Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (46 page)

In 1299, to the fury of the Byzantines, Venice and Genoa signed a separate peace; the Venetians, however
, were still insisting on their
compensation and in the summer of 1302 raided Constantinople for the third time in seven years. Once again they made their way into the Golden Horn; once again they set fire to such Byzantine buildings as were in range; once again the Emperor, bereft of his navy, was unable to stop them. This time, however, when they had done all the damage they could, they occupied the island of Prinkipo - now Biiyiikada - in the Marmara. It was then being used as a vast refugee camp for Anatolian Greeks rendered homeless by the Turkish advance; and these refugees the Venetians now threatened to massacre or to carry off into slavery if the Emperor did not pay them what he owed. Powerless against such barefaced blackmail, Andronicus gave in - agreeing also to a ten-year treaty by which Venice was confirmed in all her privileges in Constantinople.

The year 1302 was, in many respects, an
annus horribilis
for Byzantium. In the early spring the Emperor's son Michael IX - he had for the past eight years been co-Emperor with his father - suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Turks near Magnesia
1
in Caria. Deserting what was left of his army (most of whom, it is only fair to state, had already slipped away themselves) he narrowly escaped with his life. Next there had been the Venetian raid; and then, only a few weeks later on 27 July, a Byzantine force - largely composed of Alan tribesmen who had fled to the Empire, as the Cumans had done before them, when the Mongols overran the Danube valley - encountered just outside the city of Nicomedia a Turkish army more than twice its size, commanded by a local Ghazi Emir named Othman. The battle that followed was not particularly bloody; most of the retreating Greeks and Alans managed to make their way back into Nicomedia. But Othman's way was now clear, his advance irresistible. He and his men surged southwestward along the southern shore of the Marmara, laying waste virtually the entire province of Bithynia, sweeping through the Troad and continuing until they reached the Aegean coast at Adramyttium. They did not waste time at the great fortified cities of Nicomedia, Nicaea, Brusa and Lopadium; these remained intact, and provided a refuge for much of the local peasantry whose lands had been devastated. Pachymeres paints a tragic -and nowadays all-too-familiar - picture of the scene:

1
Not Magnesia ad Sipylum, the modern town of Manisa near Izmir, but Magnesia on the Meander, so
me thirty kilometres cast of Kus
adasi. Apart from the ruins of the temple to Artemis, little remains today of what was once the seventh city of the Roman Province of Asia.

The road was covered with men and animals, running confusedly hither and thither, like ants. Not a soul was there, in that vast crowd, who did not mourn the loss of at least one of his parents. Here was a woman who wept for her husband, here a mother who grieved for her daughter, here a brother who sought his brother, everywhere men and women bereft of those who were dearest to them. It was pitiful to see among that teeming multitude some who had taken refuge within the walls, some still outside, others dragging behind them the miserable remnants of their lives and possessions. No one, however callous he might be, could listen without tears to the tales of the sickly children, the despairing women, the old and the crippled, strung out along the roads . . . The violence of these horrors can be ascribed to no other cause than the wrath of heaven, their cessation to its mercy.

Such is the first appearance in history of the name of Othman who, having begun his career at the end of the thirteenth century as ruler of one of the smallest of all the Ghazi Emirates of Anatolia, lived to establish that extraordinary dynasty which was to give its name to the Ottoman Empire.

And it was in that same year of 1302 that Andronicus Palaeologus received a communication from Roger de Flor, leader of the Grand Company of Catalans.

The Grand Company was, in essence, a band of professional Spanish mercenaries - most but by no means all of them from Catalonia - who had been recruited in 1281 by King Peter of Aragon for use in his campaigns in North Africa and Sicily. More recently they had been fighting for Peter's son Frederick against his brother, King James of Aragon,
1
and Charles II of Anjou; but on 31 August 1302 Frederick and Charles signed a peace treaty at Caltabellotta in Sicily, by which the island's independence was finally recognized; and the Catalans, unable to return to Spain - where King James understandably looked upon them as traitors - had to find new employment for their swords.

