Misti, XXIII. f. 30tᵒ.
IV
1346 DIE XXIV JANUARIJ.
Capta. Quod scribatur nostro Baiulo et Consiliariis Nigropontis quod Ser Moretus Gradonico consiliarius, vel alius sicut videbitur Baiulo et Consiliariis, in nostrum ambaxatorem ire debeat ad dominam Marchionissam Bondenicie, et sibi exponat pro parte nostra quod attenta honesta et rationabili requisitione nostra quam sibi fieri fecimus per virum Nobilem Johannem Justiniano nostrum consiliarium Nigroponti, quem ad eam propterea in nostrum ambaxatorem transmisimus super reformatione scandali orti inter ipsam et virum nobilem Nicolaum Georgio eius virum in reconciliatione ipsius cum dicto viro suo: Et intellecta responsione quam super premissis fecit nostro ambaxatori predicto gravamur et turbamur sicut merito possumus et debemus, de modo quem ipsam servavit et servat erga dictum virum suum. Nam sibi plene poterat et debebat sufficere remissio et reconciliatio cum [eo?] facta coram nobis per dictum eius virum, secundum nostrum mandatum, et nuncio suo in nostra presencia constituto de omni offensa et iniuria sibi facta, et debebat esse certa quod quicquid idem Marchio in nostra presencia et ex nostro mandato promittebat effectualiter observasse. Et quod volentes quod bona dispositio dicti viri sui et paciencia nostra de tanta iniuria facta civi nostro sibi plenius innotescat deliberavimus iterate ad eam mittere ipsum in nostrum ambaxatorem ad requirendum et rogandum ipsam quod debeat reconciliare cum dicto viro suo et eum recipere ad honorem et statum in quo erat antequam inde recederet, nam quamvis hoc sit sibi debitum et conveniat pro honore et bono suo, tamen erit gratissimum menti nostre et ad conservacionem ipsius marchionisse et suorum avidius nos disponet et circa hoc alia dicat que pro bono facto viderit opportuna.
Si vero dicta marchionissa id facere recusaret nec vellet condescendere nostre intentioni et requisitioni predicte, dictus Ser Moretus assignet terminum dicte Marchionisse unius mensis infra quem debeat complevisse cum effectu nostram requisitionem premissam. Et sibi expresse dicat, quod elapso dicto termino nulla alia requisitione sibi facta, cum non intendamus dicto civi nostro in tanto suo iure deficere, faciemus intromitti personas et bona suorum et sua ubicumque in forcio nostro poterunt reperire. Et ultra hoc providebimus in dicto facto de omnibus favoribus et remediis, que pro bono et conservacione dicti civis nostri videbimus opportuna. Et si propter premissa dicta Marchionissa ipsum recipere et reintegrare voluerit bene quidem sin autem scribatur dicto baiulo et consiliariis quod elapso termino dicti mensis et ipsa marchionissa premissa facere recusante mittant ad nos per cambium sine aliquo periculo yperpera octomillia quinquaginta vel circa que sunt apud Thomam Lippomanum et Nicolaum de Gandulfo, qua pecunia Venecias veniente disponetur et providebiter de ipsa sicut dominationi videbitur esse iustum.
Capta. Item quod scribatur domino Delphino Vihennensi et illis de Compagna in favorem dicti civis nostri et recommendando ei iura et iusticiam ipsius in illa forma et cum illis verbis que dominacioni pro bono facti utilia et necessaria videbuntur.
Non sinceri 15—Non 12.—De parte 57.
Misti, XXIII. f. 46tᵒ.
V
1348 DIE XI FEBRUARIJ PRIME INDICTIONIS.
Capta. Quod possint scribi littere domino Pape et aliquibus Cardinalibus in recommendacione iuris domini Nicolai Georgio marchionis Bondinicie nostri civis in forma inferius anotata.
Domino Pape.
Sanctissime pater pro civibus meis contra Deum et iusticiam aggravatis, Sanctitati Vestre supplicationes meas porrigo cum reverentia speciali: Unde cum nobilis vir Nicolaus Georgio Marchio Bondinicie honorabilis civis meus, iam duodecim annis matrimonii iura contraserit cum domina Marchionissa Bondinicie predicte et cum ea affectione maritali permanserit habens ex ea filium legiptimum, qui est annorum undecim, ipsa domina Marchionissa in preiudicium anime sue, Dei timore postposito ipsum virum suum recusat recipere et castrum Bondinicie et alia bona spectantia eidem suo viro tenet iniuste et indebite occupata in grave damnum civis mei predicti et Dei iniuriam manifestam precipientis, ut quos Deus coniunxit homo non separet: Unde Sanctitati Vestre humiliter supplico quatenus Clementie Vestre placeat dictum civem meum habere in suo iure favorabiliter commendatum, ut dicta domina eum tanquam virum legiptimum recipiat et affectione maritali pertractet sicut iura Dei precipiunt, atque volunt, et salus animarum etiam id exposcit. Cum ipse civis meus sit paratus ex sua parte ipsam dominam pro uxore legiptima tractare pacifice et habere.
Misti, XXIV. f. 63.
Note.—The “Misti” are cited throughout from the originals at Venice; I have corrected the dates to the modern style.
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 least in outline, to make out the fortunes of the famous island under its western lords.
