Part 48

Whether Athens could be defended, that was the question which its conquerors now had to decide. At a council of war, held at the Piræus on December 31, it was pointed out that it was impossible for the small Venetian forces to fortify the town, or even to leave a garrison there to defend its inhabitants, for all the available troops would be needed for the attack upon Negroponte in the spring; while, even if it could be fortified, Athens, situated so far from the sea, could not be revictualled while the Turks were still about. The destruction of Athens was actually mooted, but the council decided to postpone that for the present, and to remove the Greek population, estimated at over 6000, besides the Albanians, into the Morea and grant to them lands in the new Venetian territory there as compensation for the loss of their old homes. A further council, held on January 2, 1688, decided, in view of the spread of the plague from the Morea to continental Greece and some of the islands, to accelerate the departure of the Athenians, so as to remove the army, and in the meanwhile to organise a sanitary administration of the town. The decision to remove the Athenians filled them with dismay; the “elders,” the _vecchiardi_, as they were styled in Italian, in vain offered to contribute 20,000 reals and to maintain the garrison at their own cost, if they were allowed to remain and men were left to defend “the castle[776].” The plague and Turkish raids continued to harass the Venetians and the auxiliaries, while those mutual recriminations, usual among allies of various nationalities, so greatly disturbed the harmony of the expeditionary force that Morosini formed five companies of Albanians, who might enable him to dispense with his grumbling German troops. Koenigsmark on January 30 made another proposition—to leave a garrison of 300 men on the Akropolis with provisions for sixteen months, but Morosini calculated that this would involve the presence of another hundred servants, and that for all this force a large quantity of biscuit and wine would be needed. But the argument which weighed most with the decisive council of February 12 was the water-supply. The sixteen cisterns of the Akropolis, it was said, held water for only three months, and of these the great cistern under the Parthenon had probably been damaged by the explosion, and the still larger one in the theatre of Dionysos could easily be cut off, and the water-supply of “the castle” thereby reduced to what would suffice for only fifty days. It was, therefore, unanimously decided to leave “the castle” of Athens for the present as it was, with its walls intact, but to remove all the guns and munitions, trusting to Providence for its ultimate re-capture. The council justified its resolve to abandon the place by stating that the only object of attacking Athens had been to push back the enemy from the neighbourhood of the isthmus of Corinth.

Morosini determined, however, to carry off to Venice some memorial of Athens which could vie with the four bronze horses, carried thither after the capture of Constantinople. He ordered the removal from the western pediment of the Parthenon of the statue of Poseidon (whom Morosini thought to be Zeus) and the chariot of Victory (whom the Venetians mistook for Athena); but the recent explosion had disarranged the blocks of marble, so that the workmen no sooner touched them than these beautiful sculptures fell in pieces upon the ground. Morosini, coolly announcing this disaster in a dispatch to the senate, expressed satisfaction that none of the workmen had been injured, and announced his decision to carry off instead a marble lioness without a head; but the head, as he added in a sentence worthy of Mummius, “can be perfectly replaced by another piece.” His secretary, San Gallo, took away, however, the Victory’s head, which Laborde purchased in 1840 from a Venetian antiquary, while other fragments were picked up from the ruins by other Venetian, Danish and Hessian officers. Morosini did not content himself with the headless lioness alone; he carried off the great lion, which had given to the Piræus its mediæval name, and a third lion which had stood near the temple of Theseus, where it was seen by Babin and Spon; a fourth, a lioness, which bears the inscription _Anno Corcuræ liberatæ_, did not reach Venice till 1716, the year of Schulenburg’s deliverance of Corfù, and, therefore, does not figure in Fanelli’s[777] previous plate of the lions before the arsenal, where they may still be seen. This done, the Venetian forces abandoned Athens on April 4 and five days later the last detachment set sail for Poros. The nett result of the Venetian capture of Athens had been disastrous. It had done irreparable damage to the Parthenon without any permanent military or political gain; it had injured the inhabitants, who had been forced to leave their homes; it had spread disease and discontent among the allies. To set against these disadvantages Venice acquired four marble lions and Morosini the fame of having temporarily held the famous city. To us Verneda’s plans are the only satisfactory result of its siege.

