Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice Part 8

OTRANTO.

1881.

Hydrous, Hydruntum, Otranto, has as good a claim as a city can well have to be looked on as the end of the world. It is very nearly the physical end of the world in that part of the world with which it has most concern. When we have reached Otranto, we can go no further by any common means of going. It may pa.s.s for the south-eastern point of the peninsula of Italy: it is the point where that central peninsula comes nearest to the peninsula which lies beyond it. It is the point where Western and Eastern Europe are parted by the smallest amount of sea. It has therefore been in all times one of the main points of communication between Eastern and Western Europe. The old Hydrous appears as a Greek colony, placed, as one of the old geographers happily puts it, on the mouth either of the Hadriatic or of the Ionian sea. Hydruntum appears in Roman days as a rival route to Brundisium for those who wish to pa.s.s from Italy into Greece. A city so placed naturally plays its part in the wars of Belisarius and in the wars of Roger. Held by the Eastern Emperors as long as they held anything west of the Hadriatic, it pa.s.sed, when the Norman came, into the hands of Apulian Dukes and Sicilian Kings, and it remained part of the continental Sicilian kingdom, save for the two moments in its history which bring it within our immediate range. Otranto is the one city of Western Europe in which the Turk has really reigned, though happily for a moment only. It is one of the cities in this corner of Italy which formed, for a somewhat longer time, outlying posts of Venetian dominion; and it is a spot where the memory of the Turk and the memory of the Venetian are mingled together in a strange, an unusual, and a shameful way. In most of the other spots which have seen the presence of the Turk and the Venetian, the commonwealth which was the temple-keeper of the Evangelist shows itself only in its n.o.bler calling, as "Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite." At Otranto, Venice appears in a character which is more commonly taken by the Most Christian King. Before Francis and Lewis had conspired with the barbarian against their Christian rivals, the Serene Republic had already stirred him up to make havoc of a Christian city.

At Otranto then we finish our journey by land, and from Otranto, as Otranto is now, we have no means of continuing it by sea. We cannot sail straight, as men did in old times, either to Corfu or to Aulona.

To make our way from the central to the south-eastern peninsula, we have to make the "iter ad Brundisium" back again from the other side.

It is the natural consequence of being at the end of the world, that when we reach the point which holds that place, we have to go back again. And when we find ourselves at Otranto, the fact that we are at the end of the world, that we have reached the end, not only of our actual journey, but of any possible journey of the same kind, is forcibly set before us as a kind of symbol. We have come to an end, to a very marked end, of the great railway system of central Europe. From any place within that system we can find our way to Otranto by the power of steam. Beyond Otranto that power can take us no further; indeed we have so nearly reached the heel of the boot that there is not much further to go by the help of any other power. We are at the end of Italy, at the end, that is, of the central peninsula of Europe, in a sense in which we are not even at more distant Reggio. For Reggio is before all things the way to Sicily, and Sicily we must allow to be geographically an appendage to Italy, strongly as we must a.s.sert the right of that great island to be looked on historically in quite another light. And that at Otranto we have distinctly reached the end of something is clearly set forth by the arrangements of the railway station itself. The rails come to an end; the buildings of the station are placed, not at the side of the line, but straight across it, a speaking sign that we can go no further, and that the thought of taking us further has not entered the most speculative mind.

At Otranto then we have come to the end of one of the great divisions of the European world; it is therefore a fitting point to form a main point of connexion between that division and another. Otranto and its neighbourhood are the only points of the central peninsula from which we can, as a matter of ordinary course, look across into the eastern peninsula. We say as a matter of ordinary course. There are Albanian or Dalmatian heights from which it is said that, in unusually favourable weather, the Garganian peninsula may be descried; so it may be that the Garganian peninsula is favoured back again with occasional glimpses of south-eastern Europe. But a stay of even a few hours at Otranto shows that there south-eastern Europe comes within the gazer's ordinary ken. It is easy to see that it does not so much need good weather to show it as bad weather to hinder it from being shown.

Before we reach Otranto, while we are still on the railway, the mountains of Albania rise clearly before our eyes; from the hill of Otranto itself they rise more clearly still. And even to those to whom those heights are no unfamiliar objects from nearer points of view, it is a thrilling and a saddening thought, when we look forth for the first time from a land of which every inch belongs to the free and Christian world, and gaze on the once kindred land that has pa.s.sed away from freedom and from Christendom. From the soil of free Italy we look on sh.o.r.es which are still left under the barbarian yoke, sh.o.r.es where so many whose fathers were sharers in the European and Christian heritage have fallen away to the creed of the barbarian and to all that that creed brings with it. On the other hand, it is said that there are more favourable moments when it is possible to look from free Italy into free Greece. It is said that, sometimes perhaps Corfu itself, more certainly the smaller islands which lie off it to the west, may be seen from the hill of Otranto. If so, we look out from that one spot of the central peninsula, from that one spot of the general western world, where the Turk can be said to have really ruled, for however short a time, and not simply to have harried. And we look out on that one among the many islands which gird the eastern peninsula, which has gone through many changes and has bowed to many masters, but where alone the Turk has never ruled as a master, but has shown himself only as a momentary besieger.

