Setines was one of the names for Athens coined by the ruling Franks, the medieval name in the eastern Mediterranean for western Europeans. It is a contraction of εις Αθήνα - eis Athena - in or at Athens. (The name Istanbul has a similar origin, ‘eis stin poli’, in the city.)
The history of Frankish Setines began in 1204 when the valiant knights of the Fourth Crusade gave up on the Holy Land and sacked Constantinople. They replaced the Byzantine emperor with a Catholic one of their own. The land grab that followed resulted in several competing principalities within the new Latin Empire. The Burgundian knight Otto de la Roche was granted Attica and Boeotia to create the Duchy of Athens.
Otto set about replicating the western European feudality he had grown up with. Latins were the lords. Greeks were the serfs. They had no right to own, sell, buy, leave or inherit property. They were not allowed to hold military or public office. The Orthodox archbishop was banished. Greeks could practise their religion but the clergy answered to a Catholic archbishop supported by an influx of Cistercian monks. The official languages were French and Latin.
Acropolis with the Frankish Tower
James 'Athenian' Stuart 1782
If Greeks thought the French were oppressive, worse was to come. In 1311 the Great Catalan Company of mercenaries defeated the Burgundians and made the Duchy of Athens their home for the next forty-five years. The official language was changed to Catalan. In 1388, seven years before Martoni arrived, Nerio Acciaiuoli, from a Florentine banking family, captured Athens from the Catalans. To win the support of his Orthodox subjects and Byzantine neighbours he changed the official language back to Greek, employing Greek scribes and officials. He learned Greek, took a Greek mistress and appointed Greeks as ‘elders’ to advise on government. An Orthodox Archbishop was allowed back into the city for the first time since 1204, although he had to make do with a church in the lower town as the Parthenon church remained Catholic.
Nerio died in in September 1394, the year before Martoni arrived. He bequeathed Athens and its revenues to the Parthenon church to replace riches he had looted from it and to employ twenty priests to pray for his soul. The Orthodox Archbishop, incensed that Athens was now the property of the Catholic clergy, invited Turks into the lower town. Besieged on the Acropolis the Florentine governor appealed for help to the Venetians of Negropont, the name given to the island of Euboea and its capital. They sent an army to evict the Turks and took over the city.
This was the situation when Martoni arrived in Attica. He travelled by night to avoid bands of Italians, Catalans, Turks, Albanians and unaffiliated brigands. But the city was peaceful under its Venetian garrison and he took the opportunity for a spot of sightseeing. From the evidence of the stone blocks and columns lying around, his first impression is that Athens must have been a great city at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. Then it was destroyed by the Trojans and reduced to the area around the castle. Trojans? Later he describes a relic from Homeric Troy so he may have mixed up his historical periods, not for the first time. Or he was using Trojan as one of the popular names of the time for Turks and other invaders from the east. The actual culprits were the Heruli, a Germanic tribe from the Black Sea, who destroyed the city in AD 267.
After settling in he asks some locals to show him round. They take him to ‘Aristotle’s School’, passing two handsome fountains where students imbibed wisdom with the water. His guides conjured the school out of the ruins. It is built of marble, twenty feet long and sixteen feet wide. It was roofed with marble architraves and entablatures above them. The whole building around and overhead was decorated with various reliefs in gold and other beautiful colours. Traces of decoration can be seen at both ends of the room. Outside the door are porticos with columns supporting marble architraves and entablatures, sculpted and painted in gold, where Aristotle used to stroll to relax when he was tired of studying.
A stroll in the cloisters is a faded memory of the Peripatetics. What they are in fact admiring is the remains of the reservoir at the end of the Hadrian’s aqueduct. It is now the ‘Dexamini’ in Kolonaki at the foot of Mount Lycabettos, where water is blessed on January 6. The actual Lyceum was destroyed by the Romans in 86 BCE.
Our tourist follows his guides to the imposing palace of the Emperor Hadrian, where he miscounts the twenty remaining columns and their architraves. Hadrian certainly dedicated it and doubtless admired the several statues of himself. As Martoni pictures the great emperor sitting in state he is not to know it was the Temple of the Olympian Zeus, left in ruins by the Heruli and a handy source of marble for their successors.
A couple of minutes walk away is Hadrian’s Arch. Martoni compares it with the entrance to the tower of Capua, his provincial capital. It is not as high but nevertheless impressive. The Panathenaic Stadium he takes to be a Field of Mars, where soldiers from the nearby barracks trained for battle. Echoes may have come down of gladiatorial contests from Roman times.
Walled-up Propylaea 1770
The high point of the tour is the Castro. The wide Roman steps up to the Propylaea and the great gateway through which the Panathenaic procession passed are closed off. The way in is along a narrow path to the east of the Nike bastion near the modern entrance. He peeks inside the walled-off Propylaea, now the great hall of the Ducal Palace, and admires the columns and massive architraves.
