Yet, even under the Venetians, that love of literature which has always characterised the Greeks did not become wholly extinct. Jacobo Triboles, a Corfiote resident at Venice, published in the sixteenth century in his native dialect a poem, the subject of which was taken from Boccaccio, called the History of the King of Scotland and the Queen of England. Another literary Corfiote, author of a Lament for the Fall of Greece, was Antonios Eparchos, a versatile genius, at once poet, Hellenist, and soldier, upon whom the fief of the gipsies was conferred for his services[240]. Several other Corfiote bards sang of the Venetian victories, while, in 1672, Andrea Marmora, a member of a noble family still extant in Corfù, published in Italian the first history of his country from the earliest times to the loss of Crete by the Venetians. Subsequent writers have criticised Marmora’s effusive style, his tendency to invent details, his intense desire to glorify the most serene Republic[241]. But his work is quaintly written and he thoroughly reflects the feelings of his class and era. In 1725 Quirini, whom we have already mentioned as Latin Archbishop of Corfù, issued the first edition of a Latin treatise on the antiquities of his see, which was followed, thirteen years later, by a second and enlarged edition. In 1656 an academy of thirty members, known as the Assicurati, was founded at Corfù[242], and only succumbed amid the dangers of the Turkish siege of 1716. A second literary society was started about the same time, and a third saw the light in 1732. Of the other islands Cephalonia produced in the seventeenth century a priest of great oratorical gifts in the person of Elias Meniates. In short, the Frankish influence, which had practically no literary result on the mainland, was much more felt in the intellectual development of the Ionians. But this progress was gained at the expense of the Greek language, which, under the Venetians, became solely the tongue of the peasants. Even to-day Greek is almost the only language understood in the country districts of Corfù, while Italian is readily spoken in the town. In the Venetian times the Venetian dialect was the conversational medium of good society, and the young Corfiote, fresh from his easy-won laurels at Padua, looked down with contempt upon the noblest and most enduring of all languages. Yet it will never be forgotten in Corfù that in the resurrection and regeneration of Greek two Corfiotes of the eighteenth century, Eugenios Boulgaris and Nikephoros Theotokes, played a leading part. The former in particular was the pioneer of Greek as it is written to-day, the forerunner of the more celebrated Koraes, and he dared to write, to the disgust of the clergy, in a language which the people could understand. But, as his best work was done at Joannina, then the chief educational centre of the Greek race, it concerns the general history of Greece under the Turks rather than that of the seven islands[243].
Ionian commerce was hampered by the selfish colonial policy then prevalent in Europe, which aimed at concentrating all colonial trade in the metropolis, through which the exports of the islands had to pass. This naturally led to a vast amount of smuggling, even now rampant in the Greek Archipelago, in which the British gained an unenviable pre-eminence and for which they sometimes paid with their lives. The oil trade, the staple industry of Corfù, was, however, greatly fostered by the grant of 360 drachmai for every plantation of 100 olive trees, and we find that, in the last half-century of the Venetian rule, there were nearly two millions of these trees in that island, which exported 60,000 barrels of oil every second year. The taxes consisted of a tithe of the oil, the crops, and the agricultural produce, and a money payment on the wine, a “chimney tax” on each house, and an export duty of 15 per cent. on the oil, 9 per cent. on the salt, and 4 per cent. on other articles. There was also an import duty of 6 per cent. on Venetian and of 8 per cent. on foreign, goods. The revenue of Zante was so greatly benefited by the introduction of the currant industry that it increased more than forty-fold in the space of thirty years during the sixteenth century, and a hundred years later the traveller Spon said it deserved the name of the “island of gold” and called it “a terrestrial paradise.” But the wholesale conversion of corn fields into currant plots caused such alarm that the local authorities applied to Venice for permission to root up the currant bushes by force. The Republic replied by allowing the currants to remain, but at the same time levying a tax upon them, the proceeds of which were devoted to the purchase and storage of bread stuffs. The currant industry of that island was injured by further duties, and was thus placed at a disadvantage as compared with the lightly taxed currants of the Morea. But in the eighteenth century such numbers of English ships came to Zante to load currants that the place had an English consul, two English offices, and an English cemetery, while our countrymen were very popular there[244]. One of the English families, attracted thither by the currant trade, that of Sergeant, still flourishes there. These public granaries were also instituted at Corfù, which continued, however, to suffer severely from famines. At the time when Zante was so prosperous Corfù was less productive, and we accordingly hear that the Venetians obtained permission from the Pope to levy a tithe on the goods of the Catholic clergy, in order to defray the costs of maintenance. The salt pans of Levkimo, at the south of the island, formed a government monopoly, and the importation of foreign salt was punished by banishment[245]. In order, perhaps, to counteract the excessive usury of the Corfiote Jews, the government established an official pawnshop[246], where money was lent at a moderate rate of interest—6 per cent.
