Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/211

 and so back by Italy and Bohemia. King James was a kindly old man, but much tied up between the Venetians and the Genoese. He had accumulated three crowns; he had received that of Jerusalem at Nicosia, as Famagosta was now lost; in 1393 he received that of Armenia, which he handed on to his successors. James had been a hostage or prisoner at Genoa when the Cyprian crown fell to him; he had been sent thither when the perfidious Admiral Fregoso had seized the island; and at Genoa his son, King Janus or John II, was born.

The reign of Janus, thirty-four years long, was one sad struggle, with the Genoese on the one hand and the Turks on the other. The main features of the story are these. King Janus, with a very natural ambition, stimulated moreover by hereditary and personal enmity, made it the first object to recover Famagosta from Genoa, and for this end, in the year 1402, prepared a force and fleet to besiege the Genoese there. The days of Genoese greatness were over. In 1396 the Doge Adorno had submitted to Charles VI of France, and Genoa had become a French dependency. Famagosta had been won by the Fregosi, the opposite faction to that of Adorno, but the French were, as usual, ready to maintain their claim to conquests under whatever regime they were acquired. On the alarm of war in Cyprus, they sent Marshal Boucicault with a small fleet into the Levant. King Janus prepared for resistance, but the Grand-Master of Rhodes, Philibert of Naillac, interposed as mediator, and a collision was avoided; the poor king had to pay 150,000 ducats for the expenses of the expedition. Peace was however made, and both parties turned their arms against the Mahometan neighbours. The Genoese ravaged the Syrian coast; King Janus plundered the shore of Egypt. Booty was abundant, but the inexorable vengeance of the Sultans was aroused; the savaging of Syria ended in the loss of the last fragments of Armenian sovereignty; and the plundering of Egypt drew down the Mameluke Sultan on Cyprus. Truces and treaties were made, but were kept on neither side. In the midst of war Cyprus was again; for the