the sea, not the land, was the treasury of St. Mark. In the moiety of the adventurers, the marquis Boniface might claim the most liberal reward; and, besides the isle of Crete, his exclusion from the throne was compensated by the royal title and the provinces beyond the Hellespont. But he prudently exchanged that distant and difficult conquest for the kingdom of Thessalonica or Macedonia, twelve days' journey from the capital, where he might be supported by the neighbouring powers of his brother-in-law the king of Hungary. His progress was hailed by the voluntary or reluctant acclamations of the natives; and Greece, the proper and ancient Greece, again received a Latin conqueror, who trod with indifference that classic ground. He viewed with a careless eye the beauties of the valley of Tempe; traversed with a cautious step the straits of Thermopyla; occupied the unknown cities of Thebes, Athens, and Argos; and assaulted the fortifications of Corinth and Napoli, which resisted his arms. The lots of the Latin sent a colony to Candia, drawn from every quarter of Venice. But in their savage manners and frequent rebellions, the Candiots may be compared to the Corsicans under the yoke of Genoa; and when I compare the accounts of Belon and Tournefort, I cannot discern much difference between the Venetian and the Turkish island.

* Villehardouin (No. 159, 160. 173-177) and Nicetas (p. 387-394) describe the expedition into Greece of the marquis Boniface. The Choniate might derive his information from his brother Michael, archbishop of Athens, whom he paints as an orator, a statesman, and a saint. His encomium of Athens, and the description of Tempe, should be published from the Bodleian MS. of Nicetas (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. vi. p. 405), and would have deserved Mr. Harris's inquiries. [This MS. (which Gibbon noticed before, vol. vi. p. 571) was published by Wilken, Lips. 1830, under the title Narratio de Statuis Antiquis, quos Franci post captam C. P. anno 1204, destruxerunt, and again by Bekker (1838) in the Scriptores Byzant. But the description of Tempe and Athens by Michael Nicetas, remains anpublished.—ED.]

+ Napoli di Romania, or Nauplia, the ancient sea-port of Argos, is still a place of strength and consideration, situate on a rocky peninsula, with a good harbour. (Chandler's Travels into Greece, p. 227.) [Athens and Thebes were never recovered by the emperors of the East; they fell to the share of Otho de la Roche, who attended this expedition. (See the close of ch. lxii.) He had the title of Miyag Kupus, Grand Sire; his son Guy obtained that of Duke in 1254. Nauplia was retained by the Byzantine Greeks till 1248, when with the assistance of a Venetian fleet, William de Villehardouin, the youngest son of Geoffrey I., added it to his principality of Achaia and the Morea (Koeppen, p. 114-117.) In the struggle which gave birth

pilgrims were regulated by chance, or choice, or subsequent exchange; and they abused, with intemperate joy, their triumph over the lives and fortunes of a great people. After a minute survey of the provinces, they weighed in the scales of avarice the revenue of each district, the advantage of the situation, and the ample or scanty supplies for the maintenance of soldiers and horses. Their presumption claimed and divided the long-lost dependencies of the Roman sceptre; the Nile and Euphrates rolled through their imaginary realms, and happy was the warrior who drew for his prize the palace of the Turkish sultan of Iconium.* I shall not descend to the pedigree of families, and the rent-roll of estates, but I wish to specify that the counts of Blois and St. Pol were invested with the duchy of Nice and the lordship of Demotica;† the principal fiefs were held by the service of constable, chamberlain, cup-bearer, butler, and chief cook and our historian, Jeffrey of Villehardouin, obtained a fair establishment on the banks of the Hebrus, and united the double office of marshal of Champagne and Romania. At the head of his knights and archers, each baron mounted on horseback to secure the possession of his share, and their first efforts were generally successful. But the public force was weakened by their dispersion; and

:

to the new kingdom of Greece, Napoli di Romania was conspicuous, and for several years was the capital of the infant state. It then contained 9000 inhabitants; but this number has been considerably reduced since the removal of the seat of government to Athens. Still, from the excellence of its harbour, nearly all the trade of the Morea centres there, and its fortress, which is called the Gibraltar of Greece, stands on the top of a precipitous rock 720 feet above the level of the Malte Brun and Balbi, p. 619.-ED.]

sea.

