him as his liege lord in return for his assistance. Champlitte agreed, and the two friends, at the head of a small body of a hundred knights and some esquires, started on their bold venture[48]. The ease with which the little band of Western warriors conquered the peninsula, which had once produced the Spartan warriors, strikes every reader of the _Chronicle of the Morea_—the prosaic, but extremely curious and valuable poem in which the Frank conquest is described. The cause lay partly in the disunited state of Greek society and the feuds of the local _archontes_, but still more in the neglect of military training, due to the fact that the Byzantine emperors had long drawn their best troops from the non-Hellenic portions of their heterogeneous dominions. It is remarkable that, apart from Sgouros, interned, as it were, on Akrocorinth, and a Greek _archon_, Doxapatres, who held a small but strongly situated castle in one of the gorges of Arcadia, the invaders met with little opposition. Greece, as we know from the complaints of Michael Akominatos, the last orthodox Archbishop of Athens before the conquest, had been plundered by Byzantine tax-gatherers and despised as a “Scythian wilderness” by Byzantine officials. So, when the inhabitants found that the Franks had no intention of interfering with their prized municipal privileges, they had no great objection to exchanging a master who spent their money at Constantinople for one who spent it in Elis at the new Peloponnesian capital of Andreville or Andravida. One pitched battle decided the fate of “the isle of Greece,” as the Franks sometimes called it. At the olive grove of Koundoura, in the north-east of Messenia, the small force of Franks easily routed a Greek army six times larger; and as the chronicler, always in sympathy with the invaders, puts it, Αὐτὸν καὶ μόνον τὸν πόλεμον ἐποῖκαν οἱ Ρωμαῖοι Εἰς τὸν καιρὸν ποὺ ἐκέρδισαν οἱ Φράγκοι τὸν Μορέαν. Yet a modern Greek historian of singular fairness, the late K. Paparregopoulos, has remarked how great was the change in the Turkish times. The descendants of the unwarlike Moreotes, who fell so easy a prey to the Frankish chivalry in 1205, never lost an opportunity of rising against the Turks after the Frankish domination was over. As he justly says, one of the main results of the long Latin rule was to teach Greek “hands to war and their fingers to fight.”