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| + | French knights! Beware of women from aragonese Peralada! | ||
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| + | Ramon Muntaner [1] was a rich townsman, educated man, counselor of kings and princes of Aragon and Sicily and accountant of the Catalan War Company [2]. | ||
| + | He was in charge of feeding, clothing and providing for up to five thousand soldiers and their families. | ||
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| + | He was occasionally leading smaller military detachments and commanded successful defense of besieged city of Gallipoli. | ||
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| + | For four years, the king granted him possession of the island of Jerba close to the African coast. | ||
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| + | Muntaner had decades of first-hand experience in logistics, managing large sums of money, command, warfare, plunder, distribution of booty, and active diplomacy between the Western Christian, Byzantine, and Muslim worlds. | ||
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| + | The Catalan Company was a company of mercenaries drawn from the Aragonese-Granadian borderlands. They were professional soldiers whose commissions included guarding the walls of the city of Constantinople, | ||
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| + | While reading the Chronicle, I came across an interesting story about a townswoman' | ||
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| + | The year is 1285, the time of the French crusade against Aragon, the wars for the Sicilian inheritance from the imperial Hohenstauf family. The Aragonese city of Peralada [6] resists the invasion of the French king. | ||
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| + | Chapter CXXIV | ||
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| + | How a woman of Peralada dressed in a man's gown and armed with a lance and with a sword girded to her side and her shield on her arm, captured a fine French knight in armour. | ||
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| + | There was a woman in Peralada whom I knew and saw who was called Na Mercadera, because she kept a shop. And she was a very clever woman and big and tall. And one day, whilst the host of the French was before Peralada, she issued from the town and went to a garden of hers to pick cabbages. And she put on a man's gown and took a lance and girded on a sword and carried a shield on her arm, and she went to the garden. And when she was there she heard small bells and she wondered and at once left off picking cabbages and went to whence the sound came, to see what it was. And she looked and saw, in the trench there was between her garden and another, a French knight on his horse, armed with bells on the poitral, and he was going hither and thither not knowing how to get out. And she, when she saw him, quickly took a step forward and thrust at him with her lance and hit him so hard on the thigh through the skirts that it passed through his thigh and the saddle and pricked the horse. And as soon as she had done this and the horse felt himself wounded, it bucked and reared, so that the knight would have fallen, if he had not been chained to the saddle. What shall I tell you? She took hold of her sword and aimed at another opening and wounded the horse in the head and it was stunned. What shall I tell you? She seized the horse by the reins and cried: " | ||
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| + | picture: Antoni Caba, oil on canvas 1864 | ||
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| + | - lance | ||