Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/359

1920 THE VENETIAN REVIVAL IN GREECE 351 Greeks, who regaled her mistress m their homes upon orangeade, lemonade, fresh almonds, pomegranates, and jams, just as their descendants do still. Our Hessian officer, too, liked the Athenians ; 'they are very respectable, good people,' he wrote, 'only one cannot understand them, because they speak Greek.' The English consul, however, the same Frenchman, Giraud, who had acted as cicerone to Spon, spoke German and Italian, as well as Greek and Turkish, and hobbled about with the distinguished Swedes.^ Despite his trouble in his feet, he seems to have been still an active man, who sent two dispatches on the Venetian conquest to his ambassador at Constantinople before his French colleague had written a word about it. A protestant from Lyons, but married to a daughter of the Athenian Palaiologoi, he was closely connected with the town. Morosini had converted into churches the mosques of every place that he had taken. At Athens he turned two mosques into catholic churches, in addition to the already existing chapel of the Capuchins, and made his naval chaplain, D. Lorenzo Papaplis, priest of the church of Dionysios the Areopagite.^ For the use of his Lutheran auxiliaries he founded out of another mosque, that ' of the Column ', near the bazaar, the first protestant .place of worship in Greece, which was inaugurated under the name of Holy Trinity on 19 October with a sermon by the minister Beithmann. While to the Venetian commander non-catholics thus owe the introduction of their liturgy into Hellas, to his conquest of Athens military history is indebted for two views of the Akropolis and a general view of Athens at the moment of the explosion in the Parthenon, all sketched by the Venetian engineer, Verneda, another unofficial view of Athens, a plan of the Akropolis also by Verneda, and a plan of the town designed by him under the direction of Count di San Felice.^ This last work has been called ' the first serious plan of the town of Athens ', but its object was military rather than archaeological — to explain to the council of war and the home government the extent and cost of the works necessary for the defence of Athens. Whether Athens could be defended was the question which its conquerors now had to decide. At a council of war, held at the Piraeus on 31 December, it was pointed out that it was impossible for the small Venetian forces to fortify the town, or even to leave a garrison there to defend its inhabitants, for all the available troops would be needed for the attack upon Negroponte in the spring ; while, even if it could be fortified, Athens, situated so far from the sea, could not be revictualled while the Turks were still about. The destruction of Athens was » Laborde, ii. 279, 313. * Ihid. ii. 179, 317. 3 Ihid. ii. 150, 172, 176, 180, 182 ; Fanelli, Atene Attica, pp. 113, 308, 317.