by Peter Darman
Co-Emperor Michael next to Roger suddenly rose from his chair, prompting the fledgling Caesar to do likewise.
‘Nature calls,’ smiled Michael.
Sancho also rose to his feet out of respect, and out of the corner of his eye saw a familiar figure – the thin eyebrows and sharp nose of Arabates, the treacherous Alan mercenary who had deserted the Catalan Company outside Philadelphia. The Alan saw the Almogavar looking at him and smirked, and Sancho felt a chill shoot down his spine. He turned to Roger, only to see his commander and friend die at the hands of a figure behind him who drew a razor-sharp dagger across his throat in a lightning-fast motion. Grand Duke Roger died instantly, his blood-stained corpse collapsing back down on the chair, the seat next to him vacant after Michael’s departure. The sickening truth hit Sancho like a war hammer.
‘Treachery,’ he screamed, grabbing the knife he had been using to cut chunks of cheese.
He stiffened when a blade was thrust into his back, instinctively spinning and slashing the edge of the knife across the windpipe of the man who had been tasked with killing him. The servant-cum-assassin had not expected to be attacked and registered shock as his throat was lacerated, causing him to drop his own weapon and stagger back in shock.
The Almogavars fought like rabid animals, using anything to hand – knives, benches, platters for shields, overturned tables – to fight off the assassins in their midst. But Arabates and Leo Diogenes had planned their trap well and had not underestimated the fighting ability of the Almogavars. The first part of the plan had been to get the mercenaries drunk. Very drunk. And during their inebriation the hall would slowly fill with more servants – Alans concealing daggers and Paramonai with swords beneath their flowing robes. The second part was to ensure Co-Emperor Michael was absent from the hall when the bloodshed began, for he would be leading the army assembled at Adrianople against the remainder of the Catalan Company on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The third part of the plan would be triggered when the co-emperor rose from his chair, which would lead to the upstart mercenary Roger de Flor also standing. The slitting of his throat would be the signal for the killing to begin.
The Almogavars did not die easily. Angel, stabbed repeatedly, his zamarra cut to ribbons, killed three before he succumbed to his wounds. Marc managed to grab a sword from a Paramonai he had head-butted and fought off half a dozen assailants before he was hit by arrows, Arabates taking no chances, having ordered archers to enter the hall once the slaughter commenced. Biel used a dead Alan as a shield until he was wrestled to the ground and literally hacked to pieces, his head, arms and legs severed from his torso in an orgy of frenzied violence.
Sancho Rey knew he would die but was determined to take Arabates with him. Despite the blood gushing from his back, he tried to reach the gloating Alan leader, scrambling over the table and throwing the contents of a wine jug in the face of an Alan armed with a dagger in front of him. The Alan flinched, allowing Sancho to stab the man in the belly repeatedly, until he keeled over. Sancho stepped over the body but a sharp pain in his back caused him to falter, allowing two more Alans to pounce on him, pinning him to the floor. He grabbed the right hand of one, preventing the blade the Alan was holding going into his eye socket, kicking out at the other assailant and hitting his left ankle with the sole of his boot. The blow caused the Alan to fall across the bodies of Sancho and his Alan comrade, and onto the knife of Sancho Rey. He yelped when the blade went deep into his belly, causing him to drop his own weapon and crawl away.
Sancho grabbed the right arm of the other Alan with both hands, pulled with all his might and lunged with his mouth at the man’s throat, locking his teeth into flesh and biting down with all the strength he could muster. His mouth began to fill with blood, but not his own. The Alan made a hideous gurgling noise as his own blood began to seep into his lungs and he began to desperately thrash around as the liquid began drowning him. Sancho kept biting, the pain in his back increasing to resemble a hot poker being driven into his flesh.
Arabates kicked the dying Alan off the body of Sancho Rey, the Almogavar leader trying to rise up when he saw his target standing over him. But he had lost too much blood and his limbs felt like lead weights. The floor around his body was wet with blood. Mostly his own; some belonging to his two assailants. Arabates crouched beside him.
