GENNADEION MONOGRAPHS 111

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6 CHAPTERS ON MEDIAEVAL AND RENAISSANCE VISITORS TO GREEK LANDS BY JAMES MORTON PATON EDITED BY L.A.P. THE AMERICAN SCHOOL OF CLASSICAL STUDIES AT ATHENS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1951

7 Copyright 1951 By the Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens Published 1951 All Rights Reserved PRINTED IN TBE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

8 PREFACE FEW words in regard to the contents of this little book are necessary. Its A author, at the time of his death on November 23, 1944, had in preparation an extensive work on the mediaeval history and monuments of Athens, in the manifold sources for which, even after the invaluable studies of Laborde and more recent scholars, he still found a fresh harvest. His researches, carried on principally in the libraries and archives of Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome, were interrupted in 1939 by the European war, and their continuation at the Harvard College Library was somewhat later terminated by his gradually failing health. His work, in spite of its long duration, can scarcely be said to have passed beyond the stage of collecting sources; their synthesis and discussion he had of course postponed until they should have been adequately assembled. He had, however, although Athens remained the center of his interest, almost completed a few sections, forming to a certain extent byways leading from the main path, and he had also prepared the texts of various sources in a form suitable for publication. This material is collected here in the hope that, as he would have desired, it mzy prove of service to future investigators in the same field. His private notes have supplied a basis for the main part of the slight requisite editing, which has chiefly consisted in the completion or addition of footnotes. A lecture on Turkish Athens, though somewhat elementary and delivered many years ago, has been included as a compendium of its subject that may be found convenient. The accounts of Athens in Chapter I1 have been hitherto unpublished, or published only in rare or not easily accessible texts, and therefore, with a few additions, are brought together here, even if not annotated or fully collated. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that no one would have insisted more zealously than the writer upon the essentially incomplete condition of the material as a whole - a condition indeed that accounts for the absence or the inequalities in presentation of some important sources among those given below. He would earnestly have desired to express his sincere gratitude to the Bibliothcque Nationale in Paris, to the Archivio di Stato and the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the Archivio di Stato in Florence, the Biblioteca Vaticana, and the Harvard College Library for the many courtesies that he received from them in the course of his researches. That once again his work should have been given a place among the Gennadeion Monographs is an honor of which he would have been deeply appreciative. L.A.P. Boston, April, 1947 vii

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10 CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE vii ABBREVIATIONS xi CHAPTER I. Turkish Athens CHAPTER 11. Descriptions and Brief Noticesof Athens I. Aristarchus Ludolf von Suthem (Sudheim) Niccolb da Martoni IV. Le Seigneur d Anglure V. Giovanni Maria Angiolello VI. Itinerarium Maritimum. 39 VII. Giovanni Lorenzo d Anania VIII. Jean Carlier de Pinon and Hans Jacob Breuning von und zu Buo- chenbach IX. Reinhold Lubenau X. Michael Heberer von Bretten XI. Franqois Arnaud XII. Julien Bordier XIII. Gallere di Santo Stefan XIV. Louis des Hayes XV. Nicolas du Loir XVI. Bernard Randolph XVII. Antoine des Barres XVIII. Felice Gallo XIX. Giovanni-Battista de Burgo XX. Relatione Marciana XXI. Paul Lucas CHAPTER 111. The Tomb of Edward Wyche at Herakleia CHAPTER IV. Rinaldo de La Rue I. The Adventures of La Rue Relation de la Murtinique s 111. Relatione d Atene IV. Relatione delle Cose in vicinanza di Atene CIIAPTER V. A Visit to Athens in I j j ix

11 X CONTENTS APPENDICES I. Athens As Seen by Travellers under the Acciaioli..... I Two Directors of the Compagnie du SCnCgal I. Franeois Franeois Jean-Baptiste du Casse = 79 III. The Letters of La Rue INDEX.. I97 ILLUSTRATION Funerary Inscription of Edward Wyche 77

