The dryad a novel
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