he sought to lay the foundations of a navy, and strove to prevent the fruitful island of Ægina, then the property of the Catalan family of Caopena, from falling into the hands of Venice, he met with a severe rebuff. To the Florentine Duke of Athens Ægina, as a Venetian colony, might well seem, as it had seemed to Aristotle, the “eyesore of the Piræus.” With his family’s old home, Florence, Antonio maintained the closest relations. In 1422 a Florentine ambassador arrived in Athens with instructions to confer the freedom of the great Tuscan Commonwealth upon the Duke; to inform him that Florence, having now, by the destruction of Pisa and the purchase of Leghorn, become a maritime power, intended to embark in the Levant trade; and to ask him, therefore, for the benefit of the most-favoured-nation clause. Antonio gladly made all Florentine ships free of his harbours, and reduced the usual customs dues in favour of all Florentine merchants throughout his dominions. Visitors from Tuscany, when they landed at Riva d’Ostia, on the Gulf of Corinth, must, indeed, have felt themselves in the land of a friendly prince, though his Court on the Akropolis presented a curious mixture of the Greek and the Florentine elements. Half a Greek himself, Antonio chose both his wives from that race—the first the beautiful daughter of a Greek priest, to whom he had lost his heart in the mazes of a wedding-dance at Thebes; the second an heiress of the great Messenian family of Melissenos, whose bees and bells are not the least picturesque escutcheon in the heraldry of mediæval Greece. As he had no children, numbers of the Acciajuoli clan came to Athens with an eye to the ducal coronet, which had conferred such lustre upon the steel-workers and bankers of Brescia and Florence. One cousin settled down at the castle of Sykaminon, near Oropos, which had belonged to the Knights of the Hospital, and served his kinsman as an ambassador; another became bishop of Cephalonia, the island of that great lady, the Countess Francesca, whom Froissart describes as a mediæval Penelope, whose maids of honour made silken coverings so fine that there was none like them, and whose splendid hospitality delighted the French nobles on their way home from a Turkish prison after the battle of Nikopolis. Two other Acciajuoli were archbishops of Thebes; and towards the close of Antonio’s long reign a second generation of the family had grown up in Greece. With such names as Acciajuoli, Medici, Pitti, and Machiavelli at the Athenian Court, Attica had, indeed, become a Florentine colony.