It remains to describe the fate of the exiled Athenians and of the conquerors of Athens. The unhappy natives had left on March 24, and some even earlier. Three boat-loads went to the Venetian island of Zante, others to the Venetian possessions in the Morea, especially to Nauplia, but most (under the leadership of the brothers Gaspari) to Ægina and, like their ancestors at the time of the Persian invasion, to Salamis (“Culuris,” as it was still called), where, as the famous _Fragments_ from the monastery of the Anargyroi (SS. Cosmas and Damian) at Athens inform us[778], they built houses and churches at Ambelaki, while “Attica remained deserted for about three years” except for a few stragglers on the Akropolis and in some towers of the town. This is the passage upon which Fallmerayer based his theory of the desertion of Athens for nearly 400 years from the time of Justinian! The poorest went to Corinth, while the leading families were scattered about the Morea, the Benizeloi at Patras, the Limponai at Koron, Peroules at Nauplia, and Dousmanes at Gastouni in Elis. The last-named received for his services to Venice several grants of land and the title of _Cavaliere di San Marco_; his family subsequently became counts and migrated to Corfù, where fifty years ago one of them published an Italian account of Gladstone’s famous mission. To other Athenian notables, who had been specially useful to them, the Venetians also gave money or titles—a pension to the ex-metropolitan Jacob as compensation for his punishment by the patriarch, the title of count to the schoolmaster, Benaldes, to another scholarly Athenian, Joannes Macola, the translator of Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ and Justin’s _History_, to Taronites for his subsequent services at the siege of Nauplia, and to Venizelos Rhoïdes. Indeed, so well were these Athenian refugees treated, that a geographical shibboleth was devised to discriminate between the genuine and the pseudo-exiles from Athens[779]. To the 662 Athenian families which entered the Morea, the Venetian authorities assigned lands, vineyards, olive-trees, houses, shops, and gardens in proportion to the supposed requirements of the four classes into which Athenian society was then divided. An official Venetian report of 1701 praises their industry in trade, but remarks that “not even the common folk among them were inclined to work on the land,” and extols their “subtle intelligence,” adding that they desired to return to Athens, although the town was once more under Turkish rule, while at the same time retaining their Moreote property[780].

Athens was the climax of Morosini’s Greek career. On board his galley at Poros he received the news of his election as doge, but his first ducal enterprise, the siege of Negroponte, not only failed, despite the rising of northern Greece against the Turks, but cost the lives of Koenigsmark by fever and of Peter Gaspari, leader of the Athenian volunteers. This was the last big event of the war. The German auxiliaries left Greece; Morosini, recalled home by fever and the duties of his new office, left to his successor, Cornaro, the task of completing the conquest of the Morea by starving out the impregnable rock of Monemvasia in 1690; meanwhile a military revolution at Constantinople had placed a weak Sultan on the throne and a strong minister, the third of the Kiuprili dynasty, in power. The latter’s first act was to conciliate the Christians, and to appoint a Mainate, Liberakes Gerakares, then a prisoner in the arsenal, as bey of Maina and leader against the Venetians. The “first Christian prince of Greece” had served as a youth in the Venetian fleet; he had then turned pirate, and had during the Cretan war acted as a Turkish instrument in his native land. He now addressed a proclamation to the Athenian exiles in Salamis and Ægina, bidding them return to their homes and telling them that he was authorised by the Sultan to grant them an amnesty, at the same time threatening those who disobeyed his orders with condign punishment at his hands[781]. Under these circumstances they thought it best to come to terms with their former masters. The superstitious among them attributed the plague, the famine, the drought, and the Turkish raids upon their vineyards on the continent opposite Salamis, to the curse of the Œcumenical Patriarch. To him, therefore, they addressed an appeal, drawn up by the schoolmaster, Argyros Benaldes, describing in high-flown language their pitiable condition and imploring with deep humility his forgiveness[782]. The patriarch relented, and, probably owing to his mediation, the Athenian refugees were allowed, in 1690, to return. Several of the principal families, however, remained in voluntary exile, and their property was put up to auction and bought by a group of leading Athenians; many Athenian Greeks stayed at Nauplia till its recapture by the Turks in 1715; nor did all the Athenian Turks, who had gone to Asia Minor, return; in 1705 the town contained only 300 Turkish families. The population was, therefore, smaller and the material prosperity less than before the Venetian conquest. Great damage had been done during the “three years” of exile in Salamis; most of the houses had fallen, the raiders had burned the trees, and to their fires is attributed the blackening of Hadrian’s Porch. In order to facilitate the economic recovery of Athens, the Sultan allowed it to be free from taxes for three years; the fortifications of the Akropolis were repaired, as a pompous Turkish inscription on the old Turkish entrance, dated 1708, long testified, while a small mosque (which collapsed in 1842) was erected within the Parthenon out of the ruins caused by the besiegers’ bomb[783]. Greek education, which had languished at Athens since Benaldes had been appointed schoolmaster at Nauplia and then at Patras, was revived by the opening of a school in 1714, while the appointment of the learned geographer, Meletios, as metropolitan, gave to Athens a patron of culture. But the reinstated exiles fell to intriguing and quarrelling among themselves to such a degree over their metropolitan, that the Patriarch of Jerusalem—for the Holy Sepulchre had many possessions in Attica during the Turkish period and still possesses property near the so-called _Anaphiótika_ at Athens—wrote to them, congratulating them on having so wise and noble a hierarch, and bidding them for the honour of their famous city cast out scandals from their midst[784]. Meletios was specially anxious to keep out of a quarrel between his flock and the representative of the _voivode_, at that time an absentee, whose exactions provoked an Athenian deputation to Constantinople in 1712, headed by Demetrios Palaiologos, a local notable skilled in Turkish—a rare accomplishment among the Athenian Christians, for most of their Turkish fellow citizens spoke Greek. The chief of the black eunuchs, to whom Athens still belonged, not only deposed his _voivode_, but, taking from his secretary’s girdle his silver ink-horn, handed it to Palaiologos with the words, “Take this ink-horn and from to-day I appoint thee _voivode_ of Athens.” This was the first and last occasion on which a _rayah_ was made _voivode_ of Athens. The local Turks and the local Christian notables alike were furious at being governed by a Christian, and the former assassinated him in the house of his kinsman, Palaiologos Benizelos[785].

