Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/355

 J 920 THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE 347 Athenian notables, the brothers Peter and Demetrios Gaspari, Spyridon Peroules, the schoolmaster Dr. Argyros Benaldes, and others hastened to make submission to Venice.^ Although Sir Paul Rycaut, as the result of eighteen years' diplomatic experience in Turkey, wrote in that very year that ' the Greeks have an inclination to the Muscovite beyond any other Christian prince ', there was a special reason for the popularity of Venice at Athens. Many young Athenians had been educated at the Flangineion at Venice, and the recent outrage of the Turks upon the Athenian notable, Limponas, made the Greeks eager to welcome any Christians who would free them from their Moslem rulers. The Turks were not unprepared for the Venetian invasion. They had taken down the beautiful temple of Nike Apteros and out of its materials raised the walls of the Akropolis and built a battery. Fortunately, although there was a powder magazine underneath it, the venerable stones of this temple received no damage during the siege. When, in 1836, the Bavarian architects reconstructed it, they found not a single block missing (except what Lord Elgin had carried off) nor a bullet-mark upon it.^ Within the Akropolis, thus strengthened, the Turkish inhabitants of Athens took refuge with their effects and ammunition, hoping that ' the castle ' would hold out until relief could arrive from* Thebes. The Venetians were, therefore, able to occupy lower Athens unmolested. Colonel Raugraf von der Pfalz with a body of Slav and Hanoverian troops was stationed in the town ; Koenigsmark encamped in the olive-grove near the Sacred Way, along which the Turkish force might be expected to march through the pass of Daphni from Thebes. As the garrison of the Akropolis refused to surrender, it was decided to bombard that sacred rock. Archaeologists and historians cannot but be horrified at this act of vandalism. But in our own day we have seen the Germans bombarding the cathedral of Rheims, and the Austrians dropping grenades close to St. Mark's at Venice, while ' military necessities ' involved the firing of projectiles over the Parthenon by the Allies in the crisis of December 1916. The Venetian engineers accordingly placed their batteries on the Mouseion hill, upon which stands the monument of Philopappos, on the Pnyx, and at the foot of the Areiopagos. On 23 Sep- tember the bombardment began .^ The officer in charge of the batteries, Mottoni, Count di San Felice, was a notoriously incompetent gunner, as he had already proved at Navarino and Modon, and on this occasion his aim » Locatelli, ii. 3. » Laborde, i. 116-17. and Greece (ed. 1825), ii. 111.
 * Morosini's dispatch apvd Laborde, ii. 158 ; Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor