If this were a folktale, the youngest brother would end up with the princess, the throne, and live happily ever after. But even though the Palaiologue jewels and robes have appeared in one folktale or another for 600 years, the Palaiologos family did not live in a folk tale. Nor did any of them live happily ever after: the family simply unraveled.
The youngest Palaiologos brother, Thomas, is the most enigmatic of the brothers. The Italians who knew him in his last years noted his fine appearance, his dignity, his melancholy. Melancholia. Depression.
Depression is understandable, even normal: he had left the Morea in July 1460 with his family, pursued by Mehmed. He had not surrendered his Despotate or dowry lands, and he spent his last five years waiting on the kindness of strangers. Pius II was going to lead a crusade to retake the Morea and, ultimately, Constantinople, and make him the eastern emperor, but Pius died in August 1464, just before the crusade sailed, the crusade went wrong in the Morea almost immediately, and Thomas died in May 1465.
He moved into history at the age of 8, when he was shipped off to the Morea to join his brother Theodoros. It was normal practice for the Palaiologos family to hive off its sons very young. His introduction to Italy probably came a few years later through his brother's wife Cleope and her Italian companions, not to mention a steady stream of Italians -- merchants, colonists, diplomats, curiosity-seekers -- I almost said, people like Cyriaco of Ancona, but there was no one like Cyriaco.
In his teens, Thomas joined his brothers, Theodoros and Constantine, in a series of small military campaigns to take over the non-Byzantine lands of the Morea. The campaign against the Principality of Achaia was settled when he was 21, with marriage to Catharine Zaccaria, daughter of the last Prince of Achaia, and more than a third of the Morea as dowry -- western Morea across to Karitena and down to Kalamata, Vostitsa nearly to Corinth, and the eastern Argolid. John sent an emissary from Constantinople to tell him that he had been awarded the title of Despot over Achaia. There seems to have been a pattern in the family of formal titles coming with marriage, and like Theodoros, John and Constantine, he married a Latin woman in conformance with his father's strategy that marriage in the Latin church would bring Western aid.
We know of little he did in his role as Despot beyond signing the occasional grant of land. He lived primarily in Patras and Leondari. One account mentions his giving an order to have someone blinded. This may not tell us anything about him: it was normal Byzantine judicial practice and we know of a similar order from his brother John. A foreign writer commented that you saw a lot of mutilated people in Greece.
Despite his apparent affinity for things Italian, he did not go to Italy until his late 20s when his brother Constantine sent him with a message to John at Floremce, and Florence must have been overwhelming -- Brunelleschi's dome was half-way along, Fra Angelico was frescoing the convent of S. Marco where many of the Greek delegation were staying, the Gates of Paradise were dazzling in the summer sun. But this is a problem. We know of nothing Thomas did or sponsored in the Morea that would indicate he had seen or enjoyed Italy, or that he had learned anything there, and when he had to live in Italy, he was an outsider and a subject for art. He is reported to have had beautiful manners, but this was reported of most of his family.
He becomes more problematic after Constantine moved to Constantinople on the death of their brother John, and Demetrios was sent out to hold the position of Despot of Mistra. That is when the vocabulary comes in and one chronicler describes them as "those brothers who swallowed their oaths like cabbages," and another, "those brothers who ate each other's hearts." (These were quoted in the entry on Demetrios, but they are eminently quotable descriptions by people who knew them better than we do.) Demetrios was with reason jealous: Thomas had been in the Morea for nearly 32 years, he had acquaintances and alliances, and he would have liked the whole thing. Even though Demetrios was older he was the new boy.
After the Fall of the City the brothers were left flailing at each other, surrounded by revolts, needing Ottoman aid to maintain their titles, needing Venetian aid to balance off the Ottomans. Several of Thomas' followers offered their allegiance to Mehmed. Then after five years, Mehmed demanded the surrender of Constantine's cities -- Corinth, Patras, Kalavryta -- which Thomas held. They were formally surrendered on his behalf, but the next year he went to war with 300 soldiers sent from the west, and took Kalavryta and some few territories back. But he found that his followers were now ruling, not on his behalf, but were treating these lands as their personal conquests, and the 300 were were rampaging and out of control. He and Demetrios continued to tear at each other, encouraged by various archons who changed sides with the weather. What could any of them have thought would happen?
Inevitably, in 1460 Mehmed came into the Morea, took the surrender of Mistra and added Demetrios Palaiologos and his family to the numbers who traveled with his camp. He set out next for Leondari and Thomas, but Thomas worked his way south with his family. He never surrendered. He took ship at Porto Junco/Pylos for Corfu where he left his family and went to Italy to obtain Papal assistance. He was dependent on others for his support, and while he shows up often enough in art, and even on the central doors of St. Peter's in Rome, he is essentially unknowable.
