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Early Years and Chief Successes of the Catalans 37 small advantage to Venice, for the inhabitants of the city of Pteleum, at the entrance to the Gulf of Halmyrus (Volo), offered their city to the Venetians. The Emperor Andronicus, who could not protect Pteleum, gave his sanction to the Venetian occupation, and Don Alfonso accepted a situation that he could not alter to his advantage. Venice thus gained a very valuable commercial station across the narrow strait from the island of Negroponte. We may assume that the Venetian rector suppressed the piratical activities of some of the natives, and so Don Alfonso had done an unexpected service to the cause of law and order on the Aegean coast of Greece. Although the Catalan duchies acknowledged the suzerainty of the cadet. branch of the house of Barcelona in Sicily, the authority of the King of Aragon was sometimes felt and apparently recognized in the duchies. Thus, on 15 April, 1328 (or 1329 or 1330), after a ten years’ acquaintance with the fortress of Neopatras had brought Don Alfonso Fadrique the desire to possess it — a single round tower still stands on an impregnable rocky height — he sent a petition from Thebes, which Rubio y Lluch has published from the Archives of the Crown of Aragon,* to his cousin King Alfonso III (IV) of Aragon, asking the latter to intercede with his father King Frederick II of Sicily to grant him as a fief the fortress of Neopatras, Patria, qui es cap del pahis e es cap del ducam de la Blaquia.™ Similarly, cases are known in which the King of Aragon, without feeling apparently that he was trespassing upon the prerogative of the Sicilian crown, ordered the restoration of property in the Catalan duchies to those whom he believed to be the rightful owners when he felt injustice was being done.°* His right to interfere in this manner does not seem to have been challenged either in Sicily or in Greece. Beneath the multiplicity of crowns that comprised the Catalan-Aragonese confederation of the fourteenth century there was a peculiar unity and attachment to the homeland. 6&5 W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-dge, 1 (réimpr. 1936), 453.
88 Arch. Cr. Aragon, Cartas reales, Alfonso III [IV], no. 3280 (provisional): it is the only Catalan autograph we possess from the chancery in Greece. (DOC, no. CXLI.) 87 Documents per V'historia de la cultura catalana mig-eval, 1 (1908), Lxx1x (pp. 96-97). Frederick II had already granted him, as fiefs, the six castles of Pharsalus, Domokos, Zeitounion (Lamia), Gardiki, Siderocastron (near Heraclea), and Loidoriki (cf. doc. cited). See Rubiéd y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., 11 (1908), pp. 402-403; any Vv (1913-1914), Pp. 409, 452. See, supra, the quotation from the third letter of Marino Sanudo Torsello (Bongars, Gesta Dei per Francos, vol. 1, p. 291). The medieval fortress of Siderocastron has been identified by G. Kolias, "Exernpls ‘Era:pelas Bufavriva Lrovdav, X (1933), pp. 72-82, about half way along the road from Gravia to the river Spercheus (and between Hypate and Mountinitza [Mendenitsa]). It is fairly close to the site of the ancient Heraclea where Neroutsos, “Christian Athens,” Deltion 1v (1892), pp. 108-109 (n. 2), believed it to be. Cf. A. Bon, Bull. de Corr. Hellén., uxt (1937), pp. 139-140. 88 Rubié y Lluch, “La Grécia catalana des de la mort de Roger de Lluria fins a la de Frederic III de Sicilia (1370-1377), Anuari de l'Institut d’ Estudis Catalans, v (1913-1914), P- 499; cf, L. Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), pp. 113-114.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FRENCH FAILURE TO REGAIN ATHENS AND THE PERIOD OF CATALAN STRENGTH “THE day came at long last when young Gautier de Brienne was prepared to press by force of arms his paternal claim to the duchy of Athens. The papacy had done its best to prepare the way forhim. For years Gautier had been a favored son of the Holy Father in Avignon. On 13 April, 1322, Pope John XXII granted him the right to choose his own confessor,
to have mass celebrated before daybreak and even in places laid under an interdict, and to receive from his confessor a complete remission of all his sins and the penalties therefor when he should, some day, regard himself as on the brink of death... Twenty years later, on 15 March, 1342, when Gautier had had a larger experience of sin, he received from Benedict XII another letter of absolution which would stand him in good stead when he finally found himself in articulo mortis.2. Grants of this kind were not uncommon, but they indicate something of the warm regard that was entertained for Gautier at the papal court, and they are a part of the background of the efforts made by the papacy in his behalf. To officials of the Roman Curia in Avignon Brienne’s natural ally seemed to be Venice, and, indeed, the Catalans in Athens were proving less respectable friends than the Venetians in Negroponte could have
wished for. On 1 October, 1322, Pope John XXII condemned the Catalan corsairs who were still plying their dangerous trade in the Aegean and cooperating therein with the Turks.’ Despite the Venetian pacts with the Catalans of 1319 and 1321, it was believed in Avignon that the Serenissima might be prevailed upon to assist in the restoration of Athens to the French. Thus, in late October of 1324, Pope John wrote commending the interests of young Gautier to the Doge and Republic of
Venice.t The Avignonese Curia refused to recognize the Catalan sovereignty in Athens. A letter of John XXII, dated 14 June, 1330, directed the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople and the Archbishops of Corinth, Patras, and Otranto to proceed against the Catalans, “‘schismatics, sons of perdition, and pupils of iniquity” (scismatict, perditionts
filii, et iniguitatis alumpni). The Pope, persistent in his support of 1 Fean XXII: Lettres communes, ed. G. Mollat, 1v (Paris, 1910), nos. 15268-15270 (p. 80). 2 Benott XII: Lettres communes, ed. J.-M. Vidal, 11 (Paris, 1906), no. 9316 (p. 413), inter litteras de absolutione in articulo mortis. § Rinaldi, Ann. eccl., ad ann. 1322 (vol. v, p. 201). ‘ Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 33 (p. 55).
The French Failure to Regain Athens 39 French interests, commanded all loyal Catholics to assist young Gautier to regain from the Catalans the lands his father had lost with his life in the battle of the Cephissus.5 The Latin Patriarch of Constantinople and the Archbishops of Patras and Otranto were directed in June of 1330 to excommunicate the Catalans unless, within six months, they had returned to Gautier the duchy of Athens; in the following month, on 1 July, the Pope directed the Archbishops of Corinth, Patras, and Otranto to preach a crusade against the Catalans! Young Gautier de Brienne had been raised under the tutelage of his maternal grandfather, the Constable Gaucher de Porcien, and had become, although less so than his father before him, a formidable figure in
the field of battle. He was Count of Lecce, in the heel of Italy, and holder of rich fiefs in Champagne, where the family derived its name from
the town of Brienne-le-Chateau, and in Cyprus, the latter a reminder of the greatness of his crusading forebears: In December of 1325 young
Gautier had married Beatrix, daughter of the titular Latin Emperor Philip I of Taranto and Thamar of Epirus, and, five years before, his sister
Isabelle, who eventually became his heiress, had married into the illustrious family of the d’Enghien.’? The birth, in September of 1329, of a son to young Gautier and Beatrix — he was named after his father and grandfather — made heavier still the responsibility of the Briennists and their Angevin lords to regain the duchy of Athens.* In 1330 King Robert of Naples released Gautier, for a year, from the knights’ service which he owed for the county of Lecce.° It was thus towards the end of August in 1331 that young Gautier assembled at Brindisi, with the aid of the Pope and King Robert of Naples, a considerable force, including some eight hundred French knights and five hundred Tuscan foot, to finance whose transport to Epirus he had mortgaged many of his holdings as well as his wife’s dowry.° As Vicar General of the Prince of Taranto, Gautier occuried the island of Leukas (Santa Maura), the mainland stronghold of Vonitza, and, to the north, the important city of Arta, capital of the despotat of Epirus, and forced
its lord, Count John of Cephalonia (1323-1335), to acknowledge the suzerainty of King Robert. The Church lent its energetic support. On 5 Rinaldi, 4nn. ecel., ad ann. 1330 (vol. v, p. 495); Wm. Miller (1908), p. 262; Rubié y Lluch, Ze Poblacié de la Grécia catalana, Barcelona, 1933, p. 16, n. 1. * Chas. Ducange, Histoire de empire de Constantinople, ed. J. A. Buchon, 11 (Paris, 1826), 202-203; cf. K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 426; Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 1 (1889), 114-115. 7K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 416, 418, 424; Chroniques (1873), pp. 470, 473-474.
8 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 426. ° Hopf, Joc. ett. 10 Cf, Silvano Razzi, Vite di cingue huomini illustri ... Gualtieri duca d Athene e tiranno di Firenze, Florence, 1602, p. 58.
40 Catalan Domination of Athens 28 February, 1332, in the Franciscan church of St. Nicholas in Patras, Archbishop Guglielmo Frangipani (1317-1337), while Gautier was seeking to regain his duchy, again proclaimed the ban of excommunication
against the Catalans. Gautier pushed on across the peninsula to Athens. It may well have been, as the Florentine historian Giovanni Villani has observed in his Chronicle, that Brienne would have beaten the Catalans,
had they met him in the open field.*? But they were too wise to match their strength with his; they shut themselves up in their strongholds in
Boeotia and Attica. Like Pericles, the Catalan Vicar General, now Nicholas Lancia, waited, and like Archidamus long before him, Gautier de Brienne plundered the open country. Gautier’s funds began to run out; the expedition had cost him a fortune. The details of the expedition
are obscure. His young son, Gautier III, three years of age, who had been brought by his mother on this perilous undertaking, when she had joined Gautier at Glarentza in midsummer of 1332, was taken ill and died. Gautier had entertained some hope of Venetian support, but on 5 April, 1331, when he was at the height of his preparations, Venice had renewed and put on a firmer basis the agreements of 1319 and 1321.8 The Vene-
tians had given Gautier fair words, but they had too high a regard for the sanctity of treaties to assist him. This had been a shattering blow to papal-Angevin plans, even before they had been put in operation, to oust the Catalans from the Acropolis and the Cadmea. For over a year Brienne remained in Greece, with his headquarters, it would appear, at Patras. He was being impoverished by the undertaking. Villani suggests that he should have taken fewer troops with him at the start, and added to them gradually as and if the need arose.“ Brienne’s plight was in no way helped by papal vigilance in his behalf. Nor were
his designs furthered in any respect by the fact that the great Don Alfonso Fadrique was no longer Vicar General of the duchies and so not in
chief command of the Catalans against him. In 1330 Don Alfonso had been removed from the office of Vicar General, the duties of which for some fourteen years he had fulfilled with energy and distinction. The 11 Ducange-Buchon, 11 (1826), 203; K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 429-430; cf. pp. 420-421,
The Church of St. Nicholas was destroyed by the explosion of a powder margazine in 1811 (see Ernst Gerland, Das lateinische Erzbistum Patras, Leipzig, 1903, p. 117, n. 1). 12 Giov. Villani, Cronica, x, 188, in Croniche storiche di Giovanni, Matteo, e Filippo Villani, ed. Fr. Gherardi Dragomanni, vol. 111 (Milan, 1848), pp. 169-170. Villani hated Gautier de Brienne, who had usurped power in his beloved Florence, but he is not unjust, perhaps, in his treatment of him, although his description of Gautier’s personal appearance possibly indicates some measure of pique (xu, 8). 18 Dipl. Ven.-Levant., ed. G. M. Thomas, 1 (1880), no. 108 (pp. 214-219). 4 Giov. Villani, Cron., x, 190, and cf. F. de Sassenay, Les Brienne, Paris, 1869, pp. 191-192.
The French Fatlure to Regain Athens 4! reasons for his removal are not known, but perhaps he had served with too much energy and distinction. Don Alfonso had been succeeded as Vicar General by the Catalan Marshal Odo de Novelles, who is known to have held the Vicariate in August of 1331.5 But Novelles himself must have been quickly replaced by Nicholas Lancia. As for Don Alfonso, he spent the remainder of his life as one of the chief feudatories in the Catalan dominions in Greece (he died in 1338). His years as Vicar General had been very successful ones for the Catalans. His rule could not have borne too oppressively upon the native population of Boeotia and Attica, for during the Briennist attempt to retake Athens, so far as we know, “no Greek moved even a finger to throw off the Catalan yoke.’’ Brienne returned to Brindisi in the late summer of 1332. The results of his expedition were slender, but not entirely negligible, for he had won for himself Leukas and Vonitza, the command of which he entrusted to Jean de Mandélée, while he had gained for his Angevin lords a short-lived suzerainty over the despotat of Epirus. Undoubtedly, too, he made more secure his hold upon his fiefs of Argos and Nauplia in the Morea.” In distant Avignon, however, the Pope and the Curia continued to do everything they could to help Brienne. After the failure of Brienne’s expedition to regain his father’s duchy, Pope John XXII wrote at great length, on 12 August, 1334, to the Archbishops of Patras and Corinth and to the Bishop of Olena that ‘“‘some sons of iniquity, devoid of all reason’”’
(nonnulli iniguitatis filit, omnis rationis expertes) had invaded and occupied the duchy of Athens, “which is the ancient inheritance from his father of Duke Gautier de Brienne” (gui est antigua et patrimonialis hereditas ipsius ducis). As allies and companions in their plunder of churches, ecclesiastics, and the faithful in the duchy, these scoundrels had schismatics, Turks, and other enemies of the faith. They were subjecting the inhabitants of the duchy to most grievous oppressions, to the injury of and in contempt of divine majesty; they were a fearful stumbling block to the faithful, an enormous and intolerable detriment to the Duke
of Athens, despoiled by them of his patrimony. His Holiness was anx-
ious to find the means of snatching the duchy of Athens “from the madness of tyranny” (radbte tirampnidis) and seeing it restored “‘to its state of olden liberty” (in statum pristine libertatis). The Catalans and their allies within and without the boundaries of the Athenian duchy %® Rubid y Lluch, Anuari de I’Institut d’Estudis Catalans, any v (1913-1914), p. 409; La Poblacié (1933), Apén., p. 47; L. Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 114. (DOC, no. cx1Vv.) 6 Rubid y Lluch, De/tion, new series, 1 (1928), 83. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 430. 1 Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 430, 441.
42 Catalan Domination of Athens were given respectively five and six months after the promulgation of the papal decree before the ban of excommunication fell upon them throughout the Latin cities and dioceses of Greece.}®
During the decade in which the Latin Empress Catharine of Valois struggled, after the death of her husband Philip of Anjou-Taranto (1331), to settle her affairs in the Morea and to compose the Angevin dispute with
the Avignonese Curia and Pope Benedict XII over the possession of Patras (1337-1338), the Catalan Company in Athens gradually achieved a greater measure of peace with, and a more stable position among, their
neighbors. Hopf suggests that the death of Don Alfonso Fadrique in 1338 may have contributed to this development. The Catalans maintained good relations with the Venetians, who were anxious not to add trouble with the Athenian duchy to the anarchy from which they were suffering in the Morea. Catalan relations were amicable, too, with Niccolé Giorgio, who in 1335 had married Guglielma Pallavicini, heiress of Boudonitza and widow of Bartolomeo Zaccaria; Niccolé Giorgio raised no objection to the feudal payment of four warhorses a year to the Vicar
General of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras. In 1335 Gautier de Brienne’s efforts to secure Venetian aid against the Catalans again miscarried, although the Serenissima allowed Brienne the use of state galleys as far as Glarentza.?®
During the decade of the 1340’s the Venetian bailies of Negroponte got
along most amicably with the Catalans in Athens. Friendship with Venice was, of course, most important to the Catalans, but possibly the latter felt the Venetian bailie was almost too amicable when, in 1346, Marco Soranzo borrowed 9,000 hyperperi, to help him discharge the duties of his office in Negroponte, from a Catalan resident of Athens, the knight Berengar de Puigverde, whose disposal of such a sum, however, is evidence of much prosperity.”° Throughout the years 1334 and 1335 Gautier de Brienne made prepara-
tions, apparently, for a second attempt upon the duchy of Athens. Again the Pope stood firmly by him. In 1334 King Robert, with a generosity unusual in an Angevin, had released him, for the second time, from his feudal obligations to the crown of Sicily (Naples) for his county of Lecce. On 29 December, 1335, in the Franciscan church of Patras, Archbishop 18 Lampros, Eggr., pt. I, doc. 34 (pp. 55-60); Jean XXII: Lettres communes, ed. G. Mollat, x11 (Paris, 1933), no. 63752 (p. 182). (The letter is incorrectly dated 1333 in Lampros.) 19 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (186" }, pp. 433, 436. (DOC, nos. CLXIII—CLXV.) 20 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 439, who cites Misti, vol. xxi, fol. 97v. (Hopf cites the Venetian Misti from a seventeenth-century copy, the foliation of which does not correspond to that of the original registers in Venice.) (DOC, no. CXC.) 1 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 430.
The French Failure to Regain Athens - 43 Guglielmo Frangipani, following instructions the Pope had sent him on 12 August, again published the ban of excommunication against the leaders
of the Catalan Company — Duke William of Randazzo; Don Alfonso Fadrique and his sons Pedro and James; Nicholas Lancia, the Vicar General of the Company; Odo de Novelles, the Marshal; and more than a score of others.” These preparations, however, which included much diplomatic activity in Venice, came to nothing. Gautier de Brienne never returned to Greece, and never beheld again the Acropolis where he had wished to reside.”* Lordship awaited him not in the Athens of Greece, but in the so-called “‘Athens”’ of Italy, for in after years he made himself
tyrant of Florence, apparently with the aid of banking interests in the city. He ruled Florence for a year, from 1 August, 1342, to 26 July, 1343, when he was expelled from the city, again with the aid, alas for Gautier, of the city’s bankers. On 1 March, 1344, Gautier and his heirs were accorded, like so many notables of the day, citizenship in the Venetian Re-
public.“ In 1346 Gautier was present at the battle of Crécy.” A decade 22 Ducange-Buchon, 1 (1826), pp. 204-205; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 436. Ducange transcribed the document badly, and some of the names remain unidentifiable. Golubovich, B:d/. dio6161., 111 (1919), pp. 189-190, knows very little about Archbishop Guglielmo Frangipani, whom he believes to have been a Frenchman (che crediamo francese)!
23 There is some confusion in the accounts of Gautier’s Athenian venture in the works of the Catalan historians: Rubidé y Lluch correctly places the year of Gautier’s expedition against Athens in 1331-1332 in some passages in his work (An. Instit. Cat., 1v [1911-1912], p. 56; ib7d., v [1913-1914], p. 436), and incorrectly gives the year as 1335 elsewhere (4. Instit. Cat., 11 [1908], pp. 366 and 376; et alibi), This error led Nicolau d’Olwer, L’Expansié de Catalunya (1926), pp. 114-115, to assume that two expeditions were made, one in 1331 and another in 1335, and from Nicolau d’Olwer the error passed into the work of the popular Catalan historian Rovira i Virgili, Historia Nacional de Catalunya, v (1928), p. 300. Although there were continued efforts made in behalf of Briennist claims by interested persons in Avignon, Naples, and Venice, and, as noted in the text above, such activities marked the year 1335, there was no actual expedition against the Athenian duchy in that year (cf. the explicit statements to that effect in K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 [1867], p. 430; idem, “Walther VI von Brienne, Herzog von Athen,” Historisches Taschenbuch, ed. Fried. von Raumer, vol. xxv (Leipzig, 1854], pp. 323-324; and Wm. Miller, Latins in the Levant, 1908, p. 263). * Coll. de docs. inédits, Mél. hist., 11 (1880), docs. ed. Mas Latrie, no. xiv (pp. 58-59). Cf. Carlo Cipolla, “Venezia e Gualtieri di Brienne,” Archivio Veneto, xvut (1879), 141-144, and especially Cesare Paoli, “Della signoria di Gualtieri duca d’Atene in Firenze,” Giornale storico degli Archivi Toscant, vi (Florence, 1862), pp. 81 ef sgq.; 169 et Sgq.; idem, “Nuovi documenti intorno a Gualtieri VI di Brienne, duca d’Atene e signore di Firenze,” Archivio storico Italiano, 3rd series, xvi (1872), pp. 22-62; and
E.-G. Léonard, La Jeunesse de Feanne Premiére, vol. 1 (1932), pp. 288-291. (The references to Gautier in the Chronicle of Giovanni Villani are given below.)
The history of Gautier’s Florentine tyranny is told with admirable brevity in Platynae historici Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum (aa. 1-1474), ed. Giacinto Gaida, Rerum italicarum scrip-
tores: Raccolta degli storici italiani ...ordinata da L. A. Muratori... nuova edizione...con la direzione di Giosué Carducci e Vittorio Fiorini, vol. m1, pt. 1 (Citta di Castello, 1913), pp. 273-274: “Tum vero Rhobertus Florentinorum amicus, sociorum calamitatibus permotus, Gualterum quendam Gallum Athenarum ducem appellatum, cum parvo equitatu in Haetruriam misit, qui artibus exquisitissimis deiecto Malatesta, ut imperito belli duce, ita gratiam Florentini populi aucupatus est,
44 ' Catalan Domination of Athens later, in 1355, he was made Constable of France, like his grandfather before him, but he lost his life fighting the English at Poitiers in September
of 1356.% His body was carried to Beaulieu and buried, as he had directed in his will, in the abbey which his ancestors had founded in the county of Brienne. His epitaph reads: ‘“‘Cy gist trés-excellent prince monseigneur Gautier duc d’Athénes, comte de Brienne, seigneur de Liche, et connétable de France, qui trespassa MCCCLVI en la bataille devant Poitiers quant le roy Jean fut pris.”2”. Five Brienne had ruled the county of Lecce, and every one had died a violent death. Gautier’s mother, Jeanne de Chatillon, had died almost two years before him (16 January, 1354). She had been buried in the choir of the Jacobin church in Troyes, before the high altar, where her epitaph also recalls the departed glories of Briennist Athens and relates that the lady was Duchesse d’Athéenes.2®> CGautier’s sister Isabelle d’Enghien inherited
his lands and titles, according to his interesting will,?® and some thirty ut brevi et copiis eorum et urbi praeficeretur, deiectis et extinctis omnibus urbis magistratibus .... Cum autem Florentini ferre Gualterii tyrannidem diutius non possent, necarenturque quotidie multi, in eum ob libertatem coniurantes, Angelus Acciaiolus urbis episcopus, cives armatos in episcopatum propere ad se vocat, patriam in libertatem vindicaturus. Quare tyrannus imparem se civibus videns, episcopo ipso pacis sequestro adhibito, incolumis cum militibus et rebus suis decimo tyrannidis suae mense abiit.” In connection with Gautier de Brienne mention should, perhaps, be made of the theory of his rise to power in Florence put forth in the work of Professor Armando Sapori, La Crisi delle Compagnie mercantili det Bardi e dei Peruzzi (Florence, 1926), pp. 146-154, and cf. pp. 177, 185, and 205. Following the financial crisis of 1339, caused by the collapse of King Edward III’s credit and the threatened bankruptcy of the Bardi and the Peruzzi, to whom the English monarch was so heavily indebted, and the complete failure, by July of 1342, of Florentine designs upon Lucca, banking interests in Florence, grandi and popolani both, raised the Duke of Athens to the Florentine signoria, hoping so to guide his domestic and foreign policies that the ruinous expenditures of the preceding decade might be stopped, for neither the bankers nor the municipal treasury could any longer afford
the luxury of costly failures. Cf. K. M. Setton, “Some Recent Views of the Italian Renaissance,” Report of the Canadian Historical Association (1947), pp. 10-11. The career of Gautier in Florence provides a perfect illustration of the so-called “‘proto-Fascism” of the Renaissance, a phenomenon of some interest to scholars today (cf. Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance, trans. W. L.
Luetkens, London, 1944, pp. 1x-x, 69-70). % Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 440. % Jean Froissart, Chron.,1, 161, and cf. F. de Sassenay, Les Brienne (1869), p. 243. 27 Ducange-Buchon, 11 (1826), 206-207. On Gautier II (VI) de Brienne, see Giovanni Villani, Chron., lib. 1x, cap. 301; x, 188; x11 (on his Florentine lordship), 1-4, 8, 16-17, 34, 36 (ed. Fr. Gherardi Dragomanni, vols. u-1v, Milan, 1848); Giovanni Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium, Augsburg, 1544, lib. 1x, cap. 24 (pp. 264-268), and Ital. ed. by Giuseppe Betussi, Florence, 1598, pp. §75-
586; Silvano Razzi (a Camaldolensian monk), Vite di cinque huomini illustri...Gualtieri duca d’ Athene ... Florence, 1602, pp. 37-62; J. A. Buchon, Nouv. rech. Aist., 1, pt. 1 (1843), pp. 30-40; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 453; and idem, a work now out of date, ‘Walther VI von Brienne, Herzog von Athen und Graf von Lecce,” Historisches Taschenbuch, xxv (Leipzig, 1854), pp. 301-399. 28 Ducange-Buchon, 11 (1826), 152.
9 Gautier’s will, dated 18 July, 1347, and written in French, was published after a MS in the Biblioteca Magliabechiana by Cesare Paoli, Archivio storico Italiano, 3rd series, xvi (1872), pp. 39-52. Paoli discusses some of the older bibliography on Gautier and his will. Cf. Hopf, Chroniques gréco-
The French Failure to Regain Athens 45 years later the tradesman Republic of Venice purchased from her granddaughter the fortress towns of Argos and Nauplia, the last remnants of the La Roche duchy of Athens.*° These were anxious years for the Avignonese Papacy. The seriousness of the war threatening between France and England was well understood by the Curia. Papal efforts to make peace between the belligerents were to be unavailing. The austere Benedict XII, successor of John XXII, made known to Christendom within a month of his accession to the throne of St. Peter his ardent crusading ambitions, and in the furtherance of that lofty if anachronistic ideal he sought to effect the union of the Latin
and Greek churches.* His efforts were to no avail. Latin unity, too, was much needed in Greece, and the Pope much desired to see the return of the duchy of Athens to Gautier de Brienne, loyal vassal of the Angevin King Robert of Naples. Seven years after Gautier de Brienne’s attempt to conquer the duchy of Athens, on 16 March, 1339, Pope Benedict XII wrote to the vicars of the
Latin churches of Constantinople and Negroponte, repeating John XXIT’s decree of excommunication against those who had invaded, occupied, and held Brienne’s duchy (invasores, occupatores, et detentores). The epistle was composed with some feeling, for it appears that Archbishop Isnard of Thebes had not properly published and observed the previous decree of excommunication against the Catalans in the Athenian duchy. Isnard was well acquainted with conditions in the Levant; he knew the Greeks and Turks well; and had been elevated to the patriarchate of Antioch by Clement V as early as 1311, although he had been later
removed by John XXII. Isnard had already seen too many Latin and especially Catalan apostates to Greek Orthodoxy. He disapproved of the Avignonese policy with respect to the Catalans. romanes (1873), pp. XXIX-Xxx, 236-242, 537. Gautier made some small bequests to the chapel in his
castle at Nauplia (Naples en Romanie); to the Franciscans in Patras and Glarentza; and to his numerous retainers in Greece (Paoli, op. cit., p. 48). 30 Tsabelle’s son Sohier d’Enghien (1356-1367) and the latter’s son Gautier III (1367-1381) and brother Louis d’Enghien (d. 1394) all bore the empty title Duke of Athens: Ducange-Buchon, 11 (1826), 207-208; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 453-454; Chroniques (1873), p. 474; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 264, 298. For the purchase of Argos and Nauplia by Venice, an event to which we shall have to return in a later chapter, see Regesti dei Commemoriaii, lib. v111, nos. 301 and 302 (R. Predelli, 111 [1883], p. 195), and for a complete account, see Roberto Cessi, “Venezia e l’acquisto di Nauplia ed Argo,” Nuovo Archivio Veneto, new series, xxx (1915), pp. 147-173. 3. Georges Daumet, Benott XII: Lettres closes, patentes et curiales se rapportant @ la France, Introduction, Paris, 1920, pp. xlv ef sgg. Cf. Rinaldi, 4nm. eccl., ad ann. 1335 (vol. v1 [1750], pp. 33 ef 599.)3 Karl Jacob, Studien iiber Papst Benedikt XII, Berlin, 1910, pp. 109 et sgg. All the Avignonese Popes were much interested in eastern affairs, as the publication of their regesta has shown (cf. L. Pastor, Op. cit., 1, 60-62); see Jules Gay (1904); pp. 8 et 59g.
2 Daumet, op. cit., pp. lix et sqq. ® Ducange-Buchon, 11 (1826), 196.
46 Catalan Domination of Athens Indeed, the Pope’s venerable brother Isnard, “if he deserves to be called a venerable brother,” had revoked the papal decree, with the collusion of his Dominican vicar, one Gregory de Papia, and had even had the effrontery to celebrate mass before the Catalan offenders in the metropolitan church of St. Mary of Thebes, the Megale Panagia (idem archiepiscopus Thebanus ... scienter missarum solemnia celebravit). For
this infraction of apostolic discipline Isnard and his vicar were to be ordered to present themselves, within six months of their notification by
the vicars of Constantinople and Negroponte, at the papal court in Avignon to defend themselves, “‘if they could,” and accept the dictates of justice** — or of such justice as was likely, under the circumstances, to be dispensed to them at Avignon.
The censure which Benedict XII thus directed against the Catalan Company and Archbishop Isnard was apparently the result of appeals which Brienne had made to Avignon. Lampros has published from the Vatican Archives a letter of 15 March, 1337, sent by Brienne to the Pope, whence it appears that a letter or letters written by Archbishop Isnard to
King Frederick I] of Sicily, whose son William was titular Duke of Athens and Neopatras, had been but recently intercepted by retainers of the Angevins in Italy. The Pope was sent a copy of Isnard’s letter, together with other communications from Brienne’s suzerain, King Robert
of Naples, “King of Jerusalem and Sicily,’ who retained the originals which Isnard had sent to the Sicilian King. From the evidence thus placed at his disposal the Pope could perceive how perilous to the honor and reverence of mother church and how prejudicial to the interests of her sons were prelates like Isnard, who by word and deed were striving to lead others into error and were making no effort to recall them from wrong since they had lapsed into wrong-doing themselves. The Duke of Athens had therefore requested a renewal of the apostolic censure which John XXII had directed “‘against that unspeakable band of Catalans” (contra illam soctetatem nefandam).* This, as we have seen, Pope Benedict did. * Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 35 (pp. 60-66), where the letter is incorrectly dated; Benott XII: Lettres communes, ed. J.-M. Vidal, 1 (Paris, 1906), no. 7420 (pp. 206-207); cf. Ducange-Buchon, 1 (1826), 221-222; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 277; Rubié y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., v (1913), 436; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 115. % On the Angevin house and the illustrious title King of Jerusalem (an empty honor after the fall of Acre in 1291), see E.-G. Léonard, La Feunesse de Feanne Premiére, Reine de Naples, Comtesse de Provence, vol. 1 (1932), pp. 100-103. The Italian royal house of Savoy have maintained the right to the title King of Jerusalem since 1489 (cf. Almanach de Gotha: Annuaire généalogigue, diplomatique et statistigue, Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1940, p. 74). % Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 37 (pp. 67-68); Benott XII: Lettres communes, ed. J.-M. Vidal, 1 (Paris, 1903), no. 5214 (p. 493), inter instrumenta miscellanea anni 1337. (On Archbishop Isnard [Tacconi] see DOC, nos, cxxxv, CXLII, CXLIV, CLXVII-CLXvII1, and CLxxIx.)
The French Failure to Regain Athens 47 There were hopes of improvement, however, in the relations between the Catalans and the Papacy. In March of 1335, although Frederick II of Sicily was still estranged from the Papacy, Benedict XII entertained hopes of his turning his steps from evil and seeking the way of truth and justice.?7 On the other hand, a few years later (23 April, 1339), Benedict had occasion to express his strong disapproval of conditions in the kingdom of Naples (Sicilia).38 Italy was, to be sure, in a sad state, but the withdrawal of the Papacy from Italy was more responsible for this than the incapacity of King Robert (1309~1343).°® Robert was, of course, unable to help his vassal regain the duchy of Athens; the infidel Turk and the schismatic Greek did not relax their hostility to Latin Christendom; the Angevin principality of Achaea was much endangered. A change in the papal policy in Greece was very necessary. Finally Pope Benedict
became reconciled to receiving the ‘devotion and obedience” of the Catalan Company, and in February of 1341, shortly before his death, the Supreme Pontiff instructed Henry d’Asti, Bishop of Negroponte and recently appointed Latin Patriarch, to go through the duchy of Athens upon returning to his church in Negroponte, and to inform the Catalans that his Holiness would receive their procurators, if they sent them to him at Avignon, “with willingness and approval” (libenter et favorabiliter).*° In 1342 a Venetian, Leonardo Pisani, replaced the difficult Isnard as Archbishop of Thebes; he sent favorable reports of the Catalans to the papal Curia; Hopf regards him as an important factor in the reconciliation of the Catalans to their holy father in Avignon. By the year 1342-1343, after the fiasco of Gautier de Brienne’s attempt to make himself tyrant of Florence,*? Benedict’s successor Pope Clement 3? Benott XII: Lettres closes et patentes intéressant les pays autres que la France, ed. J.-M. Vidal, fasc. 1 (1913), no. 123 (col. 29). 38 Tbid., fasc. 111 (1922), no. 2339 (cols. 678-679); for difficulties in the Angevin principality of Achaea at this time (1337), see, idid., fasc. 2 (1919), docs. nos. 1528 et sqq. 9 L. Pastor, op. cit., 1 (1891), 63 et sgqg. The growth of the free Companies further demoralized the political life of Italy during the next two generations (cf. A. Sautier, Papst Urban V. und die Séldnerkompagnien in Italien in den fahren 1362-1367, diss. Zurich, 1911). On 22 December, 1335, Benedict XII wrote King Alfonso IV of Aragon that he had received and accepted by proxy his homage and fealty for the island kingdom of Sardinia-Corsica, a fief of the Church, but he took occasion to protest against an Aragonese-Sicilian attack upon the forces and territories of his beloved son Robert, King of “Sicily” (Sicilia), while he lamented again the unenviable position of Frederick, rex Trinacriae, who remained extra gratiam et communionem Ecclesie, and persisted in his implacable hostility to King Robert and in his pertinacious disobedience of Mother Church (Benott XII: Lettres closes et patentes intéressant les pays autres que la France, ed. J.-M. Vidal, fasc. 1 [Paris, 1913], no. 725, cols. 174-176; cf., idbid., fasc. 2 [1919], no. 1626, cols. 473-474). 40 Rinaldi, Ann. eccl., ad ann. 1341 (vol. vi, p. 286); Benott XII: Lettres closes, patentes et curiales se rapportant @ la France, ed. Georges Daumet, fasc. 11 (1902), no. 810 (cols. 515-516); cf. Mas Latrie,
Reo. de l’Or. latin, 111 (1895), 438. 41 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 439. “2 Cf. Vita Benedicti XII, in Vitae paparum Avenionensium, ed. G. Mollat, 1 (1914), P. 239.
48 Catalan Domination of Athens VI came to see clearly the defense which the Catalan Company in Athens and Neopatras provided to Catholics in continental Greece against both
the Turks and the Greeks. On 31 August, 1343, Clement wrote to the Archbishops of Athens, Thebes, and Neopatras, among others, directing them to receive Henry, Patriarch of Constantinople, and to obey him in all matters touching upon his mission as papal legate in the Levant. On 21 October of the same year Clement wrote to the Patriarch Henry direct-
ing him to undertake the reconciliation of Gautier de Brienne and the Catalan Grand Company (Societas Magna Romanie) in order to further the cause of Christianity against the Turks. He also encouraged Brienne himself to compose his differences with the Company like a devoted and obedient son of the Church.“ Not without bitterness of heart had the Pope learned of the atrocious depredations of infidel Turks on land and sea, “thirsting after the blood of Christian people and yearning for the extinction of the Catholic faith.’ When Humbert II, the dauphin of Viennois, was crusading in the Levantaiter the near recapture of Smyrna by the Turks and the sad death of the Patriarch Henry at their hands, he asked the Pope to remove the sentences of excommunication standing against the Catalans.“° Then, at long last, on 15 June, 1346, Clement granted the Catalans, for three years, relaxation of the papal interdict and bans of excommunication which had been laid upon the duchy of Athens by his predecessors.‘ Before the passage of the three year period, however, the Catalans fell under the ban again, and in 1354 we find King Pedro IV (II]) of Aragon promising them that if they would give up to him the head of St. George,
patron of Catalonia, which was preserved in the castle of Livadia, he would use his full influence in Avignon to have the interdict lifted under which the Catalans had been laboring since their first establishment in & Clément VI: Lettres closes, patentes et curiales se rapportant a la France, ed. Eugéne Déprez, vol. 1, fasc. 1 (1901), no. 388 (cols. 162~163); cf. no. 340 (col. 129). On 16 September, 1343, clerks in the
papal chancery spent a busy day dispatching anti-Turkish documents to interested persons in Italy and the Levant (iid., nos. 404-417). “4 Thid., no. 465 (cols. 204~205); fasc. 2 (Paris, 1925), no. 1608 (cols. 482-484), doc. dated 1 April, 1345; Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 38 (pp. 68-70); doc. 40 (pp. 75-77); cf. Rinaldi, 4nn. eccl., ad ann. 1343 (vol. v1, p. 311).
& Clément VI: Lettres closes ...1, fasc. 1, no. 388 (cols. 162-163), doc. dated 31 August, 1343; Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 39 (p. 71).
# Rinaldi, 4nn. eccl., ad ann. 1346 (vol. v1, p. 422). On the crusade itself, see C. Faure, “Le Dauphin Humbert II a Venise et en Orient (1345-1347), Mélanges d’archéologie et d'histoire, xxvul (1907), pp. 509-562; J. Delaville Le Roulx, Les Hospitaliers 2 Rhodes jusqgu’a la mort de Philibert de Naillac (1913), pp. 96 e¢ sqg., 107; and Ulysse Chevalier’s brief study on La Croisade du dauphin Humbert II (7345-1347), Paris, 1920. Cf. Atiya, Crusade (1938), pp. 290-316. ‘7 Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 41 (pp. 77-79), doc. dated xoii Kal. Iulii anno quinto; cf. Gregorovius,
It (1889), 91, 133; Jules Gay (1904), pp. 70, 156—157, and see K. M. Setton, Hist. Crusades, MI (1975), 192-93.
