If you passed by the first installment, you haven’t missed much. It’s a history about some medieval mercenaries told to illustrate what greatness and what depths of depravity free men can accomplish if they are so inclined. It’s a story of a Free Company – a private war machine, a pirate corporation. Their victories showed what is possible for a group of free men and women to accomplish, while their legendary brutality showed a different side of unfettered humanity. Their attempts to govern themselves were those of any revolutionary regime – direct popular rule mixed with the tyranny of the strong.
This installment begins in 1302, at the moment Roger de Flor, vice admiral of the transitory Kingdom of Trinacria, fugitive ex-Templar and habitual pirate, has sold the services of several thousand mercenaries, people of ill repute from throughout Western Europe who had grown hard fighting in the chaos of medieval Italy, to the Byzantine Emperor.
Roger de Flor got a good deal from the Byzantine Emperor, Andronicus II Palealogus, who occupied a shaky throne. His capital Constantinople had only recently been liberated from a French-Venetian occupation dating from when the Fourth Crusade sacked it instead of Jerusalem in a terrible map reading mishap, taking the accumulated wealth of the Empire with them. Despite the recent liberation, everything was already fully in hock to the Genoese. But the Emperor’s most pressing problem was that his provinces in Turkey had been overrun by the Turks, a development that in retrospect appears inevitable.
The invading Turkish bands were also governed on the Free Company model, though they would later give rise to a highly developed state, the Ottoman Empire. They were subdivided into many petty kingdoms and war bands, which rose and fell in direct correlation with the military talents, luck and longevity of their commanders. The fighting units were composed of bands of nomads from Central Asia, mixed with Armenian and Greek volunteers and conscripts, who had turned against their own former country and religion. They preferred to pillage the wealth of the rich Roman countryside rather than to working to maintain it in harsh servitude to the distant elites, who gave them no protection but charged them dearly for the privilege to live in the decrepit Empire. The Turks justified their looting by a fervent jihadist ideology – the leaders styled themselves "ghazis" – holy Islamic warriors living solely to fight the infidel enemies. However, they had no qualms in allying with, or absorbing without conversion, valuable Christian fighting units. Both sides relied on enslaved, converted and brainwashed children of their enemies for a source of manpower in the perpetual war. The Byzantines called the Christianized Turkish soldiers Turcopoles, and they were one of the last effective fighting forces in the country. The Turks would go on to evolve this system further until it produced the janissaries, the finest soldiers in Europe of the early modern age.
The bulk of the underpaid Byzantine fleet declared itself Turk and took to raiding the coastal areas it had been assigned to protect. Turkish kingdoms were forming on the other side of the narrow straits separating Europe from Asia, within sight of Constantinople itself. Great ancient walled cities which would not surrender to the Turks, and which could not be stormed by their primitive armies, remained under siege for decades, desperately wafting for relief from the beleaguered capital. Rather than rectifying any of the acute social problems that were literally driving people to fight on the side of invaders against their own government, Andronicus, in typically Byzantine fashion, decided to inject several new barbarian armies, who would, hopefully, chase out the other barbarians and then keep each other in check.
Roger was to lead one of the new Imperial armies, rewarded with the title of Mega Dux, a title which greatly flattered his parvenu pride and the hand of the Emperor’s nice, the Princess of Bulgaria, who was both lovely and wise. The Emperor even agreed to name another Catalan to be Admiral of the Byzantine fleet, to guarantee Roger’s Company open communications with Europe, allowing reinforcements to come in and as a potential escape route. Amid great fanfare the Catalan Company, as it was becoming known, departed Sicily and sailed for Constantinople, with six months’ wages paid ahead. One can only marvel at the mentality which was possessed by the people of this age. With their wives and children, thousands sailed for a completely unknown land, to face a multitude of enemies and uncertain allies, trusting in their own strength and courage to overawe all opposition.
Their arrival alarmed those who regarded themselves as the true masters of Byzantium – the Genoese, who had a stranglehold monopoly on commerce, and enjoyed immunity from both the local justice and the taxes, and sought total control over the Black Sea route of the Silk Road. They were not pleased to see another rapacious group of Europeans, particularly subjects of Aragon, an emerging and highly ambitious maritime power, already challenging Genoa’s hold on the Western Mediterranean, now getting a foothold in Constantinople. Roger was aware of the true balance of power, having dealt with the Genoese extensively during his previous career as a Templar captain. Ironically, after Roger had been forced to flee from the Templar Order over his lifelong tendency for massive corruption, it was to Genoa that he went to raise emergency funds. His previous connections notwithstanding, Roger intended to supplant the Genoese and he would stop at nothing to achieve his aims. On the even of Roger’s nuptials with his Princess, a Genoese merchant insulted a Catalan soldier. The Catalans ran for their weapons, and within an hour, 3,000 Genoese lay dead in the streets and Pera, the Genoese stronghold found itself besieged. Roger was sending a message to the former owners of the Empire that he was here to make a claim. Finally the Emperor, after watching for a while with great pleasure as the two hated barbarian groups slaughtered each other, persuaded Roger to call off his troops.