Monemvasia was the last durable acquisition of Venice during the war. In 1691 the island fortress of Grabusa, off the north-western extremity of Crete, was betrayed by two Neapolitan officers in the Venetian service; next year an attempt to take Canea was frustrated by the old Venetian fortifications, once erected against the Turks. Liberakes raided the Morea, but the Moreote Greeks did not rise, as he had led his Turkish patrons to expect, and the fear of being cut off by the disembarkation of a Venetian force at the isthmus made the raiders soon retire. In 1693 Morosini resumed the command, but his only acts were to re-fortify the castle of Ægina, which he had demolished during the Cretan war in 1655, the cost of upkeep being paid, as long as the war lasted, by the Athenians, and to place it and Salamis under Malipiero as governor[786]. This led the Athenians to send him a request for the renewal of Venetian protection and an offer of an annual tribute. His death at Nauplia in 1694 caused the appointment of Zeno, then governor of the Morea, as his successor. Zeno easily accomplished the capture of the rich island of Chios, but in the following year the island was abandoned. The Greek population was more favourable to the Moslems than to the Catholic Venetians, especially as the presence of the Archbishop of Naxos on board the fleet was interpreted as an intention to interfere with the Orthodox Church. Those Catholic Chiotes, on the other hand, who did not emigrate to the Morea, were dismayed at the departure of the Italians, and paid dearly for their brief triumph when the Turks returned. Four were hanged, their religion was prohibited, and their cathedral (whose Archbishop was compensated by the Venetians with the titular see of Corinth) turned into a mosque[787]. This was the last important event of the war in Greece. A series of naval battles was fought in the Ægean; and, even after the Venetians had abandoned the idea of operations north of the Morea, the continental Greeks kept up a guerilla warfare on their own account with the aid of Slavonian troops. Unable to make head against their combined efforts, Liberakes went over to the Venetians, who showed their distrust of the “Bey of Maina” by imprisoning him at Brescia, where he ended his days. In 1699, thanks to English mediation, the war ended with the peace of Carlovitz, by which Venice retained possession of the Morea, Santa Maura, and Ægina, and ceased to pay tribute for Zante, but restored to the Sultan her continental Greek conquests, such as Lepanto. The castles of Prevesa and Rumeli, the classic Antirrhion, were to be demolished, but Venice did not recover Grabusa. Thus the end of this fifteen years’ costly war found her with a Greek dominion consisting of the seven Ionian Islands, Butrinto and Parga in Epeiros, the two Cretan forts of Spinalonga and Suda, Tenos and Ægina, and the “kingdom” of the Morea, the whole of which, in the Middle Ages, had never been hers.

When the Venetians set to work to re-organise the Morea, they found their new conquest devastated and depopulated[788]. Much of the land had gone out of cultivation, for there were not hands enough to till it, and the war and the plague had aggravated the evils engendered by the long period of Turkish rule. As early as 1687 they took the first step to improve the condition of their new colony by sending three commissioners with instructions to make a survey of the country, its mills, fisheries, mines and other resources, and in 1688 sent Cornaro as its first governor, or _provveditore generale_. He estimated the total population, exclusive of Maina and the district of Corinth, to be only 86,468, as against 200,000, exclusive of garrisons and foreigners, before the war; Michiel, one of the three commissioners, puts it, without Maina, at 97,118, of whom 3577 were Turks converted to Christianity from interested motives, who required careful watching. Out of 2111 villages the war and the plague had laid desolate 656, and Cornaro could not find a living soul between Patras and Kalavryta. Under the Venetian rule the population gradually rose to more than it had been in the Turkish time—to 116,000 in 1692, to 176,844 in 1701, to over 250,000 in 1708. These figures were probably below the mark, owing to the characteristically oriental dislike of the natives to be numbered—a proceeding regarded as the prelude to that accurate taxation which has never been popular in the Near East. The increase was partly due to emigration from the neighbouring Turkish provinces and the Ionian Islands. Besides the Athenians, mostly congregated at Nauplia, there were the Chiote exiles at Modon, Thebans and Lepantines (after the peace), Cretans from Canea and even Bulgarians. Cornaro alone in his two years of office was successful in inducing 6000 emigrants to enter the Morea, where he gave them lands between Patras and Aigion and at Kalavryta, and promised them exemption from taxes. Ere long there was no one in the Morea who had not his house, his mill, and his bit of land—a thing very rare among the Christians of Turkey—and even the Athenians, the flower of the emigrants, were admittedly much better off than they had been at home. Only material welfare does not satisfy the whole nature of man, else _ubi bene, ibi patria_ would have been an easy solution of many Balkan questions.