The French Failure to Regain Athens 49 Attica and Boeotia.4® The Catalans kept the head of St. George. Almost a decade had passed when, on the second Christmas day of his papacy (25 December, 1363), Urban V recalled that when his predecessor Innocent VI had in his turn lifted the interdict from the duchy of Athens and relaxed the bans of excommunication against the leaders of the Company, these sentences had been intermittently promulgated from the Avignonese chancery ‘“‘for thirty years and more.’’*®
One very lamentable result of Gautier II’s expedition was the destruction by the Catalans, by order presumably of Nicholas Lancia, Vicar General from 1331 to about 1335, of the great castle of St. Omer in Thebes, built upon the ruins of the ancient Cadmea (76 xdorpov rod Zalvr ’Opepiov, dou Hrov eis THv OnBav) when they feared lest Gautier, uéyas kipns, SobKas
6¢ r&v’APnvdv, would take possession of the castle and ensconce himself too firmly in the duchy of the La Roche.*° The castle was famous for its
frescoes depicting contemporary scenes. It would seem to be evidence, too, of Don Alfonso Fadrique’s eclipse that the castle was destroyed (part of one squat tower still stands on the Cadmea), for he had bestowed it in 1327 upon Giorgio II Ghisi, son of Bartolomeo II, one of the triarchs of Negroponte, grand constable of the principality of Achaea, and lord of the islands of Tenos and Mykonos, when Giorgio had married Don Alfonso’s daughter Simona of Aragon.®! The Catalans destroyed the castle, apparently, because they did not trust the loyalty of its Venetian lord; and, as might have been expected, when the castle on the Cadmea had been pulled down, the Constable Bartolomeo Ghisi did join Brienne.*? It was in this castle that the original Chronicle of the Morea (in Greek or French or Italian?) was found, from which the French version, which Buchon 48 Rubidé y Lluch, “Els castells catalans de la Grécia continental,” Anuari de l'Institut d Estudis Catalans, 11 (1908), 380. He also promised them peace with Venice. 49 Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1, doc. 43 (p. 81). 80 The Chronicle of the Morea (Td Xpovixdv rod Mopéws), ed. John Schmitt (London, 1904), verses
8080-8092 (MS Copenhagen, p. 524; MS Paris, p. 525). Professor Schmitt regards these verses charging the Catalans with the destruction of the castle of St. Omer as possibly an interpolation. The Italian version, Cronaca di Morea (ed. Hopf, Chroniques (1873], pp. 461-462), a poor translation of the Greek, states: “Questo castello [di S. Omer] ft rovinato dalla Compagnia, per dubio, che Megachin Miser Gualtier entrasse dentro e mediante quello non aquistasse il Ducato d’Atenne, e ft gran rovina, perch’era fabricha nobilissima.”” Had Rubié y Lluch known of Schmitt’s questioning of the verses accusing the Catalans of destroying the castle of St. Omer, he would have seized upon it when he wrote his “Els castells catalans de la Gracia continental,” An. Instit. Cat., 11 (1908), p. 372. On the medieval remains at Thebes, see A. Bon, “‘Forteresses médiévales de la Gréce centrale,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, ux (1937), pp. 187-191. 8! Hopf-Sardagna, Karystos (1856), p. 39; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 263-264. Bartolomeo’s son, Giorgio II Ghisi, became lord of the fortress of St. Omer, upon his marriage in 1327 to Simona of Aragon (cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 [1867], pp. 425, 426; Chroniques [1873], pp. 477, 486). 582 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 426, 430.
50 Catalan Domination of Athens named, after the manuscripts, the Livre de la Conqueste, was made. The original, unfortunately no longer extant, is known to have been in the possession of Bartolomeo Ghisi before the year 1332, and from it the French version was made, as the Chronic/e itself testifies, ‘in its shortest form.’ The Chronicle survives in four different versions in four languages and in eight manuscripts, of which five are in popular Greek, one in French,
one in Italian, and one in Aragonese (written as late as 1393). The original version of the Chronicle, its most learned editor believed, was in Greek ‘‘written by a Grecised Frank,’°* but it was probably in French. In 1338 Don Alfonso Fadrique died, and the greatness of the Catalan duchies was at an end, but Don Alfonso’s house prospered after him. His two eldest sons, Pedro and James, became, the one after the other (Pedro died in 1355) lords of Salona, Loidoriki, and Lamia — i.e. Zeitounion, which was acquired by Don Alfonso in 1319, and remained Catalan until 1393 — and, as we now know, the island of Aegina, while a third son, Boniface, possessed apparently as a legacy from his mother, the daughter of Boniface of Verona, the stronghold of Carystus in Negroponte and certain other valuable properties on the mainland of Attica which 1n 1359,
after leaving Sicily, he appeared in Greece to claim. Through the 58 John Schmitt, Chron. of Morea (1904), pp. XXx—xxxi.
& John Schmitt, Chron. of Morea (1904), pp. xv-Xxvill, xxvili-xxxiil. M. Terrier de Loray and Schmitt sought to prove, contrary to the opinion of Buchon, Hopf, and Rubid y Lluch, that the original version of the Chronicle was in Greek, the best and earliest version, although not the original,
being that contained in a MS from the Fabricius collection in the Library of the University of Copenhagen (Codex Havniensis 57). On the Chronicles of Morea, however, see the learned work of Ad. Adamantiou, “The Chronicles of the Morea”’ (in Greek), AeArlov ris ‘Ioropixijs kai "EOvodoyixijs
‘Eratpelas v1 (1906), pp. 453-675; there is also a topographical and historical study (in Greek) by E. Dragoumis (Athens, 1921), and cf. the art. of P. A. Phourikis (in Greek), in ’A@nva@, vol. x1 (1928), pp. 26-59. Jean Longnon, Chronique [francaise] de Morée, Paris, 1912, has modified the conclusions of John Schmitt and Ad. Adamantiou (Ta Xpovixa rod Mopéws, Athens, 1906): Longnon believes in a prototype common to the Greek and French versions of the Chronicle (0p. ci#., p. Ixxxin), a point of view accepted by Georges Recoura, Les Assises de Romanie (Paris, 1930), pp. 24 e¢ 5gq., and it is, significantly, Longnon’s belief that the original of the Chron. of Morea was written in Italian, probably in the Venetian dialect (op. cit., p. Ixxvi), while Recoura believes that Italian was also the original language of the Assizes of Romania (Les Assises, p. 46). N. orga still believed, however, that the French version was the original for some very good reasons (see Revue historique du sud-est européen, XII [1935] , 353—356), and nowsee D.Jatoby, in Journal des Savants, 1968, pp. 133—89: 5 Cf, Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any 11 (1908), pp. 394-395, 396; any IV (1911-1912), 9-10, et alibi; any v1 (1915-1920), 145; Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), pp. 65-66, and docs. xxxIx, XLVI; La Poblacié de la Grécia catalana (1933), Apen., pp. 40-43; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 438, 4533 Chroniques (1873), pp. 474-475; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 265-266. (Most of this material, especially
Hopf and Miller, contains errors.) The succession in the lordship of Salona was (cf. Rubid, 4n. Instit. Cat., 11 [1908], 419): Roger Deslaur: 1311-? Alfonso Fadrique of Aragon: ?-1338 Pedro Fadrique (Alfonso’s eldest son): 1338-1355 James Fadrique (Alfonso’s second son): 1355-1365
The French Failure to Regain Athens 51 early years of his residence in Greece, Boniface seems to have administered his rich inheritance and rather to have avoided the hostilities which he had not yet had time to understand thoroughly and the conflicts which were to result, as we shall see, in violence and bloodshed in 13611362. At this time, too, Boniface acquired, by gift from his brother James, the historic island of Aegina, and in after years, upon his death about 1376, Boniface was to be succeeded therein by his son Don Pedro
II Fadrique (1377).5 We shall trace what is known of the younger Pedro Fadrique’s sad history in a later chapter. Don Alfonso’s family remained, then, the strongest in the duchies during the remaining half
century of Catalan domination in Athens. Next to it in importance stood the Catalan houses of the Novelles and the Lluria. It 1s a strange and curious chapter these families have written in the history of the
Mediterranean world in the fourteenth century: one hardly knows whether to attach it to the history of the Greek or the Italian or the Spanish peninsula. Usurpation of Pedro de Pou: 1361-1362 Luis Fadrique, “‘the last Count of Salona,” son of James Fadrique: 1365-1382 Helena Cantacuzena (Don Luis’ widow) and Maria Fadrique (his daughter): 1382-1394 56 On the problem of the chronology of lordship on the island of Aegina, see, infra, Chapter vu, and cf. L. Nicolau d’Olwer, “Les Seigneurs catalans d’Egine,” in the dedicatory volume Im Memory of Spyridon Lampros (Eis Mvjunv Urvpidwros Adumpov), Athens, 1935, pp. 389-392.
CHAPTER Four
THE DANGERS AND CRISES OF THE MIDDLE YEARS OF CATALAN RULE FREDERICK III’s accession to the ducal throne of Athens brought him all the problems of the absentee ruler (1355). He was to wrestle
with them unsuccessfully for more than twenty years. The death of Frederick of Randazzo had left certain affairs of state pending, among which
was a petition which the Catalans had presented to their Duke for the removal from office of the Vicar General Ramon Bernardi (Ramon Bernat de Sarbou), whose ineffective rule, it was alleged, the magnates met with disdain and disobedience, and which brought peril to and threatened the
ruin of the duchies (1355).! At their own request the Catalans received from King Frederick the appointment as Vicar General of James Fadrique, second son of the illustrious Don Alfonso Fadrique of Aragon; the Catalans also requested the royal Duke to bestow upon James Fadrique the strongholds of Salona and Loidoriki, which he apparently received at
this time (they had been the possessions of his father and his elder brother Don Pedro Fadrique).? It fell to James Fadrique as Vicar General from 1356 to 1359 to deal, in the interests both of his Duke and himself, with the ambitious family of
the Novelles, which seems to have held as a heritable right, although ostensibly subject to royal appointment, the office of Marshal of the
duchies. James Fadrique suppressed an attempted insurrection of Ermengol de Novelles, which cost the latter and his family, if not the office of Marshal, as has been erroneously believed, at any rate the castle of Siderocastron, which now became a fief of James Fadrique. Some time before this (at least from the year 1354), the title of Marshal had passed to the noted Roger de Lluria.®
One may perceive here a constitutional crisis of some importance al-
though it must be acknowledged that in the history of the Catalan 1 Rosario Gregorio, Opere rare (1873) p. 357; Considerazioni, 11 (1833), pp. 570-571, doc. quoted: “...
pro parte universitatum .. . ducatuum extitit supplicatum, Raimundum Bernardi vicarium ipsorum ducatuum ... ab eodem vicariatus officio amoveri, et pro conservatione statuque salubri dictorum ducatuum alium nobilem et potentem in ipso vicariatus officio deputari.” (Messina, 27 January, 1355 [1356].) Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 453. (DOC, no. CCXXV.) 2 Rosario Gregorio, Opere rare (1873), p. 360; Considerazioni, 11 (1833), pp. 582-583, doc. quoted (dated at Messina, 7 December, 1355). Cf. Rubié y Lluch, La Poblacié de la Grévia catalana (1933), Apen., pp. 37, 41-42. (DOC, no. CCXXIII.) 2 Rubié y Lluch, La Poblacié de la Grécia catalana (1933), Apen., p. 45 (Roger de Lluria as Marshal);
Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxx1x (pp. 256-257), whence we know of Novelles’s loss of Siderocastron to James Fadrique (cf. La Poblacid ..., pp. 41, 46—47). On the Vicars General and their dates, see K. M. Setton, Hist. Crusades, III (1975), 198-99.
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule 53 duchies we find a perennial crisis. During the two generations of Catalan rule in Attica, Boeotia, and southern Thessaly, the Vicar General and the Marshal had apparently often been guilty of mutual usurpations
of authority. The Vicar was the chief political officer in the duchies; the mechanics of government lay under his control; he was also the repre-
sentative of the Sicilian Duke. When chosen from among the Catalans in Greece, he was always a high feudatory; when chosen by the King from among his Catalan-Sicilian nobles, he was always a man of family and great prestige. In either case he possessed no little military strength, and his position was invested with a certain constitutionality such as no other officer in the duchies could lay claim to. Whether Novelles was led to revolt because he had been deprived of the office of Marshal cannot be said, nor can it be affirmed that he was deprived of his office by the King because he was seeking to exalt its authority over that of the Vicariate. Both these suppositions seem not unreasonable, however, since we now know that it was before Novelles’s fall that Roger de Lluria was made Marshal (before December of 1354). When, further, in 1366-1368 Lluria also became Vicar General of the duchies, first de facto and then de jure, the office of Marshal was quickly forgotten. The Marshal’s powers and functions were now swallowed by those of the Vicar General; a concentration of authority thus resulted, dangerous but perhaps necessary to protect the duchies against the numerous enemies of the Catalans in Greece. The little known career of Ermengol de Novelles apparently taught the Sicilian royal Duke and his subjects in Greece that a Marshal and a Vicar General could not both reside in Thebes, and that an ambitious ex-Marshal, loath to relinquish his power and position, was a danger to the internal peace and security of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras. In the later history of the duchies, then, the Vicar General became the sole great officer of state. Unfortunately the loss of a number of registers from the years preceding 1355 in the royal archives of the Catalan-Sicilian Kings in Palermo has left a gap of some twenty years in our knowledge of the inner history of the Catalan states in Greece — even the names of the Catalan-Sicilian Vicars General after Nicholas Lancia are unknown to us
(from about 1335 to about 1354). Moreover, the chronology of the appointments to the office made thereafter by King Frederick is difficult, to say the least, and sometimes the documents reveal that the terms of office of certain Vicars overlap. Frederick III’s appointees to the office of Vicar General were: James Fadrique of Aragon (1356-1359), who was also Viceregent in 1365; Gonsalvo Ximenes de Arenos (1359); Matteo de Moncada, Grand Seneschal of the kingdom of Sicily (Trinacria) and ¢ Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any wv (1911-1912), p. 22. Cf. DOC, no. ccxvi.
54 Catalan Domination of Athens Count of Aderno and Agosta in Sicily (1359-1361, 1363-1366); Moncada’s successor, Pedrode Pou , a Catalan resident in Thebes, who usurped from James Fadrique of Aragon the castles of Salona, Loidoriki,
and Veteranitza (1361-1362), and who met his death in a revolt in Thebes (1362); the famous Roger de Lluria, who, as we have seen, became
last Marshal of the duchy in 1354 (?), and who, although referred to as Vicar General in documents of 1365-1366, held the post officially only from 1366 to 1370; the ineffective Matteo de Peralta of the family of the Counts of Caltabellotta in Sicily (1370-1374); and, finally, the grandson of the illustrious Don Alfonso Fadrique of Aragon, Luis Fadrique, “the last Count of Salona” (Vicar General from April of 1375 to the year 1381, he died in 1382).5. It should be observed, further, that the history of the half dozen years from 1354 to 1360 is very confused. We shall, doubtless, never know its details with any considerable degree of accuracy. Apparently four persons were appointed Vicars General in rapid succession — Roger de Lluria (?), Ramon Bernardi, James Fadrique of Aragon, and Gonsalvo Ximenes de Arenos.® Conditions in the Catalan duchies must have been close to anarchy, for many rulers is generally evidence of little rule.
The decade of the 1360’s was the most troubled and critical period in the history of he Catalan rule in Greece. In 1359 Matteo de Moncada, third Count of Agosta and scion of one of the noblest Catalan families in Sicily, became Vicar General of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras. After the Alagé and the Peralta, the Moncada were probably the most 5 This chronology is based upon Rubié y Lluch’s best studies on the history of Catalan Greece: ““Atenes en temps dels Catalans,” Anuari de l Institut d’ Estudis Catalans, any 1 (Barcelona, 1907), pp. 225~254; “Els Castells catalans de la Grécia continental,” sid., any 11 (1908), pp. 364-425; and, more
especially, “Els Governs de Matheu de Moncada i Roger de Lluria en la Grécia catalana (13591370),” sbid., any Iv (1911-1912), pp. 3-58; “La Grécia catalana des de la mort de Roger de Lluria fins a la de Frederic III de Sicilia (1370-1377),” sdid., any v (1913-1914), pp. 393-485; and “La Grécia catalana des de la mort de Frederic III fins a la invasié navarresa (1377-1379), ibid., any vi (1915-1919-20), pp. 127-199. Most of the relevant Sicilian documents were printed, from Rubid’s transcriptions, by Sp. P. Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v (from the Archives of Palermo). The chronological facts to be learned from these documents have been conveniently summarized by Rubié in the very valuable prosopography which he appended to his little monograph on La Poblacié de la Grécia catalana (1933), pp. 35~59, where other documents are cited with references to Rubid’s Diplomatari de lV’Orient Catala (abbr. DOC),the appearance of which was most unfortunately delayed by the war. Hopf, Chroniques (1873), p. 475, gives a list which requires revision of the Vicars General of the duchy of Athens during the whole period of Catalan domination: the similar lists in Gregorovius, 11 (1889), 448-449; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), 454-455; and G. Constantinides (1894), p. 538, are also inaccurate. For the names of the Vicars General and the periods of their tenure the safest guide is R. J. Loenertz, “Athenes et Néopatras,” Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, XXV (1955), 157. 6 On Gonsalvo Ximenes de Arenos, note three documents published by Lampros, Eggrapha (1906),
pt. Iv, nos. 8 (p. 239), 86 (p. 332), and 87 (p. 334). Rubié y Lluch, 4x. Instit. Cat., any v (19131914), p. 407. (DOC, nos. cCLXXV-CCLXXVI.)
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule 55 important family of Catalan origin in the island of Sicily.?./ Moncada’s nominal and incompetent rule only increased the disorder and confusion already rife in the duchies at the time of his appointment (1359-1361). We know little of the history of these years. Nevertheless, several documents have come down to us from the first vicariate of Moncada.*° When the Vicar returned to Sicily, he appointed a lieutenant, as was customary, to rule in his name until the King made some further disposition of his post (1361). The King, as we shall see, re-appointed Moncada (13631366). Moncada’s choice of successor, at the time of his departure, was as unhappy as his own attempt to rule the duchies had been ineffective, for he entrusted his command to Pedro de Pou, a Catalan noble resident in
Thebes, whose tyranny and usurpations quickly provoked the chief feudatories of the duchy of Athens to revolt (1361-1362). Pedro de Pou expelled James Fadrique of Aragon, former Vicar General of the duchies (1356-1359), and the Fadrique family from the castles of
Salona, Loidoriki, and Veteranitza. He also seized the sum of 5,000 hyperperi (perpari) which belonged to James Fadrique. The King’s command to restore to Fadrique his castles and his cash, Pedro de Pou absolutely refused to obey (fotaliter recusavit).2 Pou was apparently something of an upstart, even if of noble birth, and was clearly determined to make the most of the opportunities which rule in the Catalan states now gave him. He was not a judge in the duchy of Athens, as has been erroneously assumed, nor was he lord of Carditza and Atalandi, as had been thought after Gregorovius confused him with Pedro de Puigpardines. How he won the confidence of Moncada 1s not known. To these injustices Pou added, in his effort to establish his authority, the folly of attacking the Marshal Roger de Lluria, one of the strongest 7 Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any 1 (1911-1912), pp. 6-7. 8 See the documents in Rubio y Lluch’s DOC, nos. CCXLI ff., and the analyses provided in Loenertz’s study of ‘“Athénes et Néopatras,”"Arch. FF. Praed., XXV, 157, and ibid., XXVIII (1958), 59—60.
° Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. Iv, doc. 95 (pp. 343-344). James’ possessions in the duchy of Athens were later claimed by his brother Boniface Fadrique of Aragon: “idem nobilis Jaymus dum viveret cesserit eidem bonifacio omnia bona sua atque jura, que habebat et habere possit 1n futurum in eodem ducatu Athenarum... ” (Joc. cit., p. 344). At any rate Boniface was granted the turris que dicitur Giffina (or Gittina) posita in eodem ducatu (Athenarum), in Catalan /a torre de Gittina, formerly the property of Pedro de Pou, in lieu of the 5,000 hyperperi which Pedro de Pou had not returned at his death, and which the King recognized as his property (Joc. cit., p. 344, and Rubié y Lluch, dn. Instit. Cat., v, pp. 18-19; La Poblacié .. . [1933], Apén., p. 41). Luis Fadrique, of course, succeeded his father James as Count of Salona, and in his other possessions, upon the latter’s death in 1365. K. Hopf, T. D. Neroutsos, and Wm. Miller have all identified the turris Giffina or Gittina with Zeltounion (Lamia), also called Gipton or Gyptona by the Franks. This is an inaccurate identification (cf. Rubié y Lluch, 4. Instit. Cat., 11 [1908], 395-396), which Miller, who had not studied Rubié’s later work very well, still holds to, it would seem, in his Essays on the Latin Orient, 1921, p. 157. Neroutsos and Miller have followed Hopf (e.g. Ersch u. Gruber’s Encyklopadie, vol. 85, p. 438).
56 Catalan Domination of Athens men in the duchy. A cabal was formed against Moncada’s successor; at its head was Roger de Lluria; he was supported by the less energetic
James Fadrique. After a period of mounting tension a bloody encounter took place between the opposing factions in Thebes, the administrative center of the duchy, and Pedro de Pou, his wife Angelina, and a large number of his followers, including a canon and the dean of the Theban minster, were killed by Lluria and his partisans (1362)."° In the turmoil that followed Pou’s death the government of the duchies fell to Roger de Lluria and James Fadrique. Fadrique served as Viceregent in 1365.11 Roger de Lluria, however, was the actual ruler of the
duchy of Athens and that of Neopatras, without any question, from 1362 until his death in 1370. The authority which he exercised from 1363 to 1366 was, in a sense, usurped from Matteo de Moncada, whom Frederick III of Sicily had re-appointed Vicar General in the summer of 1363.
But the Catalan states in Greece were completely isolated from the Sicilian court during these years. Lluria seems to have been bitterly estranged from the King. Moncada was in Sicily, and he apparently never returned to Greece. Roger de Lluria appears in royal documents of the years 1365-1366 as Vicar General, but his exact status 1s, for obvious reasons, difficult to determine. In a recently published resolution of the Venetian Senate, dated 25 July, 1365, to which we shall return shortly, he is referred to as “‘Marshal and Vicar General of the Corporation of the Duchy of Athens” (mareschalchus et vicarius generalis untversitatis Ducatus Athenarum). In documents dated 18 March, 16 and 23-24 September, 1366, and in some undated documents of this year, he is called Marshal only.* However, Lluria is also called Vicar General in 10 Rubié y Lluch, 4”. Instit. Cat., any 11 (1908), p. 410, n. 2; Iv (IgII-1912), pp. 15-18, 21-22, 2526; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 132. Cf. Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. tv, doc. 20 (pp. 256-257). The older accounts of events from 1359 to 1366-67, especially of the struggle between Pedro de Pou and Roger de Lluria, are hopelessly inexact and confused (Hopf, Gregorovius, Guardione, Wm. Miller, and the earliest work of Rubié y Lluch). Hopf translates the name Puteus (Pou) erroneously by Puig, and Gregorovius goes wrong in identifying Petrus de Putheo with Pedro de Puigpardines, lord of Carditza and Atalandi, who is important in the later history of the duchies (cf. Rubié, 4. Instit. Cat., any Iv, 1911-1912, pp. 15-16, cf. 17-18, 21-22, 25, 26 n. 3). Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), pp. 18-19. Wm. Miller, Eng. Hist. Reo., xx11 (1907), 519; The Latins in the Levant (1908), p. 297, puts the revolt against Pedro de Pou in 1366 instead of in 1362. On the determination of the date (1361-1362), see, infra, the last note in the present chapter. (DOC, no. CCXC.) 1 Cf, Lampros, Eggr., pt. rv, doc. 60 (pp. 302-303). 12 On 24 February, 1365, King Frederick directed James Fadrique to recognize Moncada and cooperate with him in the latter’s capacity of “Vicar and Vice-regent” (Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1v, doc. 60). Moncada’s second appointment was already eighteen months old at this time; there is no evidence that he ever arrived to take over his command. (DOC,no. CCLVII.)Note also DOC, no. CCLX. 18 Misti, vol. xxx1, fol. 104v, published by Sp. M. Theotokes, in ’Ezernpis ‘Eratpelas BuSavrivay Lrovbav, vil (1931), p. 203. (DOC, no. CCLVMIL.) “ Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1v, docs. 41 (p. 279); 43 (p. 281); 85 (p. 331); 88 (p. 335)s 93 (P. 341); and ror (p. 350), but see the articles by Loenertz, Arch. FF. Praed., vols. XXV, XXVIII.
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule $7 documents dated on 3 August and 5 October of the same year." In a document dated on 10 March, 1367, Lluria is called Vicar General and Marshal,’ but he seems not to have officially replaced Moncada until 14 May, 1367, when King Frederick finally reconciled himself to accepting the inevitable.” For a moment we must pass to the larger scene of Levantine history
and take some note of the relations of the Greek Emperor with the Turks, for the repercussions of events in Byzantium and the Turkish emirates in Asia Minor were sometimes felt in Athens and in Thebes. The Turkish chieftain Orchan, the successor of the mysterious Othman, hav-
ing assisted John Cantacuzenus to the Byzantine throne, and having married his daughter in recompense of great services rendered on that occasion, had later sent twenty thousand Ottoman warriors into Macedonia
to aid Cantacuzenus against the menace of the great Stephen Dushan and his Serbian followers. Orchan helped John Cantacuzenus, too, in his struggle against his young co-emperor, John V Palaeologus, and sold his services at a high profit to the Genoese in their war with the Serenissima. The middle of the sixth decade of the century, however, brought the Turks across the straits of Gallipoli as the enemies, no longer the allies, of both the Greeks and the Latins, and the crescent began to cast a dismal
shadow upon the cross. In 1363 the Emir Murad I, the second successor of Othman, became the suzerain of the Greek Emperor.1® Murad was
15 [did., docs. 89 (p. 335); 9 (p. 240); and 84 (p. 330). : 16 Tbid., doc. 46 (p. 282).
17 The royal letter of commission is given in Lampros, Eggr., pt. tv, doc. 47 (pp. 283-285), and cf. doc. 83 (pp. 328-329). Note also, op. cit., doc. 19 (which ratifies grants and concessions made to Roger de Lluria by Frederick III and his predecessors as Dukes of Athens), doc. 20 (which absolves Roger de Lluria and his partisans of responsibility for their crimes and violence in the revolt in Thebes in 1362 against Pedro de Pou, successor of Matteo de Moncada), and doc. 21 (which confirms to Roger and his heirs forever possession of Estir [Stiris] and Mathocyn [Metochion]). From May of 1367 on, Lluria is regularly addressed or referred to as Vicar General (sdid., docs. 19-21, 66, 69, 703 14, 15, 73). Cf. Rubiéd y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., any 1v (1911-1912), p. 50; La Poblacié de la
Grécia catalana (1933), Apéen., pp. 45, 46; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), pp. 132-133. There were at least four other persons, besides the Marshal, who bore the name Roger de Lluria, one of whom died, before the Marshal, sometime before 13 June, 1367 (Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1v, doc. 70, p. 311). 18 On the historical background of the Turks in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, see W. L. Langer and R. P. Blake, “The Rise of the Ottoman Turks,” American Historical Review, XXXVII (1932), especially pp. 490 et sgg.; and cf. Peter Charanis, “Strife among the Palaeologi and the Ottoman Turks, 1370-1402,” Byzantion, xvi (1942-1943), pp. 286 ef sgq. The “Ottomans” were the warriors and leaders of a Ghazi state and not a distinctive “tribe” (cf. Mekmed Fuad Ko6priilii, Les Origines de l’empire ottomanParis, 1935, and Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, London, 1938). On the meaning of “Ottoman,” cf. Fuad K6prili, op. cit., pp. 10, 14; on the Ghazis, Wittek, Op. cit., pp. 37 et sqq., and Fuad Képriilii, op. cit., pp. 93, 101-107. The Ottomans first met a Byzan-
tine army, protecting the region of Nicaea, in 1301 (Fuad K6prilii, op. cit., p. 124). (In these instructive little monographs Fuad Koprulii refers to the Catalans once and Wittek twice.) Note in general The Cambridge Medieval History, TV—1 (1966), 753 ff., and The Cambridge History of Islam, 1 (1970), 263 ff.
58 Catalan Domination of Athens the first Turkish ruler whose career possesses any direct importance for the history of Thebes and Athens. In the meantime, to return to events in the Athenian duchy, as a result of the seizure of the property of certain residents of Negroponte, possibly involved in Pedro de Pou’s downfall, the Marshal Roger de Lluria had found himself at war with Pietro Gradenigo, Venetian bailie of Negroponte. The war was very much in earnest, and was to last a full three years (1362-1365). In an hour of peril Lluria sought an ally among the Catalans’ former friends, the Turks, to the despair of the Sicilian elements in the duchy and — when the news reached Avignon and Sicily — to the horror of Pope Urban V and King Frederick III. These were the years and these the circumstances in which the Turks first entered Greece in significant force and with the realization that in Greece they might remain if they so wished. In 1361-2 they had occupied the important city of Adrianople, which they made their capital a few years later, in place of
Brusa in Asia Minor. Adrianople was thus to remain the center of Ottoman strength and activity until a greater city fell into Turkish hands
in 1453. But now the Turks were losing no time in descending into Greece, passing through Thermopylae under the shadow of the castle of Boudonitza, which they were to destroy just about half a century later, and encamping in the plains of Boeotia, where many an historic army
had encamped before them. Early in 1363 Roger de Lluria received Turks into the city of Thebes, but they presumably came from the Anatolian emirates. Well might King Frederick lament the presence of the infidel and the stories of the atrocities they were committing in “‘our city
of Thebes, which in these duchies is the head, so to speak, and the mistress” (civitas nostra Thebana, quae in ipsis ducatibus quasi caput est et magistra).!® Just as the Emperor John Cantacuzenus opened up the road
to Europe to the Turk, so did the Catalan Marshal Roger de Lluria open the road to Greece and the Peloponnesus. There were Catalans in the Levant who were fit companions for the Turks.” 19 Rosario Gregorio, Opere rare (1873), pp. 357-358 (document given in note); Considerazioni, 11 (1833), pp. 572-575. (The document is Moncada’s notification of his second appointment as Vicar General, dated at Syracuse on 16 August, 1363.) Libro de los Fechos, 685-686 (ed. Morel-Fatio, p. 151). Rubid y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., any 1v (1911-1912), pp. 30-31; any V (1913-1914), p. 438. 20 Aegean politics were apparently complicated throughout this period by Catalan piracy, in which without doubt the Catalans in Athens had some interest and from which, conceivably, they derived some profit. Thus, in 1359-1360, corsairs under Luke the Catalan ravaged the coasts of Cyprus with two galleys, and “‘seized many Cypriot ships,” whereupon King Peter I de Lusignan of Cyprus sent an indignant mission to Barcelona, to Don Pedro IV of Aragon, “‘and told the King of Aragon about it,” threatening that if he got the corsairs into his hands it would be the end of them (Leontios Makhairas, Chron., chap. 103, ed. R. M. Dawkins, 2 vols., Oxford, 1932, vol. 1, p. 93). The King of Aragon was a cousin of Queen Eleanora of Cyprus (cf. L. M., Chron., chap. 100, ed. Dawkins, 1, p. 89).
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule 59 Archbishop Paulus of Thebes had to abandon his church (he occupied the cathedra from 1357 to 1366): in company with three other notables of the Catalan dominions in Greece the learned Archbishop laid the tale of awful woe in the duchies before King Frederick at his court in Sicily. It was then that the King, in answer to their petition, re-appointed for life Matteo de Moncada, Count of Agosta, and Seneschal of the Kingdom of Sicily (Trinacria), as Vicar General (16 August, 1363). The new Vicar, after giving the municipalities of the Catalan states in Greece his oath to
rule them according to their traditional laws and customs, and after having received for the second time their expression of homage, was to proclaim a general amnesty; he was to occupy the castles and fortress towns of the duchies, to nominate new castellans, veguers, and captains; he was to collect the various feudal revenues, the tolls and rents pertaining to the crown, and use such resources as the King possessed to reestablish law and order in the duchies.” All this he was supposed to do, but he never got to Greece to do It. King Frederick now also made Moncada the grandiose but meaningless
gesture “that he should have the right of conquest of Vonitza and ‘Cathaciae’ and of other towns and villages from Vonitza as far as Arta, provided the cities and towns which lie within the area of conquest, [and] pertain to the royal and ducal dignity and domain, should be reserved for our Majesty.’’ Loenertz suggests that the King must have had an expedition against the Albanians in mind, but since the Catalans seemed hardly able to manage their own affairs, they had no need of seeking additional problems beyond their own borders.” ? Urban V, in the meantime, recoiled in anguish before the alliance of the self-seeking Catalan Marshal and the “profane multitude of infidel Turks”’ which threatened the principality of Achaea from their positions “‘in the city of Thebes and other surrounding districts.”” On 27 June, 1364, his
Holiness directed Pierre de Thomas, Latin Patriarch, Bartolommeo, Archbishop of Patras, and the Lombard lords and the Venetian bailie of Negroponte, to take all necessary measures to protect the Angevin principality in the Morea from conquest and depredation by the Turk. The Pope demanded the restoration of the Theban Archbishop, the return of his property, and the expulsion of the Turks from the territory which 21 His letter of commission, giving the details of Paulus’ embassy, is to be found in Gregorio, Opere
rare (1873), pp. 357-358; Consid., 11 (1833), 572-575. Cf. Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any (1911-1912), p. 32; idid., any V (1913-1914), p. 395. On Paulus himself, see Rubid, idid., any v (1913-1914), pp. 479-480. (Paulus later became Latin Patriarch of Constantinople.) Cf. Giov. Mercati, Simone Atumano, Arcivescovo di Tebe, Rome, 1916, pp. 30-31. (DOC, no. CCLIII.) 22 Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any 11 (1908), p. 382; Iv (1911-1912), p. 33.
73 DOC, no. CCLIV, and Loenertz, Arch. FF. Praed., XXV, no. 69, p. 118, doc. dated 16 August, 1363.
60 Catalan Domination of Athens they held in the duchies.7* On 10 July Urban named Pierre de Thomas eastern legate, with the power to authorize preaching of the crusade in wide areas of Europe and the Levant, including Athens, Thebes, and
Neopatras.** In December (1363) Urban had already relaxed, for three years, the interdict and sentences of excommunication — we have noted his indulgence in another place — recalling that papal bans had been mtermittently directed against the Catalan Company in Greece for more than thirty years.’® The Frankish and Greek rulers of the Morea, most notably the Angevin
bailie of the principality of Achaea and the Cantacuzene Despot of Mistra, were joined by the Venetians and Hospitallers in an alliance against the Turks. For once the Greeks preferred the tiara to the turban.
The Turks were defeated in a naval battle off Megara, the southern border of the Catalan duchy of Athens, in the early summer of 1364; they lost thirty-five ships, and Turkish land forces sought refuge in Thebes under the protection of Roger de Lluria.2”. But while Lluria might ally himself with the Turks so long as they were strong and unbeaten, he seems to have acquired religious sensibilities when it came to continuing
his alliance with them after their defeat off the Megarian coast. Peace with Venice had now become more valuable to him than his pact with the
Turkish rulers, and so later in the year 1364 Lluria negotiated an armistice with Domenico Michieli, the Venetian bailie of Negroponte.” Almost a year later, on 25 July, 1365, the Venetian Signoria acted upon the petition and proposals presented to them by Lluria’s envoy. When Lluria sought from the Republic renewed confirmation of a “‘peace and truce” which Niccolo Pisani, Venetian Captain General of the Sea, had negotiated, for a period of twenty years, ‘‘with the said Corporation [uziversitas| of Athens,” the senatorial advisers of the Republic recalled that other truces had been made since then and broken by the Catalans, but it was agreed that the truce which the Venetian bailie of Negroponte had *% Odorico Rinaldi, Annales ecclesiastici ab anno 1198, ad annum 1364 (vol. vir [1752], p. 108); Rubiéd y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., any 1v (1911-1912), pp. 33-34; Lettres secrétes et curiales du pape Urbain V se rapportant a la France, ed. Paul Lecacheux, fasc. 11 (1906), nos 1046-1050 (p. 163). % “Dépouillement .. . de l’Orbis Christianus de Henri de Suarez,” Archives de l’Orient latin, vol. 1 (Paris, 1881), doc. cL1 (pp. 284-285); cf. N. lorga, Philippe de Méziéres et la croisade au XIV® siécle, Paris, 1896 p. 273. On the Latin Patriarch Pierre de Thomas, see A. S. Atiya, Crusade (1938), pp. 129 et. Sqq.
** Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1, doc. 43 (pp. 80-82). Cf. Rubid y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., any Iv (1911-1912), p. 34. 27 Libro de los fechos, 685-686 (ed. Morel-Fatio, p. 151). Rubiéd y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 1v (191 I-
1912), pp. 34-35; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), pp. 132-133; D. A. Zakythinos, Le Despotat gree de Morée, 1 (1932), pp. 108-109.
8 Rubié y Lluch, 4m. Instit. Cat., rv (1911-1912), pp. 35, n. 1; 36. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 16. The Turks in question doubtless came from the emirates in Asia Minor.
