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THE
PALACES
OF
CRETE
BY
J. Walter Graham
REVISED EDITION
PRINCETON, NEWJERSEY
PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
Guildford, Surrey
Copyright© 1962, 1969, 1987 by Princeton University Press
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Princeton Paperback printing, with revisions, 1987
LCC 85-43376
ISBN 0-691-03585-7 ISBN 0-691-00216-9 (pbk.)
Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are
printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for
strength and durability. Paperbacks, while satisfactory for personal
collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding
Printed in the United States of America by
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton Legacy Library edition 2017
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-60794-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-62939-1

P R E F A C E
T H E STORY OF Minoan Crete is as new as the twentieth century.
Much of importance doubtless remains to be discovered, and
much that archaeologists have unearthed they have as yet failed
to publish fully in scientific reports. It is not surprising there
fore that students of Minoan architecture have hesitated to at
tempt to present a comprehensive account of the dwellings of
the Bronze Age Cretans.
Yet the attempt cannot be postponed indefinitely. And surely
the efforts of two generations of such outstanding scholars as
Evans, Pernier, Hazzidakis, Chapouthier, Mrs. Hawes, and
their successors, should make it possible, by a careful compari
son of similar features wherever they occur, to determine with
considerable clarity what is truly typical in Minoan architecture.
Likewise by combining every clue which the large number of
excavated ruins now makes available, we may endeavor to go
a little further in reconstructing in imagination even those im
portant parts of the palaces of which there exist little or no
actual remains; but we must constantly remember that for the
stability even of "castles in the air," firm foundations are an
essential requirement.
In this volume, which it is hoped will prove of interest to
the layman and prospective visitor to Crete, as well as to the
scholar, footnotes and other scholarly paraphernalia have been
kept to a minimum. This has been facilitated by publishing the
more complex problems in a series of fully detailed and docu
mented discussions in the American Journal of Archaeology
(which I have been permitted to draw upon freely) between
1956 and 1961 (see Bibliography), and to these the specialist
reader is referred for further information.
ν

PREFACE
The viewpoint of the study is architectural. The first chapter
is intended as an introduction for the general reader, and what-
ever the individual specialist may think of the views of the
chronology and history of the Minoan civilization there outlined
(a very controversial subject at the moment), these have very
little bearing on the conclusions reached in the following chap-
ters. It is on the form of the houses and palaces presented in
their final, pre-destruction, phase that I have concentrated; we
are not, I think, ready at present to attempt to trace the evolu-
tion of Minoan architecture and to relate it closely to the po-
litical or social history of the period.1
Nor are we yet in a po-
sition, I believe, to assess the influence of foreign architectures
on the development of the Cretan palace, in spite of the confi-
dent assertions recently made by several distinguished archae-
ologists.
With but one or two exceptions all the photographs repro-
duced in this volume were taken by the author during visits to
the island in 1955 and 1959. These trips were made possible
by grants from the American Philosophical Society and the Uni-
versity of Toronto, together with a senior fellowship awarded
by the Canada Council; to these institutions I express my sincere
thanks.
The many individuals to whom I am grateful for assistance
in various ways include Professors John L. Caskey and Henry
Robinson, the former and the present director of the American
School of Classical Studies at Athens, Eugene Vanderpool of
the same institution, Nikolaos Platon, the ephor of Cretan Anti-
quities, and Stylianos Alexiou, now the ephor for Western Crete;
and many others connected with the Cretan Antiquities Service,
especially Emmanuelis Phigetakis of Siteia, Alexandras Veneti-
kos at Phaistos, Manolis Katsoulis at Mallia, and Eleutherios
Synadinakis at Arkhanes. Officials of the British, French, and
Italian Schools have also been most helpful, particularly Misses
Luisa Banti and Carla Gerra, and Messrs. Hood, Piet de Jong,
1
Ludwika Press has shown what can be done along· this line in two articles
cited under his name in the Bibliography.
Vl

PREFACE
Levi, Courbin, Daux, Demargne, and Dessennej and I am
grateful for the permission to photograph and to measure freely
at the various sites controlled by these Schools, and to draw on
their published plans and illustrations for publication. My in-
debtedness for particular figures is listed at the end of the book,
but I am especially glad to be able to reproduce, I believe for
the first time, though unfortunately not in the original colors,
two of the excellent restorations recently done by Piet de Jong
in cooperation with Platon, and now exhibited in the Herakleion
Museum (Figs. 44, 45). I am also greatly indebted to the in-
terest of Prof. Hugo-Brunt of the Division of Town-Planning
in the University of Toronto, which led him to make for me
the axonometric restoration of the Palace of Phaistos, Fig. 55.
Miss Frances Brittain, of the staff of the Royal Ontario Mu-
seum, has taken great pains in doing the final versions of three
of the restored drawings: the perspective of the Palace of
Mallia (Fig. 58), that of House Da at Mallia (Fig. 21), and
the west entrance of the Palace of Phaistos (Fig. 48). I am
likewise grateful to my wife, my daughter Margaret, and my
son Robertson for their assistance during the six pleasant weeks
we toured the far corners of Crete in our "Volvo" station-wagon
in the spring of 1959, and especially to my wife for her criticisms
and helpfulness at all stages of my work. The Princeton Uni-
versity Press and particularly Miss Harriet Anderson have al-
ways been most encouraging, and Mrs. E. B. Smith, through
whose capable hands have passed first the AJA articles, and
afterwards, as copy editor, the text of this book, has suggested
many improvements in the style. To include all these in my
thanks is not to incriminate them for the shortcomings that re-
main.
Prof. Spyridon Marinatos' recent book, Crete and Mycenae,
with its magnificent plates by Prof. Max Hirmer, only became
available to me in the last stages of my work. Most of the
translations from Homer are from Lang, Leaf, and Myers*
Iliad, and Butcher and Lang's Odyssey; a few (so marked) are
from Rieu's translation in the Pelican Series.
vii

PREFACE
L. R. Palmer's Mycenaeans and Minoans, so important for
the history and chronology of the Late Bronze Age, appeared
when my book was already in proof (Nov. 1961), and I have
made no changes in the text of Chapter I. His views, which are
based on first-hand knowledge only in the philological field
(though he has been careful to consult archaeological authority),
do not alter my conviction (1) that there is no significant rela-
tionship between the supposedly Luvian palace at Beycesultan
and the Minoan palaces, and (2) that architecturally the Palace
of Minos remained essentially Minoan (not Mycenaean) down
to its last days. Whether there is any valid evidence for the pres-
ence of Greeks at Knossos in the half century before 1400—an
idea largely (but not wholly) based on the assumption that the
Linear B tablets found there were LM II—should be carefully
reconsidered (see Chapter I, note 16); I agree with Prof.
Palmer that historically it would be much simpler to suppose
that the Greeks first invaded Crete about 1400 B.C.
For reasons largely of economy, references within the book
are made by chapter and section rather than by page; more
exact references can usually be found by consulting the full in-
dex. Except for a few well-Anglicized forms like Athens and
Mycenae, Greek names have been transliterated directly; the
delta of modern place-names has, however, been represented by
"dh" (pronounced like "th" in "there").
It should be noted, especially by those who use the book at
the sites, that detailed descriptions of special rooms or archi-
tectural features (such as the "Grand Staircase" at Knossos)
may appear in chapters other than those presenting the general
description of the building (Chs. 11, in). Such descriptions can
be located through the Index.
J.W.G.
University of Toronto
VlIl

ADDENDUM TO T H E PREFACE
W H I L E the original edition of The Palaces of Crete was still
in the press, a new palace was discovered by the then Director of
Cretan Antiquities, Nikolaos Platon, at the extreme east end of
the island near a tiny hamlet called Kato Zakro, in an area con-
sidered most unlikely for a palace in view of the very limited
amount of arable land in that part of the island (below, p. 4).
The excavations, conducted with great care and skill, are still
in progress, and apparently a considerable area of the palace
remains to be uncovered. The palace was destroyed, according
to Platon {Ancient Crete, p. 167), about 1450 B.C. as a result
of the cataclysmic eruption of Thera (below, p. 11); and the
destruction evidently came so rapidly that the inhabitants aban-
doned almost everything in their haste to escape, and never
returned to reclaim their lost possessions. Platon has conse-
quently discovered vast amounts of stone and clay vessels as
well as many other objects of fine quality in various parts of
the ruins, and these often provide valuable clues as to the
original function of the rooms in which they were found. Some
of the finest of these treasures have been put on display by
Alexiou in one of the galleries of the great museum at Herak-
leion, and photos in color and in black and white have now been
published in Platon's recent book, Crete, and in an even more
recent volume, Ancient Crete, to which Platon has contributed
a valuable chapter about Kato Zakro (see bibliography, p. 250,
under Alexiou).
From the standpoint of the present volume it is the architec-
ture of the new palace that offers the most interest, particularly
because it affords an opportunity to check some of the theories
put forward in the original edition of this book on the basis of
the evidence then available at Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, and
Gournia.
Until Platon has finished the excavation and publication of
the palace at Kato Zakro, any description must be very incom-
plete and entirely provisional. But certain features are already
clear, as its excavator has pointed out. In size, the new palace,
IX

ADDENDUM TO THE PREFACE
when fully excavated, will probably be comparable to the pal-
aces at Phaistos and Mallia (Anc. Crete, p. 164). The general
layout would also appear to be very similar, for it is built
around the four sides of a large oblong central court whose long
axis lies a little more northeast to southwest than the fairly
strictly north-south oriented courts of the other palaces. Similar
also is the concentration of the main public rooms in the large
block of rooms to the west (or southwest) of the court, but
different is their location on the ground-floor level, just off the
court, rather than in the Piano Nobile. This promises to be a
very useful point of difference for it means that these impor-
tant public halls will be, in comparison with the vanished halls
of the Piano Nobile of the other palaces, well preserved both
in form and in contents. Whether there was any important
series of rooms on the upper storey to the west of the court at
Zakro seems at present uncertain; we can only await Platon's
further investigations.
One of these ground-floor rooms at Zakro (xxix) at the
southwest corner of the court, Platon has identified, on the
strength of finding in it a number of wine jars and jugs, as a
dining-room {Anc. Crete, p. 166 and plan p. 165). But the real
Banquet Hall seems to have been situated, just as at Phaistos
and Mallia, in the storey above a large ground-floor room
(xxxn) at the northwest corner of the central court. The identi-
fication is suggested by the resemblance of xxxn to the similarly
situated ground-floor rooms at Phaistos and Mallia in size and
shape and in the rough bases which indicate the presence of two
rows of (wooden?) pillars, three in each row, directly above
which in the upper storey the presence of two rows of three
columns each may fairly be postulated. The similarity with
Mallia is especially close because, in each instance, access to the
Banquet Hall was gained by way of a two-flight stairway lead-
ing up from the rear of a portico on the north side of the cen-
tral court. But it is the nature of the contents of room xxxn and
of the small rooms under and around the stairway that clinches
the identification. In one corner of xxxn was found "an enor-
x

mous cooking-pot still standing in the ashes of the fireplace,"
while "two small adjoining rooms were full of cooking-pots
and kitchen utensils" (Anc. Crete, pp. i66f).
Even more recently, the publication of the palace at Pylos on
the Greek mainland, destroyed about 1200 B.C., has permitted
the identification of a remarkably similar Banquet Hall. Its
resemblance in plan to the one at Mallia is particularly close,
while the discovery of masses of crockery and miscellaneous
pieces of cooking apparatus in the adjacent rooms parallels the
evidence of Kato Zakro. This new evidence has led me slightly
to modify the suggested plan of the Banquet Halls in the sec-
ond storey at Phaistos and Mallia, as explained in AJA 71
(1967), pp·353-360.
Another new suggestion put forward in the original edition
of The Palaces of Crete that has been confirmed by the evi-
dence of the new palace, is the use of a foot as the unit of
linear measurement, a foot with the approximate value of
30.36 cm. (below, pp. 222-229) and possibly divided into
twelve parts {Second, International Cretological Conference 1,
pp. 157-165). At Phaistos and Mallia the central courts were
both interpreted as having been laid out to be 170 Minoan feet
long by 80 feet wide, but, especially in the former, there were
slight uncertainties about these measurements, and the number
170 may also have seemed a somewhat odd choice. But about
the Kato Zakro central court there can be no doubt whatever
since it can be closely measured between well-preserved wall
faces. The east to west dimension varies, according to my meas-
urements (which Platon kindly allowed me to make), from
12.03 m
· n e a r t n e
south end to 12.15 m. at the north end.
Forty Minoan feet would be 12.14 m
· The north to south
length, also on my own measurement, is approximately 30.30
m.; 30.36 m. would be the theoretical value for 100 Minoan
feet. Surely then the determination can no longer be in doubt
and the result is of very considerable significance for our under-
standing of the way in which the palaces were planned (below,
pp. 222-229). So long as there existed any reasonable doubt
Xl

regarding the unit of measurement used by the Minoan archi
tects, my theories of palace-planning in terms of round num
bers of feet could not fail to appear somewhat problematical;
the new evidence puts the theory on a far sounder footing. It
will be difficult, in the future, to maintain that the palaces of
Crete were haphazard labyrinths; in fact such a view will run
counter to the clear evidence of the ruins themselves.
In a recent article the present director of Cretan antiquities,
Stylianos Alexiou (Kret. Chron. 17, 1963, pp. 339-351) identi
fies certain tall vertical architectural members seen on several
stone vases, mural paintings, etc., and what I spoke of as an
"odd form of capital" (below, p. 196), as masts or banner poles
held in place against the walls by rectangular cleats or "tie-
blocks" as I have suggested terming them in English. Alexiou's
interpretation has much to recommend it and I have therefore
suggested in an unpublished article a modification of my resto
ration of the north end of the central court at Phaistos (Fig.
50). Instead of two ranges of half columns on either side of
the central doorway I would now propose to restore two banner
poles held firmly against the wall, probably at the level of the
bottom of the third storey, by a pair of large cleats or tie-blocks.
Alexiou's idea about the banner poles was suggested by the
form of the New Kingdom Egyptian temple pylons, and the
general resemblance of the facade at Phaistos, if so restored,
to such a pylon is obvious.
Finally, I should like to mention that the very competent
young American architect-archaeologist, Joseph W. Shaw, who
has worked with the University of Chicago expedition at Cen-
chraeae on the isthmus of Corinth and with Platon at Kato
Zakro, for whom he has drawn the plans of that palace during
several campaigns, has undertaken to study the materials and
techniques used in Minoan architecture as the subject of a doc
toral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Such a
study is badly needed, and Mr. Shaw seems admirably qualified
for the task.
University of Toronto J.W.G.
October 1068 χϋ

