The Venetians resigned themselves to a position which would allow them once more to trade with the empire, and in 1310 concluded a truce with its ruler for ten years. Philip now prepared to organise an attempt against Constantinople, and once more the pope, in 1313, weakened the position of the Latin party in Constantinople by calling upon Frederic, king of Sicily, to aid the new pretender. The king of France undertook to furnish five hundred men-at-arms, and money to pay them for a year, and called upon Louis of Burgundy to furnish another hundred. The undertaking, however, languished, and when Philip of France died, in 1314, no one, except Philip of Tarentum, seemed to have any further interest in it. He leagued himself with the king of Hungary in 1318, and two years later purchased certain rights in the principality of Achaia and what was still spoken of in the West as the kingdom of Thessalonica. But no favourable opportunity came to him, and in 1324 the doge of Venice notified the emperor that the princes of the West had no intention of attacking the imperial city. The notification turned out correct, for, until his dethronement, in 1328, Andronicus was no longer troubled with tidings of expeditions against Constantinople from Western Europe. [Sidenote: The Catalan Grand Company. Expedition Against Constantinople.] Meantime it is necessary to return to the invitation which Andronicus had given to Robert de Flor to come to his aid. This aid was intended nominally against the Turks, but really against the expedition which Charles of Valois was preparing, with the sanction of the pope and the help of the Venetians and of all men who would respond to the pope’s exhortation, to assist in restoring a Latin emperor to Constantinople. The invitation brought into the empire a band of auxiliaries from the West which, in its weakened condition, was almost as mischievous and ruinous to the empire as any expedition openly directed against its existence could have been. The evil inflicted upon the empire by the band of mercenaries invited for its defence was indeed so manifold that the story deserves telling with considerable detail. As already stated, Philip, the son of Baldwin, the last Latin emperor, had married the daughter of Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily. Charles promised, in 1278, to send an expedition to Constantinople, but the pope, seeing the efforts which Michael continued to make for Union, refused his sanction. Two years later, however, a new pope entered into a treaty with Venice and Naples to attack the empire, and Charles undertook to send eight hundred cavaliers to claim what he considered the rights of his granddaughter. A body of troops was sent across the Adriatic to assist the Albanians, who were fighting against the emperor. The invaders were utterly defeated, and the empire was saved from the attack of Charles by the disorganisation produced by the Sicilian Vespers in 1283, a massacre in which 8,000 Frenchmen perished.