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule 61 just made with them should be observed for two years (article 1). The Venetians, however, disallowed a claim for 6,000 hyperperi made by Roger de Lluria against the property of Pietro Gradenigo, formerly bailie of Negroponte (1362-1364), because “‘before the proper time he broke the truces and pacts which he had madewith the said Company [universitas]and made’ war against it, causing it many losses and injuries, contrary to God
and justice, notwithstanding the fact that the Company had sent its ambassadors to Gradenigo to effect a peace”: but the Signoria knew, by letters both from Gradenigo and from others worthy of credence, that Gradenigo had acted justly: the Catalans had been the first to break the truces, and had inflicted many injuries and losses upon the bailie and Venetian citizens in Negroponte (2-4). To Lluria’s plea that the then bailie, Domenico Michieli (1364-1366), should return to the Company the many serfs who had escaped to Negroponte during the period of hostilities, and who had been granted freedom and other privileges by Gradenigo, the answer was given that the senatorial advisers were badly informed on this matter, but the Company could have recourse to the bailie, who could be depended upon to do what justice required (5). Roger de Lluria appealed from a petition lodged by Michieli for restitution of 2,000 florins, the
value of the goods of a certain Pietro de Bernardo, a Venetian merchant, who had died at Vostitza. Whatever the circumstances of Bernardo’s
loss, the Signoria held the Catalans responsible, and either Roger de Lluria or the Company was to be bound to the payment or restitution of the 2,000 florins (6). To the petition of the Company that it be allowed to
sell its goods freely (in Negroponte), and that a maximum price set on wine, apparently, by Venetian authorities in the past, should be removed so that the Catalans might sell their wine for any price they could get, the reply was, again, that information was not available in Venice to render any decision on these matters: the Company could present its case to the bailie in Negroponte, and, so long as the Catalans did as they should, there was no doubt in Venice, it was asserted, but that justice and fair practice would be observed in the Venetian colony in Greece (7-8). Finally, the Company’s petition for the right to maintain armed vessels “for offense and defense against its enemies” was met by the Signoria’s firm refusal to alter in this respect the truce just struck between the Venetian bailie and the Catalan Company, which, like all such agreements since 1319, had forbidden the Catalans in the Athenian duchy to maintain armed vessels in the Aegean (9).?® Peace was thus restored. Letters patent, moreover, had already arrived from King Frederick III 29 Senatorial Misti, vol. XXXI, fol. 104v, document dated 25 July, 1365, and published by Sp. M. Theotokes, “Embassy of Roger de Lluria to the Venetian Senate” (in Greek), ’Ewernpis ‘Eratpelas Butarvrwav Zrovsav, VIII (1931), 200-205 (text on pp. 203-205). (DOC, no. CCLVIII.)
62 Catalan Domination of Athens in Sicily ordering James Fadrique of Aragon to turn over to the new Vicar
General the disputed castles of Livadia, Neopatras, and Siderocastron (24 February, 1365),° and similar commands to recognize the authority of the royal Vicar were sent to Ermengol de Novelles, Guillem Fuster, and the recalcitrant Marshal de Lluria.*! It was the Marshal de Lluria, who had admitted the Turks into Thebes
two years before, upon whom the task now fell to expel them; and his struggle, even the hostile Sicilian faction in the duchies had to acknowledge, was a valiant one. Finally, at the cost of much bloodshed, Lluria was able to undo what he had done, and the Anatolian troops were driven from the shelter of the ancient Cadmea.” Thus, by the end of July of 1365, after almost a half dozen years of anarchy, the political life of the duchies returned to some semblance of order. The Turks had been expelled from Thebes; peace with the Venetians of Negroponte had been restored; and the way was now open to the Catalan feudatories, especially Roger de Lluria himself, to reconciliation with their sovereign in Sicily. A thorough reorganization of the administrative and ecclesiastical life of
the duchies was desperately needed. Numerous appointments now had to be made, and in the exercise of his rights herein the almost meaningless character of the King’s prerogative was most unhappily revealed.* The feudal oligarchy which had taken over the Athenian duchy, detached it from the Sicilian crown, admitted the Turks into Boeotia, and abetted their attacks upon the Angevin principality in the Morea — for Roger de Lluria was surely not alone — and then in its own self-interest found again its loyalty, and drove out the Turks — this clique was rewarded by the helpless King, in distant Sicily, with lands and with positions. Such was the background, apparently, of King Frederick’s grant, on 6 June, 1366, to William Fadrique of Aragon, fifth son of the great Don Alfonso Fadrique, of the lordship of Estir (Stiris),*4 while later in the same year (on 16 September) the King also granted him, for life, the castellany, vigeriate, and captaincy, with the customary right of jurisdiction in criminal cases (cum cognicione causarum criminalium), of the important stronghold of Livadia.® Numerous other grants, similar if less important, had to be made. More than a score of documents — indeed, more than thirty documents 30 Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. tv, doc. 60 (pp. 302-303). His Majesty had just learned that his previous letter to James Fadrique had been accidentally lost (quas didicimus casualiter fore amissas). 31 Rubié y Lluch, 4. Instit. Cat., tv (1911-1912), p. 36; DOC, no. CCLVII. 32 Rubid y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., 1v (1911-1912), p. 373 Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 133. 3 Cf. Rubid y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 1 (1911-1912), pp. 37-38, 46. * Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 97 (pp. 345-346); DOC, no. CCLXV1. * Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 42 (pp. 279-280); DOC, no. CCLX XII.
The Middle Years of Catalan Rule 63 as Lampros has divided them — are extant, from the Palermitan chancery, which relate to the administrative reconstruction of this period. Athens and Thebes had been pretty much cut off from Sicily since July 1361. Much had to be done. King Frederick Ili had already tried to do what he could, too, to right some of the many wrongs perpetrated during the tyranny of Pedro de Pou which had provoked the virtual rebellion of
Lluria in the first place. Thus, at this time (on 28 May, 1362), the King granted a certain Berenguer Soler (Belingerius Soleri), a procurator of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Corinth, castellan of the stronghold of Veteranitza, and a faithful citizen of Thebes, the restitution of various properties, of which he had been dispossessed by Pedro de Pou, to whom, however, a chancery clerk still applies the common formula “our faithful citizen of Thebes” (petrus de puteo civis thebarum fidelis noster).%°
At the beginning of the year 1367 the inhabitants of the duchies could finally meet in their town councils — on some of which, as in Neopatras and in Athens, Greeks served — and seek, in their turn, to make provision for better government, now that the state seemed to have been rescued from its peril and period of crisis. A general assembly at Thebes thus prepared a petition to be presented to King Frederick III in Sicily by John de Bonacolsis of Mantua and Francisco de Cremona,
both distinguished residents of the Catalan states in Greece. This petition, which Rubio y Lluch has called the Articles of Thebes (Capitols de Tebes), contains four requests which display at the same time an in-
terest in the welfare of the Catalan communities in Greece and in the welfare of the Marshal de Lluria. The first article in the petition relates to the castles of Livadia, Neopatras, and Siderocastron — after the Athenian Acropolis itself, these were the most important strongholds under the King’s jurisdiction — upon the administration of which the Crown and the Catalan municipalities in Greece, as we have noted, had been in disagreement. Siderocastron was especially important, now that the Turk was a danger in the north; indeed, the fortress is referred to in the Articles of Thebes as the “‘key to the duchy of Athens” (clavis Athena-
rum ducatus). Roger de Lluria was thus, very naturally, opposed to its continued occupation by the young Don Luis Fadrique, now his sole rival in the duchy, as a result of the prestige which Don Luis’ half-royal lineage
gave him. The King, however, refused the petition to deprive Don Luis of Siderocastron, recalling that the latter’s father, James Fadrique of Aragon, had taken it by force of arms, about a decade before, from the rebel Ermengol de Novelles, and the Crown was satisfied with his main6 Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. IV, docs. 1—3, 5—7 (pp. 233—238), and DOC, nos. CCC—
CCCVI, all misdaied 1368. Pedro de Pou was still alive when the documents were issued, on which see Loenertz, Arch. FF. Praed., XXV, 114—17, 157, 194. At least twenty documents are misdated in Rubio y Lluch’s DOC.
64 Catalan Domination of Athens tenance and administration of the fortress. The King also insisted upon
his ultimate right to make appointments to commands in the other fortresses, although the castles of Livadia and Neopatras were “to be held and to remain in the custody of the aforesaid municipalities ... at his royal Majesty’s good pleasure.”’
The other articles sought to adjust the relations of Lluria with his predecessor Moncada and with the Sicilian court, demanded a general amnesty for those who had taken part in the late uprisings, and finally requested that the property of the deceased Pedro de Pou be confiscated for the benefit of Roger de Lluria, as indemnity for the losses he had suffered under Pou. The Articles of Thebes were composed on 2 January in the year of the Incarnation 1366 (i.e. 1367); they were presented to the King by Lluria’s envoy Francisco de Cremona, and ratified by his Majesty at Messina on 18 May, 1367.37 The King and his subjects in Greece had been reconciled. There followed a few years of uneasy peace in the troubled history of Catalan Athens. 37 The royal responses, given on 18 May, 1367, to the petition (dated at Thebes on 2 January, 1367) are printed from a document in the Archivio di Stato di Palermo, Regia Cancelleria, reg. 9, fol. 107, by Francesco Guardione, Sul dominio dei ducati di Atene e Neopatria dei re di Sicilia, Palermo, 1895, pp.
21-24. This is a most important document. It refers Matteo de Moncada’s authorization of the lieutenancy of Pedro de Pou, and so his acts, to 17 June, of the fourteenth indiction . . . xvii Funii, xitit indictionis ... (Guardione, op. cit., p. 24), and thus places the fact and so the events of his tyranny in the year 1361. The indiction may, for the reader’s convenience, be reckoned in the customary manner: the year 1361 minus 312 (the first indictional year) equals 1049; 1049 divided by 15 (the
indictional cycle) equals 69, with a remainder of 14, and so the fourteenth indiction (by Roman reckoning). The indictional number of the year may be tested by adding 3 to the year in question (1361 plus 3 equals 1364), and dividing the result (1364) by 15: the remainder is the number of the indiction (i.e. 14). The year 1366 (i.e. 1367), which Karl Hopf, Wm. Miller, and others, have taken to be the date of Pedro de Pou’s tyranny, belongs — as the document of 2 January indicates — to the fifth indiction ... anno dominice Incarnationis millesimo trecentesimo sexagesimo sexto, secundo FJanuarii, quinte indictionis .. . (Guardione, op. cit., p. 21). The months of January and February, as commonly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, followed December (the new year began with March); but in our calendar January begins the new year, and so the document dated 2 January, 1366, we refer to the year 1367 (and its indiction may be tested: 1367 minus 312 equals 1055; 1055 divided by 15 equals 70, with a remainder of 5, which is the indiction). Notarial instruments of the sort we are here concerned with form the chief class of documents still dated by indictions in the four-
teenth century (in southern Italy the indiction was employed until the beginning of the sixteenth century). Rarely, as in the present instance, the indiction is valuable, but there would have been no problem at all if the notary had been content to record the date as 1361 instead of having recourse to an esoteric art to record a simple date (and Hopf and Miller would probably have been spared their
distortions of events in the Athenian duchy in the 1360’s). On the indiction, see H. Grotefend, Zeitrechnung, vol. 1 (Hanover, 1891), pp. 92 e¢ sgq., and for the historical considerations here involved, see Rubié y Lluch, dn. Instit. Cat., any 11 (1908), p. 381; 1v (1911-1912), pp. 17, 26 (where n. 3 col-
lects the evidence for the year 1362 as that of the death of Pedro de Pou, etc.), 50-52; any v (19131914), PP. 452-453; and any vi (1915-1920), p. 137. The Articles of Thebes are also referred to, capitula data Thebis sub sigillo beati Georgi, in a document dated at Messina on 16 May, 1367, in Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 20 (p. 256). (DOC, nos. CCLXXXIX—CCXCI.)
CHAPTER FIvE
THE FORTUNES OF THE FLORENTINES IN GREECE AND THE MISFORTUNES OF THE CATALANS “TOWARDS the end of the sixth decade of the century, although the Catalans could have no inkling of their ultimate peril, an enemy appeared in Corinth who, a generation later, was to cause the downfall of the Cata-
lan state. Turkish pirates became much bolder and more active in the Gulf of Corinth, and the considerable power of the Byzantine despotat of
Mistra (Sparta) stirred in the Frankish barons of Achaea grave apprehensions as to their future. For over thirty years (1348-1380), Manuel Cantacuzenus, second son of the imperial usurper John VI and one of the greatest Greek soldiers and administrators of the fourteenth century,! was despot of Mistra, where he successfully maintained himself, after his
father’s fall, against the latter’s co-ruler, rival, and successor, John V Palaeologus (1341-1391). At the beginning of the 1340’s John VI Cantacuzenus, still the grand domestic, had entertained high hopes of Byzantine power in the Morea: “If with God’s help,” he once told an imperial council, ‘“we may be able to join to us the Latins in the Peloponnesus, the Catalans in Attica and Boeotia will perforce be obliged to join
us whether they wish it or not.”? But the great days of Cantacuzene power and confidence had passed, and now the Catalans under their new Vicar General, Roger de Lluria, were a source of concern and anxiety to
Manuel Cantacuzenus. The Moreote barons and the Latin natives of Corinth received, however, an able protector against the Catalans, the Turks, and the Greeks when, in 1358, Robert II, son of the titular Latin Empress Catherine of Valois (d. 1346), granted the town of Corinth and its impregnable citadel (civitas et tota castellania Corinthii), which brought with it eight other fiefs, to the distinguished banker and courtier Niccolo Acciajuoli, grand Seneschal of the kingdom of Sicily (southern Italy), Count of Malta and Gozo.’ 1 Demetrius Cydonius’ letter in praise of Manuel Cantacuzenus is famous: Ep. 20, ed. J. Fr. Boissonade, Anecdota nova, Paris, 1844, pp. 294-295; Démétrius Cydonés: Correspondance, ed. Giuseppe Cammelli, Paris, 1930, ep. 85 (p. 149); ep. § in Cammelli’s edition was clearly not addressed to Manuel (P. Charanis, Byzantion, xvi [1942-43], 308); but on Manuel’s brother Matthew, who succeeded him (1380-1383), see, idid., ep. 29 (pp. 78-79, 158, 206-207). Denis A. Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée (1262-1460), Paris, 1932, pp. 95 et sgg. Cf. K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 449-450. 2 John Cantacuzenus, Hist., 111, 12 (Bonn, 11, 80; Pasr. gr., cLi11, col. 769D, and cf. Georg Ostrogorsky, Gesch. d. byzant. Staates, [Munich, 1940], pp. 366-367); idid., 1v, 13 (Bonn, 111, 90); and Rubidé y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., any 1v (1911-1912), p. 35.
3For the Angevin and Acciajuoli holdings in the Morea (in 1377?), see A. T. Luttrell, in the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, LI (1958), 355-56, and ibid., LVII (1964), 340-45, and cf. Hopf, Chroniques (1873), p. 229.
66 Catalan Domination of Athens The Acciajuoli fortune is said to have been founded by a Brescian ironworker Gugliarello, who settled in Florence about 1160, where he established a foundry for the manufacture of steel (acciaio), whence the family
derived its name. Throughout the thirteenth century the wealth of the family increased enormously; unlike the Lycurgus of Spartan legend, however, they preferred gold to iron, and turned to banking; by the first decade of the fourteenth century their fame and their fortunes rivalled those of the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Frescobaldi. They were Guelfs, and through the period of the Avignonese papacy they handled, apparently at great profit to themselves, papal funds throughout the whole of western Europe and the Mediterranean. The regesta of the Avignonese popes, now available to us in the splendid series edited by MM. A. Coulon, G.
Mollat, G. Daumet, E. Déprez, J.-M. Vidal, and others (under the auspices of the Bibliothégue des écoles frangaises d’ Athénes et de Rome), fairly
abound in references to the activities of the Acciajuoli throughout most
of the fourteenth century. It was the Guelf connection, too, which brought the Acciajuoli into close relations with the court of Robert, King of Naples and Count of Provence, and, by virtue of his latter title, lord of
Avignon (the city was purchased by Pope Clement VI from Robert’s granddaughter, Queen Joanna I of Naples, on 12 June, 1348, for “‘the absurdly insignificant sum of 80,000 gold florins’’).4 Aprincely future loomed before this family of bourgeois bankers when young Niccolo Acciajuoll was sent by his father to Naples in 1331, where his charm of manner and his ability eventually won him the attention of the Empress, Catherine of Valois, and thereafter, it has been wrongly alleged, her love. With Niccolo’s rise to greatness in the 1330’s and 1340's we are not concerned. The Acciajuoli had already come to possess, however, extensive holdings in
the Morea when Niccolo became lord of Corinth (23 April, 1358); so that now his rule embraced much of the territory between the foothills of Mt. Cyllene and the Troezenian coast.’ He spent a fortune, as he had p. 229. As his feudal charge for the islands of Malta and Gozo, granted to him on 30 March, 1357, Niccolé was to render the crown of Sicily (Naples), on the feast of Pentecost of each year, the feudal “service of one black slave, dressed in red, and bathed on the night before...” (document in J. A. Buchon, Nouvelles recherches historiques sur la principauté francaise de Morée et ses hautes baronnies, vol. II, pt. 1, Paris, 1843, Florence: no. XxIv, p. 140). 4 On the sale of Avignon to the papacy, cf. Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the
Middle Ages, trans. Annie Hamilton, vol. v1, pt. 1 (1906), pp. 334-335. For the part played by Niccold Acciajuoli in the sale of Avignon, see the document published in E. -G. Léonard, La Jeunesse de ‘feanne Premiére, vol. 11 (1932), no. 52 (pp. 455-458). Joanna, of course, later regretted the sale and sought, after Clement’s death to recover Avignon (cf. Léonard, vol. 11, docs. LxxI-LxxII, pp. 489490). The papacy held Avignon until 1791. 5 J. A. Buchon, Nouvelles recherches historiques, vol. 11, pt. 1 (1843), Florence, doc. xxv (pp. 145, 147-153). In the interests of Niccolé, Robert also annulled all previous grants that had been made
Fortunes of the Florentines and Misfortunes of the Catalans 67 been expected to do, upon the Isthmian defenses of the Frankish principality in the Morea. Niccolé died on 8 November, 1365, a year after to others in the castellany of Corinth (doc. xxv1); granted a remission of taxes to Niccold’s new Corinthian vassals and retainers, a guibus nulla possit pecunie quantitas exhigi vel haberi (doc. xxv); forced peasants and others who had left their homes in Corinth and Niccold’s other holdings, preterit turbati condicio temporis et guerrarum strepitus dantes causam, to return to their former habitations (doc. xxviir); and, finally, required of Niccold, for the latter’s holdings in the Morea, feudal service only in imperilled Corinth, but not elsewhere, feudale servicium ... prestandum fore providimus in dicta castellania Corinthii et non alibi (doc. xx1x). Cf. Karl Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 454 ef sqg. (who gives precise references to the older literature — Ubaldini [on whom see below], Ammirato, Gaddi, della Marra, Litta); Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), 141-142; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 270-272, 285-287; Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., any 1v (1911-1912), pp. 3-5; any V (1913-1914), 459-460. With the observation that “in Nicold Acciaiuoli tritt uns eine neue Macht im Peloponnes entgegen .. . die Geldmacht,” Ernst Gerland, Neue Quellen zur Geschichte des lateinischen Erzbistums Patras, Leipzig, 1903, pp. 27 et sqq., gives an excellent summary of the political and financial machinations of the Acciajuoli in the Morea and central Greece. There are contemporary (literary) accounts of the great Niccold Acciajuoli by Giovanni Villani, Matteo Villani, and Matteo Palmieri (Palmerius) in L. A. Muratori, Rerum italicarum scriptores, vols. x111-x1v (1728-1729), and in other editions. Valuable also is the essay on E/ Origine della famiglia de gli Acciaioli ei fatti de gli huomini famost d’essain Giambattista Ubaldini, [storia della casa de gli Ubaldini e de’ fatti d’alcuni di quella famiglia, Florence, 1588, pp. 171-181. There is a more modern work by Leopoldo Tanfani, Niccolé Acciatuolt, studi storici fatti principalmente sui documenti dell’ Archivio Fiorentino, Florence, 1863, with an appendix of important documents. On Niccolo, see also E. -G. Léonard, La Jeunesse de Feanne Premtére, Reine de Naples, Comtesse de Provence, vol. 1 (1932), passim, especially pp. 178-187, with refs. and docs. cited; vol. 11 (1932), pp. 78 et sgg., 136 et sgq., etc.; and vol. 111, passim. For Boccaccio’s famous attack on the illustrious Niccold, see Francesco Corazzini, Le lettere edite ed inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Florence, 1877, pp. 131 ef sgqg. Boccaccio believed, or at least wished others to believe, in Niccold’s complicity in the murder of Andrew of Hungary, husband of Joanna I of Naples, in September of 1345 (Eclogae III, VIII): see E. -G. Léonard, Jeanne Premiére, 1, pp. 482, 720, and Léonard’s article, “Nicolas Acciaiuoli, victime de Boccace,” in Mélanges de philologie, d'histoire et de littérature offerts 2 Henri Hauvette, Paris, 1934. Cf. A Sapori, “Lettera di N. Acciaiuoli a N. Soderini,” Archivio storico napoletano, L11 (1927), pp. 346-365. Other documents concerning Niccolo Acciajuoli and other members of his family will be found in J. A. Buchon, Nouo. rech. hist., vol. 11, pt. 1 (1843), cited above, and in Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, eds. Giuseppe Canestrini and Abel Desjardins (Coll. de docs. inédits sur l’histoire de France), 6 vols., Paris, 1859-1886 (of which vol. v1 is an index, where see Acciaiuolt). Much material will be found in the Monuments storici publicati dalla R. Deputazione Veneta di Storia Patria: Documenti: Regesti dei Commemortalt, ed. Riccardo Predelli, 1876 e¢ sgqg., on which and other Venetian sources see Chapter x11. Dipl. Ven. -Levant., ed. G. M. Thomas, vol. 11 (1889), p. 320; Codice diplomatico della citta d’Orvieto . . . ed. Luigi Fumi (Documenti di Storia Italiana, vol. vir), Florence, 1884, pp. 545-546; Documenti sulle Relaziont delle citta Toscane coll’ Oriente Cristiano e coi Turchi, ed. Giuseppe Miller, Florence, 1879, pp. 152-153, 154, 155; and the very important and masterly volumes of the Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzt [7370-1442] per il comune di Firenze dal 1399 al 1433, ed Cesare Guasti (Document di Storia Italiana, vols. 1-111), 3 vols., Florence, 1867-1873, passim (see index in vol. 111, p. 691, under Acciaiuol:). Le Consulte della Republica Fiorentina dall’ anno 1280 al 1298, Florence, 1896~1898, contains some brief
notices of the early Acciaiuoli. Important, too, are the documents edited by L. de Mas Latrie, Meélanges historigues, vol. 111 (1880), in the Coll. de docs. inédits sur l'histoire de France, and by K.N. Sathas, Documents inédits relatifs 2 l'histoire de la Gréce au moyen-dge, Paris, 1880 e¢ sqq., vols. 1-111. We have already noted the study of Ernst Gerland, Neue Quellen zum Erzbistum Patras (1903), and
very frequent reference has been made to Sp. P. Lampros, Documents [Eggrapha] Relating to the Medieval History of the City of Athens (1906), and Rubio y Lluch’s now well-known Diplomatari de l’Orient catala (sometimes abbreviated in this book as DOC) contains a few documents dealing with
68 Catalan Domination of Athens his young patron Robert II, in Naples, where his family, headed by his son Angelo, who succeeded him as Grand Seneschal and inherited his most valuable holdings,* remained and, although Angelo’s son Robert, also Grand Seneschal in his day, was the last member of the older branch of the family (he died in 1420), the last of the Acciajuoli survived in Florence until 1834: he was, fittingly enough, also named Niccold. The private archives of the Acciajuoli are today the possession of their collateral descendants, the baronial family of the Ricasoli-Firidolfi, of the castle of Brolio, half way between the city of Siena and the river Arno. The passing of the Grand Seneschal’s own family in Italy, however, did not affect the prominence attained by the family of his cousin, Giacomo Acciajuoli, three of whose sons — Donato, Nerio, and Giovanni — sought
fame and wealth in Greece and found them there. Some months before his death, the great Niccolé had appointed his nephew Donato Acciajuoli vicar of his lands in Achaea and castellan of the fortresses in his Corinthian barony. Thus did the lesser branch of the Acciajuoli first become established in the Morea.’ Giovanni became the Archbishop of Patras (1360-1 363),® one of several members of the Acciajuoli family to attain
to episcopal honors both in the Morea and in Italy. When Angelo Acciajuoli was confirmed in the possession of his father Niccold’s Corinthian fiefs by the new Latin Emperor Philip III,° Donato was summoned to Italy, and Angelo replaced him by his brother Nerio (or Rainerio), to
whom Angelo was heavily in debt.!° It was under Nerio that the house of Acciajuoli attained its height in Greece. The possession of Corinth gave them strength: “‘Coranto sta sopra un monte,” reads the Italian version of the Chronicle of the Morea with eloquent simplicity, “sito in mezo alla compagna mirabilmente.””!! the Acciajuoli. Of great importance for the history of the family in Greece as well as in western Europe, as indicated in the text, is the third series of the regesta of papal correspondence, edited by Coulon, Mollat, Vidal, Daumet, Déprez, Lecacheux, ef a/. (under the auspices of the Bibliotheque des écoles frangaises d’ Athénes et de Rome). Occasional documents are also to be found scattered through other publications. Most of the works mentioned here as sources for the history of the Acciajuoli in Greece and elsewhere in Europe will not be mentioned again in the bibliographical essay (Chapter x11). The numerous references to the Acciajuoli in later writers (such as Vespasiano da Bisticci, Machiavelli, et a/.) are rarely valuable for the history of the family in Greece. 6 J. A. Buchon, Nouvelles recherches historiques, vol. 11, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. xxx11 (p. 203); Buchon prints Niccold’s will as document xxx (op. cit., pp. 161-198). Niccold’s chief monument today is the Certosa, outside of Florence, which he built from “the spoils of Greece,” as Miller has said, and where his body still lies. Cf. Ubaldini (1588), op. cit., pp. 173-1741 J. A. Buchon, 11, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. xxx1 (pp. 198-203); Gregorovius, 11 (1889), 147-148; Hopf, Chroniques (1873), p. 476. 8 Cf. Ernst Gerland, Das lateinische Erzbistum Patras, Leipzig, 1903, pp. 35-38. * Buchon, ny, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. xxx111 (pp. 204-207). 10 Buchon, 11, pt. 1 (1843), pp. 120-122. 1 Cronaca di Morea, ed. Chas. Hopf, Chronigues (1873), p. 423; cf. p. 436.
Fortunes of the Florentines and Misfortunes of the Catalans 69 The Catalans in the meantime had been caught in the renewal of the commercial war between Venice and Genoa (1350-1355). King Pedro IV (III) of Aragon-Catalonia was much vexed by the aid the Genoese had been giving to his rebellious subjects in Sardinia, where in the town of Alghero (4/guer) Catalan is still spoken. Venice was determined to break the commercial power of Genoa in the Levant. Since 1348, the year of the plague, the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus had been virtually at war with the Genoese in Galata and on Chios; a Genoese fleet made an attempt on Constantinople; and John Cantacuzenus looked cautiously for allies among the enemies of Genoa. He was joined, more
heartily than he wished, by the Venetians and Don Pedro IV; the Genoese were thus forced into a Turkish alliance. We are not concerned
with this war as a whole,! but only with an episode in it in which the Catalans in Athens played an important part. On 16 January, 1351, a treaty was signed in the ducal palace in Venice, and ratified by the Doge on 12 September, between the Republic and the King of Aragon “‘for the confusion, destruction, and final extermination of the Genoese.” The agreement was that the Catalan (Aragonese) fleets should harass Genoa in Italy and the western Mediterranean while Venice was to deal with Genoa in the Levant. Pope Clement VI tried in vain to intervene, but in the early summer of 1351 the Venetians pressed the war in earnest under Niccold Pisani, who plundered and burned Galata, the strongly fortified Genoese quarter in Constantinople, and finally, in July, forced the still wavering John Cantacuzenus into the alliance against the Genoese. In the meantime a mighty Genoese fleet, sixty-two ships under the redoubtable Paganino Doria, appeared in the eastern Mediterranean. Doria laid siege to the fortress town of Oreos, a Venetian possession in northern Euboea, whither Pisani
had betaken himself with reckless haste, but whither the Catalans of Athens now despatched to his aid three hundred horse and a large body of foot to hold Oreos against the Genoese. After a two months’ siege, which lasted from 15 August to 20 October, 1351, Doria was forced to withdraw from Euboea, when Pisani received aid from Venice, and when
a strong Catalan fleet under Pons de Catapan (Pong de Santa Pau) also 12 Cf. John Cantacuzenus, Hist., 1v, 30-32 (Bonn, 111, 219-236); 39 (p. 286). Don Pedro IV’s own account may be read in the Crénica del Rey de Aragén D. Pedro IV el Ceremonioso . . . traducida al castellano y anotada por Antonio de Bofarull, Barcelona, 1850, chap. v, pp. 299 et sgg. Cf. Zurita, Anales, v111, 46, vol. 11 (1610), pp. 244v-246v; Ptolemy of Lucca, Vita Innocentit VI,in Vitae paparum Avenionensium, ed. G. Mollat, 1 (1914), p. 344. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 446 et 59¢. 18 Regesti dei Commemoriali, lib. 1v, no. 368 (R. Predelli, 11 [1878], pp. 187-188); 398 (p. 195); cf. nos. 392 and 395 (p. 194); Memorial histérico espanol: Coll. de docs., 11 (Madrid, 1851), pp. 274-286. Cf. Zuritas, Anales, vol. 11 (1610), p. 243v (misnumbered); Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), Pp. 447-
70 Catalan Domination of Athens came to his assistance. The Genoese then plundered Pteleum and ranged like pirates through the Archipelago.“ The Venetians had every intention of prosecuting the war vigorously, and in January of 1352 the Serenissima made an alliance with Pisa (where the Genoese victory at Meloria in 1284 and its cruel aftermath were still
a hated memory). In the following month, on 13 February, 1352, near Constantinople, a bloody but indecisive battle took place when the combined Venetian and Aragonese fleets met the Genoese. It was a costlyencounter; both sides suffered severe loss and both sides claimed the victory. The Aragonese fleet fared the worst. The engagement, if anything, favored the Genoese, for when the Venetian and Aragonese fleets withdrew from ‘the region of the Bosphorus, the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus was obliged to make peace with Paganino Doria (6 May). Thereafter John Cantacuzenus was occupied with the revolt of his son-inlaw John V Palaeologus, who now entered the war, from which only the Turk was likely to profit, with Venetian funds. Rendered desperate by the turn of events John Cantacuzenus had sought papal support, and on 15 March, 1353, Pope Innocent VI wrote him an enthusiastic letter of approval and gratitude for his imperial efforts to effect a union of the Latin and Greek churches," and on the twenty-seventh of the following October urged him to persevere in his God-given task (princeps inclyte, animum robora, fortifica mentem).% In the meantime, on 29 September, Innocent VI, aghast at this bitter warfare between Christians, dispatched a letter to the Genoese Republic, urging that peace
be made with the King of Aragon and with the Venetians.” It was all in vain. When John Palaeologus entered Constantinople, however, towards the end of the year 1354, the political career of Cantacuzenus had run its allotted course; almost thirty years later, in 1383, he died in the humble garb of a monk, in his son’s capital city of Mistra, where
he was buried. In the west, in the meantime, the defeat which the Genoese suffered at Alghero in Sardinia on 29 August, 1354, forced them to submit to Giovanni Visconti, episcopal lord of Milan, and with Milanese money another fleet was equipped, with which, on 4 November, Paganino Doria captured thirty-five Venetian galleys at Zonklon.
This event was long remembered in Venice as not the least disastrous event in the disastrous reign of the Doge Marino Falieri. Nor was Venice 14 Nicephorus Gregoras, xx1, 22 (Bonn, 111, pp. 47 ef sqq.). Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 4473 Rubié y Lluch, 4”. Instit. Cat., any v (1913-1914), p. 410; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), pp. 126-127. % Innocent VI (1352-1362): Lettres closes, patentes et curiales se rapportant @ la France, ed. Eugéne Déprez, fasc. 1 (Paris, 1909), no. 117 (cols. 79~-80).
16 Tbid., no. 240 (cols. 166-168). 7 [bid., no. 225 (cols. 152-153).
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When the Turks came to possess Neopatras, from 1393-1394, however, it
was permanently lost to Nerio and his heirs (it became Patradjik, capital of a Turkish province).?4 The most valuable, indeed the only, source we have for the fall of Athens to Nerio Acciajuoli is a letter preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence: it was written in Patras on g May, 1388, by Jacopo da Prato — possibly a relative of Ludovico da Prato, first Florentine Archbishop of Athens — to Donato Acciajuoli in Florence: ““Most reverend Lord, may
your revered Magnificence know... I arrived in Patras safe and sound, and here I found news that Messer Neri and all his family are well, and on the second day of this month he took the castle of Athens [the Acropolis,
lo chastello di settino|. It is true that in Athens there is a plague [stato] and there is great loss of life from which Messer Neri with all his family has gone away and is staying in Thebes [stive]. Of his people and of his family Pino Cavalcanti is dead and Corso, a young Florentine, who was his manservant, and so, if you will, tell Pino’s parents and Corso’s father
that they are dead....’
The writer of this letter missed an opportunity, could he have but known, to compose, at the cost of an afternoon’s labor, a document of the profoundest interest and the greatest historical importance, but we must be grateful to him, even so, for the hasty note which has thus given us the
precise date of the Florentine occupation of the Acropolis. Had our correspondent been more prolix, had he been able to imagine that Donato Acciajuoli would have been interested, we might have learned the fate of the Catalan garrison on the Acropolis and, above all, that of Don Pedro de Pau. Whether Don Pedro met his death in the siege of the Acropolis,
or saved his life by flight or formal surrender, we do not know.* But % Lampros, Eger., pt. v1, doc. 1 (p. 405). R. Cessi, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, xxxvui (1919), p. 41. * Rubié y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 11 (1908), pp. 411, 413. % Lampros, Eggr., pt. 11, doc. 10 (p. 119). On the plague in question, the fourth in forty years (1348, 1372, 1374, 1388), cf. the Chronicon breve, ad ann. 6896 (1388), appended to Ducas’ Historia byzantina (Bonn, p. 516), and see Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 49. DOC, no. DCXXII. 78 Don Pedro de Pau is mentioned in a document referring to his brother Francisco de Pau, major-
domo of the King, on 5 May, 1392 (doc. not printed in the Dipl. de l’Orient Cat.), from which it seems not unlikely that Don Pedro was able to hand over the Acropolis to the Florentines in a formal capitulation and to return to Catalonia, where, however, he must have lived in obscurity (see Rubid y Lluch, Los Catalanes en Grecia, [1927], p. 259, and Miscel.lania Crexells, [1929], p. 204).
