Athína

In 1311 the Catalan Company, mercenaries whom Duke Walter of Brienne had tried to cheat of their pay, killed him and most of the Frankish nobility at Halmyros and took the duchy for themselves. For nearly eighty years Athens was ruled under the Customs of Barcelona, in the Catalan tongue, by vicars-general of the Aragonese kings of Sicily. Their rule was ended by Nerio Acciaioli, scion of a Florentine banking house, whose mercenaries drove the Catalans onto the Acropolis in 1385 and forced its surrender in 1388. When he died in 1394, he left the city itself to the Church of St Mary, the Parthenon.

Mehmed II rode into Athens in 1458 and, struck by its monuments, forbade their looting on pain of death. The Parthenon became the city's main mosque, but Athens shrank to a small country town, from the early 17th century the property of the chief black eunuch of the sultan's harem. The Ottomans kept gunpowder in the Parthenon, and in 1687, when the Venetian Francesco Morosini besieged the Acropolis, one of his shots set off the magazine and tore the temple apart. Greek insurgents took the city in 1822; the Ottomans won it back in 1826, but in March 1833 their garrison withdrew for good.