Part 18

When one morning in 1435, after a reign of thirty-two years, Antonio’s attendants found him dead in his bed, a Greek as well as an Italian party disputed the succession. The Italian candidate, young Nerio, eldest son of Franco Acciajuoli, baron of Sykaminon, whom the late Duke had adopted as his heir, occupied the city. But the Duchess Maria Melissene and her kinsman, Chalkokondyles, father of the historian and the leading man of Athens, held the castle. Well aware, however, that the Sultan was the real master of the situation, the Greek _archon_ set out for the Turkish Court to obtain Murad II’s consent to this act of usurpation. The Sultan scornfully rejected the bribes of the Athenian diplomatist, threw him into prison, and sent his redoubtable captain, Tourakhan, to occupy Thebes. Even then the Greek Duchess did not abandon all hope of securing Athens for the national cause. Through the historian Phrantzes she made an arrangement with Constantine Palaiologos, the future Emperor, then one of the Despots of the Morea, and the foremost champion of Hellenism, that he should become Duke of Athens, and that she should receive compensation near her old home in the Peloponnese. This scheme would have united nearly all Greece under the Imperial family; but it was doomed to failure. There was a section of Greeks at Athens hostile to Chalkokondyles—for party spirit has always characterised Greek public life—and this section joined the Florentine party, decoyed the Duchess out of the Akropolis, and proclaimed Nerio II. The marriage of the new Duke with the Dowager Duchess[114] and the banishment of the family of Chalkokondyles secured the internal peace of the distracted city; and the Sultan was well content to allow a Florentine princeling to retain the phantom of power so long as he paid his tribute with regularity.

The weak and effeminate Nerio II was exactly suited for the part of a Turkish puppet. But, like many feeble rulers, the “lord of Athens and Thebes” seems to have made himself unpopular by his arrogance; and a few years after his accession he was deprived of his throne by an intrigue of his brother, Antonio II. He then retired to Florence, the home of his family, where he had property, to play the part of a prince in exile, if exile it could be called. There he must have been living at the time of the famous Council, an echo of whose decisions we hear in distant Athens, where a Greek priest, of rather more learning than most of his cloth, wrote to the Œcumenical Patriarch on the proper form of public prayer for the Pope. A bailie—so we learn from one of his letters[115]—was then administering the duchy, for Antonio had died in 1441; his infant son, Franco, was absent at the Turkish Court; and his subjects had recalled their former lord to the Akropolis. There he was seen, three years later, by the first antiquary who ever set foot in Frankish Athens, Cyriacus of Ancona, the Pausanias of mediæval Greece.

That extraordinary man, like Schliemann, a merchant by profession but an archæologist by inclination, had already once visited Athens. In 1436 he had stayed there for a fortnight as the guest of a certain Antonelli Balduini; but on that occasion he was too much occupied copying inscriptions to seek an audience of the Duke. He, too, like the Capuan notary, went to see “Aristotle’s Study”; he describes the “house” or “palace of Hadrian”; he alludes to the statue of the Gorgon on the south of the Akropolis. But of contemporary Athens, apart from the monuments, he tells us little beyond the facts that it possessed four gates and that it had “new walls”—a statement corroborated by that of another traveller thirty years later, which might indicate the so-called wall of Valerian as the work of the Acciajuoli[116]. Of the inhabitants he says nothing; as living Greeks, they had for him no interest; was he not an archæologist?

In February 1444 the worthy Cyriacus revisited Athens; and on this occasion, accompanied by the Duke’s cousin and namesake, he went to pay his respects to “Nerio Acciajuoli of Florence, then prince of Athens,” whom he “found on the Akropolis, the lofty castle of the city[117].” Again, however, the archæological overpowered the human interest; and he hastened away from the ducal presence to inspect the Propylaia and the Parthenon. His original drawing of the west front of the latter building has been preserved in a manuscript, which formerly belonged to the Duke of Hamilton, but is now in the Berlin Museum, and is the earliest known pictorial reproduction of that splendid temple[118]. Other Athenian sketches may be seen in the Barberini manuscript of 1465, now at the Vatican, which contains the diagrams of San Gallo; and it seems that the eminent architect, who took the explanatory text almost _verbatim_ from the note-books of Cyriacus, also copied the latter’s drawings.

