Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (4 page)

The crusaders had little difficulty in establishing themselves in the Peloponnese. Though the region had been allotted to Venice, the Venetians were interested only in the harbours of the Peloponnese and their commercial possibilities, and were satisfied with the southern ports of Methóni and Koróni. De Villehardouin and Champlitte fought only one major battle against the Greeks, in which it was claimed that 700 crusader troops decisively defeated 4,000 Greeks. Otherwise the crusaders were conciliatory as, being so few, they had to be. The Greeks, weary of conflicts between local warlords, which their remote Byzantine rulers had become too weak to control, readily submitted. A chronicler reports de Villehardouin addressing an assembly of Greeks as ‘archons, friends and brothers and, henceforth, comrades’. He goes on to point out to them that ‘You do not have a lord to protect you,’ and ends by saying: ‘Therefore it seems to me better for you that we come to terms whereby murders, lootings and the taking of prisoners will not occur.’ The Greek landowners could keep their domains, with the accompanying privileges and obligations, while the crusaders took state and Church land, and it was promised that ‘the peasants of the villages would remain as the crusaders had found them.’
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There was indeed little point in resisting, and the Greeks submitted to the new rulers.

The chronicler mentioned above is the writer of the so-called
Chronicle of Morea
. There are eight versions of the material it contains, three in prose in French, Spanish or Italian, and five in verse in Greek, of which the earliest, written in about 1388 or possibly before, is considered the most authentic and is used here. All eight versions are probably derived from a French original, now lost, which was composed about 1310.

The
Chronicle of Morea
was designed either to be read or to be listened to. As its author says, ‘If you know letters, start reading; if, on the other hand, you are illiterate, sit down beside me and listen.’ It opens engagingly with the sentence that stands as the epigraph to this book: ‘I am going to tell you a great tale . . .’.
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The chronicle has its weaknesses. It
clearly favours the Franks. Some of its details are wrong. Its many long speeches by leaders cannot be verbatim records, but can reasonably be relied on to express the speaker’s policies. And, as a window on the actual conditions in the Peloponnese of those centuries, it is uniquely valuable.

The first half-century of crusader rule in the Peloponnese was something of a golden age. De Champlitte returned to France in 1208, where he died soon afterwards, and Geoffroy I de Villehardouin was recognised as overlord of the Peloponnese both by the Latin Emperor in Constantinople and by the Pope, with the title of Prince of Achaia. His rule lasted from 1208 to 1228, followed by those of his two sons Geoffroy II (1228–46) and Guillaume (1246–78). The conciliatory approach of Geoffroy I towards the Greeks was followed by his sons. Guillaume besieged Monemvasía, the precipitous fortress just off the south-east coast, for three years from 1245 to 1248; the town was ‘enclosed in exactly the same way as the nightingale by its cage’, says the chronicle.
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When it finally surrendered there was none of the bloody retribution common at the time and for centuries later. The people of Monemvasía were required in future only to provide boat services, for which they would be paid. Guillaume left the town’s three leading families in control, gave them a grant of land in the Mani, which may have been as rocky as their old home, and, if the chronicle is to be believed, ‘bestowed upon them gifts of horses and chargers, robes all of gold, and scarlet ones as well’.
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In the following year Guillaume began building the fortress of Mistrás, on a commanding and easily defensible hilltop three miles from Sparta; Mistrás was to remain the administrative centre of the Peloponnese under different rulers until replaced by Tripolis in 1719. Guillaume and his barons brought out from France their existing families or new noble brides, and formed a highly cultivated circle, one of whose products was the splendidly illuminated
Manuscrit du Roi
, now in Paris. As a contemporary Spanish chronicler put it, ‘one would say that the noblest knights of France were the knights of Morea, and the French spoken there was as fine as that of Paris.’
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But Guillaume was not a remote ruler cushioned in cultivated luxury. ‘He was wont’, wrote a contemporary, ‘to send his most confidential advisers from time to time to the courts of his vassals, to see how they lived and how they treated their subjects.’
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He also went out among his subjects himself, and as the chronicle puts it ‘he went riding with his retinue and strolled among the villages near Monemvasía and the lands in that direction; with joy he went around and passed his time.’
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For the peasants among whom Guillaume de Villehardouin strolled so benignly, life went on under a continuing feudal system much as it
had before. The twin sources of wealth had been, and remained, land and the labour to work it. To convert this wealth into military power, the ruler granted portions of land as fiefs to those who owed him allegiance, who in return had to provide military service. When Geoffroy I de Villehardouin came to allocate fiefs in the Peloponnese he set up a commission to do so, which included, besides himself and other Franks, five major Greek landowners. Twelve large fiefs were granted, with varying requirements for providing mounted knights and other troops when demanded.

