Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

310 HOME LIFE IN HELLASland provinces of Bceotia, Locris, and Attica.suffered the usual exactions and injustice, andVasilike pleaded its cause with the Sultan, withthe result that it was detached from the tyrannyof the Pasha of Egripos and his myrmidons, andgranted as a fief to the Kizlar-Agha, a functionarywhose title means, literally, the Master of theGirls, though he is known more familiarly toEuropeans as the Chief Eunuch. This personage,more powerful than any Pasha, himself appointedthe Voivoda or Governor of Athens, who wouldspeedily have been presented with a bowstring hadhe been guilty of maladministration. Achmet Idied in 1617, but the privilege he granted wascontinued by his successors, and Athens remaineda fiscal appanage of the Palace down into thenineteenth century. Thus Byron's line, " Slaves,nay the bondsmen of a slave," was literally true,for the Kizlar-Agha, though wealthy and potenthe bore the title of Highness and ranked with theGrand Vizier, whom he could often make and unmake—wasin reality an Ethiopian slave. ThatAthens of all places should have fallen into thepossession of this sable thrall is a supremeinstance of the irony of fate.ItAccorded as a boon,it might rather have been accounted the depth ofdegradation ;yet a boon it was, inasmuch as itsaved the city from the rapacity of the ordinaryform of Turkish rule. The shadow of her ancientglory seems at all times to have inspired respect.Under the Byzantine Empire—and the Byzantines