traded (sold mainly to Egypt) on the Venetian-ruled island of Crete; thereafter, almost all victims of the slavery business were Greeks. — Zachariadou 1983. The Mediterranean as a Christian lake: Western merchants and shippers by the end of the crusading period dominated maritime trade in the eastern
Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The Muslims, if not the Greeks, “had lost the shipbuilding art” (to quote Ibn Khaldun). It was the Genoese who organised the slave trade from the Crimea to Mamluk Egypt, the trade in timber from Asia Minor to Egypt, and the trade in Cypriot textiles in Turkey and Syria (Day in Laiou ed. 2002: 813).
1304-06:
Sardis, inland from the old Nicaean seat of Nyphaeum, 1304-06:
“The acropolis furnished the last piece of evidence for the Byzantine period in the narrative of a Turkish attack of 1304. The Turkomans [warrior pastoralists] . . . proposed to the Sardians that they allow them to share the fortress. The locals refused and resisted a siege, but were finally forced to agree [in 1306] when they ran short of water and suffered from not being able to till their fields. In this account, the nature of the acropolis settlement becomes clear. Although some of its inhabitants may have been soldiers only, many were farmers, who worked land in the plain below, leaving the fortress every day to attend to agriculture, [a system] attested in the entire Byzantine record only here”. —Foss and Scott, 2002, in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou; emphasis added.
1304-08:
Rebellions by mercenary Turks and Catalans bring the ‘Greek’ (Rhomaioi) state to near collapse. Profiting from the chaos, the Ottomans and other Turks seize most of west-central Asia Minor.
As noted, the Catalans comprised 1,500 cavalry and more than 5,000 or more infantry: total up to say 7,800 men by 1304. They outnumbered Andronicus’s own field forces of perhaps 4,000 men; and the Romaniyan navy was non- existent (Treadgold 1997: 819). See 1305, 1307.
In accounts of the Catalan Company's actions, it is invariably the less well paid infantrymen, the Almughavars, who are given credit for carrying the tide of battle. As we noted earlier, they fought with a short spear that could be thrown, several javelins, and a large dagger or short sword, but (usually) no shield. How they could defeat the horse-archers of the enemy Turks is quite obscure. – Perhaps by staying beyond the (short) range of the cavalry bow, or positioning themselves on broken ground, and choosing the right moment for a foot sprint, hurling their javelins.
After initially routing the Turks in western Asia Minor, the Grand Company rebelled. As noted, they fought their way from the isolated inland Byzantine- governed town of Philadelphia and across the Turkish-dominated hinterlands in 1304 before returning to winter in Gallipoli. Then, with various Turkish allies, they will ravage through Gallipoli and Thrace (1304-06) and south to
Thessalonica (1308).
Not only was much harm done to the empire's territory in Europe, this also allowed the Turks to advance further in Asia Minor (as noted: to
Ephesus, on the coastal plain of SW Asia Minor, 1304) and the Genoese were able to seize more Aegean islands. Seeing Andronicus's European lands devastated, and the Turks in control of practically the whole of the emperor’s former Asian lands, many observers now began to believe that the Byzantine state was
doomed. 1304-29:
Genoese rule the islands of Samos and Icarus, in the south-east Aegean off Ephesus. See 1329: Byzantine recovery of Phocaea and the islands of Lesbos and Chios.
c.1305:
Soon after 1300, Andronicus II introduced the so-called silver basilicon or “imperial” coin, modelled on the Venetian silver ducat (coin “of the doge”: ducal coin) and which was of a comparably high purity. Of pure silver, it was made flat and not concave, and at 1/12 of the hyperpyron, it corresponded to the old miliaresion and thus fitted easily into the system of account. —Grierson, ‘Byzantine Coinage’: www.doaks.org/byzcoins.pdf.
