resubmission of the despotate of Epiros to the house of Anjou.^110 Pope
John XXII played his part too, elevating the campaign into a crusade.^111
As a result, it was a sizeable host, spear-headed by some 800 knights,
that assembled at Brindisi in the summer of 1331.^112 The campaign
began very promisingly. Walter occupied the island of Lefkada, seized
the port of Vonitsa and attacked the Epirote capital of Arta as well. The
cumulate effective of all this was to force the despot to reacknowledge the
suzerainty of the king of Naples.^113 This freed Walter to press on towards
his real goal. The Catalans’response, though, was canny. They slighted
castles that they could not hold, such as the great fortress of Saint-Omer
in Thebes. They then withdrew into what little they had left, and waited
for the crucial moment when Walter’s momentum would run out.
Villani sums it up rather neatly. He observes that Walter had too few
troops to win a quick and overwhelming victory, but too many for the
long, expensive campaign in which the Catalans eventually ground him
down.^114 Walter’s sorrows were complete when his young son was
brought out to Greece in 1332, but was taken ill and died.^115 It is worth
pausing to consider the effects that this had, not only on the expedition
itself, but also as the end of the senior line’s extraordinary run of genea-
logical good fortune. Walter VIfinally called a halt and returned to
Brindisi a couple of months later.^116
As it turned out, it was the very beginning–the capture of Lefkada and
Vonitsa–that was the lasting achievement of Walter’s campaign. He
ruled them, atfirst, through a series of French castellans, starting with a
certain John of Mandalée. In 1343, however, Mandalée’s successor, John
Clignet, was summoned to Naples to account for his maladministra-
tion.^117 It seems that, in the same year, Walter granted the governorship
of Lefkada to his Venetian ally, Giorgio Zorzi–and, by the mid-1350s,
Walter had turned it over to him as afief. (Later, there were persistent
complaints that Zorzi was attacking Vonitsa, and causing great damage
there.)^118 The fundamental point, though, is simply that Walter was
retaining these lordships, alongside Argos and Nafplio, as springboards
(^110) See Nicol,The Despotate of Epiros,97.
(^111) John XXII,Lettres communes, compiled by G. Mollat, 16 vols. (Paris, 1947), ix-x,
no. 49924. See also N. Housley,The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1307– 1378
(Oxford, 1986), 27.
(^112) Villani,Nuova cronica, ii, book 11, ch. 189. (^113) Nicol,The Despotate of Epiros, 97.
(^114) Villani,Nuova cronica, ii, book 11, ch. 189.
(^115) Setton,Catalan Domination of Athens, 40. For the persistent calumny that the boy was
116 killed by the Catalans, see de Sassenay,Brienne, 191.
118 Setton,Catalan Domination of Athens, 41.^117 Nicol,The Despotate of Epiros, 98.
For this, seeibid., 133–4, 137; and also A. Luttrell,‘Vonitza in Epiros and Its Lords,
1306 – 1377 ’,inLatin Greece, the Hospitallers and the Crusades, essay no. 7, 135.
A Florentine Tragedy 165