The Turk then was never lord of Corfu; he was for a while, though only for a very little while, lord of Otranto. The winged lion floated over Corfu while the crescent floated for a season over Otranto. It was therefore perhaps not wholly unfitting that, for another somewhat longer season, the winged lion should float over Corfu and Otranto together. But it was not in his n.o.bler character that the winged lion floated over Otranto. It would have been a worthy exploit indeed, if the arms of Venice, by that time a great Italian power, had driven out the Turk from his first lodgement on Italian soil. But instead of Venice driving the Turk out of Otranto, it was the common belief of the time that it was Venetian intrigue which had let him in. Nay more, if there was any truth in other suspicions of the time, the good old prayer of our forefathers, which prayed for deliverance from "Pope and Turk," might well have been put up by the people of Otranto and all Apulia in the year 1480. Not only the commonwealth of Venice, but the Holy Father himself, Pope Sixtus the Fourth, was believed to be an accomplice in the intrigues which enabled the infidel to establish himself on the sh.o.r.es of Italy. A time came, almost within our own day, when Pope and Turk were really leagued together, and when the Latin Bishop of the Old Rome owed his restoration to his seat to the joint help of the Mussulman Sultan of Constantinople and the Orthodox Tzar of Moscow. But in the fifteenth century we need hardly expect even such a Pope as Sixtus of deliberately bringing the Turk into Italy. His own interests both as priest and as prince were too directly threatened. But it is hard to acquit the Venetian commonwealth, under the dogeship of Giovanni Mocenigo, of risking the lasting interests of all Christendom, and of their own Eastern dominion as part of it, to serve the momentary calls of a petty Italian policy. We even read that Venetian envoys worked on the mind of the Sultan by the argument that it was the part of the new lord of Constantinople to a.s.sert his claim to all that the older lords of Constantinople had held east of the Hadriatic. No argument could be more self-destructive in Venetian mouths. If the Turk had inherited the rights of Eastern Caesar in the Western lands, how cruelly was Venice defrauding him of a large part of the rights of the Eastern Caesar in his own Eastern lands.

The conquest of Otranto was the last of the conquests of him who rightly stands out in Ottoman history as pre-eminently the Conqueror.

The second Mahomet, he who completed the conquest of Christian Asia by the taking of Trebizond, who crowned the work of Ottoman conquest in Europe by the taking of Constantinople, who by the taking of Euboia dealt the heaviest blow to the Venetian power in the aegaean, who brought under his power, as a gleaning after the vintage, the Frank lordship of Attica and the Greek lordship of Peloponnesos, in his last days stretched forth his hand to vex Western Europe as he had so long vexed Eastern Europe and what was left of Christian Asia. He was in truth attacking both at the same time; he won Otranto almost at the moment when he was beaten back from Rhodes. Each scene of his warfare ill.u.s.trates the nature of the Ottoman power at that moment, how it was by the hands of her own apostate sons that Christendom was brought into bondage. Against Rhodes the infidel host was led by a Greek, against Otranto by an Albanian, both renegades or sons of renegades.

And under the first Ferdinand of Aragon such was the state of things in the land which had once been ruled by good King William that soldiers of the Neapolitan King were willing to pa.s.s into the service of the Turk. Nay, the inhabitants in general seemed ready to believe the Turk's promises and to accept his dominion as likely to be milder than that of their own stranger king. The invader was his own worst enemy. A contemporary writer witnesses that the prisoners taken by Achmet _Break-Tooth_--such is said to be the meaning of his surname _Giedek_--pointed out to him that by his cruelties at Otranto he was losing for his master a province which otherwise might have been won with little effort.

But happily things took another turn. Otranto was in the Western world what Kallipolis--the Kallipolis of the Thracian Chersonesos--had been in the Eastern. It was the first foothold of the barbarian, the gate by which he seemed likely to open his way to the possession of the central peninsula of Europe, as he had by the gate of Kallipolis opened his way to the possession of the eastern peninsula. Otranto was the last of the conquests of the great Conqueror; what if he had been longer-lived? what if the second Bajazet had deserved the name of Thunderbolt like the first? Would the threat of the first Sultan have been carried out, and would the Turk have fed his horse on the high altar of Saint Peter's? The eastern peninsula fell by internal division, and the central peninsula, as his very entrance into it shows, was fully as divided as the eastern. The French conquests presently showed how little prepared Italy was to withstand a vigorous attack, and Mahomet the Conqueror would have been another kind of enemy from Charles the Eighth. But all such dangers were warded off.

