Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/178

 part during the twelfth century in Palestine; they were still more prominent in Cyprus: from them the royal house received wives and guardians for the infant kings; two of the great recorders of the Assizes of Jerusalem were lords of Ibelin; one as regent or bailiff of Cyprus conducted the valiant resistance to the claims of Frederick II: and in fact, if any one had cared to write it, the fortunes of the house of Ibelin would have been as great part of the history of Cyprus as those of the house of Lusignan. Other great families were those of Gibeleth and Bethsan, named from Byblus and Bethshan or Scythopolis. The whole peerage of Cyprus however contained only a few names, which sound strangely enough, as they illustrate the geographical unity of history. There were princes of Antioch, Galilee, and Montreal, lords of Beyrout, Sidon, Toron, Csesarea, Tyre, and Tiberias; counts of Jaffa, Tripoli, and Carpasso; there were also, as grand serjeanties, the double stewardships, constableships, and marshalships of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the chamberlainship of Cyprus; these are all, or nearly all. They constituted a high court of baronage or parliament, as they had done in Palestine, and were the supreme council of the king, of which we have so much information in the Assizes of Jerusalem.

As for the ecclesiastical estate, tradition assigns also to King Guy some trenchant measures which help to complete the parallel or the contrast between him and William the Conqueror. The old Cypriot church had an archbishop and fourteen suffragans; the archbishop was Archbishop of Cyprus, and owed obedience to no patriarch. The flight or submission of the Greeks left the field open to the Latin clergy; and Guy placed a Latin archbishop at Nicosia, with suffragans at Famagosta, Limasol and Baffo. This arrangement was sanctioned by Celestine III in 1196. As time went on, the Greek clergy returned, and Jacobites and Nestorians followed; very uneasy relations were produced between the two chief hierarchies, one of which depended on Rome, whilst the other,