184 Catalan Domination of Athens with his passing from the purview of history the rule of Aragon in Attica came to an end. More than a year before this melancholy climax to the period of Catalan domination, on 26 April, 1387, King John I had himself promised to come
to Greece. Although he should not, perhaps, be regarded as the first European sovereign to express a desire to visit Athens,” King John, “‘true Augustus of Catalan civilization,” had written the officers and syndics of
the city of Athens that they were not to think that he had forgotten such an illustrious part of his Crown as the city of Athens was (tan assenalyat membre com es aquest de nostra Corona), and that with God’s help he would
make the Catalans in Athens a personal visit (personalment visitar), to enliven by his royal presence both the Catalans and all who served them, ‘“‘and those both near and far will know that you are our people and that we are your king, prince, duke, and lord by the grace of God.”*® He informed the stalwart band then holding the Acropolis that he was sending a fleet to relieve the siege of the city, but no such fleet ever arrived in
the harbor of Piraeus. It is fitting, however, that this desire to visit Athens in person, this expression of pride in the city and appreciation of its illustrious name, should come from Don John I, /aimador de la gentilesa, who was to establish at Barcelona in March of 1395 the famous 27 Rubid y Lluch’s oft-repeated declaration that King John of Aragon-Catalonia was the first European monarch to express a desire to visit Athens is not strictly true (or requires, at least, some qualification): King Frederick II of Sicily (d. 1337) had provided in his will, dated 29 March, 1334, that if his son William II, to whom had been given the duchies of Athens and Neopatras, wished to go to
Greece, his elder brother, King Pedro II, was to supply him with twenty armed galleys and 200 knights with pay for a period of three months (for the text, see Archivio storico per la Silicia, vols. 1-111 [1936-1937; 1938], Z/ testamento di Federico II Aragonese, art. 29 [p. 44]). The project came to nothing because of the young Duke’s illness and the confusion in Sicily which followed Frederick IT’s death as a result of the defection and intrigues of the Palizzi. William’s successor, John II of AragonRandazzo, ablest of the children of the great Frederick II, also never saw his Greek dominions, but Zurita declares that in 1344 he sought to raise an army of 600 knights and 4,000 almogavares in Aragon for an expedition to the Levant against the Turks. Count Blasco de Alagona of Mistretta, the guardian of John II’s son and successor, Frederick I of Aragon-Randazzo, urged an expedition to Athens upon his ducal ward in 1349 although his plans also came to nothing. See Zurita, 4males, vii, 39, 82; vit, 36 (vol. 11 [1610], pp. 129, 183, 236); K. Hopf, Ersch and Gruber’s Encyklopdadie der Wissenschaften u. Kiinste, vol. 85 (1867), p. 437 (and Hopf’s references). In his will dated 9 January, 1347 (i.e. 1348), John of Randazzo acknowledged the receipt from the Sicilian royal court of 17,000 ounces of gold ‘for our voyage to Romania,” and in the event that death prohibited his thus going to Greece, he wished the money restored to the treasury if he were deemed liable for it: “Item fatemur recepisse a curia regia pro nostro viagio Romanie uncias auri decem et septem milia que in casu quo viagium ipsum non compleremus morte preveniente eidem curie restitui volumus si ad id de iure tenemur”’ (document published by R. Starrabba, Rivista Sicula, 1 [1869], pp. 456-457). 8 Rubiéd y Lluch, Documents per Historia de la Cultura catalana mig-eval, 11 (Barcelona, 1921), Introd., pp. xvi, xli; Homenaje a Menendez y Pelayo, 11 (Madrid, 1899), p. 110; 4n. Insti. Cat., 1 (1907), p. 250; Los Catalanes en Grecia (1927), p. 150; cf. Misc. Crexells (1929), p. 201. (The letter, dated 26 April, 1387, Rubié cites from Arch. Cr. Aragon, reg. 1751, fol. 51v.) DOC, no. DCVHI.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 185 Focs Florals (founded originaJly at Toulouse, it would appear, in 1323), which having declined with Catalonia were revived in 1859 in the extraordinary renaissance of interest in Catalan letters which began a century ago.2® Don John I of Aragon, the friend of the famous Juan Fernandez de Heredia, was one of the earliest princely humanists in Europe.*° With the fall of the Acropolis some of the Catalans, like the brothers Roger and Antonio de Lluria, took refuge in Sicily.*4_ A few found their
way back to Catalonia and to Aragon. According to Rubio y Lluch, Archbishop Antonio Ballester of Athens apparently lived through the terrible months of the siege and capture of the Castell de Cetines, survived the perils and hazards of war, which may well have included capture by Nerio Acciajuoli, and finally was able to spend the last decade or more of his life in Catalonia (1389-1399). The last appearance of the Athenian Archbishop of which historical record survives was in the Cathedral of Saragossa, on 13 April, 1399, when (Rubio believes) he
placed the crown of three kingdoms upon the head of Don Martin I, last member of the Catalan dynasty which had ruled in Athens as well 28 In 1860 Elisea Lluch de Rubid, wife of the Catalan poet and scholar Joaquin Rubid 1 Ors, was chosen queen of the festival (Reina dels Focs Florals) — Elisea and the brilliant Rubidé were the parents of Don Antonio Rubié y Lluch, by whose superb scholarship, to which the present book owes so much, the history of the Catalans in Greece was not only re-written but actually discovered in over
half a century of research and writing. See C. Porpal y Marqués, “El Sr. D. Joaquin Rubié y Ors: Sus escritos y su apostolado,” in A. Rubiéd y Lluch and C. Porpal y Marqués, Mild y Fontanals y Rubié y Ors, Barcelona, 1919, pp. 83 et sqg. Cf. Diccionario biografico y bibliografico de escritores y artistas catalanes del siglo XIX, by D. Antonio Elias de Molins, Barcelona, 1889, 11, 524 et 59g.; A. Rovira 1 Virgili, Histéria Nacional de Catalunya, vol. v1 (1931), pp. 124-126; Ferran Soldevila, Historia de Catalunya, 1 (1934), p. 386; J. Rafel Carreras, ‘““Estudis biografichs,” Boletin de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona, x1v (1930), 375 et sgg. The focs Florals were interrupted in 1902 by the Spanish authorities, discontinued in 1936 because of the war in Spain and resumed by Catalan exiles in Buenos Aires (1941) and in Mexico (1942): see Full Catala, 11 (June, 1942), passim. During the last few years Catalan poets and publicists have celebrated the ‘focs, in a small way, in various other cities in Central and South America. Rubidé y Ors was the spiritual father of modern Catalan nationalism, which has brought, for two generations, much inspiration and much grief to Catalonia (see Jean Amade, La Renaissance littéraire en Catalogne, Paris, 1924, pp. 460-490). 30 Rubidé y Lluch, “Joan I humanista i el primer periode de |’humanisme catala,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans, x (1917-1918), passim, and numerous references given elsewhere; Ferran Soldevila, Historia de Catalunya, 1 (1934), pp. 384-386. 81 Zurita, 4n. de la Cor. de Aragén, 11 (1610), p. 403v.; cf. Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 11 (Bonn, p. 69); Eugen Darké, ed., L. Chalcocandylae historiarum demonstrationes, 1 (Budapest, 1922), 63: “Some fof the Catalans] returned to Italy, and some remained in Greece until they died... .” 82 Préspero de Bofarull y Mascaré, Los Condes de Barcelona vindicados, y cronologta y genealogia de los reyes de Espafia, 2 vols., Barcelona, 1836, 11, p. 292. On the royal house of Barcelona, domus Aragonie, in qua erant tres corone regie, note doc. no. 400 (dated at Avignon, 19 September, 1325) in Acta Aragonensia, ed. H. Finke, 11 (1908), p. 631; and cf. Muntaner, Cron., chap. 292 (ed. K. Lanz, Chronik des edlen En Ramon Muntaner, Stuttgart, 1844, pp. 532-533, cited by Rubié y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., v (1913-1914), p. 407; tbid., VI (1915-1920), p. 158; Los Catalanes en Grecia (1927), pp. 274-278. On the coronation itself, see Pedro Abarca, Anales, 11(1684), Rey xxvi, cap. 1, no. 8 (pp. 159v-160). Gir.
186 Catalan Domination of Athens as in Aragon.?? But there no longer seems any doubt that it was Archbishop Antonio Blasi who crowned Don Martin. As for Ballester, like
so many other Catalans prominent in the Athens of the fourteenth century, he sank into the deep sea of history, “‘spurlos untergegangen’??? A few families, however, most notably the Fadriques, tried to hold fast
the shreds of Catalan glory in Greece. It had been the death of Don Luis Fadrique, the last Count of Salona, in the late summer of 1382, which, although no one knew it at the time, had really sealed the fate of the Catalan duchies in Greece.** To the hand of his daughter Maria, his heiress, some of the most eligible young notables in Catalonia, Sicily, and Latin Greece had aspired. Nerio Acciajuoli had tried to secure her marriage to his brother-in-law Pietro Saraceno, scion of a Venetian family with large holdings in Negroponte. But the mother of Maria Fadrique was a Byzantine princess, Helena Cantacuzena, who looked with scorn upon these hucksters of war and politics. She betrothed her daughter and the latter’s claims to Salona and Zeitounion to the Serbian Stephen Ducas of Thessaly, and thereby offended both Latins and Greeks. This rebuff, indeed, furnished Nerio Acciajuoli with a pretext for his attacks upon the Catalan duchies. But the widowed Countess of Salona maintained a precarious rule under the shadow of Parnassus for six years after the fall of the Acropolis — hers is a dramatic story — and then lost her
castle, her life, and her much-wooed daughter Maria to the Turkish Sultan Bajazet I (in January of 1394°).* Golubovich suggests that it was Antonio Blasi, Ballester’s titular successor as Archbishop of Athens, who crowned King Martin at Saragossa in April of 1399 (Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra
Santa, v [1927], p. 142, n. 2): as noted above, Loenertz has finally dispelled the illusion of Ballester’s presiding at the coronation of 1399 (Arch. FF. Praed., XXVIII, nos. 231-34, 237,
pp. 78-79). 33 Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), 216.
* On 18 November, 1382, Don Pedro IV wrote the Countess of Salona, Don Luis’ widow, “‘que havem gran desplaer dela mort del noble en lois frederich darago, cosi nostre e marit vostre” (Rubidé y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia, 1886, doc. xxx1, pp. 240-241). The King took the Countess and her daughter Maria, the heiress of Don Luis, under the royal protection, and granted to Maria the castle of Siderocastron under the same terms as her father had held it provided she be married to Bernaduch Dalmau, the son of the Viscount of Rocaberti, Vicar General of the duchies, ¢ en altre manera no volem que hata lo dit castell (doc. cit.). DOC, no. DXXVI. 5 On 20 February, 1394, Nerio Acciajuoli wrote to his brother Donato in Florence: “Inpero che lo gran Turcho e venuto a Salonichi, e a preso per moglie la figlia della donna della Sola, et apresso a preso tutto lo suo paese, e sperasi lui venira pit inanzi” (from the Corrispondenza Acciajoli, in Gregorovius, Sitzungsberichte ... der Akad. zu Miinchen, 11 [1890], 307; Greg.-Lampros, 11 [1904], p. 652). Cf. Rubié y Lluch, Catalunya a Grecia (1906), pp. 64-55; An. Instit. Cat., 11 (1908), 423-425; “Tradicions sobre la caiguda del comtat catala de Salona,” Buél-leti del Centre Excurstonista de Catalunya, XxX (1910), pp. 117-120, 144-150; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 346-347, with his references; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 139. The account of the fall of Salona to the Turks and of the death of Don Luis Fadrique in the Greek Chronicle of Galaxidi, ed. K. N. Sathas, Athens, 1865, p. 206, is only fiction: Don Luis had died a
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Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 187 The Catalan had not been without appreciation of the treasure he had
possessed for three quarters of a century in the city of Athens. Don Pedro IV looked upon the Acropolis as the richest jewel in all the world, the like of which no other king in Christendom could match (lo dit castell sia la pus richa joya qui al mont [sic] sta e tal que entre tots los Reys de cristians envides lo porien fer semblant). Inthe order to his treasurer Pedro de Valls, in which he so describes the Acropolis (dated at Lérida, 11 September, 1380), Don Pedro IV assigned a dozen men at arms, with pay for four months, “‘per guarda del castell de Cetines.”’® The name Acropolis had passed out of use in the west long before the fourteenth century, and except perhaps to the student who met it in an intelligible context in his reading of a Latin classic, if it occurs in a Latin classic, the name Acropolis
was wholly unknown; and it was not restored to use until the time of Ciriaco of Ancona, the founder of modern archaeology, in the middle of the fifteenth century. Don Pedro IV’s precious jewel is regularly called, in Catalan documents, Castell de Cetines; it had been known to the Burgundians of the previous century as the Chéteau de Sethynes: both names are only the obvious corruption, in the typical Latin fashion of the day, of the Greek phrase els ras ’A@qvas, in which the sigma of the article has become the initial letter of the proper name.*” One may be justified in suspecting that Don Pedro was no more impressed by the beauty of the Acropolis, of which Bishop John Boy! of Megara must have told him much in August and early September of 1380, than by its strategic location and its impregnability. But there is, too, an aesthetic ring to Don Pedro’s expression of appreciation of the great fortress of Cimon and Pericles. It is, indeed, as Gregorovius and Rubié y dozen years before the fall of Salona (Rubid, Zos Navarros en Grecia, 1886, doc. xxx1, pp. 240-241). See the account in Laonicus Chalcocondylas, Hist., 11 (Bonn, pp. 67-69), ed. Darké, 1 (1922), 62-63, which seems to be generally accurate, but the proper names have never made good sense (on which see Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86, p. 62, n. 83). Theodore I Palaeologus occupied the county of Salona and the castle of Zeitounion (Lamia) in the fall of 1402, after the defeat and capture of Bajazet I by the forces under Timur at Ankara, and one year later he ceded Salona, which he could not hold, to the Knights of St. John, an arrangement which Bajazet’s son Soleiman felt constrained to accept in 1403—1404 (Docs. inédits, MeL hist., u11
[1880], docs. ed. Mas Latrie, no. xx1I, art. 25, p. 182). Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 71; Gregorovius, 11 (1889), 271-272; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 361, 369. On the activities of the Hospitallers in the Peloponnesus and their relations with Theodore I during this decade (1397-1404), see R. Loenertz, in Etudes Byzantines (Institut francais d’études byzantines), vol. 1 (Bucharest and Paris, 1943), pp. 186-196. % Documents perl’ Historia de la Cultura catalana mig-eval, publicats per Antoni Rubié y Lluch, vol. 1 (Barcelona, 1908), no. cccx1 (pp. 286-287); Rubiéd, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), pp. 106-107, and doc. xx (p. 233); Gregorovius, 11 (1889), 191; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), 194; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 315; Rubidé, Los Catalanes en Grecia (1927), pp. 133 e¢ sgg. (Rubiéd cites this document from Arch. Cr. Aragon, reg. 1268, fol. 126.) DOC, no. CDIV. 37 See, infra, chap. x1, n. ITo.
188 Catalan Domination of Athens Lluch have emphasized, the first aesthetic eulogy, after almost a millennium of silence, to come to the mind and lips of anyone in western Europe.*®
Bishop John Boy] seems to have infected his Majesty with some of his own love of the monumental beauty of Athens. To guard this jewel, however, which might excite the envy of all the kings of Christendom, Don Pedro IV set only a dozen men-at-arms and modern historians have criticized him for an unseemly parsimony in entrusting to so small a number so prized a possession. But a dozen men were probably enough to secure the Acropolis in those days, for they were archers, and Muntaner has proudly informed us of the efficacy of Catalan archers in the fourteenth century.*® Only a year before (in 1378-1379), the world had seen the castle of St. Angelo in Rome withstand a siege of almost a year by the Roman populace with a garrison of only seventy-five men, who, with cannon mounted on those historic walls, had terrified the whole region of the Borgo.*® When the Venetians began their eight years’ occupation of Athens after the death of Nerio Acciajuoli (they held the city, as we shall see, from 1395 to 1402-3), the Serenissima assigned only twenty men and two officers to protect the Acropolis against the menace of the Turks.“ In especial fear, however, of Nerio’s son Antonio I Acciajuoli, then lord of Thebes and Livadia, the Venetians made further provisions for the defense of the Acropolis. On 3 August, 1400, a brave soldier, Niccold Vitturi, was appointed podesta and captain of Athens.” On 20 September, 1401, Vitturi was authorized to spend 200 hyperperi for the repair of the defenses of the Acropolis,** defenses which had been in no small part constructed by the Catalans. It was a small enough sum. On 10 February, 1401 (O.S.), a cavalry force of fifty men was provided the Venetian government of Negroponte with orders that it be used “‘for the security of our city of Athens” when it was not required for the defense of the island of Negroponte.* But these were very critical times: 8 F’. Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), 192; Greg.-Lampros, 11 (1904), 195; see especially Rubié y Lluch, “Significacié de l’elogi de l’Acrdpolis d’Atenes pel Rei Pere’ Ceremoniés,”’ Homenaje ofrecido a[D. Ramén| Menéndez Pidal: Miscelénea de Estudios lingiitsticos, literarios, e histéricos, Madrid, 1925, Ill, pp. 37-56, and Los Catalanes en Grecia (1927), pp. 135 et qq. 39 Muntaner, Crdén., 262, sermo vir (ed. Lanz, p. 490). 40 F. Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. Annie Hamilton, vol. v1, pt. 2 (London, 1906), p. 515; cf. Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), 191; Greg.-Lampros, 11 (1904), 194. “ Venetian Misti,Reg. 43, fol. 76v., in Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 626. 2 C_N. Sathas, Documents inédits relatifs a [’ histoire de la Gréce au moyen Gge, vol. 11 (1881), doc. 222
(p. 7). 4 Sathas, op. cit., 11, doc. 256 (p. 45). “ Sathas, op. cit., 11, doc. 272 (p. 60). On Athenian matters coming before the Signoria, note also, op. cit., 11, docs. 212, 220-221, 224, 292, and 310 ef sgg. Venetian strongholds on the island of Corfu in 1400 were held by twenty-five men (cf. Rubiéd y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., 11, 1908, p. 370). Cf. Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 355-356, 359-360; Hopf’s Regestensammlung, ad ann. 1400, no. g, in E. Gerland, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, v1 (1899), p. 371. When Thessalonica fell to Murad II on 29 May, 1430,
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 189 there is reason to believe that four years before this, in 1397, the Turks, under Timurtash, had occupied the lower city of Athens.“ Three centuries later, however, with the development of artillery and the great improvements in siege tactics, the Acropolis was defended by a garrison of six hundred Turks against the assaults of Francesco Morosini and his Swedish general Von KG6nigsmark (in the late September of 1687).‘ At the beginning of the Greek Revolution, almost a century and a half thereafter, the Acropolis was defended against the Greeks by a Turkish garrison of more than athousand.*’ The natural defenses of the Acropolis and the fortifications on its western slope, which had been accumulating since the construction of the Roman (Beulé) Gate a full thousand years before, enabled the Catalans to withstand sieges of the Castell in 1331, 1375, 1379, and 1387. It is interesting to observe that the first documentary reference to an official palace on the Acropolis appears in a communication of Don Pedro IV to his Vicar General, dated 10 September, 1380, and in connection
with it is mentioned a chapel of St. Bartholomew (/a capella de sant berthomeu del palau del Castell de Cetines). For himself as chaplain and for two servants Bishop John Boyl of Megara, whose episcopal city had been held for a half dozen years by Nerio Acciajuoli, was to draw twentyfour gold ducats a year for his spiritual duties in the chapel, which appears to have been situated in the ancient Pinakotheke in the north wing of the Propylaea.*®
In the year that Nerio Acciajuoli took possession of the Acropolis he it was defended by a wholly inadequate garrison although the Venetians had paid the considerable sum of 50,000 ducats for the city only seven years before (see John Anagnostes, De extremo Thessalonicenst excidio, § [Patr. gr., cLv1, cols. 593 et 5qq.]). 4 J. von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches,1 (Budapest, 1827), pp. 252-255, cf. p. 613; Fr. trans. J. J. Hellert, 1 (Paris, 1836), pp. 350-354, 433; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 359; cf. Herbert A. Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford, 1916, p. 231; and, above all, the learned
note of J. H. Mordtmann, ‘“‘Die erste Eroberung von Athen durch die Tiirken zu Ende des 14. Jahrhunderts,” Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Fahrbticher, vol. 1v (1923-1924), PP. 346-350. “ To the traditional sources may now be added Cristoforo Ivanovich (1628-1688?), [storia della Lega Ortodossa contra il Turco (MS in Harvard College Library: Ott. 404.6*, 2 vols. in 6), ed. James M. Paton, The Venetians in Athens 1687-1688, Cambridge, Mass., 1940, p. 10: “Dagli stessi [i.e. li
principali Greci d’Atene] si rilevd essere li Turchi abili al maneggio dell’armi [in addition to the garrison about 2,500 Turkish inhabitants of the city had taken refuge on the Acropolis at the approach of the Venetians] nella Fortezza in numero di 600 con rissoluzione costantissima di voler difendersi....’’ Cf. Count Léon de Laborde, Athénes aux XV*, XVI* et XVIT* siécles, Paris, 1854, vol. 11, which contains the best account of the Venetians in Athens in 1687 and the destruction of the Parthenon, and T. E. Mommsen, 4m. Journ. Arch., xiv (1941), PP. 544-556. 47 When the Turkish garrison surrendered on 21 June, 1822, it contained eleven hundred and fifty Moslems, of whom only one hundred and eighty were, apparently, in condition to bear arms. 48 Rubiéd y Lluch, Los Navaerros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxxv1 (misnumbered xxxIv), pp. 253-254; An. Instit. Cat., v1 (1915-1920), pp. 163-164. DOC, no. CCCXCVI.
1gO Catalan Domination of Athens believed that fortune had also presented him with the opportunity to take over Argos and Nauplia, traditional appanages of the Latin duchy of Athens, for in 1388 the Venetian lord Pietro Cornaro died, and his young
wife Maria d’Enghien was left alone in her Argolid barony without a warrior’s strong arm to protect her prestige and her property. She faced
a multiplicity of enemies, including the Turks. It was Theodore I Palaeologus, however, at the behest of his father-in-law, who promptly occupied both Argos and Nauplia, and the bewildered Maria d’Enghien became very anxious to sell to Venice possessions which, if left to her own
resources, she could never maintain. The Serenissima purchased them from Maria for an income in perpetuity, for herself and her heirs, of 500 ducats of gold, together with an additional 200 ducats as a life income for herself — so long as Venice should continue to hold Argos and Nauplia, once she had secured them — and Maria was still further granted the right to bequeath to whomever she should designate as her heirs the sum of 2,000 ducats, but the Serenissima insisted that if she married again, her new husband must be a Venetian.4® The able Perazzo Malipiero, sent by the Venetian Republic as her high commissioner (provisor) of Argos and Nauplia, managed to take over the latter city in the Republic’s name, but Theodore Palaeologus and Nerio, as the Serenissima’s instructions to Malipiero had anticipated, refused to surrender the historic stronghold of Argos.5° The Venetians turned for aid to Pedro de San Superano, the 49 The chroniclers record the sale with great interest: Raphaynus Caresinus, in L. A. Muratori, Rer. ital. scrip., x11 (1728), cols. 482-483; Marino Sanudo, Vite de’ duchi di Venezia, ibid., xxi (1733),
cols. 760, 777; Andrea Navagero (Navagiero), ibid., xxx111 (1733), cols. 1072-1073. Dipl. Ven.Levant., eds. G. M. Thomas and R. Predelli, 11, Venice, 1899, docs. 126-127 (pp. 211-215): Regesti dei Commemoriali, \ib. v111, nos. 301, 303 (ed. R. Predelli, 111 [1883], p. 195). Cf.docs. in Hopf, Chroniques (1873), pp. 236-242; idem, Ersch u. Gruber’s Encyklopadie, vol. 86 (1868), pp. 49-50; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 339-340; D. A. Zakythinos, 1 (1932), pp. 132 e¢ sgq. 60 Ernst Gerland, Neue Quellen (1903), pp. 159-162, prints Malipiero’s commission (from Misti, x1, fol. 361r e¢ sqg., doc. dated 18 February, 1389): “Post mortem ser Petri Cornaro cum Maria uxore eius, cuius Argos et Neapolis erant, tractatum fecimus, ut Maria procuratores nominet et nobis urbes
concedat. Sed he [urbes] molestantur per dominum despotum Misistre, cui subito scripsimus .... Domino despoto et domino Raynerio de Azaiolis scripsimus, ne diutius hec loca occuparentur.... Si autem Raynerius et despotus ea tradere noluerint, eas ad eos et nunties, primum quod Petrus mortuus est et nos cum uxore eius emptionem perfecimus; et quamquam despotus ea loca occupaverit, tamen consideratis aequitate et respectu Venetiarum ea relinquat; speramus eum hanc amicitiam se-
pius promissam imposterum servaturum esse.... Si plus quam tres meses i1bi moraberis, et Argos et Neapolim non acceperis, sexaginta ducatos accipies; si vero loca acceperis, in uno locorum provisor remanebis et de sexaginta ducatis socium et alterum famalum tenebis. Plenam potentiam tibi damus tractandi cum domino Despoto, domino Raynerio de Azaiolis ...”’ (Gerland, op. cit., pp. 160, 161). Cf. Chronicon breve, ad ann. 6897 (1389), appended to Ducas’ Hist. Byzant, (Bonn, p. 516). Hopf has listed from Venetian sources the names of almost a hundred successors of Perazzo Malipiero who served as governors (rettori, podesta, capitani, provveditori) of Nauplia and Argos from 1389 to 1539 (Chron. gréco-romanes, 1873, pp. 382-384). Venetian rule in the Morea came to an end in 15391540 (cf. Wm. Miller, Latins in the Levant, 1908, pp. 508-511), after which the Venetians did not again possess a stake there until the late seventeenth century.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians IgI Navarrese commander in the Morea, and the chief enemy of the Despot Theodore and of Nerio Acciajuoli. The Archbishop of Patras was Paul Foscari, a Venetian, and upon him the Republic could depend. To help settle the affair of Argos, held by the Despot Theodore, San Superano invited Nerio to a conference at Vostitza to discuss the matter with him, and since his personal safety was guaranteed, Nerio acceded to the suggestion. Despite the safe-conduct, which must have amused San Superano, Nerio was taken prisoner on 10 September, 1389.5! Agnes Saraceno, Nerio’s wife, and his elder brother, the Cardinal Angelo, and his younger brother, the powerful Donato, Gonfalonier of the Florentine Republic, all sought to use in Nerio’s behalf their wealth and their influence. The
negotiations were long drawn out; they need not concern us here.* Among other concessions which the Acciajuoli were prepared to make to secure Nerio’s freedom for him, Donato proposed to allow the Serenissima to take over Athens, Thebes, and certain places in the castellany of Corinth which were not necessary for its defense, together with merchandise ‘“‘to the value of twelve to fifteen thousand ducats or thereabouts,” which Nerio possessed in Corinth — all as a pledge to the Venetians that Argos should be surrendered to them, and the great Donato declared that he was willing to go to Greece himself to see to the execution of the terms he proposed.*8
Theodore Palaeologus, to whom Agnes Saraceno had offered money to surrender Argos to the Venetians, had been put in a most difficult position: Theodore now decided to turn the whole armed might of the Despo-
tat of Mistra upon the Navarrese to force the release of Nerio. In the year of Nerio’s captivity his brother the Cardinal Angelo had almost been elected Pope: his influence with the Roman Curia and with Boniface
IX was enormous. Papal intervention was sought; the Genoese were appealed to; the aid of Amadeo of Savoy was enlisted. The Venetians gave way. It was not necessary to admit them to Athens and Thebes. 51 On 15 September, 1389, Agnes Saraceno, Nerio’s wife, wrote to Donato Acciajuoli in Florence the news of Nerio’s captivity: “ . . . lo vichario [della morea, i.e. San Superano] !’a fatto ritenere e portato
nelo prigione e questo fue venerdi ad X settenb...” (from the Corrispondenza Acciajoli, in Gregorovius, Sitzungsb. ... der Akad.zu Miinchen, 11 [1890], p. 305; Greg.-Lampros, 11 [1904], pp. 649-650). 52 See especially Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), pp. 50-52; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 341.
8 J. A. Buchon, Nouv. rech. hist., vol. 1, pt. 1 (1843), has published the proposals which Donato Acciajuoli made to the Venetian Republic to secure his brother’s release (Florence: doc. xtvi, pp. 238-
253): “...dominus Donatus... ponet seu poni faciet in manibus dicti ducalis dominii [Venice] custodiendas .. . civitates Athenarum et Thebarum et illa loca . . . de baronia Corinthi . . . tot mercantiones dicti domini Nerii que sunt in civitate Corinthi quot erunt pro valore ducatum x11 millia in xv millia vel circha [op. cit., p. 238]... contentus est dictus dominus Donatus ire ad partes illas cum naviglis communis Venetorum et tenere modum quod adimpleantur ea que supradicta et promissa sunt...’ (op. cit., p.239). The Despot Theodore was said to be holding Argos contrary to the wishes of Nerio, which, considering Nerio’s plight, was doubtless the truth (op. cit., pp. 242-243).
192 Catalan Domination of Athens An agreement was reached on 22 May, 1390. After almost a year’s confinement in the castle of Listrina near Patras, Nerio Acciajuoli was released towards the end of the year 1390: his daughter Francesca became a hostage in his stead, and he turned over to the Venetians the city and citadel of Megara, as well as all his goods in Corinth, as a pledge that when he had regained his freedom, he would persuade the Despot Theodore to give up Argos or else he would join the Venetians against him. Peace had now been restored between Nerio and the Serenissima, and when the terms thereof had been fulfilled, the bridge of Negroponte was
to be lowered again and trade was to be resumed with the Athenian duchy.* After his release from the fortress of Listrina, Nerio turned his attention to the claims of Amadeo of Savoy as Prince of Achaea. During Nerio’s captivity Amadeo had written to Donato Acciajuoli of the indignation he felt at the Navarrese seizure of Nerio “‘in our principality of Achaea,” and that whereas in times past he had been ready to reduce his principality to obedience, he was now all the more ready to do so since he had heard of the plight of the unfortunate Nerio, whom he wished, he declared, to set free himself (cupientes fratrem vestrum a carceribus totaliter liberare).™ Nerio thought he knew an ally when he saw one. On 29 December, 1391, therefore, Nerio met the envoys of Amadeo of Savoy in the palace chapel, on the Acropolis, and as the “lord of Corinth and the duchies of Athens and Neopatras”’ he agreed, in recognition of Amadeo as his suzerain, to drive the Navarrese from the Morea, fotis viribus, and Nerio agreed to enlist the aid of the Despot Theodore in the undertaking, while Amadeo’s
envoys guaranteed the integrity of the Despot’s lands. Nerio was to receive back, as his guerdon for service against his enemies and those of the titular Prince, the estates of his family in the old castellany of Corinth, the lands of the Grand Seneschal Niccold, especially the castle of Vostitza.56 Nothing came of this agreement because Amadeo of Savoy never & Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), pp. 51-52. Venice, however, did not secure Argos until 11 June, 1394 (op. cit., p. §6). Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 11, doc. 7 (p. 114), letter to Donato Acciajuoli dated 30 July, 1394, in which his correspondent declares, “Io scrissi in quella [a previous letter dated 24 July] come argho fu renduto alli Viniziani di 11 di giugno, e quello era costato a mio signore [Nerio]....” The first agreement between Nerio and the Venetians dated 22 May, 1390, is summarized from Commem., lib. viu1, fol. 178, by R. Predelli, Regesti dei Commemoriali, vol. 111 (1883), no.
343 (p. 206), but the negotiations continued (see, op. cif., no. 348), and four years later the Despot Theodore finally agreed to give up Argos (op. cit., nos. 408-411 and 413). Cf. Chronicon breve, ad ann. 6902 (1394), appended to Ducas’ Hist. Byzant. (Bonn, p. 516). % Letter dated 30 March, 1390, in the Corr. Acc., published by Gregorovius, Sitzungsberichte der k. bayer. Akad., Hist. Cl., 11 (1890), p. 306; also in Greg.-Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 651. Diplomatic amity obtained also between Amadeo of Savoy and Theodore Palaeologus (cf. Miklosich u. Miller, op. cit., 113, 249-250). See, in general, R. Cessi, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, xxxvii (1919), pp. 12 et 5qq. % Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. v1, doc. 1 (pp. 405-407). This is the agreement witnessed by
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 193 came to Greece. Had Amadeo appeared in the Morea, however, it would not have been to fight the Navarrese (and to help Nerio recover his property), for he had been carrying on much more important negotiations with them. In fear of the ever growing power of the Turks, the Navarrese finally recognized Amadeo of Savoy as the Prince of Achaea in return for his recognition of their own legal possession of the great fiefs they held.
The Venetians agreed to transport to Achaea, by sea, Amadeo or his representative, together with 300 mounted lancers and 600 foot or bowmen, in return for which the Prince of Achaea would seek to regain Argos from the Despot of Mistra and, if successful, turn it over to Venice.57 A list of the fiefs in the Morea, apparently as they existed in 1391, was prepared for Amadeo and sent to him: it is a very important document, the
last feudal roll we have of the Frankish principality of Achaea. At the head of the list of the fifteen greater vassals of the Prince stood the Duke of Athens, and sixth on the list was the Countess of Salona.58
With the fall of the Catalan possessions of Neopatras and the county of Salona to the Sultan Bajazet I, in the campaign he made at the end of 1393 and the beginning of 1394, the Turks became the near neighbors of the Florentine lord of Athens. Evrenosbeg, the Turkish chieftain who had already occupied Livadia for almost a year (1392-1393), after which it had been recovered by the Gascon captain Bertranet Mota, now became undisputed ruler of Thessaly®® Nerio Acciajuoli paid tribute to the Demetrius Rendi and Nicholas Macri. Nerio had purchased Vostitza, together with Nivelet, from Marie de Bourbon, Princess of Achaea, and her son Hugh of Cyprus in 1364 (cf. Ducange-Buchon, n, p. 265; Buchon, Recherches et matériaux, 1 [1840], p. 347). ‘7 According to an agreement dated 26 September, 1390 (Commem., lib. v111, fol. 149), in R. Predelli, Regesti det Commemorialt, 111, no. 3§2, p. 209. The document is published in R. Cessi, Nuovo Archivio Veneto, XXxvil (1919), pp. 25-27 (see also doc. in Cessi, op. cit., pp. 32-34). 58 The feudal roll of 1391 has been published by S. Guichenon, Histoire généalogique de la royale maison de Savoye, 3 vols., Lyon, 1660, 1, pp. 127-128; J. A. Buchon, Recherches et matériaux, 1 (1840), 296-299; Hopf, Chroniques (1873), pp. 229-230; Sir Rennell Rodd, Princes of Achaia, 11 (1907), 294296.
The greater vassals are said to have been: (1) The Duke of Athens, (2) the Duke of the Archipelago, (3) the Duke of Leucadia, (4) the Marquis of Boudonitza, (5) the Count of Cephalonia, (6) the Countess of Salona, (7) the lord of Arcadia, (8) “the Island of Negroponte’’ (i.e. the serziert), (9) the lord of Chalandritza, (10) ‘‘the barony of Patras” (i.e. the Archbishop); (11-13) the Archbishops of Modon, Coron, and Olena; and (14-15) the commanders of the Teutonic Knights and of the Hospitallers. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 53; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), 244-245; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 343. The Duke of Athens is named as first peer of the Prince of Achaea in the Assizes of Romania (ed. Georges Recoura, Paris, 1930, art. 43, p. 191). Amadeo of Savoy, known to Italian history as Amadeo of Achaea, is not to be confused with Amadeo VII (d. 1391), nor with his successor, Amadeo
VIII, first Duke of Savoy and Basel candidate for the papacy as Felix V (d. 1451). Amadeo of Achaea was famous as the opponent, in north Italian politics, of Theodore II of Montferrat; he died at Pinerolo on 7 May, 1402, and was succeeded in his Piedmontese possessions by his brother Louis, last of the Princes of Achaea. 6° Cf, Laonicus Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 111 (Bonn, p. 145); bk. 1v (p. 213); ed. Darké, 1 (1922),
194 Catalan Domination of Athens Turk for the Athenian duchy. To Pope Boniface IX the situation in central Europe and 1n Greece looked desperate, and desperate it was: his Holiness shuddered at the thought of what the Turks had done (horret animus talia reminisct) ; the whole of Christendom was in the direst peril,
and a crusade was proclaimed against the Turk.®° Nerio turned to Italy, to Rome and Naples, for support and the legitimization of his position. Like the Catalan Dukes before him, he held Athens only by right of conquest, but he was anxious to secure a more constitutional basis
for his control of the Athenian duchy. King Ladislas of Naples, the young son of Charles III of Durazzo, still maintained the Angevin claim to the suzerainty of Achaea, upon which the duchy of Athens rested in feudal dependence. Since King Ladislas chose to regard Nerio, at the latter’s request, as having wrested ‘‘the duchy of Athens, part of our principality of Achaea, ... from the hands of some of our rivals,” his Majesty formally bestowed upon Nerio and the legitimate heirs of his body, in perpetuity, the city and duchy of Athens; granted him and his aforesaid heirs the coveted title of Duke of Athens; and confirmed him in the honor, title, and dignity thereof (11 January, 1394). But Nerio had no legitimate male heirs, for his only son was the offspring of his liaison with Demetrius Rendi’s daughter Marta. King Ladislas, therefore, provided that Nerio’s title should go, after his death, to his brother Donato, miles, and the latter’s legitimate male heirs, an arrangement to which, the King declared, the Cardinal Angelo had given his consent (12 January, 1394). Since Nerio could not come to Naples for the investiture, “‘because of the distance and the dangers of the journey,” the King conceded to his brother Angelo, cardinal priest of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, or to one who should thus represent Angelo and his Majesty, the right to invest Nerio with the title and honor of the Athenian duchy, with the customary gold ring, and to.receive from him the customary homage and oath of fealty (12 Jan136, 200; cf. the fragment De rebus Epiri, 111 (Epirotica, Bonn, p. 242), referring to events in the reign of Bajazet I. There are no contemporary Turkish sources for these particular events. On the Turkish sources for the period as a whole, see Akdes Nimet, Die tirkische Prosopographie bei Laonikos Chalkokandyles, diss. Hamburg, 1933, pp. 7-8, et passim, Mehmed Fuad Kopriilii, Les Origines de LP empire ottoman, Paris, 1935, and the Enzyklopadie des Islam, 1v (1934), pp. 1013 e¢ sqqg. On Evrenos,
see Akdes Nimet, op. cit., pp. 39-41, and cf. Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 345, 346, 348, 350-351, and G. Ostrogorsky (1940), pp. 395-396. 60 Q, Rinaldi, nn. eccl., ad ann. 1394, vol. vir (1752), pp. 584-585. 61 J. A. Buchon, Nouv. rech. hist., u, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. x11 (pp. 223 et sgqg.); Lampros, Eger., pt. 11, doc. 7 (pp. 165-167). The King’s grant of ducal dignity, be it observed, bound Nerio immediate et in capite a nobis (Buchon, op. cit., p. 226), so that if some one other than the Neapolitan King became Prince of Achaea, the latter would not be the liege lord of the Athenian Duke, who now became a direct vassal of the King. 62 Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. 1, Flor., doc. x11 (pp. 228-231). On the meaning of miles, denoting the militie dignitas, see Gaetano Salvemini, La dignitd cavalleresca nel comune di Firenze, Florence, 1896.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 195 uary, 1394). Angelo was in his turn appointed by the King as Vicar General of the principality of Achaea and the city of Lepanto (14 January, 1394). The family of the steelworker from Brescia had gone far in two hundred years: Nerio Acciajuoli had thus become first Florentine Duke of Athens, and although he knew it not, his bastard son Antonio was to succeed him (in 1402-1403). Nerio had gone far, but fortune is capricious; less than nine months after he had attained to the dignity of Duke, he died in Corinth on 25 September, 1394.® His relatives in Italy who had followed his career with pride and worked for his interests with unfailing devotion knew that the mest spectacular member of their family had died. The Grand Seneschal Robert Acciajuoli, grandson of the famed Niccolé and last male member of the older branch of the family (he died in 1420), wrote to Donato Acciajuoli, Gonfalonier of Florence and Senator of Rome, a letter of pious remonstrance against the ways of for- |
tune and of resignation to the will of God: the Grand Seneschal had learned of Nerio’s passing (emigratio) by a letter from the Duchess Fran-
cesca of Leucadia. He had wept at the grievous news; no blow could have caused him more anguish. ‘“‘And yet my heart did rejoice when I but thought and recognized that one of our family, a man of such character and greatness, had achieved the name of Duke of Athens.’ Eight days before his death, lying ill at Corinth and thinking much of his soul and less of his great possessions, Nerio sought the salvation of the one by the disposition of the other. It must have been a solemn occasion
when Nerio dictated his will to the notary who was to draft it in legal parlance, and more solemn still, perhaps, when the notary read the final document to him and it was duly witnessed and the lead seal was attached to it with silken threads. As Nerio’s eyes fell upon those sheets of paper, the symbol of his earthly achievement, he must have thought much of whither the paths of glory lead. For him they had led to Athens, and the magic of the city had not been lost upon him: “We, Nerio Accia-
juoli, lord of Corinth and of the duchy of Athens, sound of mind though infirm of body, wishing to provide for the salvation of our soul and
for the well being of our land, do make and order, by the tenor of this testimonial letter, our testament and our last will: First, we commend our 68 Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. I, doc. xLu1 (pp. 232-234); cf. Ubaldini (1588), p. 175. ¢ Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. 1, doc. xLtv (pp. 234-236). 65 The date of Nerio’s death is given in the letter written by Bishop James of Argos from Nauplia
(on 2 November, 1394) to the Cardinal Angelo in Florence (from the Corr. Acc. in Gregorovius, Sitzungsh. der k. bayer. Akad. xu Miinchen, 11 [1890], p. 308; Greg.-Lampros, 11, pp. 653-654).