12 A.J.A Ath. Mitt..... Beregani.... Bibl. Nat..... C.r. Acad. Insc.... Collignon, Giraud.. Relation. Enc. ital Foscarini.... Garzoni.... Laborde.... Locatelli.... Migne, P.L..,. Miller..... O.F Omont, Athknes.. Pernot..... R. arch R. tt. gr..... R. Or. Eat..... ABBREVIATIONS American Journal of Archaeology. Mittheilungen des deutschen archaeologischen Instituts. A t henische A b t heilung. N. Beregani, Historia delle Guerre d Europa dalla comparsa dell drmi Ottomane nell Hungheria, Panno Venice, Paris, Bibliothkque Nationale. Comptes rendus de I Acadtmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Let tres. M. Collignon, Le Consul Jean Giraud et sa Relation de Z Attique auxviie sidcle. Paris, Extrait des illthoires de I Acade mie des Inscriptions et Belles- Lettres, XXXIX, Relation d Attenes, C.Y. Acad. Insc., 4: SCrie, XXV, 1897, pp Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti. M. Foscarini, Historia della Republica Veneta. Venice, P. Garzoni, Istoria della Repubblica di Venezia in tempo della Sacra Lege contro Maometto IV. Venice, th edition. Comte de Laborde, Athbnes aux XFIe, XVle, et XVIIF sikcles. Paris, A. Locatelli, Racconto historic0 della Veneta Guerra in Levante. Cologne, J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Patres Latini. W. Miller, Essays on the Latin Orient. Cambridge, Old French. H. Omont, Athdnes au XVIIe sikcle. Paris, Robert de Dreux, Voyage en Turquie et en Grkce, ed. H. Pernot. Paris, Revue archtologique. Revue des ttudes grecques. Revue de I Orient latin. xi

13 xii Saint-Priest... Setton, Catalans.. Stuart..,.. Vandal..... Wachsmuth... z ABBREVIATIONS Comte de Saint-Priest, ime moires sur I Avzbassade de France en Turquie. Paris, Publications des langues orientales vivantes, SCrie I, 6. K. 14. Setton, Catalan Domination of Athens, I~II Cambridge, Mass., James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Antiquities of Athens. London, I A. Vandal, L Odysste d un Ambassadeur. Les Voyages du.marquis de Nointel. Paris, C. Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen h a Alteythum. Leip zig, I, 1874; 11, Zeitschrift. In the quotations from manuscripts the capitalization, accentuation, and punctuation have usually been modernized, but errors in vocabulary and spelling have in general not been corrected; in quotations from books the printed text has been followed in these particulars, though most abbreviations have been expanded.

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16 CHAPTER I Turkish Athens' RADITION tells us that in the year 529 of our era an edict of the Emperor T Justinian closed the schools of philosophy at Athens. Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that about this time Athens, whose citizens had found a congenial substitute for the political conflicts of their ancestors in factional strife over the merits of their favorite lecturers or the qualifications of rival candidates for vacant professorial chairs, ceased to be a university city and sank into the insignificant provincial town which it remained for thirteen hundred years. Although during most of this time it can scarcely be said to have a historyin fact I doubt whether a dozen references to contemporary Athens can be found in the six centuries after Justinian, - four episodes stand out as possessing peculiar significance. Each marks a definite break with the past; after each we are confronted by a changed city; its life or at any rate its aspect has been profoundly altered, and there is no return to previous conditions. These episodes are the capture of the city by the Franks (the Fourth Crusade) in 1204; the annexation by the Turks in 1456; the Venetian siege in 1687; and the evacuation of the Acropolis by the Turkish garrison, March 31,1833. It is the interval between the second and third of these events, that is, the first period of Turkish rule, that especially concerns us today. Moreover, although Athens during long periods almost disappears from sight, a happy chance has preserved from the years immediately preceding each of the above events contemporary records which enable us to reconstruct, however incompletely, the conditions that were soon to pass away. For Byzantine and Frankish Athens the sources are so meager that the resulting picture is indistinct; but for the two phases of Turkish rule the stream of information flows much more freely and we are further aided by plans and drawings, which, though often defective, at least enable us to realize better the changes caused by the brief but disastrous Venetian occupation. No sharp line can be drawn separating Roman from Byzantine Athens. The An illustrated lecture delivered with a few variations before the Classical Association of Eastern Massachusetts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 2, 1918, and before the Hartford Society of the Archaeological Institute of America in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 7,1919. References to some of the illustrations, derived principally from Stuart and from Omont, are given below. A few notes partially prepared before 1919 and others utilizing material that has been published since 1919 have been added. For a detailed and richly documented account of the events briefly sketched here the reader is referred to Setton, Catalans, especially Chapters I, 11, V, VIII, X. 3

