These Gascon and Navarrese mercenaries, some of them the same as had fought for Charles the Bad of Navarre against the king of France until 1366, came to Greece under Charles’ brother Louis d’Evreux, who had a claim to the ‘kingdom’ of Albania and the city of Durazzo through marriage. They probably started arriving in Albania soon after the country had fallen to Charles Thopia in 1368 (see page 54), but the principal elements were only assembled in 1375-76, during which period alone 1,000 took ship, Charles the Bad himself supplying 100 men-at-arms. The ‘Navarrese Company’ was therefore actually composed of many smaller companies, as was usually the case with such mercenary bodies (for the organisation of which see volume 1, pages 18-20). Two years after Louis’ death in 1376 this large company broke up, and individual elements were employed for their own ends by the other Frankish powers of Greece. Principal captains of the Navarrese from this time on were Jean de Urtubia Esquire and Sir Mahiot de Coquerel (whose personal units respectively comprised 50 and 30 men-at-arms in 1375, and 100 and 50 in 1378). The largest part of them, under de Coquerel, Pierre Bordo de Saint Superan and Berard de Varvassa, was employed by Jacques de Baux, claimant to the title of prince of Achaea, and overran the principality in his name (but really for themselves). Pierre Bordo (Pierre ‘the Bastard’) even became Vicar of Achaea 1386-91, and then prince 1396-1402, after whom there was only one more prince of Achaea (Centurione II Zaccaria) before the principality fell to the despots of the Morea in 1430.
In 1379 the rest of the company (made up of Navarrese, Gascons and Italians in roughly equal numbers, whereas de Coquerel’s band had been chiefly Gascons) invaded the Catalan duchy of Athens — specifically Boeotia and Attica — under Urtubia, where they were reinforced by disaffected Catalans and Greeks and even some Hospitallers. Urtubia captured Thebes in 1379 and Livadia in 1381, thus unintentionally paving the way for the conquest of the duchy between 1385 and 1388 by Nerio Acciajuoli, the Florentine lord of Corinth who in 1384/5 could muster 70 lances and 800 Albanian cavalry, plus ‘many foot’. (The Navarrese, now his enemies, could by this time muster ‘up to 1,300 horse’.) Nerio died in 1394 and by the terms of his will control (‘protection’) of the duchy was effectively assigned to the Republic of Venice, though the true heir was his daughter, married to Carlo Tocco, count of Cephalonia and Leucadia. In 1395 the Venetians placed a garrison of 2 officers and 20 archers or crossbowmen in the castle of the Acropolis (the Castel de Cetines, or Castrum Athenarum, as it was known to the Franks), and in 1402 the raising of a force of 250-350 cavalry, plus other archers and infantry, was authorised by Venice. In fact the Venetian bailli of Negroponte led as many as 6,000 men against Nerio’s son Antonio, so Chalkokondyles tells us, but he defeated them with just two small units of 300 men in an ambush in a mountain pass and, returning to his siege of Athens, captured the city at the very beginning of 1403.
Thereafter the duchy remained in Florentine hands until its capture in 1456 by the Ottoman Turks (to whom Nerio had paid tribute since 1394). In 1460 Franco Acciajuoli, the last Duke of Athens, was obliged to provide troops for the Ottomans against the count of Cephalonia and seemingly against the despotate of the Morea too, and then, towards the end of the year, he was murdered on the orders of Sultan Mehmed II.
After 1394 the Navarrese, like their predecessors, employed Turkish auxiliaries in considerable numbers. The Morea
The origins of the Byzantine despotate of Mistra are to be found in the defeat of the despotate of Epiros’ Frankish allies at the Battle of Kastoria (1259) by Michael Palaeologus of Nicaea, as a result of which Epiros was reduced to its former size and to Nicaean suzerainty. Terms for the release of prisoners taken in the battle led, in 1261, to the surrender to the central Byzantine government of the important Frankish fortresses of Mistra, Monemvasia and Maina, which thereafter were to provide the cornerstones of the Byzantine reconquest of the Morea. Initially the province was ruled by military governors appointed from Constantinople, who vigorously enlarged its territories, especially under Andronikos Palaeologus Asen (c. 1315-21), and many lesser Frankish lords became Greek subjects, holding important military posts and fighting in the despotate’s armies. In 1349 the Morea effectively became a semi-autonomous despotate under Emperor John VI Cantacuzene’s son Manuel, who reigned there until 1380.