1305:
1. The increased taxes levied to pay the Catalans provoked a revolt in Bithynia (Bartusis p.79).
emperor Michael Palaeologus, aged 28, not daring to attack the fierce and now augmented bands of Catalan adventurers in the Gallipoli peninsula, invited their leader Roger to Adrianople. There he contrived the assassination of the Catalan leader and the massacre of a part of his Catalan cavalry. Roger’s death would be avenged by his men in a fierce and prolonged war against the Greeks. —
Wikipedia 2009, ‘Roger de Flor’.
2b. Thrace: Michael Palaeologus eventually marched against the main Catalan force with a substantial army (up to perhaps 10,000 men; but probably fewer), but on 10 July 1305 he was defeated at Apros, which is modern Kermeyan, to the north of the Gallipoli peninsula (some authors date this battle to 1307). See next. 3. Andronicus seeks and receives a promise of a marriage alliance with the Mongol ruler of Persia, the Il-Khan Ôljaitü or Uljaytu who promises to send troops to rescue Nicaea from Osman Gazi; but the deal fell through (Freely 2008: 108).
The Battle of Apros, 1305 The imperials:
The Catalan memoirist Ramon Muntaner writes of ‘14,000 horse’ and ‘30,000 foot’ in the imperial-Greek army; but these numbers are not credible. In his Aragon, Chaytor says Michael probably led ‘10,000’ men, but even that seems too many.
There were five Byzantine battalions or syntaxeis at the battle of Apros,
differentiated by ethnicity: [unit 1] the Alans and [2] Tourkopouloi or Turcopoles, converted Christian Turks with bow and shield, in the van, followed by the [3] Macedonians, the Anatolians [cavalry], the Vlach infantry and [battalion 4] Byzantine farmer-militiamen or light infantry called the Thelematarioi;* they served as a rear-guard along with [unit 5] the ‘imperial taxis’, presumably a division of imperial guardsmen, probably including Varangians (cf LBA pp 43, 273).
If we guess that each syntaxis contained 2,000 men, then we might have an army of 10,000. But knowing how expensive soldiers were, and how little money the empire had, it would be more likely that the actual figures were units of 1,000 making up a total of 5,000 men.
(*) The Thelematarioi were ethnic Greeks living in the rural hinterland adjoining Constantinople on the west. The name meant "voluntaries" or ‘waverers’, derived from a propensity (i.e. before 1261) to shift allegiance at will to either the Greek or Latin side (Geanakoplos 1959: 95).
The infantry formed up in the centre, with cavalry on either wing and a small reserve or rearguard. Michael’s cousin Theodore commanded the Turcopoles and
Alans on the left. The ‘Grand Heteriarch’ or head of the palace guard commanded the Thracians, Macedonians and Vlachs on the right. Michael himself took
command of the reserve or short second line (Lowe 1972: 77; also Bartusis, LBA: The Late Byzantine Army, 1992: 256).
The Catalans:
The Catalans under Bernat de Rocafort numbered about 3,000 men , or 2,500 according to Chaytor, i.e. not their full strength.
The battle:
The Catalans defeated the larger Romaniyan army at Apros (1305), and later the Romanian Franks of the Duchy of Athens at Kephissos (1311; near Thebes) in pitched battles. They did so, in part, because the Catalans were ‘leaner and meaner’ than their "soft" opponents. That is, they were battle-hardened and self- confident. Or so propose David Kuijt and Chris Brantley, ‘Catalans’ at
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~kuijt/dba165/dba165.html).
The defeat at Apros was due in part to Paleologus’s Alans, who, fearful of
Catalan wrath at the loss of their leader de Flor, deserted the Imperial army in the field.
After the battle:
Michael withdrew behind the walls of the fortress-town of Didymoteichon. The Catalans for their part advanced to Rhaidestos which was located immediately NE of Apros: present-day Tekirdag, halfway between Gallipoli and
Constantinople. They massacred the Greek population of the town. Rhaidestos then became a centre of operations for an ineffectual blockade of Constantinople and raids throughout Thrace for approximately two years, 1306-1307 (LBA p.81). Cf 1305-06: Turks.