His last years were a litter of losses, failures, waiting, dependency -- all done with beautiful manners. Melancholia. His wife died on Corfu. He never saw his children again though he left detailed instructions for their education -- daughter as well as sons-- with his friend Cardinal Bessarion who became their guardian. He had no more knack for fatherhood than his own father who also suffered from melancholy.
He died on 12 May 1465, aged about 56.
Gina Margarita told us about the Metamorphosis, except that she said it was a church with a moat. Gina was an Englishwoman living on a tiny pension in a tiny caravan near Asine beach. It took us a long time to realize how very poor she must have been, but she frequently came up our stairs at lunchtime crying, "AL-lo it's GI-na!" She had red hair and green toenails ("I was born in Sherwood Forest, like Robin Hood, you know!), and she believed she was the reincarnation of Isadora Duncan. German hikers had taken her to see the Metamorphsis -- it was in their hiking guide. In fact, she was frequently taken off on expeditions by vacationing foreigners or invited to dance for parties.
She told about being invited to dance for a large estate outside Argos, where people came down from Athens and engaged in behaviors they said were the restoration of the worship of the ancient Greek gods. Everyone back then had just read The Magus and wanted to try it out themselves, and at some point a great many people with inadequate clothing were arrested for what the police who had no theological training said was an orgy. Gina said the parties did get a bit naughty, and she found it tiresome having to wait until someone was sober enough to drive her back to her caravan. A daughter said I should not put much about Gina in here, and she was right: Gina tends to lead the topic astray.
Thirty years ago I walked to the Metamorphosis by going up the hill above Tolo, through the garbage dump, and down into the valley on the other side. (The Tolo and Nauplion --above Karathona --garbage dumps have the most spectacular sites and views in the Argolid). Then it was a long walk either out to the Asine-Lefkakia road, or on across two more lines of hills to Nauplion. Now there is a long and winding, but simple road right to the church. The valley has been planted with orange trees and farmers need access.
The Metamorphosis -- in English that would be "Transfiguration" and locally it is called. Ag. Sotira -- is a medieval chapel that at some point became a monastery. It has a 15th-century tower on the north side, originally at least 4 floors, but in thirty years it has lost the indications of the fourth, and the guidebook says it had three. You can compare the before- and after- pictures, though different angles, and there wasn't a tree 30 years ago. Other parts of the walls have gone missing, but there is a vaulted room down to the left. The enclosure wall, somewhat restored, remains along the south side of the propery.
The most interesting aspect of the church, apart from the roof that looks as if it is melting, is the spring house. The church was built against a spring. On the south side by the apse, slippery steps go down to a chill dark enclosure where a metal cup hangs. It was hanging there 30 years ago, and probably for 30 before that. The water is fine, not as good as that from the Agia Moni, but better than that from Profitias Elias. The water flows under the apse of the church and emerges on the south side where it feeds a large open tank -- this must be Gina's moat -- and an irrigation channel. Under the apse, in a niche beside the flowing spring, is a hiding place, used during the Revolution, and WW2 and the Civil War. In recent years, large protective walls have been built around the spring, not damaging, but they do alter the somewhat absent-minded effect of the old roof.
Like all the other chapels of the Argolid, this has a great cool porch with benches and a table (and a place for trash). Interestingly, there is also a great marble structure which appears to be an altar for outdoor use as the porch can hold at least four times the number of people that could squeeze into the airless interior. The picture at the beginning is the little window that looks out on the porch, and you can see that this window has been rebuilt at least three times.
The interior of the chapel is densely frescoed in mostly 16th-century frescos, not terribly exciting individually and difficult to make out from the damage of age, and my inability to find out how to turn on the electricity, but some about women are prominent on the left -- Salome, the wedding at Cana. The apse has a fine Virgin andChild with a damaged Annunciation just above. At various places you can glimpse frescos under frescos, and there is a fresco on the soffit of the large arch over the front door which was filled in at some point with the fresco left in place. Many of the frescos have been covered with a clear varnish -- this cannot be a good idea and the reflectivity makes them nearly impossible to photograph -- and there is a nice inscription dated 1570 on one wall from the donor of the frescos. The lightbulb wasn't there thirty years ago.
There are two arcosolia, one with a Deisis -- this was another burial chapel for a fief at one time, though we can't now know if the fief was private or belonged to the church. A couple of late 15th-century documents from Nauplion refer to the hermitage of the Franciscans of Sta. Maria di Valverde, a Venetian order with a name descriptive of the location. But we don't know if it belonged to them.
