While the corsairs were devastating Greece a picturesque adventurer, who recalls the abortive scheme of Charles VIII of France, was engaged in planning her deliverance. Charles Gonzaga, duc de Nevers, boasted of his connection with the imperial house of the Palaiologoi through his grandmother, Margaret of Montferrat, a descendant of the Emperor Andronikos Palaiologos the Elder[695]. After having fought against the Turks in Hungary he conceived the romantic idea of claiming the throne of Constantinople, with which object he visited various European courts, and about 1612 entered into negotiations with the Greeks. His schemes received a willing hearing from the restless Mainates, who sent three high ecclesiastics to assure him of their readiness to recognise him as their liege lord if he would send them a body of experienced officers to organise a force of 10,000 Greeks. They even promised to become Roman Catholics, and arranged, on paper, for the division of the Turkish lands among themselves, and for the confiscation of all Jewish property in order to defray the expenses of the expedition. The pretender, on his part, sent three trusty agents to spy out the land and make plans of the Turkish positions; they came back with most hopeful accounts of the enthusiasm of the Mainates, who were only waiting for the favourable moment to raise the two-headed eagle on the walls of Mistra. Neophytos, the bishop of Maina, and Chrysanthos Laskaris, the Metropolitan of Lacedæmon, and namesake of the Manuel Laskaris whose tomb may still be seen in one of the churches at Mistra, addressed him as Constantine Palaiologos, and told him to hasten his coming among his faithful people, who in proof of their submission sent him some falcons.

But the duc de Nevers wasted in diplomacy time which should have been devoted to prompt action. He appealed to Pope Paul V, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the King of Spain, and the Emperor, who were all profuse in promises and some of whom furnished him with ships and money. An attempt was also made to stir up the other Christian nationalities of the East, and a meeting of Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and Serbian leaders was held for the purpose of concerted action, while the two hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia promised their aid. Another adventurer, who styled himself Sultan Zachias and gave out that he was a brother of the Sultan Ahmed I, was admitted as an ally. Finally, in order to give a religious character to the movement, the duke founded and became chief of a body calling itself the “Christian army,” commissions in which were offered to the conspirators, among whom we find the name of a learned Athenian, Leonardos Philaras[696], who was patronised by Richelieu and to whom Milton addressed two letters. A date was fixed for the rising, and four memoranda were addressed to the duke, with full particulars of his future realm of Greece. From these we learn that in 1619 the Peloponnese could furnish him with 15,000 fighting men, while it contained 8000 Turks capable of bearing arms, of whom 800 formed the scanty garrisons of Koron, Modon, Navarino and Nauplia. At that time, we are told, there were 800 Turkish military fiefs in the Morea, and the population of Maina was estimated at 4913 families, spread over 125 villages and hamlets. These statistics are the most valuable result of the agitation.

After several years of correspondence and negotiation the pretender at last managed to equip five vessels for the transport of his crusaders; but a sudden fire, perhaps the work of an incendiary, laid them in ashes, and the jealousy of Spain and Venice prevented any effective political action. The “Christian army” still went on meeting and discussing its plan of campaign, and two more strange adventurers—a Moor who had become a Christian and styled himself “Infant of Fez,” and a Greek who, with even greater ambition, had adopted the title of “prince of Macedonia”—became the principal agents of the duke. At last, however, every one grew weary of his absurd pretensions, and the secession of the Pope from his side finally destroyed his hopes[697].

During the Cretan war between Venice and the Turks two risings were promoted by the Venetians in Greece for the purpose of diverting the attention of their enemies. In 1647 the Venetian admiral, Grimani, after chasing the Turkish fleet to Eubœa and Volo, blockaded it within the harbour of Nauplia. At this the Albanians of the Peloponnese, who were very favourable to the Republic, rose against the Turks, and after having done a considerable amount of damage to Turkish property, escaped punishment by fleeing on board the Venetian squadron. A Greek, more daring but less fortunate, conceived the idea of setting fire to the Turkish vessels as they lay in harbour, but paid for his audacity with his life[698]. In 1659 the Mainates, who had availed themselves of the war to throw off every shadow of subjection to the Sultan, but who plundered Venetian and Turkish ships with equal impartiality, were induced by the great Francesco Morosini to devote their abilities to the plunder of the Morea. At that time piracy was the principal profession of the Mainate population, who sold Christians to Turks and Turks to Christians. Priests and monks, we are told, joined in the business, and the fact that they lived in caves overlooking the sea made them valuable auxiliaries of the pirates, whom they informed of the approach of passing vessels. Some of them even embarked on board the pirate schooners, for the purpose of levying the tithe which was allotted by the pious freebooters to the Church[699]. These schooners sometimes sailed out among the Cyclades, and just as Lepanto was nicknamed “Little Algiers” so Vitylos in Maina was called “Great Algiers.” Well acquainted with the influence of the Church in eastern politics, Morosini worked upon the feelings of the Mainates by taking with him the deposed Œcumenical Patriarch, then living on the island of Siphnos. The pirates of Maina humbly kissed the hand of the eminent ecclesiastic, and 10,000 of them, with 3000 Greeks and Albanians, assisted the Venetian commander in an attack upon Kalamata, which was abandoned by its Mussulman and Christian inhabitants alike to its rapacious assailants. The Cretan poet Bouniales has left a graphic account of their proceedings in his poem on the Cretan war.