‘You and your filthy barbarians are finished. In the morning, we march south to finish off the rest of the Catalan Company. We will kill all the men and enslave the women. Apart from your wife. I will make it my mission to ensure she is paraded naked before the whole army before being raped night and day. And when she can no longer walk from being penetrated so many times, I will skin her alive and send her hide to the emperor as a present.’
Sancho spat a mouthful of blood at the Alan leader, who stood, drew his sword and severed the Catalan’s head with a single strike. So died Sancho Rey, his captains, sergeants and the bravest of the Almogavars, along with Roger de Flor, mercenary, admiral and grand duke of the Roman Empire.
And while the cream of the Almogavars was being butchered, a covered wagon guarded by Varangian Guards trundled out of Adrianople on the road heading southeast, towards the coast, specifically the city of Rhaedestus. From there, the unconscious Luca Baldi and Jordi Rey would be loaded on a dromon and shipped south to the Gallipoli Peninsula, to be unceremoniously dumped on a beach so they could be found by their fellow Almogavars. Princess Maria doubted they would live long after, not with her nephew leading a great army south to wipe out the remainder of the Catalan Company. But she comforted herself with the thought that at least her two young rescuers would die with swords in their hands facing an enemy across the battlefield, rather than being killed like animals in a slaughterhouse.
To be continued…
Historical notes
The reader may have noticed that though ‘The Black Sheep’ is set in the Byzantine Empire at the beginning of the fourteenth century, there is no mention of ‘Byzantine’ in the text. This is because the title Byzantine Empire entered common usage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having first been coined in the sixteenth century. Those who were citizens of what today we call the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans. This was because they traced their lineage back to the founding of the city of Constantinople by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 330AD, though it would be more accurate to describe the event the renaming of the city of Byzantium by the emperor. Byzantium was originally a Greek colony founded in 667BC (though the precise date is contested). The city of Constantinople remained mainly Greek speaking until the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Constantinople grew in size and importance under Roman rule, its population reaching one million people by the sixth century AD. What we would call the Byzantine Empire reached its height in the same century, with lands in southern Spain, North Africa, Syria, Judea, Anatolia, Greece, the Balkans, Italy, Sicily and Sardinia. But ruling such a large empire placed enormous strains upon the army and imperial finances, which in themselves sparked a series of crises in the empire. These crises were made worse by external threats, chief among them being the followers of the religion of Islam. The result was a prolonged struggle between Muslim rulers and Byzantine emperors in what became known as the Arab-Byzantine Wars between the seventh and eleventh centuries. In these wars the Byzantine Empire lost lands in Syria and North Africa, though its control over Anatolia (the area inhabited by modern-day Turkey) ensured it could still raise substantial numbers of soldiers for the imperial army.
A greater threat to the empire’s very existence was the appearance of the Muslim Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. Originating in the steppes of Central Asia, the Seljuks established a huge empire covering an area encompassing modern-day Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Syria. It was inevitable that the Seljuks would look west to the rich lands of Byzantine Anatolia, and the decisive clash occurred at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which was a crushing Seljuk victory. In
the years afterwards, the Byzantine Empire lost its Anatolian heartlands. This led to internal revolts against what was seen as corrupt and profligate emperors, which further weakened the empire. In addition, and to compound the Byzantine Empire’s problems, the Catholic west viewed the rulers of Constantinople as no longer capable of protecting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, and as well as being weak and vulnerable.
The fracturing of the Seljuk Empire by the Mongols in the thirteenth century resulted in the establishment of a number of independent emirates throughout Anatolia, all of them Muslim and all competing with each other. These kingdoms were not states in the modern sense of the word, but rather areas controlled to varying degrees by what were in effect warlords. By the year 1300, there were nearly 20 such emirates in Anatolia, plus those cities and areas still controlled by the Byzantines in western Anatolia. Some of those emirs feature in ‘The Black Sheep’, among them Karesi Bey, one of the most powerful, and Mehmed Bey, both of whom would live another 20 years after the events portrayed in this book.