If you follow the route of the little creek from the spring, you will go on down the hill to a small valley opening onto a private beach. It is difficult not to think that at one time, or at different times, it served as a hiding place for one of the small pirate boats that in medieval times infested the coast of the Argolid like mosquitos. That broken tower would have been a good place from which to watch the bay and perhaps to signal.
[More on a fresco here.]
Cleofe -- that is how she signed her name in three of the four letters we have from her -- may not have dressed like this Greek bride. Her Italian dress was one of the problems that came up. But perhaps she allowed herself to be adorned for the wedding celebrations at Mistra in February 1421. Was that before or after she learned that her bridegroom had made a vow to live in chastity for six years (and not eat meat which, presumably, would inflame his sexual desire)?
Was the vow made before he met her, or after? Everyone agreed she was beautiful and very bright. She is reported to have been tall. Theodoros was probably shorter than average, like his father and brother John. He was awkward and immature, raised by clerics and professional intellectuals who taught him mathematics and theology. He knew nothing about women, except that they were occasions for sin. One can imagine him pudgy, possibly a little nearsighted, and absolutely terrified by the gaiety and charm of this young woman they had shipped in for him for the benefit of his father's political arrangements. Perhaps the wedding night was a disaster and he found a vow a great relief.
We don't know. We do know that Cleofe was miserable because her letters say so, and the women in her family wrote each other that she was. Four of her letters survive, as well as one from her sister Paola, and two from their sister-in-law Battista. These were highly literate women: there must have been many more and our view of her life and marriage might be profoundly changed if we had them. Finally -- despite the letter Theodoros had written the Pope guaranteeing she could maintain her religion and her Italian customs -- she, after much pressure from him, took to wearing Greek dress and was received into the Orthodox church. She took up fasting according to Orthodox practice.
This is where it gets complicated. Jacomo de Sancto Angelo from Padua talked to Cleofe when he was in Mistra, and reported to her brother in Patras that she had said, "I have not become a nun, just because I was anointed with a little oil. My heart is as free as it ever was." And Christofano, another friend of her brother, commented that she could dispute religion so well she could corrupt a lamb, and that she was the most perfidious Greek in the world.
Most writers misunderstand this last phrase and take it that she had "betrayed her faith," but Greek perfidy has been a catchphrase ever since the Trojan horse, and everyone who has studied Latin, and many who haven't, knows "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes." Cleofe made such a performance of being a devout Orthodox woman that her husband and his courtiers were deeply impressed. He had grown up without women and couldn't have been expected to know better, but it also suggests that the Greek aristocratic male mindset saw categories of women rather than individual people. Or perhaps no one who caught on to the truth wanted to make more difficulty for her.
Whatever the tensions between Cleofe and Theodoros, she was allowed much personal freedom. She had books and music. She wrote. She talked at great length with various men who visited Mistra, and gave them intimate information to take back to her family. Her letters told Paola and Battista that Antonio da Fossombrone, Conte Ricardo, the Mega Kartophylax, were bringing messages.
She was moody. In three of the four letters -- no longer than would fit on a postcard -- she says she does not have time to write more. The four letters date from October 1426, January 1428, March 1428, July 1428.
The marriage was complex, more complex than I have seen recognized in print, and the period of abstinence was not one of calm. Her sister-in-law Battista wrote the Pope about "internecine warfare" and wanted him to interfere. This is a clue that Cleofe was not simply a victim. She remembered that she was a Malatesta. The Malatesta did not go as lambs to the slaughter. She threatened to leave him, delivering literary tirades, or being ominously silent. Everyone knew that his brother John's wife had left him because he ignored her: John, in fact, wanted her to leave.
Perhaps Cleope threw Theodoros' math manuscripts out the window. One hopes so. But Theodoros must not have actually wanted her to leave. A year after the six years of abstinence were completed, in the January 1428 letter, Cleofe refers with anxiety to her pregnancy. She was very close to delivery. She may have been normally concerned, or she may may have been aware of potential difficulties. The second pregnancy killed her.
The March letter is a long and wrenching train-of-consciousness. She was desperately lonely for her sister. She begged for letters, about the children, about anything that has happened. She asked as a favor, but if she doesn't get letters from home, she will die. She hoped God would confine her unhappiness to this world. Her life was bitter, she was worthless. She could not stop crying. There was not enough paper to record her unhappiness. The only consolation she had is from her baby daughter -- this a bare mention at the end of the letter-- but no consolation comes through to the reader. If there ever were a portrait of post-partum depression, this letter is it. The letter has not previously been read with this interpretation.