But no strategic result accrued from the sack of Kalamata; Morosini sailed off to the Ægean, advising the Mainates to reserve their energies for a more favourable opportunity of conquering the Peloponnese. The auxiliaries of the Venetian commander, pending that event, continued to prey upon Turkish vessels, and even attacked the fleet of the Grand Vizier, Ahmed Köprili, which was then engaged in the siege of Candia. The offer of double the pay of his own soldiers could not bribe the Mainates to desist from their at once patriotic and profitable piracies. Baffled by their refusal, the Grand Vizier ordered Hasân-Babâ, a pirate of renown and accounted the best seaman in the Turkish fleet, to reduce Maina to submission. But the women of Maina sufficed to strike terror into the heart of the bold Hasân. “Tell my husband,” said one of them, “to mind the goat, and hold the child, and I will go and find his weapons and use them better than he.” At the head of the population the women marched down to the shore, and the Turkish captain thought it wiser to remain on board. But in the evening experienced swimmers cut the cables of his ships, two of which were driven upon the rocks of that iron coast and became the prey of the wreckers, while Hasân was glad to escape on his sole surviving vessel.

Unable to subdue the Mainates by force, the Grand Vizier now had recourse to diplomacy. The hereditary blood feud had long been the curse of Maina, and its inhabitants were divided into the hostile factions of the Stephanopouloi and the Iatraioi—the Montagues and Capulets of that rugged land. At that time there was in Maina a certain Liberakes Gerakares, who, after an apprenticeship in the Venetian fleet, had turned his nautical experience to practical use as a pirate. In an interval of his profession he had become engaged to a daughter of the clan of Iatraioi, who boasted of their descent from one of the Florentine Medici, formerly shipwrecked there; but, before the wedding had taken place, a rival, belonging to the opposite clan, eloped with the lady. Smarting under his loss and burning for revenge upon the whole race of the Stephanopouloi, the disappointed lover was accidentally captured by the Turks at sea and carried off to prison. The crafty Köprili saw at once that Liberakes was the very man for his purpose. He not only released him, but provided him with money, and sent him back to Maina in the capacity of his secret agent. Liberakes at once distributed the pasha’s gold among his clansmen and proclaimed civil war against the Stephanopouloi. At the same time the Mainates were told of favours which the Grand Vizier had in store for them—the use of bells and crosses outside their churches, the abolition of the tribute of children, and the remission of half the capitation tax. No Turk, it was added, should live among them.

As soon as Crete had fallen Köprili devoted his attention to the accomplishment of his plan. He peremptorily summoned the Mainates, under penalty of extermination, to submit to his authority, promising them an amnesty and the remission of all arrears of tribute in case of prompt submission. At the same time he despatched 6000 men to Maina, with orders to treat the people well, but to build, under the pretext of protecting trade, three forts in strong positions. As soon, however, as the forts were finished, Liberakes and his men seized some of their most prominent foes, while the Turks preserved an air of complete indifference. After a mock trial the unfortunate Stephanopouloi were sentenced to death as disturbers of the public peace. Those of them who escaped emigrated to Corsica, where their descendants may still be found at Cargèse. More than a century later they furnished to Bonaparte agents for the dissemination of his plans of conquest in Greece. Other Mainates went into exile in Tuscany, where their descendants soon became fused with the Italian population, and in Apulia, while those who remained behind were for the second time placed under Turkish authority. Liberakes, as soon as his deluded countrymen had realised the device of which they had been the victims, became so unpopular that he took to piracy again. A second time captured by the Turks, he was again imprisoned till his captors once more found need for his services[700].

While Candia was the scene of the great struggle between Venice and “the Ottomite,” Athens was once more coming within the ken of Europe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the French showed much activity in the Levant, where they established consuls about that time. In 1630 the French ambassador at Constantinople, Louis des Hayes, had visited Athens[701], of which a brief mention is made in his travels, and in 1645 a very important step towards the “re-discovery” of the famous city was taken. In that year a body of Jesuit missionaries were sent thither, and though they subsequently removed to Negroponte, because that place contained more Franks, they were followed at Athens in 1658 by the Capuchins, whose name will ever be remembered in connection with the topography of that city. In 1669 they bought the choragic monument of Lysikrates, then colloquially known as “the Lantern of Demosthenes,” which henceforth formed part of their convent[702]. Over the entrance they placed the lilies of France, to which the monument still belongs, and by whose care it has twice been restored; but their hospitality was extended to strangers of all races and religions, and it is curious to hear that the Turkish cadi would only sanction this purchase of a national monument on condition that the Capuchins promised not to injure it and to show it to all who wished to see it. The monument itself was converted into a study, where Lord Byron passed many an hour during his visit to Athens in 1811, and where he wrote his famous indictment of Lord Elgin’s vandalism. The chapel of the convent was, till the capture of the city by Morosini, the only Frankish place of worship. But the worthy Capuchins did not confine themselves to religious exercises. About the same time that they purchased the choragic monument they drew up a plan of Athens, which was a great advance on the imaginary representations of that place, which had hitherto been devised to gratify the curiosity of Europe, and which had depicted Athens now as a Flemish and now as a German town. Nor did they keep their information to themselves. They communicated their plan and a quantity of notes to a French literary man, Guillet, who published them in the form of an imaginary journey, supposed to have been undertaken by his brother, La Guilletière. The sources of Guillet’s information render his narrative far more valuable than if he had merely paid a flying visit to Athens; and though he never saw the place about which he wrote he had at his command the best available materials, compiled by men who had lived there. About the same time Babin, a Jesuit who had also lived at Athens, drew up an account of it, which was published by Dr Spon[703], a physician and antiquary of Lyons, who visited Greece in 1675 and 1676 in the company of an Englishman, Sir George Wheler, and subsequently issued a detailed account of his travels, upon which his travelling companion afterwards based an English version. Two other Englishmen, Randolph and Vernon, also travelled in Greece at different times between 1671 and 1679, and have left behind records of their impressions. Besides these unofficial travellers Lord Winchelsea, the British ambassador at Constantinople, paid a visit, of which, however, he published no record, to Athens in 1675, while the previous year had witnessed the tour of his French colleague, the marquis de Nointel, through the Cyclades and Attica, in the company of the painter Jacques Carrey, who drew for him the sculptures of the Parthenon, and of an Italian, Cornelio Magni, who wrote an account of the great man’s journey[704]. Thus we have ample opportunities for judging what was the condition of Athens between the years 1669 and 1676, or shortly before the Venetian siege, while recent researches have greatly elucidated the statements of the travellers.

The population of Athens at that time is estimated by Guillet at between 15,000 and 16,000, of whom only 1000 or 1200 were Mussulmans, and by Spon at between 8000 and 9000, of whom three-quarters were Greeks and the rest Turks. A modern Greek scholar[705], while accepting Spon’s estimate of the proportion between the Greeks and the Mussulmans, puts the total population at the time of the Venetian siege at 20,000, which would better tally with the expression of a Hessian officer, Hombergk, who was among the besiegers, and who wrote home that Athens was “a very big and populous town.” Another German officer, a Hanoverian, named Zehn, even went so far in his journal as to state that Athens had “14,000 houses[706],” which must be an exaggeration. In 1822 there were only 1238. It is clear, however, from all these estimates that Athens was in 1687 a considerable place. Besides the Greeks and Turks there were also a few Franks, some gipsies, and a body of negroes. The negroes were the slaves of the Turks, living in winter at the foot of the Akropolis, in the holes of the rock, in huts, or among the ruins of old houses, and in summer, like the modern Athenians, spending their spare time on the beach at Phaleron. The gipsies were particularly odious to the Greeks as the tools of any Turk who wished to torture them. Among the Franks were the consuls, of whom there were two. At the time of Spon’s visit they were both Frenchmen and both deadly enemies, M. Châtaignier, the representative of France, and M. Giraud, a resident in Athens for the last eighteen years, who acted for England and was the cicerone of all travellers. A little later, in the reign of James II, we were represented by one of our own countrymen, Launcelot Hobson, one of whose servants, a native of Limehouse, together with two other Englishmen, was buried at that time in the Church of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock beneath a tombstone, now in the north wall of the English church, commemorating his great linguistic attainments. Besides the two consuls Spon found no other Franks at Athens, except one Capuchin monk, one soldier, and some servants; a little earlier we hear of a German adventurer as living there[707].

Our authorities differ as to the feelings with which at that period the Athenians regarded the Franks. Guillet, indeed, alludes to the excellent relations between the Greeks and Latins, and points, as a proof of it, to the remarkable fact that young Athenians were sent by their parents to be educated by the Capuchins. The consul Giraud’s wife was also a Greek. Spon, however, speaks of the great aversion of the Greeks to the Franks[708], and this is confirmed by an incident which followed the visit of the marquis de Nointel to Athens in 1674. During his stay the pious ambassador had had mass recited in the ancient temple of Triptolemos, beyond the Ilissos, which, under the title of St Mary’s-on-the-Rock, had served as a chapel of the Frank dukes[709]. After their time it had been converted into a Greek church, but had been allowed to fall into disuse. None the less it was considered by the Orthodox to have been profaned by the masses of the French ambassador[710]. A great number of satirical verses have been also preserved[711], which show that the Frank residents were the butt of every sharp-witted Athenian street boy, and their cleanly habits were especially suspicious to the Orthodox. Besides, as many of the pirates were Franks, the popular logic readily confounded the two, and visited upon the harmless Latin the sins of some of his co-religionists. It was manifest, however, at the time of the Venetian siege that the Athenians preferred the Franks to the Turks, and every traveller from the West praised the hospitality which the Greeks of Athens showed to the foreigner. Spon tells us that there was not a single Jew to be found in the city. Quite apart from the national hatred which they inspired, and still inspire, in the Hellenic breast, how could they outwit the Athenians[712]? Would they not have fared like their fellow countrymen who landed one day on Lesbos, but, on observing the astuteness of the Lesbian hucksters in the market-place, went off by the next ship, saying that this was no place for them? On the other hand a few Wallachs wandered about Athens, some Albanian Mussulmans were employed in guarding the entrances to the town, and in all the villages of Attica the inhabitants were of the Albanian race, as is still largely the case[713]. In Athens itself all the non-Turkish and non-Hellenic population did not amount at that time to more than 500.