66 Letter dated on 22 December, 1394, in Gregorovius, Corr. Acc., op. cit., pp. 309—310; Greg.Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 655: ‘“Gloriebatur utque animus meus considerans et cognoscens unum de prole
nostra tante probitatis et excellentie virum ducis Attenarum nomen acquisisse.”
196 Catalan Domination of Athens soul to Almighty God.... We direct that our body be buried in the Church of St. Mary of Athens. Next, we leave to the Church of St. Mary of Athens the city of Athens with all its appurtenances and effects.’’®”
Nerio’s whole thought, in his last days, seems to have been for the Parthenon, the Church of Santa Maria di Athene, and for its cathedral staff and for the masses that were to be said for his soul. Athens had begun her recorded history under the virgin goddess Athene; had Nerio had his way, she would have closed her history under the Virgin Mary. He left to the said Church his valuable stud of brood-mares (tutte le giumente della nostra razza). He ordered that the doors of the Parthenon, once ornamented with silver, be decked out in silver again; likewise all
the jewels, vestments, gold, silver and precious stones of which the Church had been stripped to help ransom him from the Navarrese (per nostra occasione) “should be bought back and restored to the said Church
of Athens.” In addition to the twelve canons who had served in the Cathedral from the preceding Catalan era,®* Nerio provided for twenty priests, who had to be “Latins of the Catholic faith,” and were to serve night and day in the said Church of Athens, “‘and to celebrate masses for the salvation of our soul.”” He wished that the income of the Church
of Athens and of the brood-mares be allocated to the support of the twenty priests, according to the discretion of the executors of his will. The aforesaid income and goods should be used also for the fabric and general maintenance of the church of Athens. “And we will that the said ordination of the said twenty priests and of
the other matters appertaining to the said Church of Athens be under the protection and guidance of the exalted and illustrious ducal Signoria of Venice, so that if anyone should stand in the way of my will, both as regards the priests and the other matters aforesaid touching the said Church of Athens, as well as by the negligence of our executors, the said ducal Signoria may have the power and freedom to execute with effect all our aforesaid dispositions, as regards the priests and the other matters aforesaid which concern the said Church of Athens.’’®?
In 1389-1390, when he was a prisoner of the Navarrese and Asan Zac6? The will of Nerio, dated at Corinth on 17 September, 1394, is given in Buchon, Nouwo. rech. hist., II, pt. I, pp. 254 e¢ sgg., and Lampros, Eggr., pt. 111, doc. 4 (pp. 147 ef 5qq.).
68 Cf, Rubiéd y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxxiv (p. 252): “... xm canonici Ecclesie Sedis de Cetines . . . ” from a letter of Don Pedro IV, dated at Lérida 12 September, 1380 (Arch. Cr. Aragon, reg. 1366, fol. 5sv.). There had also been, commonly, twelve canons on the cathedral staff of Thebes since the early thirteenth century (cf. I regesti del pontefice Onorio III, ed. Pietro Pressutti, 1 [Rome, 1884], no. 331, p. 93; Regesta Honorii Papae III, ed. Pressutti, 1 [Rome, 1888], no. 356, . 63). , ream pros, Eggr., pt. 111, doc. 4 (pp. 147-148); Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. I, p. 255.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 197 caria, Grand Constable of Morea, he had despoiled other churches than that of St. Mary of Athens: he now ordered all the jewels, vestments, gold, silver, and precious stones, which were taken from the Church of Corinth to be restored to the said Church, “‘and the same for all the other churches in our country.” The gold cross which had the emeralds and other precious stones he wanted given, “‘for our soul,’”’ to the Church of Argos, whose Bishop had always been his devoted friend and was to be one of the executors of his will. To the Bishop of Argos, indeed, he left
250 ducats, and to the Archbishop of Athens, Ludovico da Prato, a Florentine, 100 ducats of gold. All persons who could show his executors
good reason for payment of obligations that he owed them were to be paid in full. Nerio provided, too, for certain of his property to be sold, the proceeds of which should be used in Florence “‘for our soul” and for charitable purposes. He granted Maria Rendi, daughter of the notary Demetrius, as we have already seen, her freedom and all her possessions, movable and immovable, wherever located. He made bequests which need not concern us to certain members of his family, to friends, and to servitors of his house and in his household. To Antonio Acciajuoli, his son by Maria Rend, he left the castle of Livadia and all his property in Livadia. He left him also the city of Thebes.7° With most of his property in Argos he wished “‘a hospital for the poor” to be built in Nauplia and to be maintained as a monument, it would seem, to the charity that had not distinguished him in life. According to William Miller, Nerio’s hospital at Nauplia was restored by Capo d’Istria and “‘is still in use.””” He also provided money for a high mass to be said for his soul every Monday in the Church of Argos. These matters he left, especially, to the care of Bishop James of Argos, as well as a nunnery that he had founded in Nauplia.
To his elder daughter Bartolomea, Vasilisa, who had married the Despot of Mistra, Theodore I Palaeologus, he left only 9,700 ducats of gold which her husband owed the Signoria of Venice, and which Nerio had,
for his own reasons, made good. Bartolomea, he insisted, should be allowed no other claim against his estate. She had, clearly, become unpopular with her father. His chief heir — or heiress — was his daughter Francesca (Facciamo nostra herede la duchessa Francesca, nostra figlia .. .); she had married, in 1388, Carlo Tocco, the Duke of Leucadia, who thus stood most to benefit by Nerio’s success in life. Besides 30,000 hyperperi in money and jewels, Francesca was to be allowed “‘peaceful possession” 70 Lampros, Eggr., pp. 149, 152; Buchon, op. cit., 1, pt. 1, pp. 257. 260. Cf. Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. rv (Bonn, p. 213); ed. Darké, 1 (1922), 200. Wm. Miller, The Latins in the Levant (1908), p. 350.
198 Catalan Domination of Athens of the castles of Megara and Basilicata, the ancient Sicyon; he wanted her, too, to have possession of all his lands which were not left by specific
bequest to others in his present will. If Francesca had children at the time of his death, or soon thereafter, she was to take immediate possession
of these demesnes: but, in any event, she was to have them within three
years. Finally he left her the city of Corinth if the Grand Seneschal Robert Acciajuoli, son of the Angelo who had mortgaged the city to Nerio, did not wish “‘to repay the money which he owes me.’’”?_ Nerio’s
wife, Agnes Saraceno, had died three months before him, and he had, therefore, no need to make provision for her. But Nerio had given the Despot of Mistra to understand that after his death Corinth should go to the Despot:”* Nerio left his heirs trouble as well as money and cities.
Nerio named seven executors of his will: his daughter Francesca, the Duchess of Leucadia; his sister Gismonda Acciajuoli, ‘““while she shall be in the country’’; James, the Bishop of Argos; two other members of his family, Donato and Monte Acciajuoli, also for as long as they remained in Greece; Matteo de Montona, his Venetian castellan of the Acropolis; and, lastly, a certain Girardo di Viso, a Florentine, for as long as he, too, should be in Greece.7> Should any one of the legatees, however, wish to deprive the Duchess Francesca of any of the bequests her father thus made her, Nerio wished that he be considered a traitor (che sia tenuto per traditore) ‘and deprived of every legacy that we have left him.”’ Clearly he had in mind the Despot of Mistra. Inventories of Nerio’s properties were to be made, and each of the executors was to have one. Finally, Nerio commended his lands to the Church and to the Signoria of Venice, and the Signoria he recommended to the executors of his will; in that direc-
tion they should turn when they needed help, and “the said executors are to do every honor to the said Signoria.”’ To the Serenissima, with the
pitiful insistence of a dying man, Nerio committed the interests of the Duchess Francesca, and prayed the Signoria to see that justice should be
done her. Such was the testament and the last will of the Duke of
Athens (“given at Corinth, in the year of our Lord 1394, on the 17th day of the month of September, of the third Indiction’’).” No part of Nerio’s last will, but the inevitable consequence of his testament, was strife between his sons-in-law, Theodore I Palaeologus, the Despot of Mistra, and Carlo Tocco, Duke of Leucadia and Count Pala7 Lampros, Eger., pp. 150-151; Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. I, p. 259, 260. 78 On Agnes Saraceno’s marriage to Nerio, see Greg.-Lampros, 11 (1904), 213. % Cf, Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. rv (Bonn, pp. 207-208, 213); ed. Darkéd, 1 (1922), 194-195, 200; cf. Niccoléd Serra, Storia di Zante [1784], in Hopf, Chroniques gréco-romanes (1873), p. 342. 7% Lampros, Eggr., p. 151; Buchon, 11, pt. I, p. 259. 7% Lampros, Eggr., p. 152; Buchon, 11, pt. 1, p. 261.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 199 tine of Cephalonia. They fought over Corinth.”” Taken over first by Carlo Tocco, to whose wife it had been left, Corinth was finally acquired by the Despot Theodore. But any account of these proceedings belongs rather to the history of the Morea than to that of Athens.78 The bestowal of the city of Athens and such wealth as it possessed upon, as Nerio had insisted in his will, Latini della fe Cattolica was an arrangement naturally most offensive to the Greek Metropolitan Macarius. The latter was cut out of the same cloth as his predecessor Dorotheus, whom Nerio had expelled from Athens two years before for his treacherous dealings with the Turks.”? At the behest of Macarius, as we have seen, the Turkish Pasha Timurtash was to occupy the lower city of Athens (1397),
although Matteo de Montona managed to hold the Acropolis against him. To save the city from the Turks, who would make most undesirable neighbors for the Venetians in their rich island of Negroponte, velut pupilla oculi, and to insure the execution of the terms of Nerio’s will, for
Nerio had placed his trust in the Signoria, the Venetians accepted the suggestion of Montona that they take over the city (by vote of the Senate on 18 March, 1395). It was the decision of the statesmen of the Serenissima “‘that the lordship of the said city of Athens be received and taken up for rule and governance by our Signoria [dominatio nostra], according to the form of the testament of the Lord Nerio Acciajuoli — but because his stud of brood mares, some of which have been stolen, 1s now 1nadequate, and from this source the said Church was drawing the greater part 77 See J. A. Buchon, Nouv. rech. hist., u, pt. 1 (1843), docs. t-L11 (pp. 262-269), concerned with Carlo Tocco’s forcible attempts to secure Corinth and Megara as his wife’s properties (1394-1395). The immediate effects produced by Nerio’s will in the Morea are best described by a letter of Bishop James of Argos, dated at Nauplia on 2 November, 1394, to the Cardinal Angelo (Gregorovius, Sitzungsh.... der Akad. zu Miinchen, 11 [1890], p. 308; Greg.-Lampros, 11 [1904], 653-654): “Post cuius obitum [i.e. immediately after Nerio’s death] dispotus [the Despot Theodore] cepit omnia chastra chastellanie Chorintiensis; etiam rocam et civitatem Chorintim tenet obsessam, bastardus [Nerio’s son Antonio] autem prefati domini Nerei et Beltranetus {[Bertranet Mota] sunt totis viribus con dispoto ac secum manent in campo pugnantes contra Chorinti et cetera vestra locha et nisi per dominationem vestram de ceteri provideatur remedio, totam patriam per domum vestram atenus acquisitam dictus dispotus totaliter ochupabit.” Cf. also the account of the Capuan notary Niccolé da Martoni, who was in Athens on 24 and 25 February, 1395, when the war between Carlo Tocco and Theodore Palaeologus was going strong (in Revue de [Orient latin, 111 [1895], pp. 652-653). 78 See Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), pp. 59 et sgq.; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 351 e¢ 5qq.
79 Fr, Miklosich and Jos. Miller, 4cta et diplomata graeca medit aevi sacra et profana: Acta patriarchatus Constantinopolitani (1315-1402), 11 (1862), pp. 166-169; D. Gr. Kampouroglous, History of the Athenians (in Greek), vol. 11 (1890), p. 147. Until Dorotheus no Greek metropolitan had dared take up his residence in Athens under Latin domination: ré\ac wore yap bro t&v Aativwy dXovons Tis woArews exelyns & duvnuovebrwr T&v xpdvwy obdels rv xeporovovpeywy wrevey dpxrepewv xal wenropevin exel TH Tupavvldc xal buvacrela Tav apxdévrwv &elywy érddrunoew eloedOety Tr. (Miklosich
and Miiller, op. cit., 11, p. 165). Macarius had been especially active during the spring and summer of 1395 (Miklosich and Miller, 11, pp. 250, 256, 259).
200 Catalan Domination of Athens of its revenues and the necessary expenses were to be met therefrom, and also because the times are critical, and the said city of Athens requires a
larger garrison and expenditures [for defense] than if the times were peaceful, and since we ourselves do not know what the income and the costs of maintenance of the city are, let it be established that henceforth there shall be assigned to the celebration of divine offices in the Church of
St. Mary of Athens only eight priests, to whom such provision 1s to be made by our governor [rector] for their board and other necessities as shall be found proper. ... °° To safeguard the Acropolis the Venetian Senate assigned a garrison of twenty men and two officers.®! If twenty men were sufficient to protect the Acropolis in what the cautious statesmen of the Serene Republic regarded as “critical times” (¢empora suspecta),it would seem that Don Pedro IV of Aragon was being neither very niggardly nor very negligent when, in 1380, when the Navarrese threat was past and the times were comparatively peaceful, he assigned a dozen men to protect “‘the richest jewel in all the world.” Antonio Acciajuoli, bastard son of Nerio and Maria Rendi, looked with resentment upon the Serenissima’s possession of his late father’s duchy of Athens. From his lordship of Thebes he descended upon the city, and
laid siege to the Acropolis. The force of cavalry established by the Venetians at the beginning of the year was increased to a number “‘from 200 to 300 beyond the fifty for which privilege had been at another time granted to the said government of Negroponte,” and, together with other bowmen and foot soldiers in the service of the Republic, the purpose of the new recruitment was to be “‘for the recovery of our city of Athens, and for the injury and destruction of Antonio Acciajuoli,” while the Acropolis, the castrum Athenarum, was to be especially strengthened, ‘‘as shall seem to the said government of Negroponte to be necessary.”” It was further declared that ‘‘if chance should grant, as is to be hoped, that the city of Thebes, which belongs to the said Antonio, may be captured and held, we wish, and it is expressly demanded of the said government, that it have the said land ruined, destroyed in its entirety.”’®* The Serenissima, fur80 From the entry on the acceptance of Athens (intromissio Athenarum) in the Venetian Misti, Reg. 43, fol. sov., published by Gregorovius, Sitzungsb. . .. der Akad. zu Miinchen, 1 (1888), p. 155; Greg.Lampros, 11 (1904), pp. 623-624. Cf. Max Silberschmidt, Das orientalische Problem zur Zeit der Entstehung des tiirkischen Reiches nach venezianischen Quellen [1381-1400], Leipzig and Berlin, 1923, pp.
7 Mist Reg.43, fol. 76v., in Gregorovius, Sitzungsh.... der Akad, zu Miinchen, 1 (1888), p. 158; Greg.-Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 626. Cf. H. Noiret, Documents inédits .. . de la domination vénitienne en Créte, Paris, 1892, pp. 69, 71. 8 Rubid y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xx (p. 233); Documents per I’ Historia de la Cultura catalana mig-eval, 1 (1908), no. cccx1 (pp. 286-287); “Significacié de l’elogi de l’Acrépolis d’Atenes pel Rei Pere’! Ceremoniés,” Homenaje ofrecido a [D. Ramén] Menéndez Pidal: Miscelénea de Estudios lingittsticos, literarios, e histéricos, 3 vols., Madrid, 1925, 111, pp. 37-56. 8 C, N. Sathas, Docs. inédits, 11 (1881), no. 310 (pp. 91-92): “... quod debeat [regimen Nigro-
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 201 ther, put a price upon the head of their archenemy, Antonio, gui meretur omne malum, tamquam inimicus fidet christianae, — eight thousand hy-
perperi would be paid for Antonio if he were turned over alive to the Venetian authorities at Negroponte, or five thousand hyperperi would be paid for his dead body or for proof that the claimant of the reward had
really killed him.®* Save Athens, destroy Thebes, remove Antonio Acciajuoli: so the Venetian bailie and captain of Negroponte was commanded by the statesmen of the Serenissima, safe in the lagoons of far-
away Venice. The bailie of Negroponte sought to do as he was bid. He marched an army of 6,000 men from Negroponte against the city of Thebes, according to Chalcocondylas, while Antonio, when he heard of the Venetian advance, divided his men into two bands, with not over three hundred men in each, and, following the strategy of Trasimene, probably in the pass of Anephorites, Antonio caught the Venetian soldiers in ambush, closed the entrance and exit to the pass, “‘and many of them he killed, others he captured, and he captured, too, those who were then in command of their territory.”” Thereafter he calmly returned to the siege of Athens; treachery opened the gates to one whose mother had been Greek; soon he had occupied the Acropolis, ‘‘and then he was lord of Attica and Boeotia”’ (xal érupdvveve rijs re ’Arrixjs da Kai Bowwrias).® The commander himself, bailie and captain of Negroponte, was captured.
In Venice it was affirmed that “‘this new development, the capture of the bailie and captain of Negroponte, and of the entire force which was with
him, is as hard as it can be and extremely perilous. ... 8 The Serenissima was forced to contemplate “with the illustrious Antonio Acciajuoli, lord of Thebes, or with his commissioners and procurators, a peace, agreement or truce.’’®”
Niccold Vitturi, the podesta and captain of Athens, and Matteo de Montona, the distinguished soldier who had gained the city for the Venetians, were finally forced to surrender the Acropolis to Antonio Accia-
juoli. The siege had lasted seventeen months: the garrison had eaten every horse but those in the sculptures of Phidias. Shortly after the fall of Athens, Vitturi died in Negroponte, a broken man, whose family the Republic he had served had to rescue from poverty, while provision had pontis] facere ruinari et destrui totam dictam terram...” (from a document dated 22 August, 1402).
"ul Sa thas, op. cit., doc. 311 (pp. 92-93).
8 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 1v (Bonn, pp. 213-215); ed. Darké, 1 (1922), 200-201.
8 C, N. Sathas, op. cit., 11, no. 315 (p. 95), document dated 7 October, 1402. Elaborate and detailed plans were made to meet the emergency (doc. cit., pp. 96 et 5qq.).
87 C. N. Sathas, op. cit., 1 (1880), no. 4 (pp. 4-5), document dated 30 October, 1402: “... pax, concordia vel treuga...” The document was republished by Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. v, doc. 14 (pp. 392-393). On Antonio I, cf. Ubaldini (1588), op. cit., pp. 176-177.
202 Catalan Domination of Athens also to be made for Montona, who had lost his Athenian pension of 400 hyperperi a year.*® The precise date of the surrender of the Acropolis is not known, but it probably came in January or February of 1403.*° The Serene Republic was determined to regain Athens, for the safety of her trading colony at Negroponte depended upon it. Her statesmen possessed diplomatic resources and devices as numerous as the sixty islands upon which their city was built, and they were as persistent as the waves that washed her multiple shores. On 28 July, 1402, near Ankara, the redoubtable Bajazet I “the Thunderbolt” ([/derim),®° the victor at Nicopolis, was defeated by Timur the Lame, was captured, and died in March of the following year in the conqueror’s camp in Caramania. Constantinople was spared for another half century. Soleiman, one of the Sultan’s sons, now became arbiter of the destinies of Athens, and to him the Venetians turned for help to regain their former possession, and to him Antonio Acciajuoli turned for support in order to maintain his rule in the city. Christendom was closing its ranks against the infidel in the west, and in the east the Turk looked with fear and dismay upon the startling successes of the forces under Timur. In January or February of 1403, Venetian claims gained apparent precedence over Antonio Acciajuoli’s ducal ambitions when Soleiman concluded a treaty of commerce and a pact of alliance against Timur with Venice, the Greek Emperor, the Duke of Naxos, Genoa, and the Hospitallers on the island of Rhodes, agreeing among other conditions that Athens be restored to the Serenis88 In the spring of 1409 the Republic extended its official thanks to the wife and two children of Vitturi for his defense of the castle of Athens “called Sithines’’ through seventeen months; nor would Vitturi have surrendered the castle, the Signoria was sure, if he and his men had had anything to eat (cum prius comederint equos et omnia alia comestibilia, que reperire potuit, usque ad urticham...). The document was published by N. Iorga, ‘Notes et extraits pour servir a l’histoire des croisades au XV¢8 siécle,” Rev. de l’Or. latin, 1v (1896), p. 303. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), pp. 70-71; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 622; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 360. Vitturi had been appointed podesta of Athens on 3 August, 1400 (C, N. Sathas, op. cif., 11 [1881], doc. 222, p. 7; Hopf’s Regestensammlung, no. 34, in E. Gerland, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, v111 [1899], p. 377; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86, p.60). At
this time Matteo de Montona petitioned the Venetian Signoria for relief: he had been captured by enemies, stripped of all his possessions except four horses, while the pension of 400 hyperperi a year voted him on 18 March, 1394, had never been paid, ‘“‘except a hundred hyperperi or thereabouts” (doc. dated 16 July, 1400, in C. N. Sathas, Docs. inédits, 11 [1881], no. 220, pp. 6-7). Leonardo of Bologna consigned his pension of 200 hyperperi, granted at the same time, de introitibus civitatis nostre Athenarum, to an aged father in Venice (Sathas, op. cit., 11, doc. 224, p. 8). Hopf lists four Venetian capitani d Atene (Chron, gréco-romanes, 1873, p. 371):
1395 Albano Contarini 1399 Ermolao Contarini 1397 Lorenzo Venier 1400-02 Niccold Vitturi
89 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 70; N. Iorga, doc. in Reo. de [’Or. latin, 1v (1896), p. 259: early in 1403 Pietro Zeno informed the Venetian Signoria “che Antuonio Azaiuoli haveva habudo lo castelo de Sitine.” *” Cf, the fragment De rebus Epiri, 11 (Epirotica, Bonn, p. 241): ...xal éxwvoudtero "Tréiply, dre frov ws doTrpaxn oyAlywpos...
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 203 sima, ¢ darli Sitines.*\ But Timur began preparations for an invasion of China, not of Europe, and in February of 1405 he died. Soleiman had, in the meantime, made no effort to oust Antonio from Athens and to effect the restitution of the city to the Venetians. Antonio’s relatives in Italy, however, had again had occasion to take pride in the possession of the Athenian duchy by one who bore their name. Angelo Acciajuoli, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Dean of the Sacred College, worked in his nephew’s behalf; the aid of Pope Innocent VII was enlisted; and King Ladislas, upon whose head the Cardinal Angelo had placed the crown of Naples fifteen years before, lent his support to Antonio Acciajuoli’s retention of the duchy which his Majesty, a decade before, had professed to bestow
on the fortunate Nerio. The diplomatic representations of Cardinal, Pope, and King bore fruit in the lagoons. On 22 June, 1404, Francesco Acciajuoli, a bastard of the Gonfalonier Donato, the late brother of Antonio’s father Nerio, was named by Antonio his procurator (the document was drafted by the Greek chancellor Nicholas Macri): on 31 March, 1405, an agreement was reached with representatives of the Serenissima whereby Antonio was pardoned for the affronts he had put upon the Republic, the price upon his head was lifted, and it was agreed “that Antonio
should rule, have and hold and possess the land, castle, and place of Athens, in modern times called Sythines’’ (guod ipse dominetur, habeat et teneat et possideat terram, castrum et locum Athenarum, moderno tempore vocatum Sythines). Asa vassal and faithful son of the Republic, Antonio
was to send to the Cathedral Church of St. Mark, every Christmas, a pallium which should be worth not less than one hundred ducats. He promised to make the friends and foes of the Republic his own and make restitution to the Venetians for various losses they had suffered during the war; the Margrave of Boudonitza, as a citizen of the Republic, was to be included in the agreement; while the exiled Greek Metropolitan Macarius, who had preferred the crescent to the Latin cross, was not to be allowed to take up residence in Athens.” But the Serenissima did not find Antonio Acciajuoli a reliable and dutiful vassal.% Although to the Florentines the title Duca d’Atene will always suggest *! Coll. de docs. inédits, Mél. hist., 111 (1880), docs. ed. Mas Latrie, no. xx11 (pp. 178-182), article 17 (p. 181); Dipl. Ven.-Levant, eds. G. M. Thomas and R. Predelli, 11, Venice, 1899, doc. 159 (p. 292);
N. lorga, in Rev. de Or. latin, IV (1896), p. 82, n. 3, and op. cit., pp. 258—262, 268—269. Cf. G. T. Dennis, “The Byzantine-Turkish Treaty of 1403,” Orientalia Christiana periodica, XXXIII (1967), 72-88. 2 Regesti dei Commemoriali, lib. x, no. 2 (R. Predelli, vol. I [1883], pp. 309—310, (from Commem., vol. x, fols. 3—4v); Gregorovius, II (1889), 273—274. *° C.N. Sathas, op. cit., Il (1881), nos. 365 (p.135) and 420 (pp. 183—184); I (1880), no. 43 (p. 52); N. Iorga, doc. in Rev. de l’Or. latin, IV (1896), pp. 284—285. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 72; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 361—362.
204 Catalan Domination of Athens the younger Gautier de Brienne, who attained to lordship over Florence, for a brief period, though never over Athens, their countryman Antonio I Acciajuoli was for some thirty-three years the Duke of Athens (1403-51435). His was the longest rule in the medieval history of the illustrious city: the title he commonly bore was that of “‘lord of Athens, Thebes, of all the duchy and its dependencies” (adééyrns ’AOnvdv, OnBdv, ravrds dovxtduou Kal r&v éffs);°4 to the many members of his family, some of whom
he invited to live with him in Athens and Thebes, Antonio was, as they often refer to him in their correspondence, i/ signore: Antonio’s long period of rule was prosperous and almost peaceful. He never forgot that he was a Florentine, and Florence was becoming, in competition with Genoa and Venice, a great commercial power, whose galleys were plying the waters of the eastern Mediterranean in search of some share of the wealth of the Levant. In 1406 Florence had conquered the rival city of Pisa; she acquired a harbor in Porto Venere four years later, and in 1421, she purchased from the Genoese, hard pressed in their war with the Grimaldiof Monaco, the port city of Livorno.® In the year following, on 22 June, 1422, the Florentines instructed one of their citizens, Tommaso Alderotti, to seek trading rights, “‘as good as those of the Venetians and the Genoese,” from “‘the magnificent Antonio Acciajuoli, lord of Corinth in Romania.”% Although the magnificent Antonio was not, and had never been, lord of Corinth, he was glad to acknowledge his Florentine origin and that of his family and he granted to the most puissant Signoria of Florence the same trading rights possessed in his domains by the “Venetians, Catalans, and Genoese.’’*’ His chief worry through the years was the Turks, but he managed well with them, and after the first decade of his rule the Venetians in Negroponte found him a good neighbor and worried about him no more.®*® The misfortunes of his reign were few, apparently, but one of the most serious must have been the plague which
ravaged Athens and Thebes in 1423.°? In the summer of 1435 Antonio “ J. A. Buchon, Nouv. rech. hist., 1, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. txvitt (p. 289); cf. no. Lx1x (p. 290) and, a document of Nerio II, no. Lxx1 (pp. 296, 297); and dominus Athenarum et Thebarum, also in documents of Nerio II (nos. Lxx11 and Lxx1n, pp. 298, 299). Cf. N. Iorga, doc. in Rev. de /’Or. latin, v111 (1900-1901), p. 78: Nerio 11, gui est dominus Stives et Sithines. % G. F, Pagnini, De/la Decima e di varie altre gravezze imposte dal comune di Firenze, 4 vols., 17651766, 11, 28-30. A readable presentation of Florentine expansion during this period may be found in Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence, New York, 1936, pp. 347-348. %® J. A. Buchon, Noun. rech. hist., 11, pt. 1 (1843), doc. Lxvii (pp. 287-288). 97 J. A. Buchon, op. cit., 1, pt. 1, doc. Lxvi11 (pp. 289-290); Fr. Miklosich u. Jos. Miller, Acta et diplomata res graecas italasque illustrantia, 111 (1865), pp. 251-252 (doc. dated 7 August, 1422). % Cf. Chalcocondylas, H72s¢., bk. rv (Bonn, p. 216); ed. Darké, 1 (1922), 202.
9 J. A. Buchon, op. cit., , pt. 1, Florence: doc. tiv (pp. 271-272).
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 205 died suddenly of a stroke,!© leaving behind him no son to inherit the ““pleasaunce of Athens,” but it was a difficult heritage in any event, and the cautious statesmen of the Serenissima wrote their government in Negroponte in October of 1435 that if the heirs of the late Antonio Accia-
juoli should occupy Athens, they should do so without Venetian interference, and, indeed, the bailie was instructed to offer no opposition even to the Turks if they should choose to take over the city which paid them tribute. But the lord of Athens was a Venetian vassal; and when the great republic was prepared thus easily to forfeit her suzerainty, a new and dismal day had dawned tn Greece: twenty years later the Turks occupied Athens.
In 1394 King Ladislas of Naples had named as Nerio’s heir in the Athenian duchy his younger brother Donato Acciajuoli, but Donato had never aspired to the uncertain glory of a duchy dependent upon Turkish sufferance and far away in the political chaos that was Greece. Donato had died in Florence in 1400; he had left three daughters and five sons; of the latter, unlike their father, four were attracted to Greece, and three took up residence there. Donato’s son Francesco (or Franco) was a good friend of his cousin, the lord Antonio, who employed him as his envoy in Venice,!* and from whom he received the castle of Sykaminon, near Oropus, in land once claimed by ancient Athens, and latterly a commandery of the Knights of St. John. When Francesco died in 1419, he left his young sons Nerio and Antonio a greater heritage than he had possessed himself, for they had been summoned from Florence, together with their mother Margareta Malpigli, a half dozen years before, by the childless Antonio to be with him in Greece :! both these sons of Francesco became Dukes of Athens. When the youngsters, about three and four years of age, came to Athens, they were accompanied by their uncle Nerio, the third son of the Gonfalonier Donato.!* This Nerio di Donato Acciajuoli made at least two visits to Athens (1413, 1423); he 1s an attractive figure, more interested in falconry and hunting than in fighting, an especial favorite, it is clear, of Carlo I Tocco and Francesca Acciajuoli, the Duke 10° Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. VI (Bonn, p. 320); ed. Darkdé, II—I (1923), 93; Sphrantzes, Chron. minus, in Patr. graeca 156, 1044; Pseudo-Sphrantzes, Ann., II, 10 (Bonn, p. 159); Gregorovius-Lampros, II (1904), p. 321. 101 C, N. Sathas, op. cit., 1 (1880), doc. 131 (p. 199). 102 Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 72; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), pp. 295-296; and the document dated in Venice on 26 March, 1416 (C. N. Sathas, op. cit., 1 [1880], no. 43, p. 52). 103 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. vr (Bonn, p. 320); ed. Darkéd, 11-1 (1923), 93. Cf. Buchon, op. cit., II, pt. 1, doc. Lxx (pp. 292—296); vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 163, 181.
1% J, A. Buchon has published a considerable correspondence addressed to Nerio di Donato Acclajuoli (Nouv. rech. hist., 1, pt. 1, docs, LINI-LIV, LVI-LVIII, LX-LXv1).
206 Catalan Domination of Athens — and Duchess of Leucadia.!% Two other sons of Donato Acciajuoli found ecclesiastical careers in Greece: Antonio became Bishop of Cephalonia in 1427,!% and Giovanni became, through the lord Antonio’s influence,
Archbishop of Thebes. The attitude of these various members of the Acciajuoli family towards their distinguished relative’s city of Athens is best put by young Niccolé Machiavelli, a son of one of Donato’s daughters and a member of the family to be made famous by another Niccol6 about a century later: Niccolé wrote from Athens in December of 1423 to Nerio
di Donato, then visiting his cousin, the Duchess Francesca, on the island of Santa Maura: “Ah, you have never seen a fairer land than this nor a finer fortress’”’ — than the Acropolis !!° Into the obscure details of the succession struggle between the Duchess ‘“‘Maria Melissena’”’, the widow of Antonio! Acciajuoli, and the latter’s
young cousin and adopted heir, Nerio II Acciajuoli, we need not go: for our present purposes it will suffice to observe that Nerio II did succeed to the ducal throne of Athens — for so had the Sultan Murad II decided —— despite the intrigues and opposition of the Duchess Maria, the family of the Chalcocondylae, and even of the Despot Constantine Palaeologus of Mistra.1°® Neither as a person nor as a politician did Nerio II give evidence of strength or trustworthiness; the weakness of his position as a ruler was equalled only by the weakness of his character asa man. After three or four years of rule on the Acropolis (1435-14392), according to Laonicus Chalcocondylas and the Florentine poet of a later period, Jacopo Gaddi, Nerio II was deprived of his power and driven from Athens by his younger and more energetic brother Antonio II (1439?-1441).!° 106 Cf. J. A. Buchon, op. cit., 1, pt. 1, pp. 163-166; vol. 11, pt. 1, docs., where Carlo Tocco or Francesca address Nerio di Donato as “‘affinis noster predilectissime’’ (no. Lx11, pp. 282, 283), ‘‘frater noster predilectissime” (no. Lx111, p. 283), “consanguine nostro carissime quanto a fratel amor” (no. LxIv, p. 284),‘‘nepos nostre carissime tamquam fili’” (no. Lxv, pp. 284, 285); and cf. doc. txv1, pp. 285-286, which gives Nerio a Greek slave named Eudoxia “‘benevolentia et amore fraterno quem habemus erga
Nerium de Aziolis de Florentia, fratrem nostrum amantissimum... ” 106 Cf, the letter written by him to Nerio di Donato from Athens on 16 December, 1423 (Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. 1, doc. Lx, pp. 280-281). 107 J, A. Buchon, op. cit., 11, pt. 1, doc. Lx1 (pp. 281-282): “Frater Johannes, Dei gratia archiepiscopus Thebarum.” 108 J, A. Buchon, of. cit., 1, pt.1, doc. Lv1u1 (p. 279): “Mio, tu non vedesti mai el pid belo paese che
questo ne la pit bela forteza.” 109 Cf, Laonicus Chalcocondylas (whose father was the Duchess Maria’s chief Athenian supporter against Nerio II), Hist., bk. v1 (Bonn, pp. 320-322); ed. Darkd, 1-1 (1923), 93-94;Pseudo-Sphrantzes, Ann., 11, 10 (Bonn, pp. 158-160). Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 91; Gregorovius-Lampros, 1 (1904). pp. 334-336; Wm. Miller (1908), 404-406. Cf. J.A. Buchon, op. cét.,1, pt. 1 (1843), pp. 178180; but see Setton, Hist. Crusades. II (1975), 271, note 167. 110 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. v1 (Bonn, p. 322); ed. Darké, 11-1 (1923), 94. Of great interest in this connection are the verses of Jacopo Gaddi, who probably had, however, the account of Chalcocondylas in mind (Adlocutiones et Elogia, Florence, 1636: Corollarium poeticum, p. 33), De Nerio II et Antonio II Acciatolis fratribus ducibus Athenarum:
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 207 After the death of Antonio II, Nerio returned to Athens and to his ducal power: the intervening two or three years he had spent in Florence.“ Nerio II was thus the only Florentine ruler of Athens to see again his native city, and he was present, presumably, when the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus, whose face is so well known to us from Pisanello’s portrait medallion, made a profession of his Catholic faith in Florence on
6 July, 1439. It may be, too, that one with so much at stake in the proceedings as the ruler of Athens and Thebes heard the proclamation of the Union, ‘‘as the heavens rejoiced,” in the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore beneath the famous dome which Brunelleschi had completed three years before. The Union brought nothing but grief to Constantinople. But in Florence, we may assume, the Duke of Athens would have found a warm welcome in the homes of the city’s great philhellenists. Three quarters of a century before, Boccaccio had sought to learn Greek with the aid of Leontius Pilatus, who had helped him to prepare, for Petrarch, a ludicrous translation of Homer; but from the turn of the century, when the impressive Manuel Chrysoloras had lectured there, Florence had been the home of Greek studies. Leonardo Bruni has left us eloquent testimony of Chrysoloras’ success in Florence.4? The Duke of Athens might have met Bruni, had he wished, and they could have talked of the late Niccolo Niccoli (d. 1437); one assumes, however, that the languid Nerio hadno interest in the humanists’pursuit of a language that he knew so well. Nerio must have met, however, Gemistos Plethon, the glory of the Greek renascence at Mistra, and his friend and follower, Bessarion, whom Pope Nobile par fratrum, Graecos Dux rexit uterque Non simul, alterno tempore sceptra ferens. Gesserat haec Nerius, quo pulso Antonius ardens Rursus at extincto fratre gerit Nerius. Nimium Pollux et Castor in urbe fuissent, Si fratrum iJlis gratia sanctus amor. Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 113; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), p. 336. Cf. J. A. Buchon, op. cit.,1, pt. 1, p. 185; Ubaldini (1588), op. cit., p. 177. 111 Nerio II was still in Athens on 6 August, 1437, when he confirmed his Greek subject Gregory Camachi’s right to the Latin franchise and its manifold privileges (J. A. Buchon, op. ci#., 1, pt. 1, doc. LXxXI, p. 297), and he was back in Athens on 24 February and 5 March, 1441, when he ratified two documents in favor of his Florentine agent Tommaso Pitti (Buchon, idid., docs. LXXI1, LXXIII, pp. 298, 299). Chalcocondylas, Joc. cit.
