And he began the story of the Almogavars in the Orient, that romantic Odyssey across the ancient Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire that ended only with the founding of the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria in the city of Pericles and Minerva.  The chronicles of the Oriental Middle Ages, the books of Byzantine chivalry, the fantastic tales of the Arab do not contain more improbable and dramatic adventures than the warlike enterprises of these Argonauts coming from the valleys of the Pyrenees, from the banks of the Ebro, and from the Moorish gardens of Valencia.

“Eighty years,” said Ferragut, terminating his account of the glorious adventures of Roger de Flor around Gallipoli, “the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria flourished.  Eighty years the Catalans governed these lands.”

And he pointed out on the horizon the place where the red haze of distant promontories and mountains outlined the Grecian land.

Such a duchy was in reality a republic.  Athens and Thebes were administered in accordance with the laws of Aragon and its code was “The book of Usages and Customs of the City of Barcelona.”  The Catalan tongue ruled as the official language in the country of Demosthenes, and the rude Almogavars married with the highest ladies of the country.

The Parthenon was still intact as in the glorious times of ancient Athens.  The august monument of Minerva converted into a Christian church, had not undergone any other modification than that of seeing a new goddess on its altars, La Virgen Santisima.

And in this thousand-year-old temple of sovereign beauty the Te Deum was sung for eighty years in honor of the Aragonese dukes, and the clergy preached in the Catalan tongue.

The republic of adventurers did not bother with constructing nor creating.  There does not remain on the Grecian land any trace of their dominion,—­edifices, seals, nor coins.  Only a few noble families, especially in the islands, took the Catalan patronym.

“Although they yet remember us confusedly, they do remember us,” said Ferragut. “‘May the vengeance of the Catalans overtake you’ was for many centuries the worst of curses in Greece.”

Thus terminated the most glorious and bloody of the Mediterranean adventures of the Middle Ages,—­the clash of western crudeness, almost savage but frank and noble, against the refined malice and decadent civilization of the Greeks,—­childish and old at the same time,—­which survived in Byzantium.

Ferragut felt a pleasure in these relations of imperial splendor, palaces of gold, epic encounters and furious frays, while his ship was navigating through the black night and bounding over the dark sea accompanied by the throbbing of machinery and the noisy thrum of the screw, at times out of the water during the furious rocking from prow to poop.

They were in the worst place in the Mediterranean where the winds coming from the narrow passage of the Adriatic, from the steppes of Asia Minor, from the African deserts and from the gap of Gibraltar tempestuously mingled their atmospheric currents.  The waters boxed in among the numerous islands of the Grecian archipelago were writhing in opposite directions, enraged and clashing against the ledges on the coast with a retrograding violence that converted them into a furious surge.