Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/297

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 289 his own with all its complicated and bewildering details, which only give way to comparatively simple conditions under the deadening influence of the Turkish domination. No part of the Prankish history of Greece is more full of these details than Mr. Miller's new chapter on the history of the Genoese colonies in Phocaea, Chios, and Lesbos, interesting, as he points out, as being an early example of the government of a colonial dependency by a chartered company. Of the thirteen sections into which the chapter on Frankish and Venetian Greece is divided, the most interesting are those dealing with the marquisate of Boudonitza and with Crete and the Ionian Islands under Venetian rule. The earlier sections on the Frankish conquest and on Athens under the dukes and Florentines deal with subjects already treated in The Latins in the Levant, and suffer also somewhat from the repetitious inevitable in a book made of a collection of independent articles. A few points in the book call for more detailed notice. In the chapter on Byzantine Greece the Slavonic theories of Fall- merayer are discussed, and the author points out how small was the basis upon which the whole imposing structure was raised. But something more may now be made of the evidence of the language than the bare statement, itself perfectly true, that not ' even the vulgar language con- tains any considerable Slavonic element ' (p. 35). Dr. Gustav Meyer's researches (Neugriechische Studien, ii) have shown that of 273 Slav words in use either generally or for the most part only in certain dialects, more than two-thirds are confined to northern Greece and especially to Epeirus, whilst the Peloponnese can claim as peculiar to itself no more than thirty- one. This indicates that it was in northern Greece that the Slavonic invasions were on a considerable scale, rather than in the Peloponnese, upon which Fallmerayer laid so much stress, and supports Mr. Miller's use of the quotation on p. 39 from the Epitome of Strabo's Geography with its stress upon ' all Epeirus ' in the list of regions colonized by the Slavs. A saying that the Greek clergy ' preferred the turban of a Turkish priest to the red hat of a Roman cardinal ' is quoted on p. 77, and we do not question the correctness of the attribution, from Voltaire. But in a book on Greece it would have been better to give the saying in its original form, ' Better to see in the midst of the city the Turkish turban (Aiov) than the Latin mitre (KavirrpavY, and to refer to Ducas, who puts it (p. 148 CD) into the mouth of the Grand Duke Notaras at the time of the Turkish siege. On the subject of the Tzakonians the author (p. 98) mentions the list of Tzakonian words given by the Byzantine satirist Mazaris. The curious point about these words is that there is no other evidence to connect any of them with Tzakonian, whilst one at least of them (epxovrrjo-av) is definitely non-Tzakonian, but is characteristic of the common Greek of the north-east Peloponnesos. It is not likely that Mazaris knew any- thing of the dialect, and it would seem that he jotted down a few barbarous forms, and that the nearest he got to Tzakonian was that some at least of them were in vulgar use in the Peloponnese. He should not be quoted without qualification as a medieval evidence for Tzakonian. The name of the castle where Mohammed II broke wrists and ankles of the Albanians, Tokmak Hissari, does not mean, as we are told on p. 104, ' the castle of the ankles ' but ' the castle of the mallet '. By the side of a most useful facsimile of the Karditsa inscription on the battle of the Kephissos the author gives. VOL. XXXVII. NO. CXLVI. U