17 4 VISITORS TO GREEK LANDS transition from the university city to the provincial town seems to have been gradual, but its successive stages can no longer be traced. Ceasing to be a center of learning Athens dropped completely out of the current of events and for seven hundred years her name is rarely mentioned by historians. Naturally this decline, accompanied as it was by the extinction of the old faith, was not without serious consequences for the ancient monuments. Some of the temples, indeed, as the Parthenon, Erechtheum, and Theseum, were only transformed into churches, and such buildings as the Propylaea and the Stoa of Hadrian may have been devoted to public use; but in general the indications are that what religious zeal spared fell into ruin and gradually disappeared. Yet the record is not merely one of destruction and decline. The city was by no means deserted and seems to have retained a certain importance, while it doubtless shared the general prosperity of the empire under such great rulers as the Macedonian dynasty and the Comneni. Its bishop in the tenth century had become a Metropolitan, and his cathedral, the Parthenon, now dedicated to the Virgin, the Panagia Theotokos Atheniotissa, was sufficiently famous to attract as pilgrims even high officials from the court at Constantinople. Here too came in 1018 the Emperor Basil I1 to render thanks to the Virgin for his great victory over the Bulgarians and to bestow rich gifts upon her ~anctuary.~ Churches indeed were numerous in Athens, and some have survived until this day. The Panagia Gorgoepekoos or Little Metropolitan is dated by some authorities in the ninth century and can scarcely be later than the twelfth; the Russian church of St. Nicodemus was standing early in the eleventh century, and the churches of the Capnicarea and the Saints Theodore were probably built before I I 50. Outside of the city proper the monastery church at Daphni with its superb mosaics is a work of the eleventh century, and assuredly suggests that at that time the city was fairly prosperous. The inhabitants too enjoyed certain privileges; they were subject only to the land tax and ship money - no light exemption in the heavily taxed Byzantine empire; and they were secured against the quartering of soldiers by the provision that no governor could enter the city with an armed force. Yet in spite of all this Athens was by no means the first city in Greece. Thebes was the residence of the governor of the united provinces of Hellas and Peloponnesus, and was also the center of a flourishing silk industry. Patras, Corinth and Chalcis were all prosperous and wealthy cities compared to Athens, which at the end of the twelfth century had little trade and seems to have manufactured only soap, and cloth 2 See K. M. Setton, Athens in the Later Twelfth Century, Speculum, XIX, No. 22, 1944, pp The Latin emperor Henry I1 in the course of a journey to Thessalonica in 1209 made a detour A la maistre eglyse d Athaines en orisons chou est une eglyse c on dist de Nostre-Dame. Henri de Valenciennes, Histoire de 1 Empereur Henri, in Geoff roi de Villehardouin, Conqugte de Constantinople, ed. Natalis de Wailly (Paris: 1874), p Cf. Miller, p. 113.

