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ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT
ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS C. F. CLAY, Manager LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ESSAYS ON THE LATIN ORIENT BY WILLIAM MILLER, M.A. (Oxon.) HON. LL.D. IN THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF GREECE: CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE HISTORICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF GREECE: AUTHOR OF THE LATINS IN THE LEVANT CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1921 “You imagine that the campaigners against Troy were the only heroes, while you forget the other more numerous and diviner heroes whom your country h
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PREFACE
PREFACE
This volume consists of articles and monographs upon the Latin Orient and Balkan history, published between 1897 and the present year. For kind permission to reprint them in collected form I am indebted to the editors and proprietors of The Quarterly Review , The English Historical Review , The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Die Byzantinische Zeitschrift , The Westminster Review , The Gentleman’s Magazine , and The Journal of the British and American Archæological Society of Rome . All the articl
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I. THE ROMANS IN GREECE
I. THE ROMANS IN GREECE
From the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. Greece lost her independence for a period of nearly two thousand years. During twenty centuries the country had no separate existence as a nation, but followed the fortunes of foreign rulers. Attached, first to Rome and then to Constantinople, it was divided among various Latin nobles after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1204, and succumbed to the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From that time, with the exception of the brief Venetian occu
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II. BYZANTINE GREECE
II. BYZANTINE GREECE
The period of more than a century which separated Alaric’s invasion from the accession of Justinian was not prolific of events on the soil of Greece. But those which occurred there tended yet further to accelerate the decay of the old classic life. Scarcely had the country begun to recover from the long-felt ravages of the Goths, than the Vandals, who had now established themselves in Africa, plundered the west and south-west coasts of Greece from Epeiros to Cape Matapan. But at this crisis the
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1. THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE
1. THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE
Professor Krumbacher says in his History of Byzantine Literature , that, when he announced his intention of devoting himself to that subject, one of his classical friends solemnly remonstrated with him, on the ground that there could be nothing of interest in a period when the Greek preposition ἀπό governed the accusative, instead of the genitive case. I am afraid that many people are of the opinion of that orthodox grammarian. There has long prevailed in some quarters an idea that, from the tim
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2. FRANKISH SOCIETY IN GREECE
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 Monemva
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3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE
3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE
It is satisfactory to note that, after a long period of neglect, the great romance of mediæval Greek history is finding interpreters. Since George Finlay revealed to the British public the fact that the annals of Greece were by no means a blank in the Middle Ages, and that Athens was a flourishing city in the thirteenth century, much fresh material has been collected, by both Greek and German scholars, from the Venetian and other archives, which throws fresh light upon the dark places of the Lat
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4. THE DUKES OF ATHENS
4. THE DUKES OF ATHENS
Nations, like individuals, sometimes have the romance of their lives in middle age—a romance unknown, perhaps, to the outside world until, long years afterwards, some forgotten bundle of letters throws a flash of rosy light upon a period hitherto regarded as uneventful and commonplace. So is it with the history of Athens under the Frankish domination, which Finlay first described in his great work. But since his day numerous documents have been published, and still more are in course of publicat
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5. FLORENTINE ATHENS
5. FLORENTINE ATHENS
The history of mediæval Athens is full of surprises. A Burgundian nobleman founding a dynasty in the ancient home of heroes and philosophers; a roving band of mercenaries from the westernmost peninsula of Europe destroying in a single day the brilliant French civilisation of a century; a Florentine upstart, armed with the modern weapons of finance, receiving the keys of the Akropolis from a gallant and chivalrous soldier of Spain—such are the tableaux which inaugurate the three epochs of her Fra
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6. THE DUCHY OF NAXOS
6. THE DUCHY OF NAXOS
Of all the strange and romantic creations of the Middle Ages none is so curious as the capture of the poetic “Isles of Greece” by a handful of Venetian adventurers, and their organisation as a Latin Duchy for upwards of three centuries. Even to-day the traces of the ducal times may be found in many of the Cyclades, where Latin families, descendants of the conquerors, still preserve the high-sounding names and the Catholic religion of their Italian ancestors, in the midst of ruined palaces and ca
