Part 15

Wherever there was knightly work to be done, the gallant Duke of Athens was foremost; none was more impetuous than he at the great tournament held on the Isthmus of Corinth in 1305, at which the whole chivalry of Frankish Greece was present. He needs must challenge Master Bouchart, one of the best jousters of the West, to single combat with the lance; and their horses met with such force that the ducal charger fell and rolled its rider in the dust. His Theban castle rang with the songs of minstrels; festival after festival followed at his Court; and this prosperity was not merely on the surface. Now for the first time we find Attica supplying Eubœa with corn, while the gift of silken garments to Pope Boniface VIII is a proof of the continued manufacture of silk at Thebes. But the duke’s health was undermined by an incurable malady; he had no heirs of his body; and, when he died in 1308, there was already looming on the frontiers of Greece that Grand Company of Catalan soldiers of fortune whom the weakness of the Emperor, Andronikos II, had invited from the stricken fields of Sicily to be the terror and the scourge of the Levant. The last duke of the house of la Roche was laid to rest in the noble Byzantine abbey of Daphni or Dalfinet (as the Franks called it), on the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis, which Othon had bestowed upon the Cistercians a century before. Even to-day there may be seen in the courtyard a sarcophagus, with a cross, two snakes, and two lilies carved upon it, which the French scholar Buchon (_La Grèce continentale_) believed to have been the tomb of “the good duke,” Guy II.

The succession to the “delectable duchy” of Athens—for such, indeed, it was in the early years of the fourteenth century—was not seriously disputed. There were only two claimants, both first cousins of the late duke—Eschive, Lady of Beyrout, and Walter de Brienne, Count of Lecce, a true scion of that adventurous family, who had been a “knight of death” in the Angevin cause in Sicily, and had fought like the lion on his banner at the fatal battle of Gagliano. The rival claims having been referred to the High Court of Achaia, of which the Duke of Athens was, in Angevin times, a peer, the barons decided, as was natural, in favour of the gallant and powerful Count of Lecce, more fitted than a lonely widow to govern a military state. Unfortunately, Duke Walter of Athens was as rash as he was brave; prison and defeat in Sicily had not taught him to respect the infantry of Cataluña. Speaking their language and knowing their ways, he thought that he might use them for his own ends and then dismiss them when they had served his purpose.

In the spring of 1309 the Catalan Grand Company threatened by starvation in Macedonia, marched through the vale of Tempe into the granary of Greece, whence, a year later, they descended upon Lamia. The Duke of Neopatras had now come of age, and had not only emancipated himself from Athenian tutelage, but had formed a triple alliance with the Greek Emperor and the Greek Despot of Epeiros in order to prevent the ultimate annexation of his country by his French neighbours. In these circumstances the new Duke of Athens bethought himself of employing the wandering Catalans against the allies. Thanks to the good offices of Roger Deslaur, a knight of Roussillon who was in his employ, he engaged them at the same high rate of payment which they had received from Andronikos II. The Catalans at once showed that they were well worth the money, for by the end of a six months’ campaign they had captured more than thirty castles for their employer. Thereupon his three adversaries hastened to make peace with him on his own terms.

Walter now rashly resolved to rid himself of the expensive mercenaries for whom he had no further use. He first selected 500 men from their ranks, gave them their pay and lands on which to settle, and then abruptly bade the others begone, although at the time he still owed them four months’ wages. They naturally declined to obey this summary order, and prepared to conquer or die; for retreat was impossible, and there was no other land where they could seek their fortune. Walter, too, assembled all available troops against the common enemies of Frankish Greece—for as such the savage Catalans were regarded. Never had a Latin army made such a brave show as that which was drawn up under his command in the spring of 1311 on the great Bœotian plain, almost on the self-same spot where, more than sixteen centuries before, Philip of Macedon had won that “dishonest victory” which destroyed the freedom of classic Greece, and where, in the time of Sulla, her Roman masters had thrice met the Pontic troops of Mithridates. All the great feudatories of Greece rallied to his call. There came Alberto Pallavicini, Marquess of Boudonitza, who kept the pass of Thermopylæ; Thomas de Stromoncourt of Salona, who ruled over the slopes of Parnassos, and whose noble castle still preserves the memory of its mediæval lords; Boniface of Verona, the favourite of the late Duke of Athens; George Ghisi, one of the three great barons of Eubœa; and Jean de Maisy, another powerful magnate of that famous island. From Achaia, and from the scattered duchy of the Archipelago, contingents arrived to do battle against the desperate mercenaries of Cataluña. Already Walter dreamed of not merely routing the company, but of planting his lion banner on the ramparts of Byzantium.

