Similarly since the union with Greece the Cretans have become excellent constables. The next problem was that of the Venetian knights. It had been the original intention of the Republic that none of their fiefs should pass into Greek hands. But as time went on many of the colonists had secretly sold their estates to the natives, and had gone back to Venice to spend the proceeds of the sale in luxurious idleness. When Foscarini arrived, he found that many even of those Venetians who remained in Crete had become Greek in dress, manners, and speech. More than sixty years earlier we hear complaints of the lack of Catholic priests and of the consequent indifference of the colonists to the religion of their forefathers, so that we are not surprised to hear Foscarini deploring the numerous conversions of the Venetians in the country districts to the Orthodox faith through the want of Latin churches. In the town of Candia, where the nobles were better off, they still remained strict Catholics, and this difference of religion marked them off from the Orthodox people; but their wives had adopted Oriental habits, and lived in the seclusion which we associate with the daily life of women in the East. In Canea, which was a more progressive place than the capital, things were a little more hopeful, but even there education was almost entirely neglected. In the country, owing to the subdivision of fiefs, many of the smaller Venetian proprietors had sunk to the condition of peasants, retaining neither the language nor the chivalrous habits of their ancestors, but only the sonorous names of the great Venetian houses whence they sprang. All the old martial exercises, on which the Republic had relied for the defence of the island, had long fallen into abeyance. Few of the knights could afford to keep horses; few could ride them. When they were summoned on parade at Candia, they were wont to stick some of their labourers on horseback, clad in their own armour, to the scandal of the Government and the amusement of the spectators, who would pelt these improvised horsemen with bad oranges or stones. Another abuse arose from the possession of one estate by several persons, who each contributed a part of the horse’s equipment which the estate was expected to furnish. Thus the net result of the feudal arrangements in Crete at this period was an impoverished nobility and an utterly inadequate system of defence.