Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/202

 very well known in the West. It was in his defence that John XXII proclaimed a Crusade in 1333; and among other helps Edward III, in 1335, allowed his ambassadors £40 from the London subsidy. Leo found himself before his death reduced to the few mountain fortresses from which his ancestors had emerged two centuries before. He failed to gain the support of the Armenians, and was thus thrown on that of the Latins, who could really give him no aid. He was assassinated about 134a, and his dynasty ended with him. The five remaining Kings of Armenia sprang from a branch of the Cypriot house of Lusignan, and were little more than Latin exiles in the midst of several strange populations all alike hostile.

We have now to return to Hugh IV, King of Cyprus, a prince who is known in literary history as the king to whom Boccaccio dedicated his genealogy of the gods. He reigned twenty-five years, and has the merit of setting on foot the great alliance between the Venetians, the Pope, and the Knights of Rhodes, to which the chief successes of his reign and that of his son were due. It is true that these successes wear to modern eyes the look of mere piratical exploits: but we have two points to remember in this connexion. All naval war, not only during the middle ages, but down to the seventeenth century, was more or less piratical; and the war between the Christians and the Saracens, although interrupted now and then by truces, which both parties felt ashamed to make and took the first opportunity of breaking, was really continuous and internecine. The coasts of Asia Minor had been gradually lost to the Christians; the coasts of Egypt were to some extent open to reprisals. The fact that the coast of Syria and Palestine afforded so few harbours had, when once the fortified harbour of Acre had fallen into the hands of the Saracens, the effect of removing the seat of war to the Asiatic and Egyptian coasts. That was the deliberate opinion of King Edward I, who had ruled that Egypt must be the first point of attack, then Palestine, and then Constantinople. Hence the two attacks on Damietta in 1219 and 1249. Now, after a long period of defence, the Christians