Showing posts with label Morea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Morea. Show all posts

15 July 2010

Fletcher



Fletcher is missing. There is no picture of William Fletcher.

Two hundred years ago this July, George Gordon, Lord Byron (left), and John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton (right), were starting their travels in the Morea.

If you want the interesting things, read Hobhouse --it would make a great buddy-movie. Byron's reports in his diaries and letters are infuriatingly brief. But something they both wrote about was Fletcher. Fletcher was Byron's valet, but only in a technical sense. What he was was their scapegoat. Here is Hobhouse:


"We had only one English servant with us, who was my friend's valet; for I was fortunately disapointed the day before I left London, of the man who was to have accompanied me in our travels: I say fortunately, because English servants are rather an incumbrance than a use in the Levant, as they require better accommodation than their master, and are a perpetual source of blunders, quarrels, and delays. Their inaptitude at acquiring any foreign language is, besides, invincible, and seems more stupid in a country where many of the common people speak three, and some four or five languages."

And here is Byron (he had finally sent Fletcher back to England):

"I cannot find that [Fletcher] is any loss, being tolerably master of the Italian & modern Greek languages, which last I am also studying with a master, I can order and discourse more than enough for a reasonable man. ----Besides the perpetual lamentations after beef & beer, the stupid bigotted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him like all other English servants, an incumbrance. ----I do assure you the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far) the pilaws (a Turkish dish of rice & meat) which he could not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, and the long list of calamities such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c. which assailed him, would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and of inconvenience to a Master. ----After all the man is honest and in Christendom capable enough, but in Turkey--Lord forgive me, my Albanian soldiers, my Tartars & Janizary worked for him & us too as my friend Hobhouse can testify."

They had started out with "a Tartar, two Albanians, and interpreter, besides Fletcher," but it was Fletcher who received the abuse: "Fletcher too with his usual acuteness contrived at Megara to ram his damned clumsy foot into a boiling teakettle." "That timber-headed Fletcher. . .." "Fletcher is fat and facetious." Byron was not a very nice person in those years -- "I have kicked an Athenian postmaster" -- not that Athenian postmasters, or the postmistress at the Kolonaki postoffice in particular, don't on occasion trigger such an impulse. But read Hobhouse again and see what Fletcher was up against:


"Our baggage was weighty; but, I believe, we could not have done well with less, as a large quantity of linen is necessary for those who are much at sea, or travel so fast as not to be able to have their clothes washed. Besides four large leathern trunks, weighing about eighty pounds when full, and three smaller trunks, we had a canteen, which is quite indispensable; three beds, with bedding, and two light wooden bedsteads. The latter article some travellers do not carry with them; but it contributes so much to comfort and health, as to be very recommendable. We heard, indeed, that in Asiatic Turkey you cannot make use of bedsteads, being always lodged in the khans or inns; but in Europe, where you put up in cottages and private houses, they are always serviceable, preserving you from vermin, and the damp of mud floors, and possessing advantages which overbalance the evils caused by the delays of half an hour in packing and taking them to pieces.

"We were also furnished with four English saddles and bridles, which was a most fortunate circumstance, for we should not have been able to ride on the high wooden pack-saddles of the Turkish post horses; and though we might have bought good Turkish saddles, both my Friend and myself found them a very uncomfortable seat for any other pace than a walk.

"Whilst on the article of equipage, I must tell you, that as all the baggage is carried on horses, it is necessary to provide sacks to carry all your articles. These sacks you can get of a very useful kind in the country. They are made of three coats; the inner one of waxed canvas, the second of horse-hair cloth, and the outward of leather. Those which we bought at Ioannina were large enough to hold, each of them a bed, a large trunk, and one or two small articles; and they swing like panniers at each side of the horse.

"Some travellers prefer a large pair of saddle-bags, and to have a large chest or trunk, which they send round by sea to meet them, or leave at one fixed spot; but this is a bad plan: the saddle bags will not carry things enough for you; and then to have your wardrobe at any fixed spot, binds you to one route, and prevents you from taking advantage of opportunities."