The letter has one more point of interest, and that is the signature. Her usual signature was "La vostra sorella Cleofe Paleologhina," but this one she signed as "La vostra sorella Cleofe Paleologhina. Deo gratia, vasilisa della Morea." Theodoros gave her a title when Helena was born, βασιλίσσα, and she was proud of it, and she spelled it the way it is pronounced with a V for the B.
Theodoros must have been frightened. They were parents and he knew that should have been a source of joy for both of them, but he was afraid and she wouldn't stop crying. He couldn't handle the situation. The intensity of his own emotions was too much, and he talked about retiring into a monastery. He had been talking about it ever since she became pregnant. The monastery would have been pretty much the same kind of life he had at Mistra before Cleofe arrived, only without the burdens of ruling and having interpersonal relations.
This is at least the third example we know of his choosing retreat when confronted with crisis. When they were making him into a boy ruler and intellectual, no one considered that his heart needed education, too. Several years earlier, in the summer of 1423, when an Ottoman army invaded the Morea and came all the way to the walls of Mistra, he had thought he would go into a monastery. This most recent time, his family took it so seriously, that his brother Constantine had arrived in December to take over.
He decided not to retire. He hung on, and during the next year and a half, his brothers conquered their rivals for power in the Morea and doubled the size of the Palaiologos holdings in the Morea. The family had acquired glory and apparently considerable wealth. Theodoros became wonderfully exhilarated and thought ruling had definite appeal. Cleope's father came to visit. One can imagine that when he went back to Italy he sent Theodoros an architect, because this was the period when the great Italian wing of the palace was built at Mistra.
Somewhere in here, things changed between Cleofe and Theodoros. Perhaps planning for the new palace allowed them to discover how well they could work together. They studied poetry together, wrote it. Her father was a well-known poet, Petrarch had been a family friend. Theodore developed an interest in Italian poetry.
She became pregnant again in 1432, probably in August or September. It is not clear just what happened -- probably the foetus died before it could be born, perhaps Dr. Pepagomenos interfered more than his skills warranted and gave her puerperal fever. Cleofe suffered for days. Theodoros sat with her, holding her hand until she died on 18 April 1433.
Theodoros' heart was broken. He wrote a poem to go in her tomb and from it we get hints that whatever the fears and furies that had been between them, they had become lovers and companions.
The primary sources and a bibliography for the Theodoros and Cleope story can be found here. The poem and its sources can be found here.
This dim and damaged painting is from the eave of a house in Nauplion -- take the street to the left of the bus station, first corner to the right -- to my knowledge, the only remaining 19th-century house with eave-paintings left in the city.
Other houses, much restored, have these curved eaves but they show stenciled ornamentation: pre- and post-independence ornamentation made extensive use of stencils. This house, built shortly after 1830, has hand-painted swags of flowers, a parrot, and this exceptional view of the walls of Nauplion with columned buildings that were never there. At that date, Nauplion's walls were mostly wrecked, and the remaining towers were of a different design. In fact, most pre-modern views of Nauplion show buildings that no one who lived there would ever recognize: Venetian images have Venetian houses from the terraferma, and later artists show Ottoman fantasies, but the eave painting seems to have been influenced by an image from a popular book.
This book published by G. N Wright in 1840 and called The Shores and Islands of the Mediterranean included a steel-engraving of a view of Nauplion from the water -- a detail here. When the image is enlarged, you can see a number of white-columned buildings, pediments, acroteria -- the various signals of classical Greek architecture. A Nauplion painter, then, saw the picture -- or the owner of the house had a copy of the picture -- and it was used for the wreathed cartouche over the front door of the house.
A second image, or one of the many derived from it, possibly contributed a tower to the cartouche -- the Camoccio map excerpted here several times previously. The artist of Shores and Islands never saw towers like this at Nauplion: this is a 15th-century design for defense against small shipboard cannon. Those towers were built about 1700 for a different kind of defense, when the harbor was too shallow for the high-decked ships of the period to come in close enough to be of danger.
Those small black keyholes in the towers are sighting blocks for small cannon. You can see several of them in the walls at Methoni, but Nauplion has only one left and that one is upside down, in a tower by one of the swimming clubs past the end of the waterfront. But it is possible that the tower of the cartouche was painted from one of the towers up on Akro-Nauplion.
The configuration of the largest street in Nauplion follows the line of the walls in this engraving. The street that ends at the Bibliotheke Palamidi occupies the space where this (actually, straight) harbor wall stood. Where the print shows water and wooden piers, there are now schools, hotels, Hermes Car Rental, the Peloponnesian Folklore Museum, Savouras Restaurant, and others. Much of Nauplion is built on landfill, intentionally as of 1480 and the Venetians, from silt brought down by a stream that disappeared in the 19th century, and in the last decade from a vigorous program of fill and construction.