A great change had taken place in the government of the city since the early years of the seventeenth century. We last saw Athens forming a district of the sandjak of Euripos, and dependent on the pasha of Eubœa, who was represented there by a lower official. A document in the Bodleian Library[714], dated 1617, gives us, from the pen of a Greek exile in England, an account of the exactions of a rapacious Turkish governor of Athens somewhat earlier. In consequence of this bad treatment the Athenians sent several deputations to Constantinople, and about the year 1610 the efforts of their delegates received strong support from one of those Athenian beauties who have from time to time exercised sway over the rulers of Constantinople. A young girl, named Basilike, who had become the favourite wife of Sultan Ahmed I, had been requested by him to ask some favour for herself. The patriotic Athenian, who had heard in her childhood complaints of the exactions of the pasha of Euripos and his deputy, and perhaps primed by one of the Athenian deputations which may then have been at Constantinople, begged that her native city might be transferred to the kislar-aga, or chief of the black eunuchs in the seraglio. The request was granted, and thenceforth Athens, greatly to its material benefit, depended upon that powerful official[715]. A firman, renewable on the accession of a new sultan, spared the citizens the annual visitation of the pasha of Euripos, who could only descend upon them when the issue of the precious document was delayed. The kislar-aga was represented at Athens by a voivode, or governor, and the other Turkish officials were the disdar-aga, or commander of the garrison in the Akropolis, which shortly before the Venetian war amounted to 300 soldiers; the sardar and the spahilar-aga, who directed the Janissaries and the cavalry; the cadi; and the mufti.

The Athenians enjoyed, however, under this Turkish administration an almost complete system of local self-government. Unlike the democratic Greece of to-day, where there is no aristocracy and where every man considers himself the equal of his fellows, Turkish Athens exhibited sharp class distinctions, which had at least the advantage of furnishing a set of rulers who had the respect of the ruled. Under the Turks the Greek population of the town was divided into four classes—the archontes; the householders, who lived on their property; the shopkeepers, organised, as now, in different guilds; and the cultivators of the lands or gardens in the immediate suburbs, who also included in their ranks those engaged in the important business of bee-keeping[716]. The first of these four classes, into which members of the other three never rose, had originally consisted of twelve families, representing—so the tradition stated—the twelve ancient tribes of the fourth century before Christ. Their number subsequently varied, but about this period amounted to rather more than sixty. Among their names it is interesting to find, though no longer in the very first rank, the family (which still exists at Athens) of the Athenian historian Chalkokondyles, slightly disguised under the form Charkondyles. More important were the Benizeloi, said to be descended from the Acciajuoli, whose Christian names occur frequently in their family, and the Palaiologoi, who boasted, without much genealogical proof, of their connection with the famous Imperial family. Some of the archontes went so far as to use the Byzantine double eagle on their tombs, of which a specimen may still be seen in the monastery of Kaisariane, and all wore a peculiar costume, of which a fur cap was in later Turkish times a distinctive mark. Their flowing locks and long beards gave them the majestic appearance of Greek ecclesiastics, and the great name of Alexander was allowed to be borne by them alone. This Athenian aristocracy is now all but extinct; yet the names of localities round Athens still preserve the memory of these once important families, and in Mount Skaramangka, near Salamis, and in Pikermi, on the road to Marathon, we may trace the property of archontes, who once owned those places, while in modern Athens the names of streets commemorate the three great families of Chalkokondyles, Benizelos and Limponas.

From this class of some sixty families the Christian administrators of Athens were selected. Once a year, on the last Sunday in February, all the citizens who paid taxes assembled outside St Panteleemon, which was in Turkish times the metropolitan church, after a solemn service inside; the principal householders and tradesmen and the heads of the guilds then exchanged their views, and elected from the whole body of archontes the chief officials for the ensuing year, the so-called δημογέροντες, or “elders of the people.” There is some difference of opinion as to their numbers, which have been variously estimated at two, three, four, eight and twenty-four. A recent Greek scholar has, however, shown from the evidence of documents that they were three[717]. After their election had been ratified by the cadi they entered upon the duties of their office, which practically constituted an imperium in imperio. They represented the Greek population before the Turkish authorities, watched over the privileges of the city, looked after the schools and the poor, cared for the widows and the orphans, and decided every Monday, under the presidency of the metropolitan, such differences between the Greeks as the litigants did not prefer to submit to the cadi. Their decision was almost always sought by their fellow Christians, and even in mixed cases, which came before the Turkish judge, they acted as the counsel of the Greek party. They had the first seats everywhere; they were allotted a special place in the churches, and when they passed the people rose to their feet. Each of them received for his trouble 1000 piastres during his year of office, and they were entitled to levy a tax upon salt for the expenses of the community. They sometimes combined the usual vices of slaves with those of tyrants, fawning on the Turkish officials and frowning on the Greek populace. But they often had the courage to impeach the administration of some harsh governor at Constantinople, and, like the rest of the class from which they sprang, they sometimes made sacrifices of blood and treasure for their native city. In addition to these “elders” there were eight other officials of less age and dignity, called “agents,” or ἐπίτροποι, and elected from each of the eight parishes into which Athens was then divided. These persons, who were chosen exclusively from the class of archontes, acted as go-betweens between the latter and the Turkish authorities.

