Of literary culture there are some few traces in Florentine Athens. It was in Antonio’s reign that Athens gave birth to her last historian, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, the Herodotos of mediæval Greece, who told the story of the new Persian invasion, and to his brother Demetrios, who did so much to diffuse Greek learning in Italy. Another of Antonio’s subjects is known to scholars as a copyist of manuscripts at Siena; and it is obvious that the two Italian Courts of Athens and Joannina were regarded as places where professional men might find openings. A young Italian writes from Arezzo to ask if either Antonio Acciajuoli or Carlo Tocco could give him a chair of jurisprudence, logic, medicine, or natural or moral philosophy[112]. Unfortunately, we are not told whether the modest request of this universal genius was granted or not. Thus, for a long period, the Athenian duchy enjoyed peace and prosperity, broken only by a terrible visitation of the plague and further diminished by emigration—that scourge of modern Greece. But the modern Greeks have not the twin institutions, serfdom and slavery, on which mediæval society rested. Even the enlightened Countess of Cephalonia presented a young female slave to one of her cousins, with full power to sell or otherwise dispose of her as he pleased. Antonio did all in his power to retain the useful Albanians, who had entered his dominions in large numbers after the capture of the Despotat of Epeiros by Carlo Tocco in 1418, and thus rendered a service to Attica, the results of which are felt to this present hour. It is to the wise policy of her last Aragonese and her second Florentine duke that that Albanian colonisation is due which has given “the thin soil” of Attica numbers of sturdy cultivators, who still speak Albanian as well as Greek, and still preserve in such village names as Spata, Liosia, and Liopesi, the memory of the proud Albanian chieftains of Epeiros. Greek influence, too, grew steadily under a dynasty which was now half Hellenised. The notary and chancellor of the city continued to be a Greek; and a Greek _archon_ was, for the first time since the Frankish conquest, to play a leading part in Athenian politics[113]. * * * * *