A long period of peace now ensued, a peace born not of prosperous contentment but of hopeless exhaustion. The first act of the Republic was to substitute for the original oath of fealty, exacted from the colonists at the time of the first great settlement in 1212, a much stricter formula of obedience. The next was to put up to auction the vacant fiefs of the executed and banished knights at Venice, for it had been resolved that none of those estates should be acquired by members of the Greek aristocracy. The bidding was not very brisk, for Crete had a bad character on the Venetian exchange, so that, some years later, on the destruction of the castle of Tenedos, the Republic transported the whole population to Candia. There they settled outside the capital in a suburb which, from their old home, received the name of Le Tenedee[190]. We hear little about Crete during the first half of the fifteenth century, which was so critical a time for the Franks of the mainland. The principal grievance of the colonists at that period seems to have been the arrogance of the Jews, against whom they twice petitioned the Government. It was a Jew, however, who, together with a priest, betrayed to the Duke the plot which had been concocted by a leading Greek of Rethymno in 1453 for the murder of all the Venetian officials on one day, the incarceration of all other foreigners, and the proclamation of a Greek prince as sovereign of the island. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in that year, followed as it was by the flight of many Greek families to Crete, induced the Venetians to take more stringent precautions against the intrigues of their Cretan subjects. An order was issued empowering the Duke to make away with any suspected Cretans without trial or public inquiry of any kind. We are reminded by this horrible ordinance of the secret commission for the slaughter of dangerous Helots which had been one of the laws of Lycurgus. Nothing could better show the insecurity of Venetian rule, even after two centuries and a half had passed since the conquest. Another incident, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, shows how savage was the punishment meted out to the insurgents, with the approval of the authorities. At that period the Cretans of Selmo, Sphakia, and the Rhiza, not far from the latter place united their forces against their Venetian masters under the leadership of the Pateropouloi clan. The three insurgent districts were formed into an independent Republic, of which a leading Greek was chosen Rector. The Venetians of Canea, under the pretext of a wedding feast at the villa of one of their countrymen at the charming village of Alikianou, lured the Rector and some fifty of his friends to that place, seized the guests after the banquet, and hanged or shot him, his son, and many others in cold blood. The remainder of the rebels were rigorously proscribed, and a pardon was granted to