Showing posts with label Patras. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patras. Show all posts

20 September 2014

Oranges, salt pork, and grain


This picture and the one below are from Michael of Rhodes.

In trying to find out how Greeks lived their lives in the fifteenth century, I have come across a few – a very few – references to Greeks in commerce who owned their own ships. Almost all these references come in records from Ragusa (Dubrovnik), where permission is being granted for ships to enter the harbor. There are more references for Greeks from Corfù and Crete, but my focus is the Morea. I am reading a French summary of medieval Latin entries, and I am getting very few indications of types of ship. The ship above may be generously-sized. It is likely that quite a few are like these:


I have one reference from Nauplion in 1450, to an Andreas Fantalouris whose family owned a ship. Andreas was a large landholder, and may have been involved in a court case with Anonymous of Nauplion who has been a guest of this blog. Otherwise, all the sources I have now are from Ragusa.

Other Naupliots transacted business in Ragusa. In 1408, Costantinos reported that 20 dozen bread knives were stolen from him while he was drinking in a tavern. In 1428 a Yannis Canakis brought a ship of merchandise. In 1435 a Yannis spent 3 1/2 ducats to buy 300 pounds of ship's biscuit for his ship. These don't give us much information about Nauplion shipping.

There is more for Koroni. In 1428 George arrived in a griparia with salt meat, oranges, and cheese. Kyriakos Maropoulos brought salt meat, oranges, and cotton. In 1437 Kosta brought a ship of cheese, barley, fats, and other merchandise to Ragusa. In 1439 Theodoros brought salt meat. In 1442 Nikola Mortato brought oranges and merchandise. In 1443 Maropoulos and Nikolaos brought ships with cheese, lard, and linen. I've not found ships from Methoni.

In 1441 Nikolaos of Patras brought wheat and salted meat. There are a number of entries which identify merchants as "Greek" without the name of a port. If I can assume as does the editor that all the Greeks are from the Morea, that gives me a few more merchants. Yannis arrived with merchandise on his ship in 1446. In 1428 Greeks brought saindoux, a high-quality rendering from pork fat. in July 1436 Dino imported 600 steres of millet for which he was to be paid 300 hyperpera. That was 600 cubic metres of grain, perhaps not requiring a large ship, but one larger than the two boats in the picture above. In 1421 so much grain was offered for sale by a Greek that it was necessary for the grain commissioners to set the prices.

So this is about all I have on Moreote merchants and ships, but it begins to suggest a picture of Greek trade. I would be delighted if readers could contribute more.



The Ragusan sources are from B. Krekić, Dubrovnik et le Levant au moyen âge. Paris. 1961.






30 October 2013

Antelm the Nasty

Antelm's view and castle of Patras 700 years later.


Antelm the Nasty was very nearly the worst person in the whole world. He comes to attention as the first Frankish archbishop of Patras. "Nasty" is the name Chris Schabel gave him in an outstanding paper (see below), and there is no reason to disagree with that assessment. When William of Chaplitte took the surrender of Patras in 1205, he appointed canons for Patras, and the canons elected Antelm Archbishop. He had to be ordained a priest first.

He spent his time in extraordinary legal and political entanglements, with two popes, and two Villehardouins, and just about everyone else, traveling back and forth to Rome a number of times. The man's persistence in arguing was amazing.

Now, the Pope has just suspended a German bishop for spending too much money on personal luxuries, a lot of money. After complaints from the Bishop of Coron, the Archbishop of Corinth, the Archbishop of Larissa, a cardinal, and a great many others -- "battered our ears," here are the 30 reasons why Pope Honorius suspended Antelm:
  1. He laid violent hands on the treasurer of the Church of Patras, and then said mass without having been absolved.
  2. He violently pushed a priest who was celebrating mass, spilled and stole the chalice, trampled the host, and had accomplices strip the priest of his vestments.
  3. He whipped a priest who could not pay him money he was trying to extort, put the priest backwards on an ass, hands tied behind his back, and had him whipped through Andravida.
  4. He had a canon of Olen whipped bloody and took his horse, and then said mass without absolution.
  5. When the Dean of Cephalonia (?) excommunicated him, he said mass.
  6. He said mass while he was suspended, and never paid satisfaction to the treasurer of Patras, within the time he was sworn to.
  7. He squandered the goods of the Church of Patras and used them to buy possessions in Burgundy, and extorted 100,000 hyperpera from the subjects of the Church.
  8. He kept men of the Church in prison so long that when they were taken out half-alive they died afterwards, and he had his own servant gouge out the eye of one of them.
  9. He promoted an excommunicate to holy orders, and conferred a priory on him.
  10. He performed the vice of infamous incontinence.
  11. He maintained incontinent clerics.
  12. He surrendered Latins and their lands to the Greeks.
  13. By his negligence the Church of Patras suffered partial ruin
  14. He falsified the privileges of the emperors of Constantinople and some papal affirmations and letters.
  15. He removed nearly all the ornaments of the Church of Patras.
  16. Having put aside the Cistercian habit, he conferred himself to the monastery of Casa Dei, and finally worked in a secular habit.
  17. He entertained pirates and gave them support so that they might capture and kill travellers.
  18. He gave indulgences to those who killed Templars, and in his very own presence many of them were killed.
  19. Despite the interdict by Gervais, Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, he celebrated mass.
  20. He so completely destroyed the abbeys of Galea and Gerochoma that no one remained in them.
  21. He incurred excommunication by detaining William de Lu[?]y in prison without cause and having violent hands be laid upon him.
  22. He had the eyes gouged out of one whom he had sworn by oath to protect.
  23. He had had some Greek abbots put in prison, and had the beard forcibly shaved off one of them.
  24. He had Herman, his servant, gouge out the eye of one of them and mutilate the foot of another, from which cause he met with death.
  25. He had the eye of one pulled out because he could not pay him the 10 hyperpera that he owed him.
  26. He had a certain Greek cleric be hanged.
  27. He had the eye removed from a certain layperson, and then had him tied up with rope, and set on fire, which person expired from this affliction.
  28. He had a certain Greek priest thrown into the sea, who, although he was pulled out, was only half-alive, and before he made it home, he exhaled his spirit.
  29. He had someone thrown from a tower, who for this reason perish.
  30. And he even dared to maintain heretics.
"Therefore, although the archbishop, even if not of all the aforesaid, was found guilty of enough of them that one could have prodeeded against him very severely, we however, the rigor of severity being tempered by the mildness of mercy, have decided to provide thus in this case: Indeed, we have suspended that archbishop from his pontifical duties for a year, ordering that for that year he shall live according to a rule in some monastery . . . the same archbishop shall behave such that we are not compelled to change mercy into judgment."