The administration of the other six islands was on similar lines to that of Corfù. The nearest of them, Paxo, with its dependency, Anti-Paxo, was treated as part of that island, and, as we have seen, the Corfiote “chief priest” had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over it, just as nowadays the Greek Archbishop of Corfù is also styled “of the Paxoi.” In 1513, however, Paxo, together with the taxes which it paid, was sold by the Venetians to the heirs of a Corfiote noble, who treated its inhabitants so badly that many of them fled to Turkish territory. At last the provveditore generale del Levante, under whose province the affairs of these islands came, interfered, fixed the taxes of Paxos at a certain sum, and appointed a native with a title of capitano to govern it as the representative of the provveditore e capitano at Corfù. Zante was administered during the first half-century of Venetian rule by a single provveditore; but when the population had considerably increased the Zantiotes, like the Cephalonians, had need of further officials—two councillors and a secretary, all Venetian nobles—who assisted the provveditore, and, like him, were appointed for two years. In both Cephalonia and Zante there were a general council, composed of the nobles, and a smaller council, whose numbers were finally fixed in Zante at 150. The character of these two islands, separated by such a narrow channel of sea, was, however, widely different. Zante was much more aristocratic in its ideas, though the feudal system, against which the popular rising of 1628 was directed, prevailed in both islands alike, where it had been introduced by the Latin counts, Zante having twelve fiefs and Cephalonia six[247]. But Cephalonia, owing to its purer Hellenic population, was actuated by the democratic sentiments engrained in the Greek character. The meetings of the Cephalonian council were remarkable for their turbulence, of which the authorities frequently complained, and a retiring governor of that island drew up a report to the home government in 1754 in which he described in vivid colours the tendency of the strong to tyrannise over the weak, which he had found common to all classes, and which caused annoyance to the government and frequent disturbances of the public peace[248]. British officials had in turn a similar experience, and Mr Gladstone discovered that the vendetta was not extinct in the wild mountainous regions of Cephalonia when he visited the Ionian islands on his celebrated mission. Venice fostered the quarrels between the various parties at Argostoli, and governed the unruly Cephalonians by means of their own divisions. In Zante the number of the noble families, at first indefinite, was finally fixed at ninety-three; and if any became extinct the vacancy was filled by the ennoblement of a family of burghers. Once a year the provveditore generale del Levante paid a visit of inspection to these islands; his arrival was the greatest event of the whole calendar, and etiquette prescribed the forms to be observed on his landing. He was expected to kiss first the cross presented to him by the Latin bishop, and then the copy of the Gospels offered to him by the spiritual head of the Orthodox community.
Leonardo Tocco had restored the Greek episcopal throne in Cephalonia, and in the Venetian times, promoted to the rank of an archbishopric, it continued to exist with jurisdiction over the Greeks at Zante and Ithake, which was often disputed by the “chief priest” (πρωτοπαπᾶς) of Zante, where a Latin bishop also resided. This dispute was at last settled by a decree of the senate that the Cephalonian clergy should retain the right to elect their prelate on condition of choosing a Zantiote on every third vacancy[249]. In Zante, as in Corfù, the Jews were a considerable factor; at the close of the Venetian rule they numbered about 2000, and lived in a separate quarter of the city, walled in and guarded; and the island was remarkable for the violent anti-Semitic riots of 1712[250], arising out of the usual fiction of the slaughtered Christian child, which found their counterpart at Corfù in our own time. But the greatest evil in these less important islands was that their provveditori, being chosen from the poorer Venetian aristocracy, the so-called barnabotti, and receiving small salaries, made up for their lack of means by corruption, just as the Turkish officials do now. The efforts of the home government to check the abuse of bribery, by forbidding its officials to receive presents, were not always successful. The discontent of the lesser islands found vent in the embassies which they had the right to send to Venice, and we occasionally hear of their provveditori being detected in taking bribes. More rarely the provveditore generale himself was degraded from his high office for malversation. Accordingly the most recent Greek historian of the fiscal administration of the islands under the Venetians, considers that it was fortunate for them to have been taken, and lost, by Venice when they were[251].
Anything which concerns the supposed home of Odysseus must necessarily be of interest, and fortunately we have some facts about the government of Ithake at this period. We first hear of a Venetian governor there in 1504, when the island had been repeopled by emigrants from Santa Maura, and this official was assisted by two local magnates, called “elders of the people” (δημογέροντες). In 1536 a life governor was appointed, and upon his death, in 1563, a noble from Cephalonia, appointed by the council of that island, was sent to administer it with the two “elders,” subject to the approval of the provveditore generale, who visited Ithake every March. The Ithakans twice successfully complained to Venice of their Cephalonian governors, who were accused of extortion and of improper interference in local affairs. Accordingly in 1697 the office was abolished, and thenceforth the two Ithakan “elders” held sway alone, while every year the principal men of the island met to elect the local officials. Small as it is, Ithake formed one feudal barony[252], of which the Galati were the holders, and its population at the close of the Venetian period was estimated at about 7000.
Santa Maura was more democratic in its constitution than most of the islands; for when Morosini took it from the Turks he permitted the inhabitants to decide how they would be governed. Accordingly the general council came in course of time to be largely composed of peasants; but when, towards the close of the eighteenth century, the Venetian government sent a special commissioner to reform the constitutions of the seven islands he created a second and smaller council of fifty at Santa Maura, to which the election of the local officials was transferred. Venice was represented there by two provveditori, one of whom had jurisdiction over the continental dependencies of Prevesa and Vonitza, subject, however, to the supreme authority of the commander of the fleet at Corfù[253]. Parga and Butrinto were entrusted to two officers sent from the seat of the Ionian government; the former had its own council, its own local officials, and paid neither taxes nor duties. All its inhabitants were soldiers, and many of them pirates, and they were known to imprison a Venetian governor, just as the Albanians of our time besieged a Turkish vali, till they could get redress[254].
Finally the distant island of Kythera was administered by a Venetian noble sent thither every two years. While it was a dependency of Crete Kythera fell into a very bad state; its chief men indulged in constant dissensions; the government was arbitrary, the garrison exacting. In 1572 an attempt was made to remedy these evils by the establishment of a council of thirty members, elected on a property qualification, with the power of electing the local authorities. A Golden Book was started, and the natives were granted the usual privilege of appeal to the Venetian government, either in Crete or at the capital. All the islands shared with Corfù the right of electing the captains of their own galleys, and they on more than one occasion rendered valuable services to the Republic at sea.
There had been, as we have noticed, a Genoese party at Corfù when the fate of the island lay in the balance, and the commercial rivals of Venice did not abandon all hope of obtaining so desirable a possession until some time after the establishment of the Venetian protectorate. Twice, in 1403 and again in 1432, they attacked Corfù, but on both occasions without success. The first time they tried to capture the impregnable castle of Sant’ Angelo, which was courageously defended by a Corfiote noble. The second attempt was more serious. The invaders effected a landing, and had already ravaged the fertile island, when a sudden sally of the townsfolk and the garrison checked their further advance. Many of the Genoese were taken prisoners, while those who succeeded in escaping to their vessels were pursued and severely handled by the Venetian fleet. The further attempts of Genoese privateers to waylay merchantmen on their passage between Corfù and Venice were frustrated, and soon the islanders had nothing to fear from these Christian enemies of their protectors.
