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.
XII
THE WINDING OF THE HORN
The palace of Duke Baldwin on the Acropolis was the stateliest of
the many stately buildings which the French lords had made for their
pleasure in Athens. All that the lessons of Western civilization could
teach, all that the experience of Eastern luxury could suggest, to
embellish the ducal dwelling had been accepted, and the daily state of
Baldwin's existence was little, if at all, less regal than that of the
monarch of France. The living-rooms were richly furnished and hung with
costly tapestries. The walls of the great banqueting-hall were painted
with vivid representations of the deeds of the Crusaders in the Holy
Land. Vessels of gold and vessels of silver were in common use, and the
jewelled pride of Byzantine mosaic filled every corridor with coloring
as lustrous as the dawn and as glowing as the sunset. Whatever the arts
could do to enrich and to adorn had been generously welcomed, and the
people of Duke Baldwin's household moved familiarly, while the guests
of Duke Baldwin's hospitality walked in wonder, amid surroundings as
lovely as the liberal creation of a dream. Never had an abode been
known more worthy of the presence of beautiful women, and the fair
faces and shapely forms that made the home of Baldwin a wanton paradise
in the minds of his knights found in every part of the great mansion a
background worthy of their favor and their grace.
Duke Baldwin's palace, look at it one way, hummed like a human hive.
It was full of sounds from dawn till night--servants going and coming,
minstrels bowing and thrumming, the rustle of women's dresses, the
flutter of women's fans, the patter of pages' footsteps running on
delectable errands, merry messengers of love, the ring of noble voices,
the clink of noble swords. Here, there, and everywhere Duke Baldwin's
presence loomed, jovial, ferocious, vehemently alive and blithe, making
love to a dozen ladies with a whole heart, drinking a dozen wines with
a clear head, voluble, jocular, a brawny image of the lusts of the
flesh. He was very well content with the world, and would not have it
other than it was. To indulge all appetites furiously without hurt
or satiety, to play the prodigal host and to read the reward of his
opulence in the admiring eyes of easy women, this was Duke Baldwin's
simple ideal of existence. It was the ideal of many others, but few
attained it as completely as the genial, truculent duke, for few had
his length of purse and fewer his strength of body.
But just now Duke Baldwin had other causes for complacency and content
than gluttonizing in all the passions. The presence of the Duchess
of Thebes in his palace he had at first looked forward to as an
experiment in the affections, and it had never occurred to him that he
might have his own son as a rival. But now this was so, as it seemed,
and yet Duke Baldwin was plainly satisfied and limber of spirit over
the business. For when the Duchess Esclaramonde came riding up to his
gates on that memorable evening and told him her strange tale, Baldwin
was well content with the way of affairs. Here was his son's life saved
by this great lady and neighbor, and here was his son's heart given
to, and taken by, this same great lady, which meant the welding of
Thebes and Athens in a common strength and a common splendor. Baldwin
thought better of his son for a sensible choice, and was quite willing
to forego dalliance with the duchess in consequence, the more readily,
indeed, that a number of lovely, affable ladies had newly landed from
Byzantium.
The duchess was all for a speedy wedding. Her brief term of widowhood
was expired; she needed, she said, the prop of a man's arm, and the
duke, grinning in his sleeve, was delighted to meet her wishes. As
for Rainouart, he took his good-fortune with a curious apathy, which
might have puzzled his parent if that parent ever troubled his mind
about people's motives so long as their actions conformed to his idea
of the precisely right. Whatever the duchess said Rainouart echoed.
Recovered from his hurt, thanks to the deep sleep and easeful rest on
the duchess's litter, he squired her pertinaciously, patently in love
to all beholders, patently under the spell of her beauty: under the
spell also of her ministrations, for she must needs continue to be his
leech who had begun by being his rescuer, and she slyly plied him with
philtres in his drink. So it was settled out of hand that the heir
to the Duchy of Athens and the dame of the Duchy of Thebes should be
married on the second day following the evening of their arrival in the
city, and that all the pomp and ceremony of the joustings should be
regarded as incidental and obsequious to the hurried nuptials.
Fernand Ximenes was sorely displeased at the news, but he protested
pleasure with the best, persistently patient. Everybody else was hugely
delighted, for this sudden marriage put the perfect top to all the
jollity--it was the cream on the milk of mirth, the finest feather in
the cap of happiness. Of course the opinions of the gentlefolk were
the only opinions that counted, but in their obscurity the citizens of
Athens made merry with the rest, for the waves of great folk's pleasure
always carried some flotsam and jetsam to their humble thresholds. As
for those dark subalterns of St. Nicholas, Captain Fox and Captain
Gander, Captain Bat and Captain Chanticleer, Captain Rat and Captain
Badger, they were neck-high in delights, and drank of the best daily
and nightly in popular taverns, toasting bride and groom mellifluously,
and thanking their saint and their stars that they by a storm and a
strange voice were stayed from slitting the weasand of the son of Duke
Baldwin the Beneficent.
On the morning of the marriage-day the great court-yard of Duke
Baldwin's palace was a little world of many types and many
nationalities. From the gallery of the palace the loveliest ladies of
the court looked down upon the flower of the French chivalry below and
named their names to new-arrived beauties, and told tales of them, not
always without malice. The slender fellow with the yellow hair was Sir
Guy de Hainault. The gallant with the brown curls who sat apart and
nursed a lute upon his knee was Sir Jaufre de Brabant. That lean, dark,
strenuous figure, his visage bronzed by Spanish suns, the man with
something Moorish in his garb and accoutrements, was Fernand Ximenes,
chief among the leaders of the Catalan Grand Company. The portly,
florid man, no longer young but comely in his prime, who carried a
white staff in his hand and moved hither and thither among the knights
with cheerful greeting for each, was Count Ernault of Toulouse, Duke
Baldwin's right-hand man and lord-marshal of the lists. The two who
walked and talked together in the shade, talking very surely of
women and deeds of war, were Sir Ambrose of Blois and Sir Raymond
of Provence. The two who sat and diced upon a drum-head, with faces
as grave as if every cast gave or took great slices of empire, were
Demetrius, the vassal prince of Epirus, and Andronicus Palæologus, the
great noble from Constantinople.