Wherever there was knightly work to be done, the gallant Duke of Athens was foremost; none was more impetuous than he at the great tournament held on the Isthmus of Corinth in 1305, at which the whole chivalry of Frankish Greece was present. He needs must challenge Master Bouchart, one of the best jousters of the West, to single combat with the lance; and their horses met with such force that the ducal charger fell and rolled its rider in the dust. His Theban castle rang with the songs of minstrels; festival after festival followed at his Court; and this prosperity was not merely on the surface. Now for the first time we find Attica supplying Eubœa with corn, while the gift of silken garments to Pope Boniface VIII is a proof of the continued manufacture of silk at Thebes. But the duke’s health was undermined by an incurable malady; he had no heirs of his body; and, when he died in 1308, there was already looming on the frontiers of Greece that Grand Company of Catalan soldiers of fortune whom the weakness of the Emperor, Andronikos II, had invited from the stricken fields of Sicily to be the terror and the scourge of the Levant. The last duke of the house of la Roche was laid to rest in the noble Byzantine abbey of Daphni or Dalfinet (as the Franks called it), on the Sacred Way between Athens and Eleusis, which Othon had bestowed upon the Cistercians a century before. Even to-day there may be seen in the courtyard a sarcophagus, with a cross, two snakes, and two lilies carved upon it, which the French scholar Buchon (_La Grèce continentale_) believed to have been the tomb of “the good duke,” Guy II. The succession to the “delectable duchy” of Athens—for such, indeed, it was in the early years of the fourteenth century—was not seriously disputed. There were only two claimants, both first cousins of the late duke—Eschive, Lady of Beyrout, and Walter de Brienne, Count of Lecce, a true scion of that adventurous family, who had been a “knight of death” in the Angevin cause in Sicily, and had fought like the lion on his banner at the fatal battle of Gagliano. The rival claims having been referred to the High Court of Achaia, of which the Duke of Athens was, in Angevin times, a peer, the barons decided, as was natural, in favour of the gallant and powerful Count of Lecce, more fitted than a lonely widow to govern a military state. Unfortunately, Duke Walter of Athens was as rash as he was brave; prison and defeat in Sicily had not taught him to respect the infantry of Cataluña. Speaking their language and knowing their ways, he thought that he might use them for his own ends and then dismiss them when they had served his purpose.