Although the Turks were rapidly gaining ground on the mainland, they were repulsed in the attack which they made upon Corfù in 1431, and did not renew the attempt for another century. Meanwhile, after the fall of Constantinople and the subsequent collapse of the Christian states of Greece, Corfù became the refuge of many distinguished exiles. Thomas Palaiologos, the last Despot of the Morea, and the historian Phrantzes fled thither; the latter wrote his history at Corfù at the instance of some noble Corfiotes, and lies buried in the church of Sts Jason and Sosipater, where Caterina Zaccaria, wife of Thomas Palaiologos, also rests. About the same time the island obtained a relic which had the greatest influence upon its religious life. Among the treasures of Constantinople at the moment of the capture were the bodies of St Theodora, the imperial consort of the iconoclast emperor Theophilos, and St Spiridion, the latter a Cypriote bishop who took a prominent part at the council of Nice and whose remains had been transferred to Constantinople when the Saracens took Cyprus. A certain priest, Kalochairetes by name, now brought the bodies of the two saints to Corfù, where they arrived in 1456. Upon the priest’s death his two eldest sons became proprietors of the male saint’s remains, and his youngest son received those of the female, which he bestowed upon the community. The body of St Spiridion ultimately passed to the distinguished family of Boulgaris, to which it still belongs, and is preserved in the church of the saint, just as the body of St Theodora reposes in the metropolitical church. Four times a year the body of St Spiridion is carried in procession, in commemoration of his alleged services in having twice delivered the island from plague, once from famine, and once from the Turks. His name is the most widespread in Corfù, and the number of boys called “Spiro” is legion[255].
During the operations against the Turks at this period the Corfiotes distinguished themselves by their active co-operation with their protectors. We find them fighting twice at Parga and twice at Butrinto; we hear of their prowess at the Isthmus of Corinth and beneath the walls of Patras in 1463, when Venice, alarmed for the safety of her Peloponnesian stations, called the Greeks to arms; and they assisted even in the purely Italian wars of the Republic. It seems, indeed, as if, at that period, the words of Marmora were no mere servile phrase: “Corfù was ever studying the means of keeping herself a loyal subject of the Venetians[256].” At last, after rather more than a century of almost complete freedom from attack, the island was destined to undergo the first of the two great Turkish sieges which were the principal events in its annals during the Venetian occupation. In 1537 war broke out between the Republic and Suleyman the Magnificent, at that time engaged in an attack upon the Neapolitan dominions of Charles V. During the transport of troops and material of war across the channel of Otranto the Turkish and Venetian fleets came into hostile collision, and though Venice was ready to make amends for the mistakes of her officials the Sultan resolved to punish them for the insults to his flag. He was at Valona, on the Albanian coast, at the time, and, removing his camp to Butrinto, despatched a force of 25,000 men, under the command of the redoubtable Barbarossa, the most celebrated captain in the Turkish service, to take possession of the island. The Turks landed at Govino, destroyed the village of Potamo, and marched upon the capital, which at that time had no other defences than the old fort. That stronghold and the castle of Sant’ Angelo were soon the only two points in the island not in the power of the invaders. A vigorous cannonade was maintained by Barbarossa from the site of the present town and from the islet of Vido, but the garrison of 4000 men, half Italians and half Corfiotes, under the command of Jacopo di Novello, kept up a brisk reply. The Greeks, it was said, could not have fought better had they been fighting for the national cause, and they made immense sacrifices in their determination never to yield. In order to economise food they turned out of the fortress the women, old men, and children, who went to the Turkish lines to beg for bread. The Turkish commander, hoping to work on the feelings of the garrison, refused; so the miserable creatures, repudiated alike by the besieged and besiegers, wandered about distractedly between the two armies, striving to regain admission to the fortress by showing their ancient wounds gained in the Venetian service, and at last, when their efforts proved unavailing, lying down in the ditches to die. Their sufferings contributed largely towards the victory of the defenders, for while provisions held out in the fortress they began to fail in the camp.
Sickness broke out among the half-starved Turks, and, after a stay of only thirteen days in the island, they re-embarked. But in that short time they had wrought enormous damage. They had ravaged the fair island with fire and sword, and they carried away more than 20,000 captives[257]. The population was so greatly reduced by this wholesale deportation that nearly forty years afterwards the whole island contained only some 17,500 inhabitants, and rather more than a century after this siege a census showed that the total was not more than 50,000—a much smaller number than in classical days, when it is estimated to have been 100,000. In 1761 it had declined to 44,333; at the end of the Venetian occupation it was put down at 48,000; a century later, in 1896, it was 90,872[258]. At the census of 1907 it was 94,451. Butrinto and Paxo, less able to defend themselves than Corfù, fell into the hands of the Turks, who plundered several of the other Ionian islands. Great was the joy of Venice at the news that the invaders had abandoned Corfù, and public thanksgivings were offered up for the preservation of the island, even in the desolate condition in which the Turks had left it. A Corfiote, named Noukios, secretary of an Ambassador of Charles V and author of three books of travels, the second of which, relating to England, has been translated into English, wrote, with tears in his eyes, a graphic account of this terrible visitation.
One result of this invasion was the tardy but systematic fortification of the town of Corfù, at the repeated request of the Corfiote council, which sent several embassies to Venice with that object. More than 2000 houses were pulled down in the suburb of San Rocco to make room for the walls, for which the old classical city, Palaiopolis, as it is still called, provided materials, and Venice spent a large sum on the erection of new bastions. Two plans are in existence showing the fortifications of the citadel and of the town about this period[259], and some parts of the present Fortezza Vecchia date from the years which followed this first Turkish siege. The still existing Fortezza Nuova was built between 1577 and 1588, when the new works were completed. Another result of the Turco-Venetian war was the grant of lands at Corfù to the Greek soldiers, or stradioti, who had formed the Venetian garrisons of Monemvasia and Nauplia, and for whom provision had to be made when, in 1540, the Republic ceded these two last of her Peloponnesian possessions to the sultan. The present suburb of Stratia still preserves the name of these soldiers. The loss of the Venetian stations in the Morea and the subsequent capture of Cyprus by the Turks naturally increased the numbers of the Greeks in Corfù.
