Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/356

348 TEE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE July was so high that the bombs flew over the Akropolis and fell into the town beyond it, whose inhabitants claimed compensa- tion for the damage to their houses. A fresh battery of two mortars was accordingly placed on the east and closer to the rock, while the miners attempted to drive a tunnel under the north wall and above the grotto of Aglauros. This attempt was, how- ever, frustrated by the hardness of the rock, the fire of the besieged, and the fatal fall of the miners' captain from a cliff. The bombardment now, however, began to damage the buildings on the Akropolis. On the 25th a bomb exploded a small powder magazine in the Propylaea, and a deserter betrayed to the besiegers the fatal secret that the Turks had put all the rest of their ammunition in the Parthenon, then a mosque. Upon the receipt of this news the gunners concentrated their fire upon the famous temple ; and, on the evening of the 26th, a lieutenant from Liineburg fired a bomb into it. The explosion was so violent that fragments of the building were hurled into the besiegers' lines, whence cries of joy in various languages rose at the destruc- tion wrought in a moment to a masterpiece that had survived almost intact the vicissitudes of over twenty centuries. But even among the besiegers there were some who mourned the havoc wrought by the German gunner's too accurate aim. Morosini, in his official report to his government, merely alludes to it as a * fortunate shot ', and his secretary remarks that the 'ancient, splendid, and marvellous temple of Minerva ' was ' ruined in some parts ' ; but a Swedish lady, Anna Akerhjelm,^ who accom- panied Countess von Koenigsmark to Greece and was then at Athens, has told in her interesting correspondence 'how repugnant it was ' to Koenigsmark ' to destroy the beautiful temple ', which ' can never in this world be replaced '. So much did Ranke feel this act of vandalism committed by one of his country- men, that he tried to discredit the diary of the Hessian lieu- tenant, Sobiewolsky, which mentions the Liineburg gunner's fatal shot. For the moment it failed to attain even the practical effect of ending the siege. The Turks, expecting the arrival of their deliverer from Thebes, still held out ; but when Koenigsmark went to meet the advancing army and its commander retired without a blow, when the fire, caused by the explosion, had blazed for two days on the Akropolis, where over 300 putrifying corpses, including those of their commander and his son, lay beneath the ruins of the Parthenon, they hoisted the white flag and sent five hostages to ask for a cessation of hostilities. Morosini's official dispatch informs us that he was inclined to insist upon their ' Apud Laborde, ii. 277 ; Locatelli, ii. 3 ; Ranke, ' Die Venezianer in Morea ', in Sa7nmt. Werke, xlii. 297.