Thus the English traveller Randolph was justified in asserting that “the Greeks live much better here than in any other part of Turkey, with the exception of Scio, being a small commonwealth among themselves[718]”; or, as a modern writer has said of his countrymen, “the Athenians did not always feel the yoke of slavery heavy[719].” The taxes were not oppressive, consisting of the haratch, or capitation tax, which in Spon’s time was at the rate of five instead of four and a half piastres a head, and of a tithe, both of which went to the voivode, who in turn had to pay 30,000 crowns to the chief eunuch. There was also the terrible tribute of children, from which Athens was not exempt, as has sometimes been supposed, for the above-mentioned Lincoln College manuscript, which had belonged to Sir George Wheler and was first published by Professor Lampros, expressly mentions the arrival of the men to take them[720]. But on the whole the condition of the Athenians, owing to the influence of their powerful protector at Constantinople, was very tolerable. When some of the principal Turkish officials of Athens meditated the imposition of a new duty on Athenian merchandise, two local merchants were sent to the then chief eunuch, with the result that they obtained from him the punishment of their oppressors[721]. When the Œcumenical Patriarch ordered the deposition of their metropolitan, the Athenians persuaded the kislar-aga to get the order quashed[722]. We do not know whether they felt with Gibbon that this august patronage “aggravated their shame,” but it certainly “alleviated their servitude.” At times, however, even the long arm of the chief eunuch could not protect them from the vengeance of the enemies whom they had denounced to him. Thus in 1678 the local Turks murdered Michael Limponas, the most prominent citizen of Athens, who had just returned from a successful mission, in which he had complained of their misdeeds at Constantinople. A Cretan poet celebrated his death for his country, and this archon of the seventeenth century may truly be included among the martyrs of Greece[723]. It was noticed that, even in that age, the old Athenian love of liberty had not been extinguished by more than four centuries of Frankish and Turkish rule; the Attic air, it was said, still made those who breathed it intolerant of authority. Babin remarked that the Athenians had “a great opinion of themselves,” and that “if they had their liberty they would be just as they are described by St Paul in the Acts[724].” Athens, he wrote, still possessed persons of courage and virtue, such as the girl who received sixty blows of a knife rather than lose her honour, and the child who died rather than apostatise.

The Athenians were very religious under the Turkish sway, and then, as now, there were frequent pilgrimages to the Holy Land[725]. Sometimes this religious feeling was prone to degenerate into superstition; for example, Greeks and Turks alike believed that various epidemics lay buried beneath the great marble columns of the ruined temples. In short, the Athenian character was much what it might have been expected to be. Industrious, musical, and hospitable, the Greeks of Athens were admitted to be, and the virtue of the Athenian ladies was no less admired than their good looks. But the satirical talents of Aristophanes had descended to the Athenians of the seventeenth century; no one could escape from the barbed arrows of their caustic wit, sometimes poisoned with the spirit of envy; they ridiculed Turks, and Franks, and Wallachs, and their own fellow-countrymen alike, and they delighted in inflicting nicknames which stuck to their unhappy object. Their love of money and astuteness in business may have given rise to the current saying, “From the Jews of Thessalonika, the Turks of Negroponte, and the Greeks of Athens, good Lord, deliver us.” In striking contrast to the proverbial Turks of Eubœa, those resident in Athens were usually amiable[726]. They generally agreed well with their Greek neighbours, whose language they spoke very well. In fact, like the Cretan Mussulmans of to-day, they knew only a few words of Turkish, barely sufficient for their religious devotions, while some of the Greeks were acquainted with the latter language. Sometimes the Turkish residents would aid the Greeks to get rid of an unpopular governor; and, when Easter and Bairam coincided, they would take a fraternal interest in each other’s festivals. The Athenian Moslem drank wine, like his Christian fellow, and his zeal for water and his respect for trees were distinct benefits, the latter of which modern Athens has now lost. There was, however, one notable exception to the general amiability of the Turkish residents. The Greek population of Attica, as distinct from the town, was much oppressed by the Turkish landlords, and despised by the Greek townsfolk. One part of Athens, and that the holy of holies, the venerable Akropolis, was exclusively reserved to the Turks, and no rayah was allowed to enter it, not because of its artistic treasures, but because it was a fortress. Archæological researches there were regarded with grave suspicion[727].