3. Eastern Aegean: Benedetto Zaccaria, a Genoese merchant-adventurer,
occupies the island of Chios to the west of Genoese-ruled Phokaia and persuades the Emperor Andronicus to cede it to him as a freehold property for 10 years. Chios was an important source of alum, a coagulant and dye-fixer, and the aromatic resin known as mastic that was used as an aphrodisiac and medicinally and in cooking (most of which went to the Egyptian port of Tinnis). Having no navy and only a tiny army, Andronicus was no doubt more relieved than angry (or so Nicol imagines, B&V p.223).
In the same year another Genoese adventurer, Andrea Morisco, attacked and occupied the island of Tenedos at the entrance to the Hellespont (Nicol, B&V p.222).
1305-06:
Following the battle of Apros, the Catalans invited Turks from Asia Minor to fight with them as allies. Gregoras says the Turkish corps numbered 2,800 men: 800 horse and 2,000 foot (cited in Oikonomides, Turks 1305 p.159).
Gregoras says that the Catalans at Gallipoli first invited 500 of the Turks as allies from the opposite side (of the Dardanelles), i.e. from Asia Minor, and that many more volunteered their services. A second group also arrived in 1305. They did not ask for any money; all they wanted was to keep the booty that they would gain, giving only one fifth to the Catalans. See 1306 below.
1305-07:
The Balkans: The Empire's problems were exploited by Theodore Svetoslav of Bulgaria, who defeated the co-emperor Michael IX and conquered much of northeastern Thrace and its Black Sea ports in c.1305–1307. The conflict ended (1307) with yet another dynastic marriage, between Michael IX's daughter Theodora and the Bulgarian emperor (Norwich, Decline p.273).
1305-c.1309:
Because of the Catalans, land communications between the capital and Macedonia were interrupted. Cf 1308.
1306:
1. The Catalans and their Turkish allies devastated Thrace, destroying what they could not steal and selling many Byzantines into slavery.
“They [also] attacked Stenia, which was the imperial arsenal [ship-shelter] about eight miles [13 km] to the north of the Golden Horn [near modern Rumeli Hisar]. Making a great circuit, they avoided Constantinople itself and advanced to the shore of the Black Sea, leaving devastation behind them, until they reached the arsenal; they burnt some 150 [sic*] ships in course of construction or
completed, seized four of their galleys which the Greeks had captured at the time of the assassination, set the town on fire, broke down the dykes which kept out the sea-water, loaded their galleys with booty and sailed [back] in front of Constantinople”. —H. J. Chaytor, History of Aragon.
(*) This is too many for the navy; nearly all must have been civilian vessels.
(Possibly around 1307:) Gregoras says the Catalans so terrorised the countryside in Thrace that the Greek peasants could not leave their refuge in the fortified towns and cultivate the land for two entire years; Oikonomides prefers to date this to 1311-12: see there (quoted in Laiou-Thomadakis p.261; and Oikonomides).
2a. Asia: The citadel of Sardis, the town east of the old Nicaean seat of
Nymphaeum, was handed over to the Turks by treaty in 1306 (Encyc. Brit. 1911: www.1911encyclopedia.org/Sardis). Cf 1308.
2b. The large town of Philadelphia, today’s Alasehir, in Asia Minor: twice, in 1306 and 1324, was besieged by the Turks; but it managed to retain its independence for decades - until after 1390, when it was captured by the combined forces of the Turks and the Constantinopolitans.
In a letter from the 1320s, Manuel Gabalas, a church official from Philadelphia writing to the future metropolitan Matthew of Ephesos, gave two reasons why towns (polismata) in a far-off region in the midst of Turkish enemies were still under Byzantine control: “First, because of their fortifications, and (second) because they always find a way to get along with their enemies. This has created such a relationship of trust between them that our people for a very long time now have been holding all the gold and silver the others [the pastoralist Turks] own in trust for them, all their Persian [sic: Turkish] belts, rugs, precious mantles, and robes.* And there is agreement that neither the emperor nor the military commanders who are appointed from time to time are allowed to appropriate these things”. —Quoted by Matke 2002.
