Franco’s three sons were enrolled in the corps of janissaries, where one of them showed military and administrative ability of so high an order as to win the favour of his sovereign. Their mother, a Greek of noble lineage and famed for her beauty, became the cause of a terrible tragedy which convulsed alike Court and Church. Amoiroutses, the former minister and betrayer of the Greek Empire of Trebizond, fell desperately in love with the fair widow, to whom he addressed impassioned verses, and swore, though he was already married, to wed her or die. The Œcumenical Patriarch forbade the banns, and lost his beard and his office rather than yield to the Sultan. But swift retribution fell upon the bigamist, for he dropped down dead, a dice-box in his hand. Though the Acciajuoli dynasty had thus fallen for ever, members of that great family still remained in Greece. An Acciajuoli was made civil governor of the old Venetian colony of Koron, in Messenia, when the Spaniards conquered it from the Turks in 1532. When they abandoned it, he was captured by pirates but eventually ransomed, only to die in poverty at Naples, where his race had first risen to eminence. At the beginning of the last century the French traveller, Pouqueville, was shown at Athens a donkey-driver named Neri, in whose veins flowed the blood of the Florentine Dukes; and the modern historian of Christian Athens, Neroutsos, used to contend that his family was descended from Nerozzo Pitti, lord of Sykaminon and uncle of the last Duke of Athens. In Florence the family became extinct only so recently as 1834; and the Certosa and the Lung’ Arno Acciajuoli still preserve its memory there. In a Florentine gallery are two coloured portraits of the Dukes of Athens, which would seem to be those of Nerio I and the bastard Antonio I. In that case the Florentine Dukes of Athens are the only Frankish rulers of Greece, except the Palatine Counts of Cephalonia, whose likeness has been preserved to posterity[127]. Thus ended the strange connection between Florence and Athens. A titular Duke of Athens had become tyrant of the Florentines, a Florentine merchant had become Duke of Athens; but the age when French and Italian adventurers could find an El Dorado on the poetic soil of Greece was over. The dull uniformity of Turkish rule spread over the land, save where the Dukes of the Archipelago and the Venetian colonies still remained the sole guardians of Western culture, the only rays of light in the once brilliant Latin Orient. AUTHORITIES 1. Ἔγγραφα ἀναφερόμενα εἰς τὴν μεσαιωνικὴν Ἱστορία τῶν Ἀθηνῶν (_Documents relating to the Mediæval History of Athens_). Ed. Sp. P. Lampros. Athens, 1906. 2. _Briefe aus der “Corrispondenza Acciajoli” in der Laurenziana zu Florenz._ By Ferdinand Gregorovius. Munich, 1890. 3. Nicolai de Marthono liber peregrinationis ad loca sancta. In _La Revue de l’Orient Latin_, vol. III. Paris, 1895.