The usual name for Ithake in Italian documents is Val di Compare, the earliest use of which, so far as I can ascertain, occurs in the Genoese historian Caffaro’s Liberatio Orientis, written in the first half of the twelfth century[374]. According to K. Bergotes of Cephalonia this name was given to the island by an Italian captain, who was driven to anchor there one stormy night. Seeing a light shining through the darkness, he landed, and found that it proceeded from a hut in which a child had lately been born. At the request of the parents he accepted the office of godfather, or κουμπάρος at the child’s christening, and named the valley where the hut lay Val di Compare, to commemorate the event. Whether this derivation be correct or not, the name stuck to the island for several centuries, though we shall also find the classical Ithake still surviving contemporaneously with it. The neighbouring islands of Zante and Cephalonia were severed from the Byzantine empire in 1185, at the time of the invasion of Greece by the Normans of Sicily, and were occupied by their admiral, Margaritone of Brindisi. Ithake is not specially mentioned as included among his conquests, but its connection with the other two islands under the rule of his immediate successors makes it very probable. Six years later, in the graphic account of Greece as it was in 1191, ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough, Fale (Valle) de Compar is said to have had a specially evil reputation for piracy, and the channel between it and Cephalonia is described as a favourite lair of those robbers[375]. After Margaritone’s death he was succeeded by a Count Maio, or Matthew, a member of the great Roman family of Orsini, who seems to have been born in Apulia—according to one account he came from Monopoli—and who at the time of the fourth crusade was lord of Cephalonia, Zante, and Theachi, el qual se clamado agora Val de Compare[376], under the suzerainty of the king of Sicily. Although the two larger of those islands had fallen to the share of Venice by the partition treaty he and his descendants continued in possession of them and of Ithake, though he thought it wise, in 1209, to acknowledge the overlordship of the Republic. A Venetian document of 1320, alluding to this transaction, specially mentions Val di Compare as one of the islands, for which he then did homage[377]. In 1236 the count recognised as his suzerain Prince Geoffroy II of Achaia, and he and his successors were henceforth reckoned among the twelve peers of that principality, in whose history they played an important part[378].
The next mention of Ithake occurs in a Greek document of 1264, in which Count Matthew’s son and successor, “the most high and mighty Richard, palatine count and lord of Cephalonia, Zakynthos, and Ithake,” confirms the possessions of the Latin bishopric of Cephalonia[379]. Here Ithake is called by its classical name, which was not confined to Greeks, for we find it used in a Venetian document of 1278, where the island is again mentioned as the scene of piracies[380]. Later on, in 1294, a document in the Angevin archives at Naples mentions the promise of Count Richard to bestow “the castle of Koronos”—a name still given to part of the island of Cephalonia—“or the island of Ithake” (sive vellent castrum Corony de dominio suo, sive vellent insulam Ythace) upon his son John I, on the occasion of the latter’s marriage with the daughter of Nikephoros I, despot of Epeiros[381]. Richard, in spite of the repeated remonstrances of Charles II of Naples, who, in virtue of the treaty of Viterbo, was suzerain of Achaia, and accordingly of Cephalonia, failed to carry out this promise. We next hear of Val di Compare in the above-mentioned Venetian document of 1320, in which Count John I’s son, Nicholas, who had two years earlier murdered his nephew, the last Despot of Epeiros of the house of the Angeloi, and had made himself Despot, is reminded that his ancestor Matthew had done homage, as he was now offering to do, for the three islands of Cephalonia, Zante, and Val di Compare to the Venetian republic.
Although not mentioned by name Ithake doubtless followed the fortunes of Cephalonia and Zante when those islands were conquered from the Orsini by John of Gravina, prince of Achaia, in 1324. The “county of Cephalonia,” of which the island of Odysseus had long formed a part, was thus under the direct authority of the Angevins, and was transferred by John of Gravina, together with the principality of Achaia, to Robert of Taranto in 1333, after which date the same Angevin officials held office in both Achaia and the insular county till Robert bestowed the latter in 1357 upon his friend Leonardo Tocco, a Neapolitan courtier, whose family came from Benevento. In an ecclesiastical document[382] of 1389 the Greek bishop of Methone, writing about the archbishopric of Levkas, mentions “the duchess Franka (Francesca), lady of Levkas, Ithake, Zante and Cephalonia,” the allusion being to the daughter of Nerio I Acciajuoli of Athens, who had in the previous year married Carlo I Tocco, count of Cephalonia and duke of Levkadia. A little earlier, in a Piedmontese document[383] of 1387, we find Amedeo of Savoy, one of the claimants to the principality of Achaia, rewarding the zeal of one of his Greek supporters, Joannes Laskaris Kalopheros, with Cephalonia, Zante, Val di Compare, and other places as hereditary possessions—a gift which was, of course, never carried out, as the islands were not Amedeo’s to bestow. Spandugino[384] specially mentions “Itaca,” or “Val di Compare,” as being part of the insular dominions of the Tocchi, and Carlo II Tocco is described in documents of 1430 and 1433, and by the annalist Stefano Magno, as comes palatinus Cephaloniæ, Ithacæ, et Jacinti—a designation repeated in a document of 1458 after his death[385]. We find an allusion to it under both its classical and its mediæval name in the Liber Insularum of Buondelmonti[386], written in 1422, and the latter also occurs in a Venetian document of 1430, where Val di Compare[387] is stated to belong to Carlo II. Six years later the archæologist Cyriacus of Ancona, visiting the “king of the Epeirotes,” as he calls that prince, mentions Itaci (sic) insulæ as opposite the mainland[388]. After Leonardo III lost practically all his continental possessions to the Turks in 1449 he still retained the islands, Ithake among them, under the protection of Venice, of which both he and his father were honorary citizens, and under the nominal suzerainty of the kings of Naples. From a document of 1558 we learn that it was in his time that the family of Galates—the only Ithakan family which enjoyed the privileges of nobility in the Venetian period, and which is still extant in the island—first received exemptions[389]. It was he too who revived the Orthodox see of Cephalonia and bestowed it, together with spiritual jurisdiction over Ithake, upon Gerasimos Loverdo[390].
When Mohammed II sent Achmet Pasha to conquer all that remained of Leonardo’s dominions in 1479 we are told by Stefano Magno[391] that the Turkish commander “ravaged also the island of Itacha (sic), called Valle di Compare, which belonged to the said lord,” whom he also styles “palatine count of Cephalonia, Itaca (sic) and Zakynthos.” Loredano, the Venetian admiral, thereupon sent some galleys to Ithake and rescued seven or eight persons—an act of which the pasha complained. This devastation of the island will account for the fact that, in 1504, the Venetian government, which then owned Cephalonia and Zante, took steps for repopulating “an island named Val di Compare, situated opposite Cephalonia, at present uninhabited, but reported to have been formerly fertile and fruitful.” Accordingly lands were offered to settlers, free from all taxes for five years, at the end of which time the colonists were to pay to the Treasury of Cephalonia the same dues as the inhabitants of that island[392]. Thenceforth down to 1797 Ithake remained beneath the sway of the Venetian republic. The offer of the senate seems to have been successful; among those who accepted it were the family of Boua Grivas, of Albanian origin, connected with the clan of Boua, which had formerly ruled over Arta and Lepanto and had played a part in the Albanian revolts of 1454 and 1463 in the Morea, that of Petalas, and that of Karavias, which in modern times produced a local historian of Ithake[393]. In 1548 Antonio Calbo, the retiring provveditore of Cephalonia, reported to the Venetian government, that “under the jurisdiction of Cephalonia there is another island, named Thiachi, very mountainous and barren, in which there are different harbours and especially a harbour called Vathi; in the island of Thiachi are three hamlets, in three places, inhabited by about sixty families, who are in great fear of corsairs, because they have no fortress in which to take refuge[394].” The three hamlets mentioned in this report are doubtless those of Paleochora, Anoe, and Exoe, which are regarded as the oldest in the island.