PREFACETO 1987 EDITION
T H E CONTINUED DEMAND for Palaces of Crete that has led to the
preparation of this new edition (first edition, 1962) indicates a
lively interest in these structures which mark the beginnings of
monumental European architecture. Unfortunately even though
nearly twenty years have passed the time still does not seem ripe to
attempt to trace the chronological development of Minoan archi-
tecture inasmuch as what little is left of the early stages of the pal-
aces still lies hidden beneath their later remains, and what has been
brought to light is still woefully insufficient to produce a compre-
hensive and unambiguous account. To date, the most ambitious
attempt to investigate the earlier phases of the palaces is that of the
veteran Italian archaeologist, Professor Doro Levi; but even at
Phaistos only a small part of the original building or buildings
could be revealed and published.
I shall attempt, then, to describe the palaces as they appeared in
the final and most splendid period of their existence, i.e. about
1700-1450 B.C., basing the account on the actual remains but not
hesitating to endeavor to conjure up those parts of the buildings
that formed part of the now missing upper storeys, especially if
they seem to represent significant aspects of the palace functionally
or architecturally.
So many new archaeological discoveries have been made, or
older ones published during the last two decades, that many sec-
tions of this book might be the better for a complete rewriting.
Since that has not been possible, we hope that the usefulness of the
book may be recovered by incorporating in the text numerous ma-
jor or minor corrections or amplifications; by bringing the Bibli-
ography up to date; by revising the Analytical Index to include the
new additions; and by improving and increasing the number of
illlustrations to represent the recent discoveries. Where additions
could not be introduced without disturbing the pagination, the
material has been put in six Addenda at the end of the text.
One very important aspect of Minoan architecture and build-
ing which I have treated in a single chapter (vm), has now been
properly studied and published by my colleague, Professor J. W.
XlIl

PREFACE TO I 9 8 7 EDITION
Shaw, in his Minoan Architecture: Materials and Techniques,
Rome, 1973 (Annuario della Scuo/a Archeologica di Atene 33,
1971), abbreviated to M. and T. In a recent article (see Select Bib-
liography, 1980) Shaw has discussed the interesting topic of the
orientation of the palaces. He suggests that the east-west axis
might be the controlling factor in the planning of the palaces
rather than the north-south. The most important piece of evidence
favoring his view is offered by the remains of a four-legged table-
altar^) located in the exact center of the Central Court at Mallia,
since an east-west line extended westward through this altar would
exactly bisect the interval between two cult pillars—each bearing
common Minoan cult symbols, especially the double-ax—on the
long axis of a cult room that corresponds closely in its position
with the East and West Pillar Crypts at Knossos.
My acknowledgments and thanks expressed in the Preface to
the first edition still stand. In recent years I have profited partic-
ularly by discussions with Nikolaos Platon, Stylianos Alexiou,
Sinclair Hood, Joseph Shaw, and my wife, with whom I have
made many enjoyable journeys in the lovely island of Crete "in the
midst of the wine-dark sea." I am particularly grateful to Mrs.
Giuliana Bianco for her skill and patience in redrawing several of
my figures (Figs. 3, 6, 50, 58, 87-88, 159). My thanks are also
due to J. W. Shaw for his plan of the Northwest Entrance at Knos-
sos (Fig. 158) and to Sinclair Hood and the British School for
permission to use it.
Anyone using the book, especially at the sites, should bear it in
mind that individual features at particular sites, such as the Grand
Staircase at Knossos (Chapter 11, Section 1), may be further de-
scribed in the section dealing specifically with such features, in
this instance with staircases in general (Chapter x, Section 1); the
index should be consulted to bring together such related material.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Chapter 1 is intended as an
introduction for the general reader.
Toronto J. W. G.
xiv

C O N T E N T S
P R E F A C E S
C H A P T E R i. The Land, the People, and the History
of Minoan Crete
C H A P T E R ii. The Major Palaces
ι. The Palace of Minos at Knossos, 23
2. The Palace of Phaistos, 34
3. The Palace of Mallia, 41
C H A P T E R i n . Minor Palaces, Villas, and Houses
ι. The Palace of Gournia, 47
2. The Villa of Hagia Triadha, 49
3. The Little Palace at Knossos, 51
4. The Royal Villa, Knossos, 52
5. The South House, Knossos, 55
6. The House of the Chancel Screen, Knossos, 56
7. The Southeast House, Knossos, 56
8. The House of the Frescoes, Knossos, 57
9. The House at Nirou Khani, 58
10. Houses at TyIissos, 59
11. House A, TyIissos, 60
12. House C, Tylissos, 61
13. Houses at Mallia, 62
14. House DA, Mallia, 63
15. House ZA, Mallia, 64
16. House ZB, Mallia, 66
17. House E, The "Little Palace," Mallia, 67
18. The Villa of the Lilies, Amnisos, 68
19. House B, Palaikastro, 69
20. House at Sklavokambos, 70
21. Plati, Lasithi Plain, 71
22. Other Sites, 72
XV

C O N T E N T S
C H A P T E R i v . T h e C e n t r a l C o u r t and the B u l l G a m e s 7 3
C H A P T E R v. T h e Residential Q u a r t e r s o f the R o y a l F a m i l y 84
1. General Description, 84
2. The Minoan Hall, 94
. Bathrooms or Lustral Chambers?, 99
4. The Toilet, 108
5. The Guest Rooms, 111
C H A P T E R v i . P u b l i c A p a r t m e n t s 1 1 4
1. Reception Halls, 114
2. The Banquet Hall, 125
C H A P T E R v i i . O t h e r R o o m s 1 2 9
1. Storerooms and Workrooms, 129
2. Cult Rooms, 137
C H A P T E R V I I I . B u i l d i n g M a t e r i a l s and F o r m s 143
1. Materials, 143
2. Construction, 149
C H A P T E R IX. W i n d o w s and D o o r s 1 6 2
1. The Meaning of the Recesses, 162
2. Lighting and Ventilation, 164
3. Doors and Locks, 170
C H A P T E R x. Stairs and Storeys 1 8 0
1. Stairways, 180
2. Height and Number of Storeys, 185
C H A P T E R XI. D e c o r a t i v e Features 1 9 0
1. Columns and Porticoes, 190
2. Architectural Detail, 197
3. Wall Decoration, 199
4. Pavements, 206
C H A P T E R X I I . F u r n i s h i n g s and E q u i p m e n t 2 1 0
1. Furniture and Furnishings, 210
2. Water Supply and Drainage, 219
xvi

CONTENTS
C H A P T E R XIIi. Procedures and Principles 222
ι. Measuring and Planning the Palaces, 222
2. The Origins of Minoan Architecture, 229
3. Principles of Minoan Architecture, 234
A D D E N D A 249
i. The Northwest Entrance, Knossos, 249
2. Palace at Kato Zakro, 250
3. The West Annex of the Little Palace, 252
4. The Arkhanes Model, 253
5. Minoan Linear Measurement, 254
6. Bathrooms and Lustral Chambers, 255
B I B L I O G R A P H Y 270
A B B R E V I A T I O N S 2 7 5
I L L U S T R A T I O N S : Sources, Credits, Dimensions 277
I N D E X 283
PLATES 295
XVIl

C H A P T E R I
T H E LAND, T H E PEOPLE, AND T H E
HISTORY OF MINOAN CRETE
There is a land called Qrete in the midst of the wine-dark sea,
a fair land and a rich, begirt with water, and therein are many
men innumerable} and ninety cities.—(ODYSSEY, 19, 172-174)
SUCH was Crete when Homer sang, nearly three thousand
years ago, when the island was still heavily forested with cy-
press, and when the fertile earth still supported a teeming
population.
But even by Homer's day the memory had already grown
dim of a time, little more than half a millennium earlier, when
Crete had enjoyed a prosperity eclipsing anything in the Aegean
area, and could boast a civilization rivaling that of its contempo-
rary, New Kingdom Egypt. Today, the forests have vanished
through most of the island, the fertility of the valleys has di-
minished, and the ninety "cities" have mostly shrunk to small
towns.1
Yet the island is still beautiful. Along its hundreds of
miles of rocky shores and gleaming sand beaches the clear blue
waters of the Mediterranean still break in white surf, and never
is one far from sight or sound of the sea (Figs. 35, 63), for the
island is nowhere more than thirty-six miles (58 km.) in
width (Fig. 1).
Rugged mountains stretch almost continuously from east to
west the entire 160 miles (250 km.) of its length, and allow no
room even for a road along much of the nearly harborless south
coast. The White Mountains in the west (Fig. 34), traversed
by spectacular gorges, leave scant space for man except for a
1
Paul Faure, "La Crete aux cent villes," Kret. Chron., 13 (1959), pp. 171-217.
3

LAND, PEOPLE, AND HISTORY
few small plains along the north coast where the present capital,
Khanea, is located; and somewhere in its neighborhood, still
undiscovered, lay the important Minoan city of Kydonia with
its palace. The range of Ida reaches heights of over 8000 feet
(2500 m.) in the center of the island (Fig. 51); but since Crete
is wider here, room is left for a considerable plain on the north,
where lies Herakleion (Fig. 36), the largest city, with a popu-
lation of about 40,000, and for a much larger and more fertile
valley in the south, the Messara (Fig. 46). It is no accident
that in Minoan times Crete's greatest cities, Knossos and
Phaistos, were situated in these two plains. East of Ida the
range of Dikte, over 7000 feet (2150 m.), encloses the high
plain of Lasithi, possibly the site, at Plati, of a Minoan palace
(Fig. 30); today it is famous for its potatoes and for the ten
thousand windmills that pump water to the thirsty fields in
summer. In a coastal plain to the north lies the third largest
known palace, that of Mallia (Fig. 56). Across the low isthmus
of Hierapetra the mountains stage one final grand upheaval
before they slip down steeply into the sea at the east end of the
island. The coastal road from Hagios Nikolaos on the Gulf of
Mirabello, at the north end of the isthmus, to Siteia near the
northeast tip of the island, is one of the most spectacular in
Crete. Far below, for much of the way, the two tiny islets of
Mochlos and Pseira, where the American archaeologist Seager
dug early in the century, rise from a sea of unbelievable blues
and greens. Even in the very rugged eastern end of the island an
important palace was discovered in the 1960s by Nikolaos Platon
at the harborage of Kato Zakros.2
In addition to abundant timber—especially the cypress,
highly valued in ancient days for building ships and palaces—
the mountains furnished plenty of limestone of good quality
and, while little of the fine marble for which the mainland of
Greece is famous was available, gypsum quarries supplied a
2
Wroncka, BCH, 83 (1959), p. 538. A bibliography of Cretan geography is
given by Philippson, Die griechischen Landschaften, IV, Das aegaische Meer una
seine Inseln (Frankfurt am Main, !959), pp. 353-354; but unfortunately no
account of Cretan geography is given in this otherwise comprehensive survey of
Greece.
4

CHAPTER I
handsome and easily worked stone particularly prized for dec-
orative purposes (Fig. 125).
On the highest mountains snow lingers through much of
the year (Fig. 51), but in general it is rarely very cold in
winter; the latitude, 35° north, is about that of Memphis,
Tennessee. In summer the sun's blazing heat, felt especially
on the south side facing Africa, is usually relieved by tempering
breezes from the surrounding sea. In the west there is a fair
annual rainfall, but this tapers off badly toward the east and,
thanks to the progressive deforestation, there is little running
water during the long summer months. Spring is the botanist's
paradise; even the rocky hillsides are carpeted with an amazing
variety of wildflowers, many of them of diminutive size.
Though less than half the size of Lake Ontario (Fig. 1, in-
set) and but two-thirds that of the state of Connecticut, Crete
is much the largest of the hundreds of islands that compose the
Aegean archipelago, and as the nearest considerable land-mass
of Europe to the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the Near
East—a half-way house, as it were, between three continents—
it is not surprising that it cradled the first European civilization.
This historical fact is mirrored mythologically in the quaint tale
of the princess of Phoenicia, bearing the significant name of
Europa, who was ferried in miraculous fashion from her Asiatic
homeland on the back of a handsome white bull—Zeus in bo-
vine disguise according to Greek legend—to Crete, where she
became by courtesy of the god the mother of three famous
Cretan dynasts, Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Sarpedon.8
As early as the Neolithic Period the island was inhabited by a
scattered population living partly in caves, but also concen-
trated at Knossos in one of the largest Neolithic settlements in
the eastern Mediterranean area. Little is known of the origins
of these first settlers, but the associations suggested by the pot-
tery and other artifacts are with Anatolia and possibly Egypt
rather than with the Greek mainland; considerable reinforce-
ments seem to have arrived perhaps from the same areas about
s
Marinates, RA, 34. (1949), pp. 5-18.
5

the beginning of the Bronze Age, that is sometime after 3000
B.C. A recent study of place-names suggests that a considerable
element in the Cretan population may have been related to the Lu-
vians who, in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, were established
in Asia Minor southwest of the Hittites. Luvian-speaking Bey-
cesultan has recently been partially excavated by British archaeol-
ogists led by Seton Lloyd (Fig. 1, inset).4
Cultural development through the third millennium (3000-
2000 B.C.) was "accelerando" and the population increased and
spread throughout the island in this Early Bronze or Early
"Minoan" period. Sir Arthur Evans, who more than anyone
else is responsible for the recovery of this forgotten civilization,
devised a system of chronology into which to fit his discoveries
which is still generally followed, though many have grave
doubts about certain details such as the date of the beginning of
Early Minoan. Here in round numbers, adequate for our pur-
poses, is the scheme, named of course from the famous leg-
endary king of Knossos:
Early Minoan (E.M.) 3000-2000 B.C.
Middle Minoan (M.M.) 2000-1600 B.C.
Late Minoan (L.M.) 1600-1200 B.C.
These three divisions correspond roughly to, and in fact were
suggested by, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New
Kingdom Egypt, and the tentative dates are largely dependent
upon lists of pharaohs and their regnal years as recorded by
the Egyptians.
Little is yet known of the architecture of Crete during the
Early Minoan period (Fig. 33), still less of its history, govern-
ment, and religion, matters which the material remains un-
earthed by the archaeologist can only dimly and very imperfect-
ly illumine.5
The consistent improvement of pottery in quality,
* Mellaart, AJA, 6a (1958), pp. 9-33 ·, cf. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans
(London, 1961), chap, vii, 3.
5
On 3rd millennium architecture see K. Bramgan, Foundations of Palatial Crete
(New York, 1970), Tombs of Mesara (London, 1970); also P. Warren, Myrtos- An
Early Bronze Age Settlement in Crete (London, 1972).
6

