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was imputed to their private revenge, his countrymen, who dwelt at Constantinople in the security of peace, were involved in the same proscription by the prince or people. The loss of their leader intimidated the crowd of adventurers, who hoisted the sails of flight, and were soon scattered round the coasts of the Mediterranean. But a veteran band of fifteen hundred Catalans or French, stood firm in the strong fortress of Gallipoli on the Hellespont, displayed the banners of Arragon, and offered to revenge and justify their chief by an equal combat of ten or a hundred warriors. Instead of accepting this bold defiance, the emperor Michael, the son and colleague of Andronicus, resolved to oppress them with the weight of multitudes; every nerve was strained to form an army of thirteen thousand horse and thirty thousand foot; and the Propontis was covered with the ships of the Greeks and Genoese. In two battles by sea and land, these mighty forces were encountered and overthrown by the despair and discipline of the Catalans; the young emperor fled to the palace; and an insufficient guard of light horse was left for the protection of the open country. Victory renewed the hopes and numbers of the adventurers; every. nation was blended under the name and standard of the great company; and three thousand Turkish proselytes deserted from the imperial service to join this military association. In the possession of Gallipoli, the Catalans intercepted the trade of Constantinople and the Black Sea, while they spread their devastations on either side of the Hellespont over the confines of Europe and Asia. To prevent their approach, the greatest part of the Byzantine territory was laid waste by the Greeks themselves; the peasants and their cattle retired into the city; and myriads of sheep and oxen, for which neither place nor food could be procured, were unprofitably slaughtered on the same day. Four times the emperor Andronicus sued for peace, and four times he was inflexibly repulsed, till the want of provisions, and the discord of the chiefs, compelled the Catalans to evacuate the banks of the Hellespont and the neighbourhood of the capital. After their separation from the Turks, the remains of the great company pursued their march through Macedonia and Thessaly, to seek a new establishment in the heart of Greece.*

* The Catalan war is most copiously related by Pachymer, in the

After some ages of oblivion, Greece was awakened to new misfortunes by the arms of the Latins. In the two hundred and fifty years between the first and the last conquest of Constantinople, that venerable land was disputed by a multitude of petty tyrants; without the comforts of freedom and genius, her ancient cities were again plunged in foreign and intestine war; and if servitude be preferable to anarchy, they might repose with joy under the Turkish yoke. I shall not pursue the obscure and various dynasties, that rose and fell on the continent or in the isles; but our silence on the fate of ATHENS* would argue a strange ingratitude to the first and purest school of liberal science and amusement. In the partition of the empire, the principality of Athens and Thebes was assigned to Otho de la Roche, a noble warrior of Burgundy,+ with the title of great duke,‡ which the Latins understood in their own sense, and the Greeks more foolishly derived from the age of Constantine.§ Otho followed the standard of the marquis of Montferrat; the ample state which he acquired by a miracle of conduct eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth books, till he breaks off in the year 1308. Nicephorus Gregoras (1. 7. 3—6) is more concise and complete. Ducange, who adopts these adventurers as French, has hunted their footsteps with his usual diligence. (Hist. de C. P. 1. 6, c. 22-46.) He quotes an Arragonese history, which I have read with pleasure, and which the Spaniards extol as a model of style and composition. (Expedicion de los Catalanes y Arragoneses contra Turcos y Griegos; Barcelona, 1623, in quarto; Madrid, 1777, in octavo.) Don Francisco de Moncada, Conde de Osona, may imitate Cæsar or Sallust; he may transcribe the Greek or Italian contemporaries; but he never quotes his authorities, and I cannot discern any national records of the exploits of his countrymen. [Raymond Montaner, one of Roger de Flor's Catalans and governor of Gallipoli, has written a Spanish history of his comrades, from whom he was separated when they left the Thracian Chersonesus, to penetrate into Macedonia and Greece. -GUIZOT.] *See the laborious history of Ducange, whose accurate table of the French dynasties recapitulates the thirtyfive passages in which he mentions the dukes of Athens,

He is twice mentioned by Villehardouin with honour (No. 151. 235); and under the first passage, Ducange observes all that can be known of his person and family. From these Latiu princes of the fourteenth century, Boccace, Chaucer, and Shakspeare, have borrowed their Theseus duke of Athens. An ignorant age transfers its own language and manners to the most distant times.

§ The same Constantine gave to Sicily a king, to Russia the magnus dapifer of the empire, to Thebes the primicerius; and these absurd fables are properly lashed by Ducange (ad Nicephor. Greg. 1. 7, c. 5).

or fortune,* was peaceably inherited by his son and two grandsons, till the family, though not the nation, was changed, by the marriage of an heiress into the elder branch of the house of Brienne. The son of that marriage, Walter de Brienne, succeeded to the duchy of Athens; and with the aid of some Catalan mercenaries, whom he invested with fiefs, reduced above thirty castles of the vassal or neighbouring lords. But when he was informed of the approach and ambition of the great company, he collected a force of seven hundred knights, six thousand four hundred horse, and eight thousand foot, and boldly met them on the banks of the river Cephisus in Boeotia. The Catalans amounted to no more than three thousand five hundred horse, and four thousand foot; but the deficiency of numbers was compensated by stratagem and order. They formed round their camp an artificial inundation; the duke and his knights advanced without fear or precaution on the verdant meadow; their horses plunged into the bog; and he was cut in pieces, with the greatest part of the French cavalry. His family and nation were expelled; and his son Walter de Brienne, the titular duke of Athens, the tyrant of Florence, and the constable of France, lost his life in the field of Poitiers. Attica and Boeotia were the rewards of the victorious Catalans; they married the widows and daughters of the slain; and, during fourteen years, the great company was the terror of the Grecian states. Their factions drove them to acknowledge the sovereignty of the house of Arragon; and, during the remainder of the fourteenth century, Athens, as a government or an appanage, was successively bestowed by the kings of Sicily. After the French and Catalans, the third dynasty was that of the Accaioli, a family, plebeian at Florence, potent at Naples, and sovereign in Greece. Athens, which they embellished with new buildings, became the capital of a state, that extended over Thebes, Argos, Corinth, Delphi, and a part of By the Latins, the lord of Thebes was styled, by corruption, the Megas Kurios, or Grand Sire! Quodam miraculo, says Alberic. He was probably received by Michael Choniates, the archbishop who had defended Athens against the tyrant Leo Sigurus. (Nicetas in Baldwino.) Michael was the brother of the historian Nicetas; and his encomium of Athens is still extant in MS. in the Bodleian library. (Fabric. Bibliot. Græc. tom. vi. p. 405.) [See our note at page 7.-ED.]