But the Catalans were better strategists than the impetuous Duke of Athens. They knew that the strength of the Franks lay in the rush of their splendid cavalry, and they laid their plans accordingly. The marshy soil of the Copaic basin afforded them an excellent defence against a charge of horsemen; and they carefully prepared the ground by ploughing it up, digging a trench round it, and then irrigating the whole area by means of canals from the river Kephissos. By the middle of March, when the two armies met face to face, a treacherous covering of green grass concealed the quaking bog from the gaze of the Frankish leaders.

As if he had some presentiment of his coming death, Walter made his will—a curious document still preserved[86]—and then, on March 15, took up his stand on the hill called the Thourion, still surmounted by a mediæval tower, to survey the field. Before the battle began, the 500 favoured Catalans whom he had retained came to him and told him that they would rather die than fight against their old comrades. The duke bade them do as they pleased; and their defection added a welcome and experienced contingent to the enemy’s forces. When they had gone, the duke, impatient for the fray, placed himself at the head of 200 French knights with golden spurs and charged with a shout across the plain. But, when they reached the fatal spot where the grass was greenest, their horses, heavily weighted with their coats of mail, plunged all unsuspecting into the treacherous morass. Some rolled over with their armoured riders in the mire; others, stuck fast in the stiff bog, stood still, in the picturesque phrase of the Byzantine historian, “like equestrian statues,” powerless to move. The shouts of “Aragon! Aragon!” from the Catalans increased the panic of the horses; showers of arrows hailed upon the helpless Franks; and the Turkish auxiliaries of the Catalans rushed forward and completed the deadly work. So great was the slaughter that only four Frankish nobles are known to have survived that fatal day—Boniface of Verona, Roger Deslaur, the eldest son of the Duke of Naxos, and Jean de Maisy of Eubœa[87]. At one blow the Catalans had destroyed the noble chivalry of Frankish Greece; and the men, whose forefathers had marched with Boniface of Montferrat into Greece a century earlier, lay dead in the fatal Bœotian swamp. Among them was the Duke of Athens, whose head, severed by a Catalan knife, was borne, long afterwards, on a funeral galley to Brindisi and buried in the church of Santa Croce in his Italian county of Lecce.

The Athenian duchy, “the pleasaunce of the Latins,” as Villani[88] quaintly calls it, now lay at the mercy of the Grand Company; for the Greeks made no resistance to their new masters, and in fact looked upon the annihilation of the Franks as a welcome relief. We would fain believe the story of the Aragonese _Chronicle of the Morea_, that the heroic widow of the fallen duke, a worthy daughter of a Constable of France, defended the Akropolis, where she had taken refuge with her little son Walter, till she saw that there was no hope of succour. But the Byzantine historian, Nikephoros Gregoras, expressly says that Athens fell without a struggle, as Thebes had already fallen. Argos and Nauplia alone held aloft the banner of the Frankish dukes. Thus the Catalans were able, without opposition, to parcel out among themselves the towns and castles of the duchy; the widows of the slain became the wives of the slayers; each soldier received a consort according to his services; and many a rough warrior thus found himself the husband of some noble dame in whose veins flowed the bluest blood of France, and “whose washhand-basin,” in the phrase of Muntaner, “he was not worthy to bear.”

After nine years’ wandering these vagabonds settled down in the promised land, which the most extraordinary fate had bestowed upon them. But they lacked a leader of sufficient social position to preside over their changed destinies. Finding no such man in their own ranks, they offered the post to one of their four noble prisoners, Boniface of Verona, whom Muntaner, his guest at Negroponte, has described as “the wisest and most courteous nobleman that was ever born.” Both of these qualities made him disinclined to accept an offer which would have rendered him an object of suspicion to Venice, his neighbour in Eubœa, and of loathing to the whole Frankish world. On his refusal the Catalans turned to Roger Deslaur, whom neither ties of blood nor scruples of conscience prevented from becoming their leader. As his reward he received the castle of Salona together with the widow of its fallen lord.

But the victors of the Kephissos soon recognised that they needed some more powerful head than a simple knight of Roussillon, if they were to hold the duchy against the jealous enemies whom their meteoric success had alarmed and excited. Their choice naturally fell upon King Frederick II of Sicily, the master whom they had served in that island ten years earlier, and who had already shown that he was not unwilling to profit by their achievements. Accordingly, in 1312, they invited him to send them one of his children. He gave them as their duke his second son Manfred, in whose name—as the Duke was still too young to come himself—he sent, as governor of Athens, Beranger Estañol, a knight of Ampurias. On his arrival Deslaur laid down his office, and we hear of him no more.

