The Catalan Company 1302 AD – 1388 AD

Charles of Anjou with a French army invaded Italy and conquered the Kingdom of Sicily in 1266, losing the island of Sicily in the War of the Sicilian Vespers from 1282, but retaining the Kingdom of Naples for his heirs. 

In 1282 the Sicilians revolted against Charles, massacred his French supporters and invited Pere III of Aragon to rule them. Bringing a force of Aragonese and Catalans, he fought the War of the Sicilian Vespers. Peace in 1301 left Sicily in Aragonese hands, Naples in Angevin hands and a dangerous surplus of Catalans, soon transferred to Byzantine service as the notorious Catalan Grand Company.

The Catalan Grand Company from its departure from Sicily until the fall of the state it founded in Greece to the Florentines. During this time it fought for both Byzantines and Romanian Franks, was short-changed by both, took a horrid revenge on both, and beat every Turkish, Byzantine and Frankish army that got in its way. Its Alan allies were allied only because hired by the Byzantines to assist the Grand Company. The relations between the two ranged from veiled hostility to naked hostility. After the Byzantine assassination of its great leader Roger de Flor, the company was largely commanded by committee, often through a figurehead. It is said to have been highly disciplined, although displaying extremely rapacious behaviour towards even friendly civilians. Despite having left Aragonese service under a cloud after backing the wrong heir, the Company continued to fight under the banner of Aragon [yellow with horizontal red stripes].

The Catalan companies in the East. – Andronicus could not master the situation without foreign aid, and he got such aid from the Catalan mercenary bands, the so-called “Catalan companies,” or “almughavars.” Mercenary bands of various nationalities, under the name of “companies,” which lived only for war and would fight for pay for anyone against anyone, were very well known in the latter half of the Middle Ages. “The Catalan companies,” which consisted not only of Catalans, but also of the inhabitants of Aragon, Navarre, the island of Majorca, and other places, fought as mercenaries on the side of Peter of Aragon during the war which burst out after the Sicilian Vespers. When at the very beginning of the fourteenth century a peace was concluded between Sicily and Naples, the Catalans were out of work. Such allies, accustomed to war, pillage, and violence, became in time of peace dangerous to those who had invited them, and who now tried to get rid of them. Moreover, the companies themselves, finding no satisfaction in peaceful living conditions, sought new opportunities for activity. The Catalans chose for leader Roger de Flor, a German by origin, whose father’s surname, Blum (i.e. a flower), was translated into Catalan as “Flor.” 

With the consent of his companions Roger, who spoke Greek fluently, offered his services to Andronicus II for his struggle with the Seljuq and Ottoman Turks and extorted from the hard pressed Emperor unheard-of conditions: the insolent adventurer demanded the consent of Andronicus to his marriage with the Emperor’s niece, the granting of the title of megadukas (admiral), and a large sum of money for his company. Andronicus was compelled to yield, and the Catalan companies took ship and sailed for Constantinople.

The participation of the Catalans in the destinies of Byzantium is narrated in detail both in the Catalan sources and in the Greek. But while a participant of the expedition, the Catalan chronicler Muntaner described Roger and his companions as courageous and noble fighters for a right cause, a credit to their country, Greek historians consider the Catalans pillagers and insolent ruffians, and one of them exclaimed: “Would that Constantinople had never seen the Latin Roger!” Historians of the nineteenth century devoted much attention to the Catalan expedition. A Spanish investigator of the problem compared their deeds with those of the famous Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth century, Cortez and Pizarro; he does not know “what other people may plume themselves on such a historical event as our glorious expedition to the East,” and he considered the expedition an eternal testimony to the glory of the Spanish race. 

The German historian Hopf declared that “the Catalan expedition is the most attractive episode in the history of the Empire of the Palaeologi,” especially on account of its dramatic interest. Finlay wrote that the Catalans “guided by a sovereign like Leo III or like Basil II, might have conquered the Seljuq Turks, strangled the Ottoman power in its cradle, and carried the double-headed eagle of Byzantium victorious to the foot of Mount Taurus and to the banks of the Danube.” 

Elsewhere the same historian remarked: “The expedition of the Catalans in the East is a wonderful instance of the success which sometimes attends a career of rapacity and crime, in opposition to all the ordinary maxims of human prudence.” The Spanish archives still afford much new information on this expedition.

At the very beginning of the fourteenth century Roger de Flor with his company arrived in Constantinople. There were almost ten thousand members of the expedition; but this number included wives, mistresses, and children. The marriage of Roger to the Emperor’s niece was celebrated at Constantinople with great pomp. After some serious conflicts in the capital between the Catalans and Genoese, who, jealous for their exceptional privileges in the Empire, felt the newcomers their rivals, the company was finally transported into Asia Minor, where the Turks were besieging the large city of Philadelphia, east of Smyrna. Supported by a band of imperial troops the small Hispano-Byzantine army, under Roger de Flor, freed Philadelphia from the Turkish siege. The victory of the western mercenaries was enthusiastically received in the capital; some men thought that the Turkish danger to the Empire was over forever. 