So if you are fortunate enough to be traveling in the Morea this summer, take a moment of silence for Fletcher.

12 December 2009

The Singular Stratiote


These marvellous striped stockings, much gimped, are all that remain of the figure of a stratiote in a Cretan fresco of military saints, but they suggest something of the multivalent world of the stratioti. The name comes from the Greek word stratiotis, one obligated to military service, and in this period it was supplemented by the Italian notion that it meant something like "on the road." Marino Sanudo described them in the 1480s:

These stratioti are Turks, Greeks, and Albanians living in the Morea, men of great spirit, ready to put themselves in every danger. They ride their horses with great swiftness, cutting down and laying everything to waste. They are by nature rapacious and much given to looting and to the deaths of men, against whom they use great cruelty. They carry shield, sword and lance with a pennant at the tip of the lance, and an iron mattock at their side. Few wear a cuirass, and the rest only their coats of bombazine1 sewn in their fashion. Their horses are large, good workers, fast on the hoof, and always carry the head high. They eat grain and straw. These people are much experienced in war . . . and their city wall is the sword and the lance.
OK, that sounds a bit like the Spartans claim for themselves, but the stratioti were -- given that this is a fallen world and much happens that we would prefer did not -- the stratioti were pretty magnificent. Those Sanudo writes about had been imported from Modon, Corone, and Nauplion in 1482 for the Ferrara war. There had been days of arguing and a near-revolt against Minio over the pay scales offered, and then as soon as they were off-loaded from their barges on the Brenta canal, most were massacred in a charge by Federigo de Montefeltro and his steel-armed warriors. The stratiotiwere having no more of this, so they refused to fight until they had a commander of their own -- "not one of those Italians " -- and announced they would take no prisoners. The general practice was to try to capture individuals for whom they could collect ransom. Meanwhile they engaged in a little looting while the Venetians decided what to do. Minio arrived back in Venice from Nauplion just in time to be appointed their commander -- he seems to have been thought the only person likely to be able to control them, and was commended for their military success. But the Ferrarese and their allies were frightened of losing their heads or, if not killed, their ears, and the stratioti's reputation possibly accomplished more for them in Italy than actual fighting.

Venice had been hiring stratioti here and there in Greece for about 60 years, but their first real use came early in the 1464-1478 war when four-fifths of the fanti Sigismundo Malatesta had brought from Italy died of plague. Stratioti cost considerably less, they supplied their own horses, they knew the mountain routes that had to be negotiated as the Venetian troops dodged and tracked the Turkish. And, as Barbarigo wrote, "These peasants are better fighters than the Italians." Barbarigo was supposed to oversee Malatesta and coordinate the war efforts, including food, pay, hiring and firing.

This war had very little commitment back home, and much of Barbarigo's wonderful letters are concerned with trying to get food for his troops, pay for his troops, straw for their horses. Very little of anything was being sent out, and he had before him the example of stratioti in country, too long without pay, who had decapitated their Italian captain. Then he had trouble finding aides who could speak and write Greek to deal with them, and he was on short rations himself. He had to send half of his stratioti up to Nauplion territory, because Modon and Corone territories could only feed 150 horses each. Meanwhile, the stratioti were selling off their future wages at one-quarter of their worth to get a little money for a little food. Most of them were without shoes, and many of were sick from malnutrition and malaria. Then there were the occasional raids that acquired a couple of thousand sheep and goats, and half of them had to be slaughtered and abandoned because the band of 40 or 70 stratioti couldn't manage them across the mountain passes fast enough ahead of the Turks.


Stratioti are rarely singular. They are almost always mentioned in groups, though two were assigned to take the Anonymous Naupliote from Mouchli to Argos. They fight in bands, almost always family-related groups, usually between eighteen and thirty males of all ages, but on occasion as many as 500. We have very few names of individual stratioti, but we have many of names of kapitanioi, or capi -- Krokondeilos and Emmanuel Kladas, Michali Rallis, Thodoro Bua, Petro Bua, Bozike, Blessi, Theodoros Palaiologos, Demetrios Palaiogos (related, but not imperial), and towns all over Greece have names familiar from stratioti in the 15th Century -- Gerbesi, Manessi, Zonga. Venice rewarded the kapitanioi and gave them lengths of red or black cloth on occasion when there wasn't money, and generally provided widows' pensions, daughters' dowries, and hired the sons. The stratioti were so much food for the birds and the dogs.

