The narrowness of the environment made these efforts after magnificence more conspicuous than they would have been in the country they had quitted. Gorgeous garments and splendid armor adorned and defended bodies cherished with pompous banquets and royal wines. But the ease of their condition did not weaken the limbs or the spirit of the French lords. Their passion for the tournament kept them hardy for their wars with each other, stiffening their voluptuousness with that desire to shine in strife which forbade pleasure to degenerate into effeminacy. Their passion for ballads and the ballad-maker's arts refined their wild, bright life with tales of ancient days and heroic ideals. Their passion for women, growing apace in the magical atmosphere of that enchanted land where the winds seemed to whisper the songs and lisp the names of old-time lovers, was saved by their persistent chivalry, artificial perhaps in form, but with a heart behind its artificiality, from lowering into the Oriental grossness that was the weakness of Byzantium. The history of the ages has no stranger as it has no more bravely painted page than that which records the rule of the French dukes in Athens and Peloponnesus. If Athens in the dawn of the fourteenth century was strangely unlike the Athens of the Periclean age, the contrast was rather of one kind of splendor against another than of a present squalor with a splendid past. The capital of the French dukes of Athens surpassed in luxury and comfort any European capital of the time. Their commerce flourished, their port was populous with ships, their influence was felt, and their strength unquestioned all along the Greek littoral. Many of the other French princes in Greece had pomp and power, but Baldwin, Duke of Athens, overcrowned them all for wealth and power and magnificence. He delighted to beautify after the fashion of his time the spot that once had been the loveliest in the world, and if the shade of some great Athenian could have returned for an hour to the city of Cecrops, he must have regretted, indeed, the glories of the past; but, at the same time, he must have recognized that the barbarian who held by a strong hand the land of Deucalion was not denied some measure of the intelligence that goes to the making of a fair town and a great state. Duke Baldwin was always hospitable to strangers visiting Athens, and delighted to send them away brimmed with admiration of the civilization of Athens and the generosity of Athens's duke. If he did not set a kingly crown upon his helmet, he lived like a king, and could have entertained the monarch of France or the sovereign of England with an opulence not to be outdone in Paris or in London.