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Using their fleets the League troops were able to crush any semblance of an Ottoman presence at sea and prevent the invasions of the Aegean Islands and Cyrpus as well as an Ottoman attempt to invade Constantinople. The real strength the Italians and Aragonese added to the armies of the Holy Coalition was that of their massive fleets which numbered 230 ships. These added a total of 25,000 men to the cause of the League of Nauplia. The only major Christian States to respond to the call where the Kingdom of Aragon, the Kingdom of Naples and Italian merchant city states like Genoa, Florence and Venice, which sought to protect their interests and their vassals in the area. The Holy Roman Empire had just recovered from a civil war between the Habsurg and Nassau claimants to its throne, which ended merely in 1298 with the Battle of Göllheim.
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However the major rulers of Christian Kingdoms like France and Britain had been alienated from the Papacy and the official leadership of the Catholic Church after it had issued the Unam Sanctam, attempting to assert direct political control over the Christian world. It would be the first time Crusaders and Byzantine Successors, and later Italians and Aragonese, would sign a treaty of alliance. These states met in Nauplia, a major port city in southern Greece where they officialised and sealed the agreement. Following the destruction of several important Christian relics by the Ottomans the unlikely coalition of Christian states managed to convince Pope Boniface VIII to declare a Crusade against the Ottomans. Together they assembled an army of 45,000 troops. Soon, the initial defeats of the Empire of Trebizond, Kingdom of Cyprus and the Empire of Nicaea drove the Crusaders and Byzantines successors to band together, in the face of Ottoman onslaught. He unified the Turkic states of Anatolia and sought to carve out an even greater Empire for himself. In 1299 Osman I the founder of the Ottoman Empire took advantage of the weakened status of the various states in Anatolia and the Balkans due to their infighting to attempt to spread his rule there, after having subdued much of the Arab world in the Levant. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade saw the fall of the Byzantine Empire and its division into a number of Byzantine Greek successor states and Crusader states. Francocratia & the Great Ottoman War of 1299