The Catalan duchy of Athens was now organised as a state, which, though dependent in name on a Sicilian duke, really enjoyed a large measure of independence. The duke nominated the two chief officials, the vicar-general and the marshal, of whom the former, appointed during good pleasure, was the political, the latter the military, governor of the duchy. The marshal was always chosen from the ranks of the Company; and the office was for half a century hereditary in the family of De Novelles. Each city and district had its own local governor, called _veguer_, _castellano_, or _capitán_, whose term of office was fixed at three years, and who was nominated by the duke, by the vicar-general, or by the local representatives from among the citizens of the community. The principal towns and villages were represented by persons known as _sindici_, and possessed municipal officials and councils, which did not hesitate to present petitions, signed with the seal of St George by the chancellor, to the duke whenever they desired the redress of grievances. On one occasion we find the communities actually electing the vicar-general; and the dukes frequently wrote to them about affairs of state. One of their principal subsequent demands was that official posts should be bestowed upon residents in the duchy, not upon Sicilians.

The feudal system continued to exist, but with far less brilliance than under the Burgundian dukes. The Catalan conquerors were of common origin; and, even after seventy years of residence, the roll of noble families in the whole duchy contained only some sixteen names. The Company particularly objected to the bestowal of strong fortresses, such as Livadia, upon private individuals, preferring that they should be administered by the government officials. The “Customs of Barcelona” now supplanted the feudal “Assizes of Romania”; the Catalan idiom of Muntaner took the place of the elegant French which had been spoken by the Frankish rulers of Greece. Even to their Greek subjects the Spanish dukes wrote in “the Catalan dialect,” the employment of which, as we are expressly told, was “according to the custom and usage of the city of Athens.” Alike by Catalans and French, the Greeks were treated as an inferior race, excluded, as a general rule, from all civic rights, forbidden to intermarry with the conquerors, and still deprived of their higher ecclesiastical functionaries. But there were some notable exceptions to these harsh disqualifications. The people of Livadia, for services rendered to the Company, early received the full franchise of the Conquistadors; towards the end of the Catalan domination we find Greeks holding such important posts as those of _castellano_ of Salona, chancellor of Athens, and notary of Livadia; a count of Salona and a marshal married Greek ladies; and their wives were allowed to retain their own faith.

Under the rule of Estañol the Catalans not only held their ground in Attica and Bœotia, but increased the terror of their name among all their neighbours. In vain the Pope appealed to King James II of Aragon to drive them out of Attica; in vain he described the late Duke Walter as a “true athlete of Christ and faithful boxer of the Church”; the king’s politic reply was to the effect that the Catalans, if they were cruel, were also Catholics, who would prove a valuable bulwark of Romanism against the schismatic Greeks of Byzantium[89]. The appointment of King Frederick II’s natural son, Don Alfonso Fadrique (or Frederick), as “President of the fortunate army of Franks in the Duchy of Athens” yet further strengthened the position of the Company. The new vicar-general was a man of much energy and force of character; and during his thirteen years’ administration the Catalan state attained its zenith. Practically independent of Sicilian influence—for the nominal Duke Manfred died in the year of Fadrique’s appointment, and his younger brother William was likewise a minor—he acquired a stronger hold upon Attica, and at the same time a pretext for intervention in the affairs of Eubœa, by his marriage with Marulla, the heiress of Boniface of Verona, “one of the fairest Christians in the world, the best woman and the wisest that ever was in that land,” as Muntaner, who knew her, enthusiastically describes her. With her Fadrique received back, as her dowry, the thirteen castles which Guy II of Athens had bestowed upon her father on that memorable day at Thebes.

The growing power of the Catalans under this daring leader, who had marched across “the black bridge” of Negroponte and had occupied two of the most important castles of the island, so greatly alarmed the Venetians that they persuaded King Frederick II of Sicily to curb the restless ambition of his bastard son, lest a European coalition should be formed against the disturber of Greece. Above all else, the Republic was anxious that a Catalan navy should not be formed at the Piræus; and it was therefore stipulated, in 1319, that a plank was to be taken out of the hull of each of the Catalan vessels then lying in “the sea of Athens,” and that the ships’ tackle was to be taken up to “the Castle of Athens” and there deposited[90]. Thus shut out from naval enterprise, Fadrique now extended his dominions by land. The last Duke of Neopatras had died in 1318, and the best part of his duchy soon fell into the hands of the Catalans of Athens, who might claim that they represented the Burgundian dukes, and were therefore entitled to some voice in the government of a land which Guy II had once administered. At Neopatras, the seat of the extinct Greek dynasty of the Angeloi, Fadrique made his second capital, styling himself “Vicar-General of the duchies of Athens and Neopatras.” Thenceforth the Sicilian dukes of Athens assumed the double title which figures on their coins and in their documents; and, long after the Catalan duchies had passed away, the Kings of Aragon continued to bear it. This conquest made the Company master of practically all continental Greece; even the Venetian Marquess of Boudonitza paid an annual tribute of four horses to the Catalan vicar-general[91]. Still, however, the faithful family of Foucherolles held the two great fortresses of Argos and Nauplia for the exiled house of Brienne.

