Of all the strange and romantic creations of the Middle Ages none is so curious as the capture of the poetic “Isles of Greece” by a handful of Venetian adventurers, and their organisation as a Latin Duchy for upwards of three centuries. Even to-day the traces of the ducal times may be found in many of the Cyclades, where Latin families, descendants of the conquerors, still preserve the high-sounding names and the Catholic religion of their Italian ancestors, in the midst of ruined palaces and castles, built by the mediæval lords of the Archipelago out of ancient Hellenic temples. But of the Duchy of Naxos little is generally known. Its picturesque history, upon which Finlay touched rather slightly in his great work, has since then been thoroughly explored by a laborious German, the late Dr Hopf; but that lynx-eyed student of archives had no literary gifts; he could not write, he could only read, and his researches lie buried in a ponderous encyclopædia. So this delightful Duchy, whose whole story is one long romance, still awaits the hand of a novelist to make it live again. The origin of this fantastic State of the blue Ægean is to be found in the overthrow of the Greek Empire at the time of the Fourth Crusade. By the partition treaty made between the Latin conquerors of Constantinople, Venice received the Cyclades among other acquisitions. But the Venetian Government, with its usual commercial astuteness, soon came to the conclusion that the conquest of those islands would too severely tax the resources of the State. It was therefore decided to leave the task of occupying them to private citizens, who would plant Venetian colonies in the Ægean, and live on friendly terms with the Republic. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that generation, and it so happened that at that very moment the Venetian colony at Constantinople contained the very man for such an undertaking. The old Doge, Dandolo, had taken with him on the crusade his nephew, Marco Sanudo, a bold warrior and a skilful diplomatist, who had signalised himself by negotiating the sale of Crete to the Republic, and was then filling the post of judge in what we should now call the Consular Court at Constantinople. On hearing the decision of his Government, Sanudo quitted the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, to whom he promised rich fiefs in the El Dorado of the Ægean, equipped eight galleys at his own cost, and sailed with them to carve out a Duchy for himself in the islands of the Archipelago. Seventeen islands speedily submitted, and at one spot alone did he meet with any real resistance. Naxos has always been the pearl of the Ægean: poets have placed there the beautiful myth of Ariadne and Dionysos; Herodotos describes it as “excelling the other islands in prosperity[167]”; even to-day, when so many of the Cyclades are barren rocks, the orange and lemon groves of Naxos entitle it, far