18 TURKISH ATHENS 5 for monks gowns. Moreover the coast was plundered ceaselessly by the pirates who infested the Aegean and rendered even the passage to Aegina dangerous. At the end of the twelfth century the silence is broken by the writings of Michael Acominatu~,~ Metropolitan of Athens. A native of Colossae6 but trained at Constantinople in all the learning of his time, the pupil and friend of the Homeric commentator Eustathius, bishop of Thessalonica, and himself an orator and scholar of high reputation, he came to Athens about I I 75 full of enthusiasm, and in spite of bitter disappointments labored earnestly for the welfare of his people, until in 1204 the Frankish conquest drove him from his beloved city? He had found a scanty population almost without manufactures or trade, wretchedly poor and ignorant, to whom his simplest classical style was scarcely intelligible, and who showed plainly their lack of appreciation by inattention and even conversation during his sermons. Full allowance being made for obvious rhetorical exaggeration, the picture is a gloomy one, and we are hardly surprised to learn that the good bishop had little but an occasional name to remind him of the past. Indeed he gives us scanty information about the monuments, beyond lamenting the disappearance of the Heliaea, Peripatos and Lyceum, and the pasturing of sheep among the ruins of the Poecile. One allusion, however, shows that the choragic monument of Lysicrates had already become the Lantern of Demosthenes (6 Aqpoo.9Evow~ Ibi)xvo~). The Acropolis was already a fortress, and apparently the only defensible part of the city, but it was also the ecclesiastical center. Here the bishop lived, though whether in the Propylaea or in the complex of buildings which seem to have clustered about the Erechtheum and the Parthenon is quite uncertain. Both these temples had long before been transformed into churches and the latter was the cathedral or ~ v-ihq Exxhqoia, dedicated still to the Virgin of Athens. Acorninatus was naturally proud of his splendid church, and refers to its decorations, some of which were due to the gifts of the Emperor Basil 11, to its famous lamp, which according to the Icelandic pilgrim of 1102, Saewulf, was fed by a never failing supply of oil, and especially to a golden dove which ever circled about the cross It has recently been shown that Michael s surname is Choniates, not, as previously accepted, Acorninatus. See G. Stadtmiiller, Michael Choniates, Metropolit von Athen (ca. I 138- ca. 1222), Orientalia Christiana, XXXIII*, No. 91, 1934, pp ; M. Wellnhofer, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, XXXV1, 1935, p. 107; Setton, A Note on Michael Choniates, Speculum, XXI, No. 2, 1946, p. 234; idem, Catalans, p He was born in the Phrygian Chonae, about 4 km. from Colossae. Stadtmuller, p Georgios Burtzes, the predecessor of Michael in the see, died in February, Michael therefore presumably did not come to Athens before that date, and sources examined a few years ago all point to his having been called there in See ibid., pp ; Wellnhofer, loc. cit.; Setton, loc. cit., p For an account of Athens as Michael knew it see Miller, pp ; Stadtmuller, loc. tit., pp ; Setton, Speculum, 1944, pp Michael, with some wanderings, spent the greater part of his life after 1204 in the island of Ceos, and is said to have visited Athens once in He died at Boudinitza (Mutinitza), probably in Stadtmiiller, pp ; Setton, Speculum, 1946, pp

19 6 VISITORS TO GREEK LANDS on the high altar.? All this is vague enough; we must still wait two hundred years for a western traveler to attempt an account of the remains of the ancient city, and during this interval many changes had taken place. In the division of the Greek empire among the Crusaders, which followed the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Greece was assigned to the king of Thessalonica, the Lombard leader, Boniface of Montferrat, who without delay proceeded to occupy his kingdom. Acominatus wisely declined a hopeless resistance, and the prompt surrender of Athens seems to have been attended with no further violence than the plundering of the Parthenon and the dispersal of the episcopal library, which apparently was contained in two cupboards in the church. Boniface gave Thebes and Athens as a fief to a Burgundian noble, Othon de la Roche, who took the title of Dominus Athenarum, which his Greek subjects translated as Megas- Kyr. His nephew and successor, Guy, was created duke by Louis IX of France. The capital, as in Byzantine days, was at Thebes, and we hear little of Athens. The feudal system and the Latin church were naturally established, but the Greeks were not oppressed, and their priests remained, though the sees and revenues were given to the Roman clergy. The Parthenon, or Notre-Dame d Athcnes, then became the cathedral of a French archbishop, with a chapter and services according to the use of Paris, while later we find that Pope Nicholas IV granted indulgences to those who visited Santa Maria di Atene on certain festivals. Papal documents show that Pope Innocent I11 confirmed the ancient privileges of the Athenian diocese and likewise that the Dukes frequently paid very little attention to the claims of their clergy. The religious orders followed the Roman church. Daphni was given to Cistercians from Burgundy, and we hear of Franciscans at the foot of Hymettus. Thebes, however, as the capital, was the seat of a splendid court. So much is clear from the glimpse we get of the brilliant display that marked the admission to knighthood of Guy I1 at the end of the century, while scattered allusions show that the French in Greece maintained a high reputation for chivalry and their castles formed a school to which nobles at home gladly sent their sons for training in knightly arts. Under its new rulers the country evidently prospered, and at the end of the century a Spanish noble found the Duke of Athens barely inferior to a king in wealth and splendor. At the height of its power a single day destroyed this French feudal state. The Duke, Walter of Brienne, had quarreled with the Catalan Company, a dangerous band of mercenaries, and on March I 5,13 I I, he attacked them at Lake Copais. The battle was a complete victory for the Catalans. The Duke Saewulf, Recueil a% voyages et mdmoires, ed. Armand d Avezac (Paris: SociCtC de GBographie, IV, 1839), p It is not certain that Saewulf himself went to Athens, for after recording his arrival at Negroponte, he continues: Athenas etenim ubi apostolus Paulus predicavit, distat duas dietas a latere Corinthiae unde beatus Dionysius ortus est, et doctus, et postmodum a beato Paulo ad Deum conversus: ibi est ecclesia beatae Virginis MARIAE, in qua est oleum in lampade semper ardens sed nunquam deficiens.