The former counts of Ithake were till lately the only Latin rulers of Greece who still existed in prosperous circumstances. But in the seventeenth century they took the title of “prince of Achaia”—to which they were not entitled, although the counts of Cephalonia had once been peers of Achaia and Leonardo II and Carlo I had for a short time occupied Glarentza. The modern representative of the family was Carlo, Duke of Regina[395], who succeeded his cousin Francesco Tocco in 1894. But he is now dead and his only son was killed in a motor accident.
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 two islands, the only members of the Cyclades group under the direct rule of the Venetian government, were bequeathed to the Republic by George III Ghisi, their ancestral lord, upon whose death in 1390 they passed into its hands. The islanders implored Venice not to dispose of them; and, though there were not failing applicants for them among the Venetian princelets of the Levant, she listened to the petition of the inhabitants. At first an official from Negroponte was sent as an annual governor; then, in 1407, Venetian nobles who would accept the governorship of Tenos and Mykonos, with which Le Sdiles, or Delos, was joined, for a term of four years, paying a certain sum out of the revenues to Venice and keeping the balance for themselves, were invited to send in their names. One of them was appointed, still under the authority of the bailie of Negroponte[398]; and this system continued down to 1430, when a rector was sent out from Venice for two years, and the two islands were thenceforth governed directly by an official of the Republic.
Mykonos remained united with Tenos under the flag of St Mark till the first great raid of the Turkish fleet in the Cyclades under Khaireddîn Barbarossa in 1537. Neither Andrea Morosini nor Paruta, nor yet Hajji Kalifeh, mentions its fate in their accounts of that fatal cruise; but Andrea Cornaro in his Historia di Candia[399] relates that, after taking the two islands of Thermia and Zia, Barbarossa went to Mykonos, many of whose inhabitants escaped to Tenos, while the others became his captives. After the Turkish admiral’s departure the fugitives returned; but in the same year one of Barbarossa’s lieutenants, a corsair named Granvali, with eighteen ships, paid a second visit to Mykonos and carried off many of them. Accordingly the shameful treaty[400] between Venice and the Sultan, concluded in 1540, in both versions mentions Mykonos among the islands ceded to the Sultan, while Tenos was expressly retained. How, in the face of this, Hopf can have asserted that Mykonos still remained Venetian it is difficult to understand. Nor is this all. In a document of 1545 the Republic orders her ambassador at Constantinople to obtain the restoration of the island[401]; in 1548 a certain Zuan Zorzo Muazzo, of Tenos, begs, and receives, from the Venetian government another fief in compensation for that which he had lost in Mykonos[402]. A petition from the inhabitants of Tenos to Venice in 1550 mentions the lack of ships “at the present time when Mykonos has been lost[403].” We have, too, the statement of Sauger[404], who becomes more trustworthy as he approaches his own time, that Duke Giovanni IV Crispo, of Naxos, bestowed the island of Mykonos (apparently in 1541) upon his daughter on her marriage with Giovanfrancesco Sommaripa, lord of Andros. There is nothing improbable in this. The Turks acquiesced at the same time in the action of the duke in turning the Premarini family out of their part of Zia, and bestowing that also upon his son-in-law; they may have had no objection to his dealing in the same manner with the devastated island of Mykonos. At any rate the latter was no longer Venetian. The long and elaborate reports[405] of the Venetian commissioners, who visited Tenos in 1563 and 1584, make no mention whatever of Mykonos, except that in the latter document we hear of a Grimani as Catholic bishop of Tenos and of the sister island; nor does Foscarini allude to it in his report on Cerigo and Tenos in 1577. More conclusive still, while the style of the Venetian governor is “rector of Tenos and Mykonos” down to 1593, from that date onwards the governor is officially described as “rector of Tenos” alone[406]. Hopf[407] is, therefore, wrong in giving us a long list of rettori di Tinos e Myconos from 1407 to 1717. It seems probable that the latter island ceased to belong to Venice in 1537, but that the rector of Tenos continued to bear the name of Mykonos also, as a mere form, for rather more than half a century longer. Possibly it may have belonged to the Sommaripa of Andros from 1541 to 1566, when that dynasty was dethroned.