12 The tragic history is well known. Cf. the letter which Ciriaco of Ancona wrote, however, to the Emperor John VIII, sanctsssima illa peracta fidelium unione, in J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis, tom, v1 (Padua, 1754), Addenda, pp. 12-13. Cf. Georg Ostrogorsky, Gesch. d. byzant. Staates (1940), pp. 404-405; Diehl, Oeconomos, Guilland, and Grousset, op. cit., pp. 361 et sqq.
3 Leonardo Bruni, Rerum suo tempore in Italia gestarum commentarius, in L. A. Muratori, Rer. ital. scrip., x1x (Milan, 1731), col. 920, ed. Carmine di Pierro, in the new Muratori, vol. x1x, pt. 3 (1926), 431.
208 Catalan Domination of Athens FEugenius IV made a Roman cardinal in 1439.44 Surely Nerio must have got to know well, in two or three years’ residence in Florence, his relatives,
the young statesman Angelo Acciajuoli and the small Donato, in after years a famous scholar; a friend and supporter of the Medici, Angelo had been exiled to Cephalonia in 1433 when the great Cosimo de’ Medici himself had sought refuge in Padua and in Venice.“ But in the following
year the Florentine Signoria had recalled them, and their enemies, Rinaldo degli Albizzi and the distinguished patron of humanism, Palla Strozzi, were banished in their turn. When the young Acciajuoli took their cousin, the Duke Nerio, to call upon Cosimo de’ Medici, what did they say of Athens and of Plato? What did Nerio II Acciajuoli know of Plato? Did he ever accompany Cosimo to the Camaldulensian monastery of Saint Mary of the Angels to render expert, judgment upon Ambrogio Traversari’s Greek translations? Did Nerio meet with the first members of the Platonic Academy when they gathered at Cosimo’s summer villa at Careggi? Did the man who owned the world’s most beautiful architectural treasures, who lived in the Propylaea that Mnesicles had built, ever meet Michelozzi and Brunelleschi? In April of 1436 when the merchant archaeologist Ciriaco of Ancona had paid his first visit to Athens, he had apparently not called upon Nerio: Ciriaco, however, collected manuscripts for Cosimo de’ Medici, and the question suggests itself whether Nerio might not now have met Ciriaco and heard the account of his two weeks in Athens; for, about three years after Nerio’s restoration
to power on the Acropolis, Ciriaco returned to Athens, and this time he made a point of calling upon its ruler.%® When Ciriaco of Ancona walked
around the Acropolis, studied the Propylaea, the Erechtheum, and the Parthenon, for the first time in perhaps a thousand years Latin eyes beheld
and understood the meaning of what they saw, and for the first time in
almost two centuries and a half, since the days of the Metropolitan Michael Choniates, there walked through the city of Pericles and Plato one who could truly commune with their departed spirits and with the departed greatness of Athens. When Nerio II Acciajuoli returned to Athens for another decade of rule, if we may describe as such his occupancy of the little palace in the 114 Cf, John P. Mamalaki, George Gemistos Plethon (in Greek), Athens, 1939, pp. 130 et Saq., 156 et sqq., and Sp. P. Lampros, Palaeologeia and Peloponnesiaca (in Greek), vol. 1 (Athens, 1912-1923), QSSi™M.
, 115 Cf, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Commentario della vita di Messer Agnolo Acciaiuoli, printed in the Archivio Storico Italiano, vol. 1v, pt. 1 (1843), pp. 339-361, and Niccolé Machiavelli, storie Fiorentine, lib. 1v. cap. xxx (ed. Plinio Carli, 1 [Florence, 1927], pp. 227-229). 16 Ciriaco’s second visit to Athens seems to have been made in 1444 rather than 1447 (see, infra, Pp. 234, n. 72).
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 209 Propylaea, he found his lands buffeted from the south by the Greek Despot of Mistra, Constantine Palaeologus, and from the north by the Turkish commander Turakhan and the great sultan Murad II: he paid tribute to the Turk, to the Greek, and to the Turk again.“” But a new and dismal era was beginning for Greece: on 31 October, 1448, the Emperor John VIII died and left the city of Constantinople to his brother
Constantine, the Despot of Mistra, and on 6 January, 1449, the latter, as Constantine XI, was proclaimed Emperor."8 Two years later, on 5 February, 1451, Murad II died, and the young Mohammed II followed him. In 1451 Nerio II died, too, and left his little son Francesco and his ducal lordship of Athens and Thebes to his second wife, the Duchess Chiara Zorzi (Giorgio), the daughter of Niccolé II Giorgio of Carystus, who some time after the fall of Boudonitza to Mohammed I, in 1414, had acquired the empty if illustrious title of Margrave. The Duchess Chiara was more beautiful — and more corrupt — than Clytemnestra. She fell in love with the young Bartolommeo Contarini, who had come to Athens on business, and whose father, appropriately named Priamo, had been the Venetian castellan of Nauplia.4“° Contarini proved equal to Chiara’s expectations of him: to live with her —in Athens — he murdered his
wife in Venice. But the Sultan Mohammed II was prevailed upon to intervene by the Athenians and the retainers of the Acciajuoli in Athens, who entertained a not unreasonable fear for the life of the little Francesco. Contarini was summoned, together with the boy, to the Sultan’s court at Adrianople. He found there Franco Acciajuoli, the son of the late Duke Antonio II, who after his father’s death had become a Turkish hostage. Franco Acciajuoli now went to Athens as its last Duke, but his rule was short-lived (1455-1456). He was alleged to have murdered the Duchess Chiara in the Megarian castle which the first Nerio had taken from the Catalans in 1374. Now Bartolommeo Contarini, appalled at the vileness of the deed, stepped forth as an injured lover, and in his turn beseeched the Sultan to intervene again in the affairs of Athens. At the Sultan’s command, the Pasha Omar, the son of the old warrior Turakhan, invested Athens, and when Franco held out on the Acropolis, Omar offered him “‘the land of Boeotia and the city of Thebes,” but Athens, which
the Sultan had given to Franco, he was now taking away from him: 117 Cf. Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. vt (Bonn, pp. 319, 320 et sqq.); ed. Darké, 11-1 (1923), 91-92 ef sqq.; Chronicon breve, ad annum 6952 (1444), appended to Ducas’ Hist. Byzant. (Bonn, p. 519); Gregorovius-Isampros, 11 (1904), PP. 372-374; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 409 e¢ 5¢¢. 118 Sphrantzes, PG 156, 1051-52; D. A. Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée, 1 (1932), p. 240. 119 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 1x (Bonn, p. 453); ed. Darké, 1-2 (1927), 211-212; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 128; cf. J. von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’empire ottoman, trans. J. J. Hellert, ui (Paris, 1836), pp. 51-52.
210 Catalan Domination of Athens Franco might withdraw to Thebes, and take with him all his possessions from the castle on the Acropolis, caradkirav 7G Baotret tH ’AKporoduw.?° The Turks took Athens over on 4 June, 1456.% It had been a possession of the Florentine house of the Acciajuoli for sixty-eight years, since 1388, except for the period of Venetian rule (1394-1402-3), during which the
lower city may have been occupied by the Turks in 1397. In a letter referred to in its chronological context, just below, written by Franco Acciajuoli to Francesco Sforza of Milan four years after the fall of Athens,
it is stated: “that while in years gone by I was ruling the city of Athens and other lands adjoining it, as my father [Antonio II] and my uncle [Nerio II] and the founders of my house had done through the course of a hundred years and more, the Sultan of the Turks [Mohammed II], moved by the wiles of jealous men and having heard of the extraordinary strength of my castle and city of Athens, decided to see it. And as soon as he had seen how impregnable it was — and that he had its equal nowhere in his dominions — he conceived a very great love for it: hence he required me to be straightway removed from possession of it and to abandon my house to him, and he gave me another city by the name of Thebes, over which my fathers had formerly ruled, although they had lost control of the city when beset by the power of the present Sultan’s father [Murad II]’’.!” Here is no mention of the Duchess Chiara, and Franco has added a generation to his family’s possession of Athens; but a century sounds like a long time, and he doubtless wished it to make its due impression upon the upstart Sforza. Although Franco now became the “lord of Thebes,” his position was insecure and unhappy; he became little more than a
Turkish mercenary. After the power of the Despots Demetrius and Thomas, brothers of the last Byzantine Emperor, was extinguished in the
Morea, Franco was ordered to assist in a Turkish campaign against Leonardo III Tocco of Cephalonia. His plight had become desperate, 120 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 1x (Bonn, pp. 454-455); ed. Darké, 11-2 (1927), 212-213; GregoroviusLampros, 11 (1904), pp. 384-388; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 437-438. On the Turkish background, see Franz Babinger, in Enzyklopadie des Islam, tv (1934), p. 950. 121. Wm. Miller, “The Turkish Capture of Athens,” Essays on the Latin Orient (1921), pp. 160-161; Latins in the Levant (1908), p. 437. Cf. Chron. breve, ad ann. 6964 (1456), appended to Ducas’ Hist. Byzant. (Bonn, p. §20);Pseudo-Sphrantzes,4nm., 1v ,14 (Bonn, p. 385), where the year ab orbe condito is reckoned as 6934; Historia patriarchica, ad ann. 6964 (properly 1456), ed. Bonn, pp. 124-125. The erroneous belief that Athens fell in 1458 is very persistent (as in the recent study by Hans Pfeffermann, on Die Zusammenarbeit der Renaissancepapste mit den Turken, Berne, 1946, pp. 3, 10-11). 122 On the reasons for believing in a Turkish occupation of the lower city of Athens, although it is not mentioned in either Venetian or Byzantine sources, see Wm. Miller, Latins in the Levant (1908), pp. 358-359; cf. J. von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de ’empire ottoman, trans. J. J. Hellert, 1 (1836), PP. 350-354, 433. See also, supra, note 45. 128 Sp. P. Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. v1, doc. 2 (p. 408); also published in Néos ‘EAA nvoprnpwr, I (1904), 216-218. (The document is in the R. Archivio di Stato di Milano: Potenze estere [material on “external affairs’’].)
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 211 and he had earned the Sultan’s suspicions that he or his followers still hoped to be re-installed in the Acropolis. But no one knew better than Franco that his rule of Attica lay in the past and even his future in Boeotia
was drawing to aclose. On Io February, 1460, Franco addressed a desperate letter to Francesco Sforza, who had for a decade held the lordship of Milan: he offered to serve Sforza for a proper stipend, to expend 10,000 ducats of his own in the establishment of a condotta, and to betake him-
self immediately to his excellency in Milan.'** Later in the same year the Turkish governor of the Morea, Zagan Pasha, had the unfortunate Franco murdered by order of Mohammed II.'*° The Sultan had sent Franco to Zagan at the close of the Turkish campaign of 1460 which had seen the final destruction of the Byzantine despotat. The heiress of the younger branch of the Fadrique family in the Athenian duchy, the daughter of Don John Fadrique, who after the death of his cousin Don Luis is found in possession of Aegina, is said to have been married in 1394 to the Catalan soldier Antonello de Caopena, whose family held Aegina until 1451 when the island was finally acquired by the Venetians at the death of his grandson, also Antonello, who had married the daughter of Antonio I Acciajuoli of Athens. In 1460, the year also in which Franco Acciajuoli met his end, Arnau Guillem de Caopena, lord 1% Tampros, Eggrapha, (1906), pt. vi, doc. 2 (pp. 407-409): “... animum firmiter alligavi non modo relinquere sed illam [militarem artem quam a teneris annis inchoavi] nullatenus exercere contra christianos pro eorum perfido inimico Theucrorum imperatore.... Abea quidem Thebarum civitate et alio oppido pingui [Livadia] non minores recipio redditus et introitus quibus a... Athenarum urbe
percipiebam ... [which may have been true]. Ad vestram igitur Excellentiam . . . confidenter recurro ...si quem fidelem et audacem armorum ductorem habere cupit .. . ducatos decem milia pro apparatu pro comitibus meis floridis et expertis in armis hic de meis exponere non dubitabo, et ad vestram Excellentiam illico me conferam ... Dat. Thebis x Februarii 1460.” (Wm. Miller, Latins in the Levant, 1908, p. 456, seems to have misread this document.) Cf. Johannes Drdseke, “Aus dem Athen der Acciaiuoli,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, x1v (1905), p. 253. (Drdaseke’s article deals briefly with problems concerning the Greek Archbishop Phantinus of Athens and the Union of the Churches in 1439-1440: cf. Sp. P. Lampros, Palaeologeia and Peloponnesiaca [in Greek], vol. 1 [1912-1923], pp. 21-22.) 12 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 1x (Bonn, pp. 483-484); ed. Darkéd, 11-2 (1927), 237; Ubaldini (1588), op. cit., pp. 178-179; Theodore Spandugino, Tratt[at]o della casa d’Ottomano, in Hopf, Chron. grécoromanes (1873), PP. 329, 331-332; Cornelio Magni, Relazione della Citta a’ Athene [from a letter written from Athens 15 December, 1674] . . . dedicata all’Eminentissimo e Reverendissimo Signor Cardinale Acciaioli, Legato di Ferrara, publ. in Parma, 1688, pp. 20-21; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904), pp. 402-403; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 456-457; cf. Nicolae Iorga, Histoire de la vie byzantine, Bucharest, 1934, 1, p.291,n.2. Of the murder of Franco Acciajuoli, Akdes Nimet, Die tiuirkische Prosopographie bei Laonikos Chalkokandyles, diss. Hamburg, 1933, p. 44, observes: ‘Dieses Ereignis wird nur von
Laonikos tiberliefert. Eine Kontrolle ist hier nicht méglich.” 128 Stefano Magno, dun. Ven., in Hopf, Chroniques (1873), p.197; cf. Chalcocondylas, Hist., 1v (Bonn, pp. 215-216); ed. Darkd, 1 (1922), 202; Hopf, Chron., p. 475; Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 1 (1889), 215, 290-291, 373; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 326, 462; Rubiéd y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 1 (1908), Pp. 371; ibid., v1 (1915-1920), p. 146; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), p. 140.
212 Catalan Domination of Athens of the fortress town of Piada in the Argolid, near ancient Epidaurus, died,
and with Arnau there passed the last fragment of a Catalan state in Greece. Catalan rule had thus endured, with its strange vicissitudes of fortune, first in Boeotia, Attica, Phocis, and Thessaly, even in Negroponte and Aegina, and then, finally, in the Argolid, for a full century and a half
(1311-1460).17” Although the dynasty of the Caopena disappeared with Arnau Guillem (1418-1460), its name is still preserved in Mt. Arna in the Argolid.’7° It is almost the only monument of the rule of the Catalans in Greece although even to this day, as William Miller observed a generation ago, there are still Roman Catholic Catalan families in Greece and the Aegean islands.'*? The history of the Catalan domination of Athens does not entirely cease with the fall of the city to the Florentine on 2 May, 1388. The Sicilian and Aragonese Kings of the house of Barcelona did not in any way
relax their claims to their dominions over the sea. On 1 September, 1392, the energetic Don Martin I of Aragon, in the name of Maria of Sicily and his son the Infante Don Martin, who had married her (in 1391), appointed, as the Vicar General of the lost duchies, a Catalan noble, Don
Pedro de Fonollet, Viscount of Isola and Lord of Laguna.¥° It was, of course, only a gesture of diplomatic defiance, flung in the teeth of the Florentine usurper: in the politics of Greece it had no meaning. All the chief powers concerned in the affairs of the Levant — except the house of Barcelona — had acknowledged Antonio I Acciajuoli as lord of Athens and Thebes after he had become reconciled with the Republic of Venice.
In the summer of 1422 Antonio was informed that King Alfonso V of Aragon, who had become established in Naples in the previous year as the adopted son of Queen Joanna II, had invested with the duchy of Athens 127 Rubidé y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 11 (1908), p. 371; ibid., v1 (1915-1920), p. 146; Nicolau d’Olwer (1926), pp. 140-141. 128 Ant. Meliarakes, Political Geography, Modern and Ancient, of the District of Argolis and Corinthia
(in Greek), Athens, 1886, p. 65, cited by Wm. Miller (1908), p. 462, n. 2. The last member of the Caopena family, Niccold, died as a priest of the Church of S. Giovanni in Bragora, in Venice, on 11 November, 1648 (Hopf, Chron., p. 475). 129 The Latins in the Levant (1908), pp. 326-327. With the establishment of Don Alfonso Fadrique in the Athenian duchy, the great Spanish historian of the earlier seventeenth century, Francisco de Moncada, bearer of a distinguished name in the Catalan history of Athens, breaks off his account of the famous expedition to the Levant (Expedicién de los catalanes y aragoneses contra turcos y griegos [published in 1623], ed. Samuel Gili Gaya, Madrid, 1924, p. 363): “Con esto daremos fin a la Expedici6n de nuestros catalanes y aragoneses, hasta que tengamos larga y verdadera noticia de lo que suce-
did en el espacio de ciento y cincuenta afios que tuvieron aquel Estado.” Although the context makes Moncada’s proud reflection an erroneous one, it is not for nothing that he can speak of a “‘hundred and fifty years”: the works of Rubié y Lluch have finally given us the /arga y verdadera noticia that Moncada lacked. 130 Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 82 (pp. 324-327); cf. Isidoro La Lumia, Storie Siciliane, 11 (1882), 333, 339, n. 1; Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat., 1 (1908), p. 378. DOC,no. DCXXXV.
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 213 ‘fa certain Lord Thomas Beraldo, a Catalan,” with every intention, it appeared, of establishing the said Thomas in his new dignity. With obvious concern Antonio had requested his cousin, Giovanni Acciajuolli,
Archbishop of Thebes, who was planning a trip to Rome, to inquire whether the report was true, and true it was. The Archbishop thereupon requested the Serenissima to have the Venetian government in Negroponte prevent any attempt at the restoration of the Athenian duchy to the Catalans. The Republic replied, serenely, that there was no cause for alarm: everyone knew that the Catalans were a boastful lot, but nothing would come of their vainglorious gesture — prout apud omnes est satis notissimum, uti multis verbis vanis et etiam magne longitudinis — and
nothing did come thereof.4! Nevertheless, Catalan royal seals of the fifteenth century regularly bear the title Duke of Athens and Neopatras (dux Athenarum et Neopatrie). The Catalans were, nevertheless, very much in evidence in Greece throughout most of the fifteenth century. Catalans and their galleys, in the employ of Pope Martin V, were serving the Archbishop Pandolpho Malatesta of Patras at the time he lost his archiepiscopal city to Constantine Palaeologus (1430), destined to be the last Greek Emperor, and another Catalan galley, hired by the Duchess Francesca of Leucadia, captured, and held for ransom, the Byzantine historian and diplomat George Sphrantzes when he was sent by his master Constantine to attempt, by
arbitration, a settlement of the disputes of the heirs of the late Duke Carlo I Tocco. In July of 1430 the Catalans also captured the city of Glarentza, and, shortly thereafter, sold the city back to Constantine
Palaeologus.'**
On 14 March, 1433, the Serenissima promised the harassed Carlo II Tocco aid and honor, as he sought to hold his island possessions of Leucadia, Cephalonia, and Zante against the claims of his bastard cousins who were seeking Turkish support, “so that he may not take counsel with 131 N. Iorga, doc. from Venetian Sen. Secreta, reg. 8, fol. 62v., in Rev. de l’Or. lat., v (1897), p. 122; Hopf, op. cit., vol. 86 (1868), p. 81; Gregorovius-Lampros, 11 (1904): “Illustrissimum regem Aragonum
investisse quéndam dn. Thomam Beraldo, Cathalanum, de ducatu Athenarum cum dispositione ponendi eum cum suo favore in possessionem ipsius ducatus.”’ 18 Ferran de Sagarra, Sigillografta catalana, 1 (Barcelona, 1916), pp. 131, 133, 219-222, 224, 225, 227; cf. Archivo histérico nacional, Seccién sigilografia: Catélogo de los sellos espatioles de la edad media, ed. Juan Menéndez Pidal, Madrid, 1918, pp. 100-106. A seal of the Infante Don Martin, son of King
Martin I, from the year 1403 reads: “Infans Mart[inus domini regis Araglonum filius, gubernator eius generalis i [n omnibus regnis et] terris suis [dux Montis Al]lbi, ac patris et [matris eius] administrator, Martini coadiutorque Malrie], regis et regine Sicilie, d[ucis] et ducisse Athe|n\arum et Neopatrie”’ (Ferran de Sagarra, op. cit., 1, no. 217, p. 248). "38 See George Sphrantzes’ own account in his Chron. minus, in PG 156, 1040—1043A, and cf.
the Pseudo-Sphrantzes, Annales, Il, 7—9 (Bonn, pp. 146—147, 151, 154-155); Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 390, 396. ‘4 Sphrantzes, in PG 156, 1043A, and cf. Pseudo-Sphrantzes, Ann., II, 10 (Bonn, p. 156).
214 Catalan Domination of Athens the Genoese, or the Catalans, orthe Turks...” (ut cum Fanuensibus, aut
Catellanis, aut Teucris non captat partitum...).*° As the Emperor John VIII Palaeologus sailed from Euboea to Cenchreae (Corinth) on his way to Venice in the winter of 1437 to attend the Council of Ferrara-Florence, he ran some danger of being captured by Catalan pirates,!*®
and, a dozen years later, after his coronation at Sparta in January of 1449, the Emperor Constantine XI and the imperial party were borne to Constantinople in Catalan galleys.%7 Indeed, in December of 1456, the Venetians still regarded a Catalan-Aragonese occupation of parts of the Morea as possible,'** and a Catalan consul was maintained in Constantinople for decades before the city fell to the Sultan Mohammed II.1° Three years or so after Nerio II’s return to Athens the news had reached Naples that, after the defeat of the Turks by John Hunyadi and Ladislas III, King of Poland and Hungary, Athens had been occupied by Constantine Palaeologus, the Despot of Mistra. Believing that the Greek Despot did hold Athens — Constantine had, in fact, captured Thebes, ravaged the Athenian duchy, and compelled Nerio II to promise to pay him tribute — King Alfonso V “the Magnanimous,” then very firmly established in his Neapolitan kingdom and able to look to Greece, despatched, on 27 November, 1444, a letter to the Despot Constantine, explaining his right of succession to the duchy, and exhorting and directing Constantine to surrender the city of Athens to his envoy, the Marquis Giovanni of Gerace.49 After the Turkish victory at Varna, however, in November of 135 C, N. Sathas, op. cit., 111 (1882), doc. 1007 (p. 417).
18% Sylvester Sguropulus, Vera historia unionis non verae inter Graecos et Latinos, trans. Robert Creyghton (1660), 1v, 4 (p. 72). Cf. N. Iorga, docs. in Rev. de l’Or. lat., v1 (1898), pp. 389, 393-394: 137 Sphrantzes, in PG 156, 1052B, and cf. Pseudo-Sphrantzes, Ann, III, I (Bonn, pp. 205—206). 188 Cf, C. N. Sathas, op. cit., 1 (1880), doc. 155 (pp. 232-233), and doc. 149 (p. 220), dated 16 July, 1454; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 428; Const. Marinescu, “Le Pape Calixte III (1455-1458), Alfonse V d’Aragon, roi de Naples, et l’offensive contre les Turcs,” Académie Roumaine: Bulletin de la section historique, x1x (Bucharest, 1935), 77-97. 139 Cf, Ps.-Sphr. , 4nm., 111 (Bonn, pp. 252-253); Rubié y Lluch, 4n. Instit. Cat.. v (1913-1914), P. 433; Nicolau d’Olwer, L’Expansié de Catalunya (1926), p. 179; “Le Commerce catalan 4 Constantinople en 1380,” Byzantion, 1v (1927-1928), pp. 193-195; cf. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, Pratica della Mercatura, ed. Allan Evans, for the Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass., p. 41. The relations of Catalonia and Constantinople had been close since, at least, the last generation of the thirteenth century (cf. the documents published by Const. Marinescu, in Byzantion, 1 [1924], pp. 460-468; idem, ‘“‘Notes sur les Catalans dans |’empire byzantin pendant le régne de Jacques II,” in Mélanges d’ histoire du moyen ge offerts 2 M. Ferdinand Lot, Paris, 1925, pp. 501 et sqq.; F. Dolger, “Die Urkunden des byzantinischen Kaisers Andronikos II fir Aragon unter K6nig Jakob II,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans, xvu11 [1934], pp. 300-308). In November of 1387 a certain John Beas
(6 Mxalas), a Catalan, had some connection, no longer known, with the Greek Church in Constantinople (Miklosich and Miller, Acta patriarchatus Constantinopolitani, 11 [1862], p. 9). #40 Arch, Cr. Aragon, reg. 2690, fol. 123v., published by Francesco Cerone, “La politica orientale di Alfonso di Aragona,” Archivio storico per le provincie napoletane, XxvU1 (1902), pp. 430-431: ‘“Tllustris
Athens under the Florentines and the Venetians 215 1444 no Christian prince, whether Orthodox or Catholic, had a future in Greece: only the Serenissima could hold on, grim and always cautious and sometimes courageous. After the fall of the despotat of Mistra to the Sultan Mohammed I], in 1460, the inhabitants of Monemvasia accepted the rule of a Catalan pirate, Lope de Bertagna, and shortly thereafter expelled him from their
almost impregnable fortress.“ Thus in the same year that the Catalan house of Caopena relinquished its scepter in the Argolid, a new Catalan dynasty was almost established in the strongest fortress in Greece. despote nobis plurimum dilecte . . . ducatus Athenarum et Neopatrie, qui nostris iunguntur titulis, ad dominium nostrum revocari posse equidem fuimus arbitrati; iniunximus propterea marchioni Geraci illustri et magnanimo viro eos quod debeat hinc acquirere, pristinoque nostro dominio agregare. Fuerunt quippe predecessores nostri qui ducatus ipsos acquisitos suis admiserunt titulis, nobisque superstitibus cum aliis regnis et terris, peculiare tamquam, reliquerunt, et 1ure ad nos pertinentur et debentur. Cum vero susceperimus civitatem Athenarum, que caput et cognomentum ducatuum unius esse a vobis tener}, illico nobis persuasimus vos iuris et successionis nostre predicte coscientiam non habere. Itaque ius nostrum vobis significandum duximus hortantes, requirentes et affectuosius deprecantes Civitatem ipsam Athenarum iam dicto marchioni pro nobis velitis restituere: iniuste enim et in nostri preiudicium a quoque alio possidetur....’’ Alfonso V called himself Duke of Athens and Neopatras in his official acts and, like his predecessors and successors, employed the title on such coins as were struck in Sicily (see Cerone, op. cit., xxvll, pp. 427-428). Cf. the notice in Gust. Schlumberger, Numismatique de [Orient latin, Paris, 1878, p. 346; Wm. Miller (1908), pp. 410-411, with his refs. to the sources; D. A. Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée, 1 (1932), p. 232. The daughter of the Marquis of Gerace, Giovanni di Ventimiglia, had married Carlo II Tocco of Cephalonia, Zante,
Santa Maura, and Epirus (cf. Miller, op. cit., pp. 415-416). For King Alfonso’s activities in the Levant at this time, see Francesco Pall, in Académie Roumaine: Bulletin de la section historique, xx (Bucharest, 1938), 21 ef sgg., and Const. Marinescu, idid., x1x (1935), 77-97. 141 Stefano Magno, Ann. Ven., in Hopf, Chroniques (1873), pp. 203-204; cf. N. Iorga, Gesch. des osman. Reiches, 11 (Gotha, 1909), pp. 94-95; Wm. Miller, The Latins in the Levant (1908), p. 448. On the establishment of papal rule in Monemvasia, after the expulsion of Lope de Bertagna, see O. Rinaldi, 4nn. ece/., ad ann. 1460 (vol. x [1753], pp. 240-242.) There is a succinct synopsis of the background of events by N. A. Bees, in Enzyklopadie des Islam, Ill (1936), pp. 648—649, and on Lope de Bertagna, see Setton, Crusades, Ill, 276.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, SOCIAL CONDITIONS AND ATHENIAN ANTIQUITIES UNDER THE CATALANS AND FLORENTINES WHEN the Catalans occupied the duchy of Athens and Thebes, after the defeat and death of Duke Gautier I de Brienne in the battle of the Cephissus in 1311, the smooth and liquid speech of French knights and noble ladies gave way to the harsher tones of the language one still hears in the streets and shops and mills of Barcelona. On the Acropolis and the
Cadmea, the /ingua franca was replaced by the /engua catalana, the language of almogavares and chroniclers, a language still spoken by several million people in Catalonia, Roussillon and Andorra, Valencia and the Balearic Isles, and in the town of Alghero in Sardinia, the last curious relic of Catalan expansion into the Mediterranean.! Unlike the Burgundian Dukes of Athens, who sometimes used vulgar Greek as well as French and Latin — and the Acciajuoli made frequent use of Greek — the Catalans in the Athenian duchy, after they had joined the Crown of Aragon, composed most of their documents, of whatever character, in Catalan, the bell catalanesch of Muntaner.
Catalan was thus, together with Latin, the official language of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras: indeed, from the twelfth century union of the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon (1137), Catalan had been the language of the Aragonese royal court, the native speech of the great line of the kings of the house of Barcelona. The nations of the Spanish peninsula were the first in Europe regularly to use the vernacular
languages in public and official documents. Soon after Alfonso X el Sabio succeeded to the throne of Castile (1252-1284), he made Castilian the official language of the realm, and Latin was to be used only or at least chiefly in foreign correspondence. A similar respect for the Catalan language was shown by King James I of Aragon (1213-1276), the founder of Catalan prose and author of a remarkable chronicle (Lithre dels feyts del rey En acme): it was under King James I and his successor Pedro III that Catalan became an official language of the confederation of Aragonese 1 Cf. Rubid y Lluch, “La lengua y la cultura catalanas en Grecia en el siglo x1v,”” Homenaje a Mennéndez y Pelayo, Madrid, 1899, 11; Catalunya a Grecia, Barcelona, 1906, pp. 68-102; “La llengua catalana a Grécia,”’ Primer Congrés Internacional de la llengua catalana [1906], Barcelona, 1908, pp. 325348; An. Instit. Cat., v (1913-1914), Pp. 431-433; cf. Los Catalanes en Grecia, Madrid, 1927, pp. 24 e¢ sqq.; “Per qué donem el nom de Catalana a la dominacié de la Corona d’Aragé a Grécia,” Estudis Universitaris Catalans, x11 (Barcelona, 1927), pp. I-12.
Language and Culture 217 kingdoms,? whose cultural achievements and constitutional developments
are among the most interesting and important in Europe. Considering the widespread use of the vernacular languages for official purposes throughout most of western Europe by the middle of the fourteenth century — even in relatively backward England French had displaced Latin and itself been displaced by English by the later 1360’s — it seems, at first, unusual to find that all the documents, relating to Athens, drafted
in the Sicilian chancery throughout the reign of King Frederick III (1355-1377), and preserved today in the Archives of Palermo, are written,
without exception, in Latin; but the Catalan-Aragonese kingdom of Sicily, with its peculiarly close relations with Aragon and Catalonia, the Avignonese papacy, Angevin Naples, native factions in Sicily, the Republics of Genoa and Venice, as well as the ducal dominions beyond the sea in Athens and Neopatras, were obliged to employ Latin to avoid the babel of vernacular tongues that would have driven chancery clerks to despair and required the too frequent translation of too many documents for the benefit of the King and his advisers. When the Greek duchies were annexed to the Crown of Aragon, however, there begins in 1379 that long series of documents, mostly in Catalan, which Rubiéd y Lluch has transcribed and published for us from the royal Archives in Barcelona. Time and the Turk have dealt very harshly with the written as well as with the monumental remains of Catalan Greece: only a half dozen or so documents have reached us which were composed in the Athenian chancery during the Catalan period, and half of them are, it is true, in Latin, but by far the longest and most important of them, the Articles of Athens, except for the customary Latin preamble and conclusion, is written in Catalan. Of the men who wrote these documents, the chancellors, notaries, and clerks of the Athenian duchy, a good deal, actually, is known. From the days of the chronicler Muntaner, who had himself been chancellor of the Company at Gallipoli (Cron., chap. 224), the office of chancellor was, of course, as everywhere in Europe, an honorable one: he was the guardian of the Company’s seal which bore the effigy of St. George. After Muntaner the first chancellor of whom record survives is James de Sarria, who was chancellor in 1312 and in 1314.8 On 8-9 October, 1316, the Sicilian notary Pedro de Ardoino was appointed to the office of chancellor ‘‘of the fortunate Army of the Franks in the duchy of Athens’’;‘ a certain Guillem 2 Cf, Miss E. S. Procter, ““The Castilian Chancery during the Reign of Alfonso X,” Oxford Essays in Medieval History Presented to Herbert Edward Salter, Oxford, 1934, pp. 105-106. ? Rubiéd y Lluch, “Chanceliers et notaires dans la Gréce catalane,” in the dedicatory volume To the Memory of Spyridon Lampros (in Greek), Athens, 1935, p. 153. (DOC, nos. Lxx, LxxI, and LXxxuII.) ‘Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, docs. 103-104 (pp. 354-356). Cf. Rubiéd y Lluch, AeArlov ris ‘Ioropuxfs xal "E®vodoyuxjs ‘Eratpelas rijs ‘EAAdSos, n.s., 1 (1928), p. 116.
218 Catalan Domination of Athens Bassada appears as chancellor of the Company, five years later, when on 11 May, 1321, the Catalans renewed their truce with the Venetians of Negroponte.’ There is, thereafter, a gap of more than forty years in our knowledge of who held the chancellorship, although presumably there must have been a more or less unbroken series of chancellors, who presided over the record offices in Thebes and Athens and who had charge of local documents as well as correspondence with the royal chancery in
Sicily. A document drafted at the royal chancery in Messina, on 18 May, 1367, mentions a certain Valenti Ferran, or Valentino Ferrando, as attaching the seal of St. George, on 2 January, 1366 (i.e. 1367), to the important Articles of Thebes in his capacity of chancellor of the ‘‘fortunate
Company of the Franks.’ We have recorded in extant documents the names of at least four notaries from Thebes: the Catalans Bernat Oller (mentioned in the Venetian truce of 1321) and Guillem de Sengler (appointed on 19 November, 1366)
and the Sicilians Francesco de Cremona, a well known figure in the Athenian duchy (1366-1375), and Matteo de Juvenio, appointed after Francesco de Cremona’s death (2 April, 1375).? The only notaries known from Livadia are Nicholas and Constantine de Mauro-Nichola, son and grandson respectively of a Greek native of Livadia who in 1311 had re-
ceived, for his services to the Company, the Catalan franchise. At Salona, too, we find a Greek notary, where the Countess and the castellans Dimitri and Mitro were also Greek: this is Cosmas of Durazzo. The other known notary of Salona was the Catalan Periulli de Ripoll (1388), one of whose relatives, Andreas, may have signed, two generations before, the Venetian truce of 1321. At Athens, we know of a certain John Seraio, a notary or clerk of the municipal court (nofarius actorum curie civitatis) ,®
and, of course, of Pedro Balter, for whom, in 1380, in the Articles of Athens, Don Pedro IV made provision from the scribal fees of the Athenian duchy.® Enough has been said already about the two most famous 5 Count de Mas Latrie, “Commerce et expéditions militaires,’’ Coll. de docs. inédits sur l’ histoire de
France: Mélanges historiques, 111 (1880), doc. x1 (p. 53): “...Guielmus Bassada cancellarius...”’ (DOC, no. CXVI).
6 Document in Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. Iv, no. 20 (p. 256): “... notum fier volumus [i.e. nostra majestas] universis tam presentibus quam futuris quod universitates hominum civitatum, terrarum et locorum dictorum nostrorum ducatuum Athenarum et Neopatrie fidelium nostrorum per earum capitula data Thebis sub sigillo beati Georgi quo ipse universitates utuntur per Valentinum Ferrandi felicis societatis Francorum 1bi degentis cancellarium....” Cof., ibid., pt. 1v, doc. 91 (p. 337), e alibi, and DOC, nos. CCLXXXIX—CCXC. 7 Rubié y Lluch, Joc. cit., and La Poblacié de la Grécia catalana (1933), Apen., pp. 47, 50, 54, 55. with references to the documents in Rubidé’s Dipl. de l’Orient Cat. 8’ Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1v, no. 30 (p. 271), document dated 7 January, 1372. ® Rubid y Lluch, Zos Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxx11 (p. 247).
Language and Culture 219 notaries of Athens, Demetrius Rendi and Nicholas Macri, both of whom became municipal chancellors, and in this capacity probably resided on the Acropolis. The first Athenian document of the Florentine period, drafted on 15 January, 1387, is a grant of certain properties to Niccolé de Medici (Latros), who had married the daughter of the Greek notary Damianus Philomachus, of whom Nerio I speaks with respect and affection,!° and from 1 February, 1431 (1.e. 1432), a deed of sale is extant, for a small piece of land in Athens, “‘written by the hand of the notary and chancellor of
Athens, Nicholas Chalcomatas.’" He is the last known notary and chancellor of Athens, and it is not without significance that he was a Greek.