He is more amazed at the sixty columns of the Parthenon, higher, would you believe, than ladders used for harvest at home in Carinola. Saint Dionysius the Areopagite was chained to one of them during the Passion of Christ. When all the buildings of the world shook in the resulting earthquake he realised either the world is coming to an end or the Son of God will suffer, and traced the sign of the cross on the marble with his fingers, where it was still to be seen. This is the tour guide’s version of the story in the Acts of the Apostles in which Dionysius was overawed in Egypt by a solar eclipse on the first Good Friday. It was another fifty years before he was converted to the cross by Saint Paul. By then he was a judge in the court of the Areopagus - hence his sobriquet.
Inside the temple is the church of Saint Mary, as large as the church in Capua. The massive entrance doors were salvaged from the ruins of Troy when it was destroyed by the Greeks. In the first of its two naves is the first altar in the world, made by Saint Dionysius after his conversion. The altar in the second nave has four massive jasper columns twelve feet high. In a crack in the wall is a light that never goes out, believed to be a saint’s last resting place. Kill-joy seventeenth century travellers reported that it was a translucent stone set in the masonry. In a side chapel is a painting of Our Lady made from life by Saint Luke. Another priceless treasure is a book of all the gospels written in Greek in Saint Helena of Constantinople’s own hand.
The custodians show them a collection of saintly body parts including an arm bone of Saint Denis of France. What is it doing here? Since the ninth century Dionysius and Denis have been confused, sharing the story of their martyrdoms. Dionysius was thought to have gone to Rome where he was beheaded under Diocletian, the same fate as befell Denis. He/they continued preaching, carrying around their head(s). Although the conflation was disproved as early as the sixteenth century and they are commemorated separately by Orthodox and Catholics, it is still promoted by online hagiographies.
Finally Martoni tells us about two great columns said to have supported a marvellous shrine containing a statue so powerful that, in those days, if enemy vessels approached, however far out to sea they appeared, the statue sank them. But if they were well-intentioned the statue did them no harm. There are memories here of the great statue of Athena Prómachos, Athena Leading the Troops, that stood between the Propylea and the Parthenon and could be seen far out to sea. The columns were in fact part of a Roman monument to a father and son, who paid for a civic celebration.
We can smile at Martoni’s credulity and the tour guide’s perennial love of a good story. The main sources of information for most people before printing was the Bible, word-of-mouth, tales and ballads. With little else to go on, misapprehension and confusion is understandable. For example, Martoni sailed upriver from Alexandria to Babylon, the Coptic twin city of Cairo. So he tells us the river is the Tigris.
Martoni travels through a ‘real’ world of physical exertion, trial and mortal danger. It is also a world of the imagination that to him is equally as ‘real’. His text makes little distinction between the natural and the supernatural. What appears to us as his gullibility, his credulity, is acceptance of the everyday marvellous. The stone glowing with saintly remains in the Parthenon church? The gates of Troy? The laser-eyed statue? When you have venerated the balsam trees sprung up for Baby Jesus’s smalls to dry on in the Matarea Garden of Cairo or the cross of the Good Thief hovering unsupported in mid-air in its chapel on Cyprus, you take smaller wonders in your stride.
Florentine image of Athens
Some stories have classical roots. Landing in Attica Martoni sees two marble statues of a man and a woman. It is said that he used to be a real man who pursued the woman in order to take her virginity. She fled into the hills, refusing to let him have his way. Seeing she could not escape him, she begged God to turn both of them into marble statues. Her prayer was heard and so they remain to this day. Arthurian Romance also brought the landscape to life with knightly deeds of derring-do, damsels and dragons. Athenians would have been familiar with Italian ‘cantari’ and similar ballads in Catalan and Greek. Tales feature the first Duke of Athens, Theseus, and his lovely Amazon bride Hippolyta, or Cecrops the founder of the city.
Dodging Turks and Albanians, Martoni left Setines for Negropont, where he hoped to find a Venetian ship to take him home. He admired the enchanted castle in the middle of the Euripos defended by currents flowing both ways at once, where the enchantress Morgan le Fay imprisoned Sir Gawain for confessing his fling with her dragon-daughter, Ponzella Gaia, to Guinevere. He waited six weeks before coming back to Setines. He has no more to say about Athens, except that he had to cadge a bed in the archbishop’s house as the inns were full. He ran the nocturnal gauntlet of brigandage again by mule and boat to Corinth, held by the Duke of Cephalonia, where he climbed up to Acrocorinth by night to evade Byzantine besiegers. After more adventures he got home via Patras, Corfu and Venice.
Seven years later in 1402 Antonio, the disinherited son of the late Florentine Duke Nerio, regrouped his forces and evicted the Venetians. Supported by Ottomans, his dynasty held Setines until 1460 when they bowed to the inevitable and surrendered its stories to the Turks, who reverted to the more classical Atina.
This appeared in Argo, A Hellenic Review, Autumn 2020
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