a woman. Beneath her Attic prose, acquired by study and polished by art, there transpire the feminine feelings, which lend a peculiar turn to her history. Among the sovereigns, lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, and ecclesiastics who form the corpus of the Byzantine historians, she is the only woman. ”

“ A titular Duke of Athens had become tyrant of the Florentines, a Florentine merchant had become Duke of Athens; but the age when French and Italian adventurers could find an El Dorado on the poetic soil of Greece was over. The dull uniformity of Turkish rule spread over the land, save where the Dukes of the Archipelago and the Venetian colonies still remained the sole guardians of Western culture, the only rays of light in the once brilliant Latin Orient. ”

“ THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, 1099-1291
No event of the late war was so dramatic, or has made such a powerful appeal to the imagination, as the liberation of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, after a Moslem occupation of 673 years. While the name of Athens is full of meaning for the cultured alone, and many excellent citizens are not quite sure “whether the Greeks or the Romans came first,” that of Jerusalem is known in every peasant’s cottage of Christendom and represents the aspirations of an ancient race scattered all over the globe. ”

“ The bright and chivalrous Frankish society has long passed away; but a few Italian and Catalan families still linger in the Cyclades, there are still Venetian names and titles in the Ionian Islands; the Tocchi were till lately represented at Naples and the Zorzi still are at Venice; the towers of Thebes and Paros, the Norman arch of Andravida, the [85] noble castles of Karytaina and Chlomoutsi, and the carvings and frescoes of Geraki still remind us of the romance of feudal Greece, when every coign of vantage had its lord, and from every donjon floated the banner of a baron. ”

“ Nothing more clearly proves the peculiar position of the Patriarch as the head of an imperium in imperio, than the fact that the Turkish government conducted its business with him through the medium of the Reis-effendi, or Minister for foreign affairs. Not without reason did men address so powerful a personage as “master” and even “king.” We might, indeed, compare his situation with that of the Pope since 1870. Like the Pope, he had no territory, but his ecclesiastical sway ranged over and beyond the dominions of the sovereign, in whose capital his seat was fixed. ”

“ The time has come when it is no longer the fashion to decry Byzantine history and to deny the name of literature to the writings of the mediæval Greeks. Finlay rehabilitated the Byzantine Empire from the contempt which Gibbon had thrown upon it; in Greece a succession of modern writers, beginning with Paparregopoulos, in his great History of the Hellenic Nation, have reminded his countrymen that Greek history is a whole, and that contemporary Hellas owes as much, or more, to the great figures of the Middle Ages as to the heroes of classical antiquity ”

“ But next year King Louis fell in the fatal battle of Mohács at the hands of the Turks, and from that moment Hungary was unable to protect her Bosnian outpost. Keglevich, weary of warfare and old in years, gave up the banat of Jajce to King Ferdinand I, who put a German garrison into the capital. But the German soldiers had had no experience of Turkish warfare, and their new commanders lacked the spirit of old Keglevich. Usref saw that the moment had come to redeem his former failures. Hungary and Croatia were in the throes of civil war, and not a hand was stretched out to save the doomed city. ”

“ But, as in Georgian, so in Frankish Athens, the family of the sovereign was numerous enough to form a society of its own. Not only did Othon marry a Burgundian heiress, by whom he had two sons, but the news of his astounding good fortune attracted to the new El Dorado in Greece various members of his clan from their home in Burgundy. They doubtless received their share of the good things which had fallen to their lucky relative; a favourite nephew, Guy, divided with his uncle the lordship of Thebes; a more distant relative became commander of the castle of Athens. ”

“ Even to-day the traveller may see the fine fortress above the town of Patras which Guillaume Aleman, one of the feudatories, constructed out of the Archbishop’s palace; the castle of Karytaina, the Toledo of Greece, still reminds us of the time when Hugues de Bruyères held the dalesmen of Skorta, ancestors of M. Delyannes, in check; and, far to the South, the war-cry of Jean de Neuilly, hereditary Marshal of Achaia, Passe avant, lingers in the name of Passavâ, the stronghold which once inspired respect in the men of Maina, who boast that they spring from Spartan mothers. ”

“ At the head of a picked body of Athenian knights he easily routed the vastly superior numbers of the Imperial army, which he contemptuously summed up in a phrase, borrowed from Herodotos, as “many people, but few men.” As his reward he obtained for his younger brother William the fair Helene as a bride; and her dowry, which included the important town of Lamia, extended the influence of the Athenian duchy as far north as Thessaly. But John of Athens was destined to experience, like William of Achaia, the most varied changes of fortune. ”