* I have softened the expression of Nicetas, who strives to expose the presumption of the Franks. See De Rebus post C. P. expugnatam, p. 375-384.

A city surrounded by the river Hebrus, and six leagues to the south of Adrianople, received from its double wall the Greek name of Didymoteichos, insensibly corrupted into Demotica and Dimot. I have preferred the more convenient and modern appellation of Demo. tica. This place was the last Turkish residence of Charles XII. [Brocquiére saw the double wall in 1433, and gives Dymodique as the name of the city at that time. He was not aware that the river Mariza or Maritza, which he crossed three times, was the ancient Hebrus. (Travels, p. 343, edit. Bohn.) Demotica is now a flourishing town with 15,000 inhabitants, and noted for its manufactures of fine pottery, silk, and wool. Malte Brun and Balbi, p. 610.—ED.]

a thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire was the sword. Within three months after the conquest of Constantinople, the emperor and the king of Thessalonica drew their hostile followers into the field; they were reconciled by the authority of the doge, the advice of the marshal, and the firm freedom of their peers.*

Two fugitives, who had reigned at Constantinople, still asserted the title of emperor; and the subjects of their fallen throne might be moved to pity by the misfortunes of the elder Alexius, or excited to revenge by the spirit of Mourzoufle. A domestic alliance, a common interest, a similar guilt, and the merit of extinguishing his enemies, a brother and a nephew, induced the more recent usurper to unite with the former the relics of his power. Mourzoufle was received with smiles and honours in the camp of his father Alexius; but the wicked can never love, and should rarely trust, their fellow-criminals; he was seized in the bath, deprived of his eyes, stripped of his troops and treasures, and turned out to wander an object of horror and contempt to those who with more propriety could hate, and with more justice could punish, the assassin of the emperor Isaac and his son. As the tyrant, pursued by fear or remorse, was stealing over to Asia, he was seized by the Latins of Constantinople, and condemned, after an open trial, to an ignominious death. His judges debated the mode of his execution-the axe, the wheel, or the stake; and it was resolved that Mourzoufle † should ascend the Theodosian column, a pillar of white marble of one hundred and forty-seven feet in height. From the summit he was

Their quarrel is told by Villehardouin (No. 146-158) with the spirit of freedom. The merit and reputation of the marshal are acknowledged by the Greek historian (p. 387), μέγα παρὰ τοῖς τῶν Λατί vwv dvvapivov σтρатεúμаσi; unlike some modern heroes, whose exploits are only visible in their own memoirs. [Dean Milman has connected this quarrel with circumstances quite foreign to it, and erroneously made Villehardouin himself, instead of his nephew, prince of Achaia. See Note, p. 18, 19.-ED.]

+ See the fate of Mourzoufle, in Nicetas (p. 393), Villehardouin (No. 141-145. 163), and Guntherus (c. 20, 21). Neither the marshal nor the monk afford a grain of pity for a tyrant or rebel, whose punish. ment, however, was more unexampled than his crime.

The column of Arcadius, which represents in basso-relievo his

cast down headlong, and dashed in picces on the pavement, in the presence of innumerable spectators, who filled the forum of Taurus, and admired the accomplishment of an old prediction, which was explained by this singular event.* The fate of Alexius is less tragical; he was sent by the marquis a captive to Italy, and a gift to the king of the Romans; but he had not much to applaud his fortune, if the sentence of imprisonment and exile was changed from a fortress in the Alps to a monastery in Asia. But his daughter, before the national calamity, had been given in marriage to a young hero who continued the succession, and restored the throne of the Greek princes. The valour of Theodore Lascaris was signalized in the two sieges of Constantinople. After the flight of Mourzoufle, when the Latins were already in the city, he offered himself as their emperor to the soldiers and people; and his ambition, which might be virtuous, was undoubtedly brave. Could he have infused a soul into the multitude, they might have crushed the strangers under their feet: their abject despair refused his aid, and Theodore retired to breathe the air of freedom in Anatolia, beyond the immediate view and pursuit of the conquerors. Under the title, at first of despot, and afterwards of emperor, he drew to his standard the bolder spirits who were fortified against slavery by the contempt of life; and, as every means was lawful for the public safety, implored without scruple the alliance of the Turkish sultan. Nice, where Theodore established his residence, Prusa and Philadelphia, Smyrna and Ephesus, opened their gates to their deliverer; he derived strength and reputation from his victories, and even from his defeats; and the successor of Constantine preserved a fragment of the empire from the victories, or those of his father Theodosius, is still extant at Constan tinople. It is described and measured, Gyllius (Topograph. 4. 7), Banduri (ad lib. 1, Antiquit. C. P. p. 507, &c.), and Tournefort (Voyage du Levant, tom. ii. lettre 12, p. 231).