The Turk still showed himself once and again in northern Italy, but only as a momentary plunderer. Otranto remained his only conquest on Italian ground, and that a conquest held for thirteen months only.

Alfonso, who bears so unfavourable a character from other sides, must be at least allowed the merit of winning back the lost city for his father's realm. Otranto, and Otranto alone of Italian cities, belongs to, and heads, the list on which we inscribe the names of Buda and Belgrade and Athens and Sofia, on which it may now inscribe the names of Arta and Larissa, but from which hapless Joannina and twice-forsaken Parga are still for a while shut out.

It was not therefore till the Turk had been driven out, not until southern Italy had been more thoroughly but not much more lastingly overrun by the armies of France, that Otranto pa.s.sed for a while under the rule of Venice. The Serene Republic hardly deserved to rule in a city which she had so lately betrayed; the place seems never to have recovered from the frightful blow of the Turkish capture. The town now shows no sign either of the short Venetian occupation or of the shorter Turkish occupation. From the side of military history, this last fact is to be regretted. We must remember that in that day the Ottomans, pressing and hiring into their service the best skill of Europe, were in advance of all other people in all warlike arts. So Guiccardini remarks that the Turks, during their short occupation of Otranto, strengthened the city with works of a kind hitherto unknown in Italy, and which, as he seems to hint, Italian engineers would have done well to copy, but did not. The present fortifications date from the time of Charles the Fifth. Their extent shows at once how far the Otranto of his day had shrunk up within the bounds of the ancient city, and how far again modern Otranto has shrunk up within the walls of the Emperor. It is said that, before the Turkish capture, Otranto numbered twenty-two thousand inhabitants; it has now hardly above a tenth part of that number. As the military importance of the place has pa.s.sed away, military precautions seemed to have pa.s.sed away with it; the castle stands free and open; no sentinel hinders the traveller from wandering as he will within its walls. But the traveller will gain little by such wanderings except the look-out over land and sea.

The town stands close upon the sea, on a small height with a valley between it and the railway station. It is entered by a gateway of late date, but of some dignity; but it is not much that the frowning entrance leads to. The visitor soon finds that Otranto, which gave its name of old to the surrounding land, which still ranks as a metropolitan city, has sunk to little more than a village. It seems to have had no share in the revived prosperity of the other towns along this coast. Its one object of any importance is the metropolitan church, and this is at once the only monument of the ancient greatness of the place, and also in a strange way the chief memorial of its momentary bondage to the barbarian.

In order thoroughly to take in the position of the great church of Otranto in its second character, as a memorial of bondage and deliverance, it may be well to pa.s.s it by for a moment and to go first to the castle, and look out on one of the points of view which it commands. Any local guide will be able to show the traveller the Hill of the Martyrs. It stands at no great distance beyond the town, and is held to mark the site of a pagan temple. There the Turks, after their capture of the city, did as they have done in later times. Some eight or nine hundred of the people of Otranto were ma.s.sacred. Their bodies lay unburied so long as the Turk kept possession; on the recovery of the city, the bodies of the martyrs, as they were now deemed, were gathered together, and a special chapel was added to the metropolitan church to receive them. There they may still be seen, piled together in cases, with inscriptions telling the story. There are skulls, legs, arms, bones of every part of the human body, some still showing the dents of barbarian weapons, some with barbarian weapons still cleaving to them. There we look on them, ghastly witnesses that, neither in their days nor in ours, is the aethiopian at all disposed to change his skin or the leopard his spots. What the Turk did at Otranto he has done at Batak; he may, if the freak seizes him, do the like at Joannina. Only the deeds of Otranto were at least done by the Turk as a mere outside barbarian; he was not licensed to do them by the united voice of Europe. It is only in these latest times that the Turk has been fully authorized, under all the sanctions of so-called international right, to renew at pleasure the deeds of Otranto and of Batak in lands to which Europe has twice promised freedom.

