| A British sailor and merchant named Bodenham visited Crete in 1550, when rumours were rife of an imminent attack by the Ottomans. Bodenham mentions that four or five thousand fugitives had descended from the mountains on the island to bolster its defences. He describes them as being fine archers, armed with bows, arrows, swords and daggers. They had long hair and wore shirts of mail above boots up to the groin, and had an insatiable appetite for wine. Bodenham’s account is contained in the fifth volume of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (Glasgow 1903). It thus supplements the information on Cretan archers published by K.D. Mertzios in the current volume of the Kretika Chronika. |