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Thessaly; and their reign was finally determined by Mahomet the Second, who strangled the last duke, and educated his sons in the discipline and religion of the seraglio.

*

Athens, though no more than the shadow of her former self, still contains about eight or ten thousand inhabitants ; of these, three-fourths are Greeks in religion and language; and the Turks, who compose the remainder, have relaxed, in their intercourse with the citizens, somewhat of the pride and gravity of their national character. The olive-tree, the gift of Minerva, flourishes in Attica; nor has the honey of mount Hymettus lost any part of its exquisite flavour;+ but the languid trade is monopolized by strangers; and the agriculture of a barren land is abandoned to the vagrant

* The modern account of Athens and the Athenians, is extracted from Spon (Voyage en Grèce, tom. ii. p. 79-199) and Wheeler (Travels into Greece, p. 337-414), Stuart (Antiquities of Athens, passim) and Chandler (Travels into Greece, p. 23-172). The first of these travellers visited Greece in the year 1676, the last in 1765; and ninety years had not produced much difference in the tranquil scene. [Since Gibbon wrote, Athens has been illustrated by the pens of learned travellers, the pencils of eminent artists, and by the muse of Byron. In some of his observations, the historian had probably in mind a passage in Harris's Philosophical Inquiries, a work often referred to by him, but not quoted here; and his observations, in their turn, appear to have suggested the beautiful eighty-seventh stanza in Canto II. of Childe Harold :

"Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild;

Sweet are thy groves and verdant are thy fields, Thine olives ripe as when Minerva smiled, And all his honied wealth Hymettus yields; There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, The free-born wanderer of thy mountain air; Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds; Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare; Art, Glory, Freedom fail, but Nature still is fair." The ruins of ancient Athens still constitute the same "6 vast realm of wonder;" and have been strikingly illustrated by Mr. Cockerell's masterly Restoration of Athens, included in Williams's Greece. But since the city became, in 1834, the residence of the new king of Greece, its general aspect is greatly altered; it has been almost entirely rebuilt; modern palaces have been constructed; new edifices. raised for the public business of the state; it has become the resort of people from all countries, and its population exceeds 20,000. Malte Brun and Balbi, p. 619.-ED.] The ancients, or at

least the Athenians, believed that all the bees in the world had been propagated from mount Hymettus. They taught that health might be preserved, and life prolonged, by the external use of oil and the

Wallachians. The Athenians are still distinguished by the subtlety and acuteness of their understandings; but these qualities, unless ennobled by freedom, and enlightened by study, will degenerate into a low and selfish cunning; and it is a proverbial saying of the country, "From the Jews of Thessalonica, the Turks of Negropont, and the Greeks of Athens, good Lord deliver us!" This artful people has eluded the tyranny of the Turkish bashaws by an expedient which alleviates their servitude and aggravates their shame. About the middle of the last century, the Athenians chose for their protector the Kislar Aga, or chief black eunuch of the seraglio. This Æthiopian slave, who possesses the sultan's ear, condescends to accept the tribute of thirty thousand crowns; his lieutenant, the Waywode, whom he annually confirms, may reserve for his own about five or six thousand more; and such is the policy of the citizens, that they seldom fail to remove and punish an oppressive governor. Their private differences are decided by the archbishop, one of the richest prelates of the Greek church, since he possesses a revenue of one thousand pounds sterling; and by a tribunal of the eight geronti or elders, chosen in the eight quarters of the city; the noble families cannot trace their pedigree above three hundred years; but their principal members are distinguished by a grave demeanour, a fur cap, and the lofty appellation of archon. By some, who delight in the contrast, the modern language of Athens is represented as the most corrupt and barbarous of the seventy dialects of the vulgar Greek ;* this picture is too

internal use of honey. (Geoponica, 1. 15, c. 7, p. 1019-1094, edit. Niclas.) * Ducange, Glossar. Græc. Præfat. p. 8, who quotes for his author Theodosius Zygomalus, a modern grammarian. Yet Spon (tom. ii. p. 194) and Wheeler (p. 355), no incompetent judges, entertain a more favourable opinion of the Attic dialect. [See Lord Byron's note on the character and language of the modern Greeks. (Childe Harold, canto ii. stanza 73.) His enthusiasm in their cause did not make him blind to their faults. Yet it must be confessed, that the improvement which he anticipated as the result of recovered independence, has not yet been realized. The dialect of the Attic race was in his time "barbarous to a proverb." The best Greek was spoken in the Fanal of Constantinople, and at Yanina in Epirus. In the course of his observations, he dissents from those of Gibbon (vol. vi. p. 231) on Anna Comnena's style and the compositions of the church and palace in her days. If the poet had connected the passage which he quotes, with some that follow in the next page, he would