That is all concrete and corners and has nothing to do with this small proud crumbling cartouche of an idealized city, the capital city of a free Greece with its mighty protective walls and the columns of its glorious heritage.
Dimitrios Antoniou called my attention to the content of this cartouche, an image I had photographed but not thought about. The 1840 Nauplion engraving is found in The Nauplion of the Foreign Travellers by Aphrodite Kouria, a 2007 publication of the National Bank of Greece available in, among other places, the gift shop of the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation in Nauplion.
There is no image for this posting because photography was forbidden but imagine a wonder dancing, to unheard music.
The Acropolis Museum is being opened during a series of carefully orchestrated receptions and lectures. It is a remarkable building and details can be read elsewhere. What appears to be the main point of the openings is the emphasis on the Elgin Marbles, and this is demonstrated visually by placing plaster copies of them amid the carvings that have survived in situ.
The Elgin Marbles are a problem I will not solve: at least they can be seen. I am much more concerned with Greek marbles, in Greece, kept unseen.
A few months ago, a group of us had the priviledge of seeing an extraordinary collection of sculpture in the apotheke of the museum of Astros. Despite guidebook recommendations, this museum has been closed for a number of years and the Greek Archaological Service seems to have no interest in reopening it, so the very real treasures it contains might just have well been left in the ground.
We had 10 minutes in the apotheke, thirty of us in a crowded humid space too low for some to stand up straight, photographs were forbidden, and there was too much visual wealth to grasp in too little time. The apotheke houses the best of the treasures found at the villa of Herodes Atticus in nearby Eva-Douliana by archaologists George and Theodore Spyropoulos over the last seventeen or so years. It is a singularly unattractive site for a villa. Four years ago the Supreme Archaological Council (who makes up these names?) announced that this villa was to become an open-air museum: it has not happened.
This Astros apotheke holds the surviving marbles from the villa. Two are especially memorable.
The first is an amazing stone that appears to be the casualty list from the battle of Marathon. The inscription is written in boustrephon and diagonally, and was acquired by Herodes Atticus when he honored his home town of Marathon by constructing a great tumulus over the burial site of the Athenian dead.
This is to make a point. Herodes Atticus, who had more money than God, did a great deal of building across Greece which allowed him innumerable sources of art for the swollen collections at his various villas, including those at Marathon and Kefissia. These sources for his collections included the Acropolis of Athens.
The second marble in the apotheke is a dancing girl so lovely that there was a pain in my heart for the rest of the day, so fiercely did it leap in response to her. She whirls, one foot up for an instant, and I have never seen lovelier motion in marble. In about 420, the sculptor Callimachus carved her as one of a dozen dancing girls for a stoa on the Acropolis opposite those rather hunky caryatids. Herodes Atticus selected the girls for his villa. It is possible that she is not as wonderful as I remember: the lighting was bad, the time short, but I truthfully cannot say that in his place I would have left them alone.
This wonder of a dancing girl, surely one of the loveliest of the Acropolis marbles, remains unseen in a back corner of the humid apotheke.
On 22 March 1451, an anonymous Naupliote wrote a poem from a Venetian prison in one of those towers at the upper left. The poem is written in 72 lines of trochaic tetrameter, what the Greeks called "politicals" as it was a form much used for social complaint. This poem is all complaint and it appears to be a complaint written for the Venetian judicial system.
Anonymous had been to the Nauplion fair of Ag. Demetrios, on 26 October, perhaps the previous fall, or perhaps the year before that. He was quite well-off, mostly because of his animals, and he thought well of himself. There was an incident at the fair in which he was somehow involved, and an Albanian named Spatharos was killed. Various individuals who were jealous of his prosperity falsified their testimony to say that Anonymous had done it. He was exiled from the territory.
He went to Mouchli in Byzantine territory, about a day's walk from Nauplion, to complain to the governor, Demetrios (Laskaris) Asan. The Albanians had apparently come over from there for the fair. Perhaps Anonymous did not explain adequately to Asan: he certainly does not explain adequately to us, but he was put in prison, in irons. On occasion he was taken out and tortured for his evidence "with the rope" -- which means he was hauled up by his wrists behind his back and then dropped. After four months of this, Asan gave him a written judgment of aquittal and three stratioti to escort him out of the territory.
He went to Argos,back in Venetian territory, where the citizens took one look at him and, expecting he would do something involving fraud, insisted that he be jailed again. This time he was held in a private house, which was probably better than irons and the rope. After two and a half months, the governor of Argos wrote a decision that sent Anonymous back to Nauplion. To prison.