A chronicle of 1320-21 mentions the Moreote army as comprising 36,000 men, which though not impossible is certainly unlikely. What forces there were probably disappeared before the establishment of the new dynasty anyway; certainly Manuel started out in Mistra with just a bodyguard force of 300 cavalry, plus a small number of Albanian mercenaries (here mentioned for the first time) hired from the Albanian despotate of Acarnania. His successor Theodore I let about 10,000 Albanians settle in ‘numerous’ military colonies in the Pelopponese in the 1390s, probably on the same terms as those the Venetians allowed to settle in Argos in 1397, i. e. probably in exchange for the military service of the head of each household. It was these Albanians who, to quote Peter Topping, ‘enabled the Byzantines to complete the absorption of the Latin state [of Achaea] by 1430.’ They seem to have fought in small units under their own chiefs (bands of 100 or 200 are mentioned in the campaign against Centurione II Zaccaria of Achaea in 1417). Later, in 1453, as many as 30,0009 Albanians revolted under Peter Boua the Lame, a figure which gives some indication of their importance in the Moreote army. Venetian documents make it clear that their speciality was watching and guarding passes against Ottoman inroads.
In addition to Albanians, Turkish auxiliaries were also, inevitably, to be found in Moreote armies. In 1385 Theodore I is recorded with ‘at least 200 horse and many foot and even Turks’, and more were employed for his attack on Corinth in 1395. Sphrantzes reports that Despot Demetrios of Mesembria ravaged the suburbs of Constantinople in 1442 with an army that was ‘supported by Turkish troops’, and that the Albanian revolt of 1453 was crushed with the support of Turahan Bey.
As the territory of the despotate increased, so its army grew. Niccolo da Martoni, who visited Greece in 1394-95, says that at the siege of Corinth in the latter year Theodore had ‘a great army’ of 20,000 men, of whom 3,000 cavalry were captured by the 40,000 Turkish auxiliaries of Carlo I Tocco, count of Cephalonia. In 1417 the joint-despots John (later Emperor John VIII) and Theodore II marched against Centurione with
10.000 cavalry and 5,000 infantry. One somewhat over-imaginative chronicler wrote in 1437 that the Pelopponese comprised 30 large towns, 200 forts and 400 villages, governed by the Emperor John’s three brothers (Theodore II, 1428-43; Thomas, 1428-60; and Constantine [XI], 1423-48), who he claims could field half a million cavalry, a figure which at least confirms the contemporary view that the Moreote army could indeed field a considerable number of men. Jean Torzelo wrote in 1439 that ‘the seignory of the Morea’ could field 15,000 men, while Mihailovic records the despot Demetrios having 6,000 cavalry with him in 1458. The Byzantine (i. e. non-Albanian) elements of these armies were raised by the granting of fiefs (pronoiai) in exchange for military service as in other parts of the Empire, and were probably still organised in allaghia (‘3,000’ men according to the ‘Chronicle of the Morea’, judging from other evidence an exaggeration for 300; units of 300 men are mentioned twice in 1445, for instance, and we have already seen that Manuel’s troop in 1349 numbered 300).
However, despite its impressive size and its undeniable success in siege operations, the Moreote army was unimpressive on the battlefield and is usually recorded fleeing in rout, seemingly through inadequate training leading to poor morale. Despot Thomas’ army in 1459, for instance, was drawn up in such a close and inflexible array that the Ottoman commander facing him — recognising the incompetence of the Byzantine formation for what it was — simply launched an attack against one of its flanks, which threw the entire army into utter confusion and routed it, the rest being so crowded together as to be unable to come to the aid of the threatened flank. Only 200 men remained in the field with the despot.
Some Frankish soldiers were still to be found in Moreote armies even in the last decades of the despotate’s existence: in 1445, for instance, 300 Burgundians were sent to assist Despot Constantine, while in 1459 200 Italian mercenaries provided by Pope Pius II, and another 100 provided by the Duchess of Milan, accompanied Despot Thomas’ forces in an attack on Patras and Kalavryta.
The despotate was finally overrun by the Turks in 1460. However, in 1463 Venice managed to briefly recapture much of the Morea and several Aegean islands from the Ottomans, but her army, comprised of
5.000 infantry and 1,500 men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen in 1463, subsequently reinforced by nearly
4.000 more men under the condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta, was decisively defeated in the spring of 1464. Malatesta himself was recalled at the beginning of 1466, and Venetian forces in the Morea were thereafter steadily reduced. The republic’s last Moreote possessions were Modon and Coron (finally lost in 1500), and Nauplia and Monemvasia, which were ceded to the Ottoman Empire as late as 1540.
World History