The travels of the antiquary of Ancona in Greece demonstrate an interesting fact, which has too often been ignored, that the Latin rulers of the Levant were sometimes men of culture and taste. Crusino Sommaripa, the baron of Paros, took a pride in showing his visitor some marble statues which he had had excavated, and allowed him to send a marble head and leg to his friend Giustiniani-Banca, of Chios, a connoisseur of art who composed Italian verses in his “Homeric” villa. So deeply was Cyriacus moved by Crusino’s culture and kindness that he too burst out into an Italian poem, of which happily only one line has been published. Dorino Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos, aided him in his investigation of that island; the Venetian governor of Tenos escorted him in his state-galley to inspect the antiquities of Delos; and Carlo Tocco II, whom he quaintly describes as “King of the Epeirotes,” gave him every facility for visiting the ruins of Dodona, and was graciously pleased to cast his royal eye over the manuscript account of the antiquary’s journey[119]. Another of the Tocchi is known to have employed a Greek priest to copy for him the works of Origen and Chrysostom; and in the remote Peloponnesian town of Kalavryta Cyriacus met a kindred soul, who possessed a large library from which he lent the wandering archæologist a copy of Herodotos. Thus, on the eve of the Turkish conquest, Greece was by no means so devoid of culture as has sometimes been too hastily assumed. It is clear, on the contrary, that her Frankish princes were by no means indifferent to their surroundings, and that the more enlightened of her own sons were conscious of her great past.

The very year of the antiquary’s second visit to Athens witnessed the last attempt of a patriotic and ambitious Greek to recover all Greece for his race. The future Emperor Constantine was now Despot of Mistra, the mediæval Sparta; and he thought that the moment had at last come for renewing the plan for the annexation of the Athenian duchy which had failed nine years before. The Turks, hard pressed by the Hungarians and Poles, defeated by “the white knight of Wallachia” at Nish, defied by Skanderbeg in the mountains of Albania, and threatened by the appearance of a Venetian fleet in the Ægean, could no longer protect their creature at Athens. Ere long the last Constantine entered the gates of Thebes and forced Nerio II to pay him tribute. The Court of Naples heard that he had actually occupied Athens; and Alfonso V of Aragon, who had never forgotten that he was still titular Duke of Athens and Neopatras, wrote at once to Constantine demanding the restitution of the two duchies to himself, and sent the Marquess of Gerace to receive them from the conqueror’s hands. Scarcely, however, had the letter been despatched when the fatal news of the great Turkish victory at Varna reached the writer. We hear nothing more of Gerace’s mission, for all recognised that the fate of Athens now depended upon the will of the victorious Sultan. To Murad II the shadowy claims of the house of Aragon and the efforts of the house of Palaiologos were alike indifferent.

Nerio’s attitude at this crisis was pitiful in the extreme. The Turks punished him for having given way to Constantine. Constantine again threatened him for his obsequiousness in promising to renew his tribute to the Turks. But the Sultan, true to the traditional Turkish policy of supporting the weaker of two rival Christian nationalities, forced the Greek Despot to evacuate the Florentine duchy. Nerio had the petty satisfaction of accompanying his lord and master to the Isthmus and of witnessing the capture of the famous Six-mile Rampart, in which the Greeks had vainly trusted, by the Serbian janissaries. Five years later, in 1451, a Venetian despatch gives us a last and characteristic glimpse of the wretched Nerio, when the Venetian envoy to the new Sultan, Mohammed II, is instructed to ask that potentate if he will compel his vassal, “the lord of Sithines and Stives,” to settle the pecuniary claims of two Venetians[120].

