There was another marked distinction between Attica and the Morea. Niketas mentions no great local magnates as settled at Athens or Thebes in the last days of the Byzantine domination, nor do we hear of such during the whole century of Burgundian rule. Thus, whereas Crete, Negroponte, and the Morea still retained old native families, which in Crete headed insurrections, in Negroponte showed a tendency to emigrate, and in the Morea held fiefs and even occasionally, as in the case of the Sgouromallaioi, intermarried with the Franks, who usually, as Muntaner tells us, took their wives from France and despised marriages with Greeks even of high degree, Athens contained no such native aristocracy. It is only towards the close of the fourteenth century that we hear of any Greeks prominent there, and then they are not nobles, but notaries. Only in the last two generations of Latin rule, is there a national party at Athens, in which the famous family of Chalkokondyles, which produced the last Athenian historian, was prominent. The Greeks of Attica were, therefore, mostly peasants, whose lot was much the same as it was all over the feudal world, namely that of serfdom. We have examples, too, of actual slavery at Athens, even in the last decades of the Latin domination. Othon’s dominions were large, if measured by the small standard of classical Greece. Burgundian Athens embraced Attica, Bœotia, the Megarid, the ancient Opuntian Lokris, and the fortresses of Nauplia and Argos, which the “Great Lord” had received as a fief from the principality of Achaia in return for his services at the time of their capture. Thus situated, the Athenian state had a considerable coast-line and at least four ports—the Piræus, Nauplia, the harbour of Atalante opposite Eubœa, and Livadostro, or Rive d’Ostre, as the Franks called it, on the Gulf of Corinth—the usual port of embarkation for the West. Yet the Burgundian rulers of Athens made little attempt to create a navy, confining themselves to a little amateur piracy. Venice was most jealous of any other Latin state, which showed any desire to rival her as a maritime power in the Levant, and in a treaty concluded in 1319 between the Republic and the Catalans, who then held the Duchy of Athens, it was expressly provided that they should launch no new ships in “the sea of Athens” and should dismantle those already afloat and place their tackle in the Akropolis.