The martyrs of 1480, their sufferings, their honours, have made so deep an impression on the mind of Otranto that the metropolitan basilica has popularly lost its name of _Annunziata_, and is more commonly spoken of as the church of the martyrs. But the great church of Otranto, the church of the prelate whose style runs as "archiepiscopus Hydrutinus et primas Salentinorum," is a building of deep interest on other grounds. Like so many Italian churches, it is not very attractive without, nor is there anything specially to tarry over in its bell-tower. But even outside we may mark one or two signs of the restoration which the church underwent after its deliverance from the Turk. The west window is of that date, one of those rose-windows to which Italian, and still more Dalmatian, taste clave so long, even when all other mediaeval fashions had vanished away. Of the same date is the north door, showing, like the great doors at Benevento, the Primate of the Salentines attended by the bishops and chief abbots of his province. As we go within, our first feeling is one of wonder that so much should have lived through the infidel storm and occupation. But, according to the usual practice of Mussulman conquerors, the head church of the city was turned into a mosque; there was therefore, after the first moment of havoc had pa.s.sed by, no temptation on the part of the new occupants to damage the essential features of a building which had become a temple of their own worship.

It is therefore not wonderful that the main features of the basilica are still there, either untouched or most skilfully restored. Seven arches rise from columns, perhaps of cla.s.sical date, with capitals, mostly of different kinds of foliage, but one of which brings in human figures, after the type which was so well set in Caracalla's baths.

But a more interesting study is supplied by the great crypt, or rather under-church. At Otranto, as in some of its neighbours, the craftsmen who worked below clearly allowed themselves a freer choice of forms in the carving of capitals than they ventured on above ground. The vault of the under-church rests on ranges of slender columns, with heavy abaci and with an amazing variety in the capitals. None perhaps can be called cla.s.sical; but very few are simply grotesque. The few that are so are found--one does not quite see the reason of the distinction--among the half-columns against the walls. Most of them show various forms of foliage and animal figures; the old law that almost any kind of man, beast, or bird, can be pressed to serve as the volute at the corner of a capital is here most fully carried out. But the further law, that that duty is most worthily discharged by the imperial eagle, can be nowhere better studied than in the Hydrantine under-church. In some capitals again, especially in the columns of the apses, the bird of Caesar is perched as it were on Byzantine basket-work, clearly showing which Augustus it was to whom the Salentine Primate bowed as his temporal lord. Other capitals again are much simpler, but also savouring of the East; the plain square block has mere carving on the surface. Then, of the columns themselves, some are plain, some are fluted, some are themselves carved out with various patterns. In short a rich and wonderful variety reigns in every feature of the under-church of Otranto.

Our comparison of the columns and capitals has carried us underground; but the really distinctive feature of the basilica of Otranto is above. Other churches of southern Italy have wonderful crypts; none, we may feel sure, has so wonderful a pavement. And here we do wonder that the Turks did not do incomparably more mischief than they did do.

Some mischief they did; but the archbishops and canons of Otranto seem--perhaps unavoidably--to have done a great deal more by destroying or covering the rich pavement to make room for the furniture of the church. It would surely be hard to find another example of a pavement whose design is spread over the whole ground-floor of a great church. The pictures are in mosaic, rough mosaic certainly, of the second half of the twelfth century, when Otranto formed part of the Sicilian realm, and when that realm was ruled by William the Bad. Luckily inscriptions in the pavement itself have preserved to us the exact date, and the names of the giver and the artist. One tells us in leonine rimes:

"Ex Ionathi donis per dexteram Pantaleonis Hoc opus insigne est superans impendia digne."

Another stoops to prose: "Humilis servus Ionathas Hydruntinus archieps. jussit hoc [~o]p fieri per ma.n.u.s Pantaleonis p[~r]b. Anno ab Incarnatione Dn[~i] Nr[~i] Ihu. Xr[~i] MCLXV indictione XIV, regnante Dn[~o] nostro W. Rege Magnif." The design of the priest Pantaleon, wrought at the bidding of Archbishop Jonathan in the last year of the first William, is of a most extensive and varied kind. Scriptural scenes and persons, figures which seem purely fanciful, the favourite subject of the signs of the zodiac, all find their place. We meet also with one or two heroes of earlier and later times whom we should hardly have looked for. The main design starts, not far from the west end, with a tree rising from the backs of two elephants. The huge earth-shaking beast, the Lucanian ox, is, it must be remembered, a favourite in southern Italy; he finds a marked place among the sculptures of the great churches of Bari. The tree--one is tempted to see in it the mystic ash of Northern mythology--sends its vast trunk along the central line of the nave, throwing forth its branches, and what we may call their fruit, on either side. Here are strange beasts which may pa.s.s either for the fancies of the herald or for the discoveries of the palaeontologist; but in the lion with four bodies and a single head we must surely look for a symbolical meaning of some kind. He is balanced, to be sure, by other strange forms, in which two or three heads rise from a single body. Here are figures with musical instruments, here a huntress aiming at a stag; and in the midst of all this, not very far from the west end, we find the figure of "Alexander Rex." To the left we have Noah, making ready to build the ark--the story begins at the beginning, like the building of the Norman fleet in the Bayeux Tapestry. Four figures are cutting down trees, and the patriarch himself is sawing up the wood, with a saw of the type still used in the country. The centre of the pavement is occupied by the zodiac; each month has its befitting work a.s.signed to it according to the lat.i.tude of Otranto. Thus June cuts the corn. July threshes it, neither with a modern machine, nor with the feet of primitive oxen, but with the flail which many of us will remember in our youth.