By this time the Byzantine Empire was a shadow of its former self, though ironically its rapid decline was nothing to do with Islam or Mongols but rather Catholic crusaders.
In 1204, when Pope Innocent III preached the Fourth Crusade, he called for an attack on Egypt. The French nobles who made up most of the 15,000-strong crusader army, however, made an alliance with Venice and attacked Constantinople instead. They were excommunicated by a livid Pope Innocent, but this did nothing to divert them from their objective, storming the city on 12 April. It was the first time in its 900-year history that Constantinople’s walls had been breached. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius V, was captured and executed and a new Latin Empire of the East proclaimed, Baldwin I being its first ruler. Constantinople was emptied of its treasures, which were shipped back to Western Europe (visitors to Venice can still see some of the loot taken in the Fourth Crusade, such as the four fourth-century bronze horses currently residing in St Mark’s Cathedral, which originally stood in Constantinople’s Hippodrome).
In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire fractured into several different kingdoms. They included the Despotate of Epiros and the Empire of Nicaea (based in western Anatolia), and it was the Nicaeans who restored the Byzantine Empire, or Roman Empire as they would have termed it, in 1261 when Emperor Michael captured Constantinople from the Latins. Unfortunately, the wealth and soldiers of what had been the Nicaean Empire was transferred to the city and its European possessions, and much money was spent restoring Constantinople to its former glory. This proved to be an impossible task but it did have two unfortunate consequences. First, Anatolia was stripped of soldiers, which allowed the Turks to make further inroads into imperial territory. Second, imperial finances became severely strained.
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, therefore, the Byzantine Empire was a pale shadow of its former self. A stark indication of its parlous state was the number of troops it could field. In the early tenth century, for example, Byzantine armies typically numbered around 90,000 men. By the end of the twelfth century, the figure had dropped but was still a respectable 50,000 troops making up the main field army. By the time General George Mouzalon had lost the Battle of Bapheus to Osman Bey in July 1302, the Byzantine field army totalled 2000 men. There were other soldiers garrisoning the empire’s towns and cities, of course, which added together produced a substantial number of troops, but such a paltry field army could never hope to reclaim lands lost to the Turks in Anatolia. Indeed, it appeared that Constantinople itself might once again succumb to enemy spears. It was a mixture of hope and desperation that made the emperor, Andronicus II, turn to a mercenary band that had won victory after victory against the French in Sicily during the so-called War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282–1302), which had just ended.
‘The Black Sheep’ is a work of fiction, but contemporary accounts of the Catalan Company in Anatolia in 1303–04 resemble an embellished medieval epic. What is certain is that in every encounter with the Turks, the Spanish mercenaries were entirely successful against superior odds.
Trying to work out how the Catalan mercenaries, and specifically their infantry arm, the Almogavars, defeated both European knights and Muslim horse archers with apparent ease is difficult. In ‘The Black Sheep’, I have surmised it was a combination of mobility and firepower that gave them battlefield success. The average Almogavar wore no body armour, his only protection being a helmet and a small round shield. To loiter on a battlefield where thousands of enemy soldiers were armed with Christian crossbows or Turkish recurve bows would be to invite certain slaughter. But the Almogavars were equipped with both javelins and spears, the logical conclusion of such a weapons combination being that they used the former before delivering the coup de grâce with the latter, their attacks delivered at speed to increase shock effect and literally shatter formations. They must have also cooperated closely with their horsemen on the battlefield, which would have secured the Almogavars’ flanks in combat, as well as undertaking general reconnaissance duties.
Today, the exploits of the Catalan Company in the service of the Byzantine Empire are largely forgotten. ‘The Black Sheep’ is an attempt to throw some light on a long-lost Medieval adventure, now buried in the mists of time.
It is a story that deserves to be kept alive.
