§ 7.

CHAP. I. descent. In the fourteenth century, they had rendered. themselves masters of a considerable extent of territory in Acarnania, Epirus, Thessaly, and Macedonia, and their colonies began to be established in the Peloponnesus. But they first made their appearance in the peninsula as mercenary troops in the service of the Greek despots of Misithra, and shortly after they were settled in great numbers as colonists on the waste lands in the province.2 During the half century immediately preceding the conquest of the Morea by the Turks, the Albanian population more than once assumed a prominent part in public affairs, and at one time they conceived the project of expelling the Greeks themselves from the Morea.

The Albanian population of the Greek kingdom amounts to about 200,000 souls, and the whole race in Europe is not supposed to number more than a million and a quarter. In continental Greece they occupy the whole of Attica and Megaris, with the exception of the capitals, the greater part of Boeotia, and a portion of Locris. In the islands they possess the southern part of the island of Euboea, and about one-third of Andros; while the whole of the islands of Salamis, Poras, Hydra, and Spetza are exclusively peopled by a pure Albanian race, as well as a part of gina and the small island of Anghistri in its vicinity. In the Peloponnesus, they compose the bulk of the population in Argolis, Corinthia, and Sicyonia, and they occupy considerable districts in Arcadia, Laconia, Messenia, and Elis. In all this great

1 Pachymeres, i. 243, 347, edit. Rom. Niceph. Greg., 69, 334. Chalcocondylas, 283. There seems to be a question whether Cantacuzenos, 289, in mentioning the Malakassians, Bouians, and Mesarites as Albanian tribes, has not confounded them with the Vallachians. A Vallachian population now occupies these districts with the same names. But the names of Malakasa and Bouia are found both in Attica and the Morea as favourite Albanian names of villages, and they appear in other districts where the Vallachians are not known to have penetrated.

2 Chalcocondylas, 112, 127. Ducange, Histoire de Constantinople, 283. Phrantzes, 38, edit. Bonn. Chronicon breve ad calcem Duca Hist. Fallmerayer, Geschichte des halbinsel Morea, ii. 255.

3 Schafarik's Slavische Alterthümer, i. 32.

§ 8.

extent of territory the prevailing language is Albanian; CHAP. I. and in many parts Greek is only spoken by the men, and very imperfectly, if at all, understood by the women. The soldiers of Suli and the sailors of Hydra, the bravest warriors and most skilful mariners in the late struggle of Greece to regain her independence, were of the purest Albanian race, unaltered by any mixture of Hellenic blood.

SECT. VIII.-TZAKONES OR LACONES.

Of all the inhabitants who now dwell on the Hellenic soil, the Tzakones, or Laconians-for the two words are identical-seem to possess the best title to connect their genealogy with their geographical locality. Part of the country conquered by the Spartans was always peopled by a race that differed from the Dorian.1 When the Crusaders invaded Greece, they found the Tzakones occupying a much wider extent of country than they do at present. They are first mentioned by Constantine Porphyrogenitus as troops employed in garrison duty.2 Nicephorus Gregoras mentions them as furnishing a body of mariners to the imperial fleets in the time of the Emperor Michael VIII. Pachymeres notices that they visited Constantinople in such numbers as to form a Tzakonian colony in the city with their families, while the men served on board the fleet. The Chronicle of the Conquest of the Morea by the Franks, which appears to have been written towards the latter part of the fourteenth century, repeatedly mentions Tzakonia and its

1 Grote, Hist. of Greece, ii. 601, observes that the readiness with which Kanya and the Maleates revolted against Sparta after the battle of Leuktra, exhibits them apparently as conquered foreign dependencies without any kindred of race. Kangae must fall within the Tzakonian territory in the middle ages. The Maleates, when expatriated by the Sclavonians, would retire to Mount Parnon, (Malevo.) The Dorians of Messenia seem not to have degraded the subject race so completely as the Spartans.

De Cerem. Aul. Byz., tom. i. p. 402, edit. Lips.; p. 696, edit. Bonn. 3 Nicephorus Gregoras, 58. Pachymeres, i. 209, edit. Rom.

§ 8.

CHAP. I. inhabitants as distinct from the rest of the Peloponnesus.1 In the fifteenth century Mazaris, in enumerating the various races then inhabiting the peninsula, places the Lakones or Tzakones first in his list. He then passes to the Italians, for, at the time he wrote, they were masters of the principality of Achaia. The Peloponnesians, or modern Greeks, appear only as third in his list.2 Crusius informs us that in the year 1573 the Tzakones inhabited fourteen villages between Monemvasia and Nauplia, and spoke a dialect different from the other Greeks. They now occupy only seven villages, and the whole population does not exceed fifteen hundred families, of whom nearly one thousand are collected in the town of Lenidhi.