The original theory, and the practice that the Venetians tried to maintain as much as possible, was that they received land to farm in lieu of pay, they took along their own provisions, provided their own equipment, and could have whatever they could get in loot. Stratioti could easily become bandits when there was no war on, and in most accounts of war in the Morea -- when not actually facing an organized Ottoman force -- it is very difficult to say why a particular action is war rather than banditry.

However, the realities of the Ottoman war meant that Venice needed to hire troops from the Albanian clans who moved their herds and huts from mountain to mountain and had little or no local allegiances or concern for Venetian discipline. In both Minio and Barbarigo there seems to be an exasperated equivalence that stratioti = good, Albanians = bad, but stratioti were as often Albanians (from earlier periods of immigration) as Greek, and were perfectly capable of rebellion. Minio calls them all "zente desregulata -- lawless people."

Still, these were ferociously loyal men, fighting, hanging on after months of not being paid, sometimes performing amazingly heroic actions. Sometimes, after not being paid for a very long time, bands would go off to fight for the Turks for a while instead of against them. Sometimes, desperate for food, a group would make a private peace so they could tend to their crops for a season. And once a group of stratioti, furious at the Ottoman-Venetian peace settlement, declared their own six-month war against the Turks. One can only imagine how difficult their lives must have been to prefer unpaid service under the Venetians to quiet herding on one of the Morea's beautiful upland pastures.

They are raggedy men -- the stockings in the picture, and the red shoes, were probably sold a few months later so their owner could buy food. The image I cary of stratioti is a scene repeated over and over in the various reports: a crowd of hungry men barefoot in the dust of the plateia at Nauplion -- now paved with marble and place lined with Rossini-esque buildings and cafes and Venetian lions and a couple of repurposed mosques -- crying "Pan! Pan!" Bread.


30 March 2009

A chapel with vestiges

The picture is of a chapel with vestiges--here a classical column built in, just right of the lower center. William Gell noted this site as he passed by, one eye on his watch, the other on his notebook.


Gell (1777-1836) was a wonderfully obsessive traveller, documenting his modern Greece of the 1810s against Pausanias, and then noting the minutiae of his modern Greece for the travellers he hoped would follow him, and then writing up his interesting experiences and candid descriptions for people who were sensible enough to stay at home, grateful for the blessing of being English, instead of Greeks or Turks..

In the introduction to his Itinerary of Greece, he writes:
To those who may consult this volume as their guide on the road, the advantage of noting every well, rivulet, mill, or farm-house . . . will soon be apparent, in a country which does not abound in water, where every stream has its history, and where every object assists in determining the direction to be pursued, when the road is nothing better than a track frequently interrupted.
This program was fulfilled in the next volume, Itinerary of the Morea. Suppose you were, inadvisedly, wanting to go from Mistra to Krabata, these would be part of your instructions. The numbers refer to minutes:
11 The last sign of Mistra. This road is the same as that to Leondari.
15 A ruined aqueduct, with two ranges of arches, with a stream under it.
10 End of the hill of Papiote, and another piece of the aqueduct
. . . . .
3 The road turns back a little, and a river falls into the Eurotas.
13 Following the glen of the last river, ascend. R. across the stream, a rock with the appearance of antique vestiges.
. . . . . .
9 Very bad road, on a summit. Descend. A church r.
5 Vestiges. A few trees. Bare hills. A stream from r.
2 A fount r in a field.
5 Vestiges r.
5. A red mountain, Krabata, l.
15 Stream r. of the road.
4 A tumulus of stones r. See r. a fine mountain with pines.
At the end of this route you learn that to go from Mistra to Krabata takes 3 hours 48 minutes, a time that assumes you are riding a horse and have a companion-servant-translator who is walking. I personally think you want a happy translator and should have got a horse for him, too, but Gell travelled constantly and seems to have known what he was doing. In fact, all of his measurements of routes and times were taken from the same horse in order to give them consistency.