The first success was followed by others against the Turks in Asia Minor. But the unbearable extortions and arbitrary cruelties of the Catalans towards the local population, on one hand, and the clearly expressed intention of Roger to establish in Asia Minor a principality of his own, though under the Emperor’s suzerainty, on the other, strained the relations between the mercenaries, the people of Asia Minor, and the government of Constantinople. The Emperor recalled Roger to Europe, and the latter with his company crossed the Hellespont and occupied first an important fortress on the straits of Gallipoli, and then the whole peninsula of Gallipoli. The new negotiations between Roger and the Emperor ended in Roger’s obtaining the title next to the Emperor’s, that of Caesar, never till then borne by a foreigner. Before marching again to Asia Minor the new Caesar went with a small band to Hadrianople, where the eldest son of Andronicus, the co-emperor Michael IX, resided. On Michael’s instigation, Roger and his companions were slain during a festival. When these tidings spread among the population of the Empire, the Catalans in the capital and other cities were also murdered. 

The Catalans, who were concentrated at Gallipoli, inflamed and thirsty for revenge, broke their obligations as allies of the Empire and set out to the West, ravaging with fire and sword the regions through which they passed. Thrace and Macedonia were terribly devastated. Not even monasteries on Mount Athos were spared. An eyewitness, a pupil of Daniel, igumen (abbot) of the Serbian monastery of Chilandarion, on Mount Athos, wrote: “It was horror to see then the desolation of the Holy Mountain by the hands of enemies.” The Catalans also burned the Russian monastery of St. Panteleemon, on Mount Athos, but their assault on Thessalonica failed. In retaliation for the Catalan devastations Andronicus commanded the merchandise of some Catalan vessels in the Byzantine waters seized and the merchants themselves arrested.

After having stayed some time in Thessaly, the Catalans marched to the south, through the famous pass of Thermopylae, into middle Greece to the territory of the Duchy of Athens and Thebes, which had been founded after the Fourth Crusade and was under French control. In the spring of 1311 there took place a battle in Boeotia, at the river of the Cephisus, near the Lake of Copais (near the modern village of Skripù). The Catalans won a decisive victory over the French troops. Putting an end to the flourishing French duchy of Athens and Thebes, they established there Catalan control which lasted for eighty years. The church of the Holy Virgin, the ancient Parthenon on the Acropolis, passed into the hands of the Catalan clergy, who were impressed by its sublimity and riches. In the second half of the fourteenth century a Catalan duke of Athens called the Acropolis “the most precious jewel that exists in the world, and such as all the kings of Christendom together would imitate in vain.”

The Athenian Duchy of the Catalans established by mere accident in the fourteenth century and organized upon Catalan or Sicilian models, has generally been considered a harsh, oppressive, and destructive government, which at Athens and in Greece in general has left very few material traces of its domination. On the Acropolis, for instance, the Catalans carried out some changes, especially in the disposition of the fortifications, but no traces of them remain. But in Greek popular tradition and in the Greek tongue there still linger reminiscences of the cruelty and injustice of the Spanish invaders. Even today, in some regions of Greece, for example, in the island of Euboea, a man in condemnation of illegal or unjust action may say: “Not even the Catalans would have done that.” In Acarnania to the present day the word “Catalan” is the synonym for “savage, robber, criminal.” At Athens the word “Catalan” is considered an insult. In some cities of the Peloponnesus, when one wishes to say that a woman possesses a bad character, one says, “She must be a Catalan woman.”

But recently much new material, especially in the Archives of Barcelona (the archives de la Corona d’Aragó), has come to light which shows that the conception of former historians on this subject was biased. The years of the Catalan domination in middle Greece in the fourteenth century were not only troubled and destructive; they were productive. The Acropolis, which was called in Catalan Castell de Cetines, was fortified; for the first time since the closing of the Athenian school by Justinian the Great, a university was established at Athens. 

Catalan fortifications were also erected in middle and northern Greece. A modern Catalan historian, the best recent authority on the Catalan problem in Middle Greece, A. Rubió y Lluch, declared, “The discovery of a Catalan Greece is, in our opinion, one of the most unexpected surprises the modern investigators have had in the history of medieval political life.” Of course, the full story of the Catalan dominion in Greece remains to be learned; but we must realize that the older works and former opinions on this problem of many very eminent scholars must be rectified, and that a new history of the Catalan dominion in Greece must be told on the basis of new material.