Grievous, indeed, was the situation of the Franks in Greece at this moment. Though little more than a hundred years had elapsed since the conquest, the families of the conquerors were almost extinct. The terrible blow dealt at the Frank chivalry by the rude Catalans, almost on the very battlefield of Chaironeia, was as fatal to Frankish, as was the victory of Philip of Macedon to free, Greece. Of the barons who had taken part in that contest, where many Achaian nobles had stood by the side of the headstrong Athenian duke, only four survived. Moreover, the Frank aristocracy, as Finlay has pointed out, committed racial suicide by constituting themselves an exclusive class. Intermarriages with the Greeks took place, it is true; and a motley race, known as Gasmoûloi[56], the offspring of these unions, of whom the author of the _Chronicle_ was perhaps a member, fell into the usual place of half-castes in the East. But Muntaner expressly says that the nobles of Achaia usually took their wives from France. Meanwhile new men had taken possession of some of the old baronies—Flemings, Neapolitans, and even Florentines, one of whom, Nicholas Acciajuoli, whose splendid tomb is to be seen in the Certosa near Florence, laid on the rocks of Akrocorinth the foundations of a power which, a generation later, made the bankers of Tuscany dukes of Athens. The Greeks, had they been united, might have recovered the whole peninsula amidst this state of confusion. But the sketch which the imperial historian, John Cantacuzene, has left us of the _archontes_ of the Morea shows that they were quite as much divided among themselves as the turbulent Frank vassals of the shadowy Prince of Achaia. “Neither good nor evil fortune,” he wrote, “nor time, that universal solvent, can dissolve their mutual hatred, which not only endures all their lives, but is transmitted after death as a heritage to their children[57].”