Roger de Flor was an adventurer cast in the Guiscard mould - one of those figures, distinctly larger than life, around whom legends tend all too easily to grow up. He is said to have been the son of Richard von der Blume, the outstandingly handsome German falconer of Frederick

1
When King Peter III died in
1285
he was succeeded in Aragon by his eldest son Alfonso and in Sicily by his second son James. On Alfonso's death in
1291
James also took over the throne of Aragon, but under pressure from the Pope agreed to cede Sicily to Charles II in exchange for Corsica and Sardinia; the Sicilians, however, refused outright to return to Angevin rule and invited a third brother, Frederick, to be their King.

II, who after the Emperor's death had given faithful service both to his son Manfred and his grandson Conradin. Richard, however, had been killed in 1268 at Tagliacozzo,
1
after which the victorious Charles of Anjou had not only had Conradin beheaded but had confiscated the possessions of all who had supported him; and Richard's widow had been left destitute in Palermo. Somehow she found a ship to take her and her two young sons to Brindisi, where - so the story goes - their hunger was such that she fainted outside a brothel. The girls took her in and fed her; and soon afterwards - perhaps as much out of gratitude as anything else - she joined the staff.

Of the elder of her sons we know nothing; the younger, though still only eight years old, managed to get himself taken on the strength of a Templar galley. When we next hear of him in 1291, after nearly twenty years' sailing the Mediterranean and fighting the Barbary pirates, he had latinized his name from Rutger von der Blume to Roger de Flor and was master of a ship of his own, named - appropriately enough - the
Falcon.
In that year, however, the city of Acre - the last bastion of the Crusader states of Outremer - faced its final siege by the Mamelukes.
2
Roger, as a Serving Brother of the Temple, at first fou
ght valiantl
y in its defence; then, when he saw the situation to be hopeless, he returned to his ship -to find himself surrounded by a crowd of panic-stricken women and children, all desperate to escape the unsavoury fate that awaited them were they to fall into infidel hands. To them Roger represented last-minute salvation; but with so many clamouring to be taken on board he could afford to be selective. He accepted only those who had managed to bring their gold and jewels with them; and even then he drove a hard bargain. The
Falcon
was quickly filled to capacity; by the time its captain had landed his passengers in Cyprus and set sail for his home port of Marseille he was a rich man.

Retribution, however, quickly followed. When news of his conduct reached the Grand Master of the Temple, Roger was expelled from the Order and denounced to Pope Boniface VIII as a thief and an apostate. Fleeing by land to Genoa, he persuaded the Doria family to fit him out with a new vessel, the
Olivetta,
and embarked on a career of out-and-out

1
See p.
225.

2
The Mamelukes were a dynasty of Sultans that reigned over Egypt and Syria from the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. Originally the Turkish slave bodyguard of the last Ayoubid Sultan in Cairo, they murdered him in
1250
and seized control; ten years later, their leader Baibars defeated the in
vading Mongols under Hulagu at
Ain Jalut near Nazareth, and extended their rule over Palestine and Syria.

piracy - which, in the space of the next few years, was to multiply his wealth many times over. Only then did he offer his services to Frederick of Sicily, who immediately appointed him admiral. Roger soon proved as courageous a fighter on land as at sea, and quickly acquired a loyal following. So the Catalan Company was born.

Such was the man who, towards the end of 1302, sent two envoys to Andronicus Palaeologus, offering his Company's services for nine months. Despite the obvious advantages of such an engagement to him personally - putting him as it did effectively out of reach of both the Templars and the Pope, neither of whom had forgotten his treachery - he demanded, as usual, a high price. His men were to be given four months' wages in advance, at double the rate normally payable by the Empire to its mercenaries; he himself was to be granted the rank of
megas dux -
at that time fifth in the whole hierarchy of Byzantium - and to receive the hand in marriage of the Emperor's niece Maria, the daughter of his sister Irene and her husband, John III Asen of Bulgaria. To his chief of staff, Corberan d'Alet, would go the title of Seneschal of the Empire.

