so completely under Wallachian influence that it was known as Great Wallachia, and its colonists were the ancestors of those Koutso-Wallachs, who still pasture their herds in the country near the Thessalian frontier, descending to Bœotia in the winter, and who, in the war of 1897, were on the Turkish side. Finally a debased currency pointed to the financial decline of the Byzantine Government. In short, the Empire was ripe for the Latin conquest. It was not long delayed. III. FRANKISH AND VENETIAN GREECE 1. THE FRANKISH CONQUEST OF GREECE Professor Krumbacher says in his _History of Byzantine Literature_, that, when he announced his intention of devoting himself to that subject, one of his classical friends solemnly remonstrated with him, on the ground that there could be nothing of interest in a period when the Greek preposition ἀπό governed the accusative, instead of the genitive case. I am afraid that many people are of the opinion of that orthodox grammarian. There has long prevailed in some quarters an idea that, from the time of the Roman conquest in 146 B.C. to the day when Archbishop Germanos raised the standard of Independence at Kalavryta in 1821, the annals of Greece were practically a blank, and that that country thus enjoyed for nearly twenty centuries that form of happiness which consists in having no history. Fifty years ago there was, perhaps, some excuse for this theory; but the case is very different now. The great cemeteries of Mediæval Greece—I mean the Archives of Venice, Naples, Palermo and Barcelona—have given up their dead. We know now, year by year, yes, almost month by month, the vicissitudes of Hellas under her Frankish masters, and all that is required now is to breathe life into the dry bones, and bring upon the stage in flesh and blood that picturesque and motley crowd of Burgundian, Flemish and Lombard nobles, German knights, rough soldiers of fortune from Cataluña and Navarre, Florentine financiers, Neapolitan courtiers, shrewd Venetian and Genoese merchant princes, and last, but not least, the bevy of high-born dames, sprung from the oldest families of France, who make up, together with the Greek _archons_ and the Greek serfs, the persons of the romantic drama, of which Greece was the theatre for 250 years.