The language of the Tzakones is marked by many peculiarities; but whether it be a relic of the dialect of the Kynourians, who, Herodotus informs us, were, like the Arcadians, original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, and consequently of the Pelasgic race, or of the Laconians called Oreata-whose traditions, according to Pausanias, were different from those of the other Greeks-seems to be a question that admits of great doubt. While the rest of the modern Greeks, from Corfu to Trebizond, speak a language marked by the same grammatical corruptions in the most distant lands, the Tzakones alone retain grammatical forms of a distinct nature, and which prove that their dialect has been framed on a different type.5 It cannot, therefore, be doubted that they have a strong claim to be regarded as the most direct descen

1 See Chacoignie in the index to the Livre de la Conqueste, and Thakovia under the head of the letter r in the Index Géographique of the Greek text, edit. 1845.

3 Boissonade, Anecdota Græca, tom. iii. p. 164.

3 Turcogræcia, 489.

4 Herodotus, viii. 73. Pausanias, Lacon., xxiv.

Kodrika, in his Observations sur les Opinions de quelques Hellenistes touchant le Grec modern, reckons thirteen spoken dialects of modern Greek, including Tzakonian, which, however, can no more be considered a dialect of modern Greek than Dutch can be considered a dialect of English.

dants of the ancient inhabitants of the Peloponnesus that now exist; and whatever may be the doubts of the learned concerning their ancestors, these very doubts establish a better claim to direct descent from the ancient inhabitants of the province they occupy, than can be pleaded by the rest of the modern Greeks, whose constant intercommunications have assimilated their dialects, and melted them into one language.1

The district of Maina has frequently been supposed to have served as an inviolable retreat to the remains of the Laconian race; but the inhabitants of Maina have lost all memory of the very names of Laconia and of Sparta they have adopted a foreign designation for their country and their tribe. Part of the district they now inhabit abounds in Sclavonian names of localities, and their language does not vary more than several other dialects from the ordinary standard of modern Greek. On the other hand, the people of the eastern mountain range of Laconia have only corrupted the pronunciation of the name of their country by the modification in the sound of a single letter, Zakonia for Lakonia, and their language bears the impression of a more ancient type than any modern Greek dialect.

A. D.

1460.

At the time Greece was conquered by the Othoman Turks, it was inhabited by six different nations as cultivators of the soil. All these different people, consequently, formed permanent elements of the population, for the true test of national colonisation is the cultivation of the soil by the settlers. It is the only way in which

1 The most important works on the Tzakonian language are Leake's Researches in Greece, 196; Peloponnesiaca, 304; Thiersch Ueber die Sprache der Zakonen, in the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Munich.

$ 9.

CHAP. I. a nursery of the colony can be created. These national races were the Greeks, who had then become the most numerous portion of the population both in the Peloponnesus and the continent; the Tzakones, who, though like the other Greeks they are the representatives of a Greek race, must still be considered a distinct people, since they speak a language unintelligible to the modern Greeks; the Sclavonians, the Bulgarians, the Vallachians, and the Albanians. The whole civilisation and literature of the country were in the hands of the Greeks, and whatever the others learned, it was from them the knowledge was acquired. Greek priests were the teachers of religion to all, and the rulers of the church that guided every inhabitant of the land. The Frank races and the Latin church, though enjoying great power and wealth for two centuries and a half, were unable to destroy this influence, and were always regarded as strangers on the Hellenic soil. Nevertheless, we have seen that the traditions of ancient Hellas were so completely forgotten by the modern population, that the ancient geographical nomenclature of the country had disappeared. The mountain-peaks visible to cultivators from valleys that rarely communicated with one another, and the rivers that fertilised distant plains, though their names must have been in daily use by thousands of tongues, lost their ancient names and received strange designations, which became as universally known as those which they supplanted. Yet in some continental districts, and in most of the islands, we find Hellenic names still preserved, so that this very circumstance of their partial preservation is used as an argument for the complete extinction of the Hellenic race in those districts where Hellenic names. have been utterly effaced. Numerous names, unquestionably of foreign origin, are scattered over the surface of the country, and many Greek names in use are derived from circumstances that attest the establishment of foreign