The Latins in Greece: A Brief Introduction 5
be ruled by representatives of the Angevins. Though the annexation of the
principality ensured that assistance from the West would be forthcoming, it
also meant that the fortunes of the Peloponnese would be subsumed in the
broader politics and ambitions of the Angevins and be ruled by delegates in
the name of absentee princes.
For a brief period, the Franks of Athens and Thebes could revel in the knowl-
edge that theirs was the only surviving independent Frankish crusader state in
Greece, whose lords could still trace their lineage back to the conquest. In the
14th century, however, all this was about to change. In 1311, a group of Catalan
adventurers known as the Catalan Grand Company, who had previously served
as mercenaries for the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos ii but had since fallen
out with him, arrived at the duchy after having terrorised Asia Minor and
most of mainland Greece. In a pitched battle at Halmyros they annihilated the
Burgundian knights and took over Athens, with most of central Greece soon to
follow. That once in Athens the Catalans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle of
recent years in favour of settlement and state-building made little difference
to the other Latin states of Greece. Their violent establishment and continued
aggression earned them the hostility of the Franks and repeated sentences of
excommunication from the papacy. The Venetians were also wary, fearing that
the Catalans would put an end to the Venetian trade monopoly in the Aegean.
In an effort to legitimise their conquests the Catalans of Athens recognised
the Aragonese kings of Sicily as their suzerains. Thereafter, the title of Duke
of Athens passed to members of the Aragonese royal family, while the duchy
was governed through vicars (much like the Principality of Achaea after the
Angevin cession). The suzerainty of the Aragonese of Sicily, though it might
have provided the Catalans with a powerful patron, did little to improve rela-
tions with the Angevin-dominated Morea, and in fact further embroiled the
Latin polities of Greece in the rivalries and disputes of western Europe.
The Catalans burst into medieval Greece in spectacular manner, but their
domination of Athens and Thebes ended with a whimper rather than a bang.
Moreover, the hardened soldiers of fortune were replaced by the unlikeli-
est of conquerors—a branch of the cultured and urbane Acciaiuoli fam-
ily of Florence. The Acciaiuoli had first acquired claims to territories in the
Peloponnese as payment for funding Angevin expeditions in the Morea in the
1320s, and in subsequent decades had expanded these claims through bequests
and purchase. Throughout the 1370s and ’80s Nerio Acciaiuoli extended his
domains by conquest into the Duchy of Athens, ousting the Catalans from
Athens and the newly-installed Navarrese adventurers from Thebes in 1388.
The dynasty that he established ruled the Duchy of Athens and Thebes until
its fall to the Ottomans.