Education was not neglected by the Athenians of the seventeenth century. From 1614 to 1619 and again in 1645 a wayward Athenian genius, named Korydalleus, was teaching philosophy to a small class there. A Greek, resident in Venice, founded a school there in 1647, and in Spon’s time there were three schoolmasters—among them Demetrios Benizelos, who had studied in Venetia—employed in giving lectures in rhetoric and philosophy, while many young Greeks went to the classes of the Capuchins. Babin tells us, however, that Benizelos (whose father, Angelos, and younger brother, Joannes, were also teachers) had “only two or three hearers, everyone being now occupied in amassing a little money.” We hear of a Greek monk who was acquainted with Latin; but Spon could find only three people in Athens who understood ancient Greek[728]. A century earlier, as we saw, correspondents of Kraus had commented on the badness of the Attic Greek of their day. Yet, according to Guillet, it was by this time “the purest and least corrupt idiom in Greece,” and “Athenian phrases and a Nauplian accent” were commended as the perfection of Greek. Externally too Athens was no mere barbarous collection of huts. The houses were of stone, and better built than those of the Morea; and a picture which has been preserved[729] of an archon’s house of the later Turkish period, constructed round a court with trees and a fountain in the middle, shows the influence of Mussulman taste on the Athenian aristocracy. The solid construction of the houses, and the name of “towers” (πύργοι) given to the country villas of the archontes, as in the island of Andros to the present day, were both due to the prevalence of piracy, then the curse of Athens. But the streets were unpaved and narrow—an arrangement better adapted, however, to the fierce heat of an Attic summer than the wide thoroughfares of the modern Greek capital. The town was then divided into eight parishes, or platómata, the name of one of which, Plaka, survives, and contained no fewer than fifty-two churches and five mosques. Among the latter were the Parthenon, or “Mosque of the Castle,” the minaret of which figures conspicuously in the contemporary plans, and the “Mosque of the Conqueror,” now used as the military bakery, which had been converted from a church by Mohammed II[730]. The most important of the former was the metropolitan church, the Καθολικόν, as it was then called, usually identified with the small building which still bears that name, but supposed by Kampouroglos to have been that of St Panteleemon[731]. Although the clergy had less influence at Athens than in some other parts of Greece, the metropolitan, as we have seen, was a personage of political importance; he received at that time 4000 crowns a year, and had under his jurisdiction the five bishops of Salona, Livadia, Boudonitza, Atalante and Skyros. The monastery of Kaisariane, or Syriane, on Hymettos, or “Deli-Dagh” (the “Mad Mountain”), as the Turks called it, still paid only one sequin to the voivode in consideration of the fact that its abbot had presented the keys of Athens to Mohammed II at the time of the conquest[732]. The Catholic archbishopric of Athens had, however, ceased to exist on the death of the last Archbishop in 1483, and the churches and monasteries which had belonged to it in Frankish days had been recovered by the Orthodox Greeks.

Although the Ilissos even then, as now, contained very little water, there were a number of gardens along its banks above the town, with country houses at Ambelokepoi, and the excellent air and its freedom from plague at that period made Athens a healthy residence, where doctors could not make a living[733]. There were still some rich merchants; but the trade of Athens was mainly limited to the agricultural produce of the neighbourhood, to the export of oil, and to a little silk, imported from other parts and woven in private houses. Randolph mentions that, in 1671, an inspector from Constantinople found about 50,000 olive trees in the plain, and some of the olives were esteemed so delicious that they were reserved for the Sultan’s table. The oil was excellent, and was exported every year to Marseilles. Athens also supplied cotton sail-cloth to the Turkish navy[734]. As for the wine, though good, it was voted undrinkable by all the travellers of that period, owing to the resin with which it was impregnated[735]. Honey was still as famous a product of Hymettos as in classic ages, and the monks of Kaisariane were specially renowned for their hives. Trade being thus small, it is not surprising that few Franks resided at Athens. Such as it was, it was entirely in Greek hands.

The monuments of Athens had not then suffered from the havoc so soon to be wrought by the bombs of Morosini. When Des Hayes was there the Parthenon was as entire and as little damaged by the injuries of time as if it had only just been built. The Turks, whatever their faults may have been, had shown great respect for the venerable relics of ancient Athens, which had now been in their power for two centuries. When a piece of the frieze of Phidias fell they carefully placed it inside the Parthenon, the interior of which was at that time entirely whitewashed[736]; the external appearance of that noble temple, as it then was, can be judged from the published drawings of Carrey. The Akropolis was fortified, and occupied by the garrison, whose houses, about 200 in number, covered a portion of its surface, and the Odeion of Herodes Atticus (then called Serpentzes) was joined by a wall with and formed a bulwark of it. The Propylæa served as the residence of the commander, the disdar-aga, whose harem was in the Erechtheion[737], and the Temple of Wingless Victory had been converted into a powder magazine. Unfortunately the Turks had also stored their ammunition in the Propylæa, and in 1656 a curious accident caused it to explode. At that time Isouf Aga, the commander of the Akropolis and a bitter enemy of the Greeks, had vowed that he would destroy the little church of St Demetrios, on the opposite hill. One evening, before going to bed, he ordered two or three pieces of artillery to be put in position to fire on the church in the morning. But in the night a thunderbolt ignited the powder magazine. The Aga and nearly all his family perished by the force of the explosion, and—what was a more serious loss—part of the roof was destroyed. The Greeks ascribed the disaster to the righteous indignation of the saint, whose church was thenceforth, and is still, called St Demetrios the Bombardier[738]. On another occasion, so it was said, when a Turk fired a shot at an eikon of the Virgin in the Parthenon his arm withered, while another Mussulman was reported to have dropped dead in the attempt to open two great cupboards, closed with blocks of marble and let into the walls[739]. For the great Temple of Olympian Zeus the Turks had a becoming regard, and at the solemn season of Bairam they used to meet near its columns to pray. The Areopagos, from the spring of “black water” still to be found there, they called Kara-su. Less scrupulous than the Turks, De Nointel took two workmen about with him on his tour, and carried off several pieces of marble, just as the Jesuits had taken with them to Chalkis some of the marble fragments of Athens to serve as monuments in their cemetery[740].