Shortly before the battle of Lepanto the Turks raided Kythera, Zante, and Cephalonia, and again landed in Corfù. But the memory of their previous failure and the fact that the garrison was prepared for resistance deterred them from undertaking a fresh siege. They accordingly contented themselves with plundering the defenceless villages, but this time did not carry off their booty with impunity. Their ships were routed; as they were departing many of them sank, and in Marmora’s time the sunken wrecks could still be seen when the sea was calm[260]. In the battle of Lepanto 1500 Corfiote seamen took part on the Christian side, and four ships were contributed by the island and commanded by natives. One of these Corfiote captains was captured during the engagement and skinned alive, his skin being then fastened as a trophy to the rigging of one of the Turkish vessels. Another, Cristofalo Condocalli, captured the Turkish admiral’s ship, which was long preserved in the arsenal at Venice, and he received as his reward a grant of land near Butrinto, together with the then rare title of cavaliere. The criticisms which Finlay, after his wont, has passed upon the Greeks at Lepanto, and which do not agree with the testimony of a contemporary Venetian historian, certainly do not affect the conduct of the Ionians[261]. A little later, when the Turks again descended upon Corfù, they were easily repulsed, and the long peace which then ensued between Venice and the Porte put an end to these anxieties. Both the Corfiotes and the local militia of Zante did service about this time under the banner of St Mark in Crete; but the fearful losses of the Zantiotes, of whom eighty only out of 800 returned home alive from the Cretan mountains, made the peasants reluctant to serve again.
There are few facts to relate of the Ionian islands during the peaceful period between the battle of Lepanto and the war of Candia. At Corfù the peace was utilised for the erection of new buildings; the church of St Spiridion was finished, and the body of the saint transferred to it[262]. But the town did not strike the Venetian traveller Pietro della Valle, who visited it early in the seventeenth century, as a desirable residence. Both there and at Zante he thought the buildings were more like huts than houses, and he considered the latter island barren and no longer deserving of its classical epithet of “woody[263].” It was about this time that the Venetians introduced the practice of tournaments, which were held on the esplanade, and at which the Corfiote nobles showed considerable skill. Rather later the island was visited by the plague, which was stayed, according to the local belief, through the agency of their patron saint, who had on a previous occasion saved his good Corfiotes from famine by inspiring the captains of some corn ships to steer straight for their port. The first two of the four annual processions were the token of the people’s gratitude for these services[264].
When the Candian war broke out further fortifications were built at Corfù as a precautionary measure; but during the whole length of the struggle the Turks came no nearer than Parga and Butrinto. The Corfiotes were thus free to assist the Venetians, instead of requiring their aid. Accordingly the Corfiote militia was sent to Crete, and horses and money were given to the Venetian authorities for the conflict, while one Corfiote force successfully held Parga against the enemy, and another recaptured Butrinto. In fact the smallness of the population at the census of that period was attributed to the large number of men serving on the galleys or in the forts out of the island. When Crete was lost Corfù naturally became of increased importance to the republic, and in the successful war between Venice and Turkey, which broke out in 1684, the Ionian islands played a considerable part. They were used as winter quarters for the Venetian troops, and the huge mortars still outside the gate of the Old Fortress at Corfù bear the memorable date of 1684, while a monument of Morosini occupies, but scarcely adorns, the wall of the old theatre. That gallant commander now led a squadron, to which the three chief islands all contributed galleys, against the pirates’ nest of Santa Maura. The countrymen of Odysseus are specially mentioned among the 2000 Ionian auxiliaries, and the warlike bishop of Cephalonia brought a contingent of over 150 monks and priests to the Republic’s standard[265]. Santa Maura fell after a sixteen days’ siege; the capture of Prevesa followed; and though the latter was restored to the Sultan with dismantled fortifications by the treaty of Carlovitz, Santa Maura was never again, save for a few brief months during the next war, a Turkish island. The Venetians did not forget the Ionians, who had co-operated with them so readily. Colonel Floriano, one of the Cephalonian commanders, was granted the two islets of Kalamos and Kastos, off the coast of Akarnania, famous in Homer as the abode of “the pirate Taphians.” Thenceforth their inhabitants were bidden to pay to him and his heirs the tithes hitherto due to the Venetian government. In consequence of this he assumed the curious title of conte della Decima (“count of the Tithe”), still borne by his descendants[266]. No wonder that Venice was popular with an aristocracy to which it gave employment and rewards.
