Duchy of Athens

The Duchy of Athens was a Latin state in central Greece, founded in 1205 in the wake of the Fourth Crusade and covering Attica and Boeotia. Over two and a half centuries it passed through three very different regimes: Burgundian lords of the de la Roche family, the mercenary Catalan Company under the kings of Sicily and Aragon, and the Florentine Acciaioli. It ended with the Ottoman conquest in the 1450s.

After the crusaders captured Constantinople and carved up the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade, Otto de la Roche, a knight of modest rank from Burgundy, became lord of Athens and Thebes in 1205. He styled himself Lord of Athens; the title of duke was used informally from the start but became official only in 1260. Athens began as a vassal of the crusader Kingdom of Thessalonica. After Thessalonica fell to the ruler of Epirus in 1224, the Principality of Achaea claimed overlordship, which the de la Roche family disputed, and from 1267 the duchy, like the rest of Latin Greece, recognised Charles I of Sicily as suzerain.

Under Otto's successors, Guy I, John I, William I and Guy II, the duchy held Attica and Boeotia and reached partly into Thessaly. The islands of the Aegean belonged to Venice, though Athens had influence over the lords of Euboea. The dukes used the buildings of the Acropolis as their palace, and Thebes later became the capital. A Latin archbishop was installed in Athens with the pope's backing, and the Parthenon, long an Orthodox church dedicated to the Virgin, was taken over for Catholic worship. Orthodox clergy carried on, but without official standing.

Guy II died in 1308 and the duchy passed to Walter of Brienne. He hired the Catalan Company, veteran mercenaries first raised by Roger de Flor, against the Greek rulers of Epirus, but when he tried to send them away without full pay in 1311 they turned on him. At the Battle of Halmyros they killed Walter and most of the Frankish nobility and seized the duchy. His heirs kept only Argos and Nauplia.

In 1312 the Catalans accepted King Frederick III of Sicily as their overlord, and he named his son Manfred duke. The title stayed with the Sicilian and Aragonese crowns until 1388, but real power lay with a series of vicars-general on the spot. In 1318 or 1319 the Catalans added southern Thessaly as the Duchy of Neopatras. Feudal law now followed the Customs of Barcelona rather than the old Frankish code, Catalan replaced French as the official language, and towns had local governors with three-year terms and councils of their own.

Catalan rule did not survive the late fourteenth century. In 1379 the Navarrese Company, hired by the titular Latin emperor James of Baux, took Thebes, and in 1388 the Florentine Nerio Acciaioli captured Athens. Nerio left the city to Venice, which held it from 1395 to 1402 before the Acciaioli returned. In 1444 Athens became tributary to Constantine Palaiologos, Despot of the Morea. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the Ottoman commander Ömer Bey took the remains of the duchy in 1456, and the last Acciaioli duke, Francesco II, held on only until 1458.

The Sicilian crown, and later the Spanish monarchy, went on using the title Duke of Athens and Neopatras long after the duchy had gone. Within the duchy, French and Italian clergy filled the archbishoprics of Athens and Thebes until the late fourteenth century, when Catalans and Aragonese took their place. Both cities are now in Greece.

The Duchy of Athens appears on our 1279, 1300 and 1400 maps. On the 1300 map it borders the Principality of Achaea, the Despotate of Epirus, Byzantine lands and the island possessions of the Republic of Venice; the 1400 map shows it in the Acciaioli period.