Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/214

 England; the see of S. Peter divided between two, three, four Popes; the Emperor of Constantinople begging money openly in the courts of the West; the three barbarian powers pitted against each other—providentially, we may say, for who could have resisted their united force?—the Ottoman sultan the prisoner of Tamerlane; the Mameluke sultan only sustained in independence by the contest between the Turks and the Tartars. Yet Europe does emerge; the battle of Nicopolis puts an end to the Crusades; the retreat of the Tartars enables the Ottomans to recover their ground; Byzantium has a respite of half a century, and Egypt of more than a hundred years of Mameluke tyranny. It takes a century more to constitute the great national factors of modern history. But out of the whirlpool little states like Cyprus do not emerge; and after the death of King Janus, the causes that were at work worked quickly and steadily. The immediate cause of the break-up was connected with the same sort of religious disputes which, after occupying half the century in councils and debates, left the Byzantine empire defenceless before the Ottomans. King John III, who succeeded in 143a, took for his second wife, in 1435, Helena, the daughter of the despot of the Peloponnese, Theodore Paleologus. The house of Lusignan had been hitherto, as a matter of necessity, devotedly Catholic; the house of Paleologus was devotedly orthodox; Cyprus was a Catholic kingdom with an orthodox population; a Latin king with a Greek people; the Latin Church was rich, and the Greek Church was not poor, but the political power was engrossed by the former. Helena would not see this. She determined, if she could, to make Cyprus orthodox; she, through her husband, who was a weak and vicious man, refused the papal nominee to the archbishopric of Nicosia, imprisoned him, and was accused of poisoning him. The grand-master of Rhodes came in, as usual, in the part of a peace-maker, and prevailed on the king to receive the prelate; and soon after, in 1458, both Helena and her husband died. But the quarrel had shaken the tottering kingdom; the grand Caraman, the Turcoman ruler of Caramania, took the opportunity of these quarrels to seize Corycus, the last Frank