From the days when the Christian faith was born in Galilee of Judea, from the days when Hellas became portion and parcel of the Roman empire, the glory of Athens dwindled and withered through the centuries for more than a thousand years. Paul preached. Nero plundered. Philopappus patronized. Hadrian adorned. Herodes commemorated the loved and lost Regilla. Neo-Platonism persuaded its followers that the lamp of the Academy was still alight. The terror of the north swept upon the city as Spartan and Persian had swept upon her, only more bloody and more merciless than both, to be beaten back for a season by the waning strength of the Roman arms. The gleaming image of Athena stayed the rage of the triumphant Alaric, but could not stay the envy of Constantinople. Byzantium stripped Athens of her riches; Byzantium silenced the voices of her philosophers. Gloom of night settled upon the sacred place for generations till, after the fourth crusade and the fall of Constantinople, Boniface of Montserrat came to turn the Parthenon from a Greek church to a Roman Catholic cathedral, and the city of Theseus into a Frankish duchy. In the dawn of the thirteenth century Otho of the Rock became grand sire of Athens, and he and the descendants of his house ruled for a century, till the time came for Baldwin to take the throne.
The French nobles who throned in Hellas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of Christendom knew nothing, or next to nothing, of the old-time glories of their home. The lions of Mycenæ told the occupants of Peloponnesus nothing of the king of men and his murderous queen, and the vengeance of Orestes leaping like a bright star to his aim. The chiefs in Attica viewed with indifferent eyes the masterpieces of antiquity still standing intact or almost blank of ravage upon the Attic plain and on the Attic hill. But the French lords of Peloponnesus and the French lords of Athens had a very liberal and deep affection for the civilization which they carried with them from their sweet land of France, and for those chivalrous institutions which made life one high delight to them. The best dream of the French gentlemen was to make the land of Greece as like the land of France as might be in all the grace and all the gayeties of life. To this end they lived in Attica as they lived in Languedoc, in Lacedæmon as in Limousin, and their greatest pleasure in their Hellenic empery was to make believe that they were in Paris or Provence. In the land where the Grecian gods had been hymned by Pindar, moulded by Phidias, painted by Apelles, and caricatured by Aristophanes, the adventurous French knights, who tricked themselves out with the titles of cities of Sparta and cities of Attica, bore to the golden land they governed all the pride and pomp and color that made their France so lovely in their eyes. They strove to make their lives as luxurious and as sumptuous as if they were kings of France and not lords of Grecian duchies, and they succeeded greatly in their purpose. French of Paris, French of Provence, French of Picardy, sang of love or commanded for battle in places where Socrates had died yesterday and Atreus the day before yesterday. All the parament of chivalry paraded, a riot of color and luxury, where Lycurgus had fed a strenuous people on bitter bread and brackish water, or played its games of mimic war and held its tribunals of fantastic love in the pale presence of the theatre of Dionysos.
The narrowness of the environment made these efforts after magnificence more conspicuous than they would have been in the country they had quitted. Gorgeous garments and splendid armor adorned and defended bodies cherished with pompous banquets and royal wines. But the ease of their condition did not weaken the limbs or the spirit of the French lords. Their passion for the tournament kept them hardy for their wars with each other, stiffening their voluptuousness with that desire to shine in strife which forbade pleasure to degenerate into effeminacy. Their passion for ballads and the ballad-maker's arts refined their wild, bright life with tales of ancient days and heroic ideals. Their passion for women, growing apace in the magical atmosphere of that enchanted land where the winds seemed to whisper the songs and lisp the names of old-time lovers, was saved by their persistent chivalry, artificial perhaps in form, but with a heart behind its artificiality, from lowering into the Oriental grossness that was the weakness of Byzantium. The history of the ages has no stranger as it has no more bravely painted page than that which records the rule of the French dukes in Athens and Peloponnesus.
If Athens in the dawn of the fourteenth century was strangely unlike the Athens of the Periclean age, the contrast was rather of one kind of splendor against another than of a present squalor with a splendid past. The capital of the French dukes of Athens surpassed in luxury and comfort any European capital of the time. Their commerce flourished, their port was populous with ships, their influence was felt, and their strength unquestioned all along the Greek littoral. Many of the other French princes in Greece had pomp and power, but Baldwin, Duke of Athens, overcrowned them all for wealth and power and magnificence. He delighted to beautify after the fashion of his time the spot that once had been the loveliest in the world, and if the shade of some great Athenian could have returned for an hour to the city of Cecrops, he must have regretted, indeed, the glories of the past; but, at the same time, he must have recognized that the barbarian who held by a strong hand the land of Deucalion was not denied some measure of the intelligence that goes to the making of a fair town and a great state. Duke Baldwin was always hospitable to strangers visiting Athens, and delighted to send them away brimmed with admiration of the civilization of Athens and the generosity of Athens's duke. If he did not set a kingly crown upon his helmet, he lived like a king, and could have entertained the monarch of France or the sovereign of England with an opulence not to be outdone in Paris or in London.
