The leading men of the Morea

Detail, Klontzas, Passion

The earliest documentary evidence for Krokodylos Kladas seems to be a letter from Jacopo Barbarigo of 25 July 1465. It is true that Sphrantzes wrote about him in terms of 1460, but Sphrantzes was writing after 1472 when he became a monk.

Barbarigo was provveditor general of the Italian troops in the Morea for a year of the Ottoman-Venetian war. Eighty-seven of his letters survive, written betwen 5 June 1465 and mid-March 1466, and they can be found starting on page 1 of volume 6 of Sathas here.

Twice Barbarigo gives distinct lists of the men who he says are the leading men of the Morea – homini da conto, zentilhomini, i molti principali, le persone de i condition. Combining the two lists, in their spelling, we get:

Petro Bua

Alexio Bua

Gini Bua Protostrator, Isaac Paraspondylos

Michali Rallis “principal homo de questa Amorea”

Michali Rallis Drimi dal Granzas [Graitzes]

Peregrino Busichi & his brother

Matheo Sfranzi [Sphrantzes]

Epiphani & Corcondilo Clada

A few other names can be collected from various Barbarigo letters:

Comes Glava

Comes Comnino

Comes Megara

Nikolaos Boccali and brother

Manoli Clada

5 Manessi kapetanioi

Silas and Zorzi Busichi, principali de Busichi

Ioannis Menaia

 The three counts are not from the Morea,  Komninos and Glava are brothers, from the north side of the gulf of Corinth, and I suppose the Count of Megara is from Megara. They all seem to disappear from the records.

 

Barbarigo calls the men on his lists stratioti, and says that their support will guarantee general Moreote support for the Venetian effort.  He also calls all the Albanian and Greek horsemen stratioti: stratioti was the general Venetian term for the non-Italian soldiers with horses.  In his first letter he says, "Isti paesani sint potentiores gentibus Italicis" -- "These peasants are more effective than the Italians."  The stratioti had certain advantages: their dress and horses were better suited to the climate and the terrain, they already knew the mountain routes, and their numbers had not been debilitated by plague.

Within two months of Sigismondo Malatesta's arrival in the Morea in August 1464 as commander of "crusade" forces against the Turks, 1500 of his 7000 soldiers were dead of the plague, peste, they had brought from Ancona, and by the end of the year only 2,500 remained. He and many of the living were ill. Between October and December, they had walked from Methoni to Mistra to Nauplion, then back across Laconia to Messenia, a formidable mechanism for transmitting plague, and famine, across the heart of the Morea. Plague not only kills, but it leaves survivors physically debilitated and depressed, and sometimes blinded. A number of Barbarigo's letters describe Malatesta's profound depression, as well as his physical weakness.  Barbarigo reported massive losses in the Italian companies – more than 200 dead out of a company of 500, 200 out of 400. The Ottoman army was also severely affected, and whatever original number Omar-Bey was supposed to have had – 3,000 or 8,000 – it was down to 1500 in June 1465.  

Stratioti were auxiliary forces in 1463, and the provveditor of 1464 was directed not to hire them, but  the losses to plague made them essential.  We see Barbarigo trying to persuade the Venetian senate to allow him to give provisioni - pronias -- to the leading men so they would be available.  These provisioni were, for the most part, in cash rather than land, although landholdings can be tracked in the letters. A number of these are the landholdings that were later lost in the Kladas revolt. There was a problem with the cash provisioni, however, in that Venice had not sent out any actual cash for two years, and we find most of these men paying their own soldiers and financing the Venetian effort themselves.

One of the things we see in Barbarigo with Kladas, Rallis, Bua, and the others is the change of the archon class to a military class, from a landholding and sometimes-fighting culture, to a culture of mercenary soldiers.  In the next generation -- Petro Bua's nephew Mercurio is the most famous example -- some of them become condottieri.   In the five years since the final surrenders of 1460, nearly a whole class, with the exception of those on Barbarigo's lists, essentially disappears from the records. Some of those on Barbarigo's list had gone to Corfu with Thomas in 1460, and had returned for the war.  Some were killed in the fighting of 1460.  Two or three were executed.  Quite a few were exported, as Doukas says:   

After taking all of the Peloponnesos, the tyrant installed his own administrators and governors. Returning to Adrianople, he took with him Demetrios and his entire household, the palace officials and wealthy nobles from Achaia and Lakedaimonia and the remaining provinces. 

Certainly some were assimilated into the Ottoman system: Kladas nearly was, except that the "crusade" against the Turks was said to be going to put Thomas Palaiologos on the throne of the Eastern Empire, and that would be centered at Mistra.  Kladas had been loyal to Thomas till the end, and after he escaped from Mani and his failed revolt, he joined Thomas' son.  