CHAPTER I
shape, and decoration throughout the period, however, is an
index of the general cultural progress. Quantities of handsome
vessels in a variety of shapes were made from beautifully veined
and colored stones—a craft long practised by the Egyptians;
and gold jewelry and ornaments found in E.M. graves exhibit
remarkably advanced craftsmanship both in design and execu-
tion.
The significant but unspectacular developments of this "pre-
palatial" period may be compared to the heat which builds up
unseen within a great stack of hay until it explodes spontaneous-
ly into a brilliant burst of flame. About 2000 B.C. such a "cul-
tural explosion"—not without parallel in the history of other
civilizations—occurred. At the very beginning of the Middle
Minoan period fairly large and substantial palaces spring into
being, and a system of writing appears. No doubt the latter was
triggered by developments in Egypt where an intricate system
had been in use for a millennium j yet the Cretan shows little
resemblance in the form of the characters to the Egyptian and
develops quite on its own into a reasonably efficient syllabic
method of writing known to the archaeologist as Linear A.
But nothing, so far as the available archaeological record
goes, is so eloquent of the new progress as pottery. The most
significant variety is called Kamares Ware, named from a cave
sanctuary on the south slopes of Mt. Ida facing Phaistos (Fig.
51), where quantities of this pottery were dedicated. The love
of color and movement, so characteristic of Cretan art, is bril-
liantly illustrated. A common shape is a bridge-spouted, two-
handled jar with a strongly swelling profile, painted in white,
red, and orange against a black background (Fig. 153, A).
Though resembling vegetable or animal forms, often in swirl-
ing patterns which suggest the vitality of nature, the designs
are strongly formalized and excellently suited to the shape of
the vase. This happy union of nature and convention is typical
of Cretan art at its best, though at times the feeling becomes
much more informal, and architecture is always predominantly
informal.
7

Our knowledge of the history of the Middle Minoan period
is almost as meager as that of the preceding period. Of material
and artistic progress and of the growth of population there can
be no doubt, and the brilliant development of the palaces and
the mansions of the rich by the end of the age bears witness
to a level of civilization reached by the aristocracy comparable to
that found in contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia. Such finds
as Kamares pottery discovered in association with the monuments
of Middle Kingdom pharaohs, a statue of an Egyptian mer-
chant58
of the twelfth or thirteenth dynasty found in the Palace
of Minos, a Babylonian sealstone about the time of Hammurabi
in a Cretan tomb, and objects of Cretan style in the Shaft Graves
of Mycenae around 1600 B.C, show that Crete was in contact
with her neighbors on all sides, and incidentally provide badly
needed clues for dating the development of Minoan civilization.
Cretan ships were probably responsible for most of the trans-
feral of such goods as these to and from Crete. The scarcity of
identifiable fortifications or of other signs of martial activity on
the island is usually interpreted, especially in the following
period (L.M.), as meaning that Crete possessed a fleet of war-
ships with which she fended off her enemies; yet this picture
of Crete as the first Mediterranean sea power, supported though
it is by ancient Greek historians, is far from proven.6
In any
case it may be doubted whether Egypt or any other of the Near
Eastern nations during the period 2000 to 1400 B.C. ever had
the power, the opportunity, and the incentive to mount an
organized naval expedition against an island so well removed
from their shores as Crete.
5a
Hardly an official, as Evans thought; see Ward, Orientalia, 30 (1961), pp.
28-29. On the date of the statue see Pendlebury in Studies 'presented to D. M.
Robinson (ed. G. E. Mylonas, St. Louis, 1951), I, p. 189.
6
Starr, "The Myth of the Minoan Thalassocracy," Historia, 3 (1954-1955),
pp. 282-291, and Origins of Greek Civilization (New York, 1961), p. 38. How-
ever, Lionel Casson holds to the traditional view, largely on the grounds of the
lack of fortifications, The Ancient Mariners (New York, 1959), p. 31; he also
reviews the general question of Cretan relations with her neighbors (pp. 21-24).
Also R. J. Buck, "The Minoan Thalassocracy Re-examined," Historia, 11 (1962), pp.
129-137. That battle-fleets were possible in early Late Minoan is shown by the new
Theran miniature fresco.
8

CHAPTER I
But another growing power was closer at hand. On a clear
day the mountains of western Crete can actually be seen from
the southeastern tip of the Greek mainland (Fig. i, inset), and
since about 2000 B.C. the dominant element of the mainland
population had been a Greek speaking people. Their descend-
ants, the Greeks of the Classical period (first millennium B.C),
however brilliant they may have been, can scarcely be accused
of having been a peaceful folk. Nor were their Bronze Age
ancestors, from the first bands who conquered new homes with
fire and sword at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age to
those who toward the end of the Late Bronze (thirteenth
century B.C.) sacked and burned the citadel of Troy.
It is therefore not an unlikely hypothesis that a destruction
of the Palace of Minos which occurred toward the end of the
M.M. period, that is sometime in the early seventeenth century,
was due to a piratical, sea-borne raid by the "Mycenaean" Greeks
of the mainland, or, since Crete was subject to periodic devastat-
ing earthquakes, that the Greek raiders followed in the track
of a severe quake which had left the Cretan cities temporarily
defenceless. On this hypothesis some of the masses of gold and
other treasure found by Schliemann in the royal Shaft Graves
inside the citadel of Mycenae, the leading city of the mainland,
would represent part of the loot. Indeed a recent ingenious
theory, for which there is some evidence at the Egyptian end,
goes further and suggests that the temporary shift in the balance
of power between Crete and the Greek mainland was partly
responsible for the expulsion of the Asiatic Hyksos from Lower
Egypt where they had ruled for a century, and for the con-
sequent founding of a new Egyptian dynasty (the eighteenth)
initiating the New Kingdom. According to this theory the
Hyksos had been favored by Crete (the lid of an Egyptian
alabaster vessel bearing the cartouche of the Hyksos king Khyan
was discovered in the ruins of the Palace of Minos), whereas
the native Egyptians were now aided by the Greeks who, like
the Classical Greeks a millennium later, served as mercenaries
9

LAND, P E O P L E , AND HISTORY
in the Egyptian army. This would also help to explain the
numerous traces of Egyptian (as well as Cretan) influence in
the Mycenaean Shaft Grave burials.7
The last and the most brilliant, if not the most prosperous,
phase of the Minoan civilization is that of the Late Minoan
period, about 1600-1200 B.C. Extensive excavations, thousands
of inscribed tablets, and numerous traditions preserved by the
Classical Greeks, combine to throw a flood of light (compara-
tively speaking) on this period. In spite of this it is impossible
at the present time even to outline with any confidence the
history of the final glory, decline, and fall of the Minoan civili-
zation, for recent happenings have thrown all the ideas about
this period that seemed to be safely established back into the
melting pot for reinterpretation. The following sketch, there-
fore, is offered with the full realization that much of it may
shortly be contradicted by evidence not yet available to the
writer.
Expressive of the level of refinement and culture attained in
the first century of the Late Minoan period, following the
rebuilding of the palaces on lines more splendid than before
and the appearance of many handsome new mansions through-
out the island,8
are the beautiful naturalistic pottery styles
known as the Floral (L.M. Ia) and the Marine (L.M. Ib). A
magnificent example of the latter is the Octopus Vase discovered
in the ruins of the modest little town of Gournia (Fig. 153, B):
the Cretan potter with his Midas touch has transformed the
repulsive creature of the deep into a thing of beauty, into a
living pattern whose eight tentacles surround and confine the
globular vase as naturally as its skin envelopes an orange. A
Mycenaean Greek rendering of the same subject already dis-
plays the Classical Greek preference for symmetry and geo-
metric form (Fig. 153, C). Both representations are beautiful,
but in quite different ways.
7
Cf. Schachermeyr, ArMv Orientdlni, 172
(1949), pp. 331-350.
8
Marinatos suggests that many of these mansions, often spaced 7 to 10 miles
apart, were centers of local administration, C and M., pp. 18, 66.
I O

CHAPTER I
For all its brilliance this first phase of the new epoch was
also, for most of the important centers except Knossos, virtually
their final stage as well. That these flourishing cities and towns
were suddenly destroyed is clear from their remains, but the
cause of such a general catastrophe is less obvious. The eminent
Greek archaeologist and explorer of many Cretan sites, the
late Professor Spyridon Marinatos, put forward the attractive
hypothesis that it was the result of a violent explosion on the
island of Thera (modern Santorini) in the Aegean Sea directly
north of Crete.9
The evidence for a cataclysmic eruption in
which the major part of the island disappeared in one or more
gigantic blasts is clear from the excavations on Thera made by
the Germans in the 1890's, and has been dated to approximately
ι 500 B.C. Like the catastrophic eruption of Krakatoa in the
Dutch East Indies in 1883 tremendous "tidal waves" must
have been generated, which Marinatos believes would have
been far greater in the case of the eruption of Thera. The entire
north coast of Crete, hardly more than seventy miles away, was
exposed to the full force of these titanic waves.
In the Villa at Amnisos, only a few yards from the sea
(Fig. 76), massive blocks of the stone foundations were found
by Marinatos to have been shifted out of place, and quantities
of volcanic pumice, carried in by the flood, mantled the ruins.
The waves must have traveled far inland over the lower parts
of the island, overwhelming many other sites including Mallia,
Gournia, Nirou Khani, and Palaikastro.
Such a terrific onslaught of nature would have at least
temporarily crippled the social, economic, and political life of
Crete. How many tens of thousands of its inhabitants may have
perished we shall never know. Since coastal communities would
have been the hardest hit we may suppose that for a time Cretan
contacts with its neighbors were abruptly severed. Is this the
long sought origin of the Lost Island of Atlantis? According
to the tale told by the Egyptians a millennium later to the
8
Antiquity, 13 (1939), pp. 425-439; C. and M., pp. 20, 22; Kret. Chron., 4
(1950), pp. i95-*i3-
I I

Greek sage, Solon, Atlantis, though a large, populous, and
powerful island, in the course of a single dreadful day and
night and after a series of calamitous earthquakes and inunda
tions, disappeared forever beneath the sea.10
But what of the fact that other Cretan sites, surely high above
the reach of the ravaging waves, were also destroyed at a per
haps slightly later date or dates, including Sklavokambos,
Tylissos, and Hagia Triadha. Even the great palace at Phaistos,
on its hilltop site, was destroyed sometime in the fifteenth
century and never rebuilt. Was this due to the earthquakes
which often follow such eruptions? Or was it the result of the
Mycenaean Greeks' seizing the opportunity to invade the island
when Cretan defences were down, especially if, as ancient tradi
tion claims,6
she depended on a navy for her protection.
The Palace of Minos, too, three miles from the sea and
enclosed by high hills, seems to have been seriously damaged
somewhat later still, about the year 1400 B.C." Perhaps the
damage to the palace at this time was not nearly so extensive,
however, as its excavators have thought, and Sir Arthur Evans
himself was constrained to admit that the building had been
reoccupied to some extent, though in his opinion this was but a
degenerate "squatter" occupation. Professor L. R. Palmer of
Oxford University has lately challenged this opinion.12
He
suggests that the palace was inhabited throughout the closing
centuries of the Bronze Age by a dynasty of Mycenaean Greek
rulers who adapted the Minoan system of writing to suit (rather
badly) their own language, and continued to keep administrative
1 0
The above account was written about i960, for a more recent comprehensive sur
vey of the problems of Atlantis, Thera, and the destruction of Crete see J. V. Luce, The
End of Atlantis (1969).
1 1
The relative dating of the destruction of the various sites is a much disputed
point; see Levi, Boll. d'Arte, 44 (1959)) ΡΡ·
2
53-z64·
1 2
Orally, in the public press, and in multigraphed statements circulated privately;
a definitive expression of his views will perhaps not be published until certain
manuscript notebooks of Sir Arthur Evans and possibly others, relative to the
excavations at Knossos, are published; cf. Hood, Antiquity, 35 (1961), pp. 80-81,
for a contrary view and for bibliography. See now Palmer, Mycenaeans and
Minoans, especially chap. Vi.
12

CHAPTER I
records as the native Cretan kings had done before them—a
practice which spread to the Greek rulers of the mainland.
Signs of the inevitable change in spirit at Knossos, due to the
installation of this foreign and warlike Mycenaean dynasty, did
not go entirely unobserved by Evans and others, though they
interpreted them differently. Pendlebury referred to the L.M.
II "Palace Style" pottery, conspicuous for its grandiose character
and pompous monumentality, as the "pottery of empire";13
significantly, this pottery has rarely been found in Crete except
at Knossos, though it is common on the Greek mainland. Evans
noticed similar changes in the wall paintings of the L.M. II
period, illustrated for example in the stiff, symmetrical com-
position of the Griffin Fresco in the Knossos Throne Room
(Fig. 130), which has since been found at Pylos on the main-
land. "As compared with the great artistic traditions, such as
characterized the preceding Palace stage . . . ," he remarks,
"the new work takes a severely regulated shape. Lost is the
free spirit that had given birth to the finely modelled forms of
the athletes in the East Hall groups and to the charging bull
of the North Portico. Vanished is the power of individual char-
acterization and of instantaneous portraiture that we recognize
in the lively Miniature groups of the Court Ladies. Departed,
too, is the strong sympathy with wild Nature. . . . A sacral and
conventional style now prevails . . . grandiose conceptions . . .
the wholesale adoption . . . of the processional scheme. . . ."14
The aesthetic feeling in the murals and pottery is indeed so
distinct that a close student of the development of Cretan pottery
styles, Arne Furumark, commented on the "colossal change in
mentality that had taken place during one or two generations."15
Recognized also was a volte-face in the previous peaceful
character of the Minoan civilization. The appearance of "warrior
tombs," of military elements in the wall paintings, of clay tablets
recording military equipment, all sound a new militaristic note
" i i . of C, p. 208.
14
Knossos, IV, p. 880.
15
Of. Arch., 6 (1950), p. 258.
13

LAND, P E O P L E , AND HISTORY
which Evans sought to explain as due to a sudden wave of
imperialism infecting the Lords of Knossos: the appearance of
a new and aggressive dynasty which proceeded to conquer and
destroy the other Minoan palaces and to develop a great mari
time empire.1
"
The Greek historian, Thucydides, writing in the fifth century
B.C, remarked that the navy of Minos was the first to control
the seas.17
But Thucydides is likely to have been wrong, unless
we interpret this as meaning a Greek "Minos." At any rate the
navy that dominated the East Mediterranean in the Late
Bronze Age was surely that of the Mycenaean confederacy; and
the discovery, thanks to Ventris' brilliant decipherment of
"Linear B" in 1952,18
that thousands of the tablets found at
Knossos were written in Mycenaean Greek, makes it certain
that the "new and aggressive dynasty" was not native Cretan
but composed of invaders from the mainland—a conclusion
diametrically opposed to Evans' tenaciously held conviction that
the mainland had been colonized and ruled by the Minoans.
The picture, then, which seems to be emerging of Crete in
the latter part of the Late Minoan period is that it was domi
nated by Greek-speaking rulers ruling from a single center,
namely Knossos j and that there occurred a gradual spread of
Mycenaean Greek influence throughout the island, accompanied
by a weakening of the native Cretan culture. The loss of popula
tion from the tidal catastrophe of 1500 seems to have been more
than made good.
It is not surprising, therefore, that when Agamemnon sum
moned his vassal kings to join him in the war against Troy,
1 6
Knossos, IV, pp. 884-888. However, some of the signs of change I have men
tioned above should perhaps be attributed to the LM III rather than to the LM II
period; and if Palmer (Mycenaeans and Minoans, especially pp. 210-215) is correct
the seizure of Knossos by the Greeks from the mainland occurred about 1400
(marked by a partial destruction of the palace) rather than about 1450. According
to Palmer (p. 214), agreeing with Furumark, the "peaceful and fruitful coex
istence (of Crete and the mainland) degenerated (about 1450) into rivalry and
conflict, resulting in the victory of the mainland c. 1400" (the parentheses are
mine). The more military aspect of Knossos during this half century could then
be due to an attempt to prepare to meet the threat from the mainland.
1 7
I , 4.
l 8
Ventris and Chadwick, JHS, 73 (1953), pp. 84-103.
Η