The occupation of the Morea by the Venetians in the early part of the eighteenth century secured the Ionians from disturbance so long as the peace lasted; but when the Turks set about the re-conquest of the peninsula they became involved in that last struggle between Venice and Turkey. In 1715 the Turkish fleet took Kythera, the garrison of which refused to fight, and the Venetians blew up the costly fortifications of Santa Maura and removed the guns and garrison to Corfù, in order that they might not fall into the hands of their foes[267]. Alarmed at the successes of the Turks, but unable in the degenerate condition of the commonwealth to send a capable Venetian to defend the remaining islands, the government, on the recommendation of Prince Eugène, engaged Count John Matthias von der Schulenburg to undertake the defence. A German by birth, and a brother of the duchess of Kendal, mistress of our George I, Count von der Schulenburg did not owe his career, strange as it may seem to us, to social influence or female intrigue. Entering the Polish service, he had compelled the admiration of his opponent, Charles XII of Sweden, and had afterwards fought with distinction under the eyes of the duke of Marlborough at the siege of Tournai and in the battle of Malplaquet. Armed with the rank of field-marshal, he set out for Corfù, where he rapidly put the unfinished fortifications into as good a condition as was possible in the time, and paid a hurried visit to Zante for the same purpose. The approach of the Turks hastened his return, for it was now certain that their objective was Corfù. They had requisitioned the Epeirotes to make a wide road from Thessaly down to the coast opposite that island, traces of which were in existence half a century ago[268]. Along this road Kara Mustapha Pasha marched with 65,000 men, and effected a junction at Butrinto with the Turkish fleet under Janum Khoja. In the narrow strait at the north end of the island, opposite the shrine of the virgin at Kassopo, which had taken the place of the altar of Jupiter Cassius, before which Nero had danced, a division of the Venetian fleet engaged the Turkish ships and cut its way through them into Corfù. But this did not prevent the landing of 33,000 Turks at Govino and Ipso, who encamped along the Potamo and made themselves masters of the suburbs of Mandoukio and Kastrades, on either side of the town. Meanwhile Schulenburg had armed all the inhabitants, including even the Jews, and we are specially told that one of the latter distinguished himself so much as to merit the rank of a captain[269]. But he wrote that he was “in want of every thing,” and his motley garrison of Germans, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks was at no time more than 8000 men. Even women and priests aided in the defence, and one Greek monk, with a huge iron crucifix in his hands, was a conspicuous figure as he charged the besiegers, invoking the vengeance of God upon their heads.
The Turkish commander’s first object was to occupy the two eminences of Mounts Abraham and San Salvatore, which commanded the town, but had been carelessly left without permanent fortifications. A first assault upon these positions was repulsed, but a second was successful, and the Turks now called on Schulenburg to surrender. The arrival of some reinforcements revived the spirits of the besieged, who had now withdrawn from the town into the citadel, while the Turkish artillery played upon the houses and aimed at the campanile of St Spiridion’s church. The New Fortress was the point at which the enemy now directed all their efforts; one of the bastions was actually taken, and a poet has recorded that Muktar, grandfather of the famous Ali Pasha of Joannina, fought his way into the castle and hung up his sword on the gate[270]; but Schulenburg, at the head of his men, drove out the Turks with enormous loss. He said himself that that day was the most dangerous of his life; but his reckless daring saved Corfù. It was expected that the Turks would renew the assault three days later; but when the fatal morning broke, lo! they were gone. On the evening before, one of those terrific showers of rain to which Corfù is liable about the end of August descended upon the Turkish camp. The storm swept away their baggage into the sea, and the panic-stricken Turks—so the story ran-saw a number of acolytes carrying lighted candles, and an aged bishop, who was identified with St Spiridion, pursuing the infidels staff in hand. The murmurs of the janissaries and the news of a great Turkish defeat on the Danube may have had more to do with the seraskier’s hasty departure than the miraculous intervention of the saint. But the Venetians, with true statesmanship, humoured the popular belief that St Spiridion had protected the Corfiotes and themselves in their hour of need. We can still see hanging in the church of St Spiridion the silver lamp which the senate dedicated to the saint “for having saved Corfù,” and a companion to which was provided by the Corfiote nobles in memory of the safe arrival of the two divisions of the fleet. The islanders still celebrate on August 11 (O.S.), the anniversary of the Turkish rout in 1716, the solemn procession of the saint, which Pisani, the Venetian admiral, instituted in his honour[271].
The siege had lasted for forty-eight days, and the losses on both sides had been very great. The lowest estimate of the Turkish dead and wounded was 8000. Schulenburg put down his own casualties at 1500. Moreover the Turks had left their artillery behind them, and in their own hurried re-embarkation some 900 were drowned. The Venetian fleet, under Pisani, whose indolence was in striking contrast to the energy of Schulenburg, did not succeed in overtaking the foe; but Schulenburg retook Butrinto, to which he attached much importance, and personally superintended the re-fortification of Santa Maura, which another Latin inscription still commemorates. The extraordinary honours paid to him were the measure of Corfù’s value to the Republic. In his favour, as in that of Morosini, an exception was made to the rule forbidding the erection of a statue to a living person. Before the Old Fortress, which he so gallantly defended, there still stands his image. Medals were struck in his honour, and foreign sovereigns wrote to congratulate him. Nor did his services to the Ionians end here. The fear of a fresh attack brought him to Corfù again in the following year. From thence he made a successful attack upon Vonitza and Prevesa, and those places, together with Butrinto, Cerigo, and the islet of Cerigotto, or Antikythera, were finally confirmed to the Republic at the peace of Passarovitz. After the peace he drew up a systematic plan for the defence of the islands, which considerations of expense prevented the Republic from carrying out as fully as he wished. One restoration was imperative—that of the citadel of Corfù, which was blown up by a flash of lightning striking the powder magazine only two years after the great siege. Pisani and 1500 men lost their lives in this accident; several vessels were sunk and much damage done. Under Schulenburg’s directions these works were repaired. At the same time, warned by the experience of the late siege, he strongly fortified Mounts Abraham and San Salvatore and connected them with subterranean passages[272]. To pay for these improvements a tax of one-tenth was imposed upon the wine and oil of the island[273]. Large sums were also spent in the next few years upon the defences of Zante, Santa Maura, and the four continental dependencies of the islands. But the Republic, having lost much of her Levant trade, could no longer keep them up, and Corfù was again damaged by a second explosion in 1789. About the middle of the eighteenth century there was a huge deficit in the Ionian accounts, and the islands became a burden to the declining strength of the Venetian commonwealth. On Corfù in particular she spent twice what she got out of it.
