Two Irish pilgrims who visited Albania on their way to Jerusalem in 1322 had reported that Durrës was “inhabited by Latins, Greeks, perfidious Jews and barbaric Albanians”.
At the death of Serbian King (Tsar) Dušan in 1355, the city had passed into the hands of the Albanian family of Thopias.
After peace was made in 1366 a company of mercenaries, mostly from Navarre and Gascony, had been organized into a coherent company of soldiers under Louis, the brother of Charles II of Navarre, who is Count of Beaumont-le-Roger in his own right and Duke of Durazzo in right of his wife, Joanna.
Louis intends to assert his claim over Albania and to fight for his claim to the principality.
Charles of France has likewise aided him with fifty thousand ducats.
The Navarrese ranks had begun to swell in 1372 through the recruiting techniques of Enguerrand de Coucy, who had been hired to form a force of five hundred lances and five hundred cavalry archers, mostly from Gascony.
Though these soldiers had been recruited for service in Albania, they had at first been first organized in Naples.
Many men from Navarre had begun enlisting in 1375 and 1376 mand have traveled directly to Albania to join their countrymen.
The enrollment lists for these years have been preserved in Pamplona and reveal the important presence of many engineers.
The total number of men that had left Tortosa between February 1375 and June 1376 is in the thousands.
They are paid thirty gold Aragonese florins a month.
Louis and the Navarrese in midsummer 1376, capture Durazzo (the remnant of the kingdom), which had been in the hands of Karl Topia, thus reestablishing the regnum Albaniae.
His death this same year leaves the Navarrese unemployed.