These conclusions are confirmed by the travellers and geographers who wrote about the Levant between that date and the loss of Tenos. Porcacchi[408], in 1572, mentions Mykonos, without saying to whom it belonged. One of the Argyroi, barons of Santorin, who, in 1581, gave Crusius the information about the Cyclades which he embodied in his Turco-Græcia[409], had nothing to say about Mykonos, except that it contained one castle and some hamlets, while he specially mentioned that Tenos and Cerigo were “under Venice.” Botero[410], in 1605, giving a full list of the Venetian possessions in the Levant, includes the Ionian Islands and Tenos alone. Neither the French ambassador, Louis des Hayes[411], who visited Greece in 1630, nor the sieur du Loir[412], who sailed with him, is more explicit, though both describe Crete, Cerigo, and Tenos as the sole Venetian islands in the Ægean. Thévenot[413], in 1656, and Boschini[414], ten years later, tell us that Mykonos was “almost depopulated” because of corsairs, but are likewise silent as to its ownership. Baudrand, in his Geographia[415], remarked, however, that it had been sub dominio Turcarum à sæculo et ultra, cum antea Venetis pareret, an account which appears to me to coincide with the real facts. But both Spon[416] and Wheler[417] censured the geographer for his statement that it had been Venetian, so completely had the Venetian tradition faded at the time of their visit in 1675. At that period, as they inform us, the Sultan’s galleys never failed to come there every year to collect the capitation tax, and the governor of the island was a Greek sent by the Turks from Constantinople. Both travellers surmised, however, that the island might perhaps have changed hands during the Candian war, when it was neglected. Their surmise is rendered probable by the remark of Sebastiani[418], who visited it in 1666, during that long struggle. For he says that it was then ecclesiastically under the jurisdiction of the Catholic bishop of Tenos, who had begged the Venetian admiral, Comaro, to give his deputy in Mykonos the old Venetian church of San Marco for the use of the twenty Latin inhabitants. Randolph[419] confirms their story of its subjection to the Sultan, for he tells of a visit paid to the island by the Capitan Pasha in 1680. Piacenza[420] reiterates their criticism of Baudrand, and mentions that the atlases of the Mediterranean erroneously described it as insula altera hoc in tractu maritimo Reipublicæ Venetæ obsequium præstans, whereas it was really “under the Turkish yoke.” Dapper[421] takes the same view. After mentioning that Tenos “is the last Venetian island in this quarter of the Levant” he adds that “there are authors who allege that Mykonos is in subjection to Venice.” Finally, in 1700, Tournefort[422] found the island dependent on the Capitan Pasha, to whom it paid the capitation tax, while in the last war it had been subject to the bey of Kos. Although, he says, it was conquered by Barbarossa, the Venetian governor of Tenos still continues to style himself provveditore of Mykonos also. But throughout the period of the Candian war and right down to the end of the Venetian occupation of Tenos the governor of the latter is always called simply Rettor a Tine in the official registers[423]. If further refutation were needed of Hopf’s statement that Mykonos was captured from the Venetians in 1715, it may be added that Ferrari[424], the contemporary authority for the surrender of Tenos, never mentions it, nor does it figure in the peace of Passarovitz.
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 movement was born; there, in 1913, King George of Greece was assassinated; and there in 1916 M. Venizelos established his Provisional Government, in the city which served as a base for the Allies in their Macedonian campaign.
Nor has Salonika’s contribution to literature been inconsiderable. The historian Petros Patrikios in the sixth century; the essayist Demetrios Kydones, who wrote a “monody over those who fell in Salonika” in 1346, during the civil war between John Cantacuzene and John V Palaiologos; John Kameniates and John the Reader, the historians respectively of the Saracen and the Turkish sieges, and Theodore Gazes, who contributed to spread Greek teaching in the West, were natives of the place. Plotinos and John, hagiographers of the seventh century; Leo, the famous mathematician of the ninth; Niketas, who composed dialogues in favour of the union of the churches; Eustathios, the Homeric commentator, historian of the Norman siege and panegyrist of St Demetrios; Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos, the ecclesiastical historian; Gregorios Palamas, Neilos, and Nicholas Kabasilas, the polemical theologians of the fourteenth century; and Symeon, the liturgical writer, who died just before the final Turkish capture of the city, were among those who occupied this important metropolitan see; while the rhetoricians, Nikephoros Choumnos and the grammarian Thomas Magistros, addressed to the Thessalonians missives on the blessings of justice and unity in the fourteenth century. And precedents for the exile of Abdul Hamid II at Salonika may be found in the banishment thither of Licinius, the rival of Constantine, of Anastasios II in 716, and of Theodore Studita during the Iconoclast controversy.
Salonika has no very ancient history. It did not exist till after the death of Alexander the Great, when Kassander, who became king of Macedon, founded it in 315 B.C., and gave to it the name of his wife, Thessalonike, who was half-sister of the famous Macedonian conqueror, just as he bestowed his own upon another town, from which the westernmost of the three prongs of the peninsula of Chalkidike still retains the name of Kassandra. When the Romans conquered and organized Macedonia, Thessalonika became the capital of that province, remaining, however, a free city with its own magistrates, the πολιτάρχαι, to whom St Paul and Silas were denounced on their memorable visit. It is a proof of the technical accuracy of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, that this precise word occurs as the name of the local magistracy in the inscription formerly on the Vardar gate, but now in the British Museum. The description in the Acts further shows that the present large Jewish colony of Salonika, which is mostly composed of Spanish Jews, descendants of the fugitives from the persecutions of the end of the fifteenth century, had already a counterpart in the first. We may infer that Salonika was a prosperous town, and its importance in the Roman period is shown by the fact that Cicero, who was not fond of discomfort, selected it in 58 B.C. as his place of exile, and that Piso found it worth plundering during his governorship. But the sojourn of the Roman orator left a less durable mark upon the history of Salonika than that of the Apostle. It was not merely that two of his comrades, Aristarchos and Secundus, were Thessalonian converts, but mediæval Greek writers lay special stress upon the piety of what was called par excellence “the Orthodox City”—probably for its conservative attitude in the Iconoclast controversy. Salonika furnished many names to the list of martyrs, and one of them, St Demetrios, a Thessalonian doctor put to death in 306 by order of Galerius[426] became the patron of his native city, which he is believed to have saved again and again from its foes. The most binding Thessalonian oath was by his name[427]; his tomb, from which a holy oil perpetually exuded, the source of many miraculous cures, is in the beautiful building, now once more a church, which is called after him; it was on his day, October 26 (O.S.), that in 1912 Salonika capitulated to the Greek troops, and there were peasant soldiers at the battle of Sarantaporon who firmly believed that they had seen him fighting against the Turks for the restoration of his church and city to his own people[428], just as their ancestors had beheld him, sword in hand, defending its walls against the Slavs. The story of his miracles forms a voluminous literature, and on the walls of his church his grateful people represented all the warlike episodes in which he had saved them from their foes. Some of these mosaics have survived the conversion of the church into the Kassimié mosque, and the great fire of August 18, 1917, and among them is a portrait of the saint between a bishop and a local magnate. Nor was St Demetrios the only Thessalonian saint. The city also cherished the tomb of St Theodora of Ægina, who had died at Salonika in the ninth century. Its walls contain the name of Pope Hormisdas.
