The invasion force fought the Cretan navy and army. Though formidable on the surface, the navy had already lost the past glory since the Thera Eruption. Once they landed on the northern coast, the Cretan army turned out no match for the invading force. King Zeminos died, leaving his young wife and infant sons. Tectamus became king of Crete. His son, Asterius, re-married Europa, and adopted her sons since he had no sons of his own.

Five years later, Tectamus died of high fever. Asterius then succeeded to his father as king of Crete.

At seventeen Minos married Pasiphae, sister of King Aeetes of Colchis—a land at the eastern end of the Black Sea. She came from all the way from Aea, the capital of Colchis, located near the mouth of the Phasis River. Minos detested the man of the Dorian blood sitting at the throne because he’d stolen his beloved mother.

Once he turned twenty, therefore, Minos engineered a coup d’etat and became king, imprisoning his stepfather Asterius in a secret chamber designed by Daedalus. At the same time, the new king spread the words, saying that he’d recently captured a mysterious, violent monster called the Minotaur that bore a bull’s head on a man’s body in the Labyrinth, a mazelike prison from which no one, once inside, could ever find his way out.

Minos proclaimed that, from then on, the Cretan king would call himself ‘Minos’—an equivalent of an Egyptian ‘Pharaoh’. Under his reign, his maritime nation and his allies—the Lelegians—swayed most Aegean islands.