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7. CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)
7. CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)
Of all the Levantine possessions acquired by Venice as the result of the Fourth Crusade, by far the most important was the great island of Crete, which she obtained in August, 1204, from Boniface of Montferrat to whom it had been given 15 months earlier by Alexios IV, at the cost of 1000 marks of silver. At that time the population of the island, which in antiquity is supposed to have been a million, was probably about 500,000 or 600,000 [183] . Lying on the way to Egypt and Syria, it was an exc
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8. THE IONIAN ISLANDS UNDER VENETIAN RULE
8. THE IONIAN ISLANDS UNDER VENETIAN RULE
On their way from Venice to Constantinople the soldiers of the fourth crusade cast anchor at Corfù, which (as modern Corfiote historians think) had lately been recovered from the Genoese pirate Vetrano by the Byzantine government, and was at that time, in the language of the chronicler Villehardouin, “very rich and plenteous.” In the deed of partition the Ionian islands were assigned to the Venetians; but they did not find Corfù by any means an easy conquest. The natives, combining with their ol
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9. MONEMVASIA MONEMVASIA DURING THE FRANKISH PERIOD (1204-1540)
9. MONEMVASIA MONEMVASIA DURING THE FRANKISH PERIOD (1204-1540)
There are few places in Greece which possess the combined charms of natural beauty and of historic association to the same extent as Monemvasia. The great rock which rises out of the sea near the ancient Epidauros Limera is not only one of the most picturesque sites of the Peloponnese, but has a splendid record of heroic independence, which entitles it to a high place in the list of the world’s fortresses (Plate II, Figs. 1, 2). Monemvasia’s importance is, however, wholly mediæval; and its histo
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10. THE MARQUISATE OF BOUDONITZA (1204-1414)
10. THE MARQUISATE OF BOUDONITZA (1204-1414)
Of all the feudal lordships, founded in Northern Greece at the time of the Frankish Conquest, the most important and the most enduring was the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Like the Venieri and the Viari in the two islands of Cerigo and Cerigotto at the extreme south, the lords of Boudonitza were Marquesses in the literal sense of the term—wardens of the Greek Marches—and they maintained their responsible position on the outskirts of the Duchy of Athens until after the establishment of the Turks in
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11. ITHAKE UNDER THE FRANKS
11. ITHAKE UNDER THE FRANKS
In works descriptive of Greece it is customary to find the statement that the island of Odysseus was “completely forgotten in the middle ages,” and even so learned a mediæval scholar as the late Antonios Meliarakes, whose loss is a severe blow to Greek historical geography, asserts this proposition in his admirable political and geographical work on the prefecture of Cephalonia [373] . But there are a considerable number of allusions to Ithake during the Frankish period, and it is possible, at l
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12. THE LAST VENETIAN ISLANDS IN THE ÆGEAN
12. THE LAST VENETIAN ISLANDS IN THE ÆGEAN
It has hitherto been asserted by historians of the Latin Orient that, after the capture of the Cyclades by the Turks in the sixteenth century, the two Venetian islands of Tenos and Mykonos remained in the possession of the Republic down to 1715. As to Tenos, this statement is unimpeachable; as to Mykonos, despite the assertions of Hopf [396] and Hertzberg [397] , who quote no authorities for the fact, all the evidence goes to show that it ceased to belong to Venice in the sixteenth century. The
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13. SALONIKA
13. SALONIKA
Salonika, “the Athens of Mediæval Hellenism” and second to Athens alone in contemporary Greece, has been by turns a Macedonian provincial city, a free town under Roman domination, a Greek community second only to Constantinople, the capital of a short-lived Latin kingdom and of a brief Greek empire to which it gave its name, a Venetian colony, and a Turkish town [425] . There, in 1876, the murder of the consuls was one of the phases of the Eastern crisis; there, in 1908, the Young Turkish moveme
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I. THE ZACCARIA OF PHOCÆA AND CHIOS (1275-1329)
I. THE ZACCARIA OF PHOCÆA AND CHIOS (1275-1329)
Genoa played a much less important part than Venice in the history of Greece. Unlike her great rival on the lagoons, she had no Byzantine traditions which attracted her towards the Near East, and it is not, therefore, surprising to find her appearing last of all the Italian Republics in the Levant. But, though she took no part in the Fourth Crusade, her sons, the Zaccaria and the Gattilusj, later on became petty sovereigns in the Ægean; the long administration of Chios by the Genoese society of
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2. THE GENOESE IN CHIOS (1346-1566)
2. THE GENOESE IN CHIOS (1346-1566)