Like Constantinople, Salonika was devoted to the sports of the hippodrome; and, in 390, the imprisonment of a favourite charioteer on the eve of a race, in which he was to have taken part, provoked an insurrection, punished by a massacre. Theodosius I, then on his way to Milan, ordered the Gothic garrison to wreak vengeance upon the inhabitants; the next great race-meeting was selected, when the citizens had come together to witness their favourite pastime, and 15,000 persons were butchered in the hippodrome. St Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, refused to allow the Emperor to enter the cathedral, and made him repent for eight months his barbarous treatment of a city where he had celebrated his wedding. Of Roman Salonika there still exists a memorial in the arch of Galerius, with its sculptures representing the Emperor’s Asiatic victories; a second arch, the Vardar gate, was sacrificed fifty years ago to build the quay; while a Corinthian colonnade, with eight Karyatides, known to the Jews as Las Incantadas, a part of the Forum, was removed by Napoleon III to France. The pulpit, from which St Paul was believed to have spoken, and which used to stand outside the church of St George, was removed—so I was informed when last at Salonika—by a German in the time of Abdul Hamid.
Salonika had been chiefly important in Roman times, because the Via Egnatia which ran from Durazzo, “the tavern of the Adriatic” (as Catullus calls it), passed through its “Golden” and “Kassandreotic” gates. But in Byzantine days its value was increased owing to its geographical position. As long as the Exarchate of Ravenna existed, it lay on the main artery uniting Constantinople with the Byzantine province in Northern Italy, and it was an outpost against the Slavonic tribes, which had entered the Balkan peninsula, where they have ever since remained, but which, despite many attempts, have never taken Salonika. Of these invaders the most formidable, and the most persistent, were the Bulgarians, whose first war with their natural enemies, the Greeks, was waged for the possession of Salonika, because of the heavy customs dues which they had to pay there, and who, more than a thousand years later, still covet that great Macedonian port, the birthplace of the Slavonic apostles, the brothers Constantine (or Cyril) and Methodios.
The influence of these two natives of Salonika, partly historical and partly legendary, has not only spread over the Slavonic parts of the Balkan peninsula, but forms in the church of San Clemente a link between the Balkans and Rome. The brothers were intended by nature to supplement one another: Constantine was a recluse and an accomplished linguist, Methodios a man of the world and an experienced administrator. Both brothers converted the Slavs of Moravia to Christianity, and it was long believed that a terrifying picture of the Last Judgement from the hand of Methodios had such an effect upon the mind of Boris, the Bulgarian prince, that he embraced the Christian creed. The real fact is, that Boris changed his religion (like his namesake in our own day) for political reasons, as a condition of obtaining peace from the Byzantine Emperor, Michael III, in 864, taking in baptism the name of his imperial sponsor. Tradition likewise attributes to Cyril the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet, which still bears his name and is that of the Russians, Serbs, and Bulgars. But Professor Bury[429], the latest writer on this question, considers that the alphabet invented by Cyril for the use of the Bulgarian and Moravian converts was not the so-called Cyrillic (which is practically the Greek alphabet with the addition of a few letters, and would, therefore, be likely to offend the Slav national feeling), but the much more complicated Glagolitic, which still lingers on in the Slavonic part of Istria, on the Croatian coast, and in Northern Dalmatia. In this language, accordingly, his translation of the Gospels and his brother’s version of the Old Testament were composed, and old Slavonic literature began with these two Thessalonians, whose names form to-day the programme of Bulgarian, just as Dante Alighieri is of Italian expansion. On another mission, to Cherson on the Black Sea, Cyril is said to have discovered the relics of St Clement, who had suffered martyrdom there by being tied to an anchor and flung into the waves. He brought them to Rome, where the frescoes in San Clemente before Monsignor Wilpert’s researches were believed to represent the Slavonic apostles, Cyril before Michael III, and the transference of his remains to that church from the Vatican—for he died in Rome in 869.
Thus sentimental and commercial reasons impelled the Bulgarians to attack Salonika. Both the great Bulgarian Tsars of the tenth century, Symeon and Samuel, strove to obtain it, and during the forty years for which the famous Greek Emperor Basil, “the Bulgar-Slayer,” contended against Samuel for the mastery of Macedonia, Salonika was the headquarters, and the shrine of its patron-saint the inspiration, of the Greeks, as Ochrida was the capital of the Bulgars. We learn from the historian Kedrenos that there was at the time a party which favoured the Bulgarians in some of the Greek cities[430]; but in 1014 the Emperor, like the King of the Hellenes in 1913, and in the same defile, called by the Byzantine historian “Kleidion” (or “the key”)—which has been identified with the gorge of the Struma, not far from the notorious fort Roupel—utterly routed his rival, and took, like King Constantine, the title of “Bulgar-Slayer.” Samuel escaped, only to die of shock at the spectacle of the 15,000 blinded Bulgarian captives, each hundred guided by a one-eyed centurion, whom the victor sent back to their Tsar. Basil celebrated his triumph in the holy of holies of Hellenism, the majestic Parthenon, then the church of Our Lady of Athens, where frescoes executed at his orders still recall his visit and victory over the Bulgarians. Thus the destruction of the first Bulgarian empire was organised at Salonika and celebrated at Athens, just like the defeat of the same enemies 900 years later. But even after the fall of the Bulgarian empire we find a Bulgarian leader besieging Salonika for six days, and only repulsed by the personal intervention of St Demetrios[431], whom the terrified Bulgarian prisoners declared that they had seen on horseback leading the Greeks and breathing fire against the besiegers.