The Piræus, which had played so great a part in the life of ancient Athens, consisted at that time of only a single house—a magazine for storing goods and levying the duties on them[741]. Its classical name had been lost, and while the Franks called it Porto Leone the Greeks styled it Porto Drako[742], from the huge lion, now in front of the arsenal at Venice, upon which Harold Hardraada had once scrawled his name, and which attracted the attention of all travellers. The foundations of the famous Long Walls were still visible almost all the way, and on the road to Eleusis there was another fine marble lion, which can be traced in the Capuchins’ plan. The monastery of Daphni had been almost entirely abandoned, owing to the ravages of corsairs, Christians as well as Turks, and the former had driven away all the inhabitants of Eleusis; but the monastery of Phaneromene, in Salamis, had just been restored by Laurentios of Megara in 1670, and a little later, in 1682, the church at Kaisariane was decorated with fresh paintings by a Peloponnesian artist at the expense of the Benizeloi who had fled thither for fear of the plague, and to whom the monastery and the present summer pleasaunce of Kephissia formerly belonged. All along the shore near Phaleron stood towers, where men watched day and night to give the alarm against the pirates. Such was the terror inspired by those marauders that not a single Turk resided at Megara, and there was only one house between that place and Corinth. The Kakè Skála maintained its classic reputation as a haunt of robbers, and descendants of the fabulous brigand Skiron were in the habit of lurking there, so that the Turks were afraid to travel along that precipitous road where the railway now passes above the sea. Akrocorinth, in spite of its ruinous condition, was, however, a sure refuge of the Mussulmans against the corsairs, while Lepanto, on the other hand, was a perfect nest of pirates[743].

Of the Greek provincial towns at that period Chalkis, with a population of about 15,000, was the most important. It was the residence of the capitan pasha and the scene of the Jesuits’ missionary labours. They had established a school there, after their departure from Athens, and the children of the seven or eight Frank families who still resided in the old Venetian town gave them more occupation than they had found at their former abode. The castle was entirely given over to the Turks and Jews, and the traveller Randolph mentions in his day the rich carving of some of the houses, which I have myself seen there. Patras, famous for its citrons, contained some 4000 or 5000 inhabitants, one-third of whom were Jews, and the latter had three synagogues at Lepanto, which had the whole trade of the gulf, though they were less numerous there than at Patras. Corinth was then, like the modern town, a big village with a population of 1500, and it was noted for the numbers of conversions to Islâm which had taken place there. Like Athens, it had no Jews. Nauplia, the residence of the pasha of the Morea, was a large town, but Sparta was “quite forsaken[744].” Delphi, then called Kastri, was the fief of a Turk, and produced cotton and tobacco. The neighbouring town of Salona contained seven mosques and six churches, and at the splendid Byzantine monastery of Hosios Loukas there were about 150 monks. Thebes was then about the same size as at present, and had no more than 3000 or 4000 inhabitants, while its rival, Livadia, provided all Greece with wool, corn and rice. Somewhat earlier it had furnished sail-cloth for the Ottoman navy[745], and in the Turkish period it enjoyed considerable liberty, being administered by a δημογέρωον, or elder, who, with the assistance of the leading citizens, successfully resisted any intervention from outside in the affairs of his native city[746]. In the Morea, where there were only 30,000 Turks, and nearly all those Greek-speaking, each town was managed by its own Greek elders, who levied the taxes. Spon found there four metropolitans, whose sees were respectively Patras, Nauplia, Corinth and Mistra, and he remarks, as every modern traveller in the country districts of Greece cannot fail to do, on the strict fasts observed by the Orthodox. He found that the sole exception was in the case of those who were subjects of Venice and who had imbibed the laxer ideas of Roman Catholicism; as for the others, they would rather die than dine in Lent[747]. The value of the Peloponnesian trade may be judged from the fact that an English consul, Sir H. Hide, had lately resided at Glarentza and had built a church there[748].

The former duchy of Naxos, then a Turkish sandjak, had been lightly treated by the Turks since their final conquest of the islands. In 1580 Murad III had given the islanders many privileges, permitting them to build churches and monasteries and to use bells, while forbidding the Turks to settle among them, a provision which has done much to keep the Cyclades free from all traces of Mussulman rule. Once a year, and once only, came the capitan pasha to levy the tribute of the islands at Paros; but the tribute was raised by the insular municipalities, whose powers of self-government were not disturbed by the Turkish conquerors. The inhabitants of some islands were, however, bound to send a fixed quantity of their produce to Constantinople every year[749]. These privileges were confirmed by Ibrahim in 1640, and we may form some idea of the state of the Cyclades from the amount of the capitation tax levied upon them at the date of Spon’s tour. Naxos was then assessed at 6000 piastres, out of which the governor had to provide one galley to the Turkish fleet; Andros paid 4500, with which one galley was equipped, while Eubœa paid 100,000 piastres, and the Morea was bound to furnish three vessels[750]. At that time the Venetian island of Tenos was the best cultivated, the most prosperous, and the most densely populated of all the Cyclades, because the banner of St Mark protected it from the Christian corsairs, whose chief rendezvous was at Melos, and who captured, among others, the English traveller Vernon. Tenos then contained twenty-four villages, the inhabitants of which, 20,000 in number, speaking Greek, but almost entirely of the Catholic religion, were exclusively employed in the manufacture of silk. Randolph, who visited this island in 1670, found it to have “ever been a great eyesore to the Turks,” especially during the Candian war, when a certain Giorgio Maria, a Corsican privateer in the Venetian service, had manned his ships with the islanders of Tenos, and had plagued the enemies of the Republic as none had done since Skanderbeg. Tenos had quite recovered from the raid which the Turks had made upon it in 1658; but since the war its inhabitants had thought it prudent to offer the capitan pasha a douceur of 500 dollars, in addition to the regular tithe which they paid to Venice[751]. The only thing on Delos was the colony of rabbits. Mykonos, which Venetian ships still frequented, had not a single Turk, and the chief profession of its inhabitants was piracy, which kept so many of the men engaged at sea that there was an enormous disproportion between the females and the males.