20 TURKISH ATHENS 7 fell, and the French duchy was not so much conquered as completely blotted out. The Catalans were masters of Thebes and Athens, and divided without opposition the spoils of the fallen. Their neighbors, however, including the powerful Venetians, were hostile, and being themselves under the ban of the Pope, they naturally turned to their nominal feudal lord, Frederick of Sicily, of the house of Aragon. He accepted the dukedom for his son, and for seventy-five years Spanish viceroys governed Athens. The Catalans were rude soldiers, seldom knights, and there was doubtless much plundering and oppression before the new state was fairly organized. Later the Greeks were evidently well treated; at least, a Greek notary is found fighting bravely for the Catalans and especially recommended to King Pedro IV of Aragon for his services. Documents at Palermo and Barcelona throw much light on the details of Catalan organization, but naturally pass over the monuments in which we are interested. It seems clear also that the descendants of the conquerors did not inherit their military ability, for before the end of the century the Catalans were so hard pressed by another set of mercenaries, the Navarrese, that they burned the castle at Thebes, and appealed to King Pedro IV of Aragon for aid to defend the Acropolis. The reply of the king, himself a troubadour, is significant; he promises aid and eulogizes Athens and its monuments, which form, he declares, such a jewel as no king of Europe has in his crown; at the same time his queen, Sybilla, wrote to the archbishop, now a Spaniard, to ask for some of the precious relics in the Parthenon. It is interesting to see that under the Catalans the Acropolis was at last able to stand a siege, and it is not improbable that with other fortifications they built on the south wing of the Propylaea the tower which is so conspicuous in views of the Acropolis before An attack of Navarrese mercenaries was repelled in 1380, but five years later the Catalans were attacked by Nerio Acciaioli, one of the great Florentine family, who for some years had ruled Corinth and Nauplia. By January, 1387, he was master of Athens, but in the Acropolis the Catalan commander Pedro de Pau, though left without aid from Aragon, held out for over a year, and it is not till May, 1388, that a Florentine reports, Messer Neri has the castle of Setines, the mediaeval corruption of tds A-&ilvas, which lingered on into the seventeenth century. The establishment of a Florentine Duke brought one great change. Nerio was friendly to the Greeks; the official language became Greek and the Greek Metropolitan after nearly two hundred years returned to Athens - a favor which that prelate seems to have requited by intriguing even with the Turks to expel the schismatic barbarians, so that Nerio again banished him. The Turks, however, had already occupied Thessaly, and Nerio found it expedient to pay a tribute to the Sultan, who left him otherwise independent. He died in 1394, and his will bequeathed the city of Athens to the Parthenon, Sta. Maria di Atene, and recom-