Andronicus, knowing full well that he had his back to the wall, accepted these conditions without demur; and in September 1302 a fleet of thirty-nine galleys and transports sailed into the Golden Horn, carrying not only some two and a half thousand fighting men - more than half of them cavalry — but also (to the Emperor's mild consternation) their wives, mistresses and children: a total of some six and a half thousand. Shortly afterwards, with full Byzantine ceremony, Roger married his bride in Constantinople; his men, however, behaved with less decorum. Fighting broke out between them and the local Genoese; and on the wedding night itself - if the Spanish chroniclers are to be believed - Roger was obliged to leave the bed of his sixteen-year-old bride to restore order in the streets. An estimate from the same source of three thousand Genoese dead is clearly an exaggeration; but enough damage had been done for the Emperor to insist on the Catalans' early departure from the capital. A few days later the entire Company, together with its womenfolk, crossed the Marmara to Cyzicus, at that very moment under siege by the Turks.

Now at last the Catalans proved their worth. Thanks to them, by the spring of 1303 the Turkish army was everywhere in retreat. On the other hand, Andronicus began to realize that he had unleashed forces which he could not begin to control. Hitherto all imperial mercenaries had been under Greek command, subject to the orders of the Emperor or one of his generals. The Catalans, by contrast,
showed scant respect for their
Byzantine employers. They took their own decisions and followed their own battle-plans; when there was any plunder to be taken, they kept it for themselves. Moreover their overbearing arrogance caused constant disaffection among their allies, and it was not long before the five hundred Alan mercenaries who were theoretically fighting at their side discovered that every Catalan was receiving double pay. The result was mutiny, followed by mass desertions; and by the time the Catalans reached the headquarters of the co-Emperor Michael IX at Pegae they had aroused such hostility among the Greeks that he closed the gates against them. But for Pegae they cared little; their eyes were on Philadelphia.

Philadelphia - now the relat
ively insignificant town of Alas
ehir, but then an important frontier city and military base - was also under siege, not by the Ottoman Turks but by another tribe, the Karamans, who were at that time and in that area more powerful still. After their arrival the Catalans lost no time. Despite a forced march of some 120 miles, they attacked at dawn on the following day. The Turks fought hard, but their arrows had next to no effect on the mail-clad Europeans. By noon, according to the Spanish chroniclers, some eighteen thousand of them lay dead on the field; the remainder, including the Emir himself, had fled. For Roger de Flor this was the perfect opportunity to follow up his victory. By pursuing his enemy, driving deep into Karaman territory, he might have inflicted upon the Emir a still more decisive defeat and opened the way for the Byzantine reconquest of Anatolia; but he did nothing of the sort. Instead, he led his men back to the coast to make contact with his fleet - which, he was pleased to discover, had filled in the time by occupying Chios, Lemnos and Lesbos.

In less than two years the former pirate had become a member of the imperial family, had scored decisive victories over both the Ottoman and the Karaman Turks and had secured much of south-western Asia Minor. After such triumphs there was little thought in his mind - if indeed there ever had been - of fighting selflessly for Byzantium. He was of course delighted to go on taking the Emperor's money; but the experience of the past few months had awoken new hopes - hopes of an independent Kingdom of his own in Anatolia where the country was fertile, the climate as benign as anywhere on earth, the only enemies weak and disunited. Henceforth, wherever he went, he exerted absolute authority — even going so far as to punish (if necessary by death) any Byzantines, civil, military or monastic, who offended him.

*

At the beginning of 1304 Roger de Flor embarked on an ambitious expedition to the East. Why he did so is not altogether clear, since he must have known full well that he would thus be allowing both the Ottomans and the Karamans to regroup and rearm as best they might; but he and his Company set out in the early spring, and by the middle of August they had reached the 'Iron Gates' of the Taurus. A pass so narrow that the pack-mules had to be unloaded before they could be taken through it in single file, there could have been no more perfect place for an ambush; and Roger wisely decided to send out mounted scouts to reconnoitre. It was as well for him that he did, for there indeed a Turkish army lay waiting for him. Another desperate battle followed; once again the Catalans carried all before them. There, however, they halted. Several of Roger's junior commanders urged a further advance, across the Euphrates into Syria; but their leader would have none of it and gave the order to return.