August, with his feet in the wine-press, gathers the grapes. December carries a boar, as if for the Yule feast of Queen Philippa's scholars.

Each month has its celestial sign attached; but it would seem that the priest Pantaleon was in a hurry in putting together his kalendar, and that he put each of the signs a month in advance. Beyond the zodiac, near the entrance of the choir, and partly covered by its furniture, is a figure, which startles us with the legend "Arturus Rex." If we were to have Alexander and Arthur, why not the rest of the nine worthies? If only a selection, why are the Hebrews defrauded of their representative?--unless indeed Samson, who appears in the form of a mutilated figure, not far from the left of Arthur, has taken the place of the more familiar Joshua, David, and Judas. Here is a witness to the early spread of the Arthurian legends; here, in 1165, within the Sicilian kingdom, the legendary British hero receives a place of honour, alongside of the Macedonian. Nor is this our only witness to the currency in these regions of the tales which had been not so long before spread abroad by Walter Map. By this time, or not long after, the name of Arthur had already found a local habitation on aetna itself. Among other scriptural pieces in different parts, we find of course Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel; there is Jonah too, far to the east; and in the eastern part of the north aisle, the imagination of Jonathan or Pantaleon has forestalled somewhat of the Dantesque conception of the _Inferno_. "Satanas" is vividly drawn, riding on a serpent, and other figures armed with serpents are doing their terrible work in the train of the "duke of that dark place." The whole work is strictly mosaic, and the design, though everywhere rude, is carried out with wonderful spirit. We may indeed rejoice that the hoofs of Turkish horses and the improvements of modern canons have left so much of a work which, even if it stood by itself, it would be worth while going to the end of railways at Otranto to see.

Such is now the one city in which the Turk ever ruled on our side of Hadria. In earlier times we might have pa.s.sed straight from Otranto to the lands where he still rules, or to the island where he never ruled.

But now he who looks out for Otranto on the heights of Albania, and whose objects call him to the nearer neighbourhood of those heights, must go back to Brindisi to find his way to reach them.

FIRST GLIMPSES OF h.e.l.lAS.

1875--1881.

In our present journey we draw near to the eastern peninsula, to the h.e.l.lenic parts of that peninsula, by way of the great island--great as compared with the ma.s.s of Greek islands, though small as compared with Sicily or Britain--which keeps guard, as a strictly h.e.l.lenic outpost, over a mainland which was and is less purely h.e.l.lenic. From Brindisi we sail to Corfu, the elder Korkyra, as distinguished from the black isle of the same name off the Dalmatian sh.o.r.e. In so sailing, we specially feel ourselves to be sailing in the wake of the conquerors who made Corfu an appendage to the Sicilian realm; we are pa.s.sing between spots on either side which have known both a Norman and Venetian master. But it may be that we may have already drawn near to Greece by another path. It is easy to prolong the voyage which took us from Trieste to Spalato, from Spalato to Cattaro, by a third stage which will take us from Cattaro to Corfu. In this case we may have already studied the Albanian coast, and that with no small pleasure and profit. We may have marked a point not long after we had left Dalmatia behind us, and that where a line may well be drawn. There is a geographical change in the direction of the coast, from the sh.o.r.e of Dalmatia, with its islands and inland seas, its coast-line stretching away to the south-east, to the nearly direct southern line of the sh.o.r.e of Albania. In modern political geography we pa.s.s from the dominion of Austria to the dominion of the Turk. In the map of an earlier day, we pa.s.s from the all but wholly continuous dominion of the two commonwealths of Venice and Ragusa. In modern ethnology we pa.s.s from the Slave under a certain amount of Italian influence to the Albanian under a certain, though smaller, amount of influence, Italian or Greek, according to his local position and his religious creed. In modern religious geography we pa.s.s from a land which is wholly Christian, but where the Eastern form of Christianity, though still in the minority, makes itself more deeply felt at every step, to a land where Islam and the two great ancient forms of Christianity are all found side by side. In the geography of earlier times this point marks the frontier of a land intermediate between the barbaric land to the north, with only a few Greek colonies scattered here and there, and the purely Greek lands, the "continuous h.e.l.las," to the south. We find on this western sh.o.r.e of the south-eastern peninsula the same feature which is characteristic of so large a part of the aegaean and Euxine coasts, both of the south-eastern peninsula itself and of the neighbouring land of Asia. The great mainland is barbarian; the islands and a fringe of sea-coast are Greek. As we draw nearer to the boundary of Greece proper, the h.e.l.lenic element is strengthened.