The traveller needed a Firman
or order from the Sultan, permitting him to pass unmolested, and recommending him to the attention of the . . . Pashas of the Morea . . . An order for post-horses may be annexed to this, by which, wherever the post is established, good horses may be had, nominally free from expence, but presents ought to be given . . . This firman should be procured by the ambassador at Constantinople and sent to . . . the first port hwere the traveller enters the country. If this does not arrive . . .
And so on.
. . . horses seem the best mode of conveyance. Some prefer mules, from an idea of their caution in dangerous or rocky situations, but the horses of the country are equally accustomed to the roads, and are not only more docile, but free from the trick of lying down in the water with luggage, which is frequently the practice of the mules.
Horses could be got for five or six pounds each at the beginning of the journey, and sold at the end. It was necessary to hire Greeks or Turks to care for them and the baggage. So, realistically, the trip from Mistra to Krabata would likely to take somewhat longer than the 3 hours and 48 minutes that you and a single attendant would require.

The baggage to occupy the attending Greeks and Turks would include: a mattress, and a piece of oilcloth to wrap it during the day, and to put on the ground at night; a small carpet for sitting on the ground; a knife, fork, spook, plate, cup, and a pot for boiling water; an umbrella with an iron spike for fixing it in the ground; silk curtains for protecting the bed from mosquitos.

The baggage would also contain presents for the hosts who might offer you a place to spend the night. Depending on circumstances, a watch or cut glass cup might be appropriate, but ordinarily one could do just as well with imitation jewellry such as red glass beads, and particularly imitation pearls.
17 The glen opens into the plain of Argos. R are ruins, on a projecting hill.
8 The plain, covered with stones, some of which have been collectd into a large heap, 400 yards r.
20 A peribola, or garden, r. L. on a hill, a pyrgo. Villages; churches; two wells, and the fragment of a column.
7 Two villages, r.
8 Village, r. L. a church. Ancient foundations r.
15 Three villages r. Pass through a village.
7 A church r. Cross a road from Argos to Epidaurus. On hill l., a church and tumulus. L. rocks. Enter a
grove of olives.
3 Ruins of Tirynthus, and a well.
30 Enter Nauplia, having turned r. at an angle of the bay.
At Nauplion -- fortunately you are not in the mountains where you may have to stay at the wretched khan if the tower is occupied, and the boys at Argos throw stones at strangers (this happened to us, too, in another century) -- and if you are coming from Corinth you should watch out for the chapel with the guard who will check to see if you are bringing plague with you -- have a bath. Preferably not when the bath is crowded.
The first apartment has a fire in the centre, and around the walls are several sofas . . . which have clean sheets and blankets . . . the bather is stripped, a cotten cloth is wrapped round him, and he is conducted in wooden pattens through several vaulted rooms, each hotter than the last, to a chamber, where he is placed upon a wooden platform about the size of a door, and raised four inches from the pavement. His profuse perspiration is rubbed off by one of the attendants . . . After this, a bason full of lather is brought, and the baqther is rubbed with a soft brush made of an oriental plant . . . On clapping the hands, the attendant brings a fresh dress of cotton cloth, which is wrapped round the waist, and another in the form of a turban is placed on the head. He is then . . . placed between the sheets, and drinks a cup of coffee while he is drying.

Those only who have tried can judge of the wonderfuly cleansing and refreshing effect of this custom.

04 February 2009

Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Two

The story of Kleope Malatesta and Theodoros II Palaiologos has already been told here, a version of it with what the research had shown up to that point. It used a borrowed portrait to represent Kleope. The child here is Theodoros, painted when he was about six years old, in a formal family portrait. It is the only picture that has survived of him, but he tells us below that there was another, of him and Kleope together, at Mistra. It has been ravaged, as was so much else there, by time.

Kleope died on April 18,1433, the Saturday after Easter, following a long illness. They had been married just over twelve years. She was buried in the church of Agia Sophia just up the hill from the palace at Mistra.