CHAPTER I
sometime after the middle of the thirteenth century, Homer
represents Idomeneus, "grandson of Minos," as joining him:
"And of the Cretans Idomeneus the famous spearman was
leader, even of them that possessed Knossos and Gortys of the
great walls, Lyktos and Miletos and chalky Lykastos and Phais-
tos and Rhytion, stablished cities all; and of all others that
dwelt in Crete of the hundred cities. . . . With these followed
eighty black ships."19
Not many years after the return of the Greek leaders from
Troy, that is about 1200 B.C, Knossos shared the fate of
Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, and many another "stablished city":
to be sacked and burned by the invading Dorian Greeks. But
the blaze that destroyed the palaces at Knossos and Pylos also
baked thousands of the clay tablets containing the records of
royal administration, and so they were preserved for the archae-
ologist to find and painfully but eagerly decipher more than
three thousand years later.
If this interpretation of Cretan history from about 1600-1200
B.C. proves to be near the truth it naturally follows that the
architectural stage presented by the ruins of the Palace of Minos
is not exactly comparable to that presented by the other palaces,
since these were destroyed some two centuries earlier. Indeed
we might expect to observe certain Mycenaean Greek architec-
tural features in the ruins at Knossos, and something of a case
could perhaps be made out in favor of such a view. Details
which, in the present state of our knowledge (or ignorance),
are common to Knossos and the mainland palaces, but are else-
where unknown in Crete, include fluted column shafts and the
triglyph half-rosette frieze (Fig. 136, A,B), as well as mural
decorations such as the Shield Fresco, and the Griffin Fresco
which "guards" the throne both at Knossos and Pylos. Some
would even add the Knossos Throne Room plan as a whole.
Surely, however, its resemblance to the Mycenaean "megaron"
is very slight,20
in spite of the fact that if the Mycenaean dynasts
19
Iliad, 2, 645-652.
30
Reusch in Minoica, pp. 334.-358; but cf. Blegen, ibid., p. 66.
15

of Knossos did any extensive remodeling or repairing of the
Palace of Minos, as a result of a destruction about 1400, we
might well expect them to have introduced the megaron, so
indispensable a feature of their own palaces (Fig. 150).21
Its
conspicuous absence reassures us, in my opinion, that we are
right in treating the Palace of Minos as essentially a Minoan
palace; and I find it highly unlikely that even such features as
the fluting of columns or the carving of the triglyph half-rosette
frieze were introduced into Crete from Mycenaean architecture.
If we can accept the hypothesis of an occupation of Crete by
Mycenaean Greeks for a period of more than two centuries
during the Late Bronze Age this will have to be considered as
a factor of considerable significance in the development of
western civilization. Contact with Crete had undoubtedly been
largely responsible for the first beginnings of culture amongst
the rude Greek-speaking folk who began to enter the peninsula
of Greece sometime about 2000 B.C, and for the development of
a rudimentary civilization there by the end of the Middle
Bronze Age, the time of the famous Shaft Graves of Mycenae.
But the infinitely closer contacts arising from a prolonged resi-
dence of Mycenaeans of the ruling class in Crete itself would
result in a far more intensive and extensive transference of
Cretan ways of life to the less cultured Greeks. The more
obvious effects of this would appear in architecture, wall paint-
ing, pottery, gem engraving, etc., and, we should add, in the
art of writing. But in the less directly provable fields of thought
and behavior, the influence is also likely to have been great: in
religion and law, for example, and probably in oral (and writ-
ten?) literature—how much may the Homeric epic owe to a
succession of nameless Minoan predecessors?22
Something of the rich Minoan heritage perhaps continued
to affect the development of Greek culture down to early Classi-
cal times; but eventually Crete became little more than a back-
21
See Mylonas, Ancient Mycenae, pp. 51-59.
22
Severyns, Grece et Proche-Orient avant Homere, Brussels, i960, pp. 99-100,
171, 204. On the date of the coming of the Greeks see Palmer, Mycenaeans and
Minoans, chap. VII; he would put it about 1600 B.C.
l6

CHAPTER I
water of Hellenism, though some of the "true" Cretans (the
"Eteocretans") lived on in the eastern part of the island and
continued to speak a non-Greek tongue. Through the Roman
and later periods Crete in general shared the fate of the Greek
mainland, though it was not until 1896 and after many bloody
revolts that it was freed from foreign domination; in 1912 it
finally became part of the modern Greek nation.
Today Greek archaeologists from both the mainland and
from Crete itself are busily engaged in recovering the long and
varied history of the island. British, French, and Italian exca-
vators have resumed the investigations interrupted by the last
war, and the magnificent treasures of Minoan art are worthily
displayed in a new museum at Herakleion under the capable
direction of Nikolaos Platon.
We have spoken of the land and the history of Crete, but
what sort of people were the Minoan Cretans who dwelt in
the palaces and houses we shall visit in the following pages?
Perhaps this is a question which should not be asked in a book
which seeks to maintain an architectural point of view and does
not pretend to be a social study. Perhaps it is a question which
should not be asked at all since the Minoans cannot speak
directly to us through a written literature—if they produced
one—and since even the Greeks of Pericles' day knew of the
Minoan civilization only what a meager stream of oral tradition
had passed on to them, for the art of writing was lost in the
"Dark Ages" that separated the Bronze Age culture from the
Classical. Yet to rebuild in imagination these homes of 3500
years ago, only to leave them desolate and deserted, seems so
unsatisfying that we can scarcely do other than grasp at what-
ever clues may be available.
A Greek historian of the time of Julius Caesar, Diodorus
Siculus, repeats the tradition that the days of Minos coincided
with the Golden Age of Cronus, father of the sky-god Zeus
(the Roman Jupiter) who, it was said, was born in Crete. And
since Diodorus remarks that "all the subjects of the rule of
17

Cronus lived a life of blessedness, in the unhindered enjoyment
of every pleasure," this has given rise to an impression that the
Minoans were an enervated and decadent race of hedonists.2
*
Yet their "life of pleasure" (a modern would consider it simple
indeed) is pictured by Diodorus as a reward of virtue: "because
of the exceptional obedience to laws no injustice was committed
by any one at any time."24
Surely the tradition is not to be
interpreted as meaning that the Cretans because of their virtue
were privileged henceforth to lead a life of depravity!
The law-abiding character of the Cretans is also attested by
the tradition that Minos "established not a few laws for the
Cretans, claiming (Moses-like) that he had received them from
his father Zeus when conversing with him in a certain cave."25
The probity of Minos and of his brother Rhadamanthys (king
of Phaistos?)28
was posthumously recognized by making them
perpetual judges in the Greek afterworld. It is also significant
that the earliest known Classical Greek law code (ca. 500 B.C.)
was found at Gortyn, a site where a large Minoan farmhouse
has recently been excavated.
It should also be set down to the credit of the Minoans that,
in the words of Sir Arthur Evans, their ever valiant and doughty
champion, "from the beginning to the end of Minoan Art (there
is) . . . not one single example . . . of any subject of an indeco
rous nature."
27
Whether or not the Cretans were a highly religious people
is difficult to decide on material evidence alone. On the one
hand the entire absence of temples and of statues of gods is
strikingly at variance with the situation in contemporary Egypt
and Mesopotamia} on the other hand we seem scarcely able to
move in the Palace of Minos, at least under the guidance of
Sir Arthur, without running into small shrines or small repre
sentations of deities or their symbols: lustral chambers, pillar
crypts, columnar shrines, temple repositories, incurved altars,
sacral horns, double-axes, libation tables, baetylic stones, sacral
2 8
5, 66, 6. t'loc.cit. " Diod. Sic. 5, 78, 3.
2 8
See note 3, above. " Knossos, π, p. 279.
I8

CHAPTER I
knots, etc., not to mention representations of sacred birds, trees,
bulls, and snakes. Religious scenes are common on gems and
other forms of Minoan art (Figs, ιοο, ι ο ί ) . Possibly the fact
that the Cretans built no great temples and carved no large
statues of their deities merely indicates that they stood in no
immoderate awe of the supernatural.
We have already referred to the fact that the Cretans seem
to have been a remarkably peaceful people. The apparently
exceptional change in spirit that took place in Late Minoan II
or III merely proves the rule for, as we have seen, the military,
imperialist character which Evans thought had led to a forceful
conquest of the Greek mainland, was on the contrary apparently
due to the Mycenaean invaders' having established themselves
at Knossos.
This peaceful character is as strange in the world of the
Bronze Age Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Mycenaean
Greeks, Hittites, and, we may add, Hebrews, as in the world
of the Classical Greeks and Romans, or in the distracted world
of today—so strange indeed that it has encouraged the charge
that the Minoans were decadent and enervated. Alas for more
such "decadence"! Perhaps it was due in part to the isolated
position of Crete and to the lack of any excessive pressure of
population, but more I think to the homogeneity of the Minoan
people. No doubt they came ultimately from a variety of racial
stocks, but the continuity of the archaeological strata from
earliest times suggests that the bulk of the population had lived
on the island long enough to have become essentially homogene
ous in language and in customs;"a
one important illustration of
this is the remarkable similarity in architectural forms through
out Crete but especially among the three major palaces. The
peaceful co-existence of the two kingdoms of Phaistos and
Knossos, hardly over twenty-five miles (40 km.) apart as the
crow flies, may be compared to the century and a half of peaceful
2 7 a
A striking- illustration of the close interconnections between the different
Minoan centers is the finding- of impressions from identical seal-stones at Sklavo-
kambos, H. Triadha, Gournia, and Zakros (see Fig. i ) , DMG, p. n o .
19

relations that have, for the same reasons, prevailed between
Canada and its neighbor to the south.28
It is often possible to judge something of the character of an
individual or of a people from their dress. The typical Cretan
costume of the court class, an elaborately patterned short kilt
for the men (Fig. 131, B), and a long elaborately flounced
garment for the women which covered the legs entirely but left
the breasts bare (Fig. 43), presents a rather odd medley of
primitive and sophisticated elements, and this is probably also
true of their general outlook, religious and social. They were
obviously a brilliant, gifted people living in a physically beautiful
and stimulating environment, but the transition from a condition
of simple peasantry to a relatively complex urban society, at
least in the upper levels of the social scale, was rapid and recent.
The transformation was naturally not complete.
The considerable degree of urbane elegance reached by this
society is revealed in their domestic architecture. From the
spacious and commodious design of the living quarters of the
palaces and better houses, often adorned with alabaster veneer-
ing and plaster walls painted with scenes from nature or court
ceremonial (Figs. 131-134), provided with bathrooms and
toilets and with ingenious devices to secure adequate lighting
and ventilation, and looking out through columned porticoes
upon terraced and beautiful landscapes, it is clear that the Cretans
aimed at comfortable living. The great suites of state reception
halls and banquet halls, which must be left largely to our
imagination to picture, for they were on the lost upper floors,
28
Yet A. W. Lawrence writes, "It is incr:dible that there can have been three
separate independent states so close together in central Crete"; he suggests that
Phaistos was the winter residence for the dynasty that reigned at Knossos in
summer. (Gk. Arch., pp. 24-25). To me it seems more incredible that the same
dynasty should have possessed two or even three palaces, so similar in plan "that
their functions must have been almost identical" (Lawrence). What a biennial
moving day that must have been when the whole court transferred itself bag
and baggage across the 2000 foot pass of Mt. Ida from Knossos to Phaistos and
vice versa!—and when did they trek to Mallia? On the other hand the H. Triadha
villa, so near Phaistos and surely of royal character, is a distinctly different type
of structure and might well have served as a pleasant occasional retreat from
the official residence.
20

CHAPTER I
would tell the same story. But this can hardly be called
luxuriant debauchery.
They were not a soft, lazy people, however much they may
contrast with the vigorous and bellicose Mycenaean Greeks. Fat
bellies, as common in Egyptian officialdom, to judge from their
art, as in America today, are rarely seen in Cretan art. Char-
acteristically the Cretans are shown with shoulders carried far
back, with slim limbs, and a waist so small that some suspect
the Minoans of practising artificial constriction (Fig. 131, B).
Boxing, dancing, acrobatics, and bull-leaping we know from
direct representations were popular, while the traditions of
the great athletic festivals of Classical Greek times perhaps
point to Crete as their ultimate place of origin. Many think
that Homer has the Cretans in mind when he draws his delight-
ful picture of the mythical Phaeacians in the Odyssey. They
boast that they "excel all men in boxing, and wrestling, and
leaping, and speed of foot," though it is true that after viewing
Odysseus' prowess they tone down their claims somewhat, "for
we are no perfect boxers, nor wrestlers, but speedy runners,
and the best of seamen; and dear to us ever is the banquet,
and the harp, and the dance, and changes of raiment, and the
warm bath, and love, and sleep."29
Finally it may be noted that women played an important part
in Cretan society. Goddesses seem to have had the dominant
role in Cretan religion, and their ministrants were as predomi-
nantly priestesses (Figs. 100, 101); female likewise were the
sacred dancers. Even in the dangerous bull games lady toreadors
took part, while in the audience women mingled with the men,
and the special "boxes" were reserved for ladies of the court
(Fig. 133). The elaborate costumes of the female aristocracy
likewise indicate the importance of women (Figs. 100, 101,
131, A). The assured place which they held in Mycenaean
society, to judge from the Homeric epics, probably owed much
to the example of the polished culture of the Minoan courts.
2i
Odyssey, 8, 102-103, 246-249.
2 1

A strong hint of this is found in one of the scenes on the
famous Shield of Achilles, as described in the Iliad, which is
actually placed at Knossos itself: "Also did the glorious lame
god (Hephaistos) devise a dancing-place like unto that which
once in wide Knossos Daidalos wrought for Ariadne of the
lovely tresses. There were youths dancing and maidens of costly
wooing, their hands upon one another's wrists. Fine linen the
maidens had on, and the youths well-woven doublets faintly
glistening with oil. Fair wreaths had the maidens, and the youths
daggers of gold hanging from silver baldrics. And now would
they run round with deft feet exceeding lightly . . . and now
anon they would run in lines to meet each other. And a great
company stood round the lovely dance in joy; and among them
a divine minstrel was making music on his lyre (Fig. ioo), and
through the midst of them, leading the measure, two tumblers
whirled.»80
za
Iliad, 18, 590-606.
22

