Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/170

 out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, perseverance to the last, and patient endurance without hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove; proving, moreover, that it was by the experience of those times that the forms of those virtues were realised and presented to posterity. This much I say, by way of a caution, that you may not accuse me of an attempt to impose upon you. The history of the Crusades has always had for me an interest that quite rivals all the interest I could take in the history of the Greeks and Romans; and very much of that interest is of the same sort; a half archaeological interest in a life and growth from which we have ourselves received some great impulses, but almost all the minutiæ of which are important only through their connexion with those great impulses. Such a half archaeological interest I hope you may feel in the history of medieval Cyprus, and what little is to be told of its sister kingdom.

The last decade of the twelfth century saw the establishment of two small Christian kingdoms in the Levant, which long outlived all other relics of the Crusades except the military orders; and which, with very little help from the West, sustained a hazardous existence in complete contrast with almost everything around them. The kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia have a history very closely intertwined, but their origin and most of their circumstances were very different.

By Armenia as a kingdom, is meant little more than the ancient Cilicia, the land between Taurus and the sea, from the frontier of the principality of Antioch, eastward, to Kelenderis or Palæopolis, a little beyond Seleucia; this territory, which was computed to contain sixteen days' journey in length, measured from four miles of Antioch, by two in breadth, was separated from the Greater Armenia, which before the period on which we are employed had fallen under the sway of the Seljuks, by the ridges of Taurus. The population was