There was a policy in all this opulence and hospitality to strangers. Duke Baldwin owed much of his first supremacy in Athens to the presence in Thessaly of a band of free lances. When he arrived, hissing hot with haste, in his new duchy he found that his hold over his dominion was not to be unthreatened nor his rule untroubled. A prince of Epirus here, a prince of Vlachia there, menaced his unsteady empire. Even Duke Baldwin's bull-dog courage recognized that he was not strong enough to compete with his enemies single-handed. But Duke Baldwin was a man of resource, and he saw that there was a valuable alliance at hand. The Catalan Grand Company, having fought its fierce way through Macedonia, had planted itself upon the soil of Thessaly eager for more conquests. The Catalan Grand Company was a remarkable association of rascals, assassins, ragamuffins, blackguards, and admirable captains. It was originally formed in Spain with the avowed purpose of selling the arms and the bodies of the brotherhood to any one needing them and willing to pay the price. The Catalans had gone hither and thither serving this master and that, till at last their baleful star had led them, maugre the teeth of the Byzantine tyrant, to the land of Greece.
A new-comer to a throne who is not in the direct line and is not upon the spot when the succession falls due is never too sure of his seat, even if his authority be unchallenged, and Duke Baldwin, with enemies ready to take the field against him, deemed it prudent to enter into negotiations for the services of the Catalan Grand Company. The Catalans, already weary of acting for their own hand, were very ready to take Duke Baldwin's pay and to play Duke Baldwin's game. Their terms were large, but Duke Baldwin's need was keen and Duke Baldwin's tongue was glib. He promised them what they asked with a cheerful spirit, albeit the company asked a good deal. Baldwin agreed to pay each full-armored horseman four gold ounces a month, each light-armed horseman two gold ounces a month, and each foot-soldier one gold ounce a month. When Duke Baldwin made, or rather accepted, these terms, the strength of the Catalan Grand Company totalled three thousand five hundred horsemen and three thousand men on foot, so that Duke Baldwin found himself pledged to a pretty penny. But with Duke Baldwin the present was very emphatically the present. The immediate important thing was to tighten his grip on the pleasant Duchy of Athens, to tweak the noses of Epirus here and Vlachia there, and he genially agreed to the terms of the Catalans, prepared no less genially hereafter to bamboozle them, but in the mean time making what might have been a dubious dominion indubitable with the strength of their support.
Yet Baldwin knew too much of the world of fighting-men to think that throne stable which was mainly defended by an army of mercenaries. So he made it his business to woo and welcome to his court all gentlemen-adventurers from France, and from the neighboring little principalities of Greece, who were willing to take chivalrous service under his standard. His fame as a warrior, his open-handed generosity where open-handed generosity was expedient, and especially the beauty of the open-hearted women with whom he took care that his court was always a-quiver, attracted to Athens a great number of knights and gentlemen-at-arms, who swelled his immediate following very rapidly. He further strengthened his hand by enrolling and equipping so many soldiers that in a short while he had more than doubled the strength of his solid little standing army. He had not been many months upon his throne before he had made his duchy the most formidable state in Greece and his duchy and himself very patently independent of the Catalan Grand Company. Feeling little need for the further services of the Catalan Grand Company, he felt little gratitude for their services in the past. Duke Baldwin was not a man burdened with a too lively sense of duty to others, and though in the early days of his dukedom he had paid the Grand Company month by month their promised wage, that payment had now been suffered to fall into arrears for a very considerable period.
For the time being this mattered very little to the Catalan Grand Company. Its members were quartered comfortably enough in the pleasant plain of Attica; they amused themselves from time to time with little marauding expeditions to the north, and they had, or affected to have, every confidence that sooner or later Duke Baldwin would pay up all the moneys that were due to them. The principal leaders of this company dwelt in Athens, and mingled on equal terms with the chivalry of Duke Baldwin's court. It could not truly be said that there was much love lost between the Spanish mercenaries and the French knights, for the latter looked down upon the Catalan companions as unchivalrous freebooters, and the Spaniards knew of this feeling, and it rankled in their hearts though they betrayed no trace of resentment in their faces. But between the two parties there was all outward show of amity, all outward interchange of knightly courtesies, and the Spanish leaders shared in all the festivals, drank at all the banquets, and jousted in all the tourneys of Duke Baldwin's court. If the Spaniards themselves were to be believed, they found no such hostility nestling in the white breasts of the fair French ladies of Athens as they were conscious that the mailed bosoms of the French gentlemen sheltered. But if the policy of the duke was regarded by the Catalan Grand Company for the most part with indifferent eyes, it was not so regarded by one of their number.
Fernand Ximenes was captain of the Catalan Grand Company, so far as the Catalan Grand Company could be said to have any single captain. That turbulent, mercenary army, though strongly bound together by common love of gold, common instinct for plunder, common lust for the gratification of all greeds, and common readiness for warfare under the service of any prince who chose to pay them, was not a community over which it was easy for any single man to extend an uncontested sovereignty. Since the Grand Company marched out on its career of rapine from Spain, leader after leader had fallen victim to the heady quarrels and bloody passions of his subordinates. Chieftains old in battle, and young chieftains eager to prove themselves peers of their predecessors, had in turn swayed for their moon the angry tides of the company, and in their turn had fallen victims to the weapons of those they were supposed to head.