C H A P T E R I I
THE MAJOR PALACES
1. T H E PALACE OF MINOS AT KNOSSOS
The mighty city of %nossos wherein CMinos ruled in nine-year
periods, he who held converse with mighty Zeus.—(ODYSSEY,
19, 178-179)
AT ATHENS with its wealth of remains of Classical Greece the
traveler can board a plane and in less than two hours find him
self a thousand years further back in time at the court of King
Minos. To fly to the island of Daedalus and Icarus has a
certain appropriateness. It also affords splendid panoramas of
sea and islands en route, and for many miles the view to the
south embraces the whole length of the island of Crete with the
three great mountain masses of Dikte, Ida, and the White
Mountains standing out high above all else.
A more intimate and leisurely first look at Crete is provided
by a comfortable Greek steamer which will bring one in the
early morning light, after an overnight trip from Athens, to
Soudha Bay near the west end of the island (Fig. 1). Then,
after several hours sail along the north coast, the harborage of
Retimo is reached, and toward noon the northern slopes of
Mt. Ida loom in the distance. Bare hills dip steeply down into a
sea of indigo blue through which the ship ploughs a wake of
white foam; and shortly before Herakleion is reached the
isolated mountain of Iuktas, conspicuous also from Knossos,
takes on the profile of a gigantic recumbent human face—accord
ing to the Classical Greeks, that of Zeus himself.
η

MAJOR PALACES
Gliding into the harbor through a narrow gap in the break-
water, the ship berths beside Venetian walls from which the
Lion of St. Mark still looks down. Though hard hit in World
War Il Herakleion is now rebuilt and well supplied with hotels
both large and small. At water-front restaurants one can eat to
the music of the pounding surf, or on the main square enjoy
a meal in the open beside a quaint old Venetian fountain ap-
propriately carved with Nereids and other beings of the sea.
The chief attraction of Herakleion to most visitors is the
newly built, well lighted, and attractively arranged Archae-
ological Museum with its fabulous treasures of Minoan art. An
Historical Museum also provides interesting displays repre-
senting the Venetian, Turkish, and modern periods, while ex-
tensive Venetian fortifications are still to be seen.
The site of the Minoan city of Knossos, whose population in
its heyday might be more conservatively estimated at about
half the 80,000 generously accorded it by Sir Arthur Evans,1
lies some three miles (5 km.) inland, and can be reached in a
few minutes by car or public bus. The palace was far from
spectacularly situated on a low hill which slopes off fairly
steeply on the east and south to the small stream known as the
Kairetos. For even a glimpse of the sea or of Mt. Ida one must
climb one of the bare hills that now rise bleakly on all sides
(Fig. 36). A scattering of small houses, a guardroom and
pavilion for visitors, a grove of pine trees that have grown up
since the excavations and through which the winds blow grate-
fully in the summer heat: that is all (Fig. 37).
Inevitably one wonders why such a site should have been
thickly populated from Neolithic times. However, there is a
considerable amount of good agricultural land in the vicinity
(better watered in antiquity); also it enjoyed a position con-
veniently near the bay at the mouth of the Kairetos which
supplied the best outlet for central Crete on the Aegean side, and
1
KnOSSOs, 11, pp. 563-5645 cf. Faure, Kret. Chron., 13 (1959), p. 210, who
estimates 30,000.
24

CHAPTER II · SECTION I
commanded the cross-island road which ran from this port to
Phaistos in the Messara plain and on to the southern beaches
that looked toward distant Africa.
It is certain, at any rate, that Homer's "mighty city" was the
outstanding city of Crete in Minoan times. To the Greeks its
semi-mythical founder and ruler, Minos, was the son of their
principal deity, Zeus, and enjoyed his confidence. Indeed most
of the familiar mythical tales associated with Crete center about
Knossos: Glaukos who was drowned in a jar of honey (one of
his father's giant "pithoi"?—Fig. 93); Daedalus, builder of
the Labyrinth to house the Minotaur and father of Icarus who
flew too near the sun; and Theseus, the Athenian hero, who
slew the Minotaur with the help of Minos' daughter, "Ariadne
of the lovely tresses."
No wonder then that the name of Knossos is well known,
and that many visitors are content to see its legend-haunted
ruins and look no farther. Sir Arthur Evans, who spent the last
forty years of his life and a large fortune in excavating, preserv-
ing, and sumptuously publishing the site, has contributed no
little to its fame through his own colorful career, which lack
of space prevents us from recounting here.2
Since Sir Arthur
throve on controversy it is not surprising that much of what he
wrote and did here has provoked dissension. The present study,
will not infrequently disagree with his pronouncements. The
four-volume (in six), three thousand page publication, The
Palace of Minos at Knossos, is both magnificent and exasperat-
ing; it is at once an encyclopedia covering the whole range of
Minoan Antiquities, and at the same time if often omits details
essential to the understanding of the Palace of Minos itself. It
provides no plan of the building adequate for serious study,3
and
the architectural description is distributed throughout the six
books in a fashion which without the Ariadne's clew furnished
2
See the recent biography by his half-sister, Joan Evans, Time and Chance
(London, 1943); also her autobiography, Prelude and Fugue (1965).
3
But an excellent plan has now(i98l) been published by S. Hood.
25

MAJOR PALACES
by a seventh Index Volume would leave the user almost as lost
in labyrinthine meanderings as the youths and maidens of the
ancient tale.
Much of the criticism has been leveled at his restorations or,
as he preferred to term them, "reconstitutions." They have been
called unnecessary, ugly, and downright wrong, and occasionally
perhaps they are all three. Yet after considerable study both of
the actual ruins and of Evans' writings I cannot help but agree
on the whole with the judgment of Georg Karo,* the distin-
guished former director of the German Archaeological Institute,
of whom Nilsson says, "no living scholar knows the course of
excavations in Crete so well."5
Karo caustically comments that
many of the most vocal critics are "unencumbered by knowledge
of the facts," and that he himself is perhaps the only living
scholar who knows what brain-racking (Koffzerbrechung) each
new phase of the excavations brought because of the extremely
perishable nature of the remains. Without restoration, he de-
clares, the site would be little today but a heap of ruins. "If
one will examine the immense remains carefully to see how
many restorations were essential and mandatory he will find
surprisingly little that was unnecessary." Certainly it cannot be
doubted that the restorations add much to the interest of the
ordinary visitor; if he is occasionally misled this will be out-
weighed by what he is helped to comprehend correctly. Un-
restored buildings are often, in their way, quite as misleading
as over-restored.
However, to return to an examination of the site. The general
map shows that crowding around the palace itself were many
large mansions or villas, the abode, we may suppose, of Minos'
prime officials. These we must visit later. The finest of them
vied with the palace itself in splendor though they were far
* Greifen am Thron, especially pp. 18, 24-26; Platon agrees with Karo, in a
review of his book, Kret. Chron., 13 (1959), p. 233. Marinates, C. and M., p. 126,
and Levi, PdP, 71 (i960), pp. 112-114, express similar views. Evans explained
and defended his reconstitutions in Antiquaries Journal, 7 (1927), pp. 258-267.
0
In a review of Karo's book, AJA, 64 (1960), p. 198.
26

CHAPTER II * SECTION I
outranked in size, for the Palace of Minos in its final period
sprawled over an area of three-and-a-half acres (Fig. 2).6
And sprawl it did, for the Cretan palace was not laid out
within definite exterior limits, rectangular or square, like a
Classical Greek temple. Instead it grew, or was planned, from
the inside out, rather like a tree (Ch. xm, 1). The "heart" was
the great Central Court around which the different units of the
building centered and which formed the focus of the system of
circulation and intercommunication (Ch. iv).
It is not quite accurate to say, however, that the palace faced
on the Central Court, or at least that it faced exclusively inward
like the Classical Greek house, since in three of the major
palaces (and Gournia too) the west exterior fagade was given
special architectural treatment and fronted on a broad area
paved with slabs of stone. At Knossos slightly raised walks or
"causeways" crossed this West Court in various directions, one
leading directly to the West Porch (Figs. 2, 128). The lower
part of the wall of the west fagade was massively constructed
of a high course of smoothly dressed blocks of stone, the ortho-
states ("standers"), resting on a low sill course, the euthynteria
("leveling" course). As in the other palaces this west wall is
not straight but advances and retreats in a curious series of bays
and projections the reason for which we will perhaps discover
later (Ch. xm, 3)5 in addition the wall is interrupted at in-
tervals by shallow breaks or recesses that are peculiarly char-
acteristic of the west palace fagades (see pp. 162-164; Fig. 155).
North of the West Court lies a small flagged area flanked by
banks of low steps on the east and south and enclosing a kind of
elevated "box" at the junction (Fig. 41). The "Theatral Area,"
as Evans dubbed it, was evidently designed for some kind of
spectacle or performance, though hardly of a dramatic nature
6
This estimate is based on the use of a grid over Evans' plan of the palace. The "over
six acres" mentioned by Evans, and often repeated, includes a generous amount of the
nearby courts and houses (Knossos, I, p. 206). My estimate for Mallia is 1.8 acres, and
for Phaistos, 1.6 acres, though part of the last palace on the east and south has disap-
peared down the hill.
27

MAJOR PALACES
as the name might suggest. Inevitably one thinks of Homer's
description of the "dancing-place that in wide Knossos Daedalus
wrought for Ariadne of the lovely tresses."1
The ordinary visitor to the site, whether he uses' a plan or not,
can scarcely fail to find the layout of the building bewildering.
This is in part due to the numerous alterations and modifications
that were introduced in the course of the successive partial
rebuildings which followed severe earthquakes or other forces
of destruction. But a more adequate explanation is that most of
what we see merely constitutes the service rooms: storage rooms,
workrooms, small cult rooms, etc. Many of the more important
rooms, with the exception of the main floor of the residential
quarters, were located in the upper storeys, an arrangement also
found in the other palaces. In fact it is from the Palace of Minos
that we get our word "labyrinth," for like some other words
with this ending that we still use, such as hyacinth, plinth, and
turpentine (from terebinthos), it is a Cretan word in origin.
The "labrys," that is, double-axe, occurs innumerable times
carved on the stone blocks of the palace walls, or on sacred
pillars, or represented on objects found within the palace; re-
cently too the cult title, "Our Lady of the Labyrinth," has
been read on a tablet from the palace.8
The palace, then, was
the Labyrinth itself, the "House of the Double-Axe," where
the Minotaur was housed, in other words where, in the Central
Court, the bull games were performed (Ch. iv). After the
destruction of the building the term gradually came to be under-
stood as referring to the "labyrinthine" character of the ruins,
and with this new meaning the word passed on to the Greeks
and Romans.
A magnificent entranceway in the form of a stepped and
columned portico led up from the river-crossing to the south-
west corner of the palace in its earlier days, but before the Late
Minoan period this had disappeared and the palace seems to
have had but two main entrances, a northern and a western.
7
Iliad, 18, 590-592.
6
DMG, p. 310, no. 205.
28

CHAPTER II ' SECTION I
The north entry was reached, as at Mallia (Fig. 6), by a
well-paved road from the west 5 passing a large pillared hall
of uncertain use9
(Fig. 40) it continued south as a narrow
passage sloping sharply upward to the north end of the Central
Court. The west entry was clearly the ceremonial one. Cause-
ways from the north and from the west led the visitor into the
West Court where rose the impressive fagade whose upper
storey housed the main reception rooms of the palace (Fig.
128 and Ch. vi, 1). The great stone orthostates that form the
base of the walls are still smoke-blackened from the furious fire
that destroyed this part of the building. At the southeast corner
of the court a columned porch, once decorated with scenes from
the bull ring, led past a guardroom into the narrow "Corridor
of the Procession" which, when excavated, retained traces of
brightly painted rows of processional figures. In Egypt such
figures would represent foreigners bringing tribute to Pharaoh
and kneeling humbly at his feet; here they seem to be Minoan
subjects of Minos bringing presents or offerings to him, or
possibly to "Our Lady of the Labyrinth." We can imagine the
colorful procession passing along the narrow corridor which,
after turning twice at right angles, reached the foot of a broad
staircase (entirely restored) leading up to ' the Piano Nobile,
where the king was waiting to receive it. On the restored west
wall of the formal porch or "South Propylon" preceding the
stairs several of these processional figures, including the best
preserved, the famous "Cupbearer" (Figs. 42, 131, B), have
been replaced in replica.
The floor of some of the great public halls of the Piano No-
bile has been restored, partly as a protective measure for the
rooms below (Fig. 116); and although the plan is conjectural
in detail it is clear that these upper halls were spacious and that
they were handsomely decorated with wall paintings of which
9
"It is improbable that the north hypostyle hall served as an agora (so Karo
on p. 30) or as a custom's house (so Evans); rather it would have been a
waiting-room for those coming by the harbor road," writes Platon in a review
of Karo, Greifen am Thron, Kret. Chron., 13 (1959), p. 238. Its form and size
were largely determined by the Banquet Hall above (see p. 127 and Fig. 156.)
29

MAJOR PALACES
scanty fragments were found in the fill. We shall have some
thing to say of their plan at a later point (Ch. νι, ι ) .
On the ground floor, beneath the western series of rooms of
the Piano Nobile a long row of storage magazines opens off a
common corridor running north to south, parallel to the Central
Court (Fig. 93). Huge clay jars (pithoi), perhaps once num
bering over four hundred and capable of holding, altogether,
some 65,000 American gallons (over 246,000 liters) of olive
oil, line their walls. The wealth of the Cretan kings is further
tantalizingly suggested by the shreds of gold found in rows of
sub-floor pits (see Ch. vn, 1 and Addendum 1).
Between the Corridor of the Magazines and the Central
Court, and south of another monumental stairway leading from
the court to the Piano Nobile, lies a group of small rooms used
for religious purposes. Their front on the Central Court ap
parently took the form of a "Tripartite Columnar Shrine"
whose appearance may be conjectured from a detail of the so-
called Grandstand Fresco (Figs. 44, 133). Two of the inner
rooms have stone pillars marked twenty-nine times with the
sacred symbol of the labrys or double-axe, and in another room
are large cists for the storage of sacred apparatus or sacerdotal
treasure (Ch. vn, 2). In fact in excavating these a wealth of
objects in clay, faience, and crystal was discovered: two-handled
jars, decorative pieces, snake-goddess figurines, libation tables,
shells, and two beautiful relief plaques, one representing a goat
suckling its kids, the other a cow with its calf.
North of these cult rooms and the stairway to the Piano
Nobile lies a group of rooms including the famous "Throne
Room," where a formal stone chair was found by the excavators
in its original position against the north wall (Fig. 130). To
preserve the room the upper walls were rebuilt and the whole
roofed over with a clerestory chamber above, whose walls are
now hung with reproductions of restored Minoan wall paintings
from this palace and elsewhere. From the Central Court four
openings between piers lead (Figs. 37, 44), by way of a broad
flight of four steps, down to an anteroom with low benches of
30

stone against the walls, and in a gap between them a wooden
replica of the throne in the inner room. In the center of the
anteroom now stands a shallow stone basin, found nearby, per-
haps intended for ablutions.
The walls of the main room are painted with restored scenes
of griffins, one pair of which heraldically guards the throne, and
are lined with stone benches as in the outer room. The "oldest
throne in Europe" is a handsome piece of furniture with a high
back of undulating outline, a comfortably hollowed seat, and an
arched design of legs and cross-braces which plainly betrays its
origin in a wooden chair (Fig. 139, D). Gypsum flagging
frames a red-painted plaster panel in the center of the floor,
and the remains of a number of decorated clay jars found here
conjured up for the excavators a dramatic scene of Minos and
his councillors performing some religious ceremony in this
room just before the final catastrophe, perhaps with a view to
averting the impending danger.9
*
In any event the presence of a "lustral chamber," that is a
stone-lined pit reached by a short flight of steps directly oppo-
site the throne, does indicate that the room was used for certain
ritual purposes (Ch. v, 3). That this low-ceilinged "basement"
chamber constituted the Throne Room of the palace is most un-
likely10
; the important ceremonial rooms were surely in the
upper storeys (Ch. vi, 1). In fact the view that Minos here
performed certain ritual acts depends on the hypothesis that he
was a priest-king; but Helga Reusch is probably nearer the
truth in her recent suggestion that this "throne"—better, "ca-
thedral chair"—was intended not for a king but for a high
priestess who, sitting here amid her ministrants, represented
the epiphany or divine apparition of the Minoan Goddess—the
"Lady of the Labyrinth(?)."11
e a
Pendlebury in Studies f resented to D. M. Robinson, I, p. 195.
10
Hugh Plommer also says of it, "surely not the only throne room," Ancient
and Classical Architecture, p. 77.
1 1
Minoica, pp. 334.-358 (another gem showing the goddess guarded by two
griffins has recently been found by Platon, Praktika, 1959, pi. 110c); Platon
likewise considers it a cult room, Kret. Chron., 5 (1951), pp. 392-394.
31