Nerio’s death was followed by one of those tragedies in which the women of Frankish Greece were so often protagonists, and of which a modern dramatist might well avail himself. After the death of his first wife, Nerio II had married a passionate Venetian beauty, Chiara Zorzi, or Giorgio, one of the daughters of the baron of Karystos, or Castel Rosso, in the south of Eubœa, who sprang from the former Marquesses of Boudonitza. The Duchess Chiara bore him a son, Francesco, who was unfortunately still a minor at the time of his father’s death. The child’s mother possessed herself of the regency and persuaded the Porte, by the usual methods, to sanction her usurpation. Soon afterwards, however, there visited Athens on some commercial errand a young Venetian noble, Bartolommeo Contarini, whose father had been governor of the Venetian colony of Nauplia. The Duchess fell in love with her charming visitor, and bade him aspire to her hand and land. Contarini replied that alas! he had left a wife behind him in his palace on the lagoons. To the Lady of the Akropolis, a figure who might have stepped from a play of Æschylus, the Venetian wife was no obstacle. It was the age of great crimes. Contarini realised that Athens was worth a murder, poisoned his spouse, and returned to enjoy the embraces and the authority of the Duchess.

But the Athenians soon grew tired of this Venetian domination. They complained to Mohammed II; the great Sultan demanded explanations; and Contarini was forced to appear with his stepson, whose guardian he pretended to be, at the Turkish Court. There he found a dangerous rival in the person of Franco Acciajuoli, only son of the late Duke Antonio II and cousin of Francesco, a special favourite of Mohammed and a willing candidate for the Athenian throne. When the Sultan heard the tragic story of Chiara’s passion, he ordered the deposition of both herself and her husband, and bade the Athenians accept Franco as their lord. Young Francesco was never heard of again. But the tragedy was not yet over. Franco had no sooner assumed the government of Athens than he ordered the arrest of his aunt Chiara, threw her into the dungeons of Megara, and there had her mysteriously murdered. A picturesque legend current three centuries later at Athens makes Franco throttle her with his own hands as she knelt invoking the aid of the Virgin, and then cut off her head with his sword[121]; so deep was the impression which her fate made upon the popular imagination.

The legend tells us how her husband, “the Admiral,” had come with many ships to the Piræus to rescue her, but arrived too late. Unable to save, he resolved to avenge her, and laid the grim facts before the Sultan. Mohammed II, indignant at the conduct of his _protégé_, but not sorry, perhaps, of a pretext for destroying the remnants of Frankish rule at Athens, ordered Omar, son of Tourakhan, the governor of Thessaly, to march against the city. The lower town offered no resistance, for its modern walls had but a narrow circumference, and its population and resources were scanty. Nature herself seemed to fight against the Athenians. On May 29, the third anniversary of the capture of Constantinople, a comet appeared in the sky; a dire famine followed, so that the people were reduced to eat roots and grass. On June 4, 1456, the town fell into the hands of the Turks[122]. But the Akropolis, which was reputed impregnable, long held out. In vain the Constable of Athens and some of the citizens offered the castle to Venice through one of the Zorzi family; the Republic ordered the bailie of Negroponte to keep the offer open, but took no steps to save the most famous fortress in Christendom; in vain he summoned one Latin prince after another to his aid. From the presence of an Athenian ambassador at the Neapolitan Court[123] we may infer that Alfonso V of Aragon, the titular “Duke of Athens,” was among their number. The papal fleet, which was despatched to the Ægean, did not even put into the Piræus. Meanwhile Omar, after a vain attempt to seduce the garrison from its allegiance, reminded Franco that sooner or later he must restore Athens to the Sultan who gave it. “Now, therefore,” added the Turkish commander, “if thou wilt surrender the Akropolis, His Majesty offers thee the land of Bœotia, with the city of Thebes, and will allow thee to take away the wealth of the Akropolis and thine own property.” Franco only waited till Mohammed had confirmed the offer of his subordinate, and then quitted the castle of Athens, with his wife and his three sons, for ever. At the same time the last Catholic archbishop, Nicolò Protimo of Eubœa, left the cathedral of Our Lady. It was not till 1875 that a Latin prelate again resided at Athens.

