The occupation of the Greek islands by the Latins was unnatural, and, like most unnatural things, it was destined not to endure. But this strange meeting of two deeply interesting races in the classic seats of Greek lyric poetry can scarcely fail to strike the imagination. And to-day, when Italy is once more showing a desire to play a _rôle_ in the near East, when Italians have officered the Cretan police, when Italian troops have occupied thirteen islands in the lower Ægean since 1912, including the old Quirini fief of Stampalia, when the Aldobrandini’s thirteenth century possession of Adalia is being revived, and the statesmen of Rome are looking wistfully across the Adriatic, it is curious to go back to the times when Venetian and Lombard families held sway among the islands of the Ægean, and the Latin galleys, flying the pennons of those petty princes, glided in and out of the harbours of that classic sea. Even in her middle age Greece had her romance, and no fitter place could have been chosen for it than “the wave-beat shore of Naxos.” APPENDIX THE MAD DUKE OF NAXOS Subsequent historians of the Duchy of Naxos have accepted without question Hopf’s[171] chronology and brief description of the reign of Francesco III Crispo, who was formally proclaimed duke, after a brief Venetian protectorate, in October 1500. According to the German scholar, who is followed by Count Mas Latrie[172], Francesco III “quietly governed” his island domain down to 1518, the only incident in his career being his capture by Turkish corsairs while hunting in 1517. His wife, according to the same authorities, had already predeceased him, having died “before 1501.” But a perusal of Sanuto’s _Diarii_ shows that all these statements are wrong. Francesco III, so far from “quietly governing” his subjects, was a homicidal maniac, who murdered his wife in 1510 and died in the following year.