Meanwhile, on October 18, 1510, it had been proposed at Venice that
the mad duke’s brother-in-law, Antonio Loredano, should be sent as
governor to Naxos, with a salary of 400 ducats a year, payable out of
the revenues, just as Venetian governors had been sent there during the
minority of Francesco III. Loredano sailed on January 16, 1511, for his
post, where he remained for four and a half years[179]. Naxos, in his
time, cannot have been a gloomy exile, for we hear of the “balls and
festivals with the accompaniment of very polished female society” which
greeted the Venetian ambassador[180]. We do not learn who governed the
duchy between July 1515, when Loredano returned to Venice, and the coming
of age of Duke Giovanni IV, which seems to have been in May 1517. On
May 6 of that year he wrote a letter to the Cretan government, signed
_Joannes Crispus dux Egeo Pelagi_, which Sanuto has preserved[181]; and
in the same summer _il ducha di Nixia, domino Zuan Crespo_, was captured
by corsairs while hunting, and subsequently ransomed[182]—an adventure
which Hopf, as we have seen, wrongly ascribed to Francesco III.
7. CRETE UNDER THE VENETIANS (1204-1669)
Of all the Levantine possessions acquired by Venice as the result of
the Fourth Crusade, by far the most important was the great island of
Crete, which she obtained in August, 1204, from Boniface of Montferrat
to whom it had been given 15 months earlier by Alexios IV, at the cost
of 1000 marks of silver. At that time the population of the island,
which in antiquity is supposed to have been a million, was probably
about 500,000 or 600,000[183]. Lying on the way to Egypt and Syria, it
was an excellent stopping-place for the Venetian merchantmen, and the
immense sums of money expended upon its defence prove the value which the
shrewd statesmen of the lagoons set upon it. Whether its retention was
really worth the enormous loss of blood and treasure which it involved
may perhaps be doubted, though in our own days the Concert of Europe has
thought fit to spend about thrice the value of the island in the process
of freeing it from the Turk. What distinguishes the mediæval history of
Crete from that of the other Frank possessions in the Near East is the
almost constant insubordination of the Cretan population. While in the
Duchy of Athens we scarcely hear of any restlessness on the part of
the Greeks, while in the Principality of Achaia they gave comparatively
little trouble, while in the Archipelago they seldom murmured against
their Dukes—in Crete, on the other hand, one insurrection followed
another in rapid succession, and the first 160 years of Venetian rule are
little else than a record of insurrections. The masters of the island
explained this by the convenient theory, applied in our own time to
the Irish, that the Cretans had a double dose of original sin, and the
famous verse of Epimenides, to which the New Testament has given undying