(*) This repeats the pattern of accommodation reported around Bilecek in the 1280s: see there.
In Italy: Beginnings of post-Byzantine or post-'Gothic' art: Giotto completes his fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel, Padua.
Catalonia: Ramon Lull pleads for a trade ban in his “De fide” (1306): “The slave trade with the Mamluks from Greece [Grecia, Byzantium*] to Egypt, exercised by profiteers falsely calling themselves Christians, is to be
suppressed by the galleys [of a Christian admiral yet to be appointed]. ... Christians, such as the Genoese and Catalans, shall buy their spices outside the lands of the Sultan, from Baghdad and India, whereby [Lull imagines] Egypt would be reduced to such poverty that within six years it can be easily conquered by the Christians”.
(*) That is, the Italians’ export of slaves from the Black Sea region via the Sea of Marmara.
1306-07:
1. Asia: Ottoman Turkish advances in the NW of Asia Minor lead to the isolation of Bursa. According to Ottoman tradition, the fortress-towns of Kestel, on the main highway immediately east of Bursa, and Kete or Kite, west of Bursa, were captured in the ‘Dinboz War’ of 1306, and the first military treaty in Ottoman history was signed. —Thus the ‘Ottoman Website’,
www.osmanli700.gen.tr/english/sultans/01estaplishment.html; accessed 2010.
“The small forts fell before the cities: in 1306 Kite/Katoikia, a small keep west of Bursa, surrendered to a surprise attack which befell the garrison as it was being mustered. A year or so later, the garrison of Gubekler/Koubouklia, a small fort near Ulubad [Lopadion]*, betrayed their post to the Ottomans. The Bursans, now isolated, had to pay tribute to Osman.” —Lindner, "The Tent of Osman, The House of Osman" in his Nomads and Ottomans, Bloomington, 1983: extracts
online at www.h-net.org/~fisher/hst373/readings/lindner.html. Cf 1308. (*) Ulubad or Ulubat lies west of Bursa, at the western end of Lake Ulubad (Ulubat Golu). Byzantium held onto Lopadion itself for several more decades.
2. Eastern Aegean: The ‘Hospitallers’ or Order of Saint John purchased (1306-7) the islands of Rhodes, Kos and Leros from the Genoese admiral or corsair
Vignolo Vignoli, who had established loose control over these supposedly Romaniyan islands.
Little detail is known about the Order’s occupation of the islands but it appears to have involved fighting against the local Greek inhabitants who fiercely opposed the Order’s arrival. Various dates are proposed for the actual occupation of Rhodes, from 1308 to 1310.
—Nicolas Vatin, L'Ordre de Saint-Jean-de Jérusalem, l'Empire Ottoman et la Méditerranée orientale entre les deux sièges de Rhodes, 1480-1522, Paris, 1994; and Nicolas Vatin, Rhodes et l'Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem, Paris, 2000, cited by Atauz 2004; also www.rhodesguide.com/rhodes/rhodes_history.php.
1307:
1a. Inner Thrace: Ainos, the Thracian town at the Aegean mouth of the Ebrus or Maritsa river, withstood an attack by the Catalans (ODB under ‘Ainos’).
1b. The devastation wrought by the Catalans in the environs of Gallipoli was so great that they were no longer able to live off the land, for they did not themselves engage in agriculture. So, in mid 1307 the Catalans razed the stronghold of
Gallipoli and, with their Turkish allies, departed for the richer lands of Macedonia (Magoulis, notes to Doukas 1975: 268). See 1308: Thessaloniki. Bartusis, LBA p.82, says they comprised nearly 10,000 fighting men: 6,000 Catalans and renegade Greeks and other Christians, and 3,000 Turks, making them the strongest military force in the Aegean region or at leaqst the strongest Christian force.
2. (or 1308:) Asia: According to one his own inscriptions in the town, Mehmed Aydinoglu captures, or recaptures, the town of Birgi, Gk: Pyrgion, ESE of
Smyrna, in the Cayster Valley (Oikonomides, Turks 1305-1313, p.167). It became the seat of the Aydin emirate. See 1308 and 1310.