Young Walter had now grown up to man’s estate, and it seemed to him that the time had come to strike a blow for the recovery of his Athenian heritage. The Angevins of Naples supported him in their own interest as well as his; Pope John XXII bade the Archbishops of Patras and Corinth preach a crusade against the “schismatics, sons of perdition, and pupils of iniquity” who had seized his patrimony; but the subtle Venetians, who could have contributed more than Angevin aid or papal thunder to the success of his expedition, had just renewed their truce with the Catalans. From that moment his attempt was bound to fail.

Walter was, like his father, a rash general, while his opponents had not forgotten the art of strategy, to which they owed their success. At first the brilliant band of French knights and Tuscan men-at-arms which crossed over with him to Epeiros in 1331 carried all before it. But, when he arrived in the Catalan duchy, he found that the enemy was much too cautious to give his fine cavalry a chance of displaying its prowess on the plains of Bœotia. While the Catalans remained behind the walls of their fortresses, the invaders wasted their energies on the open country. Ere long Walter’s small stock of money ran out, and his chances diminished with it. The Greeks rendered him no assistance. It is true that a correspondent of the historian Nikephoros Gregoras wrote that they were “suffering under extreme slavery,” and had “exchanged their ancient happiness for boorish ways,” while Guillaume Adam said that they were “worse than serfs”; but either their sufferings were insufficient to make them desire a change of masters, or their boorishness was such that it made them indifferent to the advantages of French culture. Early in the following year Walter took ship for Italy, never to return. Summoned by the Florentines to command their forces, he became tyrant of their city, whence he was expelled amidst universal rejoicings eleven years later. His name and arms may still be seen in the Bargello of Florence. Thirteen years afterwards he fell fighting, as Constable of France, against the English at the battle of Poitiers. His sister Isabelle, wife of Walter d’Enghien, succeeded to his estates and his pretensions; some of her descendants continued to bear, till 1381, the empty title of Duke of Athens, while the last fragments of the French duchy—the castles of Nauplia and Argos—remained in the possession of others of her line till, in 1388, they were purchased by Venice.

One irreparable loss was inflicted upon Greece by this expedition. In order to prevent the castle of St Omer at Thebes from falling into his hands, the Catalans destroyed that noble monument of Frankish rule. Loudly does the _Chronicle of the Morea_ lament over the loss of a building more closely associated than any other with the past glories of the De la Roche. At the time of its destruction it belonged to Bartolommeo Ghisi, Great Constable of Achaia, one of the three great barons of Eubœa, son-in-law of Fadrique, and a man of literary and historic tastes, for the French version of the Chronicle, _Le Livre de la Conqueste_, was originally found in his Theban castle[92]. Had Fadrique still been head of the Company at the time, he would probably have saved his kinsman’s home; but for some unexplained reason he was no longer vicar-general, though he was still in Greece. Possibly, as he paid a visit to Sicily about this time, he may have been accused at the Sicilian Court of aiming at independent sovereignty in the duchies—an accusation to which his too successful career may have lent some colour. Though he never resumed the leadership of the Catalans he passed the rest of his life in Greece, where one of his sons was Count of Salona, and another became, later on, vicar-general of the duchies.

Soon after Walter’s futile expedition the Papacy made its peace with the “sons of perdition,” who came to be regarded as a possible defence against the growing Turkish peril. Unfortunately, when the Catalans became respectable members of Christendom, they ceased to be formidable. Occasionally the old Adam broke out, as when the Count of Salona plied the trade of a pirate with the aid of the “unspeakable” Turk. But their Thessalian conquests were slipping away from the luxurious and drunken progeny of the hardy warriors who had smitten the Franks in the marshes of the Kephissos. Meanwhile, in distant Sicily, the shadowy Dukes of Athens and Neopatras came and went without ever seeing their Greek duchies. Duke William died in 1338; and his successors, John and Frederick of Randazzo, the picturesque town on the slopes of Etna, both succumbed to the plague a few years later—mere names in the history of Athens. But in 1355 the new Duke of Athens became also King of Sicily, under the title of Frederick III; and thus the two duchies, which had hitherto been the appanage of younger members of the royal family, were united with the Sicilian crown in the person of its holder.