Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/172

 side of them. Rupia of the Mountain was prince at the time of the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin; he died in 1189, and his successor, Leo or Livon, after having successfully courted the favour of pope and emperor, was recognised as king of Armenia by the emperor Henry VI, and crowned by Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop of Mainz, in 1198. This act which, although Livon forfeited his position by obtaining recognition from Alexius Angelus, implied a cessation of the old dependence on Byzantium, and an ecclesiastical reconciliation with Rome, was the typical act of Armenian history; the whole of which, save and except the defence against the Saracens and the Tartars of a later date, was an attempt to secure independence by skilful balancing of Greek and Roman influences; to obtain money from the West and arms from Constantinople, to obtain alternate alliances by royal marriages, and ecclesiastical freedom by regular variations between the two poles. For this latter policy the position of the Armenian Church was peculiarly fitted. It was so far schismatic as not to be integrally a portion of either Roman or Byzantine obedience, and so little heretical that its alliance was courted by both communions. Hence its importance in the conciliar history of the middle ages; an importance which has no sufficient parallel in the secular history of Armenia.

The origin of the Latin kingdom of Cyprus is less obscure and more romantic. Cyprus had been seized by the Arabs in the early days of Islam (cir. 700—cir. 963), but recovered for the empire by Nicephorus Phocas, and ruled by dukes down to the reign of Manuel Comnenus. Its population was a mixed one; there were Griffons or Greeks, Armenians, Georgians, Maronites, native Cypriots, Greek parœci, emancipated slaves, the descendants of Albanian soldiery of the empire, and of Venetian emigrants of the first Crusade. But the land was fertile, and they had dwelt together in peace. In the reign of Manuel the happy days of Cyprus ended and the period of calamity began. According to the anchorite Neophytus, who wrote the tract 'de Calamitatibus Cypri,' the native authority for the conquest by Richard Cœur de Lion, Isaac Comnenus, a nephew of the emperor Manuel, had been appointed by him to