The peace of Passarovitz in 1718, which made the useless island of Cerigo the furthest eastern possession of Venice, practically closed the career of the Republic as an oriental power, and thenceforth of all her vast Levantine possessions the seven islands and their four dependencies alone remained under her flag. The decadence of Turkey preserved them to the Republic rather than any strength of her own, so that for the next seventy-nine years they were unmolested. Yet this immunity from attack by her old enemy caused Venice to neglect the welfare of the Ionian islands, which were always best governed at the moment when she feared to lose them. The class of officials sent from the capital during this last period was very inferior. Poor and badly paid, they sought to make money out of the islanders, and at times defrauded the home government without fear of detection. M. Saint-Sauveur, who resided as French consul in the Ionian islands from 1782 to 1799, has given a grim account of their social and political condition in the last years of Venetian rule; and, after due deduction for his obvious bias against the fallen Republic, there remains a large substratum of truth in his statements. At Zante the cupidity of the Venetian governors reached its height. Nowhere was so little of the local revenue spent in the locality, nowhere were the taxes more oppressive or more numerous; nowhere were the illicit gains of the Venetian officials larger. They were wont to lend money at usurious interest to the peasants, who frequently rose against their foreign and native oppressors—for the nobles and burgesses of that rich island were regarded by the tillers of the soil with intense hatred. Murders were of daily occurrence at Zante; most well-to-do natives had bravi in their pay; there was a graduated tariff for permission to wear weapons; and Saint-Sauveur was once an eye-witness of an unholy compact between a high Venetian official and a Zantiote who was desirous to secure in advance impunity for his intended crime[274]. It is narrated how the wife of a Venetian governor of Zante used to shout with joy “Oil, oil!” as soon as she heard a shot fired, in allusion to the oil warrants, the equivalent of cash, which her husband received for acquitting a murderer. Justice at this period was more than usually halting. The French consul could only remember three or four sentences of death during the whole of his residence in the islands, and when, a little earlier, the crew of a foreign ship was murdered in the channel of Corfù by some islanders under the leadership of a noble, only one scapegoat, and he a peasant, was punished. Pirates were not uncommon, Paxo being one of their favourite haunts. Yet after the peace of Passarovitz Corfù was the centre of the Republic’s naval forces, and it was in the last years of Venetian rule that many of the present buildings were built at Govino, and a road was at last constructed from that point to the town[275].
During the Russo-Turkish war between 1768 and 1774 many Ionians took part in the insurrectionary movement against the Turks on the mainland, in spite of the proclamations of the Venetian government, which was anxious, like the British protectorate fifty years later, to prevent its subjects from a breach of neutrality[276]; but it could not even control its own officials, for a provveditore generale sold the ordnance and provisions stored at Corfù under his charge to the Russians. The sympathy of the Ionians for Orthodox Russia was natural, especially as many Greeks from the Turkish provinces had settled in the islands without having forgotten their homes on the mainland. They took part in the sieges of Patras and Koron, while after the base desertion of the Greeks by the Russians the islands became the refuge of many defeated insurgents. These refugees were, however, delivered up by the Venetians to the Turks, and nothing but a vigorous Russian protest saved from punishment two Ionian nobles who had taken up arms on her side. Russia followed up her protest by appointing Greeks or Albanians as her consuls in the three principal islands[277]; many Cephalonians emigrated to the new Russian province of the Crimea, and Cephalonian merchantmen began to fly her flag. During the next Russo-Turkish war—that between 1787 and 1792—the Ionians fitted out corsairs to aid their friends, and a Russian general was sent to Ithake to direct the operations of the Greeks. Two of the latter, Lampros Katsones of Livadia and the Lokrian Androutsos, father of the better known klepht Odysseus, were specially conspicuous. Lampros styled himself “king of Sparta,” and christened his son Lycurgus. He established himself on the coast of Maina and plundered the ships of all nations—a patriot according to some, a pirate according to others. When a French frigate had put an end to his reign of terror he, like Androutsos, fled to the Ionian islands. The Venetians caused a hue and cry to be raised for his followers, who were saved from the gallows by their Russian patrons; but Androutsos was handed over to the Turks, who left him to languish in prison at Constantinople. Katsones became the hero of a popular poem.
The attacks of pirates from Barbary and Dulcigno upon Prevesa and Cerigo roused the Venetians to the necessity of punishing those marauders, and accordingly Angelo Emo was appointed “extraordinary captain of the ships” and sent to Corfù. After a vigorous attempt at reforming the naval establishment there, which had fallen into a very corrupt state, he chastised the Algerines and Tunisians, to the great relief of the Ionians. The Zantiotes “presented him with a gold sword, and struck a medal in his honour”; in Corfù a mural tablet still recalls his services against the Barbary corsairs, and his name ranks with those of Morosini and Schulenburg in the history of the islands[278].
The long peace of the eighteenth century had marked results upon the social life of the Ionians. It had the bad effect, especially at Corfù, of increasing the desire for luxuries, which the natives could ill afford, but which they obtained at the sacrifice of more solid comfort. Anxious to show their European culture, the better classes relinquished the garb of their ancestors, and the women, who now for the first time emerged from the oriental seclusion in which they had been kept for centuries in most of the islands, deprived themselves of necessaries and neglected their houses in order to make a smart appearance on the esplanade—a practice not yet extinct at Corfù. Yet this partial emancipation of the Ionian ladies, due to the European habits introduced by the increasing number of Venetian officers who had married Corfiote wives, was a distinct benefit to society. Gradually ladies went to the theatre; at first they were screened by a grille from the public gaze, then a mask was considered sufficient protection; finally that too was dropped[279]. The population of the islands and their dependencies in 1795 was put down at 152,722. But Corfù was already in the deplorable state of poverty into which it once more relapsed after the withdrawal of the British. In spite of its splendid climate and its fertile soil the fruitful island of the Phaiakians at the end of the Venetian rule could not nourish its much smaller number of inhabitants for more than four or five months in the year. The fault did not lie with the soil; but few of the proprietors had the capital to make improvements, and few of the peasants had the energy or the necessary incentives to labour. The lack of beasts of burden and of carriageable roads was a great drawback. One governor did at last, in 1794, construct five roads from the town into the country, by means of voluntary subscriptions and a tax on every loaded horse entering the streets[280]. But it was not till the British time that either this or the scarcely less evil of want of water was remedied. The successors of the seafaring subjects of Alkinoös had scarcely any mercantile marine, while the Cephalonians, sons of a less beautiful island, voyaged all over the Levant in search of a livelihood. An attempt to naturalise sugar, indigo, and coffee in a hollow of the Black Mountain was a failure[281]. Zante, less luxurious and naturally richer than either of her two other greater sisters, suffered during the Anglo-French war from the absence of English commerce; and repeated earthquakes, the predecessors of that of 1893, caused much damage there[282]. As might have been expected the Venetian system had not improved the character of the islanders, whose faults were admitted by their severest critics to be due to the moral defects of the government. If the Corfiotes of that day seemed to Saint-Sauveur to be ignorant and superstitious, poor and indolent, they were what Venice had made them. Yet, in spite of all her errors, the Republic had given to the seven islands a degree of civilisation which was lacking in Turkish Greece, and which, improved by our own protectorate, still characterises the Ionians to-day. Corfù and Zante are still, after over fifty years of union with the Hellenic kingdom, in many respects more Italian than Greek. Even to-day the seal of Venice is upon them; not merely does the lion of St Mark still stand out from their fortifications, but in the laws and the customs, in the survival of the Italian language and of Italian titles of nobility here almost alone in Greece, we can trace his long domination. But no Corfiote or Zantiote, for all that, desires to become Italian.