From the scantier records of the Burgundian century in Athens (12051311) the name of no Greek notary is known. The notariate, however, was the only public office to which, as a rule, Greeks could aspire, not only under the three Latin régimes in Athens, but under any Latin state in Greece and in the Greek islands. To this rule there were, as we have seen, numerous exceptions in the Catalan duchies, and very likely, too, there were numerous exceptions in Florentine Athens, where both the wives of Antonio I Acciajuoli were Greek, and he himself half-Greek, and where the archontic family of the Chalcocondylae had become so powerful by the early 1430's as to scheme withthe Duchess “‘MariaMelissena’’ to secure again the rule of a Greek in Athens, whether by purchasing the Sultan Murad II’s recognition of the Duchess’s exercise of power in her own right or by turning the city over to Constantine Palaeologus, then Despot of Mistra.” During the Catalan era Greek notaries composed official documents in Catalan and Latin. On one occasion, for example, and it must have been typical — although so few are the extant documents drafted in Athens that no other instance can be cited — a Greek notary, Constantine de Mauro-Nichola, signed, with a notarial certification in Catalan, a document written entirely in Latin.% In the fourteenth century Catalan was almost as widely known in the Mediterranean as Italian: in Constantinople, in the time of John Cantacuzenus, there were numerous Greeks 10 J, A. Buchon, Noun. rech. hist., 11, pt. 1 (1843), Florence: doc. xu (p. 220); Fr. Miklosich and Jos. Miller, 4cta et diplomata res graecas italasque illustrantia, 111 (1865), p. 248. 11 J, A. Buchon, op. cit., doc. Lx1x (p. 291); Miklosich and Miller, op. cit., 111, p. 256. 12 Cf, Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. vr (Bonn, pp. 320-322); ed. Darké, 1-1 (1923), 93-94; Ps.—Sphr.,
Ann., 1, 10 (Bonn, pp. 159-160). The Greek faction which was opposed to the Chalcocondylae helped to defeat them, and Athens was to wait more than four centuries longer for Greek rule. 18 Arch. Cr. Aragon, reg. 1366, fol. 67v, document dated 22 April, 1380, cited by Rubié y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), p. 78, n. 2; Catalunya a Grecia (1906), p. 78; Byzantion, 11 (1925-1926), p. 222: “E yo, Constantino de Mauro Nicola, per autoritat del senyor vicari en los ducats d’Atenes e de.la Patria, notari public... .””» DOC, no. CCCXCIII, p. 484.
220 Catalan Domination of Athens who knew Catalan.“ Greeks, however, seldom held other positions than that of notary in the Latin states in Greece. In the Venetian colony of Negroponte, as late as 1420, Greeks were forbidden to hold any office or to serve the state in any capacity except as scribes (exceptis scribantis): the tenor of the document, however, leads one to suspect that the bailie and captain in Negroponte had been employing Greeks in the administration of the Republic’s affairs.= In Athens, however, the masses of Greek peasants, fishermen, tradesmen, artisans, and the like, naturally learned very little Catalan, if any, and, for that matter, very little French and
Italian, and not very much Turkish, despite four hundred years of Turkish rule.'® The use of the Catalan vernacular in the ducal chanceries of Athens and
Neopatras is very interesting, and the documents of the Sicilian period, always in Latin, bear ample witness to it. Thus, a document from the Sicilian royal chancery, dated 6 April, 1368, refers to the statutes of the . Company which had been promulgated, years before, 17 vulgari sermone, Catalano ydiomate."" Another document, dated 7 January, 1372, refers to a grant contained “in a letter, written on paper and in the Catalan language, according to the usage and custom of the city of Athens.’’?® Except for Latin preamble and conclusion, both the Articles of Athens and the Articles of Salona are written in Catalan. Extant communications from the Kings Don Pedro IV and his son Don John I, in the last years of Catalan domination in Greece, not only to officials, persons, or municipalities in the duchies of Athens and Neopatras and the county of Salona but to various dignitaries in the Morea and continental Greece also are written more often in Catalan than in Latin. Of the culture of the Catalan feudatories we know nothing at all, but M4 Rubid y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., v (1913-1914), p- 433. On the Catalans in Constantinople, see Francesco Cerone, Archivio storico per le provincie napoletane, xxvi1 (1902), pp. 621 et sqq. 1 C.N.Sathas, Documents inédits relatifs 2’ histoire de la Gréce au moyen dge, vol. 111 (1882), doc. 775 (p. 215). 16 Cf, Rubié y Lluch, Zos Navarros en Grecia (1886), pp. 77-78, 84-85; Homenaje a Menéndezy Pelayo, 11 (1889), pp. 99-104; Catalunya a Grecia (1906), pp. 76-82; Byzantion, 11 (1925-1926), pp. 221-222; Deltion, new series, 1 (1928), pp. 117-119.
17 Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 14 (p. 247): “... prout in quodam capitulo per dictos precessores nostros in vulgari sermone, Catalano ydiomate, constituto hec inter alia continentur ... .” Cf. Rubié y Lluch, Homenaje a Menéndez y Pelayo, 11 (1899), p. 99; Catalunya a Grecia (1906), p. 75. Rubié believed that the original Capitols de la Companya are being cited verbatim in the Articles of Athens in those sections which relate to the prohibition of gifts or bequests to the Athenian Church (doc. xxx11 in Rubié’s Los Navarros en Grecia [1886], p. 247). DOC, no. CCXCVIII. 18 Lampros, Eggr., pt. 1v, doc. 30 (p. 271); Rubiéd y Lluch, Byzantis, 11 (1911-1912), pp. 327-328; cf. Hom. a Menéndez y Pelayo, 11 (1899), p. 100; Catalunya a Grecia (1906), p. 75: ““... in carta... de
pappiro et vulgari Catalanorum eloquio secundum usum et mores civitatis elusdem....” Cf. Rubid, 4. Instit. Cat., any v (1913-1914), Pp. 431-433. DOC, no. CCCXXXV.
Language and Culture 221 there is no reason to assume that books were very rare. When Fra Henry,
Bishop of Salona, was on his way to Catalonia to do homage to Don Pedro IV in behalf of the municipality of Livadia and its captain and cas-
tellan, the unfortunate Guillem d’Almenara, his ship was stopped by four Genoese galleys, which robbed him of ‘money, clothes, dooks, and jewels worth six hundred ducats of gold” (diners, robes, libres, e joyes DC
ducats dor).® On one occasion, when Bishop John Boyl of Megara wished to hire two mules for a journey through Phocis with Bishop Matteo of Neopatras, he borrowed from a Greek money lender named Peter Moscho twenty gold ducats, in return for which he was obliged to pawn
“a box full of books” (uma caxa plena de libres). If only we had the inventory of the titles of these books which Bishop John Boy] doubtless
required Peter Moscho to sign! What was read by the Catalans in Athens? Apart from a few books which we may naturally assume were _ in the possession of an educated clergyman of the later fourteenth century,
we may wonder whether Bishop Henry did not lose and Bishop John Boy] pawn copies of three of the famous four Catalan chronicles: those of King James I of Aragon, Bernat Desclot, and Muntaner: the fourth was
to be, of course, that of Don Pedro himself, the good friend of Bishop John Boyl. Was there a copy of Ramon Lull’s somber romance, the Blanquerna, fit companion for a Catalan cleric? Was there any of the
| Catalan poetry written in the Llemosi made traditional by the work of Ramon Vidal more than a century and a half before? Did one read in Athens and Thebes and Salona Castilian poems, romances, and of the buen amor of that worldly priest Juan Ruiz? Did one read in Athens, too, chansons de geste, written in French, the language which Brunetto Latin1, a hundred years before, had described as “‘the most delightful and most
familiar to all people?’ To these questions, unfortunately, there is no answer.
Doubtless such Catalans as Don Luis Fadrique, the brothers Puigpardines, and Missili de Novelles spoke Greek as well as — possibly better than — Prince Guillaume de Villehardouin of Achaea and Duke Jean de la Roche of Athens, for two famous examples of Franks who spoke demotic Greek withease. Demetrius Rendi,the Mauro-Nicholae, and Nicholas Macri were notaries, however, and not poets, and so no Chronicle of the Morea, and unfortunately no historian like Villehardouin, has left us a sympathetic account of the last half century of Catalan domination in Greece, wherein we might find attributed to a Catalan an occasional 19 Rubié y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxvii (pp. 238-239), dated 9 May, 1382 (and referring to events of almost three years before). DOC, no. DXII. 20 Rubidé y Lluch, op. cit., doc. xxxvu (p. 255), dated 10 September, 1380. DOC, no. CDIII.
222 Catalan Domination of Athens reminiscence from Herodotus or the like, for Marino Sanudo has thus done much for Duke Jean and the reputation of the Burgundians in Athens. How much of the Theban Jewish colony of about two thousand mem-
bers of which Benjamin of Tudela speaks in the middle of the twelfth century still remained in Thebes, some two hundred years later, we cannot
say. I have already suggested that the colony had dwindled to a small number, if not to almost nothing, and expressed the belief that Benjamin of Tudela had exaggerated in the first place, but one very important association of Thebes with Hebrew studies in the Catalan era has been made, very convincingly, by Cardinal (then Mons.) Giovanni Mercati in his learned study of Simone Atumano, Arcivescovo di Tebe (1916). Benjamin of Tudela observed that the Jewish colony in Thebes contained, among its learned rabbis, some of the best authorities on the Mosaic law and on rabbinical texts that he found on his travels in the Levant. The Archbishop Simon Atumanois known to have prepared at least part of a Biblia Triglotta which he dedicated to Pope Urban VI — a remarkable feat of scholarship almost a century and a half before the appearance of the great Complutensian Polyglot under the patronage of the illustrious Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros — and the labor of the Biblia Triglotta certainly occupied at least the later years of his residence in Catalan Thebes. Were learned Jews Simon’s guests and companions in study in the archiepiscopal palace in Thebes where the Catalans, like
the Franks before them, gathered to witness many an important legal
deed and treaty? Did this Latin Christian prelate, half Greek, half Turk, prefer cultured Greek-speaking Jews to quarrelsome, sword-swing-
ing Catalans? Learning was in the tradition of the Theban archbishopric: Simon Atumano’s own predecessor had been the famous Paulus (13571366), afterwards the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, whose learning
and integrity were so great as to win praise even from so discerning a 21 Mons. Giovanni Mercati, Se Ja versione dall’ebraico del codice Veneto Greco VII sia di Simone Atumano, Arcivescovo di Tebe (Studie Testi, no. 30), Rome, 1916, pp. 15-17, 19, 30-32, 41-42, with a brief biography of the Archbishop Simon, pp. 26 ef sgg., and some new documents, pp. 47 ef sqq. Mercati believes that Simon may have got the idea of his Hebrew-Greek-Latin Bible in Thebes, where learned Jews would have stimulated him to attempt the translation of the N.T. into Hebrew and the
O.T. into Greek (op. cit., p. 32). Mercati also believes that the Jewish colony in Thebes had not only not been broken up, but “‘c’é da presumere che sia cresciuta,”’ which seems hardly tenable since, in so many Catalan documents relating to the Athenian duchy, there is no mention of Jews (although there are notices of an Armenian colony). The traveler Jacob Spon remarks that there were no Jews in seventeenth century Athens, “car les Atheniens ne sont pas moins adroits qu’eux, et j’ay oiii dire quelquefois ce proverbe qui court en ces quartiers 14: Dieu nous garde des Juifs de Salonique, des Grecs d’Athénes, et des Turcs de Négrepont”’ (Voyage, The Hague, 1680 and 1689, vol. 11, p. 136; ed. Amsterdam, 1679, vol. 11, p. 180).
Language and Culture 223 critic as the Greek historian Nicephorus Gregoras.” Finally, in passing, we may note that the Cardinal Bessarion was made Archbishop of Thebes in 1440, and may possibly have been the owner of the manuscript now in the Marcian library in Venice which contains part of what is apparently Simon Atumano’s Greek version of the Old Testament.” We may perhaps assume that the intellectual life of Athens under the Catalans was not any lower than it had been a century and a half before when Michael Choniates had dwelt in the episcopal palace on the Acrop-
olis as Archbishop of Athens (1182-1204). The very learned Montfaucon first observed, almost two and a half centuries ago, that Athens “once the home of letters and of literati,’ had contributed very few medieval and early modern MSS. to western libraries.“ While Sp. P. Lampros has shown that such MSS. are not as rare as was once believed, they are, nevertheless, for the Byzantine period, not of common occurrence: Lampros lists only nine MSS. known to have been copied in Athens before the fall of Constantinople in 1453.% Of these only two were copied during the Catalan era, while a third, from the fifteenth century, was copied by a certain Alphonsos, an Athenian, who appears to have been of Catalan
origin. In 1337, a certain Demetrius Peroules or Perouli copied the MS. now in the Biblioteca Comunale, no. 155, in Ferrara: it contains the works, in part, of Theocritus, Pindar, and Hesiod.”” Two years later, in 1339, Cosmas Camelus, a priest and exarch of the metropolitan church of Athens, copied a MS., now in the Bibliothéque Nationale (Par. 2243), for a physician named Demetrius Chlomus (X\wpés): the MS. contains the medical works of Nicholas Myrepsius and Oribasius and other such material.22 The reference to the physician, Chlomus, and to medical works 22 Nicephorus Gregoras, Hist. byzant., xxix, 55 et sqq. (Bonn, 111, pp. 262 e¢ sqq.); cf. Mercati, Simone Atumano (1916), pp. 30-31 (note); Rubié y Lluch, Homenaje a D. Carmelo de Echegaray, San Sebastian, 1928, pp. 370, 382. 23 Cf. Mercati, op. cit., pp. 9, 4324 Bernard de Montfaucon, Palaeographia Graeca, Paris, 1708, p. 111. 2% Sp. P. Lampros, ’A@nvator BiBAvtoypador cai xrHTopes Kwoikwy Kata Tods pécovs alwvas kal éxi
Tovpxoxparias (reprinted from Parnassos), Athens, 1902, nos. I-9 (pp. 13-23). 26 Lampros, op. cit., nos. 3-§ (pp. 15-18). 27 Lampros, op. cit., no. 3 (pp. 15-16). 28 Lampros, op. cit., no. 4 (pp. 16-18). Montfaucon, Pal. Gr., 1708, p. 70, misread the physician’s name as Nomachlomus (i.e. robvoua XAoyod!). Cf. Henri Omont, Facsimilés des manuscrits grecs datés de la Bibliothégue Nationale du IX au XIV siécle, Paris, 1891, introd., p. 17; also Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 439; V. Gardthausen, Griechische Palaeographie, Leipzig, 1879, p. 413 (the notice is omitted from the 2nd ed., 2 vols., Leipzig, 1911, 1913); T. D. Neroutsos, “Christian Athens” (in Greek), Deltion, 1v (1892), p. 198 (note); G. Constantinides, History of Athens (in Greek), Athens, 1894, p. 353; Rubiéd y Lluch, Homenaje a Menéndez Pelayo, 11 (1899), p. 115; Catalunya a Grecia (1906), p. 99; Byzantion, 11 (1925-1926), p. 204; Deltion (in Greek), new series, 1 (1928), p. 95.
224 Catalan Domination of Athens is interesting, for physicians were very scarce, it would appear, in the Catalan duchies, and on one occasion, in February of 1356, King Frederick III of Sicily notified his officials and the citizens of Thebes that having learned of the city’s lack of physicians, “‘skilled in the art of surgery
and also of medicine,” he was sending them from his own household a certain Master John of Montpellier (Johannes de Montepesolano), reputed to be a person of skill and capacity.?® Lastly, the third MS. already referred to, also in the Bibliothéque Nationale (Par. 2161), written by a Greek copyist named Alfonso, who, Lampros suggests, was probably of Catalan extraction, contains the works of the Greek physician Galen.*° Medical science and the Greek classics were, then, not entirely neglected in Athens during the period of Catalan domination: Greek contemporaries however, took no higher view of the cultural life of Athens in the fourteenth century than had the Metropolitan Michael in his day.
Athanasius Lepentrenus thus wrote to the historian Nicephorus Gregoras, with some exaggeration, that “‘the Athenians and the Thebans, as well as those who dwell in the Peloponnesus . . . have exchanged their ancient well being [edéa:uovia] for a state of barbarousness [dyporxia] . . .
suffering the extremes of servitude [dovAeia 4 éoxarn].’* Moreover, while on a pilgrimage to the holy land (1336-1341), a Westphalian priest, Ludolf of Sudheim, of the archdiocese of Paderborn, spent some time in
the Morea, and although he did not visit Athens, he included in the account of his travels a brief description of the city, a bit of table talk, one suspects, which the uncritical Ludolf picked up on board ship or at some hostelry: “‘And you should know that the land which was called Achaea ts
now named the Morea. This is the land which the Catalans have violently wrested from the Greeks. In this land, too, is the beautiful city of Patras... . Not far from Patras is Athens, where once there throve the learning of the Greeks. Athens was once the noblest of cities, but now it is well nigh deserted. Indeed, in the city of Genoa there 1s scarcely a column of marble or any other good work cut of stone but what has been brought there from Athens — Genoa has been put together wholly from the remains of Athens, just as Venice has been built from the stones of 29 Lampros, Eggrapha (1906), pt. 1v, doc. 61 (p. 303). (Montpellier was the Catalan medical center — scene of the activities of Henry de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac — until it was acquired by the French in 1349, after which its decline was rapid.) DOC, no. CCXXVI. 30 Lampros, op. cit., no. § (p. 18); Montfaucon, Pa/. Gr., 1708, p. 86; Henri Omont, Inventaire sommaire des manuscrits grecs de la Bibliothéque Nationale, 11 (Paris, 1888), p. 207. 31 Ath. Lepen., Ep. ad Niceph. Greg. (inter opera Niceph. Greg., Bonn, 1, p. xciv); cf. Hopf, op. cit.,
vol. 85 (1867), p. 393; G. Constantinides, Hist. Athens (in Greek), 1894, p. 334. R. Guilland, Correspondance de Nicéphore Grégoras (Paris, 1927), ep. XXI, p. 287; on Lepentrenus, see Guilland, Op. cit., PP. 346-347.
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Language and Culture 225 Troy.’ The reader need not be informed that most of this is nonsense. Although, while he was in Greece, Friar Jordanus Catalanus “‘neither saw
nor heard of aught worth telling,” except for the tides hetween Negroponte and the mainland and the extraordinary frequency of earthquakes
at Thebes, to the famous Arab warrior, historian and geographer, Abulfeda (d. 1331), Athens was still a name to be revered and a city that had been “‘the home of the Greek philosophers.’ Athens, in the Catalan era, was, we may be sure, a very small town, although we may be equally sure that when Ludolf of Sudheim calls it
“nunc quasi deserta,’” he exaggerates a good deal. In the fourteenth century Athens probably looked very much like the Turkish city of the seventeenth century, familiar to us from numerous contemporary drawings and from the accounts of travelers like Fr. Jacques Babin (1672), Jacob Spon (1676), and George Wheler (1676): the German traveler Johann Georg Transfeldt, who visited Athens about the same time as his more famous French and English confréres (1674-1675), and spent more
than a year there, informs us that the Tower of the Winds was in the center of the lower city of his day, “‘in umbilico modernarum Athenarum.’*> This means, of course, that the lower city was huddled in a circlet of walls under the north and northeast slopes of the Acropolis. It is the city we see depicted in the drawings made by Francesco Morosin1’s engineers of the Acropolis and the Parthenon explosion in September of 1687: one of these famous drawings is reproduced (pl. vit): it 1s a view _ from the northeast, looking towards the southwest, showing the Philopappus monument in the left background.* Thus no part of the city, except 32 Ludolph de Sudheim (Suchem), De itinere terrae sanctae liber, chap. 17, ed. Ferdinand Deycks, Bibliothek des litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, xxv (1851), p. 23: “Et est sciendum quod illa terra, quae dicebatur Achaia, nunc Morea vocatur. Hanc terram Catelani Graecis violenter abstulerunt. In ipsa terra est pulchra civitas nomine Patras.... Non procul a Patras est Athenis, in qua quondam viguit studium Graecorum. Haec civitas quondam fuit nobilissima, sed nunc quasi deserta. Nam in civitate Januensi non est aliqua columna marmorea vel aliquod opus bonum lapideum sectum nisi de Athenis ibidem deportatum, et togaliter ex Athenis civitas est constructa, sicut Venetia ex lapidibus Troiae est aedificata.” Cf. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), pp. 431, 436; Rubidé y Lluch, An. Instit. Cat., 1 (1907), 235, 240, n. 2; 1bid., any v (1913-1914), p. 423; Wm. Miller (1908), p. 329. % Friar Jordanus (ca 1330), Mirabilia descripta: The Wonders of the East, trans. Col. Henry Yule, for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1863, pp. 2-3. The good Friar exaggerates the danger of Theban earthquakes, which, he says, “many a time and oft’’ topple over “the strongest houses and walls.” * Géographie d’ Aboulféda, trans. Joseph T. Reinaud, vol. 11, pt. 1 (Paris, 1848), p. 313: “Athénes ... a été le séjour des philosophes grecs . . . c’était le foyer de la philosophie des Grecs et le lieu ot se conservaient leurs sciences et leurs doctrines philosophiques.”’ 35 Ad, Michaelis, “I. G. Transfeldts Examen reliquarum antiquitatum Atheniensium,” Mittheilungen des deutschen archacol. Instituts in Athen, 1 (Athens, 1876), p. 115; Curt Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum, 1 (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 70-71. % See the drawings, splendidly reproduced, in H. Omont, Athénes au XVII. siécle: Vues et plans
226 Catalan Domination of Athens the Acropolis and its fortifications, was visible to one who approached the city from Piraeus.27 The temple of Theseus (the Hephaesteum) was left a Athénes et del Acropole, Paris, 1898; Count de Laborde, Athénes au XV*, XVI et XVIT* siécles, Paris, 1854, vol. 11, pp. 150 et sqqg.; C. Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), p. 79. 37 Cf. Fr. Marco [Vincenzo] Coronelli, Mémoires, historiques et géographiques, du royaume de la Morée, Négrepont, et des places maritimes, jusques 2 Thessalonique, Amsterdam, 1686, p. 199: “Le bas de la ville est au nord de la citadelle [Acropolis], et quand on vient du cété de la Mer, elle en est sia couvert qu’il ne semble pas qu’il y ait d’autres maisons que celles de la citadelle. Cequi est cause que plusieurs n’ayant pas eu la curiosité de débarquer en terre, se font persuadez que de toute la grandeur
d’Athénes il ne restoit que le Chateau....’’ Coronelli’s drawing of the city and citadel of Athens, between pp. 196 and 197 of his work, well illustrates the point he makes: it shows the city walls, with defense turrets, enclosing the lower city under the north slope of the Acropolis. Although Coronelli represents an improvement over much of the Greek travel literature before his time, he deals much
in fancy and error. The map in question was clearly drawn by someone who had never seen the Acropolis, but had studied a contemporary drawing (clearly that of J. Spon): On the works of Fr. Coronelli, a Venetian publicist (and not a traveler), see the Count de Laborde, Docs. inédits sur [’histoire d’ Athénes, Paris, 1854, pp. 133-137; Athénes, vol. 11, pp. 98 et sgq. Asasupplement to the Count de Laborde’s study of Coronelli, see the valuable article of J. R. Wheeler, ‘“Coronelli’s Maps of Athens,” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. v11 (1896), pp. 177-189. Besides Coronelli’s maps of Athens the three best known plans of the city in the later seventeenth century were: 1) the Capuchin plan drawn about 1670 and redrawn by French engineers under the Marquis d’Otiéres in 16851687 (reproduced in Laborde, vol. 1, p. 78); 2) the plan published by Guillet de Saint-Georges in his Athénes ancienne et nouvelle (1675), and possibly based upon another Capuchin copy sent to him from Athens (reproduced in Laborde, 1, p. 228); 3) the plan published by J. Spon in his Voyages, and reproduced in Laborde, 11, p. 23. Spon’s map is the source of Coronelli’s plan of Athens published in his Memorie istoriogeographiche (1686). A second and larger map of Athens by Coronelli is discussed and reproduced by Wheeler in the article cited immediately above: it was published in one of the editions of Coronelli’s Conqueste nella Morea della Sereniss: Republica di Venezia (after 1687), and was drawn largely from Guillet’s map. Like Guillet’s map it puts the Theseum (church of St. George) to the north-east, instead of to the north-west, of the Acropolis, and the arrow which is sup-
posed to indicate the north erroneously points east. Nevertheless it is a very good map. It is most irrelevant, however, tocompare fifteenth century MS. miniatures of “Athens,’’ done for purely decora-
tive purposes, with these seventeenth century drawings prepared largely by Venetian or French military cartographers to subserve scientific ends (as a diplomatic note of 16 December, 1685, observes in connection with the expedition which prepared one of the best maps of contemporary Athens: “ ... pour examiner de quelle maniére on pourroit insulter les chateaux . . . ou en forcer le passage, au cas ot Sa Majesté voulust donner a l’empire ottoman des marques de sa puissance” [from the correspondence of M. Giradin, French ambassador to the Porte, quoted in Laborde, vol. 11, p. $7]). Our fifteenth century drawings of Athens are, as we might expect, the products of the contemporary scene and the contemporary mind: cf. the miniature of Athens “transformed into a Gothic town in Flanders”’ (reproduced in Laborde, 1, p.39), whichcomes from a Flemish MS. of the Chronicle of Jean de Courcy, and the woodcut by Michael Wolgemiit, made to illustrate the Nuremberg Chronicle (1st ed. 1493), and reproduced in Laborde, 1, p. 40, in which Athens is “transformed into a German town.” However, when fifteenth century Flemish and German painters and miniaturists portrayed Christ and the Virgin, they always represented them in contemporary garb: why should they do less for Athens? It is most unfair, therefore, to draw a contrast, as J. R. Wheeler does, upon the basis of such representations of Athens, between the knowledge of Athens possessed by interested persons in the seventeenth century as opposed to the fifteenth; the drawings from the latter century are purely decorative, and from the former, scientific; it is not sound historical methodology to mix categories in a comparison. One may wonder, too, whether these seventeenth century military maps of Athens have anything to do with “the gradual spread of the Hellenic renaissance” (as Wheeler, Op. cit., VII, pp. 182, 189, believes).
Language and Culture 227 outside the city walls — it was then the church of St. George as it had been in the days of Michael Choniates — in the uncultivated fields of what had once been a busy thoroughfare, the Agora, where Socrates had sat upon the tables of the money-changers. The temple of Olympian Zeus, lying to the southeast of the Acropolis, was also, of course, excluded
from the walls of the medieval city, while, on the southern slope of the Acropolis, the Odeum of Herodes Atticus and the Stoa of Eumenes were possibly incorporated in some way, even in the fourteenth century, in the fortifications of the great Castell de Cetines. The choregic monument of Lysicrates, on the ancient Street of the Tripods, at the foot of the east slope of the Acropolis, may have served, with the structures attached to it, as the residence of many a Catalan notable, almost five centuries before Lord Byron made his study there: it was known to the Catalans as it had been known to Michael Choniates before them and to the Capuchins after them as the Lantern of Demosthenes.*® In the days of Michael Choniates sheep grazed in the meager remains of the Stoa Poikile:*® undoubtedly sheep were still grazing in the Agora in the Catalan era: it had become a campo vaccino like the Roman forum of the same period, in the days of Cola di Rienzi, Petrarch, and the Cardinal Gil d’Albornoz. The historian of Catalan Athens is very fortunate in having a description of the city which dates from the last decade of the fourteenth century. In late February of 1395, shortly after the Venetian occupation of Athens, and while the heirs of the late Duke Nerio were fighting over what he had left them or had not left them, an Italian notary, Niccolo da Martoni, a pious pilgrim from Capua, arrived in Athens. He spent two days there, and he has left us a very valuable description of what he saw.” 38 Count de Laborde, Athénes aux XV¢, XVI*, et XVII siécles, Paris, 1854, 1, pp. 75-76, where an engraving of the Lysicrates monument is reproduced, showing it before it was detached from the surrounding structures. Cf. Coronelli (1686), op. cit., p. 199: “La Lanterne de Demosthéne qui sert d’Hospice aux PP. Capucins.” The first known mention of the monument by this name appears in Michael Choniates (Acominatus), “Inaugural Address,” 14, in Mcxa7\ ’Axopuvarov Tod Xwriarov ra Zwtdueva, ed. Sp. P. Lampros, 2 vols., Athens, 1879-1880, 1, 98; cf. p. 451; Gregorovius-Lampros, Athens, (in Greek), 1 (1904), pp. 288, 316-317; vol. 11, pp. 364, 518, etc. Cf. also Laborde, Does. inédits sur l'histoire d’ Athénes, Paris, 1854, pp. 3-4 (Vienna Anonymous); 61, 75 (Fr. J. P. Babin); 100 (Guillet); cf. p. 195 (/a scuola .. . di Demostene, in a letter dated 8 June, 1688, written from Athens by one of Morosini’s officers). The monument was acquired for the Capuchins by Father Simon in 1669; there are numerous references to it in the 17th century. #9 Mich. Chon., ““To Demetrius Drimys,” 5 (ed. Lampros, 1, pp. 159-160). 40 Léon Legrand, “Relation du pélerinage 4 Jérusalem de Nicolas de Martoni, notaire italien,” Revue de l’Orient latin, 11 (Paris, 1895), pp. 647-653, 656. (Niccold and his fellow pilgrims arrived in Athens on Wednesday, 24 February, 1395, in the early morning.) Niccold’s original MS is not extant: we have, however, a copy made in March of 1397 (Bibl. Nat., fonds latin, no. 6521), bound with two treatises of Albertus Magnus on natural history (Legrand, op. cit., pp. 575-576). Walther Judeich, “Athen im Jahre 1395 nach der Beschreibung des Niccold da Martoni,” Mittheilungen des k. deutschen archacologischen Instituts, Athenische Abtheilung, xxu1 (1897), pp. 423-438, repeats the text and adds a valuable brief commentary.
228 Catalan Domination of Athens Niccolé was on his way home, after six months, from a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine: on 17 August, 1394, he had embarked with his companions at Gaeta, leaving behind his family and the comforts and emoluments of his profession, to undertake the tour of biblical lands: now, hav-
ing satisfied the chief ambition of his life, he was returning home (and finding much difficulty in getting home).
The city of Athens, Niccolé could see, had been a great city, and still gave him eloquent testimony of its glorious past when he looked upon the “many columns and many blocks of marble which now lie about where the city itself had once been built.” Athens had reached down to the shore of the sea, says Niccolo, in the days when the Emperor Hadrian had ruled it, and its boundaries had then described a circuit of twenty-four miles (milearia), but after its destruction by the Trojans, Athens had been reduced to the little town that dwelt under the shadow of the Acropolis,
“reducta est prope castrum civitatis.”*! Niccolo admired the Attic plain, which stretched, he says, for twelve miles. He also noted the size of the city of his day: he tells us, and his evidence is important, that “the city now has one thousand hearths or thereabouts.’’*?_ I have the impression, not wholly uncritical and subjective, that Niccold, although he certainly did not count the houses in the Athens of 1395, has given us a fairly accurate figure of the number of houses in the city.“7 But Athens in 1395 was probably larger than the Catalan city had been up to 1379 when considerable numbers of Catalans and Greeks had fled from Boeotia during the Navarrese invasion and the occupation of Thebes and Livadia. Such refugees must have increased the population of Athens and, in a few years, the number of its buildings. In the fourteenth century Athens could have covered but a small area, the lower city being clustered around the Acropolis, especially under the north and northeast slopes, but also possessing houses and several churches in the region of the temple of Zeus and along the banks of the Ilissus. Indeed, the Athens of the Catalan era was probably more of acity, and certainly in much better condition, than the shambles into which, in 1833-1834, the Greek government
moved to establish its new capital, after the final withdrawal of the Turks.“ “. Rev. de l’Or. lat., 111, p. 649.
“2 Thid., 111, p. 650: “Nunc vero ipsa civitas habet focularia unum mille vel circa.” Niccold later found Corinth rather a deserted place; he judged that there were probably five hundred houses in the town: “... et in multis locis civitas est vacua... et sunt in ea focularia forte quingenta” (sd:d.,
p. 659). In Megara he found about eighty families: “‘... quod castrum [Metre] est foculariorum LXxx...” (ibid., p. 657). “8 Niccold did not count the houses in the Athens of 1395: he did not, as we shall see, count the columns of the Parthenon, rather an easier undertaking. “ Cf. Y. Chataigneau and J. Sion, “Péninsules méditerranéennes: Pays balkaniques.” Géographie universelle, eds. P. Vidal de la Blache and L. Gallois, vol. vir, pt. 2 (Paris, 1934), Pp. 544: “Quand elle
Language and Culture 229 Desiring to see some of the antiquities of Athens, Niccolé asked some of the residents of the city to conduct him on a tour of its notable buildings
and other objects of antique interest. First of all they went “‘to those two fountains of water from which a student had to drink to acquire knowledge’: here was the School (studium) of the great philosophers, of
Aristotle and of other Athenian professors. The two fountains were beautifully wrought of marble blocks — he was at the foot of Mt. Lycabettus and was examining part of the ruins of the aqueduct begun by Hadrian and completed by Antoninus Pius — and the School of Aristotle
caught his interest: it was twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide: he admired its marble vaulting, and has left us some fanciful details, furnished him by his guides, of the School’s elaborate ornamentation in Aristotle’s day. From the School Niccolé walked southwest to the great Palace (magnum hospitium) of the Emperor Hadrian — he was now
looking upon the temple of Olympian Zeus — and he studied the ruins with some care. Twenty columns remained, about eighty palms high, and so large that four men would have to join hands, with arms extended, to encircle one of them. The blocks of the entablature were of marble, long and huge, “‘supra quos magnum erat hedificium.”” A brief walk next brought Niccoldé to the western slope of the Acropolis, to the gates of the
medieval Castrum, ‘‘and the entrance is of marble blocks, done with beauty of workmanship, as handsome as the entrance towers of the city of Capua, but not so large an entrance as it seems to me.’ Thus, like the American in a European cathedral, in a scene to amuse the readers of Punch, the worthy Capuan looked upon the Propylaea which Pericles had provided for and Mnesicles had built.
In the Propylaea was built the castle palace, the Palau of Catalan Athens, “‘and in the castle is a large hall [sa/a magna], in which are thirteen great columns, over which are beams thirty feet long, and over these
beams are slabs of marble: it looks like a great and wondrous work.’ If Niccold saw thirteen detached columns, it is difficult to understand — since the columns. of the east portico of the Propylaea had certainly been incorporated in a wall — how much of the west portico of the building had been walled up (or is Niccolé counting columns embedded in thin walls?). Within the Castrum was the Church of St. Mary, the Parthenon, [Athénes] fut choisie en 1833 comme capitale de la Gréce libérée, c’était une bourgade, quasi toute en
ruines, moins grecque qu’albanaise. On reste étonné devant cette force créatrice d’un nom, aidée de la centralisation du nouveau royaume et de ]’afflux des provinciaux que, récemment encore, on dut décourager.”” The population of Athens in 1833-1834 was less than 14,000 persons. # Tbid., 111, p. 650. Niccold thought that the ruins of the Stadium, near the Ilissus, was a bridge, “quidam pons magnus cum magno hedificio domorum.” © Tbid., 111, pp. 650-651.
230 Catalan Domination of Athens built of great blocks of marble, all joined with lead, “‘and this Church, too,” the notary records with satisfaction, “is big like the Church in
Capua.” There were sixty great columns around the Church, on the outside, according to Niccold, and so large that five men, with arms ex-
tended, would be needed to gird one of them in their embrace. The architrave blocks were long and huge: like many a traveler to Athens before and after him, as he looked upon the Parthenon, the good notary could say with truth: ‘‘Impossibile videtur menti hominis quomodo ipsa tam magna hedificia construi potuerunt.’’*” Niccolé da Martoni noted, with reverence, the column where Dionysius
the Areopagite had made a sign of the cross, at the time of Christ’s passion, as all the buildings on the Acropolis shook and the whole world
shuddered, ‘‘and this cross remains even yet on that column.” The entrance to the Church was large: Niccolé estimated that it was four cannae wide and five cannae high.*® The portals (porte//i) through which
he passed had once stood in the gateways of Troy. When the city of Troy fell to the hosts of Agamemnon, they had been brought to Athens and made into the doors of the Church of St. Mary. The Church had, within, two naves, one after the other (the ancient parthenon and hekatompedon), in the first of which was the altar which St. Dionysius had made after his conversion to the Catholic faith. The choir (acchorum) of the Church was beautiful, and the famous four altar columns — Niccolé says they were of jasper, but Spon and Wheler declare they were of porphyry — were so large that it would take two men to encircle them with their arms, and they were two cannae high: upon these columns rested a domed canopy (éru//um), over the great altar. Into a beautiful
cistern, near the altar, rain fell through the roof. In a little chapel, to the right of the altar, was a picture of the Virgin, to whom the Church was dedicated. The picture had been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist (if the Venetians had believed the tale, they would have removed it to St. Mark’s, and we should have the picture today); it was ornamented with pearls, gems, and many other precious stones. The chapel gate was kept locked to guard so rare a treasure as an Apostle’s handiwork. At this point the notary paused and thought of what he had seen as he walked
around the peristyle and through the two naves of the Church. The interior rows of columns (and pilasters), he tells us, were eighty in num47 Tbid., 111, p. 651.
48 On the word canna (cf. the French canne), as a term of measurment, see Chas. Ducange, G/ossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis, vol. 11 (réimpr. 1937), Pp. 91; and especially Florence Edler, Glossary of Medieval Terms of Business, Italian Series: 1200-1600, for the Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass., 1934, p. §9. The canna is an ell, almost three English yards.