There is a poem in the Bessarion manuscripts in the Marciana in Venice long thought to be a poem by him on the tomb of Kleope. This only shows that no one has ever paid any attention to the poem at all, and that the fact that it is in Bessarion's handwriting was considered by scholars who should know better an adequate reason to consider him the author. But it is impossible to read the poem and not think that it comes from her grieving husband.

It is a striking poem, if only because the Byzantines almost never wrote romantic personal poems, and this one is to a woman in heaven who is guiding the writer on earth, a woman whose body the writer knows. The poem is written on the Italian model--Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura are easy associations, and there is that famous poem by Petrarch supposedly written to be put into Laura's tomb, as this one surely was put into Kleope's.

Kleope's father was a well-known poet, Malatesta dei Sonetti, and his father had been a friend of Petrarch. Everyone in her family wrote poetry: it was what humanists did. Beyond that, this poem suggests that this Byzantine prince, known for his qualities as the quintessential geek, had been reading and writing poetry with his Italian wife. It suggests that the marriage reported to have been miserable had in reality developed into a union of intellect and body.

Theodoros had been reading Theocritus--she knew Greek as well, and the ending of the first section of his poem with its reflection that the one thing left for consolation in his heartbreak is song alludes to the opening of Theocritus' poem on Polyphemus, which is framed by a teasing remark to a physician that some diseases are beyond the healing power of medicine and for them the only remedy is the effort of composing poetry. (And one of the eulogies for Kleope had mentioned the failure of medicine, and her doctor had himself written a lament.)

Theodoros was a mathematician, and this poem makes quiet reference to that with its structure based on the number five, thinking of the five senses, identifying five ways he and Kleope could be together. Possibly he set out to write one example for each sense, but then after Touch, Hearing, and Sight, found himself unable to match the final ways and senses.

He gives us one other valuable piece of information: he tells us that her tomb is marked by a dual portrait. There are other such portraits of husband and wife on Mistra tombs, and the image used to stand for Kleope is half of such a portrait--but it was found in a church other than the one where Kleope was buried.

Before this poem was buried with her, the monk Bessarion, who was the same age and a fellow-scholar, and who thought she was lovely, must have asked to be allowed to make a copy for himself.

Here is Theodoros' poem for Kleope:

Although we were before, my dearest, brought together
being one flesh, the word of God says
that it is better now to be with the spirit,
as you, in pure intelligence, look down from Heaven
on my life, my words, and all my thought,
as it is right that you should
while I am torn apart, ah, painfully,
calling out for you with scalding tears,
one thing is left for me, one good thing, song.

In this way, picturing you in this image,
I have added myself to the image,
wanting to join myself with you in a third way.
so as to quench the terrible fire of longing
and to empty out the agony from my soul.

But, you who have died and live, as you deserve, with God,
when in the same tomb necessity brings
my bones together with yours in a fourth way
showing me what lies outside the five senses
join with me in a fifth and greater way
to share in the delights of Heaven and the sight of God.
My courage lies with you, who possess and indeed
give me, my fellow-poet, this song.




A scholarly discussion of this poem, written with Pierre A. MacKay, will be appearing later this year.

The Greek poem and the other primary sources for the Theodoros and Cleofe story can be found here.
The narrative is continued in

Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V


Pavane for a Dead Princess, VI

Glory Days
Theodoros II Palaiologos
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti

12 August 2008

The Great Deaths




The First Death happened in 1347.
The Second Death in 1362.
The Third Death in 1373.
The Fourth Death in 1381.
The Fifth Death in 1390.
The Sixth Death in 1396.
The Seventh Death in 1409.
The Eighth Death in 1417.
The Ninth Death in 1423 when the Albanians came to Tavia.
The Tenth Death in 1440.

 So it is written in the fragmentary chronicles of the Morea, so fragmentary they rarely tell us anything but the year. The First broke out in September, the Fifth in April. The Seventh took 10,000 people in Constantinople in 1409 and was still requiring deaths in Nauplion at Christmas 1410.

