Palaeologue emperors but gradually seduced into leading a faction opposing the young Emperor John V, it seemed to many that the imperial office had changed beyond recognition; Cantacuzene had spent the years of the civil war in alliance with both Stefan DuĊĦan, king of the emergent Serbia and another threat to Byzantium, and the Ottoman Turks with whom he even entered into a marriage alliance. Although history has preferred to judge this emperor as an enlightened and high-principled figure, his reign continued to be characterized by struggles between these powers, and Cantacuzene too was eventually forced by public opinion to abdicate, in 1354, the year in which the Ottomans first gained a foothold on European soil by capturing Gallipoli.
From the west's point of view it is traditional to say that there was little to show for the 1204 enterprise. Yet one neglected feature is the ensuing colonization of a new part of the eastern Mediterranean by the west. The carve-up of territory in 1204 involved 'Franks', and Italians, in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean islands for more than two centuries. Many of these proved to be small-time rulers of patchwork territory, subject to infinite changes of borders, dynasty, and alliance, and of little significance for the historian. A few of them, though, established sane and tolerably stable rule. One such was the Frankish occupation of the Peloponnese, where despite the Byzantine reoccupation of part of the peninsula some semblance of peace and even some manifestations of Frankish chivalric culture were achieved. Even this was rudely interrupted in the early fourteenth century by the arrival of the Catalan Company, a violent band of mercenaries which found itself at a loose end in southern Italy after the Peace of Caltabellotta of 1302. The Catalans wrought untold destruction on the Greek mainland before seizing Athens and establishing control there. In about 1380 they were ousted by another company, of Navarrese, and they in turn were replaced by a Florentine, Neri Acciaiuoli. The point is that the 1204 'wave' had successors and replacements; individual barons who were minded to carve out for themselves mini-states or at least to get themselves titles, and not too concerned about the evi-
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