Thesprotians, Molossians, Chaonians, were at least capable of becoming Greeks. Epeiros, [Greek: epeiros], _terra firma_, once the vague name of an undefined barbarian region, became the name of a Greek federal commonwealth with definite boundaries. And the character of a barbarian land, fringed with European settlements and looking out on European islands, did not wholly pa.s.s away till almost our own day. A few still living men may remember the storming of Prevesa; many can remember the cession--some might call it the betrayal--of Parga. It was only when Parga was yielded to the Turk that this ancient feature of the Illyrian and Epeirot lands pa.s.sed away. What Corinth had once been Venice was. Corinth first studded that coast with outposts of the civilized world. Venice held those outposts, sadly lessened in number, down to her fall. And the men of Parga deemed, though they were mistaken in the thought, that to the mission of Corinth and Venice England had succeeded.

From whichever side our traveller draws near to Corfu, he comes from lands where Greek influence and Greek colonization spread in ancient times, but from which the Greek elements have been gradually driven out, partly by the barbarism of the East, partly by the rival civilization of the West. Whether we come from Otranto and Brindisi or from the Illyrian Pharos and the Illyrian Korkyra, we are coming from lands which once were Greek. But Otranto and Brindisi, Pharos and Black Korkyra, even Epid.a.m.nos and Apollonia, were scattered outposts of Greek life among barbarian neighbours; as the traveller draws near to the elder Korkyra, he finds himself for the first time within the bounds of "continuous h.e.l.las." He may have seen in other lands greater and more speaking monuments of old h.e.l.lenic life than any that the island has to show him; he may have seen the lonely hill of Kyme, the hardly less lonely temples of Poseidonia; but those were Greece in Italy; now for the first time he sees Greece itself. Whatever we may say of the mainland to the left, there can be no doubt, either now or in ancient times, of the h.e.l.lenic character of the island to the right. There are the small attendant isles; there are the great peaks of Korkyra--not the lowlier peaks which gave city and island their later name--but the far mightier mountains which catch the eye as we approach the great island from the north. That island at least is h.e.l.las--less purely h.e.l.lenic, it may be, than some other lands and islands, but still h.e.l.lenic, part of the immediate h.e.l.lenic world of both ancient and modern days. It was and is the most distant part of the immediate h.e.l.lenic world; but it forms an integral part of it. The land which we see is h.e.l.lenic in a sense in which not even Sicily, not even the Great h.e.l.las of Southern Italy, much less then the Dalmatian archipelago, ever became h.e.l.lenic. From the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra, it is not merely a land fringed by h.e.l.lenic colonies; it is a h.e.l.lenic island, the dominion of a single h.e.l.lenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually h.e.l.lenic or so thoroughly h.e.l.lenized that no one thought of calling their h.e.l.lenic position in question. Modern policy has restored it to its old position by making it an integral portion of the modern Greek kingdom.

And, if in some things it is less purely Greek than the rest of that kingdom, what is the cause? It is because, if Corfu may be thought for a while to have ceased to be part of Greece, it never ceased to be part of Christendom. It was for ages under alien dominion, but it never was under the dominion of the Turk. The Venetian could to some extent modify and a.s.similate his Greek subjects; the Turk could modify or a.s.similate none but actual renegades. And, after all, the main influence has been the other way. If Italian became the fashionable speech, even for men of Greek descent, men on the other hand whose names distinctly show their Italian descent have cast in their lot with their own country rather than with the country of their forefathers. Shallow critics have mocked because men with Venetian names have been strong political a.s.sertors of Greek nationality. They might as well mock whenever a man of Norman descent shows himself a patriotic Englishman. They might as well hint that Presidents and Ministers of France and Spain, who have borne names which proclaim their Irish origin, were bound or likely to follow an Irish policy rather than a French or a Spanish one.

The first aspect, indeed every aspect, of the island of Corfu and the neighbouring coast of Epeiros is deeply instructive. The island and the mainland come so close together that, till the eye has got well used to the outline of particular mountains, it is not easy to tell how much is island and how much mainland. A statesman of the last generation twice told the House of Lords that Corfu lay within a mile of the coast of Thessaly. We cannot say, without looking carefully to the scale on the map, how many miles Corfu lies from the coast of Thessaly, any more than we can say offhand how many miles Anglesey lies from the coast of Norfolk. It is a more practical fact that some parts of Corfu lie very near indeed to the coast of Epeiros, though not quite so near as Anglesey lies to the coast of Caernarvonshire.

