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Heraclius Themistocles Margaritis was a professional musician. He was a singer and a composer of songs; he wrote poetry in Romaic, and composed tunes to suit rhymes. But it was not thus that he earned his daily bread, and he was poor, very poor. He was a young man, only twenty-four, and he had married, before he came of age, an Italian girl called Tina.
The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek 'koinè' and by keeping the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors.
Monte Cristo looked at her with an indescribable expression of interest and pity. "Go on," said the count in the Romaic language. Haidee looked up abruptly, as if the sonorous tones of Monte Cristo's voice had awakened her from a dream; and she resumed her narrative.
Burgundian barons, Catalan condottieri, and Florentine bankers snatched the Duchy of Athens from one another in bewildering succession, while the French princes of Achaia were at feud with their kindred vassals in the west of the Peloponnesos whenever they were not resisting the encroachments of Romaic despots in the south and east.
As Colonel Gauntlett rather liked the look of the stranger, he condescended to be civil to him; but as he did not speak a word of Romaic, and as his Italian was very indifferent, and his French worse, Argiri Caramitzo could scarcely understand what he said. He, however, made a polite speech full of complimentary phrases in return, and then, bowing, went back to talk to the ladies.
This account was given by Jack Raby in his berth to his messmates, that narrated to the first lieutenant was more concise, without his own remarks on the subjects; for instance, he left out how often he had kissed Marianna and how often he had tried to learn Romaic of little Mila, and made love on the strength of it though, to his messmates, he enlarged much on these points, and hinted that he had completely won the heart of the old pirate's granddaughter, whom he described as a perfect angel in a red cap.
But in 1453 the Imperial city fell before the assault of Sultan Mohammed; and before his death the conqueror eliminated all the other Romaic and Latin principalities from Peloponnesos to Trebizond, which had survived as enclaves to mar the uniformity of the Ottoman domain.
In Passow's collection of Romaic Folk Songs there is one entitled Maurianos and the King, which is in substance our story; and it is probably the existence of this folk-song which causes M. Gaston Paris to place our tale among the romances derived from Byzantium. Yet Motherwell in his Minstrelsy has a ballad entitled Reedisdale and Wise William, which has the bet as its motive.
Emerson tried to persuade Longfellow to go to Greece to look after the Klephs, the supposed authors of Romaic poetry, so beautiful in both their poetic eyes. Finding this idea unsuccessful, he next turned to the Nile, to those vast statues which still stand awful and speechless witnesses of the past. He was interesting and eloquent, but Longfellow was not to be persuaded.
It allowed the Patriarchate at Constantinople to become its official intermediary with the Greek race, and it further extended the Greek patriarch's authority over the other conquered populations of Orthodox faith Bulgars, Rumans, and Serbs which had never been incorporated in the ecclesiastical or political organization of the Romaic Empire, but which learnt under Ottoman rule to receive their priests and bishops from the Greek ecclesiastics of the capital, and even to call themselves by the Romaic name.
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