M A J O R PALACES
Miss Reusch has also made it clear that this complex of
rooms, though not closely paralleled elsewhere in Crete, is es-
sentially Minoan in nearly all details. The resemblance to the
Mycenaean megaron in the position of the throne, to which
some have called attention,12
is confined to this feature alone;
and even this point is weakened by its identification as a cathedra
for the priestess.
The northeast quarter of the palace, that is the section lying
north of the heavy east-west wall on the axis of the east side of
the Central Court, was largely occupied, on the ground floor,
by storerooms and by the royal workshops. Remains of unfin-
ished products and of the raw materials used by the potters,
lapidaries, metal workers, and so forth, were found in this area.
The conspicuous rectangular block of heavy walls in the south-
ern part of this quarter, with its west end facing on the Central
Court, indicated to Evans that in the storey above there was a
Great East Hall; and this view is strengthened by the finding
of fragments of fine mural paintings and reliefs which had
fallen into the rooms beneath. The discovery of bronze locks of
hair, apparently from a colossal statue, further suggested to the
excavator that the room had been a sanctuary for the Mother
Goddess.13
The best preserved part of the Palace of Minos is the south-
east quarter, termed by Evans the "Domestic Quarter," that is,
the residence of the royal family (Fig. 10). In this area the
hill sloped off rapidly to the east and south, and in the later
history of the palace a great cutting or vertical scarp was made
to a depth of nearly thirty feet (9 m.), providing space for the
construction, below the level of the Central Court, of two
storeys served by a handsome and ingeniously built stone stair-
way known as the "Grand Staircase" (Fig. 38). Thanks to the
fact that this portion of the palace seems not to have coll?psed
12
Blegen in Minoica, p. 66; the use at Pylos of griffins on either side of the
throne does not prove that the room at Knossos was a throne room—for one thing
the theme may have been imitated without comprehension of its religious meaning.
On the dating of the Throne Room see Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, chap.
Vi, 5.
13
Knossos, in, pp. 497-525.
32

till long after the ruin of the rest of the building, sufficient time
elapsed for a great mass of debris from the floors above the
level of the Central Court to fall into the lowest storeys, and
thus to help maintain much of the walls and even much of the
Grand Staircase in nearly their original positions. Evans' careful
excavation, followed by a skilful replacement of the decayed
wooden columns and of the flooring over the lowest storey, en-
ables us to get an almost uncanny but essentially accurate im-
pression of an entire suite of rooms much as they appeared in
1500 B.C. A detailed description will be given in connection
with an account of similar suites in the other palaces (Ch. v, 1).
For the present it will be enough to say that the lowest storey
contained a great hall, the "Hall of the Double-Axes" (double-
axe signs were cut on the walls of the light-well) opening on
broad terraces (Figs. 39,45) j a smaller and more private cham-
ber, the "Queen's Hall," with private bathroom, and a series of
small rooms, reached by a long passage, including a toilet (Figs.
43, 81). The floors, walls, and ceilings of the halls were
beautifully decorated with alabaster veneering or with painted
designs and representations. South of the Residential Quarter
a complex of small rooms including two bathrooms may have
been designed for the reception of guests (Ch. v, 5).
The north, east, and south sides of the Central Court are too
poorly preserved to determine whether they resembled the
porticoed courts at Mallia and Phaistos. The west side, how-
ever, was certainly similar to the west side of the Phaistos Cen-
tral Court, and the restored drawing in Fig. 44 probably gives
a fairly correct impression: from right to left, the series of piers
framing the doorways into the Throne Room; the broad stair-
way to the Piano Nobile with its intermediate column; the Tri-
partite Sanctuary; and a pillared portico perhaps continuing to
the south end of the court. In the upper storeys open galleries
probably formed a front for the halls of the Piano Nobile.
But before we attempt to ascend to these upper halls let us
leave Knossos for the time being and cross the island to the
plain of the Messara.
33

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crews and passengers, who so often perish at the hands of pirates and cruel
Indians. One cannot trust the Indians, they are children born of traitors. I am
sure the Germans would not approach if they saw the place occupied by
Spaniards. For this you would be obliged to increase a hundred soldiers
more than are in this Garrison. Besides the men would have to be relieved
from time to time from there as the work would be arduous, and no soldier
or any one could withstand the mosquitoes which are so bad they kill the
men, and destroy much of the food. The cost of this Fort you would have to
send some one to estimate. I could not feel that I had properly complied
with my duty until I have notified you of this great and urgent need. Hoping
your Majesty may spend many happy years, as your vassals need you.
Luis De Rojas.
St. Augustine, Fla., February 13th, 1627.
A. D. 1636.
Sire:
By a Cedula of your Royal Highness, dated in Madrid, on the 28th of
June of last year, you command me to have a general offering of prayer in
all the churches in the district under my command, imploring God that you
may be successful in the arms you have taken up against France, on account
of her evil designs against you. You also recommend that I improve the
conduct and manners of the people here; that if necessary I punish them
publicly for their offences. I immediately complied with your order, and had
them go out from the high church in procession, those of the Seraphic Order
joining with all the others. They went through all the streets of the City,
then a high mass was sung, and prayers offered for your success. I also sent
a message to all the other Churches and Convents to have like services
celebrated. In regard to the conduct of the residents of these Province,
Spaniards as well as natives, I have great care in every respect, and from
today, complying with your Mandate, I shall redouble my vigilance. May
God spare your Majesty many years, for the good of Christianity.
Luis Ussitinez.
St. Augustine, Fla.

Havana, A. D. 1640.
In the city of Havana on the 13th day of April, 1678, there was a meeting
of the Board in the Hall of the City Council as is usual and customary. The
Master of the Field, Don Francisco Davila, Governor and Captain-General
of said City, and the Messrs. Nicolas Castellan, Lieutenant-Major Don
Pedro Valdes, Don Pedro Recio de Oquendo, First Alderman, Captain Don
Blas Pedraso.
In the presence of the Notary, the following was agreed:
They had begun to discuss some business when there was a rap at the
door, the Governor rang the bell, the porter opened the door and said that
outside was the Lieutenant Don Antonio Grazeano, a noted clergyman of
the Holy Office of the Inquisition, that he brought a message from the
Inquisition for his Lordship of the Board. He sent this youngest Alderman
with the Secretary to receive him, as he came in the name of the Inquisition.
Entering and having been seated in the midst of the Aldermen, he
announced that he brought an Auto from the Señor Commissionado, Don
Francisco de las Casas, of the Holy Office of this City. He was told to read
it, which he did, and delivered it. His Lordship asked that he give testimony
of his authority in order to agree upon the matter of which it treated, and for
the better veneration of God and of so Holy a Tribunal. Don Antonio
Glaziano drew forth from his pocket a folded paper which he delivered in
my, the Notary’s’ presence. Opening it, it contained a sheet of paper, the
first leaf of which was written on both sides, signed, it appeared, by the said
Don Antonio Graziano. This duty performed, he arose and left,
accompanying him to the door, the same ones who received him, and I, the
present Notary. The door being closed his Lordship ordered inserted to the
letter the testimony, the tenor of which is as follows:
In the City of Havana on the same day, Dr. Francisco de las Casas,
“Comissionado” of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the City of
Carthagena, said: That last Sunday, the eighth of the current month,
seeming to him opportune, and by order of the Holy Tribunal for which
purpose he warned and made known to the present Notary and all the
gentlemen of the Board, that they might concur to their duty as ordered by
your Majesty, preceding these courtesies and compliments.
That on the day appointed they should go from the residence of the Lord
Comissionado to the Holy Parochial Church of this City, in the order

referred in the testimony given by the present Notary. The function
terminated, they should leave the church, return to the residence of the Lord
Comissionado. It seems they wished to alter this form at the gates and
places they had been, and, as on the day of the Anathema the same
celebration must be repeated, the Lord Comissionado wished, with the best
intentions, and not to be lacking in the form observed by the Tribunal for
said act to which they should cling, this was entirely for the reasons of his
Office and to avoid public altercations, from which originate unnecessary
noise and unrest, contrary to the decency and gravity of this Tribunal. This
is well known to the Tribunal and Board of said City, it must be done in the
following manner: That the Board should come in this form to the residence
of the Lord Commissionado and conduct him to the church, he going by the
side of the Governor, the other ministers each one between two Aldermen,
according to the Office and time of service and somewhat in advance of this
Lord Commissionado and Governor with the standard of the Faith which
must be carried by the person of greatest authority who should be present.
The balls of the standard by the next in authority. That on arriving at the
church the priests must come out to receive them, sprinkling them with holy
water, and conduct them to their seats, which shall be in the High Chapel,
on the Gospel side, in a chair covered with velvet and a carpet at the feet.
Consecutively, next to the Governor and Lord Commissionado on a covered
bench, the High Constable and other attendants and ministers of the Holy
Office. That the Governor and Board are to be seated thus the day of
publication, on the Gospel side; that the Lord Commissionado should be the
preferred in all things; that at the hour for leaving, the Notary accompanied
by two attendants, will mount the pulpit and from thence he shall swear
them in, in a loud voice, to the oath of Faith. This finished, they are to take
the Lord Commissionado back to his residence. They are to try and carry
out these ceremonies in as grave and reverential a manner as possible, this
being one of the most important ceremonies of the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, and this City belongs to its District. There are reasons for other
ceremonies, and so I, the present Notary, was ordered to witness them, that I
might give testimony and the work proceed according to the acts published,
and so that all could be reported to the Lord Inquisitadores of the Holy
Tribunal. Then it was provided and ordered to be signed.
Dr. Francisco de las Casas.

This agrees with the original which I have in my possession, and having
consulted the matter, the following was agreed upon:
First: As regards the form in which the City, according to the acts of
Faith, must proceed to the Residence of the Lord Commissionado and
Minister of the Holy Office, as also in the public streets, we cite or quote a
Cedula from your Majesty where you refer to Don Juan Solozano, whose
political authority in Peru entitles him to have a voice, and on this point we
are warned by your Majesty to guard against the Lord Commissionado
assuming superiority of the Governor. In Peru, where the matter was first
discussed of precedence the form is as follows: The City goes from the City
Hall, as customary, to the residence of the Lord Commissionado, where he
is awaiting them in the yard. There he is incorporated in the procession,
being placed at the left of the Governor, and all march in twos, the
magistrates and constables of longest standing given the preference, and the
Ministers of the Holy Office intermixed, but preference always to the
Officers of Justice. On arriving at the church, assigning seats and all
through the ceremonies care is taken that the greatest preference and respect
be shown the Governor, as stated in your Royal Cedula, and thus it was
conducted last Sunday in going and coming from which much discussion
has arisen, as certified in the testimony which I, the present Notary, insert to
the letter, although the Lord Commissionado states in the Auto that all
preference was given the Governor.
1640.

CHAPTER VIII.
A. D. 1655-1657.
An anonymous letter to his Majesty recounts the death of Governor Benito
Ruid Salazer by a contagious sickness during the absence of the Sergeant
Major—The office is held by two others pro tem.—They also died
suddenly after serving a short term—Certain officials of the Garrison who
are related meet at night and elect as Governor Don Pedro Ruitinez—Who
intimidates the people and squanders the money sent for their support—
The Treasurer a partner in the illegality, and the Judge receives hush
money—This Governor maltreated an official who is also a soldier and a
conveyor of monies and goods for this port from Havana, for his Majesty
—Traffic in amber from the Indians—Taking the iron and implements sent
to be used in repairing the Fort as money to purchase this amber—
Declares he will consult his own pleasure concerning the laws of the
Church, taking communion once in one and one-half years—A distressing
condition of mismanagement—No name signed to the letter—A report
from Diego Rebolledo, 1657, concerning the necessity of having an officer
to guard the port for incoming and outgoing vessels as pirates had
frequently entered and landed before notice could be given—Also the
appointment of an officer and twelve infantrymen to guard other ports of
the coast—He desists from building more fortifications because of the
opposition of the Friars, who protested that the proximity of the Spaniards
would retard the conversion of the Indians—The Governor feels that the
danger is far greater to the development of his Majesty’s Provinces to
allow the enemy a foothold in a Province as rich as Apalachicola—The
great distance of some of the Provinces—Indians dying with smallpox—
The burden of carrying food such a distance on the shoulders of men—
Fray Juan Gomez reports (1657) of the uprising of some of the Indian
Chiefs who march to St. Augustine and hang the Governor because of his
insistance on their carrying heavy loads of corn into the settlement, when
they, the Indians, had vassals to perform such labors—Reports that the
Island of Jamaica is heavily fortified by the English who intend taking
Cuba—These reports causing much uneasiness in these Provinces.