“ But the Greeks were not the only foes who menaced the Duchy at this period. The Archipelago had again become the happy hunting-ground of pirates of all nationalities—Greek corsairs from the impregnable rock of Monemvasia or from the islands of Santorin and Keos, Latins like Roger de Lluria, the famous Sicilian admiral, who preyed on their fellow-religionists, mongrels who combined the vices of both their parents. The first place among the pirates of the time belonged to the Genoese, the natural rivals of the Venetians in the Levant, and on that account popular with the Greek islanders. ”

“ But the sole reason which decided the Venetian Government to annex Athens was its proximity to the Venetian colonies, and the consequent danger which might ensue to them if it fell into Turkish or other hands. Thus Venice took over the Akropolis in 1395, not because it was a priceless monument, but because it was a strong fortress; she saved the Athenians, not, as Cæsar had done, for the sake of their ancestors, but for that of her own colonies, “the pupil of her eye.” From the financial point of view, indeed, Athens could not have been a valuable asset. ”

“ The storm swept away their baggage into the sea, and the panic-stricken Turks—so the story ran-saw a number of acolytes carrying lighted candles, and an aged bishop, who was identified with St Spiridion, pursuing the infidels staff in hand. The murmurs of the janissaries and the news of a great Turkish defeat on the Danube may have had more to do with the seraskier’s hasty departure than the miraculous intervention of the saint. But the Venetians, with true statesmanship, humoured the popular belief that St Spiridion had protected the Corfiotes and themselves in their hour of need. ”

“ Besides the Byzantine officials and the pirates, the Greeks had a third set of tormentors in the shape of a brood of native tyrants, whose feuds divided city against city and divided communities into rival parties. Even where the Emperor had been nominally sovereign, the real power was in the hands of local magnates, who had revived, on the eve of the Frankish conquest, the petty tyrannies of ancient Greece. Under the dynasty of the Comneni, who imitated and introduced the ways of Western chivalry, feudalism had already made considerable inroads into the East. ”

“ The endowments of that school and the patriotism of rich Athenians, like Theagenes, one of the two last Archons, and known as the wealthiest Greek of his day, made up for the withdrawal of Imperial subsidies, and the bitter tongue of Synesios could still complain of the airs which those who had studied at Athens gave themselves ever afterwards. “They regard themselves,” wrote the philosopher, “as demi-gods and the rest of mankind as donkeys.” ”

“ Naturally, an assembly so composed was guided by sentiment rather than by reasons of high policy. In vain the statesmanlike Duke of Athens argued in scriptural language, that “it were better that one man should die for the people than that the other Franks of the Morea should lose the fruits of their fathers’ labours”; in vain, to show his disinterestedness, he offered to take the Prince’s place in prison or to pledge his own Duchy to provide a ransom. ”

“ Nero had already displayed his taste for the fine arts by despatching an emissary to Greece with the object of collecting statues for the adornment of his palace and capital. Delphi, Olympia and Athens, where, in the phrase of a contemporary satirist, “it was easier to meet a god than a man,” furnished an ample booty, and the Thespians again lost, this time for ever, the statue of Eros. But Nero was not content with the sculpture of Greece; he yearned to display his manifold talents before a Greek audience, “the only one,” as he said, “worthy [11] of himself and his accomplishments.” ”

“ Cyprus was, like England, defended by the sea; like England, she became one of the marts of the world, in an age when the crusading spirit had died away, and trade was the attraction that led men to the East. The Popes, by prohibiting trade with the Saracens after the loss of the Holy Land, procured for Cyprus a monopoly; and Famagosta surpassed Constantinople, Venice and Alexandria. Moreover, warned by the example of Jerusalem, the Kings of Cyprus cut down the privileges of the nobles, who were denied the right of coinage and jurisdiction over the middle class. ”

“ The Senate, at this news, ordered the bailie of Negroponte to offer a reward for the body of the bold bastard, alive or dead, to lay Thebes in ashes, and to save the castle of Athens. That obedient official set out at the head of six thousand men to execute the second of these injunctions, only to fall into an ambush which his cunning enemy had laid in the pass of Anephorites. Venice, now alarmed for the safety of her most valuable colony far more than for that of Athens, hastily sent commissioners to make peace. ”