Hiring stratioti made language problems for Barbarigo, and he needed to find people to serve as paymasters and record-keepers who could write and speak Greek.  And he had to persuade Venice to provide salaries for them.  He  found a Venetian, an Andrea Corner, who had served his predecessor as an interpreter and secretary, and a Zuane da Ponte.  He thought he should pay Andrea 5-6 ducats a month (there were 10 months in the pay-year) but there was no documentation authorizing pay.  So he found a boy who could stay in his tent, and decided to pay him by skimming the stratioti pay, but since the stratioti were not getting any pay, it was all theoretical.

More on Barbarigo's stratioti here.

The Frescos of Longanikos

Main street, Longanikos.

Longanikos is a wonderfully severe town, with massive stone buildings and ruins on the steep hillside above and below the narrow main road. It was noted in a list of fortresses controlled by the Venetians in 1463, at the beginning of the long war with the Ottomans.  It next appears two years later in the letters of Jacopo  Barbarigo, provveditor of the Morea, in his reports to Venice. Barbarigo reported Longanikos under siege in mid-September 1465, then he had a letter from Epiphani Kladas, podestà at Vordounia, saying that the Turks had left and gone to Leondari.  The next day a sad and exhausted group of men arrived at Barbarigo's headquarters at Mantinea, on the coast of Mani just south of Kardamyloi.

Michaeli Rallis and his brother, Nikolaos Bochalis and his, Manoli Kladas, and Zuanne Gavala, podestà of Longanikos, and a group of twenty representing the town, came to say that they had defended Longanikos as long as they could.  They had given over 10 of their sons as hostages, so the siege would be lifted.  Their houses had been burned, their possessions destroyed, and Longanikos was going to starve.  Barbarigo did what he could for them out of his limited resources -- a little cash, some cloth and grain, and enrolled them in the army at one ducat a month. He also gave them a letter of appreciation on behalf of the Signoria, written in Greek.

All I knew of Longanikos was the facades of the houses on the main street, and this story.  So I was delighted to come across a book, Les Peintures Murales Byzantines des Églises de Longanikos (Athens 2002) by Olympia Chassoura who presents the exceptionally lovely frescos in Longanikos in three unprepossessing little churches.  Two churches' frescos date from 1375, towards the end of the despotate of Manuel Kantakuzenos and Zampia/Isabella of Lusignan, while the frescos shown in the third date from about 1430 in the despotate of Theodoros II Palaiologos and Cleofe Malatesta.  These names are for the convenience of placing the frescos in a historical time-frame: there is no evidence to associate the frescos with the rulers.

Ag. Giorgios, Longanikos.

Church of the Dormition, Longanikos.

North facade, Ag. Apostoli, Longanikos

Ag. Giorgios, Deisis

Ag. Apostoli, Deisis

The majority of the frescos are from Ag. Georgios.  Unfortunately, most of the pictures in the book are printed in low-grade black-&-white, and details are difficult to make out. I regret not being able to see the Dormition's Virgin in color.  But what can be seen in the color photographs indicates the selection of a remarkably subdued color palette -- here one might wonder about the economics of color choice, unfamiliar iconography (the torture of Ag. Georgios, below), and exceptionally tender presentations of the human form.  In fact, the Prophet Ezekiel (below) is the only huggable prophet I have ever encountered.

The frescos at Longanikos can be demonstrated to be by the same painters who worked onAi Yannis and the Aphendiko at Mistra, and Ag. Nikolaos at Zarnata.  The Ag. Georgios frescos are dated 1374/75 (6884) in an inscription, those of Ag. Apostoli a year or so later, while those of the Dormition are from the 1420s.

Archangel Gabriel (det.), Ag. Giorgios 1374/5

 Torture of Ag. Giorgios, Ag. Giorgios,1374/5.

Dragon narrative, Ag. Giorgios, 1374/5 

 Princess and dragon, Ag. Giorgos, 1374/5

The Prophet Ezekiel, Ag. Giorgios, 1374.5. 

Ai. Blasios & Prochoros, Ag. Giorgios 1374/5



 

  Ai Theodori, Ag. Giorgios, 1374/5

 The Apostle Paul, Ai. Apostoli, 1375

The Baptism, Ai Apostoli, 1375  

Nativity, Ai Apostoli, 1375  

Metamorphosis, Church of the Dormition , ca. 1430

Dormition of the Virgin, Church of the Dormition, ca. 1430

Virgin and Child, Church of the Dormition,ca. 1430

Better Than You Were Before

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.