But Salonika was no longer a virgin fortress. An enemy even more formidable than the Bulgarians had captured it, the Saracens, who from 823 to 961 were masters of Crete. Of this, the first of the three conquests of Salonika, we have a description by a priest who was a native of the city and an eye-witness of its capture, John Kameniates, as well as a sermon by the patriarch Nicholas[432]. The “first city of the Macedonians” was indeed a goodly prize for the Saracen corsairs, whose base was “the great Greek island.” Civic patriotism inspired the Thessalonian priest with a charming picture of his home at the moment of this piratical raid, in 904. He praises the natural outer harbour, formed by the projecting elbow of the Ἔμβολον (the “Black Cape,” or Karaburun, of the Turks)[433]; the security of the inner port, protected by an artificial mole; the great city climbing up the hill behind it; the vineyards and hospitable monasteries, whose inmates (unlike their modern successors) take no thought of politics; the two lakes (now St Basil and Beshik), with their ample supply of fish, which stretch almost across the neck of the Chalkidic peninsula; and to the west the great Macedonian plain (treeless then, as now), but watered by the Axios (the modern Vardar) and lesser streams. In times of peace Salonika was the débouché of the Slavonic hinterland; the mart and stopping-place of the cosmopolitan crowd of merchants who travelled along the great highway from West to East that still intersected it; in short, both land and sea conspired to enrich it. Unfortunately, it was almost undefended on the sea side, for no one had ever contemplated any other danger than that from the Slavs of the country, and the population was untrained for war, but more versed in the learning of the schools and in the beautifully melodious hymns of the splendid Thessalonian ritual.
On Sunday, July 29, fifty-four Saracen ships were sighted off Karaburun under the command of Leo, a renegade, who on that account was all the more anxious to display his animosity to his former co-religionists. He at once detected the weak point of the defences—the low sea-wall, which had not been put into a state of proper repair[434],—and ordered his men to scale them. This attempt failed, nor was a second, to burn the “Roma” and the “Kassandreotic” gates on the east—the latter destroyed in 1873—more serviceable. The admiral then fastened his ships together by twos, and on each pair constructed wooden towers, which overtopped the sea-wall. He then steered them to where the water was deep right up to the base of the fortifications, and began to fire with his brazen tubes. The sea-wall was abandoned by its terrified defenders, and an Ethiopian climbing on to the top to see if their flight were merely a ruse, when once he had assured himself that it was genuine, summoned his comrades to follow him. A terrible massacre ensued; some of the inhabitants occupied the Akropolis, then known as “St David’s,” but now called “the Seven Towers,” whence a few Slavs escaped into the country; others fled to the two western gates, “the Golden” and “the Litaian”—the “New gate” of the Turks, destroyed in 1911—where the besiegers butchered them as they were jammed together in the gateways. Our author with his father, uncle, and two brothers took refuge in a bastion of the walls opposite the church of St Andrew. When the Ethiopians approached, he threw himself at the feet of their captain, offering to reveal to him the hidden treasure of the family, if the lives of himself and his relatives were spared. The captain agreed, but the author did not escape two wounds from another band of pillagers, and witnessed the massacre of some 300 of his fellow-citizens in the church of St George. And, if his life had been spared, he was still a captive; 800 prisoners, besides a crew of 200, were herded in the ship which transported him to Crete, and he has described in vivid language the horrors of that passage in the blazing days of August without air or water. Over and above those who perished during the voyage, which lasted a fortnight for fear of the Greek fleet, 22,000 captives were landed to be sold as slaves. Even then his troubles were not over. A hurricane sprang up on the voyage from Crete to Tripoli, and the narrative closes as the author is anxiously awaiting at Tarsus the hour of his liberation. A curious illustration in a manuscript of Skylitzes remains, like his story, to remind us of this siege.
Salonika recovered from the ravages of the Saracens, who later in the tenth century were driven out of Crete, and the collapse of the Bulgarians in the eleventh enabled her to develop her trade. Three churches, of St Elias, of the Virgin, and of St Panteleemon, date from this period, to which belong the extant seals of Constantine Diogenes, Basil II’s lieutenant, and of the Metropolitans Paul and Leo[435]. The Byzantine satire, Timarion[436], which was composed in the twelfth century, gives an interesting account of the fair of St Demetrios, to which came not only Greeks from all parts of the Hellenic world, but also Slavs from the Danubian lands, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Celts from beyond the Alps. It is curious that this list omits the Jews, now such an important element at Salonika, for they are mentioned in the seventh century, and Benjamin of Tudela, who visited the city about the time that Timarion was written, found 500 there[437]. As for Italians, we hear of Venetians and Pisans obtaining trading-rights, and having their own quarter and the distinctive name of Βουργιέσιοι[438].
Not long after the brilliant scene described by the Byzantine satirist a terrible misfortune befell Salonika—its capture by the Normans of Sicily. The usurper, Andronikos I, then sat on the throne, and Alexios, a nephew of the late Emperor Manuel I, fled to the court of William II of Sicily, and implored his assistance. William consented, and despatched an army to Salonika by way of Durazzo, and a fleet round the Peloponnese. On August 6, 1185, the land force began the siege, of which the Archbishop Eustathios, the commentator on Homer, was an eye-witness and historian. Salonika was commanded by David Comnenos, who bore a great Byzantine name, but was—by the accordant testimony of another contemporary, Niketas, who describes him as “more craven than a deer,” and of the archbishop, who calls him “little better than a traitor”—a lazy, cowardly, and incompetent officer, who, in order to prevent his supersession by some one more capable, sent a series of lying bulletins to the capital, that all was well. The walls were in good repair, except (as in 904) at the harbour, but the reservoir in the castle leaked; and many of the most capable inhabitants had been allowed to escape. Still the remainder, and not least the women, who completely put to shame the effeminate commander on his pacific mule, showed bravery and patriotism, while the archbishop specially mentions the courage of some Serbians in the garrison[439]. There were, however, traitors in the city and neighbourhood—Jews and Armenians, and on August 24 the city fell. The conduct of the learned archbishop at this crisis was in marked contrast with that of the miserable commander. Eustathios acted like a true pastor of his flock. The invaders found him calmly awaiting them in his palace, whence, seizing him by his venerable beard, they dragged him to the hippodrome, and thence, through lines of corpses, to the arsenal. There he was put on board the ship of a pirate, who demanded 4000 gold pieces as his ransom. As the archbishop pleaded poverty, he was next day escorted to the presence of Alexios himself, and thence to Counts Aldoin and Richard of Acerra, by whom he was at last restored to his palace, where he took refuge in a tiny bathroom in the garden.
