The Cretans possess, in common with all the Greeks, the avidity for instruction and quickness of intellect which make of this race the dominant element in the Levant. They are tenaciously devoted to their religion and to their traditions, which have kept them up and preserved the national character against such a continuation of hostile influences as probably no other people ever lived through. The history of Crete is a series of obstinate rebellions and barbarous repressions, since the first conquest by the Saracens in A.D. 820, a conquest which was followed by an almost complete apostasy from Christianity--sword-conversion, and by persistent attempts on the part of the Byzantine emperors to reconquer it, until 961, when Nikephoras Phocas succeeded in driving the Saracens out. They seem to have made no considerable addition to the Cretan stock, since the population rapidly returned to Christianity, to which, judging from the known and more recent past, they had always probably remained devoted at heart. At the division of the Byzantine empire, Crete passed to Boniface, Duke of Montserrat, and from him was purchased by the Venetian Republic, 1204, from which time till its conquest by the Turks, completed in 1669, the Cretans were under a yoke that would probably have depopulated any other section of the Old World. The cruelties and misgovernment of the governors sent from Venice would be incredible if not recorded by Venetian historians and official records. The Venetians seem to have regarded the Cretans much in the same light as the English colonists of America did the Indians, and, when their wretched state came to the knowledge of the Senate, they sent commissioners to examine into it, from whose reports I translate some extracts (quoted in Italian by Pashley), who took them from the original documents in the public library of Venice. Basadonna, the first of these officers whose reports remain, says (1566): "The tax-gatherers and others dependent on them use against these unhappy people, in one way and another, strange and horrible tyrannies. It would be a matter worthy of your clemency immediately to abolish so odious and barbarous exactions, since to maintain them is to abandon these wretched men to most cruel serpents, who lacerate and devour them entirely, or oblige the few of them who remain to escape into Turkey, following the footsteps of innumerable others who, from time to time, have gone away from this cause." Then from Garzoni (1586): "In all the villages in which I have been, I have seen the houses of the inhabitants, in the greater part of which there is not be seen any article for the uses of dress or table; and for food, they are without bread or corn; they have no wine; their women are despoiled, their children naked, the men slightly covered, and the house emptied of everything, without any sign of human habitation. And this wretched people ('_quella meschinità de' huomini_') is compelled