The Genoese, triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno; and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to the Holy Land, of the Knights of St.Stephen, guardians of the Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,--a settlement that knew the sea only by hearsay.
"Sand," continued Ferragut, "has changed the commercial routes and historic destinies of the Mediterranean." Of the many deeds which had stretched along the scenes of the _mare nostrum_, the most famous in the captain's opinion was the unheard-of epic of Roger de Flor which he had known from childhood through the stories told him by the poet Labarta, by the _Triton_, and by that poor secretary who was always dreaming of the great past of the Catalan marine.
All the world was now talking about the blockade of the Dardanelles.
The boats that furrowed the Mediterranean, merchant vessels as well as battleships, were furthering the great military operation that was developing opposite Gallipoli.

The name of the long, narrow maritime pass which separates Europe and Asia was in every mouth.

To-day the eyes of mankind were converged on this point just as, in remote centuries, they had been fixed on the war of Troy.
"We also have been there," said Ferragut with pride.

"The Dardanelles have been frequented for many years by the Catalans and the Aragonese.
Gallipoli was one of our cities governed by the Valencian, Ramon Muntaner." And he began the story of the Almogavars in the Orient, that romantic Odyssey across the ancient Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire that ended only with the founding of the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria in the city of Pericles and Minerva.

The chronicles of the Oriental Middle Ages, the books of Byzantine chivalry, the fantastic tales of the Arab do not contain more improbable and dramatic adventures than the warlike enterprises of these Argonauts coming from the valleys of the Pyrenees, from the banks of the Ebro, and from the Moorish gardens of Valencia.
"Eighty years," said Ferragut, terminating his account of the glorious adventures of Roger de Flor around Gallipoli, "the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria flourished.