THE MEDITERRAKEAN IN THE ACE OF JAMES II OF ARAGONbegan to look for other employers, which meant looking for
other wars. Byzantium, already an actor in the events sur-
rounding the Sicilian Vespers, was no longer directly threat-
ened by Angevin armies, though the Angevins retained their
patronage of their close kin the exiled Latin emperors, and
continued to exercise overlordship in important areas of
the western Peloponnese held by Frankish barons descended
from the commanders of the Fourth Crusade. On the east-
ern front, however, the Byzantine emperor, Michael IX, faced
an ever more intense threat from the Turks. The Catalan,
Aragonese, Sicilian and other motley mercenaries who
offered to help clear the Turks out of the border lands in
Asia Minor-whence they threatened Constantinople -were
under the command of a former Templar whose family, of
German origin, had come south in the service of Frederick
II: Roger de Flor, whose real name is assumed to have been
Roger Blum, was a charismatic commander who proved able
to bring discipline to one of the most feared fighting forces
in the Mediterranean, the almogiwers. These were men who
fought on foot, armed to deadly effect with javelins, a tradi-
tional element in the army of the Catalan-Aragonese rulers.
Accompanied by about four thousand almogavers and perhaps
two and a half thousand other men, Roger de Flor led his
men into Asia in 1304, so successfully that Michael IX felt
obliged to hail him as a hero, offering him in 1305 the title
Caesar, which conferred great ceremonial status, though
less real power. Yet Michael became so fearful of Roger
de Flor's ambition that he had him and many of his com-
panions murdered, whereupon, in revenge, what survived
of the Catalan Company (1,462 men) went on the rampage
in Thrace, to the west of Constantinople, destroying all that
fell into their hands, before moving west and south through
Thessaly into peninsular Greece.~''
It has been suggested that the line of march of the Cata-
lans can be traced in a line of impoverished, depopulated
villages that appear in the early fourteenth-century Byzantine
tax records, surrounded by better-off areas which the Catalan
Company evidently did not reach?' Once in southern Greece,
- A popular account is in A. Lowe, The Catalan Vmgeance (London,
1972); also Moncada, Expedici6n. - A. Laiou-Thomadakis, Peasant society in the late Byzantine Empire (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1977), pp. 240-1.