Corsairs were indeed the terror of the Ægean, as was natural now that the Candian war was over and they had no more scope for the legitimate exercise of their talents. Thus in 1673 a Savoyard, the marquis de Fleuri, set out to take Paros, but was captured by the Venetians in pursuance of their pledge, given to the Turks at the late peace, not to tolerate piracy in the Archipelago. Another freebooter, a Provençal, named Hugues Creveliers, who served as the original of Lord Byron’s Corsair, and had roamed about the Levant from boyhood, succeeded in making Paros his headquarters, after a futile attempt upon a Turkish fort in Maina, and scoured the Ægean with a fleet of twenty ships for two whole years, levying blackmail upon Megara and defying capture, till at last he was blown up in his flagship by a servant whom he had offended. Another pirate, a Greek, named Joannes Kapsi, made himself master of Melos in 1677, but was taken and hanged by the Turks in 1680. Nevertheless the lot of the Melians was so hard that a party of them, together with some Samians, emigrated to London, under the guidance of their Archbishop Georgirenes of Melos, author of A Description of the present state of Samos, Nicaria, Patmos, and Mount Athos. It is to this colony that Greek Street owes its name, for the Duke of York, the future King James II, assigned that site to them as a residence, and in Hog Lane, afterwards called Crown Street, Soho, they built a Greek church—the first in London[752]. Even where the privateers did not come the Turks took care to “hinder the islanders from becoming too rich.”

The Latin population of the Cyclades had not diminished, though a century had elapsed since the last of the Latin dukes had fallen; on the contrary, it had increased, in consequence of the emigration thither after the Turkish conquest of Crete. Naxos and Santorin were the chief seats of these Latin survivors, who were sedulously guarded by the Roman Church. Down to the seventeenth century a Latin bishopric was maintained in Andros, and one still exists at Santorin, another at Syra, and a third at Tenos. In 1626 the Jesuits, and nine years later the Capuchins, obtained a convent in Naxos, which was placed under the protection of France; and after the fall of Rhodes the Latin archbishopric was removed to the same island[753], where the Catholics held much property. But this concentration of Catholicism in Naxos had some most unfortunate results, which were happily lacking in the less strenuous atmosphere of Santorin. The Latins of the upper town of Naxos looked down contemptuously upon the Greek inhabitants of the lower city; they refused to intermarry with the Orthodox; and if a Catholic changed his religion for that of the despised Greeks he was sure of persecution by his former co-religionists. In the country, where old feudal usages still prevailed, the Latin nobles oppressed the Greek peasants; while, like truly oriental tyrants, they were as servile to the Turks as they were haughty to the Greeks. Worst of all, their feuds became hereditary, and thus this little island community was plunged in almost endless bloodshed. For example, towards the close of the seventeenth century the leader of the Latin party in Naxos was Francesco Barozzi, whose family had come thither from Crete about the beginning of the same century, and whose surname I have found still preserved in the monuments of the Catholic church in the upper town. Barozzi had married the daughter of the French consul, who was naturally a person of consequence among the Catholics of Naxos. But the lady was one day insulted by Constantine Cocco, a member of a Venetian family which had become thoroughly grecised. Barozzi, furious at the slight, took a terrible vengeance, and not long afterwards Cocco was murdered by his orders, and his body horribly mutilated. Cocco’s relatives thereupon murdered the French consul; the consul’s widow persuaded a Maltese adventurer, Raimond de Modène, who had recently arrived on a frigate belonging to the Knights of St John, and who was in love with her daughter, to bombard the Cocco family with the ship’s cannon in the monastery of Ipsili, where they had taken refuge. At last the vendetta ended as a dramatist would have wished. The daughter of the murdered Cocco, who was only one year old at the time of her father’s assassination, married the son of her father’s murderer. For many years the couple lived happily together, and the wife was the first woman in the Archipelago to wear Frankish dress. But, though the fatal feud was thus appeased, poetic vengeance, in the shape of the Turks, fell upon the assassin’s son. His riches attracted their attention; he was thrown into prison, and died at Naxos a beggar[754].

Such was the condition of Greece when, in 1684, the outbreak of war between Venice and Turkey led to the temporary re-conquest of a large part of the country by the soldiers of the West and the reappearance of the lion of St Mark in the Morea.