21 8 VISITORS TO GREEK LANDS mended his duchy to the protection of Venice, evidently fearing the Turkish advance. For seventy years before the Turkish conquest the Dukedom of Athens was held by the Acciaioli. They were in frequent correspondence with their kinsmen at home, and received Florentines and other Italian visitors at their court. Such visitors, influenced by the new spirit of the Renaissance, must have stimulated interest in the ancient monuments, and in fact four accounts of the antiquities, if such these brief notices may be called, have come down to us. Their picture is obviously incomplete; but one point is clear, - the destruction of the ancient city had already been carried out. With no important exceptions, the monuments mentioned by these travellers were seen in much the same condition, so far as we can judge, by visitors two hundred years later, and, apart from the damage to the Acropolis in the siege of 1687, were drawn by Stuart in It is safe, I think, to say that ancient Athens was largely destroyed in the early days of the Eastern Empire, and in a perfectly peaceful, though unfortunately none the less thorough manner. I am also inclined to attribute to this Florentine period and to antiquarian zeal, rather than to popular tradition, most of the attempts at identification of the monuments, which we shall meet with later. So far as I know, only the Lantern of Demosthenes, the popular name of the monument of Lysicrates, is found before the Latin conquest. The Acciaioli were vassals of the Sultan, but they paid their tribute regularly and avoided offense, until 1456, when a family quarrel, murders and general depravity gave Mohammed I1 a perfectly valid reason for deposing them and annexing their duchy, - a deed accomplished apparently with little effort and no harm to the city. So began the Turkish rule which continued with scarcely an interruption for three hundred and seventy-five years. It was not at first the wretched mixture of corruption and outrage which we know too well. Under the great Sultans of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries administration was fairly efficient, and the Turkish government does not seem to have been much more oppressive and harsh than many of its western neighbors. Greece had been for a century and a half the scene of continual strife between its petty states, with its coasts plundered by pirates and its inhabitants carried off as slaves by the invading armies of the Sultan. The final Turkish conquest meant, for the common people at least, a large degree of quiet and relative security, while for the church it meant freedom from the bitterly hated Latin rule. Athens, we are told, was distinctly favored by the conqueror. The people were confirmed in their local rights and privileges, and the Sultan gave special orders to protect the buildings of the Acropolis. A conspiracy to restore the Duke in 1460 caused, so far as we can see, little change, * See below, Appendix I.

22 TURKISH ATHENS 9 though it is likely that the Parthenon, long the cathedral church, was then transformed into a mosque, and that the Acropolis, now a fortress, was closed to Christians. Whatever the effect of the Turkish occupation on the people or the monuments, one result was the cessation of intercourse with western Europe. Never an important commercial center and no longer ruled by Italians, Athens was still further isolated by its distance from the ordinary trade routes to Smyrna and Constantinople by way of the Aegean islands, and from the course of the pilgrims to the Holy Land, which touched at Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus. So complete, in fact, was the obscurity in which it was enveloped that in I 575 the Tubingen professor, Martin Crusius, inquired of Greek correspondents, whether it was true that Athens was completely destroyed? Two brief letters reassured him, but it must be admitted that however pleasing to their recipient, they do not help us much toward a picture of Athens under the Turks; for that we must wait another hundred years. The seventeenth century saw a great development of French trade and influence in the Levant. Regular diplomatic relations were opened with the Porte, consulates were established in the Morea and later at Athens, missionaries settled at Constantinople and other places, and under Louis XIV France assumed her historic place of protector of the Christians in the East. All this turned men's thoughts once more toward Greece, and in 1669 the capture of Candia by the Turks, which ended the war with Venice, removed many of the hindrances that had hampered western travellers in the Levant. As a result of this greater freedom, in the next fifteen years more was written about Athens than during the fifteen preceding centuries, and for the greater part by men who had themselves visited the city. The most distinguished of these visitors was the French Ambassador, Olier de Nointel," who after completing some difficult negotiations at Constantinople, made a tour of the East, attended by a numerous retinue. He reached the city in November, 1674, and after a fortnight's stay made a short journey through northem Greece, and in December returned to his post at Constantinople. This visit to Athens owes its importance chiefly to the work of his artist (not Jacques Carrey), who without the aid of scaffolding and in an incredibly short time made Crusius (Martin Kraus), Turco-Grueciu (Basle: I 584), Lib. VII, pp. 430, 461 ; Laborde, I, 55-59; L. Ross, Juhrb. der Litterutur, XC, 1840, Anzeige-Blutt, pp In one of these letters he was told that the city contained about 12,000 inhabitants, that the Acropolis, on which the Temple of the Unknown God was situated, was reserved exclusively for the Turks, while the Christians lived in the lower town, and that only about a third of the area of the ancient city was inhabited. His other correspondent dealt in generalities about the purity of the language and the air, and the beauty of the monuments, among which was the Pantheon (for Parthenon), decorated with sculptured scenes from Greek history and having in the pediment a group of horses by Praxiteles. lo See Vandal, pp ; Collignon, Relation, pp

