THE WESTERN MEDITERK\NEAN KINGDOI\IS 1200-1'>00A venerable Catalan historical tradition looks elsewhere,
however, for signs that the Catalans were beginning to cre-
ate an empire stretching from southern Spain to the Near
East. The success of the mercenaries of the Catalan Com-
pany in establishing a Catalan Duchy based in Athens and
Thebes has been celebrated as yet another great conquest
since the time of Ramon Muntaner, the Catalan chronicler
who had himself been a military commander in the Greek
wars. For Muntaner, looking back on the Greek campaigns
from the 1320s, the successes scored in the former lands of
the Byzantine Empire were further proof of God's favour to
the Catalan race, and were a clear demonstration that Catalan
soldiers were the bravest in the world, each worth ten Sicilians
in battle. Muntaner's story, which he told within the frame-
work of a vast, optimistic chronicle of the achievements of the
kings of Aragon, Majorca and Sicily-Trinacria (all of whom he
knew personally and well), had a massive influence on later
historians such as the sixteenth-century Aragonese annalist
Jeronimo Zurita or the seventeenth-century narrator of the
Greek wars, Moncada. Major twentieth-century studies of
the Catalan 'Empire', such as that of the Catalan politician
Nicolau D'Olwer, assumed that the history of the Catalan
Company was an integral part of the process of Catalan im-
perial expansion. The result was that the events leading up
to the Duchy's creation acquired a significance in historians'
eves ; that is now much more keenlv ; doubted.~^1
That the Catalan Company was a by-product of the War
of the Vespers is, however, clear. The Catalan mercenary
was a well-established feature of Mediterranean military life,
present in large numbers at the courts of the north African
emirs such as the ruler of Tlemcen; many mercenaries had
also fought with distinction in the War of the Vespers. As
the demand for paid recruits fell away after the Peace of
Caltabellotta in 1302, Catalan and other mercenaries who
had been fighting in Sicily on behalf of Frederick ofTrinacria
- The Chronicle nf Muntaner, trans!. Lady Goodenough.^2 vols (Hakluyt
Society, London, 1921), vol. 2, pp. 4H0-587; Zurita. lin ales de limg6n
(Saragossa, 1610, and later editions); F. de Moncada, Fxjmlici6n de los
mtalanes y amgoneses mnlm turms y [.,rriegos (Madrid, 19H7); N. D'Olwcr,
l.'Pxjiansi£1 de Catalunya m Ia Meditnrrinia oriental, 3rd ed. (Barcelona,
1974); K. Scttlm, The Catalan Durhv ofAthens (Cambridge, 1\iA, 195R);
cf. .J.:-..:. Hillgarth, The jHoblem nf a Catalan Afeditemmean F.mjJire, 1229-
1324 (English Historical Review Supplement no. H, 1975), pp. 43-4.