THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEA!'\ KINGDOMS 1200-1!100had succeeded in welding together the county of Piedmont,
and other north Italian possessions, into a reasonably coher-
ent domain.
As a Christian king, Charles II was also dedicated to the
cause of the crusade, including the difficult question of the
Frankish lands in Greece, over which he sought to establish
his authority. The loss of Acre in 1291 proved the impotence
of the Angevins in the East; and in Greece it was not the
Angevins but a group of mainly Catalan freebooters who were
most successful in asserting their authority at the start of the
fourteenth century. Though the Catalan Company was not
an agent of the house of Barcelona, the Duchy of Athens
which it established eventually accepted the overlordship of
the Aragonese king of Sicily, and southern Greece became
the theatre of proxy wars between the supporters of the Sicil-
ian Aragonese and the Neapolitan Angevins. On the other
hand, the Duchy of Athens did not provide the Catalans with
important trading opportunities, and north Mrica remained
the prime target of the merchants of Barcelona and Majorca
who, particularly in the years after the peace of Caltabellotta,
were able to resume peaceful trading in the western Medi-
terranean. Thus continuing political tensions did not cancel
out the commercial dividends of peace.