23 10 VISITORS TO GREEK LANDS careful drawings of a large part of the sculptures of the Parthenon, including both pediments, thirty-two metopes, and more than half of the frieze. In spite of numerous defects these drawings are far more valuable than any description, for they contain the only useful record of the decoration that was destined soon to perish. Another result of this visit has in relatively recent times come to light. About fifteen years earlier, Jean Giraud of Lyon had been appointed consul at Athens. He married a Greek, one of the family of the Palaeologi, and though he lost his French appointment, was at once made English consul by the ambassador, Lord Winchelsea, and evidently spent the rest of his life in Athens. A man of some education, familiar with both ancient and modern languages, and interested in the geography and antiquities of the country, he gladly guided his infrequent visitors among the ruins, and Spon and Wheler, easily the most intelligent travellers of the time: bear hearty testimony to his ready and valuable aid. Nointel intended l1 In 1674 also there appeared in Lyon a little book, Relation de 1 Ctat prcsent de la ville d Athhes, containing a long letter written by a Jesuit missionary, Jacques Paul Babin, and now published with preface and notes by a young physician, Jacob Spon, who was interested in epigraphy and archaeology. He indicates in his preface (unnumbered paragraph) that he was responsible for a view of Athens that accompanied it, evidently by an artist who worked merely from a rough sketch. It is interesting only as the first view of Athens based, not upon pure fantasy, but on reality (Omont, p. 13, P1. XXXVIII, upper left-hand corner). The topographical value of Babin s letter is not great, but it confirmed Spon in a determination to visit Athens. In France it was superseded by Athhes ancienne et modeme, which appeared in Paris in 1675, quickly ran into a fourth edition, and was translated into English in It purported to record the experiences of a French gentleman, La Guilletihre, who after a tour in Greece sent his notes to a brother in Paris, who edited them with the aid of the passages from ancient authors collected by the learned Meursius. In reality it was the work of one, Guillet de St.- George, who had never seen Athens, but had combined the reports of the Capuchins with a careful study of Meursius. As the earliest attempt to apply seriously the ancient authors to the interpretation of existing remains his efforts deserve high praise, but the romantic form (chosen in accordance with the taste of the time) as well as many other factors, make its present value hard to estimate. Guillet s lack of personal acquaintance with Athens led him into curious blunders. At the same time he made some acute observations. He was the first to identify correctly the Tower of the Winds and connect it with the Horologium of Andronicus described by Vitruvius. The plan, probably furnished by the Capuchins (Omont, pp , P1. XXXIX; as reproduced by Guillet, idem, p. 16, P1. XL), is drawn as a bird s-eye view from the farther bank of the Ilissus (idem, p. 10, PI. XXXI). Guillet has added a number of sites or ruins, where he was convinced that they should be indicated, though none could have been visible. The part of the city properly concealed behind the Acropolis has been transferred to the north, and thus the whole region northwest of the Acropolis has been violently distorted. Shortly before the appearance of Guillet s book Spon and a young Englishman, Sir George Wheler, who joined him in Italy, went to Athens, which they made their headquarters from January 27 to March 9, In 1678 Spon published an account of his travels (Spon and Wheler, A Journey into Greece) with copies of numerous inscriptions and some rather poor illustrations. This work, which was practically translated by Wheler, though its plan of Athens (Omont, pp , PI. XLII, middle view) was far behind Guillet s, laid the foundations of a scientific Athenian topography. It was the earliest detailed study of the monuments by a man versed in ancient literature and with some idea of sound critical method. Mistakes, of course,