A WARLIKE ARISTOCRACY AND THE MANIOTS OF CORSICA THE TIME has come to sort out my gleanings about the mysterious Nyklians and workings of the blood feud. The former I owe almost entirely to the notes assembled by Mr. Dimitrakos-Messisklis in his fine and little-known book,[1] as nobody in the Mani seemed very clear about their origins. The latter—about which they know everything—I owe to conversations with Maniots in a dozen different villages. In 1295, during one of those civil wars that did much, between the reigns of the Frankish emperors and the Turkish capture of Constantinople, to weaken what was left of the restored Byzantine Empire, Andronicus II Palaeologue sacked Nykli in Arcadia. This town, on the site of which Tripoli now stands, was originally a colony of Spartans from Amoukli. When the Morea was conquered by the Franks, Nykli, owing to its position at a centre of communications, became strategically important and the seat of a powerful barony; and when the Frankish power began to decline, it was largely inhabited by those strange hybrids of Greek and Frankish blood known as “gasmouli.”