The population during the Venetian occupation was mixed. The majority was, of course, overwhelmingly Greek, but there was considerable difference between the Greeks of the various districts, as in classical times. The Moreotes did not like “foreigners,” in which designation, like the modern Italian peasants, they included people of their own race from other parts of Greece. The natives of Elis were specially hostile to “strangers,” whereas their neighbours in Achaia, from their commerce with the Ionian Islands, tolerated “foreigners.” The Venetians did not give the Moreotes in general a very good character, but the faults which they attributed to them were not due to a double dose of original sin, but to the effects of long years of Turkish rule. They are described in the Venetian reports as suspicious, lazy, and inclined to speak evil of each other. Suspicion is a common quality of southern nations, and laziness was excusable under the Turkish system, when the industrious man was punished by being heavily mulcted in the fruits of his industry. With the Turkish dress the Greeks retained the Turkish maxims, but it was noticed that the women of Monemvasia had preserved from the previous Venetian occupation the old Venetian dress. The Arkadians were “rustics and truly Arkadian, but full of wiles,” and there was considerable polish at Kalamata. The Cretans were an exception; brought up under Venetian rule for centuries, they were very industrious. The Ionians were restless, but more cultured than the Moreotes, of whom the most civilised were the townsfolk of Mistra, who “dressed and lived with more splendour than the others, boasting to be the remnant of the true Spartan blood.” All the people of the country round Mistra were pure Greeks, but the town contained over 400 Jews, whose descendants Chateaubriand[789] found there in 1806, and whose compatriots’ funeral inscriptions I noticed in the museum there. The Jewish element in the Morea was, however, small—it was a poor country—and the only other Hebrew colonies were at Nauplia and Patras. Truth was not the strong point of the Naupliotes, but they were loyal to Venice, as were from the first the Mainates, who abhorred the very name of the Turks, of whom the other Greeks stood in awe, but had a rooted objection to paying taxes, always went armed, and “professed to observe still the institutes of Lycurgus,” of which the chief was apparently the blood-feud. Besides the Greeks and the Jews, both chiefly occupied with trade, there were the Albanians, mostly agriculturists and specially numerous in the province of Romania, men of fine physique but hating war. Indeed, with the exception of the Mainates and some of the emigrants from Northern Greece, the population was essentially pacific and relied upon its foreign rulers to defend it. It was, however, litigious, and this natural tendency was increased by a “hungry crowd of small lawyers, partly from the Ionian Islands, partly from the Venetian bar,” who became the curse of the Morea.

The Venetians divided the peninsula at first into six provinces and seven fiscal boards, but the number of the provinces was reduced to four, viz. Romania (capital Nauplia), Lakonia (capital Monemvasia), Messenia (capital Navarino Nuovo), and Achaia (capital Patras). Each province had a _provveditore_ for its administration and defence, a judicial official known as _rettore_, and a treasurer, or _camerlengo_. There were also _provveditori_ in seven places which were not provincial capitals, viz. Mistra, Kalavryta, Phanari, Gastouni, Koron, Modon and Zarnata. Above them all stood the _provveditore generale_. None of these officials, as we see from Hopf’s lists[790], held office for more than two or three years, according to the usual Venetian system; but they were not new to the task of governing Greeks. The government was, therefore, experienced, but still wholly in foreign hands, although Morosini allowed a few communities to manage their local affairs, and Maina enjoyed practical independence. This liberal concession was not, however, altogether successful. “Every castle, almost every village, aspired to erect itself into a republic,” wrote one of the governors-general, and these petty communes begged Venice to send them a Venetian noble, in order that they might pose as the equals of the provincial capitals, even offering to pay his salary for the advantage conferred by his presence. Moreover, persons suddenly promoted from the status of Turkish _rayah_ to be local magnates, were not always disposed to treat the Greek peasants upon democratic principles, but rather upon those by which they had been treated themselves. An emancipated slave is apt to be a slave-driver.