Meanwhile, the Normans had shown no respect for the churches of the city. They danced upon the altars; they used the sacred ointment which flowed from the tomb of St Demetrios as boot-polish; they interrupted the singing by their obscene melodies and imitated the nasal intonation of the eastern priesthood by barking like dogs. But it is best to pass over the revolting details of the sack, for which the only excuse was the massacre of the Latins in Constantinople three years earlier. Eustathios, by his influence with Count Aldoin, was able to mitigate some of the tortures of his flock; he describes the miserable plight of these poor wretches, robbed of their houses and almost stark naked, and the strange appearance which they presented (like the Messina refugees after the earthquake of 1908) in their improvised hats and clothes. More than 7000 of them had perished in the assault, but the archbishop notes with satisfaction that the Normans lost some 3000 from their excessive indulgence in pork and new wine. Vengeance, too, soon befell them. A Greek army under Alexios Branas defeated them on the Struma, and in November they evacuated Salonika[440]. But their treatment of Salonika embittered the hatred between Latins and Greeks, and prepared the way for the Fourth Crusade.
Barely twenty years after the Norman capture, Salonika became the capital of a Latin kingdom. Boniface, marquess of Montferrat, was the leader of the crusaders who, with the help of the Venetians, overthrew the Greek empire in 1204, and partitioned it into Latin states. Of these the most important after the Latin empire, of which Constantinople became the capital, was the so-called Latin kingdom of Salonika, of which Boniface was appointed king, and which, nominally dependent upon the Latin Emperor, embraced Macedonia, Thessaly, and much of continental Greece, including Athens. Of all the artificial creations of the Fourth Crusade, which should be a warning to those who believe that nations can be partitioned permanently at congresses of diplomatists, the Latin kingdom of Salonika was the first to fall. From the outset its existence was undermined by jealousy between its king and the Latin Emperor, whose suzerainty he and his proud Lombard nobles were loath to acknowledge. For this reason Boniface, whose wife, Margaret of Hungary, was widow of the Greek Emperor, Isaac II, endeavoured to cultivate his Greek subjects. But, in 1207, he was killed by the Bulgarians, who would have taken Salonika, had not a traitor (or, as the pious believed, St Demetrios) slain their tsar.
Boniface’s son, although born in the country and named after Salonika’s patron-saint (whose church was, however, the property of the chapter of the Holy Sepulchre while a Latin archbishop occupied the see), was then barely two years old. His mother was regent, but the real power was wielded by her bailie, the ambitious count of Biandrate, whose policy was to separate the kingdom from the Latin empire and draw it closer to the Italian marquisate. His quarrels with the Emperor Henry were viewed with joy by the Greeks; and, after his retirement, and in the absence of the young king in Italy, the kingdom was easily occupied, in 1223, by Theodore Angelos[441], the vigorous ruler of Epeiros, where, as at Nice, the city of the famous council, Hellenism, temporarily exiled from its natural capital, had found a refuge. The Greek conqueror exchanged the more modest title of “Despot of Epeiros” for that of “Emperor of Salonika,” while the exiled monarch and his successors continued to amuse themselves by styling themselves titular kings of Salonika for another century. But the separate Greek empire of Salonika was destined to live but little longer than the Latin kingdom. The first Greek Emperor, by one of those sudden reverses of fortune so characteristic of Balkan politics in all ages, fell into the hands of the Bulgarians; and, after having been reduced to the lesser dignity of a Despotat, the empire which he had founded was finally annexed, in 1246, to the stronger and rival Greek empire of Nice, which, in 1261, likewise absorbed the Latin empire of Constantinople. No coins of the Latin kingdom exist; but we have a seal of Boniface, with a representation of the city walls upon it. Of the Greek empire of Salonika there are silver and bronze pieces, bearing the figure of the city’s patron-saint; while a tower contains an inscription to “Manuel the Despot,” identified by Monsignor Duchesne[442] with Manuel Angelos (1230-40), the Emperor Theodore’s brother and successor, but locally ascribed to a Manuel Palaiologos, perhaps the subsequent Emperor Manuel II, Despot and governor of Salonika in 1369-70.
Salonika, restored to the Byzantine empire, enjoyed special privileges, second only to those of the capital. Together with the region around it, it was considered as an appanage of one of the Emperor’s sons (e.g. John VII, nephew, and Andronikos, son of Manuel II). It was sometimes governed by the Empresses, two of them Italians, Jolanda of Montferrat, wife of Andronikos II, a descendant of the first king of Salonika, and Anne of Savoy, wife of Andronikos III, who was commemorated in an inscription over the gate of the castle, which she repaired in 1355. The court frequently resided there: we find Andronikos III coming to be healed by the saint, and the beauteous Jolanda, when she quarrelled with her husband, retired to Salonika and scandalised Thessalonian society with her accounts of her domestic life. As in our own day, Salonika was the favourite seat of opposition to the imperial authority. During the civil wars of the fourteenth century, such as those between the elder and the younger Andronikos and between John V Palaiologos and John Cantacuzene, it supported the candidate opposed to Constantinople, so that we may find precedents in its mediæval history for its selection as the headquarters of the Young Turkish movement. It enjoyed a full measure of autonomy, had its own “senate,” elected its own officials, was defended by its own civic guard, and administered by its own municipal customs. It even sent its own envoys abroad to discuss commercial questions. Its annual fair on the festival of St Demetrios still attracted traders from all the Levant to the level space between the walls and the Vardar. Jews, Slavs, and Armenians, as well as Greeks, crowded its bazaars; scholars from outside frequented its high schools, and Demetrios Kydones[443] compared it with Athens at its best.