The great Sultan, so his Greek biographer, Kritoboulos, tells us, was filled with a desire to see the city of the philosophers. Mohammed knew Greek, and had heard and read much about the wisdom and marvellous works of the ancient Athenians; we may surmise that Cyriacus of Ancona had told him of the Athenian monuments when he was employed as reader to his Majesty during the siege of Constantinople[124]. This strange “Philhellene”—for so Kritoboulos audaciously describes the conqueror of Hellas—longed to visit the places where the heroes and sages of classic Athens had walked and talked, and at the same time to examine, with a statesman’s eye, the position of the city and the condition of its harbours. In the autumn of 1458, on his return from punishing the Greek Despots of the Morea, he had an opportunity of achieving his wish. When he arrived at the gates (if we may believe a much later tradition[125]), the Abbot of Kaisariane, the monastery which still nestles in one of the folds of Hymettos, handed him the keys of the city. There is nothing improbable in the story, for the Greek Metropolitan, Isidore, had fled to the Venetian Island of Tenos; and the abbot may therefore have been the most important Greek dignitary left at Athens. The Sultan devoted four days to visiting his new possession, “of all the cities in his Empire the dearest to him,” as the Athenian Chalkokondyles proudly says. But of all that he saw he admired most the Akropolis, whose ancient and recent buildings he examined “with the eyes of a scholar, a Philhellene, and a great sovereign.” Like Pedro IV of Aragon before him, he was proud to possess such a jewel, and in his enthusiasm he exclaimed, “How much, indeed, do we not owe to Omar, the son of Tourakhan!”

The conquered Athenians were once again saved by their ancestors. Like his Roman prototype, Mohammed II treated them humanely, granted all their petitions, and gave them many and various privileges. So late as the seventeenth century there were Athenians who could show patents of fiscal exemption, issued to their forebears by the conqueror. If, however, the Greek clergy had hoped that the great cathedral would be restored to the Orthodox church, they were disappointed. The Parthenon, by a third transformation, was converted into a mosque; and soon, from the tapering minaret which rose above it, the muezzin summoned the faithful to the _Ismaïdi_, or “house of prayer.” A like fate befell the church which had served as the Orthodox cathedral during the Frankish domination, but which received, in honour of the Sultan’s visit, the name of _Fethijeh Jamisi_, or “Mosque of the Conqueror,” and which still preserves, amid the squalid surroundings of the military bakery, the traces of its former purpose.

The anonymous treatise on “The Theatres and Schools of Athens,” which was probably composed by some Greek at this moment, perhaps to serve as a guide-book for the distinguished visitor, gives us a last glimpse of Frankish Athens. The choragic monument of Lysikrates was still known as “the lantern of Demosthenes”; the Tower of the Winds was supposed to be “the School of Sokrates”; the gate of Athena Archegetis was transformed in common parlance into “the palace of Themistokles”; the Odeion of Perikles was called “the School of Aristophanes”; and that of Herodes Atticus was divided into “the palaces of Kleonides and Miltiades.” The spots where once had stood the houses of Thucydides, Solon, and Alkmaion were well known to the omniscient local antiquary, who unhesitatingly converts the Temple of Wingless Victory into “a small school of musicians, founded by Pythagoras.”

On the fifth day after his arrival the heir of these great men left Athens for Thebes, the abode of his vassal Franco, who must have heaved a sigh of relief when his terrible visitor, after a minute examination of Bœotia, set out for Macedonia. For two years longer he managed to retain his Theban dominions, from which he received a revenue as large as that which he had formerly enjoyed, till, in 1460, Mohammed, after finally destroying the two Greek principalities of the Morea, revisited Athens. There the Sultan heard a rumour that some Athenians had conspired to restore their Florentine lord. This decided Franco’s fate. At the moment he was serving, as the man of the Turk, with a regiment of Bœotian cavalry in Mohammed’s camp. His suzerain ordered him to join in an attack which he meditated upon the surviving fragments of the ancient county of Cephalonia, the domain of the Tocchi. Franco shrank from fighting against his fellow-countryman; and a curious letter has recently been published[126] in which, for this very reason, he offered his services as a _condottiere_ to Francesco Sforza of Milan for the sum of 10,000 ducats a year. But he was forced to obey; he did his pitiable task, and repaired to the headquarters of Zagan Pasha, the governor of the Morea, unconscious that the latter had orders to kill him. The Pasha invited him to his tent, where he detained him in conversation till nightfall; but, as the unsuspecting Frank was on his way back to his own pavilion, the governor’s guards seized and strangled him. Such was the sorry end of the last “Lord of Thebes.” Mohammed annexed all Bœotia, and thus obliterated the last trace of the Duchy of Athens.

