…Mistra.

Prince William II Villehardouin, a grandnephew of the Fourth Crusade historian Geoffrey of Villehardouin, was the ruler of the Frankish Principality of Achaea, established in 1205 after the conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

William had in 1249 built a strong castle, the "Oriokastro", which is to play an important role in the history of the last centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Latins in 1261 had ceded Mystras and other forts in the southeastern Peloponnese as ransom for William II, who had been captured in Pelagonia, and Michael VIII Palaeologus had made the city the seat of the new Despotate of Morea.

It has remained the capital of the despotate, ruled by relatives of the Greek emperor, although the Venetians still control the coast and the islands.

Mystras and the rest of Morea have become relatively prosperous since 1261, compared to the rest of the empire.

In an action which ignored the rights of the Villehardouin Princes, Charles of Anjou had been given Achaea in 1267 by the exiled Baldwin II of Constantinople, who hoped Charles could help him restore the Latin Empire.

Charles and his descendants will not rule in Achaea personally, but they will send money and soldiers to help the principality defend against the Greeks.

The principality has since been governed essentially as a province of the Kingdom of Naples.

With the decreasing power and influence of Achaea, the Duchy of Athens has become the most powerful state in Greece.

Charles II of Naples had at first granted the fiefdom of Morea or Achaea to Princess Isabella of Villehardouin, but he had deposed her in 1307 and granted it to his brother, Philip I of Taranto, inaugurating what is to be a three-generations long and sometimes violent succession dispute.

John VI Kantakouzenos, having abdicated the imperial throne, retires to a monastery in Mistra, in the Morea, where he will write his memoirs, a valuable source for the history of the period from 1320 to about 1357.

Fine frescoes decorate the vaults of the Church of Pantanasa, constructed in 1365 Mistra.

The frescoes in the Peribleptos Monastery Church, dating between 1348 and 1380, are a very rare surviving late Byzantine cycle, crucial for the understanding of Byzantine art.

Manuel Kantakouzenos had been recognized eventually as governor of Morea by the new regime in Constantinople.

Following the abdication of his father John Kantakouzenos, who is now the monk Josaph, the rest of his family had joined Manuel in the Morea.

Some of Manuel's enemies circulated a rumor that his older brother, the former Emperor Matthew Kantakouzenos, was plotting to replace him as governor, but when he was persuaded the rumor was false, the two worked together in the administration of the province.

For the larger portion of his reign, Manuel maintains peaceful relations with his Latin (Western European)neighbors and secures a long period of prosperity for the area.

Greco-Latin cooperation includes an alliance in the 1360  to contain the raids of Murad I into Moreas.

The Aragonese version of the Chronicle of the Morea states that, in alliance with Gautier de Lor, the Venetians, and the Hospitallers, he scored a naval victory over a Turkish fleet off Megara, setting fire to thirty-five of the enemy ships; the survivors then fled to Roger de Llúria, the Aragonese vicar-general at Thebes.

The Navarrese and Gascon mercenaries, placing themselves under the command of Peter IV of Aragon early in 1377, had been reformed as four companies, commanded by four captains: the Gascon Mahiot of Coquerel and Pedro de la Saga and the Navarrese Juan de Urtubia and Guarro.

Internecine squabbles among the Latin lords of the Peloponnese weaken resistance to pressure from the Greeks, especially from the 1370s onward.

The Navarrese enter the Morea in the spring or early summer of 1378, some coming at the invitation of Gaucher of La Bastide, the Hospitaller prior of Toulouse and commandant in the Principality of Achaea and others probably at the bequest of the Florentine adventurer Nerio Acciaioli.

Gaucher hires Mahiot and the remnant of the company for eight months during the captivity of the Grand Master Juan Fernández de Heredia.

Meanwhile, …

James of Baux, who is the son of Francis of Baux by Margaret of Taranto (circa 1325–1380), daughter of Prince Philip I of Taranto and his second wife, Catherine of Valois.

Margaret is thus sister of Robert of Taranto and Philip II of Taranto, both of whom had reigned as princes of Achaea and titular emperors of Constantinople (Robert II and Philip III).

On the death of the childless Philip II of Taranto in 1373, most of the barons in the principality of Achaea had recognized as his heir Queen Joanna I of Naples.

When in 1376 or 1377 she leased the territory to the Knights Hospitaller for five years at four thousands ducats a year, Philip II's relatives had put forward a rival candidate in James of Baux.

The Navarrese Company, after leaving the service of the Knights Hospitallers, the military-monastic order of Rhodes, takes up with this the latest claimant to Achaea.

Indeed, the Gascon Mahiot de Coquerel and the Navarrese govern the entire Morea under the auspices of James.

…are with Mahiot in the Morea again.

The Company organizes itself as a viceregal power in Achaea under three captains: Mahiot, Pedro Bordo de San Superano, and Berard de Varvassa.

…the Morea until halted in 1402 by the attack on the Ottoman Empire by the forces of Timur.

The Ottomans had begun their conquest of the Balkans and Greece in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Ottoman-occupied Thessaly is recaptured in 144 by future emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, at this time despot of Mystras, but there is little he can do against most of the other Ottoman territories.

Constantine, the fourth son of the former emperor Manuel II and his Serbian wife, Helen, of the dynasty of Dragas in Macedonia, has spent his early career with his brothers Theodore and Thomas governing the Greek despotate of the Morea (Peloponnese) and completing its recovery from the Franks.

His brother, Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, having died childless in 1448, he is in January 1449 proclaimed emperor Constantine XI (or XII) at Mistra.

A man of courage and energy, he has succeeded to a damnosa hereditas (“ruinous inheritance”).