Towards the orthodox clergy Marco II was, if we may believe the Jesuit historian of the Duchy, by no means so tolerant as his two predecessors[168]. There was, it seems, in the island of Naxos an altar dedicated to St Pachys, a portly man of God, who was believed by the devout Naxiotes to have the power of making their children fat. In the East fatness is still regarded as a mark of comeliness, and in the thirteenth century St Pachys was a very popular personage, whose altar was visited by loving mothers, and whose hierophants lived upon the credulity of the faithful. Marco II regarded this institution as a gross superstition. Had he been a wise statesman, he would have tolerated it all the same, and allowed the matrons of Naxos to shove their offspring through the hollow altar of the fat saint, so long as no harm ensued to his State. But Marco II was not wise; he smashed the altar, and thereby so irritated his Orthodox subjects that he had to build a fortress to keep them in order. But the Greeks were not the only foes who menaced the Duchy at this period. The Archipelago had again become the happy hunting-ground of pirates of all nationalities—Greek corsairs from the impregnable rock of Monemvasia or from the islands of Santorin and Keos, Latins like Roger de Lluria, the famous Sicilian admiral, who preyed on their fellow-religionists, mongrels who combined the vices of both their parents. The first place among the pirates of the time belonged to the Genoese, the natural rivals of the Venetians in the Levant, and on that account popular with the Greek islanders. No sooner was a Genoese galley spied in the offing than the peasants would hurry down with provisions to the beach, just as the Calabrian peasants have been known to give food to notorious brigands. The result of these visitations on the smaller islands may be easily imagined: thus the inhabitants of Amorgos emigrated in a body to Naxos from fear of the corsairs; yet, in spite of the harm inflicted by Licario and the pirates, we are told that the fertile plain of Drymalia, in the interior of Naxos, “then contained twelve large villages, a number of farm buildings, country houses and towers, with about 10,000 inhabitants.” Sometimes the remote consequences of the pirates’ raids were worse than the raids themselves. Thus, on one of these expeditions, some corsairs carried off a valuable ass belonging to one of the Ghisi. The ass, marked with its master’s initials, was bought by Marco II’s son, Guglielmo, who lived at Syra. The purchaser was under no illusions as to the ownership of the ass, but was perfectly aware that he was buying stolen goods. Seeing this, Ghisi invaded Syra, laid the island waste, and besieged Sanudo in his castle. But the fate of the ass had aroused wide sympathies. Marco II had taken the oath of fealty to Charles of Anjou, as suzerain of Achaia, after the death of his liege lord, Guillaume de Villehardouin, and it chanced that the Angevin