The French Revolution had little immediate influence upon the Ionian islands, though there were some disturbances at Zante, and the citizens of Corfù petitioned Venice against the exclusive privileges of the nobles. Three years before the outbreak in Paris, the most serene Republic had sent a special commissioner to reform the constitution of the islands; but those reforms mainly consisted in reducing the numbers of the councils at Corfù and Santa Maura. Much greater hopes were formed in 1794 on the arrival of Widman, the last provveditore generale whom Venice sent to Corfù. Widman had had a distinguished naval career; his benevolence was well known by report, and the Corfiotes, who had been plundered by his rapacious predecessor, gave him a reception such as had never fallen to the lot of any of their previous Venetian governors[283]. It was fortunate for him that he was so popular, for, after selling his own silver to meet the pressing needs of the administration, he had to appeal to the generosity of the Ionians for funds to carry on the government. He did not appeal in vain; the inhabitants of the three chief islands subscribed money; the four continental dependencies, having no money, offered men, who could not, however, be accepted, as there were no uniforms available; the Jews gave him over £400 and armed a certain number of soldiers at their expense; he was even reduced, as he could get nothing but promises from home, to use up the savings-bank deposits in the public service. In the apology which he published two years after the loss of the islands he gave a black picture of the state of the fortifications, which contained scarcely enough powder for a single man-of-war. Under the circumstances his sole consolation was the perusal of St Augustin. Such was the condition of the Ionian defences when the French troops entered Venice in 1797[284].
Venice was preparing to send commissioners with powers to establish a democratic form of government at Corfù, when Bonaparte, fearing lest Russia should occupy the islands, ordered General Gentili to go thither at once, bidding him introduce some telling classical allusions in his proclamation to the islanders. In the guise of an ally of Venice, with Venetian forces mixed among his own, and flying the lion banner of St Mark at his mast-head, Gentili sailed into Corfù on July 11. He informed Widman that he had come to protect the islands, and asked that room might be found within the fortress for their new protectors; he told the people in a trilingual proclamation that the French Republic, in alliance with the Venetians, would free this fragment of ancient Hellas, and revive the glories and the virtues of classic times. Catching the classical spirit of the general’s proclamation, the head of the Orthodox church met him as he landed and presented him with a copy of the Odyssey. The islanders received the French as saviours. Gentili occupied the citadel, and Bonaparte wrote from Milan that they hoped “to regain, under the protection of the great French nation, the sciences, arts, and commerce which they had lost through oligarchical tyranny.”
There are few places in Greece which possess the combined charms of natural beauty and of historic association to the same extent as Monemvasia. The great rock which rises out of the sea near the ancient Epidauros Limera is not only one of the most picturesque sites of the Peloponnese, but has a splendid record of heroic independence, which entitles it to a high place in the list of the world’s fortresses (Plate II, Figs. 1, 2). Monemvasia’s importance is, however, wholly mediæval; and its history has hitherto never been written; for the painstaking brochure of the patriotic Monemvasiote ex-deputy and ex-Minister K. Papamichalopoulos[285], was composed before modern research rendered it possible to draw upon the original authorities at Venice and elsewhere. In the present chapter I have endeavoured to state briefly what, in the present state of Greek mediæval studies, is known about this interesting city during the Frankish period.
At the time of the Frankish Conquest of the rest of Greece, Monemvasia was already a place of considerable importance. Even if we reject the statement of the fifteenth century historian, Phrantzes[286], himself a native of the place, that the Emperor Maurice had raised it to the rank of the 34th Metropolitan see—a statement contradicted by an ecclesiastical document of 1397—we know at least that it was even then the seat of a Greek bishopric, whose holder remained a suffragan of Corinth[287] till the Latins captured the latter city in 1210. The Comneni had confirmed the liberties of a community so favourably situated, and the local aristocracy of Monemvasia enjoyed the privilege of self-government. Thanks to the public spirit of its inhabitants, the wisdom of the local magnates, and the strength of its natural defences, which made it in the Middle Ages the Gibraltar of Greece, it had repelled the attack of the Normans from Sicily in the middle of the twelfth century. Fifty years later it was a busy sea-port town, whose ships were seen at the Piræus by Michael Akominatos, the last Metropolitan of Athens before the Conquest, and whose great artistic treasure, the famous picture of Our Lord being “dragged,” which has given its name to the Ἑλκόμενος church, attracted the covetousness of the Emperor Isaac II[288].
