Yet Baldwin knew too much of the world of fighting-men to think that throne stable which was mainly defended by an army of mercenaries. So he made it his business to woo and welcome to his court all gentlemen-adventurers from France, and from the neighboring little principalities of Greece, who were willing to take chivalrous service under his standard. His fame as a warrior, his open-handed generosity where open-handed generosity was expedient, and especially the beauty of the open-hearted women with whom he took care that his court was always a-quiver, attracted to Athens a great number of knights and gentlemen-at-arms, who swelled his immediate following very rapidly. He further strengthened his hand by enrolling and equipping so many soldiers that in a short while he had more than doubled the strength of his solid little standing army. He had not been many months upon his throne before he had made his duchy the most formidable state in Greece and his duchy and himself very patently independent of the Catalan Grand Company. Feeling little need for the further services of the Catalan Grand Company, he felt little gratitude for their services in the past. Duke Baldwin was not a man burdened with a too lively sense of duty to others, and though in the early days of his dukedom he had paid the Grand Company month by month their promised wage, that payment had now been suffered to fall into arrears for a very considerable period. For the time being this mattered very little to the Catalan Grand Company. Its members were quartered comfortably enough in the pleasant plain of Attica; they amused themselves from time to time with little marauding expeditions to the north, and they had, or affected to have, every confidence that sooner or later Duke Baldwin would pay up all the moneys that were due to them. The principal leaders of this company dwelt in Athens, and mingled on equal terms with the chivalry of Duke Baldwin's court. It could not truly be said that there was much love lost between the Spanish mercenaries and the French knights, for the latter looked down upon the Catalan companions as unchivalrous freebooters, and the Spaniards knew of this feeling, and it rankled in their hearts though they betrayed no trace of resentment in their faces. But between the two parties there was all outward show of amity, all outward interchange of knightly courtesies, and the Spanish leaders shared in all the festivals, drank at all the banquets, and jousted in all the tourneys of Duke Baldwin's court. If the Spaniards themselves were to be believed, they found no such hostility nestling in the white breasts of the fair French ladies of Athens as they were conscious that the mailed bosoms of the French gentlemen sheltered. But if the policy of the duke was regarded by the Catalan Grand Company for the most part with indifferent eyes, it was not so regarded by one of their number.