Latins.” The Emperor and historian, John Cantacuzene, gives much the same
description of their descendants a century and a half later.
Such was the condition of Greece, when Boniface and his army emerged from
the vale of Tempe and marched across the plain of Thessaly to Larissa.
He bestowed that ancient city upon a Lombard noble, who henceforth
styled himself Guglielmo de Larsa from the name of his fief. Velestino,
the ancient Pheræ, the scene of the legend of Admetos and Alcestis,
and the site of the modern battle, fell to the share of Berthold von
Katzenellenbogen, whose name must have proved a stumbling-block to his
Thessalian vassals. The army then took the usual route by way of Pharsala
and Domoko—names familiar alike in the ancient and modern history of
Greek warfare—down to Lamia and thence across the Trachinian plain to
Thermopylæ, where Sgouros was awaiting it. But the memories of Leonidas
failed to inspire the _archon_ of Nauplia to follow his example. Niketas
tells us that the mere sight of the Latin knights in their coats of mail
sufficed to make him flee straight to his own fastness of Akrocorinth,
leaving the pass undefended. Conscious of its strength—for Thermopylæ
must have been far more of a defile then than now—Boniface resolved to
secure it permanently against attack. He therefore invested the Marquess
Guido Pallavicini, nicknamed by the Greeks “Marchesopoulo,” with the
fief of Boudonitza, which commanded the other end of the pass. Thus
arose the famous Marquisate of Boudonitza, which was destined to play
an important part in the Frankish history of Greece, and which, after a
continuous existence of over two centuries, as guardian of the Northern
marches, has left a memory of its fallen greatness in the ruins of the
castle and chapel of its former lords, of whose descendants, the Zorzi
of Venice, there are still living—so Mr Horatio Brown informs me—some
thirty representatives in that city. Following the present carriage-road
from Lamia to the Corinthian Gulf, Boniface established another defensive
post at the pass of Gravia, so famous centuries afterwards in the War of
Independence, conferring it as a fief on the two brothers Jacques and
Nicholas de St Omer. At the foot of Parnassos, on the site of the ancient
Amphissa, he next founded the celebrated barony of Salona, which lasted
almost as long as the Marquisate of Boudonitza. Upon the almost Cyclopean
stones of the classic Akropolis of Amphissa, which Philip of Macedon had
destroyed fifteen centuries before, Thomas de Stromoncourt built himself
the fortress, of which the majestic ruins—perhaps the finest Frankish
remains in Greece—still stand among the cornfields on the hill above the
modern town. According to the local tradition, the name of Salona, which
the place still bears in common parlance, despite the usual official
efforts to revive the classical terminology, is derived from the King of
Salonika, its second founder. The lord of Salona soon extended his sway
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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