With the Genoese temporarily cowed, the army then sailed to the Asian shore and began a savage campaign against the Turks. The strength of the Catalan Company was its Almogaver light infantry, who moved so quickly and charged so fiercely that they easily overthrew much larger bodies of the enemy, overtaking even cavalry formations and annihilating the infantry. The Turks were heavily laden with the booty of many years’ pillage of the Byzantine hinterlands, and were traveling with their wives and children, who slowed down the movement of the armies, preventing escape. The Catalans killed all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery. The calculated terror campaign had its effect, and within two years no organized Turkish formations dared to challenge the Catalan Company, preferring to wait out the strange scourge.
The Catalan Company grew rich with loot of its victories, but this did not prevent Roger’s regular and very insistent demands for wages to be timely paid. The Emperor was deeply broke, several times over, and felt that the Company should be content with its winnings scoured from the battlefield that used to be the Empire’s tax base. When forced to, he paid the Company in devalued currency. Roger began to realize that one could not get blood from a stone and the true extent of the Byzantines’ weakness. He proposed a new deal – the Company would keep the territory it liberated as an autonomous fief under formal Byzantine suzerainty, acting as a buffer state keeping the Turks from Constantinople. The idea of creating another Catholic principality in the heart of a deeply wounded Orthodoxy just a generation after a great patriotic struggle led by Emperor Andronicus’ great father, Michael, had chased out the Crusaders, was not a popular one in the Empire.
But Andronicus was not his father, and he agreed to let the Catalans take half his kingdom to save the other half. Roger now became Caesar, handing the Mega Dux title to another Company commander, the Aragonese nobleman Berenguer de Entenza, who will figure more in the later chapters, and there was much rejoicing. However, Andronicus did not rule the Empire alone – he had made his son Michael co-emperor, and so Roger decided to pay the prince a visit as well to get his sign off. With a thousand men, he marched to Michael’s stronghold at Adrionople, in modern Bulgaria, leaving the rest of the Company resting on its laurels on the peninsula of Gallipoli near the Dardanelles straits, on the European side of the great connecting waterways between the Mediterranean and the Black Seas.
Unfortunately for Roger, the prince Michael decided to follow the example of his legendary grandfather and not that of his disreputable father. As Roger sat at dinner with the prince and his court, the Alan mercenaries who had also been imported to fight the Turks and keep the Catalans in check, rushed in and dispatched him onto the pages of history. In an instant, this crafty and ambitious man, who had roamed throughout the Mediterranean looking for his fortune, found it in a gloomy room of an ancient palace in an obscure corner of Europe. With this act, the status of the Catalan Company changed from the celebrated and spoiled mercenaries of the Empire, the bulwark of Christendom against the infidel Turk, into hunted fugitives, cut off from their native lands.
Prior to the murder, the prince had dispatched orders throughout the Empire to slaughter the Catalans without mercy like rabid dogs wherever they were found. Without warning, their erstwhile hosts fell upon the mercenaries, and thousands perished as the Greek population finally got to exact their revenge of those who had been oppressing them for generations. It did not matter that these particular Western barbarians spoke Catalan instead of French. Their Catholic heresy and their irrepressible rapacity identified them to the Greeks as the hated Franks who only a century earlier had sacked Constantinople and delivered the mortal blow from which the Byzantine homeland was now slowly dying. Only those who were within the fortifications of Gallipoli with the main body of the Company survived.
The Company was now leaderless and besieged in its last stronghold. Less than two thousand fighting men remained, along with thousands of women and children associated with the Company, who were now widowed or orphaned by the great Greek betrayal. However, although the Catalan admiral on whom Roger had counted to secure their escape route had also been killed in the general slaughter, the Company did have at its disposal several ships, which could begin the evacuation of the Company immediately and would be able to eventually bring back more ships from the distant Catalan bases in Sicily and Spain.
Absent a leader, it was now up to all of the members of the Company, who had a stake in the governance as they did in the sharing of the loot, to decide on the plan of action. For the exciting developments, tune in next time. Or Google the damn thing, what do I care, nobody’s paying me.