This material is taken from Chris Schabel's "Antelm the Nasty," Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000-1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication. Eds, A. Beihammer, M. Parani, & C. Schabel (2008).





09 April 2009

Anything but your dull maps and measures

William Gell was not perfect. In his Itinerary of the Morea (1817) He heard Merbaka as Mebacca, Chonika as Phonika, and identified as a well at Tiryns what is a large grinding mill. He mentioned the bridge of Karitena (left) half a dozen times, but because his interests were not in medieval Frankish, Byzantine, or Turkish building, he said nothing more than "bridge of Karitena.")*

Richard Burgess, following Gell's route from Leondari to Mistra in 1834 (which would have taken 8 hours and 48 minutes if he followed intructions precisely), wrote, "the details given of this route by Sir William Gell are most accurate," and that is all one could want.

Because of the lady who asked for "anything but your dull maps and measures," and "the events which are at this moment occurring in the Turkish empire," Gell took the opportunity of working up his travel notes into which indicates that he was noticing a great deal besides maps and measures , and what was mentioned by Pausanias and Strabo, and inJourney in the Morea (1823) he gave the bridge a whole sentence:
The bridge, though a wretched specimen of the art of masonry, is not wanting in picturesque beauty, having a sort of chapel against one of its piers, which would seem to give it a Venetian origin.
The chapel is not Venetian but Greek, and very damp, and Gell did not actually climb down in the gorge to visit the chapel where there was at the time of his visit a carving with the name of Manuel Rallis Melikes who built it in 1440. Melikes was descended from a Turk who came into the Morea in the 13th century to fight for the Greeks. Gell did not know this but he would have been pleased: he liked Turks.

Gell altogether preferred the company of Turks to Greeks, and generally traveled with a Turkish interpreter or janissary, and Turkish servants.
No people on earth ever equalled these peasants of Greece, in this unwelcoming species of sullen and ill-natured, as well as ineffectual spite . . . it can never have happened that an European has rested at any house in the country, without leaving the inhabitants the richer for his visit. It is only fear, or interest, which have any effect in opening the doors of an Albanian Greek to a stranger . . .
When an upper-class Greek suggested to him that he might have a different experience were he to go about unaccompanied by a "Musselman," he found
I met with no change in the manner of reception, but a striking difference in the results; and was once compelled to remain in the street an hour, in the snow, at a town where the inhabitants were numerous, and independent enough to venture on such incivility.
Mentioning this situation to the cogia bashi of Kalavyita, DelliGeorge, he was assured that
all Greek archon as he was, and cogia bashi in addition, he never went to any of the villages without being compelled to lay his stick on the backs of some of its inhabitants, in order to obtain the most common necessaries for his money.
The complex and difficult history of the Morea begins to suggest itself in passages such as these. It is not easy to read his criticisms of Moreote Greek ethics and religion -- although he is as often accurate as not, even less easy to read of his bullying of Doctor Zane or the gatekeeper of Tripolis, or of his sneering at the man who, on looking through a telescope, thought he was seeing a ghost. He is contemptuous about the generosity of Gligorasko of Tripolis who exchanged money for him, saying that it was only because Gligorasko thought he was a person of importance from Constantinople. Gell is a prime example of the "wogs start at Calais" school of ethnicity.