Though some peasants were free, most of them were tied to labour on these fiefs. There seem to have been three categories of these unfree peasants: those with some land of their own, those without such a holding, both types having certain rights, and serfs, without property or virtually any rights at all.

The free peasant paid taxes to his lord, and unfree peasants above the level of serfs were also obliged to provide labour services to him, for which they must maintain a pair of oxen and an ass, and pass over to the lord a proportion of their crops. Both these groups had certain limited rights under the law. What was called low justice was administered by the fief-holder, and concerned payment of rents and other dues, and lesser civil cases. High justice, administered only by the holders of the major fiefs, covered important civil cases and criminal cases involving the death penalty.

Serfs, on the other hand, contributed to the fief-holder all their labour and produce apart from what was needed to exist. The serf was a chattel. His lord could take away all the serf’s goods beyond the requirements of bare subsistence, a lord who killed a serf had only to replace him, a fugitive serf could be reclaimed wherever found, and a serf wronged by a lord could not take his case to any superior lord. It was a constrained and miserable existence indeed, though little different from the position of serfs in feudal societies elsewhere in Europe.

The people of Greece were Orthodox and their new rulers Catholic, so one might have expected attempts to convert the Greeks, or at least conflicts between the two Churches. In fact neither happened except in a few isolated instances. Catholic archbishops and bishops were appointed, in the Peloponnese at Pátras, Corinth, Argos and at Venice’s possessions of Methóni and Koróni, but they did little or nothing to spread Catholicism. They seem to have spent their time at their episcopal seats, and their energy on establishing their jurisdictions and keeping, or clawing back, their landholdings. They were competitors in the local power struggles rather than spiritual leaders. Meanwhile, little changed for the
Greeks. Catholic priests in the countryside were virtually non-existent, and though this meant that the Greeks received little pastoral care except from an impoverished local priest, at least their religion was not under threat. The Catholic hierarchy did not regard the Greeks as heretics to be punished, but as schismatics who would one day rejoin the fold through the union of the Churches.

In the two and a half centuries of Frankish presence in Greece, territory was constantly taken over by rivals, sometimes as a result of a pitched battle. One of the most decisive was the battle of Pelagonia in July 1259 on one of the few plains in the mountainous far north-west of Greece, but which, remote as it was, ended the first phase of Frankish rule in the Peloponnese. It involved three of the major power centres in a contest for Thessalonika. The Kingdom of Thessalonika had changed hands several times since 1204, and since 1246 had been held by the Byzantines of Nicaea. Now the Despot of Ípiros, Michael II, aimed to seize Thessalonika, with the help of his ally Guillaume de Villehardouin, the ruler of the Peloponnese. Guillaume was married to the sister of Michael II of Ípiros, which should have cemented their alliance. Defending the territory of Thessalonika for the Byzantines was John Palaiologos, brother of the Byzantine Emperor in Nicaea.

In the middle of the night before the battle Michael of Ípiros and his army slipped away, apparently alarmed by the size of the opposing Byzantine forces, and left his ally Guillaume of the Peloponnese to face them. Guillaume’s troops were routed, ‘mown down like grass in a meadow’, as the chronicle said.
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Guillaume himself was captured after trying to hide in a haystack. It was both the end of the first phase of the Peloponnese story, and the beginning of the end of Villehardouin rule in the peninsula.