Of the Latin states which existed in Greek lands between the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, there were four principal forms. Those states were either independent kingdoms, such as Cyprus; feudal principalities, of which that of Achaia is the best example; military outposts, like Rhodes; or colonies directly governed by the mother-country, of which Crete was the most conspicuous. But the Genoese administration of Chios differed from all the
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3. THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)
3. THE GATTILUSJ OF LESBOS (1355-1462)
The Genoese occupation of Chios, Lesbos, and Phocæa by the families of Zaccaria and Cattaneo was not forgotten in the counting-houses of the Ligurian Republic. In 1346, two years after the capture of Smyrna, Chios once more passed under Genoese control, the two Foglie followed suit, and in 1355 the strife between John Cantacuzene and John V Palaiologos for the throne of Byzantium enabled a daring Genoese, Francesco Gattilusio, to found a dynasty in Lesbos, which gradually extended its branches t
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V. TURKISH GREECE 1460-1684
V. TURKISH GREECE 1460-1684
From the second half of the fifteenth down to the close of the seventeenth century, a large portion of what now forms the kingdom of Greece formed an integral part of the Turkish Empire, and from the second part of the sixteenth century some of the Ionian Islands and a few of the Cyclades were alone exempt from the common lot of Hellas. Thus, for the first time since the Frank conquest, a dead level of uniformity, broken only by the privileges of certain communities, prevailed in place of the fe
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VI. THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE 1684-1718
VI. THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE 1684-1718
In 1684, after the lapse of 144 years, Venice once more began to be a power upon the Greek continent. She had long had grievances against the Porte, such as the non-deliverance of prisoners and the violation of her commercial privileges, while the Porte complained of the raids of the Dalmatian Morlachs. Excuses for war were not, therefore, lacking, and the moment was favourable. Sobieski, the year before, had defeated the Turks before Vienna, and the Republic knew that she would not lack allies.
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1. VALONA
1. VALONA
The late Italian occupation of Valona has drawn attention to what has been called one of the two keys of the Adriatic. It may, therefore, be of interest to trace the history of this important strategic position, which has been held by no less than twelve different masters. The name αὐλών, “a hollow between hills,” was applied to various places in antiquity, and from the accusative of this word comes the Italian form “Valona,” or, as the Venetians often wrote it, “Avalona.” In antiquity there wer
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2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE
2. THE MEDIÆVAL SERBIAN EMPIRE
The late Professor Freeman once remarked during a great crisis in the Balkans, that it was the business of a Minister of Foreign Affairs “to know something of the history of foreign countries.” The demand, however unreasonable it may seem, derives special importance from the fact, that recent events have signally justified the forecasts of the eminent historian and signally falsified those of the Minister whom he was criticising. For in the Balkans, and especially in Greece and Serbia, history i
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3. BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST[884]
3. BOSNIA BEFORE THE TURKISH CONQUEST[884]
The earliest known inhabitants of Bosnia and the Herzegovina belonged to that Illyrian stock which peopled the western side of the Balkan peninsula at the close of the fifth century B.C. At that period we find two Illyrian tribes, the Ardiæi and the Autariatæ, in possession of those lands. The former occupied West Bosnia, while the latter extended to the south and gave their name to the river Tara, which forms for some distance the present frontier between Montenegro and the Herzegovina. Few cha
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4. BALKAN EXILES IN ROME
4. BALKAN EXILES IN ROME
Those of us who are students of Punch may remember a caricature, which appeared in 1848, the year of almost universal revolution. Two distinguished foreigners were represented as arriving at Claridge’s Hotel and asking for accommodation. “I regret,” replied the manager, “that I cannot oblige you; my hotel is entirely occupied by dethroned monarchs, all except one single-bedded room, and that I am reserving, in case of necessity, for His Holiness the Pope!” What London was to the royal refugees o
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5. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, 1099-1291
5. 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.
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6. A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA
6. A BYZANTINE BLUE STOCKING: ANNA COMNENA
One of the differences between classical and modern literature is the rarity of female writers in the former and their frequency in the latter. While we have lady historians and poets in considerable numbers, while the fair sex has greatly distinguished itself in fiction, including that branch of it which is called modern journalism, ancient Greek letters contain the names of few celebrated women except Sappho; Myrtis and Corinna, the competitors of Pindar; Erinna, whose poetic fancy her mother
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