Abstract

The Crusades, particularly the Fourth Crusade and the events that followed it, attracted many Latin warriors to the Aegean. During the first half of the thirteenth century, throughout the period of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, they provided the Laskarides of Nikaia and the Angeloi of Epeiros with a steady supply of mercenaries which these Byzantine successor states relied upon heavily. In the mid-thirteenth century, Byzantine sources began to refer to certain Latin soldiers by means of the evocative epithet kavallarios, and for the next two hundred years this word was applied as a title to a variety of men in the service of the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi. An examination of the meaning of the word kavallarios, as it was first applied to Latins, and in the course of its evolution during the last two centuries of Byzantium, illustrates the frequent interplay of Byzantine and Western institutions during the later Middle Ages