Our route brought us through Murnies, celebrated for its orange groves and for the horrible execution of many Cretans by Mustapha Kiritly in the “great insurrection”—­that of 1837—­to punish them for assembling to petition the Sultan for relief.  It is one of the most ghastly of all the dreadful incidents of Turkish repressions, for the Cretans, pacifically assembled without arms, were arrested, and all their magnates, for the better repression of discontent and to overawe rebellions to come, were hanged on the orange-trees in such numbers that, as the old consul of Sweden, an eye-witness, told me during my consulate, the orchard was hung with them, and left there to rot.  According to the statement of the consul, not less than thirty of the chief men of that district were so executed.

But the history of the Venetian rule shows that it was no less cruel and even more treacherous, and Pashley gives from their own records the story of the slaughter of many of the chief people of the same district to punish refractoriness against the government of that day.  Read where we will, so long as there is anything to read, we find the history of Crete one of the most horrible of the classic world—­rebellion, repression, slaughter, internecine and international, until a population, which in the early Venetian times was a million, was reduced in 1830 to little more than a hundred thousand, and during my own residence was brought nearly as low, what with death by sword and bullet, by starvation and disease induced by starvation, added to exile, permanent or temporary.  Yet in 1865 it had been reckoned at 375,000, Christian and Mussulman.  But it must be admitted that the Cretan was always the most refractory of subjects, and, though at the time of this visit the island had obtained the fundamental concessions which it had fought for, in the recognition of its autonomy with a governor of the faith of the majority, in a later visit in 1886 I found it ravaged by a sectional war of vendetta, Christian against Christian, in which, as Photiades Pasha assured me, in one year 600 people had been killed and 25,000 olive-trees destroyed in village feuds.  But the evidence was at hand to show that the pasha himself, finding the islanders no less difficult to control for all the concessions made them, had been obliged in the interest of his own quiet and permanence in government to turn the restlessness of the Cretans into sectional conflicts during which they left him in peaceful possession of his pashalik.  In eastern countries government becomes a fine art if not a humane one.

CHAPTER XXXVI

GREEK BROILS—­TRICOUPI—­FLORENCE