Language and Culture 231 ber.4® These columns bore, through the whole circuit of the Church, a gallery built in the Byzantine era, very much before the time of Michael Choniates. In a niche in the church wall Niccolé saw the light of fire (lumen ignis accensi), which was never extinguished, and his guides apparently told him that a saint had been buried at that spot. This seems to be the ever-burning “‘lamp”’ which was all the early twelfth century pilgrim Saewulf could remember of his alleged visit to Athens (ca 1103),5°
and which three quarters of a century later (in 1182) inspired a moving passage in the Metropolitan Michael Choniates’ first sermon, preached to his flock in the Parthenon.*! Unfortunately we have the unromantic assurance of seventeenth-century travelers that the effect was caused by a translucent stone set in the masonry. Niccolo carefully records a list of the famous Parthenon relics, which the wardens of the Church showed him: bones from the skull of St. Macarius; from an armof St. Denis of France; from arms of Sts. Cyprian and Justin and the elbow of St. Maccabaeus; and a volume containing all the gospels, written in Greek by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, on parchment with gold letters, “‘qui liber 1b1 pro magno thesauro reputatur.’®?. The relics of the Athenian minster were objects of covetous interest even in faraway Aragon: in November of 1379 Queen Sibilia, wife of Don Pedro IV, had written to the Archbishop Antonio Ballester, 1nquiring about, and anxious to procure, “the very many relics both of the 49 Niccold speaks in round numbers. Actually around the exterior of the Parthenon (... extra ecclesiam sunt columpne magne LX) there were not sixty, but fifty-eight columns: the colonnade surrounding the building had forty columns: eight on the west and east ends, and seventeen on the long north and south sides, counting the four corner columns twice; the inner porticos at each end — the ancient temple was, of course, peristyle amphiprostyle — contained six columns, making a total of twelve. (In both Ciriaco of Ancona’s accounts of the Parthenon, from the years 1436 and 1444, he
mentions the temple as possessing fifty-eight columns, the correct number. See infra.) Someone obviously told Niccolé that the interior of the Church contained eighty columns (i circuytu ipstus ecclesie sunt columpne de marmore LX XX), and actually there were about eighty columns and pilasters in the larger nave: in addition to the two dozen or so pilasters engaged in the north and south and west walls of the larger nave (Aekatompedon), there were twenty-two columns, it has been thought of Byzan-
tine construction, supporting the galleries, while in the galleries were twenty-three columns. Professor Wm. B. Dinsmoor wrote me, in a letter dated 11 February, 1948, that “‘the colonnades [inside the cella of the Parthenon] were Doric in both storeys, with horizontal entablatures, as described in some detail by Francis Vernon in 1675.” (Dinsmoor long had the intention to publish a study of those portions of Vernon’s unpublished MS. which deal with Athenian monuments.) On the date of the inner Parthenon colonnades, cf. Dinsmoor, in the American Fournal of Archaeology, xxxvui1 (1934), 100-102, and idid., xLv (1941), 426 (note). 80 Peregrinatio Saewulfi, in Recueil de voyages et de mémoires, 1v, Paris, 1838, p. 834: “... ecclesia beatae Virginis Mariae in qua est oleum in lampade semper ardens, sed numquam deficiens...”’ Rev. de l’Or. lat., uw, p. 6§2.
6&1 Mich. Chon., Inaugural Address (Eisbaterios), 33-34 (ed. Sp. P. Lampros, vol. 1, p. 104). 82 Rev, de l’Or. lat., 1, p. 652.
232 Catalan Domination of Athens blessed Mary and of other saints,’’ which were preserved in the Parthenon.®3 Niccold, however, mentions no relics of the Virgin; if there had been any such in the Parthenon collection, they had been removed sometime during the preceding fifteen years (1379-1395). Outside the walls of the Castrum, Niccolo records for us, in conclusion, were two tall columns over which there was said to have been a niche, wonderfully made, in which there had been an idol which possessed the power to sink ships approaching Athens with hostile intent and to spare those that approached “pro bono.’*4 He refers, obviously, to the two Roman columns which still stand half-way up the southern ramp of the Acropolis, above the
choregic monument of Thrasyllus and his son Thrasycles. Medieval Athens — and the ancient city too — could well have used the idol which seems to reflect a garbled version of the legend of the Gorgon’s head, as told to the credulous Niccoldé by his learned guides.
The first modern archaeologist, if such we may call him, who visited Athens and looked upon her monuments with classical understanding, was Ciriaco de’ Pizzicolli of Ancona (d. 1452), who made three or four visits of exploration and research in Greece and the Peloponnesus (143536, 1437, 1443-44, 1444-48): he twice visited Athens, once in 1436, some forty years after Niccol6 da Martoni, and again in 1444 (not 1447). Ciriaco arrived in Athens, the first time, on 7 April, 1436, and stayed there with his friend Antonio Balduino until 22 April: he tells us that everywhere he saw great walls which had crumbled under the weight of centuries; in the city itself and in the fields outside were unbelievable marble buildings, houses, and temples, all kinds of sculptures, done with wonderful skill: but it was all a huge mass of ruins. Most of all he admired the Parthenon, the work of Phidias, a home fit for the goddess for whom it had been built; he mentions the fifty-eight great columns — and fiftyeight there are, of course, if one counts the corner columns twice — and the surpassing beauty of the sculptures which adorned it.*® But, aside from this, he has little to say of the city and its people; he was a good classical scholar; in Athens after the time of Antoninus Pius and Herodes 8 Rubiéd y Lluch, Le Acrépolis de Atenas en la época catalana, Academia Provincial de Bellas Artes de Barcelona, 1908, p. 30, where Rubié prints the letter from Queen Sibilia to Ballester, dated at Barcelona on 2 November, 1379 (Arch. Cr. Aragon, reg. 1586, fol. 108); 4. Instit. Cat., any 1 (1907), p. 246. DOC, no. CCCLXXXVI. 4 Reo. de l’Or. lat., 111, p. 652.
& There were no inns in Athens: Niccolé da Martoni had stayed in the home of the vicar of the Archbishop of Athens, “quia in Acthenis non reperiuntur hostulanie ad hospitandum” (Reoue de [Orient latin, 111, p. 656). 6 Inscriptiones seu epigrammata graeca et latina reperta per Illyricum a Cyriaco Anconitano, Rome, 1747, Pp. xxxvii. Ciriaco shows some intérest in the Greek liturgy and Byzantine frescoes.
Language and Culture 233 Atticus he had small interest. He wished chiefly to examine classical monuments, make notes on them, draw sketches of them, and copy inscriptions
from them. With great pride he sent to the humanist secretary of the Florentine republic, Leonardo Aretino, Latinorum elegantissimus vir, a copy of the inscription commemorating Antoninus Pius’ completion of Hadrian’s aqueduct “in new Athens’’:®” it was still known to the Athenians as the School of Aristotle.** The choregic monument of Thrasyllus, before the Cave of the Madonna (Panagia Speliotissa), in the south wall of the Acropolis, and the choregic monument of Lysicrates, at the foot of
its eastern slope, were both assumed by Ciriaco, most curiously, to be theater seats.°9 Many of the inscriptions which Ciriaco copied concerned the Emperor Hadrian, who had built, as his arch still testifies to the modern traveler, another Athens to stand beside that of Theseus.© It was Hadrian, too, who had built the temple of Olympian Zeus, the imperial “palace,” of which there remained, according to Ciriaco, twenty-one columns still standing, although most of the structure lay in ruins. To the west, on the Museion, however, Ciriaco sketched the Philopappus monument in an almost complete state of preservation. Ciriaco refers to the new walls (ova moenia) of the city,® which suggests that part of the Valerian wall may be of Florentine and even of Catalan construction, while the circuit of the walls was very small, and, as seventeenth century drawings make clear, the temple of Theseus (Hephaesteum), which Ciriaco associates with Mars, lay outside the walls of the fifteenth century
city, “in agro Athenarum’’:* Gregorovius has observed that “das Aussehen Athen’s im 17. Jahrhundert konnte aber von dem Bilde der Stadt im 15. nicht zu sehr verschieden sein.’”® The four gates which Father Simon of Compiégne describes in detail in a letter dated 20 September, 1678 — “il y a encore quatre Portes a Athénes” — suggest the 57 Gio. Targioni Tozzetti, Relazioni d’alcuni viaggi, v (Florence, 1773), p. 414. 68 Ciriaco of Ancona (from the Epigrammata graeca, cited by Curt Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1, p.
727): “... ad fauces aquaeductus extra civitatem ad unum mill., quae ‘studia Aristotelis’ vulgus Atheniensium hodie vocat ...’; W. Judeich, in Athenische Mittheilungen, xxu1 (1897), PP. 434-435. 59 Epigrammata reperta a Cyriaco (1747), nos. 69, 76. 60 Jé1d., nos. 78-93.
61 Tdid., no. 81, cf. nos. 79, 87. Cf. C. Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), p. 727: “ ... ad domos Hadriani principis marmoreis et immanibus columnis sed magna ex parte collapsis; extant utique adhuc integris et directis suis cum epistyliis c. xx1.’’ See also Emil Reisch, “Die Zeichnungen des Cyriacus im Codex Barberini des Giuliano di San Gallo,” Mittheilungen des k. deutschen archaeologischen Instituts in Athen, xrv (1889), p. 221; Wachsmuth, ‘“‘Athenae,’’ Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopddie, vol. 1, Suppl. (1903), col. 188, Il. 54 ef sqq. 62 Wachsmuth, PW., 1, Suppl., col. 177, ll. 30 e¢ sgg.; Reisch, Athen. Mitt., x1v (1889), pp. 222-223. 63 Fpigrammata reperta a Cyriaco (1747), nos. 91, 110, 117. 4 Thid., no. 96; Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), p. 727. 65 Greg., Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), pp. 344-345.
234 Catalan Domination of Athens four gates mentioned by Ciriaco:® 1) the west gate which led to Piraeus;*’
2) the north gate which ran, as Fr. Simon said more than two centuries later, through ‘‘la rue du Céramique’’;®8 3) the east gate, which led into the new city (porta novae civitatis),®° ‘“‘vers le Palais Hadrien et aboutit au Phanari de Demosthéne” [the monument of Lysicrates];7° and 4), the castle gate, which led into the Acropolis itself (porta arcis).™ Such was the Florentine city, and the city of the Catalans must have been very similar.
In December of 1443 Ciriaco of Ancona set out from Venice on another voyage to Greece, and in the following February made his second visit to Athens: he describes this visit in a letter which he wrote from Chios to his friend Andrea Gtustiniani on 29 March, 1444.” Ciriaco now inspected, once more, the octagonal temple of Aeolus (octogona Eolia de marmore Aedes), as he calls the Tower of the Winds, admired its exquisite sculpture, copied down the inscription it bears, and made a sketch of it which 1s still extant.72 Thereafter Ciriaco called upon Nerio IT Acciajuoli: “And when I went off to find Nerio Acciajuoli, a Florentine and at this time Prince of Athens, in company with his cousin Nerio, we
found him in the Acropolis, the city’s lofty citadel.”"4 The Latin Castrum has become the Acropolis for the first time, perhaps, as far as a writer of Latin is concerned, for a thousand years, the first important use of the word in the whole of Latin letters! 66 For Fr. Simon’s letter, see Laborde, Athénes, 11 (1854), pp. 33-34. 87 Epigrammata reperta a Cyriaco (1747), no. 75. 68 [did., no. 92. 69 Tbid., no. 114.
70 Fr. Simon, in Laborde, 11 (1854), p. 34. 1 Epigrammata reperta a Cyriaco (1747), no. 108. 7 Tozzetti, op. cit., Vv (1773), Pp. 440-441: “Et hodie 4. Kal. Aprilium, fausto sereno Kyriaceoque die, apud Chyum Asianam insignem Egeo in pelago insulam, et dilectissimam nobis urbem, Andreolo
Justiniano, amico incomparabili nostro...” Wm. Miller, Latins in the Levant (1908), pp. 421-422 (note 4), Essays (1921), p. 160, notes that 29 March fell on a Sunday in 1444 (not in 1447, the date commonly given for Ciriaco’s second visit to Athens): Ciriaco, further, is known to have set out from
Chalcis for Chios on 25 February, 1444 (ad V. Cal. Martias), as we learn from a letter which he wrote, on 24 June of 1444, to the Emperor John VIII Palaeologus (in J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca latina mediae et infimae aetatis, v1 [1754], Addenda, p. 13, and Francesco Pall [see below], p. 61). On the later itineraries and activities of Cirtaco, see R. Sabbadini, in Miscellanea Ceriani, Milan, 1910, and in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, Lx1v (1914); E. Jacobs, in Byzantinische Zeitschrift, xxx (1929-1930), Pp. 197 ef sgq.; and Francesco Pall, “‘Ciriaco d’Ancona e la crociata controi Turchi,” Académie Roumaine: Bulletin de la section historique, xx (Bucharest, 1938), 9-55 (with good
bibliography). ,
7 For Ciriaco’s sketch of the Tower of the Winds (made in 1436? 1444?), see Christian Huelsen, La Roma antica di Cirtaco d’ Ancona, Rome, 1907, pp. 38-39. % Tozzetti, op. cit., v (1773), P. 439: “Et cum ad Nerium Acciaiolum Florentinum et Athenarum ea tempestate Principem, una cum suo germano Nerio, me contulissem, eum in Acropoli summa civitatis arce comperimus.” (Also in Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 [1874], p. 729.)
Language and Culture 235 Rather than cultivate the acquaintance of the languid Nerio II, whom he may have met in Florence in 1439, Ciriaco preferred to give his time and strength to a second inspection of the Acropolis. Unlike so many important persons in the state and church and world of commerce in the fifteenth century, who collected Greek and Roman gems and medallions, coins and vases, statuary and manuscripts, Nerio II seems to have had no such humanist interests, and his wonderful opportunities, it would appear, to collect such antiquities he could not have used at all: had he possessed a fine library, a collection of gems or statues or the like, surely he would have shown whatever he had to Ciriaco, and the latter would have described the occasion in the present letter. But perhaps Nerio II should not be condemned on such slender evidence, or rather none at all, for who would bother with a collection of gems if he possessed the Acropo-
lis? When Ciriaco asked him what such memorials of the Athenian past he owned, perhaps he answered, Si monumentum requiris.... And look around him Ciriaco did: He was enraptured by the Propylaea, praecellentis aulae nobilissimum opus, mirifica porticus, and transported into ecstatic delight by the Parthenon, nodilissima illa divae Palladis aedes, of solid, polished marble, the wondrous work of Phidias, which called to his mind passages in Aristotle to Alexander the Great, in Pliny, and in several other noble authors of the noble past. The Parthenon stood before him, as he tells us, in all its unblemished perfection, exstat vero nostram ad diem eximium illud et mirabile templum. He noted again the number of columns: there were fifty-eight on the outside, and six columns stood, amphiprostyle, on both ends of the temple.” He noted, on the Doric metopes, the battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths and the running Ionic frieze, on which he thought that “the artist had marvelously portrayed the victories of Athens in Pericles’ time.’”’? On the east and west pediments he admired the wondrous figures of men and horses. Of the men in the Parthenon pediments Ciriaco has thus left us word, but of the men in the streets of Athens below he says nothing.”* He was a good classical scholar. % Tozzetti, op. cit., Vv (1773): p. 440: “... [templum] octo et L sublime columnis, xii scilicet ab utroque fronte, vi videlicet in medio duplici ordine, et extra parietes in lateribus, ab utraque parte xvii numero...” (Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1, p. 729.) 7% Tozzetti, op. cit., V, pp. 439-441; Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), pp. 729-730. On Ciriaco of Ancona, see also Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), pp. 336-354; Wm. Miller (1908), 417-425; Greg.Lampros, 11 (1904), 343-361, and the older literature there cited. E. Ziebarth, ‘“‘Cyriaci Anconitani inscriptiones graecae vel ineditae vel emendatae,” in Mittheilungen des deutschen archdol. Instituts in Athen, xxii (1897), pp. 405 et sgg. Cf. C. Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen im Alterthum, 1 (1874), pp. 9-11, 58 et Sqq., 727-730 (selections from Ciriaco on the ruins of Athens); “Athenai,” in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie, 1, Suppl. (1903), col. 171, Il. 20 et sgqg. As for the Acropolis today, the classicist will know, and the medievalist may like to examine, the splendidly illustrated volume of Nicolas Balanos, Les Monuments de l’ Acropole, Paris, 1936.
236 Catalan Domination of Athens After the great campaigns in the Morea, in the spring and summer of 1458, in which the Despots Demetrius and Thomas Palaeologi were completely humbled, the Sultan Mohammed II made, in the early fall, his famous visit to Athens. He spent four days in the city where the beauty and magnificence of the buildings overwhelmed him: ‘*What thanks are due to Omar, the son of Turachan,” he said, for it was Omar who had captured the city and citadel for him.77 It was about this time, whether in any way connected with the Sultan’s visit or not, that a Greek, known as the Vienna Anonymous, probably not a native Athenian, wrote a brief guide and introduction to the city’s antiquities which he called the Theaters and Schools of Athens (7a Oéarpa kal didacxadeta rev ’AOnver), and
under one heading or the other he found himself able to deal with a multi-
plicity of ancient monuments and buildings.78 First, he mentions the schools outside the city — the Academy in the district of Basilica, to the south, on the road to Phalerum; the Eleatic School at Ampelokepoi (in the ancient deme of Alopeke); the School of Plato at Paradisium (Patesia); and the Schools of Polyzelus and Diodorus, close together on Mt. Hymettus, where he seems to have in mind the famous monasteries of Kaisariane and Asteri.”? Inside the city he identifies the Tower of the Winds as the School of Socrates, and the gate of Athena Archegetis as the Palace of Themistocles; nearby was the official home of the Polemarch, by
which he means the Stoa of Hadrian; and, to the north, the place where the Apostle Philip caused the earth to swallow up the scribe who had followed him, even to Athens, to challenge what he taught. A School of the Cynics is noted — and, indeed, he was not very far from the Stoa Poikile, where Zeno of Citium and Chrysippus had taught — and nearby was a school of tragic actors. To the west of the Acropolis was the School of Sophocles, and, to the south of this school, was the Areopagus; to the east thereof, the Odeum of Herodes Atticus he identifies for us as the | 1 Chalcocondylas, Hist., bk. 1x (Bonn, p. 453); ed. Darké, 11-2 (1927), 211. 78 The text of the “Vienna Anonymous” (the MS. is in the former Imperial Library in Vienna: Codd. MSS. Theolog. Graec., no. 252, fols. 29-32), is printed, with a facsimile of the MS., in Count Léon de Laborde, Athénes aux XVe, XVI° et XVIT* siécles, Paris, 1854, vol. 1, pp. 17-20, and reprinted in his Does. inédits sur [histoire d’ Athénes, Paris, 1854, pp. 3 et sqq.; Curt Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthum, 1 (Leipzig, 1874), pp. 731-741. The readings of both Laborde and Wachsmuth should be corrected from R. Foerster (after Hilberg), Mittheilungen des deutschen archaeologischen Instituts in Athen, vu (1883), p. 32, where the text of the ‘“‘Paris Anonymous” from the 16th century, or later, is also given (idid., pp. 30-31): the Parthenon has become a mosque (70 iouaté), but some of the topographical phantasy of the Vienna is still repeated in the Paris Anonymous. (The Paris Anonymous is a short, confused account, on which see, for text and commentary, Wachsmuth, op. cit., 1, Pp. 742-744.) 19 Laborde, op. cit., 1, p. 17; cf. Wm. Miller (1908), p. 442. There are valuable notes to the text in Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1, pp. 731 et sqq.
Language and Culture 237 Palace of Cleonides and Miltiades; and still further east, the School of Aristotle was located in the Stoa of Eumenes (and not, it would seem, in the Theater of Dionysus). Over the School of Aristotle, the two Roman columns next attracted his attention, and he mentions, in connection with them, the legend of the Gorgon’s head in the iron niche, to which Niccold
da Martoni had alluded about sixty-five years before. In passing, the Vienna Anonymous notes, too, the ancient marble sun-dial, a part of which still may be seen on the Acropolis wall to the right of the Thrasyllus monu-
ment. Below the sun-dial, in what may have been the then more extensive remains of the Odeum of Pericles, our author locates the School of Aristophanes, “‘and to the east still stands the Lantern of Demosthenes,” as the noble monument of Lysicrates had been known since at least the twelfth century. Nearby had stood the homes of Thucydides, Solon, and even of the poet Alcmaeon. Our author mentions the Arch separating the cities of Hadrian and Theseus, while the temple of Olympian Zeus is identified as a royal palace, beautified by a dozen kings. To the south of this, at the stream of Callirrhoe, which in Michael Choniates’ day “‘flowed no longer,” was the “‘royal dwelling’ of the Acciajuoli, “whither on occa-
sion the Duke was moved to go and feast.”’ Here, the Anonymous informs us, was the fountain of Enneacrunus, so long debated by archaeologists, and the Duke, having bathed in the stream, said his prayers in the
sanctuary of Hera, which had been converted into a Church of the Mother of God. To the east of the stream of Callirrhoe, the author indicates, was the “theater of Athens,” and so identifies the Stadium, the only theater, so to speak, in Athens he calls by a proper name. To the east of the Stadium the author puts two aqueducts “‘which Julius Caesar built to please the Athenians”’ (he refers to the then extensive remains of
the Aqueduct of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius which lay below Mt. Lycabettus, and suffered severely from the Albanian depredations of 1778).8° To the north the Vienna Anonymous refers to another aqueduct “‘which Theseus built,” and notes, thereafter, how Cecrops founded and embellished Athens... . Finally, ascending the Acropolis, ‘‘we find a little school, that of the musicians, which Pythagoras the Samian founded,” by which he means, of course, the lovely little temple of Athena Nike. He dwells a bit upon the magnificence of the Palace, the Propylaea, “‘and, on the north end, was the chancery (xayyeAapia), all built of marble and adorned with white columns’’:®! he speaks of the Pinakotheke, where the Catalans and the 80 C, Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), pp. 21-22, 737; cf. Wm. Miller, Greece, London, 1928, p. 18. 81 Laborde, op. cit., 1, p. 20; C. Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen im Alterthum, 1 (Leipzig, 1874), p. 738; A. Boetticher, Die Akropolis von Athen, Berlin, 1888, p. 21.
238 Catalan Domination of Athens Florentines may, not impossibly, have established their public records office, although Gregorovius believes that the Vienna Anonymous was thinking only of antiquity and of some ancient records office,® while Lampros thinks that the word kangelaria really means a portico. South of the chancery, whether ancient or medieval, or no chancery at all, our informant puts the famous Stoa Poikile — he was standing, apparently, in the front portico of the Propylaea — and from the Stoa, of course, the
philosophers who had taught there had been called the Stoics, and nearby, appropriately enough, he puts the School of Epicurus. Lastly he describes the Parthenon, “‘the temple of the Mother of God, which Apollos and Eulogius built and dedicated ‘to the Unknown God.’ ’’ About a decade after the Vienna Anonymous had compiled his handbook to the antiquities of Athens, a Venetian traveler, in the year 1470 or thereabouts, visited the city and wrote a valuable description thereof.® In almost the same words as Niccolo da Martoni, although the Venetian Anonymous writes in his native dialect, it is stated that Athens is situated in a valley about twelve miles long and six miles wide,®* is about three miles from the sea, a good five miles from Piraeus, with its fortress (/a rocha) built “upon a mountain, not very high,” and the walled city itself, la terra murata, is described as lying towards the north of the fortress, although other scattered settlements pretty much surrounded the whole of the Acropolis. On the summit of the mountain was built the fortress, ‘a very strong castle with ancient walls of stones cut square,” molto bello da veder, and within the castle was “‘a church which once was an ancient Roman temple, a marvelous thing, wholly of marble, with columns all
around.’’87 Apparently more than a dozen years elapsed before the Parthenon was converted into a mosque. Within the Castello, as the whole of the fortified Acropolis was called, was a very fine palace, next to
the church, and it was all of marble “‘done in the Roman style.”” There were numerous other memorials of the ancient past in Athens, partly
within the area of the city last enclosed in walls and partly without (parte dentro della terra ultimamente murata, parte defora): the ancient walls were all in ruins, but the ruins were very impressive, great walls of stones cut square, some of them so large “‘that four pair of oxen could not 8 Gregorovius, Stadt Athen, 11 (1889), p. 352. & Greg.-Lampros, Athens (in Greek), 11 (1904), p. 359, n. 2. & Laborde, op. cit., 1, p. 20.
8 The text is given in Erich Ziebarth, “Ein griechischer Reisebericht des fiinfzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Mittheilungen des k. deutschen archaeologischen Instituts, Athen. Abth., xxiv (1899), pp. 73-78, with a commentary, idid., pp. 80 et 59g. 8 Cf, Niccolé da Martoni, in Rev. de /’Or. lat., 11 (1895), pp. 649-650. 87 Athen. Mitth., xxiv (1899), p. 73.
Language and Culture 239 haul them.” Most of the ancient buildings were within the circuit of the city’s ancient walls: to the south was the temple of Olympian Zeus, to which the traveler gives no name; he counted twenty columns, as had Niccol6 da Martoni in 1395, while Ciriaco of Ancona saw twenty-one in 1436, and the English travelers Stuart and Revett, almost three centuries later (1751-1753), only seventeen.88 The Venetian Anonymous looked upon the arch of Hadrian with appreciative eyes, un bel arco triumphale, and copied therefrom two of the world’s most famous Greek inscriptions.®
At the foot of Mt. Lycabettus he looked over the ruins of the aqueduct of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, un condutto d’aqua, which the inhabitants still called, our traveler says, 1/ studio di Aristotele. Not far outside the walls of the city of that time, /a terra al presente habitata, just to the east, was “‘a very beautiful building of fine marble,” the shape of which seemed to suggest a lantern, and although the Venetian Anonymous makes no reference to Demosthenes in this connection, he was studying the choregic monument of Lysicrates.°° He noted also the two Roman columns over the Theater of Dionysus, but since he could not get up close to examine them, he was not sure of what they were supposed to be part. But of the Philopappus monument he has left us a detailed description: part of the west wing of the monument, intact in Ciriaco’s day, had fallen and lay on
the ground. In the middle niche he saw “a king sitting on his throne, of more than the common stature of a man,” and under this he read the name of Philopappus, although it meant nothing to him, and in the east niche was another king “‘of similar stature and similarly seated,” and under this figure he read the name Antiochus: nevertheless he believed the monument was a worthy memorial of Trajan, with whose name it was commonly associated until, in the later seventeenth century, Jacob Spon
restored it to the memory of Philopappus.*! The figures on the monument were “most perfect.”” The inscription under the west niche, read by Ciriaco little more than thirty years before, escaped the Venetian Anonymous since that part of the structure had fallen down. Nevertheless he saw the figure in the chariot drawn by four horses in the reliefs of the understructure, and the procession of four men dressed in flowing robes, quatro vano davanti e quatro da drieto, and these images, done in relief, were all in perfect condition.*2 Walking north, to the hill of Colonus, our 88 There were only seventeen columns of the Olympieum still standing in the seventeenth century: the Jesuit Fr. Jacques Paul Babin in his famous letter to the Abbé Pécoil in Lyon (1674) saw “about sixteen” (4/ en reste encore environ seize): C. Wachsmuth, Stadt Athen, 1 (1874), p. 759.
89 Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 74. |
9 Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 75. | Laborde, 4thénes, 1854, 11, pp. 17-18. 2 Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 76.
240 Catalan Domination of Athens traveler noted, in passing, ‘‘a work well worth knowing ...a temple of the gods,” by which he means the Theseum, and, making his way eastward he came upon the Stoa of Hadrian, on the west portal of which he noted four columns, through which one entered the city from the north, and five other large beautiful columns, on the north, were built into the gate of the city wall. Next he saw, and describes, the octagonal Tower of the Winds, which he says was then a Greek church (a/ presente é una chiesta dei greci et é opera molto degna, tutta di marmoro). He saw, too, various ruined structures, among which four great columns stood out, in the Roman Market.* In the harbor at Piraeus he saw the marble lion, and then went on to Corinth. There he found a fortress more impressive to look upon, perhaps, than even the Acropolis itself. The habitations of the town were all upon the heights of Acrocorinth, which, the Venetian Anonymous assures us, a bit gratuitously, was very high and in great part inaccessible, and Niccolé da Martoni has left us a vivid account of how he and his traveling companions, with a guide, gui bene sciebat vias et loca occulta, climbed the perilous height, at night and in fear of their lives.°%° But we cannot follow the Venetian and the Capuan into
Corinth, for our appointed tasks lie in Athens. The account of the Vienna Anonymous is obviously less valuable than the accounts of Niccolé da Martoni, Ciriaco of Ancona, and the Venetian Anonymous: from Niccolé we learn much of the attitude towards, and knowledge of, the monuments and antiquities of Athens, such as obtained in the city during the Catalan era; and from Ciriaco’s letters and drawings, and from the Venetian Anonymous, something of the condition of those monuments in the fifteenth century — and so in the fourteenth century also. The Acropolis, it is clear, was in a perfect state of preservation — Propylaea, Erechtheum, and Parthenon — and we have ample evidence to this effect in the seventeenth century sources (some of which
are conveniently gathered and discussed in the Count de Laborde’s Athénes, Paris, 1854). As castellans of the Acropolis, William (Guillem) Ses Planes, Galceran de Peralta, and Romeo de Bellarbre, as well as Be3 Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 77. " Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 78. % Athen. Mitth., xxiv, p. 78: “Le habitatione di Corintho sono tutte sopra el monte, el quale é altissimo, et é la mazzor parte inaccessibile, ...”?On the medieval fortifications of Acrocorinth, see R. Carpenter, A. Bon, and A. W. Parsons, Corinth (American School of Classical Studies at Athens), vol. 111, pt. 2 (1936): A. Bon, “The Medieval Fortifications of Acrocorinth and Vicinity,’’ Cambridge, Mass., 1936, pp. 160 et sgg. Brief accounts of the history of medieval Corinth may be found in Bon, op. cit., pp. 128 ef sqq., and in J. H. Finley, Jr., “Corinth in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, vi1 (1932), 477-499 (both Bon and Finley contain a number of historical errors, but Bon’s detailed descriptions of the medieval fortifications of Corinth are valuable and his illustrations excellent). % Reoue de l’Ortent latin, 111 (1895), pp. 657-658.
Language and Culture 241 renguer Oroniola, the last known vice-castellan of the city, all lived at one
time or another on the Acropolis, in the fortified and partially reconstructed Propylaea, Palau del Castell de Cetines, the official residence of the governors and captains of the city and garrison of Athens. Two further residents of the Acropolis in the last years of the Catalan domination appear to have been Bishop John Boy] of Megara, whose chapel was in the Propylaean palace somewhere, but apparently not in the little Nike temple, and the notary Demetrius Rendi, whose official records office (/a cancellaria) may, it is barely possible, have been located in the ancient Pinakotheke in the north wing of the Propylaea: if, however, the records office, or chancery, was not in the Pinakotheke, it may be that the
chapel of St. Bartholomew was there. In annexes to the Parthenon and the Erechtheum, apparently, dwelt the Catalan Archbishop of Athens, Antonio Ballester (1370-1387), and his cathedral staff of twelve priests and canons regular. Doubtless there were also less important residents on the Acropolis, for, as in Turkish times, the Athenian citadel seems to have contained other more humble dwellings in which Catalan guardsmen
and even artisans, tradesmen, and others must have found secure, if not spacious, homes.°”
Although the names of more than two hundred families living in the Catalan states in Greece are known from contemporary documents, for the most part Catalan names still common in Barcelona, there are, among them all, scarcely a dozen names which indicate a noble origin. Most of the hardy adventurers of the expedition of 1303, who ended up in Athens as Conquistadors, were of lowly or of burgess origin. In the last decade of the Catalan history of Athens, the dozen or so noble families are: the Fadriques of Aragon, the most distinguished Catalan family in Greece; the Zarroviras in Salona; the Zavalls (Cavalls) in Neopatras; the Puigpardines of Karditza and Atalandi; the Novelles of“Kastri’’; the Bellestar of Kapraina (La Cabrena), a family known only by name; and the Fuster, the great Llurias, De Pou (Despou), Vitas, the Rodejas, and the Joanes in Athens and Thebes. Of the first leaders of the Company (1303-1310), Entenza (Entenca), Rocafort, Arends, Ahonés, Corberan de Lahet, and others, no record remains from the first days of the Conquest. A few of the most prominent members of the Grand Company in the first decade
of its history returned to Catalonia or to Sicily. Most of them, however, met violent deaths in the Levant. In documents from the beginning of the last decade of the history of Catalan Athens (from the year 1379) names are still found which figure in 7 Cf. Rubid y Lluch, La Acrépolis de Atenas en la Epoca catalana (1908), pp. 19, 32; 4n. Instit. Cat., any V (1913-I914), Pp. 431.
242 Catalan Domination of Athens | the first generation of the Conquest. These names are very largely Catalan; only a few are Aragonese. Among these familiar names are those of more than fifty syndics, councillors, and important personages in
the Company, who affixed their signatures to the peace treaties with Venice in 1321 and 1331, or whom the Archbishop of Patras named, as we have seen, in the papal ban of excommunication (although Ducange’s
transcription of some of the names is obviously inaccurate).°* These include the Novelles of ‘‘Kastri’’in Thessaly;the Almenara,Terrades , and
Estanyol of Livadia; the Ses Planes of Athens; the Baldomer, Ballester, Cavaller, Fuster, Ibafiez, Oller, Sabater, and Vilafranca of Thebes; and all these names, sons and grandsons of the leaders of the 1330's, recur a half century later in the last years of Catalan domination in the Athenian
duchy.*? :
Of more than fifty names of inhabitants of Athens, mostly Catalan, which Rubié y Lluch has made a part, however small, of the history of Athens, a considerable number are revealed by the documents to have owned property in Athens — they are the brothers Roger and John de Lluria, Galceran de Peralta, Guillem de Almenara, the Arnau, Guillem Ses Planes, and the Theban Bernardo (Bernat) Ballester; a certain Pedro (Pere) Solda; Jaime and Jaimet Conominas, Albert de Bonacolsis of Mantua, and Romeo de Bellarbre; Constantine Calochini and Demetrius Rendi; Arguni and Berenguer Oroniola; John Conominas and Guerau
de Rodonella.! It is not the least curious irony of Greek history that some of these men owned land which had once belonged, perhaps, to Miltiades and Cimon, Pericles, Callias, the father of Lysias, Plato, Demos-
thenes, and Herodes Atticus. But although the names of so many persons have thus become a part of the history of Athens in the last decade or so of Catalan rule in Athens, only nine or ten such persons are mentioned frequently enough in the documents to have anything approaching a personal history: Galceran de Peralta, veguer, captain, and castellan of the city and the Acropolis (from before 1371 to 1373 and during 13781379); Romeo de Bellarbre, Peralta’s colleague and successor in the Athenian captaincy and castellany (1379-1383); Berenguer Oroniola, the vice-castellan; Guerau de Rodonella and Bishop John Boy! of Megara, who in 1380 presented Don Pedro IV with the Articles of Athens; a certain
Antonio Zaragoza, who appears only once, however, on an embassy to * Ducange-Buchon, Histoire de [empire de Constantinople, 11 (1826), pp. 204-205; cf. K. Hopf, op. cit., vol. 85 (1867), p. 436. * Rubié y Lluch, 4. Instit. Cat., v1 (1915-1920), pp. 147, 162-163; cf. Hom. Echegaray (1928), p. 365; La Pobl. de la Grecia catalana (1933), pp. 8-9. 100 Rubiéd y Lluch, Byzantion, 11 (1925-1926), p. 217; Deltion, n.s., 1 (1928), pp. 110-111.
Language and Culture 243 Don Pedro IV in 1382; Demetrius Rendi and Nicholas Macri, Greek notaries, of whom, especially the former, we have seen much; Antonio Ballester, last Catalan Archbishop of Athens (1370-1387); and Don Pedro de Pau, last governor of the world’s most illustrious city (1386— 1388) 3%
It 1s not possible to determine the population of Athens in the fourteenth century, during the period of Catalan domination, but certain reasonable estimates can be made on the basis of contemporary facts and later figures. Thus in the Articles of Athens, in the petition which his fellow citizens made in behalf of Romeo de Bellarbre, reference is made to,
and emphasis put upon, the poverty of the city (pobretat... del poble daquella),'°* while in rejecting their plea to be allowed to leave property to the Church, Don Pedro IV reminded the Catalans that they were few
in number, and the Catalan duchies would find themselves in a sorry state if the few there were, left their property to the Church, for then there should be no men-at-arms living in the duchies to defend them against the enemies of the Crown. The Catalans themselves, then, on their own testimony and that of their sovereign, were, in the year 1380, both poor and few in numbers. As for the Greek population of the coun-
tryside, there is no way at all to determine their numbers. Rubid y Lluch, however, has estimated that the Catalan population of the duchy of Athens, spread over the whole of Attica and Boeotia, did not exceed five or six thousand persons, “‘of all ages and conditions.”” The most thickly populated centers were certainly the cities of Thebes and Athens, and Rubié hazards the guess that a third of the population of Athens in the decade of the 1370’s was Catalan.“ The population of Athens, then, during this period, I should put at between nine and eleven thousand persons, of whom fewer than three thousand were Catalan. In the following century Aeneas Sylvius, Pope Pius II, says that “‘Athens, in our time, bears the appearance of a small town,”!™ and something over a 101 Rubid y Lluch, Los Catalanes en Grecia (1927), pp. 192-194; Deltion, n.s., 1 (1928), pp. 110-111, 102 Rubidéd y Lluch, Los Navarros en Grecia (1886), doc. xxxu1 (p. 242). DOC, no.CCCXCI, p.473. 108 Tbid., doc. xxxul (p. 248): The Lord King replied “‘que aco seria mal estament dels dits ducats per co com hi ha poca gent nostrada, e si aquells pochs qui y son lexaven les possessions alasgleia noy
hauria qui defenes los Ducats. .. . ’” DOC, no. CCCXCI, p. 477. 10 Rubid y Lluch, ‘‘La Grécia catalana des de 1370 a 1377,” An. Instit. Cat., v (1913-1914), P. 424. The population of Catalonia itself, compiled from statistics based upon the hearth-tax rolls of 1378, and interesting in this connection since it involves the same decade, was apparently about 300,000 (see Robt. S. Smith, “Fourteenth-Century Population Records of Catalonia,” Speculum, x1x [1944], 500-So1).
105 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, (Pit IT Pon. Max.)