sharing an excerpt here which also gives us an overview of how, post Battle Of Bapheus, The Catalan Company, which had been around since the 1270s, joined forces with the Byzantine emperor, Andronicus Palaeologus, in huge numbers, to defeat the Turks.
Excerpt From
A Short History of Byzantium
John Julius Norwich
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“That year of 1302 was an annus horribilis for Byzantium. In the early spring the Emperor's son and co-Emperor Michael IX had been defeated by the Turks near Magnesia and had narrowly escaped with his life.
Next there had been the Venetian raid; and then, only a few weeks later on 27 July, just outside Nicomedia, a Byzantine force encountered a Turkish army more than twice its size, commanded by a local Ghazi Emir named Othman.
The battle that followed was not particularly bloody; but Othman's way was now clear. He and his men surged southwestward along the Marmara until they reached the Aegean.
Such is the first appearance in history of the man who, having begun his career as ruler of one of the smallest of the Ghazi emirates of Anatolia, lived to establish the dynasty which was to give its name to the Ottoman Empire.
And it was in that same year of 1302 that Andronicus Palaeologus received a communication from Roger de Flor, leader of the Grand Company of Catalans.
The Grand Company was, in essence, a band of professional Spanish mercenaries – mostly but not exclusively from Catalonia – recruited in 1281 by Peter of Aragon.
for use in his North African and Sicilian campaigns.
Roger de Flor is said to have been the son of Richard von der Blume, the German falconer of Frederick II. At the age of eight he had joined a Templar galley; later he had become a remarkably successful pirate, after which he offered his services to Peter's son Frederick, who immediately appointed him admiral. Roger soon proved as courageous a fighter on land as at sea, and quickly acquired a loyal following. So the Catalan Company was born.
Towards the end of 1302, Roger sent two envoys to Andronicus, offering his Company's services for nine months. In return his men were to be paid double the usual rate; he himself was to be appointed megas dux – at that time fifth in the whole Byzantine hierarchy – and to receive the hand in marriage of the Emperor's sixteen-year-old niece Maria. Andronicus rather surprisingly accepted; and in September 1302 the Catalan fleet sailed into the Golden Horn, carrying not only two and a half thousand fighting men – more than half of them cavalry – but also (to the Emperor's mild consternation) their wives, mistresses and children: a total of nearly seven thousand. Shortly afterwards Roger married his bride, and a few days later the entire Company crossed the Marmara to Cyzicus, at that very moment under siege by the Turks….