The battle losses at Pelagonia were enormous, and it is recorded that the victorious Byzantines ‘spent two days in burying the slain, and treating the uries of those who were wounded’.
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Relatively few of these casualties would have been Greeks; they were mainly the mercenaries hired by both sides. It was said that mercenaries were ‘hired everywhere’ by Guillaume and Michael of Ípiros, while the Byzantines are recorded as hiring 300 German cavalrymen, 3,500 archers from Hungary and the Cuman tribe from the Black Sea, and 600 mounted archers from Serbia, besides Bulgarians and even 500 Turks.
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Clearly victory depended upon the horse and the arrow, and of course the money to hire the men to use them.

So for most Greeks the battle itself would have been a remote and irrelevant clash of other men’s arms. It was the looting before the battle and
the pursuits after it that disrupted their lives. Guillaume and his troops had left the Peloponnese in high hopes during March of 1259, ‘when the nightingales begin to warble and all creatures of the world rejoice and are renewed,’ as the chronicler, who seems to have liked nightingales, poetically describes it.
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They crossed the Gulf of Corinth at the narrow part near Návpaktos, and joined forces with Michael of Ípiros. From then on they had to live off the land. Each day a large advance party – 1,000 horsemen and 3,000 foot soldiers – were sent ahead to collect plunder and to reassemble with their booty at nightfall. This procedure continued for the four months that it took the army to reach Pelagonia in July, with losses to the Greek peasantry that can only be guessed at. In the aftermath of the battle the victorious Byzantines pursued defeated fugitives as far as the Aegean coast 100 miles away, and went on to sack Thíva (ancient Thebes) before the end of the year. The towns of Greece suffered as well as the countryside.

However, pitched battles such as Pelagonia were not the only way in which territory in Greece was acquired. Marriage was another favoured route, and in histories of the period page after page features a dynastic marriage, whose intricacies require genealogical tables constantly to hand. Such marriages sealed alliances – though not always firmly, as the desertion of Guillaume de Villehardouin by his brother-in-law showed – and provided claims to territory. The marriages were often early and multiple. Guillaume’s daughter Isabelle was married and widowed when barely out of her childhood, by one account when she was as young as fourteen. She later married two further husbands, bringing to each in turn the nominal title to her inheritance in the Peloponnese. Some of the titles acquired by marriage were indeed nominal, but many were real, or must have been expected to be so; otherwise the marriages would not have been so frequent. It has been well said that ‘a sound pedigree and a good marriage allied to hope and a deep pocket’ were what any claimant to lands in Greece required.
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The second phase of the Peloponnese story began in 1259, when Guillaume de Villehardouin was captured after defeat by the Byzantines of Nicaea. Two years later Guillaume was released and allowed back to the Peloponnese on the condition that he surrendered to the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos his three main fortresses: Mistrás, Monemvasía and Ma
ḯ
na. The position of Ma
ḯ
na, also known as Great Mani, is disputed, but it was probably on the site of the ruin at Mézapos near the southern tip of the Mani.

The Byzantines, restored to Constantinople in 1261, were now in a stronger position. They were not content simply to hold these three
fortresses, but used them as bases from which to regain the whole of the Peloponnese. Fierce clashes and high casualties followed. One woman was said to have been married to seven husbands, one after the other, who were killed in this fighting. The Byzantines fought their way to full control of the Peloponnese, and by 1320 only three of the original twelve baronies remained in the hands of the Franks. A few years later the Byzantine Emperor John VI Kantakuzenos described the condition of the principality: ‘The Peloponnese’, he wrote, ‘is completely ravaged, not only by the Turks who attack the country with powerful fleets, and by the Franks, but especially by the inhabitants themselves who are continually at war with each other, pillaging and murdering. The villages of the countryside, with no defence, are destroyed by enemies from outside, while the towns are the prey of the population; both will soon disappear completely.’
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