country received lands and wives, whose offspring were still living, when
the _Chronicle of the Morea_ was written (p. 372), at two places in the
peninsula.
Unhappily for the principality, as the chronicler remarks, Guillaume de
Villehardouin left no male heir; and nothing more strongly justifies the
Salic law than the history of the Franks in the Morea, where it was not
applied. Anxious to take what precautions he could against the disruption
of his dominions after his death, the last of the Villehardouin princes
married his elder daughter Isabelle to the second son of Charles of
Anjou, the most powerful sovereign in the south of Europe at that time,
who, in addition to his other titles, had received from the last Latin
Emperor of the East, then a fugitive at Viterbo, the suzerainty over
the principality of Achaia, hitherto held by the Emperor. This close
connection with the great house of Anjou, to which the kingdom of the
Two Sicilies then belonged, seemed to provide Achaia with the strongest
possible support. The support, too, was near at hand; for communication
between Italy and Glarentza, the chief port of the Morea, was, as we
know from the novels of Boccaccio, not infrequent; and we hear of
Frankish nobles from Achaia making pilgrimages to the two great Apulian
sanctuaries of St Nicholas of Bari and Monte Santangelo. But, when
Guillaume de Villehardouin died in 1278 and was laid beside his brother
and father in the family mausoleum at Andravida (where excavations, made
in 1890, failed to find their remains)[55], his daughter Isabelle was
still a minor, though already a widow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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