For a time it seemed as if to accept any leadership over the Catalan Grand Company was not merely to court but to assure a violent death. Strong as were the links of common interest which bound the savage Spaniards into a depredatory army, it looked at one hour of their wild fortunes as if their forces must needs dissolve into anarchy from the reluctance of superior spirits to entertain or from the incapacity of inferior spirits to maintain control over the body. At length it became plain, even to the most ungovernable ruffian of that lawless brotherhood, that the promiscuous slaughter of superiors, however diverting in itself, was not the surest means of attaining the ends for which the free companions had been called together. A kind of compromise was arrived at: a form of parliamentary discussion instituted resulting in the evolution of a little cluster of captains, nominally each of equal authority, and only directing the action of the company when they spoke with a common voice and struck the drum-head of council with a common hand.
Of this little body of captains Fernand Ximenes owned indubitably the ablest mind, as he owned no less indubitably the strongest body. Of a smooth and grave exterior, with something of an ecclesiastic suavity blended with the urbanity of a scholar, this outward serenity masked a spirit as ingenious in forming schemes for self-aggrandizement as relentless in their execution. Greatly gifted as a practical soldier, greatly gifted as a possible statesman, Ximenes was most graced of all in this, that he knew how to wait. He was never in a hurry; he had never been known in a life that had now well come to middle age to speak a word there was no need to speak or strike a stroke there was no need to strike. His ambition was unlimited, but he never allowed it to lead him farther than he could safely see his clear way, and he had often let some apparently bright occasion go by when to his shrewd eyes the brightness seemed fallacious. He loved all desirable things--women, kingdoms, gold, images, pictures, jewels, costly habits, costly fare. He even--and this seemed a strange thing in a leader of the Catalan Grand Company--was not indifferent to books. But he could deny himself as vigorously as the most rigid ascetic to any of these fleshly temptations if his crafty mind were convinced that the denial of a moment meant a fuller gratification later, and he had never yet found that such wise denial had gone unrewarded.
It was through the influence and advice of Ximenes--so subtly exercised and so subtly offered that it seemed to each of his colleagues as if the course of action resolved upon had been decided as a result of his individual will--that the Catalan Grand Company entered into the service of Duke Baldwin of Athens. There were some, indeed, in the little cluster of captains who had talked none too vaguely of the possibility of the Grand Company making itself the master rather than the servant of the Duke of Athens. But with infinite patience and with infinite pains Fernand Ximenes made it plain to his co-captains that they had not at their command anything approaching to the necessary strength that would entitle them to enter upon a struggle with a fairly powerful prince of Greece, who had at his command a following little inferior to their own. "So long as we are well paid," he pleaded, "we shall do very well in Attica. The duke is generous; the duke is a free liver. He will be courteous to us captains, and our comrades will grow fat. The women of Greece are fair, if less radiant than the women of Spain, and the wines of Greece are very cheerful drinking." With these and other arguments he succeeded in carrying his point, and the forces of the Catalan Grand Company pledged their allegiance to Duke Baldwin in return for the stipulated sum.
From the moment that Ximenes had entered Greece with the company his mind had been filled with the desire--and with him to desire was almost invariably to attain--to become himself a prince in Greece. The most obvious way, and also the most difficult, was to seize some principality by the sword. An easier method suggested itself to him when the old Duke of Thebes died and left his duchy in charge of his young wife. Ximenes seemed here to perceive a chance of aggrandizement. He knew that the duchess was fair; he knew very well that the duchess was faithless, for he had visited Thebes ere he entered Baldwin's service and had found favor in the eyes of Esclaramonde. Indeed, so greatly did the handsome Spaniard gain the graces of the lady that when Ximenes heard of the death of the old dotard duke he was confident that the duchess would be likely soon to wed, and he was very ready to entertain the hope that the Duchess of Thebes would be willing to take for consort a certain valiant captain of the Catalan Grand Company. He began at once to work with his usual patience towards his goal. It was the result of his suggestions that Duke Baldwin welcomed the idea of holding a tournament, to which tournament the principal potentates in Greece should be bidden. Ximenes counted on his skill at arms to distinguish himself in the tourney; he counted on his way with women to ingratiate himself anew with the supple duchess--all seemed pleasantly and feasibly mapped out, and he thought of the project as much as he allowed himself to think of anything that lay ahead closed in the folded fingers of fate. And then, lo and behold! one moony May evening the Duchess of Thebes comes riding into Athens with Duke Baldwin's son and heir dozing on a litter, and in less than no time it is buzzed abroad through all the babblesome city that Rainouart, heir of Athens, is infatuated with the lovely Duchess of Thebes, that she is nothing unwilling to unwidow herself for his sake, that Duke Baldwin is hugely delighted at this union of Athens and Thebes, and that the marriage is decided and to take place with a celerity only excusable through the ungovernable passion of the prince. All of which is galling to an ambitious captain of Catalans, who shows, however, no sign of anger, but imperturbably waits on events.