A. D. 1655.
My Lord:
Moved by piety, and a desire for peace and quietude, it has seemed to me
timely to notify you regarding the Government of this Province and
Garrison of St. Augustine, Fla., being as you are so high and compassionate
a Minister, who is always thinking and caring for the welfare of his people.
My Lord, Governor Benito Ruid Salazar, former Governor of this Province,
died at the time the Sergeant-Major was absent. God, it seems, took him by
a contageous sickness, and although two others have been nominated pro
tem., by the death of Benito Ruiz, the reins of government were left in
charge of the Auditor Nicolas Ponce de Leon, who governed for six months
more or less, when he died suddenly. For this reason, a few of the Officials
of this Garrison, who are related, met at night in different parts of the City,
and with sufficient defamatory speech elected as Governor Don Pedro
Ruitinez, with flattering promises to those who would give their vote. When
he had been Governor one year and a half, he had given twenty-three
patents of captain, the most of them to two companies of this Garrison, four
positions as wardens of the Fort, three Sergeant-Majors said to be andantes
—three Auditors, one Treasurer—calling himself Governor and Captain-
General. In granting these patents, and other things he has done, he has
thrown down the flags, and had the artillery at the Fort salute. He arrived
here on the seventeenth of July, with the Auditor, Treasurer, Sergeant-Major
and the two captains of infantry who all left that court at the same time. The
Sergeant-Major brought a Cedula from your Majesty, for the Governor,
which he presented to Don Pedro Ruitinez, and it was not possible to
comply with it, it being a military promotion, placing the Sergeant-Major as
Governor. Don Pedro Ruitinez had received notice that Don Diego de
Rolallado had been appointed Governor and Captain-General of this Port—
he sent some friends over to Havana to meet and entertain him during his
stay in that City, and thus Don Pedro has maintained his friendly relations
with the Governor, although he has not said a word of how he intimidated
the people to elect him Governor—nor his other doings—nor how he
refused to turn over the Government to the Sergeant-Major. But he did
demand his pay. Your Lordship, the Governor and Captain-General arrived
at this Garrison on the 18th of June, 1654, having received in Havana
$20,000 sent by the Auditor and placed to the credit of this Garrison. This
money he used in Havana as follows: Goods—$7,000, gaining in this

purchase more than 200 per cent. He sent Don Alonzo Menendez with
$8,000 to relieve the suffering and need of the infantry and others who are
in your service, and he sold to advantage the remaining goods. In the month
of February of this present year there arrived a vessel laden with flour, iron
implements and other goods, and although it is true that the person in whose
charge they came, brought over $40,000 to be delivered to this treasury, he
only delivered $15,000, because in Havana the duties were so heavy and
they demanded the pay. The soldier in whose care this money and goods
came, is Domingo Nunez. He spent in Havana $2,000 on clothing, filling an
order received from the Governor, and another $2,000 in clothing he was to
bring from New Spain. The Governor after ordering this became infuriated
with Domingo Nunez, cursing him, beating and slapping him in the most
unheard of manner—accusing him of not bringing all the clothing ordered,
and finally he had him placed in the stockade on the beach. He then had the
boxes and packages taken to a neighbor’s and soldier, and opened them—
finding after pricing them and adding one-fourth more than the cost to
them, that they amounted to more than the $2,000. He then went several
times to Domingo Nunez, demanded his papers, searched them, kept him in
prison, and then without cause or reason turned him out. It is true he
becomes enraged for the slightest cause. It is a positive fact, that he and
another spendthrift named Fanfan, have sent out from his (the Governor’s)
house, chocolate to be sold on the streets by his body guards. At the time
there was such great distress and scarcity, he sent out wine to be sold at
such exorbitant prices that only those compelled to have it could buy. In this
tavern of his, the people sell cutlasses for bread, chocolate and tobacco. In
the large store, run now by Lorenzo Josi, they sell rum and clothing—a
bottle of rum costs eight dollars which is an outrage. According to Manuel
Barrios, the tavern keeper, he makes thirty-one dollars on a cask. Since
there is no more money left to buy these commodities for cash he has
adopted another method of selling them in exchange for labor, and makes
out checks for this amount. My Lord, in the month of July of last year, there
came to this Garrison a party of Indians, who live on the coast near the
Bahama Channel with a large quantity of amber, some of which they
presented to the Governor, the rest they gave in exchange for goods, and
because a few of the soldiers bought some in exchange for clothing he was
exceedingly angry. When these Indians left the land he had them followed
by two rowboats with soldiers. He finally sent Don Alonzo Menendez with

goods that he should bring him all the amber he could obtain, he also sent
out others. The Lieutenants were Don Alonzo Menendez and Juan
Dominguez and Alonzo Garcia. This trading for amber was carried on for
six months. They used up all the iron implements. At first we thought that
these implements were broken and thrust aside as worthless, soon, however,
we discovered they were used to trade for amber, as well as five hundred
tons more of iron which was brought from New Spain. All this was paid for
from your Treasury. The amber was sold in Havana for the sum of forty
thousand dollars. In the meantime the Fort has been allowed to suffer, it is
falling to pieces in many places, the timber that was cut in the forest has
rotted and the troops’ time and iron implements are all used in the trade for
amber. The infantry and other persons drawing a salary from your Highness
have been on several occasions in a great rage with the Treasurer who
abuses them and threatens them that Don Diego Rovellado will have them
killed in the field—the guards, for the slightest offense, are beaten through
the streets, and even imprisoned in the Church of San Francisco, and at
times when he can catch them in his own house he slaps and beats them
unmercifully. In a year and a half that he has been Governor he has only
once complied with the laws of the Church, confessing and receiving the
communion publicly. He says that every one can do as he pleases; that he
does as he pleases. At the Fort he does not have the flag hoisted, only two
guards at night and their round is an easy one, but he takes the men to guard
his house every night, paying them a few dimes, and in the day he takes
others to whom he pays two or three dimes, notwithstanding that your
Majesty sends money each year to pay these men, but I am told that Don
Diego Rovellado has paid the judge some five or six thousand dollars and
he can escape free from any charge made against him. All that I state to
your Highness in this letter, you may be quite sure is the truth, and I hope
you will deem it proper to relieve your vassals from this unnecessary
suffering. May God guard you and make you happy for many years.
No Signature.
St. Augustine, Fla., November 20th, 1655.
A. D. 1657.
His Lordship:

Having begun the conversion of the Indians in the Province of Apalache
at the close of the administration of Governor Louis Harristenir, who was
immediately succeeded by Dannian de las Vegas. He placed a few soldiers
in this Province to guard the going out and incoming of vessels. Having
been informed that they entered and left the Port, and there was no one to
give any report of them. This guard was kept there during the assumption of
power by Benito Ruiz Salazar and the Auditor Nicolas Ponce de Leon, until
the Sergeant-Major Don Pedro Harristenir entered as Governor. This latter,
to please the Friar, he not only dismantled the estates of your Majesty in
those parts, but he also retired the Lieutenant and soldiers who assisted him,
having no one to administer justice to the Natives, nor to give information
concerning the Post, and so, immediately upon my taking the place of
Governor, having been informed by the General Governors and other
notables who were convened in Havana, and notified further by all the
principal people of this Garrison who demonstrated how necessary it was to
have a Lieutenant in said Province to guard and advise, as there had entered
a vessel of the enemy, and the natives had aided them and supplied them in
exchange for furs, hatchets, knives and other goods, without its being
known in this Garrison. For this reason I named to the position Captain
Antonio Sartucha and two soldiers with the instructions which I send
enclosed—so that justice might be administered to the Natives, it being too
laborious and the distance too great for them to come to this Garrison to
adjust their quarrels and differences and to guard the Port and advise me. In
a few days after his arrival he notified me of another vessel of the enemy
(pirates) who had entered the Port. He asked for aid for infantrymen, which
I sent him, to the number of forty, in command of Captain Gregorio Bravo.
Before this aid reached him, the enemy was able to procure what they
wanted. By pushing into service the natives, he was however able to
prevent them from landing. It being urgent that I should go in person to
pacify and punish the natives of the Province of Timagua, testimony of
which decrees were made. I remit them to your Majesty. I passed on to visit
the other Provinces and investigate the condition of the harbors. I did this
with the consent of all the Casiques, and the approved judgment of Fray
Francisco de San Antonio and other Friars, with the advice also of the
Treasurer of the Royal Hacienda, and many of the reformed natives. I left in
command the Sergeant-Major Don Adrian de Canizares, being a person of
experience and trustworthy, giving him twelve infantrymen with which to

defend the Port and coast of these Ports, and that he should administer
justice to the Natives for which purpose I elected a syndicate of Friars who
work in said Province, and some of their friends. Having determined upon
this at the time you ordered me to be vigilant and careful, since the English
enemy had attempted to occupy one of the Ports of this Province, according
to information given your Majesty by Don Diego Cardenas, ambassador to
England, and had been sent to me by Field Marshal Don Juan Montiano,
Governor who was of Havana—information he gained from some
prisoners, which confirms the information you had. There has been a fleet
of the enemy on these coasts of Florida and the Bahama Channel. Although
I had intended to increase the force of soldiers, build a Fort and found a
settlement of Spaniards as I reported was agreed upon in the visit, which
testimony, and that of the taxes and good government I remit with the
decrees. I have desisted from this on account of the many contradictions
and opposition of some of the Friars, who with the pretext that the vicinity
of the Spaniards would be dangerous to the conversion, and who do not
consider that this danger has a remedy, and it would be much more
dangerous that the enemy should occupy that Port and plant foot on your
territory and fortify themselves in a province so rich and abundant as those
of Apalachicola, the knowledge of which the enemy is sure to be fully
aware, and the danger would be irreparable and would lose in totem the
conversions of these Provinces, and this Garrison would be unable to
dislodge the enemy, from the distance at which we are, and that we could
not scatter our forces, being too few of them, besides the consequences and
damage which would accrue from pirates on the coast of Havana and the
Bahama Channel—and there is no way of reaching us under five or six days
of sailing. Finally your Lordship, the greater part of these conversions are
reduced to three Provinces where Friars officiate—they are the Provinces of
Guale, Tunnuqua and Apalache. In the two first there are few Indians,
because for some time they have been diminishing, many having died out
from the plague and small-pox which has been raging. The same is the case
in Apalache, and in a few years very few will be left, and even now the
condition they are in, it is unnecessary to assign as many Friars as you have.
Besides their conversion would long be delayed owing to the great distance
from this Garrison, the impassable roads and untold difficulties in sending
relief, even should your Majesty send the wherewith to do so. Food must be
carried eighty leagues from this garrison to the Province of Apalache and

Chacata, on the shoulders of men—the burden is often more than they can
carry. Although I have been admonished to relieve the twelve soldiers and
Lieutenant for the good of the natives and the benefit they receive. I have
sent persons there to remedy the evil, and seeing all I have herein stated that
you may order things as you deem most advantageous and I shall carry out
your orders regardless of the petitions of the Friars, who only base their
objections in not wanting the Spaniards about them, as in their present
condition they are absolute masters of the Indians.
May God preserve your Catholic Majesty.
Diego Rebolledo.
St. Augustine, Fla., October 18th, 1657.
A. D. 1657.
Things are in a most disastrous condition in Florida, there will soon be
no government left, if God does not help us. The Casique of Tarihila refused
to send some of his principal Indians to St. Augustine with heavy loads of
corn. I don’t know why the Governor insisted on this labor, but the Casique
gathering together the other Casiques insisted that their principal Indians
should not be made to do this work that they had vassals to perform their
labor. The Governor took the refusal much to heart, and as a man of so little
experience insisted until he caused them to rise. They said they were not
slaves; that to obey God they had become Christians—they had never been
conquered, but had listened to the word of God the Priest had taught them.
So the Casique of San Martin at the head and all the Casiques who would
follow him, which were the Casiques of Santa Fe, Potano and San Pedro,
who marched from San Francisco and San Mateo with the others, making in
all eleven Casiques, entered and hung the Governor. Think, your Fatherly
Majesty, of such happenings. In a land where such war is carried on, I
cannot tell you of the atrocities perpetuated by these poor Florida Indians.
Nor do you understand how the Island of Jamaica is settled by the English,
who have it well fortified with three strong Forts, and all the harbors are
guarded. All prisoners from there tell us, and all who come from there tell
us that now, in this month of May forty store ships arrived for them, and it
is their intention to take Cuba. This has been known here and in Havana by
mail, which has come. It is very important to notify you of all this, for soon

it will be impossible to travel from here to Spain nor from there here. By
giving this information I feel that I fulfill my duty, and you can act towards
your vassals in a fatherly manner.
Fray Juan Gomez.
St. Augustine, Fla., April 4th, 1657.

CHAPTER IX.
A. D. 1662-1670.
Report of Alonzo Aranqui y Cortez concerning the auditing of the accounts
and condition of the Royal Treasury—Reports the finding of a large hill
supposed to be a silver mine—Report of Juan Cebadilla to his Majesty—
The Governor not to keep the keys of the Royal chest—The administration
to be adopted with the negroes—Too much harshness shown the Royal
employees—Francisco Guerra y Vega reports a Captain of the Garrison
for indecency and offense to his superiors, for which same he was
reprimanded and imprisoned as a warning, then given his liberty—The
King to the Captain-General of the Provinces of Florida—Instructions as
to the continuance of the passage to Marcana Guale—Founding the town
of Santiago near Augustine—The performing of certain duties by soldiers
for which money shall be paid—Soldiers shall be permitted to raise crops
which are their principal sustenance—That the Governor shall not employ
the people of the town in personal work for personal aggrandisement—
But shall look that he, the Governor, shall look to the needs and wants of
the people—By order of the King, 1670.
To His Catholic Royal Majesty:
Having presented before the tribunal on behalf of the Royal officers of
Guadalapara the sworn bills, and others not sworn to, by which were
adjusted and proven the accounts of your administration which had been
running from the 7th of March, 1663, up to August 15th of the same year, it
was found to result in a liquidated balance in favor of your Royal Treasury.
Information of which was immediately sent to Don Geronimo de la Luna,
judge for your Majesty, that he should have it delivered to the Treasury. He
provided an Auto ordering Don Diego Salazar, Treasurer, to place it in the
Treasury. This person replied to him stating that he had no money
whatsoever from Jacon or Virginia. The infantry I sent out to investigate tell
me that in the Province of Apalache there is a very large hill, which, in their
opinion, is a silver mine, from the specimens found in the ground and from
pieces they picked up on the hill and brought as samples. Persons who are
versed in such matters say that from their accounts they must be mines.

As these matters do not admit of delay, and much care and caution is
required, I am myself going to investigate the matter thoroughly, and give
you a long and detailed account, being absolutely necessary for the
tranquility of this Province. May God preserve your Majesty for many
years.
Alonzo Aranqui y Cortez.
St. Augustine, Fla., September 8th, 1662.
A. D. 1666.
To His Catholic Royal Majesty:
On the 27th of November of this year we received a document from
Your Royal Highness with six orders containing the form and manner in
which the Royal Treasury must be conducted in its administration and other
things which were herein referred to, and what has passed in the
accomplishment of them. The order in which your Majesty states that the
Governor is not to keep the keys to the Royal Chest, but that your officer
alone must keep them, and that an account must be kept and sent to this
Treasury each year. We notified him and he obeyed, but as to its
accomplishment he desired us to say nothing to him about it, as things were
different here from other places—because all allowances and pay are
collected by his order, and thus he wishes the keys to the chest where the
money is kept. As to the accounts, he will provide them as should be just,
which is the same answer he gave before as shown in the accompanying
letter. The order for the administration that must be adopted with the
negroes was obeyed by the Governor, and all are placed in compliance with
it. We also notified him of the order your Majesty sent, reproving him for
speaking so harshly to your Majesty’s Royal Employees.
As the order sent by your Majesty regarding the labor of the estates, all
necessary steps have been taken. The one received stating that hereafter one
of your employees should be present at the paying of the workmen, and the
providing of supplies and ammunition for these forts, was obeyed, and
although the Governor also obeyed in the fulfilment of it, he did not do so
to the letter and there has been trouble between us ever since.
Juan Cebadilla.

