arrival was the greatest event of the whole calendar, and etiquette prescribed the forms to be observed on his landing. He was expected to kiss first the cross presented to him by the Latin bishop, and then the copy of the Gospels offered to him by the spiritual head of the Orthodox community. Leonardo Tocco had restored the Greek episcopal throne in Cephalonia, and in the Venetian times, promoted to the rank of an archbishopric, it continued to exist with jurisdiction over the Greeks at Zante and Ithake, which was often disputed by the “chief priest” (πρωτοπαπᾶς) of Zante, where a Latin bishop also resided. This dispute was at last settled by a decree of the senate that the Cephalonian clergy should retain the right to elect their prelate on condition of choosing a Zantiote on every third vacancy[249]. In Zante, as in Corfù, the Jews were a considerable factor; at the close of the Venetian rule they numbered about 2000, and lived in a separate quarter of the city, walled in and guarded; and the island was remarkable for the violent anti-Semitic riots of 1712[250], arising out of the usual fiction of the slaughtered Christian child, which found their counterpart at Corfù in our own time. But the greatest evil in these less important islands was that their _provveditori_, being chosen from the poorer Venetian aristocracy, the so-called _barnabotti_, and receiving small salaries, made up for their lack of means by corruption, just as the Turkish officials do now. The efforts of the home government to check the abuse of bribery, by forbidding its officials to receive presents, were not always successful. The discontent of the lesser islands found vent in the embassies which they had the right to send to Venice, and we occasionally hear of their _provveditori_ being detected in taking bribes. More rarely the _provveditore generale_ himself was degraded from his high office for malversation. Accordingly the most recent Greek historian of the fiscal administration of the islands under the Venetians, considers that it was fortunate for them to have been taken, and lost, by Venice when they were[251].