More Catalan Company Infantry

Catalan Company Infantry - Part 2

As part of Project Lead Mountain I had a large number of QRF MIT03 Italian Pavisiers/Spearmen going spare. I had intended to use them to create more Italian Double Based crossbowmen with front rank pavisiers but after having a sort out of the casting poses I realised that only one of the three poses was ideal for that still to do project. This left me with 48 spare castings in two batches of 24 castings each of two poses and three spare castings with the upright spear which were left over that would be ideal as standard bearers. I cut off the soft metal sprear and replaced then with metal spears for the standard bearers. I also had a mixed bag of old Gladiator Games/Blackhat War of the Roses commanders that were spare which look perfect in the command elements for the 14th C period.

I sorted out which castings mixed in with the QRF castings and ended up having enough figures to create twelve more elements of Catalan Company Almughvars Reg Ax S and three Generals Almughvars elements also classed as Reg Ax S.

Since this is a morph project I decided that these would make the core of the army and the other Medieval Regular Auxilia elements I have painted up will be used to bilk out the army to make it usable. I cannot see me using the army often but at least now I have cleared out some more unpainted figures.

Lastly I needed some flags so I created my own flags based on historic Catalan designs and settled on using the first three flags for my generals. If I add more troops to the army I have the option of using the other flag designs. I have no idea how accurate the flags are but they are based on the Aragon flag with historic variations.

Catalan Company

Catalan Company - Europe's First Mercenaries?

At Caesaromagus this year one of the entrants used a Catalan Company army. This is the first time I had seen it used in any game and the SWDL have it recorded as being only used once before. It didnt do very well on either outing. I think this time due to a badly written list and player inexperience. 

Having seen and fought against it I became curious as to if there's a good army hidden in there somewhere? I dont have Catalan specific figures but I have sufficient Communal Italian infantry and a few other elements that I can throw in to be able to deploy this army on the tabletop. I was short on some Reg Ax S elements as this is a very unusual troop type in Medieval Europe only appearing in three lists at most. I had two batches of painted figures that came out of a Bring and Buy purchase some years ago and they were based up as Irr Ax element. Whilst they were useful I have now painted up sufficient proper elements that they are surplus to requirements so I decided to rebase them into Reg Ax S to use with the Catalans to make up the numbers. 

Here are the figures, they wont win any prizes for accuracy but they will certainly do the trick later this year when I field the Catalans on the battlefield. I think they might be from a couple of fantasy ranges and are well over 25 years old. Discovered that they are Minifigs Mythical Earth castings from the 1970's and have been out of production for a long while. http://www.miniatures-workshop.com/lostminiswiki/index.php?title=Mythical_Earth