When Prince William II of Villehardouin died in 1278 without a male heir, the Principality of Achaea — a Frankish state carved from the Peloponnese after the Fourth Crusade — passed under the suzerainty of Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, per the Treaty of Viterbo. The Angevins managed the succession cautiously, eventually passing control to William's eldest daughter Isabella of Villehardouin and her descendants. After Isabella died in 1312, however, her younger sister Margaret of Villehardouin pressed her own claim.

To make that claim stick, Margaret needed an ally with an army. In February 1314 she traveled to Messina and arranged the marriage of her only daughter, Isabella of Sabran, to Ferdinand of Majorca — a landless Aragonese prince with nothing to lose and every reason to gamble on a Greek principality. Margaret transferred her titles and claims to the couple, then returned to Achaea. The Angevin bailli Nicholas le Maure responded by imprisoning her in the castle of Chlemoutsi, where she died in March 1315. Ferdinand landed at Glarentza in June 1315. By August he had seized the town and the fertile plains of Elis.

Princess Matilda of Hainaut — the Angevin-backed claimant — arrived in Achaea in late 1315, landing at Port-de-Jonc with 1,000 Burgundian soldiers as the vanguard of her husband Louis of Burgundy's force. Several of the Achaean barons who had accepted Ferdinand's rule now shifted allegiance and sought her pardon. Ferdinand responded by capturing the castle of Chalandritsa — whose baron had defected — and garrisoning it with 1,500 men, then moved to besiege the city of Patras.

In early 1316, Matilda's commander led the Burgundians and their feudal Achaean allies northward. They encamped at a village called Picotin, near Palaiopolis, the site of ancient Elis. On 22 February, Ferdinand marched from Andravida with 500 cavalry and 500 Almogavar infantry, sharing horses to close the distance faster. The Princess's captain arranged his 700 Burgundians in the front line and charged, leaving the Achaean levies in reserve. The Burgundians unhorsed 300 Catalans on that first shock. But the dismounted Catalans and the Almogavars turned to the horses themselves, using lances to lethal effect on the Burgundian mounts.

The Chronicle of the Morea is specific: within less than two hours, the Catalans killed 500 Burgundians and 700 native troops. Among the dead was Gilbert Sanudo, brother of the Duke of Naxos, and many other nobles. The Catalans counted 700 dead horses on the battlefield — a detail that conveys both the savagery of the fighting and the Almogavar tactic of targeting cavalry mounts rather than riders. When the Achaean remnants withdrew, Ferdinand's men pursued briefly before turning back to loot the abandoned camp.

Simultaneously, the Archbishop of Patras, Renier, attempted to take Chalandritsa while Ferdinand was occupied at Picotin. That attack failed. The beaten Achaean barons retreated south into Messenia, where Louis of Burgundy's main force, which had landed in Greece around the same time as the battle, was gathering strength. The Byzantines of Mystras contributed reinforcements, and Louis now commanded a numerically decisive army.

The victory at Picotin proved short-lived. On 5 July 1316, at the Battle of Manolada, Louis of Burgundy's enlarged force met Ferdinand's Catalans on the Elian plain. Ferdinand was defeated and killed. Within months, the Catalans had surrendered the fortresses they held — Chlemoutsi, Chalandritsa, and the rest — and sailed home. The Principality returned to Angevin-Burgundian control.

The village of Picotin has not survived as a named settlement. Its location near Palaiopolis, the site of the ancient polis of Elis, places it in the broad agricultural plain east of the coast, ground that successive rulers — Frankish, Byzantine, Ottoman — found equally worth fighting over. The battle is known today primarily through the Aragonese version of the Chronicle of the Morea, one of the few vernacular histories of Frankish Greece, which preserves these operational details with the matter-of-fact clarity of someone who had heard the story from participants.

The Battle of Picotin sits at the intersection of three cultures that rarely appear in the same medieval narrative: Catalan-Aragonese mercenaries, Burgundian knights, and Byzantine Greeks. Ferdinand's Almogavar infantry — battle-hardened soldiers who had already carved a bloody path through the Byzantine Empire as the Catalan Grand Company — were among the most feared light infantry in the medieval Mediterranean. Their discipline in dismounting to cut down horses at Picotin, even after being unhorsed themselves, showed the tactical flexibility that made them so dangerous.

Ferdinand himself is a figure of genuine ambition who died before he could consolidate anything. His mother-in-law Margaret died imprisoned in the very castle his cause was meant to free. His wife Isabella of Sabran was widowed before the summer was out. The Achaean plains that seemed to be in his grasp in February 1316 belonged to someone else entirely by August. The Chronicle records his cavalry improvisation on the road to Picotin without irony. History supplies the irony.