As might have been expected from its position and history, Monemvasia was the last spot in the Peloponnese to acknowledge the Frankish supremacy. Geoffroy I Villehardouin had contented himself perforce with sending a body of troops to raid the country as far as the causeway, or μόνη ἔμβασις, which leads to the great rock-fortress and from which its name is derived[289]; and his son Geoffroy II seems to have meditated the conquest of the place[290]; but it was reserved for the third of the Villehardouins, soldierly Prince William, to hoist the croix ancrée of his family over the “sacred rock” of Hellenism, which was in uninterrupted communication by sea with the successor of Byzantium, the Greek Emperor of Nice[291], and was therefore a constant source of annoyance to the Franks of the Peloponnese. The Prince, after elaborate preparations, began the siege not long after his accession in 1246. He summoned to his aid the great vassals of the Principality—Guy I of Athens, who owed him allegiance for Nauplia and Argos; the three barons of Eubœa; Angelo Sanudo, Duke of Naxos, with the other lords of the Cyclades, and the veteran Count Palatine of Cephalonia, Matteo Orsini, ruler of the island-realm of Odysseus[292]. But the Prince of Achaia saw that without the naval assistance of Venice, which had taken care that his principality should not become a sea-power, he could never capture the place. He accordingly obtained the aid of four Venetian galleys, and then proceeded to invest the great rock-fortress by land and water. For three long years the garrison held out, “like a nightingale in its cage,” as the Chronicler quaintly says—and the simile is most appropriate, for the place abounds with those songsters—till all supplies were exhausted, and they had eaten the very cats and mice. Even then, however, they only surrendered on condition that they should be excused from all feudal services, except at sea, and should even in that case be paid. True to the conciliatory policy of his family, William wisely granted their terms, and then the three archontes of Monemvasia, Mamonas, Daimonoyannes, and Sophianos, advanced along the narrow causeway to his camp and offered him the keys of their town. The conqueror received them with the respect of one brave man for another, loaded them with costly gifts, and gave them fiefs at Vatika near Cape Malea. A Frankish garrison was installed in the coveted fortress; and a Latin bishop, Oddo of Verdun, at last occupied the episcopal palace there, which had been his (on paper) ever since Innocent III[293] had organised the Latin see of Monemvasia as one of the suffragans of Corinth.
The Frankish occupation lasted, however, barely fourteen years, and has left no marks on the picturesque town. Buchon, indeed, who spied the Villehardouin arms on the Gorgoepekoos church at Athens, thought that he had discovered the famous croix ancrée on one of the churches[294]. He apparently meant the Ἑλκόμενος church, which the late Sir T. Wyse called and Murray’s Handbook still calls St Peter’s—a name not now known in Monemvasia, but derived perhaps from an inscription to a certain Dominus Petrus, whose remains “lie in peace” hard by. One church in the town, “Our Lady of the Myrtle,” bears, it is true, a cross with anchored work below, and four stars above the door. But this church, as I was informed and as the name implies, was founded by people from Cerigo, whose patron saint is the Παναγία Μυρτιδιώτισσα (Plate III, Fig. 1). The capture of the town by the Franks is, however, still remembered at Monemvasia, and local tradition points out the place on the mainland where Villehardouin left his cavalry. One pathetic event occurred at the rock during the brief Frankish period—the visit of the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, in 1261, on his way from his lost capital to Italy[295]. In the following year Monemvasia was one of the castles ceded to his successor, the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, as the ransom of Prince William of Achaia, captured by the Greeks three years earlier after the fatal battle of Pelagonia.
The mediæval importance of Monemvasia really dates from this retrocession to the Byzantine Emperor in 1262, when a Byzantine province was established in the south-east of the Morea. It not only became the seat of an Imperial governor, or κεφαλή, but it was the landing-place where the Imperial troops were disembarked for operations against the Franks, the port where the Tzakones and the Gasmoûloi, or half-castes, of the Peloponnese enlisted for service in the Greek navy. During the war which began in 1263 between Michael VIII and his late captive, we accordingly frequently find it mentioned; it was thither that the Genoese transports in the Imperial service conveyed the Greek troops; it was thither, too, that the news of the first breach of the peace was carried post-haste, and thence communicated to Constantinople; it was there that the Imperial generals took up their headquarters at the outset of the campaign; and it was upon the Monemvasiotes that the combatants, when they were reconciled, agreed to lay the blame for the war[296]. Under the shadow of the Greek flag, Monemvasia became, too, one of the most dangerous lairs of corsairs in the Levant. The great local families did not disdain to enter the profession, and we read of both the Daimonoyannai and the Mamonades in the report of the Venetian judges, who drew up a long statement in 1278 of the depredations caused by pirates to Venetian commerce in the Levant. On one occasion the citizens looked calmly on while a flagrant act of piracy was being committed in their harbour, which, as the port of shipment for Malmsey wine, attracted corsairs who were also connoisseurs[297]. Moreover, the Greek occupation of so important a position was fatal to the Venetian lords of the neighbouring islands, no less than to Venetian trade in the Ægean. The chief sufferers were the two Marquesses of Cerigo and Cerigotto, members of the great families of Venier and Viaro, who had occupied those islands after the Fourth Crusade. It would appear from a confused passage of the Italian Memoir on Cerigo, that the islanders, impatient at the treatment which they received from their Latin lord, the descendant, as he boasted, of the island-goddess Venus herself, sent a deputation to invoke the aid of the Greek governor of the new Byzantine province in the Morea[298]. At any rate, the famous cruise of Licario, the upstart Italian of Negroponte who went over to the Greeks, temporarily ended the rule of the Venetian Marquesses. A governor was sent to Cerigo from Monemvasia; but ere long Michael VIII conferred that island upon the eminent Monemvasiote archon, Paul Monoyannes, who is described in a Venetian document as being in 1275 “the vassal of the Emperor and captain of Cerigo.” Monoyannes fortified the island, where his tomb was discovered during the British protectorate, and it remained in the possession of his family till 1309, when intermarriage between the children of its Greek and Latin lords restored Cerigo to the Venieri[299].