3. In 1307 Andronikos II imposed an extraordinary tax, the sitokrithon, on two of the most important agricultural products, wheat and barley, in order to cover part of the huge expenses created by the Catalan wars and to counter the financial effects of the loss of Asia Minor. —Foundation for the Hellenic World, online 2010: ‘Economics in Late Byzantine Period’, at
www.fhw.gr/chronos/10/en/o/oc/oc3b.html. 1307-09:
Geography: The peninsula that juts SE into the NW Aegean is the Halkidiki; the collection of monasteries jointly called Mt Athos is located on the top ‘finger’. The hill called Athos is near the tip of the top finger.
Macedonia: The Catalans raid into the peninsula of Mt Athos and plunder the monasteries. The Company and its allies, drawn from many nationalities, now numbered some 8,000 or 10,000 fighting men (women and children would have made up as least as many again) (Loew 1972: 113; LBA p.82; Norwich 1996: 272). Vasiliev notes that 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 likewise burned the Russian monastery of St. Panteleemon, also on Mount Athos. So great were the atrocities perpetrated by the Catalans on their march through Thrace and Macedonia in 1307-08, that their name has entered and stayed in the Greek language as proverbial for cruelty and evil (Magoulias, notes to Doukas 1975: 268).
c. 1307-18: Italy: Dante writes the Divina Commedia, the first great 'vernacular' [non-Latin] poem of Western Europe.
1308: Andronicus II aged 50. 1308:
1. Bithynia: The Ottomans push west past Asian Mt Olympos (Uludag) and capture Lüblüce, south of Bursa (Nicolle 2008: 37). See next.
2. Naval threat to Bursa: The conquest of the island of Karolimne (Tk: Imralı, from ‘Emir Ali’) off the shore of the Sea of Marmara in 1308 perhaps marked the first Ottoman naval victory. With a naval or pirate base established on it, the island, which was the first ever-captured by the Ottomans, enabled them to exert some control of traffic in the Sea of Marmara and potentially to cut the
connection of the Byzantines to Bursa. The name of the island Imralı is derived from the name of its conqueror Emir Ali.
Nicolle, 2008: 37, queries this tradition as just legend. If there was an expedition, he thinks it was just a raid.
3. Macedonia: The Catalan Company besieges Byzantine Thessaloniki, which holds out.
By 1308 bloody internal dissension, and ‘Greek’ (Rhomaioi) resistance to the Catalans' constant raids from their base in Gallipoli, had forced the latter to move to what is now Northern Greece, as we have seen. Using the Thessalonica region as a centre of operations, the Company raided Macedonia and ravaged the rich monasteries at Mt Athos.
The Catalan war is related in detail by the Byzantine historian George
Pachymeres, in the xi-th, xii-th, and xiii-th books, till he breaks off in the year 1308. Nicephorus Gregoras (l. vii. 3-. 6) is more concise and complete.
Pachymeres’ literary activity was considerable, his most important work being a Roman (Byzantine) History in 13 ‘books’ (parts), in continuation of that of
Georgius Acropolita from 1261 (or rather 1255) to 1308, containing the history of the reigns of Michael and Andronicus Palaeologi.
3. (Various dates have been proposed, from 1308 to 1310:) The ‘Hospitallers’ or Knights of St John establish their headquarters in Rhodes; they policed the surrounding waters against the Turkish pirates.
4a. Ephesus, the last remaining Byzantine town on the Aegean coast, falls to the Turks. Although the town was given to the Aydin-oglu Turks, it was Osman’s ‘proto-Ottoman’ troops who took the major part in capturing it (Runciman 1965: 32).
4b. [or 1307:] W Asia Minor: The Aydin-oglu Turks re-capture Pyrgion (Birgi) (SE of Smyrna, N of Aydin).
Aydin declares independence from its Germiyan overlord. Mehmet Beg Mubariz ad-Din Ghazi, r.1308-1334, founded a dynasty in territories he had conquered in