The fourteenth century was, indeed, the golden age of Salonika in art and letters. The erection of the churches of the Twelve Apostles and St Catherine continued the tradition of the much earlier churches of St George, St Sophia, and St Demetrios. The clergy followed in the footsteps of the learned Eustathios, and the beauty, wit, and reading of a Thessalonian lady, Eudokia Palaiologina, turned the head of a son of Andronikos II, when governor of Salonika, “that garden of the Muses and the Graces,” as one of the literary archbishops of the fourteenth century called it. The intellectual activity of the place led to intense theological discussion, and at this period the “Orthodox” city par excellence was agitated by the heresy of the “Hesychasts,” or Quietists, who believed that complete repose would enable them to see a divine light flickering round their empty stomachs, while the so-called “Zealots,” or friends of the people, with the cross as their banner, practised in Salonika the doctrines of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade in mediæval England. The exploitation of the poor by the rich and the tax-collectors, and the example of the recent revolution at Genoa, caused this republican movement, which led to the massacre of the nobles in 1346 by hurling them from the castle walls into the midst of an armed mob below. The “Zealots,” like the Iconoclast Emperors, have suffered from the fact that they have been described by their enemies, and notably by Cantacuzene[444], to whose aristocratic party they were opposed. Yet even an archbishop publicly advocated so drastic a measure as the suppression of some of the monasteries, in order to provide funds for the better defence of the city; nor was there anything very alarming in their preference for direct taxation. Thus, Salonika was from 1342 to 1349, under their auspices, practically an independent republic, till they succumbed to the allied forces of the aristocracy and the monks.
Salonika, indeed, continued to have urgent need of its walls, which still remain, save where the Turks completely dismantled them on the sea side in 1866, a fine example of Byzantine fortification. Andronikos II strengthened them by the erection of a tower, which still bears his initials, in the dividing wall between the Akropolis and the rest of the city. Thanks to them it escaped pillage by the Catalan Grand Company at a time when they sheltered two Byzantine Empresses. Even during the greatest expansion of the Serbian empire under Stephen Dushan, Salonika alone remained a Greek islet in a Serbian Macedonia. But a far more serious foe than either Catalan or Serb was now at hand. The Turks entered Europe shortly after the middle of the fourteenth century, and advanced rapidly in the direction of Salonika. At least twice[445] before the end of that century—in 1387 and from 1391 to 1403, when Suleyman handed it back—they occupied it, and at last the inhabitants came to the conclusion that, in the weak condition of the Greek empire, their sole chance of safety was to place themselves under the protection of a great maritime power. Accordingly, in 1423, pressed by famine and by continual Turkish attacks, the Greek notables sent a deputation to Venice offering their city to the republic, whether their sickly Despot Andronikos, son of the Emperor Manuel II, consented or no. The Venetians, we are told, “received the offer with gladness, and promised to protect, and nourish, and prosper the city and to transform it into a second Venice.” The Despot, whose claims were settled by a solatium of 50,000 ducats, made way for a Venetian duke and a captain; for seven years Salonika was a Venetian colony[446].
The bargain proved unsatisfactory alike to the Venetians and the Greeks. Their brief occupation of Salonika cost the republic 700,000 ducats—for, in 1426, in addition to the cost of administration and repairs to the walls, she agreed to pay a tribute to the Sultan. Nor was it popular with the natives, especially the notables, many of whom the government found it desirable to deport to the other Venetian colonies of Negroponte and Crete, or even to Venice itself, on the plea that there was not food for them at Salonika. Others left voluntarily for Constantinople to escape the “unbearable horrors” and the Venetian slavery. The Turkish peril was ever present, and when envoys solicited peace from the Sultan Murad II, he replied: “The city is my inheritance, and my grandfather Bayezid took it from the Greeks by his own right hand. So, if the Greeks were now its masters, they might reasonably accuse me of injustice. But ye being Latins and from Italy, what have ye to do with this part of the world? Go, if you like; if not, I am coming quickly.” And in 1430 he came.
Two misfortunes preceded the fall of Salonika—the death of the beloved metropolitan, and an earthquake. There was only one man to defend every two or three bastions, and the Venetians, distrusting the inhabitants, placed a band of brigands between themselves and the Greeks, so that, even if the latter had desired to accept the liberal offers which Murad made them, they dared not do so. Chalkokondyles hints at treachery, and a versifying chronicler[447] makes the monks of the present Tsaoush-Monastir near the citadel urge the Sultan to cut the conduits from the mountain, which supplied the city with water, and ascribes to their treason their subsequent privileges. But even the wives of the Greek notables joined in the defence, until a move of the Venetian garrison towards the harbour led the Greeks to believe that they would be left to their fate. On March 29, the fourth day of the siege, a soldier scaled the walls at the place near the castle known as “The Triangle,” and threw down the head of a Venetian as a sign that he was holding his ground. The defenders fled to the Samareia tower[448] on the beach—perhaps the famous “White Tower,” or “the Tower of Blood” as it was called a century ago, which still stands there and which some attribute to the Venetian period, or at least to Venetian workmen—only to find it shut against them by the Venetians, who managed to escape by sea.
In accordance with his promise, Murad allowed his men to sack the city, and great damage was inflicted on the churches in the search for treasure buried beneath the altars. The tomb of St Demetrios was ravaged, because of its rich ornaments and to obtain the healing ointment for which it was famous, while the relics of St Theodora were scattered, and with difficulty collected again. Seeing, however, the wonderful situation of Salonika, the Sultan ordered the sack to cease, and began to restore the houses to their owners, contenting himself with converting only two of the churches, those of the Virgin and of St John Baptist, into mosques. It is pleasant to note that George Brankovich, the Despot of Serbia and one of the richest princes of that day, ransomed many prisoners. Two or three years afterwards, however, the Sultan adopted severer measures towards the captured city. He took all the churches except four (including that of St Demetrios, which, as the tomb of Spantounes shows, was not converted into a mosque till after 1481), built a bath out of the materials of some of the others, and transported the Turks of Yenidjé-Vardar to Salonika, which thus for 482 years became a Turkish city. Chalkokondyles[449] was not far wrong when he described its fall as “the greatest disaster that had yet befallen the Greeks.”
When, on St Demetrios’ day, 1912, the victorious Greeks recovered Salonika, all those churches, sixteen in number, which had existed before the Turkish conquest were reconverted into Christian edifices; and when I was there in 1914, it was curious to see the two dates, 1430 and 1912, the former in black, the latter in gold, on the eikonostasis of the Divine Wisdom, the church which was perhaps founded before the more famous St Sophia of Constantinople. Almost the last acts of the Young Turks before they surrendered Salonika were to destroy not only the “Gate of Anna Palaiologina,” but also the “New Gate,” which bore the inscription recording the Turkish capture.