The channel must surely be everywhere more than a mile in width; certainly it could nowhere be bridged, as in the case of Anglesey, or in the cases of Euboia and nearer Leukas. Both coasts are irregular, both coasts are mountainous, and the mountains on both sides fuse into one general ma.s.s. Above all, prominent from many points, soars the famous range where, with a singular disregard of later geography,

"Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian mountains."

Snow of course is in these lands to be had only at a much higher level than the snow-line of the Alps, so that the couch of Arethousa stands out yet more conspicuously over the neighbouring heights than it might have done in a more northern region. The inhabitants of Corfu are fond of pointing to the contrast between the well-wooded hills and valleys of their own fertile island and the bare, almost uninhabited, land which lies opposite to them. And of course they do not fail to point the inevitable moral. As in most such cases, there is truth in the boast, but truth that needs some qualifications. Corfu, through all its changes of masters, has always been under governments which were civilized according to the standard of their own times. It has fared accordingly. Epeiros has been handed over to a barbarian master, and it has also been largely colonized by the least advanced of European races. Besides having the Turk as a ruler, it has had the Albanian, Christian and Mussulman, as a settler. In Corfu the Albanian is a frequent visitor; his sheepskin and _fustanella_ may be constantly seen in the streets of Corfu; but he has not--unless possibly in the shape of refugees from Parga--formed any distinct element in her population. It is only in the nature of things that Greeks under successive Venetian, French, and English rule should do more for their land than Albanians under Turkish rule. But we may doubt whether any people under any government could have made the land opposite to Corfu like Corfu itself. Had the mainland shared the successive destinies of the island, it would doubtless have been far better off than it has been. But it could hardly have been as the island. One point of advantage for the island was the mere fact that it was an island. In all but the highest states of civilization, this is an advantage beyond words; and the ancient colonists fully understood the fact.

Still it is a striking contrast to pa.s.s across the narrow sea from Corfu to what was Butrinto. Buthrotum, the mythical city of the Trojan Helenos, has a more real being as a Roman colony, and as one of those outposts on the mainland in which Venice succeeded the Neapolitan Kings, and which she kept down to her own fall. Butrinto was once a city no less than Corfu; to Virgil's eyes it was the reproduction of Troy itself. Now we cross from the busy streets and harbour of Corfu to utter desolation at Butrinto. The desolation is greater in one way than any that Helenos or any other primitive settler could have found, because it is that form of desolation which consists in traces of what has been. We enter the mouth of the river, with rich trees and pasturage between its banks and the rugged mountains; we mark ruins of fortresses and buildings on either side, till we come to the ruined castle at the mouth of the lake. The lake is a carefully preserved fishery, and permission is needed to enter it. A few dirty-looking men a.s.semble at the door of a tumble-down building standing against the ruined castle. But among them are personages of some local importance.

One is the lessee of the fishery, whose good will is of special importance. There is also a Turkish officer of some kind--more likely a Mussulman Albanian than an Ottoman--with his small and not threatening following. There are one or two native Christians; and it brings the varied ethnology of the land more deeply home to learn that they are neither Greeks nor Albanians, but that they belong to the scattered race of the Vlachs, the Latin-speaking people of the East, whose greatest settlement, far away from Butrinto, has now grown into an European kingdom. It is well to be reminded at such a moment that the Rouman princ.i.p.ality, though the greatest, is only one among many, and that the latest, of the settlements of this scattered people. And it brings home the fact to us when we see here, in a land where Greek and Albanian--that is, h.e.l.len and Illyrian--are both at home, the third of the great primitive races of the peninsula, the widely spread Thracian kin, the people of Sitalkes and Kersobleptes, so far away from the land in which alone political geography acknowledges them.

One feeling however the group, so small, but differing so widely in race and creed, seem all to share very deeply. This is a devout reverence for the image of George King of the Greeks, when graven on a five- (new) drachma piece, and held up in the hand of one of the representatives of Corfu in the Greek Parliament. We remember the ancient power of much smaller coins--[Greek: hos mega dynasthon pantachou to dy' obolo]--and we begin to doubt whether a smaller sum might not have done the work as well. Anyhow his h.e.l.lenic Majesty's countenance, in this attractive shape, acts as a talisman on all, private and official, Christian and Mussulman; it buys off all questions or searchings of any kind, and wins free access to the beautiful scenery of the lake, full licence to poke about among what little there is to poke about in the shattered castle. The thought cannot help coming into the mind that those who so greatly respect the image and superscription of King George would have no very violent dislike to become his subjects. Still it is not without a certain feeling of having escaped out of the mouth of the lion that we cross once more over the channel, and find ourselves at the hospitable door of a Greek gentleman of Koloura.

