Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/478

 470 SHORT NOTICES July printed in Bentley's Excerpta Historica. They deal with the events of June 1483, and Mr. Kingsford's note on the date of Hastings's summary execution would be conclusive but for the curious fact that the still unpublished ' Great Chronicle ' of London gives the alternative chronology which commended itself to Sir Clements Markham. 1 The rest of the Stonor letters and papers are material for what is called social history. A. F. P. Mr. H. C. Luke, commissioner of Famagusta, has written a volume on Cyprus under the Turks, 1571-1878 (Oxford : University Press, 1921). It is much to be regretted that the late C. D. Cobham never completed the history of Cyprus under the Lusignan dynasty and the Venetians, begun so admirably by Count L. de Mas Latrie, and for which he had himself collected such abundant materials, combined with great local knowledge. But while Mas Latrie's history of the Frankish period remains a magnificent torso — for his narrative went only to the fall of Acre — that of the much duller and more provincial period of Turkish rule has hitherto found practically only one chronicler, the archimandrite Kyprianos. Mr. Luke has now written a very interesting sketch of this latter subject, largely based for the later period upon the British consular archives. The author of The Fringe of the East and joint editor of The Handbook of Cyprus knows the island and its history well, and writes fairly and without bias of the two races inhabiting Cyprus. The Turks at the outset, as he points out — and the same phenomenon meets us in the Latin duchy of the Archipelago — were welcomed as a relief from the Latins ; they abolished serfdom and restored the Orthodox archbishopric (whose history has been written by Mr. Hackett), but failed, as everywhere, to administer well. Their government of Cyprus was constantly changing : at first under a resident pasha, then under the admiral of the fleet, then a personal fief of the grand vizier, sometimes under a qaimaqam, at other periods a dependency of Rhodes or the Dardanelles. But, amidst these changes, the archbishop's power steadily grew, till about 1804 it became supreme, only to end suddenly, as supreme power always ends in the Near East, in 1821, with the murder of the then archbishop and his three suffragans. Meanwhile, the Turkish peasant had been equally oppressed with the Christian, whose position before the law was intolerable, and Cyprus, once so prosperous, had been reduced by Turkish rule to a like condition with those once famous names Durazzo, Valona, and many another flourishing medieval place. Of this decay Vice-Consul Sandwith's report of 1867 gives a graphic picture. Although an English consul is mentioned in 1626, the archives do not begin till 1710. Many interesting figures flit across their pages : Sir Sidney Smith, the defender of Acre ; Leake, ' the model traveller ' ; Lady Hester Stanhope, Kinglake's ' Queen of the Desert ' ; Kiamil Pasha ; and Colonel Rose. They mention also the curious Cypriote practice of using the flag of Jerusalem, a medieval survival, and that of acquiring Hellenic citizenship after, the recognition of the Greek kingdom. The book, in which we have noticed only one misprint — ' Xanthiotes ' for ' Zantiotes ' (p. 8) — contains a bibliography, a list of British consular officers, and 1 Thornley, England under the Yorkists, pp. 116-17.