Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/182

 or sheriffs of Cyprus, with jurats and other machinery of courts of law, was an organisation of tribunals of justice and local government, not a legislative constitutional organisation: its assizes are therefore a book of procedure rather than a code of laws, and, like the Assizes of the High Court, rather a record of customs than a body of statutes. These courts also, like the court of barons, may be regarded as developments towards constitutional growth, arrested and petrified at a certain stage.

But I have said more than enough upon a subject which, somewhat repulsive by itself, needs severe study before it will begin to be remunerative. The Assizes of Jerusalem will always remain a mine of feudal principles and a treasure to scientific jurists; they reflect infinite lustre on the Cypriot lawyers who, in an age of turmoil and exertion, continuous and overwhelming, found time and labour for recording them. We conceive that the lords of Ibelin must have been well acclimatised in more ways than one; it is certainly curious that they supplied the main historical support to the kings of Cyprus in marriage, war, and jurisprudence.

King Guy had a very short reign; and most of the acts that are ascribed to him I have already noted. After the collapse of the third crusade and the three years' truce between Richard and Saladin in 1192, he seems to have retired to Cyprus, and to have died in April 1194; the same year the old Emperor Isaac died in the custody of the Hospitallers at Merkeb. Isaac's daughter was still wandering up and down Christendom; by the agreement for Richard's release she was to have been handed over to Duke Leopold of Austria, her kinsman, but when Baldwin of Bethune brought her to Austria, she found Duke Leopold dead; she was accordingly brought back to Richard, and subsequently married to a Flemish knight, who came to the East in the fourth crusade in the retinue of John de Neesle, and, in her name, put in a claim for Cyprus, which King Amalrie summarily rejected. The rights of Guy devolved upon his brother; or rather Cyprus, for the reversion of which no arrangements had been made, fell to the lot of the possessor.