[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]
There is very little to tell about Greece for hundreds of years. It was
a part of the Eastern Empire, and was for the most part in a quiet state,
except when robbers came against it. The Bulgarians came from the North,
but after they had become Christian they were somewhat less dangerous.
From the East and South came Saracens and Moors, who had been converted
to the faith of the false Arabian prophet Mahommed; and from the West
came the Northmen, all the way from Norway and Denmark, to rob the very
east end of the Mediterranean, so that beautiful old ornaments, evidently
made in Greece, have been found in the northern homes that once belonged
to these sea-kings.
The Greeks had little spirit to fight, and the emperors took some of
these stout Northmen into their pay against the Bulgarians and Saracens,
calling them their Varangian Guard. Another band, of northern blood,
though they had been settled in Normandy for two generations, came, and
after driving out the Saracens from Sicily and Southern Italy, set up two
little kingdoms there. Robert Guiscard, or the Wizard, the first and
cleverest of these Norman kings, had a great wish to gain Greece also,
and had many fights with the troops of the Emperor of the East, Alexis
Comnenus. Their quarrels with him made the Greeks angry and terrified
when all the bravest men of the West wanted to come through their lands
on the Crusade, or Holy War, to deliver Jerusalem from the Saracens.
Then, since the schism between the Churches, the Greeks and the Latins
had learnt scarcely to think of one another as Christians at all, and
certainly they did not behave to one another like Christians, for the
Greeks cunningly robbed, harassed, and deceived the Latins, and the
Latins were harsh, rude, and violent with the Greeks.
In the northern point of the Adriatic Sea lay the city of Venice, built
upon a cluster of little islands. The people had taken refuge there when
Italy was overrun by the barbarians. In course of time these Venetians
had grown to be a mighty and powerful people, whose merchant ships traded
all over the Mediterranean, and whose counsellors were famed for wisdom.
They had shaken off the power of the Greek emperor, and were governed by
a senate and council, with a chosen nobleman at its head, who was called
the Doge, or Duke. Just when the French, Germans, and Italians were
setting off on the Fourth Crusade, in the year 1201, meaning to sail in
Venetian ships, the young Alexius Angelus, son to the emperor Isaac
Angelus, came to beg for help for his poor old father, who had been
thrown into prison by his own brother, with his eyes put out. It was
quite aside from the main work of the Crusade, but the Venetians had
always had a quarrel with the Greek emperors, and they prevailed to turn
the army aside to attack Constantinople. With an immense pair of shears
they cut in twain the great chains which shut in the harbour of the
Golden Horn, and sailed safely in, led by their Doge, Dandolo, who,
though eighty years old, and blind, was as keen on the battle as the
youngest man there.
The French scaled the walls, the usurper fled, and blind old Isaac was
led out of his dungeon, and dressed in his robes again; his son was
crowned to reign with him, and they did everything to please the
Crusaders. Chiefly they made the Patriarch of Constantinople consent to
give up all the differences with the Roman Catholic Church, and own the
Pope as superior to him. This made the Greeks angry, and they could not
bear to see their young emperor so familiar with the French knights, whom
they looked on as barbarians. One day he was seen with a Frenchman's cap
on his head, and his own crown lying on the ground at his feet. In great
anger the people of Constantinople rose, under a man named Alexius Ducas,
called "Black-brows," murdered the two emperors, and set up this new one;
but he did not reign long, for the French and Venetians were close at
hand. There was a second siege, and when the city was taken they
plundered it throughout, stripped it of all the wealth they could
collect, and set up Baldwin, Count of Flanders, to be emperor, with a
Latin Patriarch; while the Venetians helped themselves to all the
southern part of the empire, namely, the Peloponnesus and the Greek
islands; and a French nobleman named Walter de Brienne was created Duke
of Athens, under the Flemish emperor.
[Picture: Promontory of Actium]
It was then that so many of the old Greek places took the names we now
see them called by in the map, and which were mostly given by the
Venetian seamen. They called the Peloponnesus the Morea, or
Mulberry-leaf, because it was in that shape; they called the island of
Euboea, Negropont, or Black-bridge; the AEgean Sea, the Archipelago, or
Great Sea; and the Euxine, the Black Sea, because it is so dangerous.
The Greeks hated their new masters very much, and would not conform to
the Roman Catholic Church. A new Greek empire was set up in Asia Minor,
at Nicea; and after the Latin emperor Baldwin had been lost in a battle
with the Bulgarians, and great troubles swept away his successors, the
emperors returned to Constantinople, under Michael Palaeologus, in 1261,
and drove out all the Franks, as the Greeks called the Western people,
chiefly French and Italians, who had come to settle in their cities.
But the Venetians still held the cities in the greater part of the Morea,
and some of the islands, and traded all over the East and West, though
their Greek subjects were only kept under by main force, still held to
their own Greek Church, and looked to the Roman Emperor of the East, as
they called the Palaeologus at Constantinople, as their head; nor was it
easy to overpower people who had so many mountain fastnesses, nor to tame
monks whose convents were nests on the top of rocks, some so steep that
there was no way of entering them save being drawn up in a basket. Well
was it for them that they had niched themselves into such strongholds,
for worse and worse days were coming upon Greece. The terrible nation of
Turks were making their way out of the wild country north of Persia, and
winning the old cities of Asia Minor, where they set up their Mahommedan
dominion, and threatened more and more to overthrow the Greek empire
altogether.
The emperor, John Palaeologus, was obliged to yield to Amurath, the
Turkish Sultan, all his lands except Constantinople, Thessalonica, and
that part of the Morea which still clung to the empire, and the Turks set
up their capital at Adrianople, whence they spread their conquests up to
the very walls of Constantinople; but the Greek mountaineers, especially
those of the mountain land of Epirus, now called Albania, had something
of the old spirit among them, and fought hard. The Venetians used to
take troops of them into their pay, since all Christians made common
cause against the Turks; and these soldiers, richly armed, with white
Albanian kilts, the remnant of the old Greek tunic, were called
Stradiots, from the old Greek word for a soldier, Stratiotes. The
bravest of them all was George Castriotes, a young Albanian, who had been
given as a hostage to the Mahommedans when nine years old. He had been
kept a prisoner, and made to fight in the Turkish army, and was so brave
there that the Turks called him Skanderbeg, or the Lord Alexander.
However, when he thought of the horror of being a Mahommedan, and
fighting against the Christian faith and his own country, he fled into
Albania, raised all the Greeks, killed all the Turks in the country, and
kept it safe from all the further attempts of the Sultan as long as he
lived, although, at Varna, a great crusade of all the most adventurous
spirits in Europe, to drive back the Turks, was wofully defeated in the
year 1446.
[Picture: Mount Helicon]