I have now described the conquest of the mainland; it remains to speak of the islands, which had mostly been allotted to Venice by the treaty of partition. But the shrewd Government saw that its resources could not stand the strain of conquering and administering the large group of the Cyclades. It was, therefore, decided to leave to private citizens the task of occupying them. There was no lack of enterprise among the Venetians of that day, and on the bench of the Consular Court, as we should now call it, at Constantinople, sat the very man for such an enterprise—Marco Sanudo, nephew of “the old Doge Dandolo.” Sanudo descended from the bench, gathered round him a band of adventurous spirits, equipped eight galleys and was soon master of seventeen islands, some of which he distributed as fiefs to his comrades. Naxos alone offered any real resistance, and, in 1207, the conqueror founded the Duchy of “the Dodekannesos” (or “Twelve Islands,” as the Byzantines called it), which soon received the title of the “Duchy of Naxos,” or “of the Archipelago”—a corruption of the name “Ægeopelagos,” which occurs as early as a Venetian document of 1268. This delectable Duchy lasted, first under the Sanudi, and then under the Crispi, till 1566, while the Gozzadini of Bologna held seven of the islands down to 1617, and Tenos remained in Venetian hands till it was finally taken in 1715 and ceded to the Turks by the peace of Passarovitz in 1718. For persons so important as the Dukes it was necessary to invent a truly Roman genealogy; accordingly, the Paduan biographer, Zabarella, makes the Sanudi descend from the historian Livy, while the Crispi, not to be beaten, claimed Sallust as their ancestor, and may, perhaps, be regarded as the forbears of the late Italian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi. The two great islands of Crete and Eubœa had very different fortunes. Crete, as we saw, was sold by Boniface to the Venetians, and remained a Venetian colony for nearly five centuries. Eubœa, or Negroponte, as it was called in the Middle Ages, was divided by Boniface into three large baronies, which were assigned to three Lombard nobles from Verona, who styled themselves the _terciers_, or _terzieri_. We have no English equivalent for the word; perhaps, borrowing a hint from Shakespeare, we may call them “the three Gentlemen of Verona.” But Venice soon established a colony, governed by a bailie, at Chalkis, the capital of the island, and the subsequent history of Negroponte shows the gradual extension of Venetian influence over the Lombards.