Franco’s three sons were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, where one of them showed military and administrative ability of so high an order as to win the favour of his sovereign. Their mother, a Greek of noble lineage and famed for her beauty, became the cause of a terrible tragedy which convulsed alike Court and Church. Amoiroutses, the former minister and betrayer of the Greek Empire of Trebizond, fell desperately in love with the fair widow, to whom he addressed impassioned verses, and swore, though he was already married, to wed her or die. The Œcumenical Patriarch forbade the banns, and lost his beard and his office rather than yield to the Sultan. But swift retribution fell upon the bigamist, for he dropped down dead, a dice-box in his hand.

Though the Acciajuoli dynasty had thus fallen for ever, members of that great family still remained in Greece. An Acciajuoli was made civil governor of the old Venetian colony of Koron, in Messenia, when the Spaniards conquered it from the Turks in 1532. When they abandoned it, he was captured by pirates but eventually ransomed, only to die in poverty at Naples, where his race had first risen to eminence. At the beginning of the last century the French traveller, Pouqueville, was shown at Athens a donkey-driver named Neri, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Florentine Dukes; and the modern historian of Christian Athens, Neroutsos, used to contend that his family was descended from Nerozzo Pitti, lord of Sykaminon and uncle of the last Duke of Athens. In Florence the family became extinct only so recently as 1834; and the Certosa and the Lung’ Arno Acciajuoli still preserve its memory there. In a Florentine gallery are two coloured portraits of the Dukes of Athens, which would seem to be those of Nerio I and the bastard Antonio I. In that case the Florentine Dukes of Athens are the only Frankish rulers of Greece, except the Palatine Counts of Cephalonia, whose likeness has been preserved to posterity[127].

Thus ended the strange connection between Florence and Athens. 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.

AUTHORITIES

1. Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (_Documents relating to the Mediæval History of Athens_). Ed. Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1906.

2. _Briefe aus der “Corrispondenza Acciajoli” in der Laurenziana zu Florenz._ By Ferdinand Gregorovius. Munich, 1890.

3. Nicolai de Marthono liber peregrinationis ad loca sancta. In _La Revue de l’Orient Latin_, vol. III. Paris, 1895.

4. Μνημεῖα τῆς Ἱστορίας τῶν Ἀθηναίων (_Memorials of the History of the Athenians_). By Demetrios Gr. Kampouroglos. 2nd Edn. Athens, 1891-92.

5. Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηναίων (_History of the Athenians_). By D. Gr. Kampouroglos. Athens, 1889-96.

6. Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν ἐπὶ Τουρκοκρατίας (_History of Athens under the Turks_). By Th. N. Philadelpheus. Athens, 1902.

7. Μνημεῖα Ἑλληνικῆς Ἱστορίας (_Memorials of Greek History_). Edited by C. N. Sathas. Paris, 1880-90.

8. Νέος Ἑλληνομνήμων (_Greek Remembrancer_). New Series. Vols. I-III. Ed. by Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1904-17.

9. _Nouvelles Recherches historiques sur la principauté française de Morée._ By Buchon. Two vols. Paris, 1843.

10. _La politica Orientale di Alfonso di Aragona._ By F. Cerone. In _Archivio Storico per le province Napoletane_. Vols. XXVII-XXVIII. Naples, 1902-3.

And other works.

APPENDIX

NOTES ON ATHENS UNDER THE FRANKS