*The nonsense of Gunther and the modern Greeks concerning this columna fatidica, is unworthy of notice; but it is singular enough that fifty years before the Latin conquest, the poet Tzetzes (Chiliad, 9. 277) relates the dream of a matron who saw an army in the forum, and a man sitting on the column, clapping his hands, and uttering a loud exclamation. The dynasties of Nice, Trebizond, and Epirus (of which Nicetas saw the origin without much pleasure or hope), are learnedly explored and clearly represented, in the Familia Byzantine of Ducange.

bauks of the Mæander to the suburbs of Nicomedia, and at length of Constantinople. Another portion, distant and obscure, was possessed by the lineal heir of the Comneni, a son of the virtuous Manuel, a grandson of the tyrant Andronicus. His name was Alexius; and the epithet of great was applied perhaps to his stature, rather than to his exploits. By the indulgence of the Angeli, he was appointed governor or duke of Trebizond; his birth gave him ambi

* Except some facts in Pachymer and Nicephorus Gregoras, which will hereafter be used, the Byzantine writers disdain to speak of the empire of Trebizond, or principality of the Lazi; and, among the Latins, it is conspicuous only in the romances of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Yet the indefatigable Ducange has dug out (Fam. Byz. p. 192) two authentic passages in Vincent of Beauvais (1. 31, c. 144), and the protonotary Ogerius (apud Wading, A.D. 1279, No. 4). [Trapezus, afterwards Trebizond, was a colony from Sinope, Ol. vi. 1, B.C. 756 (Euseb. Chron. ap. Clinton, F, H. i. 156). It was, therefore, nearly coeval with the generally received era of Rome. It received its name from the trapezoid, or tabular form of the rocky coast on which the colonists fixed their settlement. Xenophon gave it early celebrity (Anab. v. 5. 3) as the point where he and his Greeks, during their memorable retreat, first reached the shore of the Euxine. The obscure mediæval empire of Trebizond has of late found its historians in Prof. Fallmerayer (Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt, München, 1827), and Geo. Finlay (History of Greece and Trebizond, p. 354-498), both founded on a recently discovered chronicle of Michael Panaretos. Prof. Koeppen of Franklin College, Pennsylvania, has also in his useful work, The World in the Middle Ages (p. 122. 206), given a clear compendious view of the subject, and more particularly collected from various discrepant accounts, the following narrative of the origin of this State. When Isaac Angelus overthrew the Comneni in 1185, Thamar, a daughter of Andronicus (probably one of his children by Theodora, the former queen of Jerusalem, see this History v. 351), escaped and conveyed to Colchis two young sons of Manuel Comnenus. They were hospitably received by the Greeks of that country; and after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 by the Latins, Alexius, cne of these princes, then a handsome and spirited youth, was assisted by his Colchian friends, in conquering a narrow tract along the southern coast of the Euxine, as far as the river Sangarius, where he founded the Comnenian empire of Trebizond. On its subsequent fate, till its fall in 1461, the above-mentioned writers supply whatever Gibbon's imperfect authorities omitted or mis-stated. The open roadstead of Trebizond is a very insecure harbour; but its situation, at the eastern extremity of the Euxine, has made it in all commercial times a convenient medium of European intercourse with Armenia and Persia. We find this stated in the fourteenth century by Maundeville (Travels, p. 201, edit. Bohn), and in the present by Layard (N. and B. p. 7). The neighbouring port of Batonn is better sheltered; but this advan tage is neutralized by the insalubrity of the air. Koeppen states the