That was because, he assures us, the Greek and Venetian citizens at Argos and Nauplion were plotting to gain his wealth and destroy his family.
So there was a hearing before the Nauplion governor, probably Nicolo Valier, and two citizens -- a Fra Nicolo from the Franciscan convent (the Panagia church is now all that remains), and a Marin Catello whose family and relations had been prominent in Nauplion for three generations. There were documents and witnesses.
Anonymous complained of the injustice of it all, so they said he needed to bring his case to the Syndics. Every two years Venice sent around two Syndics to investigate justice in her cities. Anyone could bring a complaint.
Anonymous did not know when to keep his mouth shut, and said--without malice, you understand-- that he **** on the people of Nauplion.
Not a good move. The governor wrote up his report and said that Anonymous had said he **** on the Syndics. Anonymous was fined 14 ducats and put back into prison without being able to see his family. He was alone all day, and four guards locked him up at night.
He wrote up his 72-line complaint Presumably he is still waiting for the Syndics to arrive.
This is an extremely important manuscript. I am presenting a paper on the Anonymous Naupliote at Monemvasia this weekend. You can read his full complaint here.
This is a snip from the oldest surviving map of Nauplion, published in 1571 by Giovanni Francesco Camocio, in the celebratory wake of the victory over the Turks at Lepanto. Although Nauplion had been under Ottoman control since the fall of 1540, Camocio's map shows Nauplion as it was under the last years of Venetian control, rather than with any more recent changes. A grimmer detail from this map was discussed earlier.
This road in the form of an inverted Y shows something about how cities evolve, and because I always stay at one of the pensions at the plateia at that fork -- Atheaton or Amfitriti -- I have thought a lot about the Y and how the modern neighborhood has evolved.
The tail of the Y goes up the stairs, past the Turkish fountain, past the great Turkish mansion now under conversion, past the little mosque now a Catholic church. That has always and ever -- with Byzantines, Romans, ancient Greeks -- been the main route from the lower land to Akro-Nauplion. It was the single easiest route by which one could make the transition from the flat land to the very steep ascent. As for the rest of the Y, you can see remnants from the windows at either pension. Despite the street rationalization of the 1860s and 70, a bit of either side still slants -- that accounts for the odd shape of the apse of Ag. Spyridon, and for the angle of the small Turkish house facing the Atheaton. Other bits of the slant can be found in the basement of a shop on the next street, and in the back yard of another shop, but the fact that it remains at all is exciting to me.
Another particular view comes from a map drawn in 1686, just when the Venetians had retaken Nauplion, and before they had made any changes, or made the maps of proposed change that have led to so many assumptions. 
Thirty years ago, the old city had two massive ficus trees -- one was locally pronounced the largest tree in the Balkans -- near what both of these maps show as the harbor wall. One, growing behind a hotel which was greatly overrated then and now, shaded my balcony. The other, in a walled restaurant garden -- a restaurant whose owner would serve goat and swear it was lamb -- was at the end of my street. The trees in this map detail are in the same positions -- given the vagaries of old maps.
The hotel destroyed its tree when it wanted to expand. The tree could not be seen from the street, and so no one saw it happen. The passing of the second, larger tree -- easily 400 years old -- was a public spectacle. The owner was seen one day in early spring of 1979 girdling the bark with an axe. A crowd soon gathered and shouted at him. He tried to ignore it. Parts of the crowd shouted at each other. He shouted at the crowd. Then he went back and forth behind his restaurant, brought out planks, and hammered a modesty panel over the girdle. I am told he had bypassed the various Nauplion authorities and acquired a permit from Athens. I am also told that he later committed suicide, but this was probably not immediately connected to the tree.
The tree took years to die completely, and more years to be removed. The space is now a chic, pricey cafe, but this blog does not patronize it.
One old tree is left in the city, a platan tree old enough to remember the Turks at least 200 years back, beside the Arsenale in the main plateia. An excellent cafe has tables under its branches, and it shades the front of my friend Stavros' shop.
[These two details are updated here.]
In the fall of 1454, Mehmed II sent a letter to thirteen archons of the Morea, accepting their offer of loyalty to him. They were "Kyr Manuel Rallis with all his people, and Kyr Sophianos with all his people, and Kyr Demetrios Laskaris with all his people, and the Diplovatatsoi, the Kavakioi, the Pagomenoi, the Frangopouloi, the Sgouromalaioi, and Mavropapas, the Philanthropenoi, and Petro Bua and his people, and those others who want to come."
All those plurals mean that each of the archons brought with him several dozen, maybe several hundred, more men, so this pledge of loyalty had the result of transferring several towns to Mehmed's service without effort on his part.