Your Highness:
Don Francisco Larra whom your Majesty has had the mercy to send as
Captain of a Company of soldiers to this Garrison of St. Augustine, Fla., is
a person of such daring, restless and bold and has a mind—who is led astray
by the impulses of his will—that with his manner of acting and talking he
has given offense to the better and greater part of the people of this
Garrison, not excepting the Ecclesiastics whom he offends and speaks in
such abusive and indecent a manner of their character. And so on this
account as well as the little respect with which he treats me, not paying the
slightest attention to my office extrajudicially. I have admonished him in the
kindest terms to correct his ways and fulfill his duties as Captain of the
Infantry—not alone was this effort a vain one, but he took a bold and daring
step with me, in the presence of the Ministers and principal people of the
Garrison—for this incivility and profanation I had him imprisoned in the
Fort, expressing to him my wrath and indignation, a copy of which I send
you. With this as a warning, I then had him set at liberty. I beg your
Highness that seeing this, you will proceed as you think best for the peace
of this Garrison. May God give you the prosperity of a Christian.
Francisco Guerra y Vega.
St. Augustine, Fla., September 2d, 1666.
The King.
To My Captain-General of the Provinces of Florida:
The principal people of the town of Santiago de Tolomato have written
me a letter on the 21st of March, 1658, that Don Luis Reyes y Borhas,
being Governor of those Provinces, laid the foundation of the town of
Santiago, which is three leagues distant from the Garrison of St. Augustine
with the intention of continuing a passage to Morcana Guale and
surrounding Provinces and although at the founding there were many, only
about thirty remained including Casiques and persons of standing, to
continue the work. They beg that you will send more people, since they are
quick and disposed to work, so that they may complete the passage as far as
San Juan, a distance of twelve leagues, as much for the relief of the soldiers
as other things that may occur. That they should not be called upon to
perform other duties, as they have been by the Governors who has not

recompensed them for their services. Calling upon them to unload vessels
arriving at the Garrison, cut timber from the forests and other services not
in their line of duty, taking them from their labor when planting corn, which
is the principal sustenance for themselves and families, causing them to lose
their crops and suffer hunger. Having seen in my Council of the Indias what
I said to my Judge, it has seemed right that I should order and command
you, as I have done, that hereafter you do not employ the people of said
town in your own personal work and that you proceed to preserve them and
relieve their wants by every possible means in your power and you will
serve me best.
I The King.
Madrid, February 26th, 1670.
By order of the King our Lord.
Juan Tubiza,
Chairman of the Council.

CHAPTER X.
A. D. 1671-1673.
’Tis the judgment of the Court that Pedro Menendez received the title of
Governor of Florida by right of conquest, Captain-General and
Commander of the Fleet by appointment of the King, Don Felipe, the
Second, as well as other positions of trust because of his valor and faithful
service and that these titles shall be given to his legitimate heirs and for
which same the Don Gabriel Menendez Tarres y Aviles doth petition and it
is the judgment of this Court that said titles shall be so conferred—
Important papers burned in Simancas—Manuel De Mendoza gives
information commanded by his Majesty as to the designs of the English
enemy—The discovery of the South Sea by the four vessels sailing through
the Straights of Magellan—Condition of this Garrison and fortification
and other Provinces implores assistance for completing the work already
begun—Report of Francisco De La Guerra y Vega to the King concerning
an Englishman taken prisoner while he was Governor—The prisoner was
one of a crew who landed in the Province of Guale—The Indians killed
seven men, imprisoned three and two women—They proved to be part of
company coming over to settle in St. Elena—This man, who was second in
authority in the settlement, I detained as a prisoner, putting him on
soldier’s rations—He was turned over to my successor upon the expiration
of my term of office—An effort was made to break up this settlement upon
your Majesty’s soil, without success, however. (1673.)
Judgment of the Court.
The Governor, Don Gabriel Menendez Torres y Aviles, sets forth in the
preceding petition that His Highness the King Don Felipe II (whom God
grant may come to glory) agrees with the Governor Pedro Menendez y
Aviles, Knight of the Order of Santiago, that his uncle, brother of his
grandfather, had agreed about the year 1565, that he, the said Pedro
Menendez, had to discover all the provinces of Florida, settle and build in
them two or three towns, all at his own expense, for which service your
Grace granted him the title of Governor of said Province and lands of

Florida, with all the privileges and prerogatives that are granted the other
Governors of Castile—and that having set sail to accomplish this, and make
these settlements with a private galleon of his own, of 900 tons, and many
other ships and vessels which he also carried at his own expense and having
conquered, as he effectively did, the said Province, and having settled and
established two towns in it, which are today flourishing and supplying this
crown, even before completion of this conquest. Your Majesty has named
him Captain-General of the Royal Fleet which is to be commanded and
joined in Santander against the English, commanding him to assist in this
military exploit, notwithstanding that he is under obligations in the first
place, by the treaty and agreement he had made of discovering all the land
of the Province of Florida within the given term of three years counting
from the day he embarked and set sail in the Bay of the Port of Cadiz with
the fleet he carried for said conquest. Being of the greatest importance the
business for which the Royal Fleet was formed and arranged, and while he
was preparing and getting it ready, the said Governor Menendez de Aviles
died—and by his death the Duke of Medina Sidonia was immediately
named Captain-General. Afterwards having been asked on the part of the
legitimate heirs of the said Governor Pedro Menendez de Aviles, the
accomplishment of all these services which your grant had offered him, it
was contradicted by the Attorney-General of this Court—taking advantage
of one of said agreements which reads: “That if in the expressed term of
three years the Governor Pedro Menendez de Aviles should not have
finished and completed in all the said conquest according to agreement,
neither your Majesty nor any other Kings, your successors, should be bound
to fulfil any of the rewards offered.” For this reason the heirs brought suit
against the Attorney-General which was continued. For sentence, by
revision of the Court it was ordered to be given to Don Martin Menendez,
oldest brother of the petitioner, the title of perpetual Governor of said
Provinces, as had been done with his uncle, and besides they were to give
him forty thousand ducats of silver.
Withholding the charge of the Indias to augment from the right of
succession which his uncle left established, and a fishery in said Province
which the said Don Martin should select without any remuneration for the
many expenses he incurred in the conquest, Don Martin Menendez having
died without issue, or heir to his estate, the petitioner asked they expedite
the title of Governor upon him, as it was expedient. Although endeavors

have been made in the archives of Simancas to find these papers, they have
not been found, and it is said they were burned in the fire which occurred in
these archives. Imploring your Majesty’s order that the pre-eminence and
prerogative be reserved and observed as with the title of all the other courts
and marquises of Castile, and also in consideration of the services rendered
by the Governor his uncle, and other Generals of the Indias who were
members of his house. Having seen in the Council of the Indias the petition
and letters patent of nobility, and considering the great services done by
Pedro Menendez de Aviles in the conquest of Florida as well as in other
positions of trust where he has acted with so much valor as to deserve that
his King Felipe the Second should have voluntarily given him the title of
Governor, and that his successors continue to occupy positions as Generals
—his house having spread such glory and honor as to be noted, it has
seemed well that your Majesty should grant the petitioner the title of
Castile, that he may enjoy the honors he so well deserves as a reward for his
many and remarkable services. Your Grace will command that which is
most deserved.
Madrid, November 28th, 1671.
Sire:
By Cedula of January 20th of this year, your Majesty commands me to
give information regarding the designs of the English enemy. Also of the
discovery of the South Sea by the four vessels which sailed through the
Strait of Magellan, from which I had news that they arrived at Baldivia
dismantled. A German Captain was in command. He showed great zeal in
serving you. He gave a long account of the Viceroy of Peru, and what he
intended doing. The Government Places under my charge are the Garrison
of St. Augustine, Harbour and Port of Apalache and the river St. Catherine,
a frontier of St. Elena, where the English enemy are at present; a few other
less important harbours, all of which I desire to have guarded as by your
orders I am obligated.
As regards this Garrison, head of this Province, and the state of the
Fortification which is being built and the designs of the English enemy and
the overtures made by them. This being a frontier of the Province of Guale
where I have stationed some infantry to watch the movements and intuitions
of the enemy, and where they could detain them, while I sent aid and as

strong a reinforcement as possible. It seems the proper thing for us to have
sufficient troops there to impede the approach of the enemy on this Garrison
and place sentinels all along to notify should they approach by land or sea.
As to the Province of Apalache which falls almost in the bosom of Mexico,
I am sure it is a place of no less importance than this Garrison, rather I
should say more so, being thickly settled and reached by land from all the
Provinces far as New Mexico, and all others still to be discovered far as the
Strait of David, of which the German Captain discourses at such length in
his statement. Besides, it is a fertile land, and much longed for by the
enemy as it is noted for its agriculture, for which cause it should be well
settled and fortified, its Harbour should have a good fort and at least one
hundred infantry who could at any rate give the English enemy some
trouble to occupy it or set foot in said Province. This should be done to
prevent any damage, not alone in the Province, but to vessels plying the
Mexican path. I implore you to look into the matter with the care and
attention the case requires. So far as I am concerned, I have made every
effort in my power to secure and protect it. I shall try to push this building
through rapidly, that I may go and reconnoitre that Province, carrying with
me the military engineer, Ygnacio Daza, who resides in this Garrison, that
he may point out what is needed at present. I implore your Majesty most
earnestly to look with pious pity upon your Royal Provinces and send all
the assistance you can to complete this building and the other works of
which this Garrison stands in such need, lacking all the means of protection
by which we can serve your gracious Majesty.
May God spare you for many years.
Manuel de Mendoza.
St. Augustine, Fla., Dec. 15th, 1672.
1673.
Your Majesty:
In a letter of Yours of the present month and year, you tell me that seeing
in the Council a letter which was received, written in English, it was agreed
that I should inform you of what had happened to an Englishman, said to be
prisoner in St. Augustine, Fla., where I was Governor. The cause and

pretext for making him a prisoner. Complying with what your Majesty asks,
I inform you in the following manner:
About the end of May of last year there arrived in one of the ports of the
Province of Guale, which belongs to the Christian Indians, an English
vessel. Some of the crew having landed in a launch, the Indians of that
Province killed seven men, imprisoned three men and two women, then the
vessel with all speed turned and went off, not giving time that from St.
Augustine, where I was Governor, we should send help to those Ports to aid
in imprisoning them. Bringing me these prisoners I ordered that their
declaration be taken, at which I was present. They declared that they had
come over with vessels to settle in the Port of St. Elena, distant from the
Garrison of St. Augustine forty or fifty leagues north. In the month of June
of last year there came to the Garrison a soldier with the news that the
vessels had returned and entered the same Port, reinforced and with the flag
of truce, the captain and four other men had landed and that speaking to a
Lieutenant in command of the infantry on guard, they told him how they
were establishing a settlement near St. Elena, with two hundred men, and
that they came in search of the prisoner, delivering at the same time to the
Lieutenant two letters from the Governor of that settlement, written in
Latin, in which he asks that the prisoner be delivered, if not, they declared
themselves enemies.
With this news I called a general meeting of the Royal Officers and
Commanders of the war, from which resulted that all agreed it was the
better way to serve God and your Majesty, and secure the quietude of those
Provinces, to break up said settlement, and that we should go to work
before they fortified themselves and take possession of more land. For this
purpose they prepared themselves and equipped three vessels at that time in
Port. The Chief in command being appointed by the Board, assigning him a
number of warriors to obtain the object for which they went. A storm
overtook the vessels and they could not get there in time and so arrived
without accomplishing anything. Of the referred to notice, on two or three
occasions, it was presented to your Majesty and to the Marquez of Macera,
Viceroy of New Spain, always stating what was best to the service of God
and your Majesty. To make every effort to dislodge the said settlement, it
belonging to the Christian Indians, and they being new to our doctrine,
might be easily influenced by the heresies of the English. And although not
new to our Holy Faith, we might have the same doubts as they are a

variable and roving people. It was advisable for your Majesty’s service that
we should dislodge them at that time, that they might not possess
themselves of that Province and the interior land, and make themselves
owners. It would not be well to have a settlement of a strange Nation on
your Majesty’s territory without your orders. From this information I
awaited a reply to follow out the Orders from your Majesty and the Viceroy,
and that together you would aid me, and with some help, as that Post lacks
people, I detained the prisoner, not ill-treating him, in the house of one of
his countrymen, allowing him military rations, which is what the soldiers in
service have. As I was advised that the prisoner was the second person in
authority in that settlement, I placed him under better security, that he might
not escape and inform them of the lack of forces in the Garrison, for
without doubt knowing it the settlement would come and take possession at
very little cost. Just at this time my term of Governor came to an end,
without having determined upon a method to work in this affair, I turned all
over to the Governor, my predecessor, that he might act as ordered in the
reply to my information. This is all that I can tell you regarding the English
prisoner. By this the Council will know that I always worked with Christian
zeal, trying to stop anything opposed to the increase of our Holy Catholic
faith. God preserve you many years.
Francisco de la Guerra y Vega.
Madrid, July 12th, 1673.

CHAPTER XI.
A. D. 1675.
Letters to the King from the Governor, Pablo Ita Salazer—The oath
administered in the tower of the old Fort, which is tumbling down—The
Garrison in want of supplies and ammunition—No warehouses—Exposed
to the fatalities of the weather—The Fort in danger from pirates—
Necessary to use Spanish daggers for the land side protection—More
money badly needed to finish the works—Importance of the Castle to the
Garrison—A pentagonal form recommended—A hundred men needed to
guard the Castle—The Viceroy of Spain did not send the ten thousand
dollars—Fort in danger from pirates—Two hundred leagues from Havana
and five hundred from New Spain.
A. D. 1675.
Sire:
I have repeatedly given you an account of the manner in which I
assumed control of this Government, taking the oath of fidelity in the tower
of the Old Castle, which is almost in ruins, the artillery dismounted and
scattered as if on a beaten field of battle. The blind obedience my duty
demands in any employment of your Majesty, forces me to again repeat the
condition of things. The old wooden Fort is in ruins, the stone one
incomplete and with no defense whatever. No income or means to finish it.
In the commissary department only one hundred “arrobas” of corn, and no
other produce of any description. The Garrison is in the greatest want, as no
vessels with supplies have yet arrived from New Spain. Seeing that we
could not hold out three weeks longer, I seized two small vessels carrying
about two thousand arrobas of corn. As the Fort was in such a demolished
condition, with no defense and exposed to losing what was done, I detained
these vessels, intending to give them some amount of embargo, conceding
to each his share, but having communicated it to the Royal Officers, they
thought it too severe treatment and that I should pay freight and the
conquered’s pay; that it would be better to pursue such a course. I let the
matter stand for the present, retained the crew and the vessels I sent to bring
peons to continue the building of the Castle, which is so absolutely

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