CORFU AND ITS NAMES.

1875.

The great argument to establish the fact of a long-abiding Slavonic occupation in Greece has always been the changes in local nomenclature, the actual Slavonic names and the Greek names which have displaced older Greek names. The former cla.s.s speak for themselves; the latter cla.s.s are held to have been given during the process of Greek reconquest. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that there is a large amount of truth in this doctrine, if only it is kept in moderation, and is not pressed to the extreme conclusions of Fallmerayer. But it is important to note that the change from one Greek name to another has taken place also in cases when there has been no foreign settlement, no reconquest, no violent change of any kind. One of the greatest of Greek islands has lost one Greek name and has taken another, without the operation of any of the causes which are said to have brought about the change of nomenclature in Peloponnesos. Crete and Euboia, we may say in pa.s.sing, seem to have changed their names, when in truth they have not; but Korkyra really has changed its name. It had, for all purposes, become Corfu--in some spelling or other--till the modern revival--unwisely, we must venture to think--brought back, not the true local _Korkyra_ ([Greek: Korkyra]), but the Attic and Byzantine _Kerkyra_ ([Greek: Kerkyra]).

City and island alike are now again [Greek: Kerkyra]; or rather we cannot say that the city is again [Greek: Kerkyra], as the modern city never was [Greek: Kerkyra] at all, nor even [Greek: Korkyra]. The modern town of Corfu--in its best Greek form [Greek: Korypho]--stands on a different site from the ancient town of Korkyra, and there can be little doubt that the change of name is connected with the change of site.

The legendary history of the island goes up, we need not say, to the Homeric tales. That Korkyra was the Homeric Scherie was an accepted article of faith as early as the days of Thucydides. His casual phrase goes for more than any direct statement. He connects the naval greatness of the Korkyraians of his day with the seafaring fame of the mythical Phaiakians ([Greek: nautiko poly proechein estin hote epairomenoi kai kata ten ton Phaiakon proenoikesin tes Kerkyras kleos echonton ta peri tas naus]). Nearly a thousand years later Prokopios is equally believing, though he goes into some doubts and speculations as to the position of the isle of Kalypso. His way of describing the island should be noticed. With him the island is the Phaiakian land, which is now called _Korkyra_ ([Greek: he Phaiakon chora, he nyn Kerkyra epikaleitai]). Against this description we may fairly balance that of Niketas ([Greek: he Kerkyraion akra, he nyn epikekletai Korypho]), with whom the promontory of the Kerkyraians is now called _Korypho_. The two answer to each other. To talk of [Greek: Kerkyraion akra] was as much an archaism in the eleventh century as to talk of [Greek: Phaiakon chora] was in the sixth. The everyday name of the island in the days of Prokopios was still [Greek: Korkyra] or [Greek: Kerkyra]. In the days of Niketas it was already [Greek: Korypho].

We put the two phrases of Prokopios and Niketas together, because they are turned out as it were from the same mould. But there is no doubt that the change of name had happened a good while before Niketas, and there is some reason to believe that it was the result of causes which are set forth in the narrative of Prokopios. The earliest mention of Corfu by its present name seems to be that in Liudprand, who calls it "Coriphus" in the plural, the Greek [Greek: Koryphous]. The change therefore happened between the sixth century and the tenth, the change doubtless of site no less than the change of name. And no time seems more likely for either than the time which followed the wasting expedition of Totilas which Prokopios records. Then doubtless it was that the old city, if it did not at once perish, at least began to decay; a new site began to be occupied; a new town arose, and that new town took a new name from its most remarkable physical feature, the [Greek: korypho], the two peaks crowned by the citadel, which form the most striking feature in the entrance to the harbour of modern Corfu.

One argument alone need be mentioned the other way, and that is one which perhaps is not likely to present itself to any one out of Corfu itself. The local writer Quirini quotes a single line as from Dionysios Periegetes, which runs thus:--

[Greek: keinen nyn Korphyn nautai diephemixanto.]

Dionysios is a writer of uncertain date; but he may safely be set down as older than Prokopios. If then he used the later name, and used it in a form more modern than the [Greek: Korypho] of Niketas, the whole argument would be set aside, and the name of Corfu would be carried back to a much earlier time. But where Quirini got his verse is by no means clear. We have looked in more than one edition of Dionysios, and no such verse can we find. The only mention of Korkyra is in a verse which runs thus:--

[Greek: kai lipare Kerkyra, philon pedon Alkinooio.]