In 1416 in Greece, they heard of plague around the Black Sea. If you lived in a port city, you simply waited for it to arrive. In 1417 it reached Constantinople and then the Morea in the summer and stayed for a year. It, or a new Death, broke out in Constantinople in 1419 and lasted into1421. The Ninth erupted in the Morea in 1422 or 1423 from an earthquake, lasting all through 1423. That particular year was remembered because the Turks broke down the wall at the Isthmus of Corinth in May, ravaged into the heart of the Morea and--the chronicles say--the Albanians came to Tavia. The Albanians, mostly recent immigrant herding clans who preferred war, were the only opposition to the Turks. Eight hundred Albanian heads were left at Tavia in June.

[Tavia is now Davia , but the eight hundred is its own kind of Great Death, a summer Turk-born contamination. Eight hundred were beheaded at Negroponte on 12 July 1471. Eight hundred were beheaded at Otranto on 14 August 1480. Eight hundred were beheaded at Modon on 9 August 1500. Eight hundred shows up in chronicles and eye-witness reports like a liturgical response.]

The Byzantine year began in September, so deaths reported in one year usually spill over into another year in our calculations. The chronicles stop numbering after the tenth episode of Death, but it is nearly always there in the records. The Venetian Senato warned the ship carrying Manuel II home from the West was warned not to stop there because of the plague that struck in the winter of 1401 and went into the spring. Negroponte had plague in the summer of 1426, Patras in 1430 when people were were weak from the famine of the previous year. A "terrible" plague hit Constantinople in 1435, and the beginnings of the Tenth took the wives of John VIII Palaiologos and his brother Demetrios. It came again in 1447 and1448, moving down to Negroponte where it devoured two-thirds of the city's population over two years, into the Morea, and then to Italy where it fed for four more years. Crete and the Morea were attacked in the summer of 1456 with plague that lasted into the next year. The 1460 plague in Negroponte moved on to Modon for 1461.

The Deaths mostly followed the shipping and trade routes, but Pius II's crusade against the infidels, brought plague from Ancona into the Morea in the summer of 1464. They were already dying on the ships, and ultimately three-fourths of Sigismondo Malatesta's army died, but enough survived to carry it from the west coast to Nauplion, and all across the south. It hung on for years, at least through 1468, supplemented by starvation because of the loss of so many farm workers, either because they had gone for soldiers, or had taken sick, or because those living around the cities disappeared into the mountains for fear of plague. When you count up the years of known plague in the Morea, they take in more than a third of the century.

The chronicles tell us that Moreote outbreak in 1423 was caused by an earthquake, and Halley's comet caused the plague of 1456. In fact, the etiology for 1423 may not be completely off: an earthquake could well dislodge rats and the burrowing rodents that carry the plague fleas, and they certainly associated rodents with plague. The ancients called Apollo "the far shooter," the bringer of plague, and also the mouse god, so possibly he was responsible for the comet, too.

29 July 2008

Mouse Castle

Evliya Çelebi learned this story in the Morea in 1668:

Mouse Castle [Pondikókastro] was built by the Venetians on a peninsula at the sea's edge, and would be a prosperous castle, except that in the year 906 [1500], it was conquered by Sultan Beyazid the Saintly, and he is supposed to have left it in ruins after the conquest so that no gathering of infidels might raise an insurrection there. But according to a sound tradition the reason for the ruin is this:

Inside this great city there was a magic charm in the shape of a golden mouse, fashioned by one of the ancient sages and placed on a high column. While the charm existed, there were no mice in the city, but at the time of the conquest, Muslim booty-hunters pulled down the column, tore off the golden mouse that was on it, and took it away. As soon as they did so, the entire city was taken over by mice, and not only could the people there not save their clothes and provisions, but the warrior's horses were all nibbled down into colts by the mice, which ate up their manes and tails, and all the weak old men, long in the tooth, had their hair, beards and mustaches eaten off and were turned into young lads by the mice.

Terrified by the mice, therefore, the entire populace abandoned the city and ran away, so that the whole place fell into ruin. There are still mice as big as cats in the orchards of the city but there is no trace of any of Adam's sons.

Thus it is written . . .

From Evliya's Travels in the Morea © Pierre A. MacKay..



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