This attitude is disappointing when the rest of his work is so thorough and so useful. He was, despite himself, a noticing sort of person, and there is evidence in Journey in the Morea that all the times he measured for his routes in Itinerary were not recorded in unbroken sequence. While he was measuring the distances from Mistra to Sparta and surrounding villages, he was also noting every broken piece of marble he could spot, and recording inscriptions, short ones such as STEPHEN CHAIRE (Farewell, Stephen), and longer ones to demonstrate the style of lettering under the Roman emperors, as well as commenting on regional variations in letter usages. (Has anyone looked to see if any of his inscriptions duplicate any of Cyriaco's?)

At Gargagliano he observed that the local swine,
though not absolutely wild, have longer legs, and backs well arched and fringed with long bristles, presenting the appearance of the boars on antique gems.
In Leondari he observed "the mosque was once a Greek church." In Patras he notedthe great cypress tree that Evliya saw in 1668:
at the distance of about a mile from the town, is a most magnificent cypress, which as assumed the form of a cedar: Spon and Wheeler measured it, since which time [1680s] it has much increased in bulk.
In Dimistsana he visited "a library containing some old editions of the classics."You can see these now under glass in a dimly-lighted room, but he must have noticed the 1590 Photius from Augsburg; the 1532 Demosthenes, the1538 Ptolemy, and the1544 Souidias from Basel; the beautiful Greek 1499 Libanius or the 1506 [my handwriting illegible] published by Manutius in Venice.

He was also able to give an account of bandit ethics:
By day there was infinitely less danger for a Frank in his proper dress, as the thieves, who always retire to the Ionian islands when hard pressed by the Pasha, imagine that they would neither be received nor foriven in those pious and moral societies, if they should be known to have molested a foreigner. If it be asked how a traveller can be acquainted with details, which regard the internal government of the robbers of the Morea, I may answer, that I learned them sitting in perfect safety in a drawing-room, with many other particulars, from one of the most daring leaders of banditti, through whose hands, as he expressed it himself in the Greek idiom, I had often passed in the course of my rambles on the mountains in search of antiquties, and positions for geographical observations, my knowledge of which recesses seemed to inspire him with that sort of confidence, which we would have felt for one of his own profession.
Surely the lady who complained about maps and measures was persuaded to think better of them when she read this passage.




* Three weeks ago I fell at the foot of the stairs in the photograph, damaging my right knee and left hand. I wanted to commemorate that event here.

07 October 2008

Honey-Patras

If you are a Turk, the Greek Palia-Patras, Old Patras (not to be confused with New Patras near Thermopylae) sounds like Bali-Batra, which means Honey-Patras. And this is a true and rightful name because, as Evliya Celebi writes, there is no equal on earth or in all the inhabited quarters of the seven climatic zones to the great cypress tree of Patras, created by God:

This is a mighty tree, a cypress a green as emerald, which is under the special care of that ever-watchful Gardener, the Supreme Creator and Artificer, the Glorious Lord. In all the embellished heavens under the ninth sphere there is no sight like it. It is not tall and straight like other cypresses, but forks out in four trunks, from which spring three hundred and sixty branches reaching to the sky.

As these push out to right and left, forty or fifty picket-lines of horses might be tied in the shade, and forty or fifty thousand sheep might be shaded there. Around each upper trunk, a full fifty or sixty horses could stand, while lower down I and seven young slaves hardly managed to encircle the great main trunk with our arms outstretched. We also unwound a turban from a man's head and the full turban cloth just encircled this tall cypress tree.

In conclusion, at the top of this wondrous cypress threre is an old cavity where honey-bees have made a nest, and produce so much honey that the owner of this tree gets a hundred kilos of honey from it every year, which he sends round as presents to the great men in every province.

God knows, on the face of the earth there has never been a sweeter, purer and more aromatic honey created by the Maker of All Things.

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

30 September 2008

Sari Sadik Baba

Evliya Celebi learned this when he was visiting Patras in 1668:

Sari Sadik Baba is visited by the Greek infidels too, for they say that "this is our Saint Nicholas." By giving their offerings to the keepers of the tomb, they make their visits to him. None of the authorities have been able to root this practice out absolutely.

Once, when this saint wished to cross from the city of Vostitza to the Bay of Naupaktos, opposite, the sailors started across without taking him into the boat. Sari Sadik Sultan then gathered a little sand from the seashore into the skirts of his robe and walked onto the sea after the boat, scattering the sand grain by grain. The sailors watched, and as the heart-wounded dervish came on, filling up an area extending for two thousand paces, they became panic-stricken lest the saintly dervish should fill up the entire sea this way, and by closing off the gulf, deprive them of their place of work.

So they called out, "Come and get in the caĩque, Old Father," and taking him at once into the boat, ferried him across to Naupaktos. For this reason, there is a mile-long sandy point on the Vostitza side of the gulf.

This, then, is Sari Sadik Sultan, holiness be upon him, who lies at rest in Patras, and to bring his holiness to its fullest visibility, he has been transported to Heaven.

From Evliya's Travels in the Morea © Pierre A. MacKay.
About Evliya's manuscript.
The Modern Bridge
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

AltStyle によって変換されたページ (->オリジナル) /