To them Mehmed promised: "of your possesions,
and your children, and your heads, and anything of your possessions that remain to you, I will touch nothing, but I will leave you in peace so that you are better than before."
After the Fall of Constantinople, which surprised no one even though it broke many hearts, the Morea disintegrated. The threat of disorder had always been there among the archons, and often happened, but at this point disorder was at every level of society and there was a general revolt -- "of the Albanians" -- the chronicles say, but Greeks revolted, too, and sometimes there were several sides revolting at once. Demetrios and Thomas Palaiologos, each ruler of half the Morea, fought each other, everyone changed sides and Mehmed was invited to send in troops to help pacify the country.
The Venetians saw the general disorder as their opportunity and sent in diplomats to offer gifts, and bribes to anyone where it might be considered used -- diplomats instructed not to put anything into writing. Once they saw how things were going with the Turkish troops, they focused their attention on Thomas, who liked Italians, and later on Demetrios, but neither would make a commitment.
Ever since the Fall, various archons and island rulers had been going to Mehmed, offering him homage, and welcoming him to their towns. By the fall of 1454, and given the revolts, the Morea was so totally hopeless that archons there were doing the same thing. There was a lot of it going around, but it is only these thirteen for whom we have a piece of paper.
Manuel Rallis, a brutal man and a palace official of Thomas Palaiologos, was in control of the area originally called Morea -- the territory of Chlemoutzi, Clarenza, the plain of Andravida. It formerly was controlled by George and Thomas Rallis, for Thomas Palaiologos, their first cousin, but at the Fall, they left for Italy. Just how Manuel was related, we don't know, but he now had that territory as well as his own and he had put it under Mehmed's control. He must have been quickly disillusioned: Mehmed did not tolerate the independence and rapaciousness the Palaiologoi were unable to control.
When Mehmed came into the Morea in 1460 -- and he took the surrender of Mistra from Demetrios Palaiologos on 29 May, the seventh anniversary of the Fall -- he brought people with him to whom he assigned lands. He used the same sort of leapfrogging method of land assignments my father and I used for turtles in the summer of 1950: find a turtle on the road, put it in the floor of the car. Next turtle is put in the car, and the first put out, and so on and so forth, four days from Minnesota to Texas, and four days Texas back to Minnesota.
The people Mehmed brought were the wealthy and powerful from his recent conquests. As he took up the Moreote archons into his train, he assigned their lands to Turks and Hungarians and Bosnians and Albanians, and a Russian. So the archons found their lands evaporating, and Manuel Rallis found his lands going to the sancak bey of the Morea, Sinan bin Elvan, and the Hizir-seraskier of Chlemoutsi. Petro Bua's territory went to an Ibrahim Engurus.
[Late correction: we do not know Petro Bua's territory for sure.]
This is probably why most of these archons were to be found fighting for the Venetians three years later when war broke out in the Morea in the summer of 1463. By 1465, Manuel Rallis, four of his sons, and a grandson had all been killed, some brutally. The lands he had claimed were now under his son Micheli whose people complained to the Venetians about his harshness.
In August 1466, Micheli Rallis was with the Venetian army when it was surprised outside Patras. The Venetian commander, Jacopo Barbarigo, fell off his mule when trying to escape, and Rallis, instead of making his own escape, stopped to help him. He was pointed out to the Turks by a priest. Barbarigo was cut to pieces. Rallis and the Metropolitan of Patras were impaled on the seashore.
About the others, we have little information. Petro Bua, his sons and grandsons, were fighting for Venice in the 1480s, and when he died at home in bed, the Venetian Senate heard speeches in his honor. A Sophianos served as an emissary for Mehmed to the West, but it may not have been this one. Some went to Crete, some to Italy, and more were absorbed, one way or another, into the Ottoman system. Some probably ended up administering lands in Albania or Thrace.
And for at least three generations, Venice, out of loyalty and gratitude, was providing employment and allowances and dowries for the desendants of Micheli Rallis and his brother Nicholas.
Ag. Marina is in a valley behind the fortress of Kazarma, up the road from the Mycenean bridge. The chairs suggest how very small it is. It was probably built as a burial chapel -- we'll get back to that later. The next photo suggests that there was a collapse of the roof or wall at the rear -- too small to call it an apse -- so that it was clumsily, very clumsily, rebuilt.
The inside has a minute narthex, with an arched entrance to the chapel. The chapel has a stone iconostasis with an arch in the center and another arch on the side. None of these three arches is symmetrical or has the same arc or height. One almost has the impression that the builders had themselves never actually seen an arch before.
Thirty years ago, Ag. Marina was nearly hidden in its valley by damp green grass and shrubbery -- after rains, water came down the hillside all around it. The inside smelled of mold and the candles were too damp to light.
