of justice, that should have been the first object of its existence, but always energetic in the collection of the taxes. This odious task was entrusted to local authorities drawn from among the Greeks, who were despised and hated by their compatriots, like the Jewish publicans in the time of Christ. After the bishops and the Phanariots, there were no people of any power or influence among the Greeks. Hospitals and charities disappeared for lack of support. The monks were so poor that they went about visiting the markets with icons and cattle for sale. Libraries were stripped of their treasures in ancient manuscripts, which were sold to any chance purchasers and so scattered in all directions beyond hope of recovery. In course of time the central government lost vigour and the result was atrophy of the extremities. A partial disintegration took place and local pashas ruled as despots; even the Phanariots exercised tyrannical power with little supervision, and, as men who had sold themselves to the foreign oppressor, proved more cruel to their fellow-Greeks than the Turks themselves. The extensive coast-line of Greece left much of the mainland as well as the islands dangerously open to piratical raids. For two hundred years the most characteristic feature of the history of Greece under the Turks consists in the repeated raids of the pirates, both Turkish and Christian, and the fights to which they gave rise among the peasants and islanders. The concerns of religion seem to be swallowed up in a struggle for bare existence.
One interesting series of events breaks the monotony of this story of suffering and humiliation, namely, the progress of the Venetian conquests. Venice had suffered in the general deluge that had swept over the wreck of the Byzantine Empire under the great Mohammed ii. But gradually she more than recovered the ground she had lost in Eastern Europe, though never her own civic grandeur. After a ruinous war, the Venetians succeeded in conquering the Morea (a.d. 1684). But while they were thus able to restore a portion of the Ottoman Empire to Christendom, their action was creating a fresh complication in the Greek
