as the Chronicler quaintly says—and the simile is most appropriate, for the place abounds with those songsters—till all supplies were exhausted, and they had eaten the very cats and mice. Even then, however, they only surrendered on condition that they should be excused from all feudal services, except at sea, and should even in that case be paid. True to the conciliatory policy of his family, William wisely granted their terms, and then the three _archontes_ of Monemvasia, Mamonas, Daimonoyannes, and Sophianos, advanced along the narrow causeway to his camp and offered him the keys of their town. The conqueror received them with the respect of one brave man for another, loaded them with costly gifts, and gave them fiefs at Vatika near Cape Malea. A Frankish garrison was installed in the coveted fortress; and a Latin bishop, Oddo of Verdun, at last occupied the episcopal palace there, which had been his (on paper) ever since Innocent III[293] had organised the Latin see of Monemvasia as one of the suffragans of Corinth. The Frankish occupation lasted, however, barely fourteen years, and has left no marks on the picturesque town. Buchon, indeed, who spied the Villehardouin arms on the Gorgoepekoos church at Athens, thought that he had discovered the famous _croix ancrée_ on one of the churches[294]. He apparently meant the Ἑλκόμενος church, which the late Sir T. Wyse called and Murray’s _Handbook_ still calls St Peter’s—a name not now known in Monemvasia, but derived perhaps from an inscription to a certain _Dominus Petrus_, whose remains “lie in peace” hard by. One church in the town, “Our Lady of the Myrtle,” bears, it is true, a cross with anchored work below, and four stars above the door. But this church, as I was informed and as the name implies, was founded by people from Cerigo, whose patron saint is the Παναγία Μυρτιδιώτισσα (Plate III, Fig. 1). The capture of the town by the Franks is, however, still remembered at Monemvasia, and local tradition points out the place on the mainland where Villehardouin left his cavalry. One pathetic event occurred at the rock during the brief Frankish period—the visit of the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, in 1261, on his way from his lost capital to Italy[295]. In the following year Monemvasia was one of the castles ceded to his successor, the Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, as the ransom of Prince William of Achaia, captured by the Greeks three years earlier after the fatal battle of Pelagonia.