next century. As a good friend of Athens, he was anxious to make the city appear as poor as possible in the eyes of a grasping Government, for in the East it has always been a dangerous thing to appear rich. As a cultured man of the world, he exaggerated the “barbarism”—such is his own phrase, which would have staggered the ancient Athenians—of the spot where his lot had been cast. He derided the Attic Greek of his time as a rude dialect, and told his classical friends that few of the historic landmarks in Attica had preserved their ancient names pure and undefiled. Sheep grazed, he said, among the remains of the Painted Porch. “I live in Athens,” he wrote in a poem on the decay of the city, “yet it is not Athens that I see.” Yet Athens was at least spared the horrors of the sack of Salonika by the Normans of Sicily, whose great invasion in 1185 touched only the fringe of Greece. Then, as in the war which broke out between Venice and the Empire some years earlier, it was the islands which suffered. After the attack by the mob on the Latin quarter of Constantinople, those Latins who escaped revenged themselves by preying upon the dwellers in the Ægean, whose flourishing state had been noted by Edrisi before that terrible visitation. Cephalonia and Zante were now permanently severed from the Byzantine sway, many Italians settled there, and after succumbing to Margaritone, the Sicilian admiral, Corfù, then a very rich island, became for some years the home of Vetrano, a Latin pirate, who was soon the terror of the Greek coasts. As if this were not enough, Isaac Angelos robbed many of the churches of their ornaments and pictures for the benefit of his capital, such as the famous picture at Monemvasia of Our Lord being dragged to the Cross, and extortion once more roused an insurrection in the Theme of Nikopolis. His successor injured Greek trade by granting most extensive privileges to the Venetians, who secured the commercial supremacy in the Levant. The Byzantine State was becoming visibly weaker every day, and the re-establishment of the second Bulgarian Empire suggested to a bold official, Manuel Kamytzes, the idea of carving out, with Bulgarian aid, a kingdom for himself in Greece. His attempt failed, but the growth of feudalism had loosened the old ties which bound that country to Constantinople. The power of the landed aristocracy, the _archontes_, as they were called, had gone on growing since the days of Danielis of Patras. Their rivalries threatened the Greek towns with the scenes which disgraced the cities of mediæval Italy, and some of them, like the great clan of Sgouros at Nauplia, were hereditary nobles of almost princely position. Large estates, the curse of ancient Italy, had grown up in Greece; the Empress Euphrosyne, for example, was owner of a vast property in Thessaly, which included several flourishing towns. Moreover, that province was no longer inhabited by a mainly Greek population; in the twelfth century it had passed