But the chief literary monument of Frankish Greece is the _Chronicle of the Morea_—the very curious work which exists in four versions, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. The Italian version need not detain us, for it contains no new facts and is merely an abbreviated translation of the Greek, chiefly remarkable for the extraordinary, but characteristic, mutilation of the proper names. The Spanish version, made in 1393 by order of Heredia, the romantic Grand-Master of the Knights of St John, and the French version, found in the castle of St Omer—another proof of Frankish culture—are of great historic interest. But by far the most remarkable of all the four versions is the Greek—a poem of some 9000 lines in the usual jog-trot “political” metre of most mediæval and modern Greek poetry, composed, in my opinion, by a half-caste lawyer, who obviously had the most enthusiastic admiration for the Franks, to whom he doubtless owed his place and salary. With the exception of a few French feudal terms, this most remarkable poem may be read without the slightest difficulty by any modern Greek scholar,—a striking proof that the vulgar Greek spoken to-day is almost exactly the same as that in common use in the first half of the fourteenth century, when the _Chronicle_ was composed. As regards its literary merits, opinions differ. As a rule, it is merely prose in the form of verse; but here and there, the author rises to a much higher level, and his work is a store-house of social, and especially legal information, even where his chronology and history have been shown by documentary evidence to be inaccurate. The bright and chivalrous Frankish society has long passed away; but a few Italian and Catalan families still linger in the Cyclades, there are still Venetian names and titles in the Ionian Islands; the Tocchi were till lately represented at Naples and the Zorzi still are at Venice; the towers of Thebes and Paros, the Norman arch of Andravida, the noble castles of Karytaina and Chlomoutsi, and the carvings and frescoes of Geraki still remind us of the romance of feudal Greece, when every coign of vantage had its lord, and from every donjon floated the banner of a baron. 3. THE PRINCES OF THE PELOPONNESE