the company, paid them their arrears and gave them land so they would remain in his service, while ordering the rest to hand over their conquests and depart. The Catalans offered to recognize him as their lord if they were allowed to keep some of the land they had taken to establish themselves but Walter rejected their proposal and prepared to expel them by force. The Duke of Athens assembled a large army, comprising his feudatories—among the most prominent were Albert Pallavicini, Margrave of Bodonitsa, Thomas III d'Autremencourt, Lord of Salona and Marshal of Achaea, and the barons of Euboea, Boniface of Verona, George I Ghisi, and John of Maisy—as well as reinforcements sent from the other principalities of Frankish Greece. Battle Sources and location of the battle A number of sources report in various degree of detail on the events before and during the battle: chapter 240 of the chronicle of Ramon Muntaner; the various versions of the Chronicle of the Morea (sections 540 and 548 of the French version, verses 7263–7300 and 8010 of the Greek version, and sections 546–555 of the Aragonese version), Book VII section 7 of the history of the Byzantine writer Nikephoros Gregoras, and brief accounts in Book VIII of the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine banker and diplomat Giovanni Villani, in the Istoria di Romania of the Venetian statesman Marino Sanudo and in letter of the latter that remained unpublished until 1940. The location of the battle varies in the different sources between two locations. Muntaner reports that it took place "at a beautiful plain near Thebes, where there were marshes", which has been identified with the plain of the Boeotic Cephissus and the marshes of Lake Copais (now drained). Gregoras likewise mentions that the battle took place near the Boeotic Cephissus. On the other hand, the versions of the Chronicle of the Morea place the battle at "Halmyros", apparently the town of the same name in southern Thessaly, where there was another city known as Thebes. The former localization had been long favoured in scholarship; in his standard history of Frankish Greece, William Miller rejected Halmyros on the basis of the topography described by Muntaner, a view that continues to be repeated in more recent works. Several proposals by modern scholars for the exact site of the battle in the Cephissus valley exist, ranging from the vicinity of Orchomenos and the vicinity