Meanwhile Greece had been conquered, except a few forts which still remained to Venice. The Duchy of Athens, which had passed in the previous century to the Florentine merchant family of the Acciajoli, was won; the last Duke, Franco, surrendered the Acropolis to Omar son of Turakhan in 1456. When Mohammad visited the city, two years later, he was amazed at the beauty of its buildings and the handsome quays of the Piraeus, and cried: “Islam owes a debt to the son of Turakhan.” Subsequently Franco was privately strangled, on account of a plot of some Athenians to restore him. But, on the whole, Athens had reason to be pleased with the change from the rule of Catholic princes to that of the unbelievers. The administration of justice and the collection of the tribute were assigned to local officers, and the only new burden was the tribute of children.
The Peloponnesus was misgoverned by the two brothers of the last Roman Emperor, Thomas and Demetrius, worthless and greedy despots, whose rule was worse than the worst Turkish tyranny. Thomas, notorious for his cruelty, resided at Patras, and oppressed the western part of the peninsula; Demetrius, distinguished by his luxury, ruled over the east, and his seat was in the rocky fortress of Mistra, at the foot of Mount Taygetus, three miles west of Sparta. The court officials, who were the ministers of their oppression, were detested throughout the land, which was further distracted by the hatred between the Greek inhabitants and the Albanian shepherds, who had come down and settled here in the previous century after the fall of the Servian empire. The invasion of the Turks in 1452 had desolated the land and given the Albanian herds a wider range; the Greek peasants overcrowded the towns, and the most thriving traders began to emigrate. The Albanians deemed that the right moment had come for making the Morea an Albanian state; perhaps they were encouraged by the fame and success of Scanderbeg. But there was no Scanderbeg among them to unite and keep them together; they could not agree upon a leader of their own race; and they selected Manuel Cantacuzenus (a noble, of the family which had given an emperor to the East-Roman throne) who was now ruling informally over the hillsmen of Maina in Taygetus. He adopted the Albanian name of Ghin, and placed himself at the head of the insurgents. By themselves the despots would have been unable to hold out in their strong places; but they appealed to Mohammad, to whom after the fall of Constantinople they had become tributary; and, when the governor of Thessaly marched into the peninsula, the rebels sued for peace (1454). The Albanians received favourable terms; for it was Ottoman policy to preserve them as a make-weight to the Greeks. But the Morea was far from being tranquillised. Four years later Mohammad in person led an army thither to restore order, and captured and garrisoned the Aero-Corinth. The enmity of the two brothers Palaeologus led to new miseries. They took up arms against one another, Thomas posing as the champion of Christendom against the Turks; and Mohammad decided that an end must be made of Greek rule in the Peloponnese. In 1460 he descended for the second time, and he did not hold his hand when policy urged cruelty. Thus when the indwellers of Leondari (a place on the northern extremity of Taygetus, overlooking Megalopolis) abandoned their town and took refuge in the hills in the citadel of Gardiki—an ill-omened place where thirty-seven years before Turakhan had built pyramids of Albanian heads (1423)—Mohammad followed the luckless people to this sequestered fort, and on their surrender they were all gathered together and slain, six thousand of them. At Calavryta a renegade Albanian chief who had been in Turkish service was sawn in two. Here and elsewhere thousands were reduced to slavery. Demetrius had submitted without a blow at Mistra; Thomas fled to Corfu and ended his life at Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. It was thus that the Morea became perhaps the most miserable province in the Turkish realm; nor can there be any doubt but that Mohammad deliberately intended this to be its fate. He unpeopled and desolated it, so that it might present no allurements to a foreign invader and have no spirit to be restless. Six maritime places still belonged to Venice:—Argos, Nauplia and Thermisi in the east, and Coron, Modon and Navarino in the west, to which we must add Aegina. The little town of Monemvasia, which Frankish speech corrupted to Malvoisy, on the rocky east coast of Laconia, held out for four years, in the name of Thomas Palaeologus, and then placed itself under the protection of Venice (1464).
The withdrawal of Genoa from the field, and the conquest of the Morea and Bosnia, followed by the death of Scanderbeg, devolved the whole defence of the coasts of the Illyrian peninsula and the Aegean upon the republic of St Mark. New Phocaea and the northern islands (Lemnos, Imbros, Samothrace, Thasos) had been successively conquered (1456-7); and in 1462 Lesbos, which had become a very nest of pirates from Spain and Sicily, was annexed to the Turkish dominion. Its last Genoese Lord, Nicolò Gattilusio, was strangled; one-third of the inhabitants were enslaved, one-third deported to augment the population of Constantinople, and the rest, the poorest and the worst, were left to till the land and gather in the vintage. As bases for maritime war in the Aegean, Venice still possessed Negroponte, Candia, together with Nauplia (“Romanian Naples”), and had command of the islands composing the Duchy of Naxos.
The inevitable war broke out in 1463, and its first scene was the Morea. Singlehanded, Venice was scarcely equal to the work, and the delay of ten years made the task more arduous.
Never was there a moment at which a common effort of the Christian powers of Europe was more imperatively needed; never a moment at which such an effort was less feasible. The monarchs were not blind to the menace of the new and deadly ecumenical force which was hurled within range of their kingdoms; they discerned and owned the peril; but internal policy and the consolidation of their power at home so wholly absorbed their interest, that nothing less than a Turkish advance to the Upper Danube or the Rhine would have availed to stir them into action. The Emperor Frederick III had not remained unmoved by the fall of Constantinople, but his strained relations with Hungary as well as the affairs of the Empire hindered him from stretching a hand to save Servia. Yet at his side was a man who fully realised the jeopardy and conceived the project, to which he devoted himself heart and soul, of stirring up the princes of Europe to wage a holy war against the infidel. This was Aeneas Sylvius, bishop of Siena. He utters his idea immediately after the fall of the City in a letter to Pope Nicholas V: “Mohammad is among us; the sabre of the Turks waves over our head; the Black Sea is shut to our ships; the foe possess Wallachia, whence they will pass into Hungary—and Germany. And we meanwhile live in strife and enmity among ourselves. The Kings of France and England are at war; the princes of Germany have leapt to arms against one another; Spain is seldom at peace, Italy never wins repose from conflicts for alien lordship. How much better to turn our arms against the enemies of our faith! It devolves upon you, Holy Father, to unite the kings and princes, and urge them to gather together to take counsel for the safety of the Christian world.”
A vain idea, inappropriate to the conditions of the age, but which was to hover in the air for many years to come and inspire abundance of useless talk and empty negotiations! The urgent words of Aeneas and a letter of the Emperor roused the Pope to an action which neither of them had contemplated; he issued a bull imposing a tithe for a war against the infidel,—thus, as Aeneas himself owned, seeking to cure one evil by another.
The chief interest perhaps of the efforts made by Nicholas and his successors to bring about an European peace, for the sake of driving back the Turk and recovering Constantinople, lies in the measure which they suggest of the distance which the world had travelled since the age of the Crusades. In the eleventh and in the twelfth, even in the thirteenth century, a religious sentiment could stir the princes and the peoples of Europe to go forth, not to avert a danger, but to rescue a holy place of pilgrimage. But in the fifteenth, though the unbeliever had won his way into Europe, had reached the Danube and threatened the Adriatic, the imminent danger to Christendom left Christendom lukewarm. Except religious zeal, there was no force which could compel an European effort. With the growth of “humanism” the old kind of religious enthusiasm had passed away. Pope Nicholas himself illustrated the change of things since the days of Urban II, when, at the very time of his proclaiming a Crusade, he privately sent agents to the East, to rescue from the deluge all Greek manuscripts they could lay hands on.
There