Since then, a dirt road has been put through which channels the water away from the chapel, the grass is regularly cut, and someone keeps the paint around the front door fresh. It has acquired electricity and those chairs.
It was completely frescoed but damp and age and incense and smoke have long since turned the frescos black though ghosts of images remain.
Chunks of plaster have fallen off from old age, and others have fallen where nails were hammered in to support icons.
Fooling around with Gimp on the pictures I tried to take of the wall brought to light a reddish robe over a white gown, possibly of Christ, and of a woman in a white dress of the kind non-Greek women wore in the 14th and 15th centuies. There is too much damage for me to say whether or not she is facing someone, but it was usual to represent an unmarried woman in white in her tomb portrait. This portrait is on the rear of the iconostasis -- not at all a conventional place for such, but that was one of the only two areas in the church with enough space.
This woman in white is a tremendous addition to the historical materials of the Argolid. Otherwise, I have found only five named women in the 15th century: Soi, a serf; Kyria Malaksos, a priest's wife; Maria Buriano, defrauded in an investment; Maria de Cavaza, a land-owner, and producer and dealer in her own linen and wool business; Magdalena de Finctis, Ms. Cavaza's sister-in-law. To be so few, they are a nice variety. Six more unnamed women are mentioned in passing, and there are references to "families."
Ag. Marina was most likely built as a burial chapel for a fief. There are a number of these small chapels around the Argolid, and they will, slowly, allow us to work out general impressions of the locations of the medieval fiefs -- some of them we know had about 200 acres.
But unlike medieval chapels and churches on main roads or beside towns, Ag. Marina has never been formally identified, and it certainly has not been tidied and restored. I am not much interested in disrupting its life. I like the unmatched chairs in front -- a good place to eat lunch or rest when you are hiking, or pruning the olives across the road, but I would like to see those frescos, and the fragments of the others, cleaned up and protected.
[Ag. Marina is continued here.]
Continuing a little longer with the topic of John VIII's headgear.
This is Manuel Laskaris Chatzikis who died in 1445 and was buried in the Pantanassa monastery at Mistra. The inscription on the fresco identifies him as "servant of the Despot, Constantine."
That is all we know about Manuel Laskaris Chatzikis, except that this image shows him wearing a style of hat that is otherwise only seen in portraits of John VIII, his brother Thomas, and their father, Manuel II. The hat is generally called a skiadion, but that is the wrong name and the right name is eminently forgettable.* Call it the Palaiologos hat, or the melon hat. Chatzikis also appears to be wearing a robe very like the one John wears in his portrait, although we can't be perfectly positive about the sleeves.
There was another Laskaris in John's ambit, about whom we also know nothing, except that John sent him to Italy to help make arrangements for the Council of Ferrara-Florence.
There were more Laskarids than just those two. They were a huge family, intermarried with all the other huge families, and you couldn't swing a cat in the Morea, or Constantinople either, without taking out half a dozen. But we are limiting attention just now to the coincidence of these two.
The Palaiologoi were accustomed to reward individuals who gave significant service with significant contributions to their wardrobe. Sphrantzes reports that Manuel II once gave him a dark-colored robe lined with fur and a chest that had belonged to his father, while John's wife, Sophia, gave him one of her green robes for his future wife.
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On another occasion -- this when Sphrantzes was released nearly dead from imprisonment at Patras in a tower with mice and weevils -- Constantine gave him a double green tunic lined with fine green linen from Lucca, a red cap decorated with gold and a silken lining from Thessalonike, a heavy gold-colored caftan from Brusa, a green coat, and a finely worked sword. One might think green was the Palaiologos' special color.
When John was visiting Venice in conjunction with Ferrara-Florence, he presented someone there with one of his hats. Western artists were enthralled by John's hats, and his wardrobe generally. (He also wore a green robe one day in Florence.)
We need more evidence for this, but it may not be too much to think that in this portrait of Manuel Laskaris Chatzikis we are seeing the emissary for Ferrara-Florence, and that he is wearing John's hat and robe, a signal to the cognoscenti that he was a person of high significance, not only to Constantine who ruled at Mistra, but also to the Emperor in Constantinople.
Late addition: The fact that Chatzikis had himself painted wearing this hat and robe does not mean that he actually wore them, but he might have been buried in them.
* For the sake of conscience, the name of this style of hat is kamelaukion.To my knowledge, this is not only the only non-imperial person shown wearing this hat, this is the only Greek fresco of this hat. All other images I know of this hat were painted in the West. I would be grateful for more information here.
** Go here for more information on the kamelaukion.
